Three faculty members of the Department of Writing and Library Science will be presenting at the conference:  Jamie White-Farnham (Assistant Professor), Carolyn Caffrey Gardner (Assistant Professor), and Julie Gard (Assistant Professor).  In addition, Sakib Mahmud (Assistant Professor in the Department of Business and Economics) and Tara Kachgal (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicating Arts) will be attending the conference.  CETL will be providing transportation and lodging for this team to attend the conference. 

The presentation to be given by UW-Superior's faculty is entitled Wikis, Blogs, and E-Portfolios: Digital Approaches to Public Writing.  The faculty will share the work of assigning digital writing products in three different courses:

• Jamie White-Farnham will link the needs of Basic Writing students with the benefits of writing digital genres such as wikis. Drawing on users' experience with Wikipedia, students articulate the audience, purpose, and design of the wiki article as a genre with a context and conventions distinct yet comparable to academic writing. Jamie will share students' wiki articles and reflections, asserting that writing digital genres empowers basic writers as communicators - and not only retrievers - of knowledge (Sundin, 2008).
• Carolyn Caffrey Gardner will then describe a First Year Seminar blogging assignment between a Library Science class on technology and social movements and a Social Work class on social justice designed as a community building exercise. As authentic writing, blogging increases collaboration and fosters a learning community that extends beyond classroom walls. Carolyn will share students' blog posts and reflections.
• Finally, Julie Gard will describe the e-portfolios students create in a general education Creative Writing course to present and integrate a semester's worth of reflective and creative writing, including craft analysis of published short stories and their own literary experiments. The e-portfolio provides novice and more experienced writers with a real-life forum for sharing their work and adds a layer of professionalism to their writing endeavors. In addition, the e-portfolio contains a comprehensive overview of student learning, allowing for efficient yet meaningful feedback and fair, accurate assessment.

The University of Green Bay's Center for Advancement in Teaching and Learning is hosting the Faculty Development Conference, with this year's theme Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age, featuring keynote speaker Gardner Campbell.

For more about the conference visit http://www.uwgb.edu/catl/conference/