Overview
Our goal with this conference is to transcend traditional boundaries: among school, work, and play; among academic disciplines; between k-12 and higher education; between online and offline; and among organizers, attenders, and presenters. The conference theme will help bridge what can sometimes be divergent contexts for inquiry, and our diverse collection of organizers and sponsors will foster interdisciplinary conversations. Critical to our vision for Computers and Writing 2009 is a sustainable perspective on lifelong computing and communication, which we achieve partly by integrating k-12 teachers as conference participants. (Attending teachers may also take advantage of professional development credit through University Extension.) By making k-12 as well as postsecondary education an integral part of the conference, UC Davis will challenge conference participants not only to think about ubiquitous and sustainable computing in their own classrooms or workplaces, but within broader social and cultural dynamics across our lifespans and across learning institutions. A key component in developing these connections between k-12 and post-secondary faculty is our work with the National Writing Project's "Digital Is" Technology Program (link).
As another kind of border crossing, Computers and Writing 2009 will be the culmination of a year-long series of conferences hosted by the University of California about technology and writing. The series opened on Oct. 9, 2008 with "Performance: Reading, Writing,Technology" hosted by Departments of Theatre and Dance, Technocultural Studies and Cultural Studies, and the Davis Humanities Institute. The second event in the series was "The Future of Writing" at UC Irvine on November 6th and 7th, 2008. In February, 2009, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, USC, the New Media Consortium, Sacramento State, and San Jose State hosted Computers and Writing 2009 Online not as a fully separate event, but as a "prequel" to the onsite conference. Related themes and strands will carry over from one venue to the next. C&W 2009 Online included asynchronous sessions supported through Sakai, and synchronous sessions in Adobe Connect and SecondLife. For the onsite conference, we will continue to bridge online and offline by approaching the technical support aspect of the conference in the same spirit as the conference theme: via sustainable and ubiquitous technologies. In addition to the usual post-conference knowledge production formats, such as Kairos's conference issue and a special issue of the print journal Writing on the Edge, Computers and Writing 2009 at UC Davis will offer attendees a unique experience in participatory Web 2.0 computing. During and after the 3 1/2 conference days on campus, participants can download podcasts and video streams of town hall and keynote sessions, contribute to a conference photostream on flickr.com, interact with presenters and one another in large-format sessions via clickers, create emergent knowledge taxonomies by tagging sessions in the online program via del.icio.us, and use their laptops and campus wireless technology to join in liveblogging the conference. In this way, attendees will not only experience ubiquitous computing during the conference itself, but the community-created online resources generated by these activities will also serve to sustain social and intellectual energy long after the physical conference has passed.