The 2010 conference for the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) in Louisville, KY was very successful, and saw the participation of SIGDOC ODU members Dave Jones and Vincent Rhodes. Rhodes, along with Dr. Kathie Gossett and Dr. Liza Potts, presented their project “Tweetagogy: Building Community in 140 Characters of Less.” The project assesses the impact of the use of Twitter as an internet communication tool for PhD students participating in the English Department’s Summer Doctoral Institute in June and July of 2009. The prezi for they gave to ATTW is available on Rhodes’s blog. Their presentation was very successful, and was met with good questions from the audience regarding the different potential uses of social media as classroom instruction tools.

Dave Jones and Dr. Kathie Gossett participated in Paul Prior’s workshop on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) entitled “Analyzing Literate Activity.” (Find more information from MSU’s WIDE.) Prior presented a methodology for data gathering and analysis based on CHAT, allowing participants to workshop ideas and data from ongoing research projects. Jones is currently working on two projects drawing from activity theory, one involving Twitter as a sight of information articulation (with Dr. Liza Potts), the other examining the impact of visual and haptic UIs on gaming experiences. He was awarded a travel stipend by the ATTW research committee to attend the workshop. Gossett’s current projects revolve around new media-style dissertations and the potential problems depositing them for graduate students. See the CeME website for more information.