Getting on with it

[Shannon Carter]

I agree . . . we'll never agree. Academics rarely do :)

But maybe we can talk a bit about the less esoteric (but still
prelimary)things--things that still have to do with the preliminary stuff,
but that may help us in our efforts to promote continued and lively
involvement in the issues concering language and gender (such as the annual
conference question and suggestions posed by Janet Bing).

I have another cheap suggestion--what about a virtual conference? We are in
the middle of a rhetoric symposium here at my university: though we had a
couple days of conventional face-to-face sessions, the second part of the
conference will be held in virtual space (starting on Monday). The second
portion is entirely contained in the TWUMOO.

Let me explain how the virtual portion is working: The set up and Call for
papers worked much like it would for a regular conference. A number of us
put together CFPs that dealt with various aspects of our conference topic,
"Emerging Rhetorics." Then most of us just posted our CFPs to the Jack Lynch
list (or I guess it's Erica Lynn now). We chose our papers, and then the
conference chair sent out an acceptance letter describing the format our our
confernece and asking them to publish their papers on a web page (if they
knew how, otherwise they could sent their paper to us as an attachment and
we put them up), and then send us the url.

Anyway,there was a lot of other preliminary stuff. But it wasn't too
terribly difficult. Part I (our two days of face-to-face stuff) was last
Thursday and Friday. On Monday, we start the online portion. We will have a
synchronous discussion in each of our panels on Monday night. Participants
will read the papers in the TWUMOO beforehand and then come into a moderated
discussion in one of the TWUMOO rooms. Throughout the rest of the week, we
will post messages to one another through panel-specific lists, and then our
chair will moderate a culminating, synchronous discussion about the session
itself on Friday afternoon to close.

This is the first time we are doing it this way, so there have been some
bugs. TWUMOO itself is less than a year old and the webbased version of
TWUMOO is only a couple of weeks old. But it is really easy to use and easy
to send mail in. And I am pretty sure Dene Grigar and the others that
developed this Moo would be delighted to help us host a conference in there
in a year or less (or more). [An aside: TWUMOO is hosting the online portion
of the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference that will have its "real" portion
at the University of Minnesota.]

Please check it out if you like. The TWUMOO webbased version is at
http://moo.twu.edu:7000. YOu can connect as a guest and look around. We have
the papers for the rhetoric symposium office in the Chopin Room. It is easy
to figure out how to manuver around once you are in there. If you would like
to register for the conference itself, you can check out how the TWUMOO
mailings will work here, as well as see how the synchronous discssions go. I
think registration is $25.00.

Anyway, I thought this might be a cheap and interesting solution to trying
to get us all together early on (especially since I am seeing Australia and
Canada on these posts). Eventually, I hope we can get together in real
space, but while we're poor and small. . .



Shannon Carter
Texas Woman's University
(940)898-2338
s-carter at excite.com




_______________________________________________________
Get your free, private email at http://mail.excite.com/