On May 30th, I attended the North Carolina Scholarship of Teaching and Learning day at UNC-Greensboro with my colleagues Wanda Lloyd and Kate Hagopian. It was a great day to network with people from around the state, and I felt like I had one day that was completely dedicated to thinking about new directions for my own research on teaching and learning. I co-presented on “Going Public with SoTL” with Laura Cruz, from Western Carolina University, and her fabulous slides made me look well-prepared. I don’t mean to be too touchy-feely, but I think that for the first time in the two years I’ve been in NC, I felt like I had found a community of teacher-scholars who spoke my language. AND, I felt like we discovered a community that could be a catalyst for designing some innovative initiatives in our writing program at NC State. One idea I had: a mini-fellowship for lecturers in the writing program based on the Carnegie Scholars and Maricopa Institute for Learning models. What do you think?

Attending the conference also raised my awareness about several other opportunities around the state that will be coming up soon for those interested in professional development. The Carolinas Writing Program Administrators will be holding their annual conference in September in Little Switzerland, NC. The North Carolina English Teachers Association will host their annual conference in Winston-Salem in October, and UNC-Greensboro will hold the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching in February, 2009. I also can’t resist plugging the first North Carolina Symposium on Teaching Writing that we’ll be hosting at NC State October 17 and 18 of this year. More info soon!

I presented at the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators’ meeting in Charlotte last Friday with my good friend, Tony Atkins. (We were also scheduled to present with Paula Rosinski, but her baby is due any day now and she was ordered by her doctor to stay close to home. We missed you, Paula!) Tony and I talked about using new media for teaching writing–Tony focused on visual arguments and using Facebook, and I talked about using new media to help students conduct research (drawing on much of the work I’ve been doing with Shelley Rodrigo that is posted on this month’s Teaching Composition blog).

Tony’s resource website for his talk includes some wonderful assignments for video composition and some great resources for incorporating multimedia into a writing classroom. Great stuff!