Becky Jackson, Faculty, Texas State University

TRANSCRIPT

Interviewer: How would you describe your home department's culture with respect to the use of digital media and technology, teaching, and/or research?

Becky: Okay, that's kind of an interesting, interesting question. Um, we have computer classrooms—I'm gonna kind of go about it this way, talking about what we have—computer classrooms that are used almost excluisvely for technical communication courses, which are, um, junior, junior- and senior-level courses. Um, so we have two labs that have PCs in them and we have one lab that's a Mac lab. Um, occasionally, you can get those classrooms to teach, say, like an advanced writing course, you know, particularly if you're, you know, going to be using technology. But there's no kind of set system or idea that you could use a computer classroom to teach first-year English, which really drives me crazy.

Um, so, that's kind of the, the set-up. We have a Masters degree in technical communication, so we have a usability lab that's pretty new. Um, we have a Masters degree in rhetoric and composition, and we have an undergraduate emphasis in film. So, I say that because I think it suggests, you know, that we have a culture that's open to this work, but we don't—I wouldn't say that we have, um, the infrastructure we need to really enact fully what we could do with all of these people, all of these great ideas.

Interviewer: Uh, so how did you learn about DMAC?

Becky: Um, oh, I've known about DMAC for many years, um, because even though I don't consider myself, like, a computers and writing person, um, I have lots of colleagues who are, and, um, actually, Computers and Writing was the first conference I ever went to way back in 1993, I think. So, I've always kind of known about it, and, in its various, you know, permutations. Um, and I've always wanted to go but I couldn't afford it, and so this year, just out of the blue our chair sent around an email saying, um, we'll fund one person to go to this—first person gets to me gets to go. And I was like, yeah, hello?! I do! So, that was how it happened, but I've known about it [DMAC] for quite a while and always kind of in, in the people who are getting to go.

Interviewer: So how would you describe your own motivations or goals for attending DMAC?

Becky: Okay, I had very clear goals. One that, you know, when you get out of graduate school—and I've been out of, you know, I graduated in 1997 with my doctoral degree—you are so consumed with other things, um, that you cannot keep up, you know, so you're kind of a product of your intellectual moment, and mine is long past. So, [laughs], it's like, you know, I need to know this stuff because I work with narrative and I want to be able to help my students to understand digital storytelling, and, and things like that. So, I just knew that unless I was gonna come to a place where I had, like, you know, deep immersion, that it wasn't gonna happen. Um, so that was my primary motivation, was to, um, get some tools that would allow me to teach, um, variations of courses that I'm already teaching.