As a benefit of my participation in the LaGuardia and Baruch WID faculty colloquium I was able to attend an all day workshop on the process of defining “Academic writing”. The workshop was developed by English professors from Yale and Bard. A number of my colleagues in the WID workshop had attended a similar workshop last year and raved about it. LaGuardia was hosting a version of the same workshop for members of the English department. The leaders of the WID colloquium thought it would benefit the rest of us to have the same experience, so they acquired the funds to enable us to attend.
The workshop was both enlightening and a bit intimidating for me because I was out my academic discipline and the sole professor from outside of the English department. Now while I was an undergraduate English major at Oberlin College, the focus of my studies since then have been centered around the implementation of technology solutions and digital design. As the college starts to shift the curriculum to support a greater general education focus, finding ways in which to integrate the academic essay into the New Media program is the challenge that I face.
One reason why I agreed to attend the conference was because I have been asked to figure out a ways in which to motivate visual design, computer science, and Information technology students (many with whom have an inherent aversion to writing) to understand the benefits of having their studies focus more heavily on writing. It is doubtful that this will be easy to achieve so it was my hope that any techniques, tools or strategies that I could gather during the conference would be a benefit.
The other reason that prompted me to accept the invitation to attend the conference was to refine some of the ideas that I have for an article that I am trying to get published. But that is a subject for another time.
