Alanna Frost: So as we reviewed, we went away to these institutes, we had a fantastic time, we learned a ton, we came back to our institutions and I think the noise I made was, "Wah, wah, waaah." But I think we both... We still, we talked about that there's definitely potential in that, because what we learned needs to continue and clearly, because technology is changing, we need to keep working. So, how can we take advantage of this potential, this using what we've learned? What do we think about that? 

Rik Hunter: Well, I think being able to go to some sort of like national workshop like DMAC or something, it's great, but there's only so many slots and then there's, of course, the limited funding for graduate students. And that's something we even come across in... With the computers and writing conference, for the GRN, we're doing this fundraising, trying to get graduate students to the conference to present and participate and get that professional development at that level of attendance. But still, we don't raise enough money to cover everybody who wants to come to the conference. And so, that funding's always gonna be an issue. So, I think the idea's, at least in my mind, at UTC, I want to start developing more of these local professional development workshops, even if it's just a presentation, just a... Some place where students, the graduate students, and faculty can talk about teaching with technology.

Alanna Frost: It makes me remember that kind of call to the local and that notion of sustainable professional development, does definitely touched on it at DMAC. Cindy and Scott do work to mitigate this sustainability issue. We had presentations and then discussions, specifically about how to secure resources and how to network in order to continue to develop our practices, new pedagogical practices, we just learned.

Les Loncharich: Yeah, when I got to Kutztown, it's a pretty large department, more than 40 people, so it's pretty hard trying to come up with something that's sustainable there. And yet I felt, here's me coming in as a new person, I wanna meet colleagues, a lot of people are interested in my work, and I wanted to help other people out, help push myself. So, I knew I couldn't do a two week extensive workshop in the summer, but I took something else from Michigan Tech and that's Dickie Selfe's TWIT sessions they were called, Teaching With Instructional Technology. These were basically like a one hour brown-bag hands-on session, but of course that doesn't capture the richness of what went on there. So I started doing these bi-weekly techno pedagogy sessions and I figure I should give 'em a snappy name, so I came up with WART, Writing And Research Technologies.

Les Loncharich: And I did those for almost a year and we couldn't even have a computer lab through the department, but we had one in the library and there was a lot of curiosity, but it was just really hard to sustain that. So I kind of felt bad, but I had to give it up on the tenure track with so many other things to do. But just redoing this article made me think like, "Wow, that was a lot of fun," and we learned a lot, people... We had good connections, I still see a lot of people from that, they say, "Hey, what about this, have you kept up with that?" So I really want to bring that back after this, it made me realize how fun that was and important to kind of our department culture to some degree.

Rik Hunter: Yeah, it makes me think that we do need smaller sort of events and I haven't been to a VAT camp yet, and I've been wanting to go to one for the last couple of years. And the closest one, recently there was one in Nashville and I was thinking, "Oh, that would be a great place to take graduate students to." But again, it was sort of like the funding issue, I know we don't have the budget even to take a few graduate students and pay for lodging and food and just maybe we could get a van and travel together. But because of all the funding issues, the budget cuts, I mean we're dealing with that sort of stuff, being a state institution right now, I really wanna think more about the local sort of things that I can do like even just giving a Google Drive or Google Apps for education workshop, things like that.

Moe Folk: Hell! I don't know! 

[laughter]

Moe Folk: Perhaps, Google Hangouts, technology like this can mitigate cost of travel, but somehow, the CWIC experience, I don't see it translating into a distance learning kind of thing. I am interested in collaborative projects with colleagues as a way to secure resources and to showcase the affordances of multimedia, multimodal composing. But at the same time, right now, I'm writing a proposal for a digital humanities center, that word is part of its mission, promote professional, technological development within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. That would be really an extension of CIWIC writing and the media experience.

Rik Hunter: Yeah, that would be a fantastic resource and...

Moe Folk: Yeah.

Rik Hunter: And bring a lot of attention to the university and what you're doing. Even on a small scale, I'm thinking if there was like a University of Wisconsin sort of like technology fellowship program like I went through at UTC, and we could at least get our graduate students who are... They are doing teaching, they are teaching in our classrooms, I mean, for the most part the Master's students are teaching sort of like extra credit sessions that are tacked on to our first year writing course where they help students make... Right now, it seems like they do a lot of things like grammar and things like that in that course.

Rik Hunter: But really I think working with things like Google Apps and working on a collaborative writing and peer review and learning how to use those technologies to teach writing is what they need because that's what most of them are trained for, I mean we still have a number of students that are applying for graduate programs and teaching at the local community college. So I think those are, their skills and experiences they're not getting right now that a technology fellowship program would give them.

Les Loncharich: Yeah, given shrinking budgets and tighter funding for professional development and increasing cost of travel, maybe one option is kinda look for the past, I was thinking about how the early WAC people traveled around, they did workshops, so I'm thinking maybe, thinking about how that model, if you know, bringing experts and innovators to your own campus, so instead of one person from an institution going away somewhere at high cost and then trying to implement something back home and then you have to deal with the whole IT infrastructure and all that, you can actually build it from the ground up there. Everybody is using their own facilities, their own devices, maybe that cuts out that implementation step that sometimes never gets done because of time and money constraints. So I'm not saying such an approach should be as rich or maybe even as helpful down the road, but it definitely seems a little more sustainable in our current culture.