New Research Summit

Scheduled for May 12 here at the University of Oregon. Be sure to check out the blog also.

ARB
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the new research
a summit at university of oregon, may 12, 2006

This Summit brings us together in a mutual effort to reformulate writing and the new research with instructional technologies. On the one hand, we need to describe and make available the resources of the new technologies for students--and more often than not, they can participate in this description; they've already explored many of the possibilities.They may be ahead of us. At the same time, we need to reconceive the way that research arguments are discovered and carried out—and taught.

Often we find ourselves with students who know very well how to make a web site, use a blog, create a Power-point presentation, and/or carry out searches using Google and other search methods. What they don’t have is the rhetorical, critical understanding of these resources—how to interpret primary texts and images, how to discover a significant question, how to decide the credibility of sources, how to make an argument. They use blogs, but may they quote them? They may no longer think primarily in the linear ways of print literacy.

What new ethical questions arise from this new research? An important requirement of argumention--sustained attention to a question at issue-- is not made easier by the web. Students are poised to make powerful use of what they can do if we can help them put the two parts together.

We hope you will join us for this important conversation.