Alanna Frost: So, final question is, if the technology genie came down from the heavens and landed at your school and said, "I will give you whatever it is you wish for your program and for your students", what would you ask for? 

Rik Hunter: It's a great question. I guess I can go first. I mean, at this age, I don't believe in genies anymore. But I think what we really need, just thinking about the English department itself, if we had sort of a tech czar, somebody who represented the department and was really responsible for kinda holding these brown bags and giving the workshops and really just showing people from literature to creative writing, to rhetoric and writing, what you can do when you're able to teach with technology. For instance, and we have the most recent Blackboard Learn and they're going gaga over it because they can, now the students can upload their papers to Blackboard like they used to.

Rik Hunter: But now the instructors don't have to download the paper, comment on it and upload it again, they can simply go into Crocodoc which is now built into Blackboard and leave marginal comments and highlight things and like... But we could do all of that for free in Google Drive, right? But they don't know it because we don't have that tech person, that tech representative in the department talking about teaching with technology and... I've done my best to pick up that ball, but I have a full load and I have my research expectations and service expectations. So even if we couldn't have like that tech person show up, for me I would like maybe even to have like a course release. And that was a part of maybe my service to the department, was to lead those kinds of initiatives.

Alanna Frost: Mm-hmm.

Moe Folk: Yeah, I like that tech czar idea. I would kinda jump on something like that. I would definitely say yes, you need a course released for that and I'd also say it'd be important to make it interdisciplinary too, so there's one person from each department and you kinda can work with other people. 'Cause I think that's what's important. There's so much out there and as soon as we see it we would know, "Oh here's how I could use it in our field" and vice versa. We might show someone something they could use something in the sciences so I think we'd have some richer things rather than just one person alone.

Moe Folk: And the other thing I think would be awesome is if the course proposal process weren't as rigid. Like could you imagine trying to propose a course that says, "Yeah, in 15 weeks, we're just gonna be in the lab making stuff and whatever happens, happens." No one's ever gonna approve that course, but we all know that something really good can come out of that. So I think if I could put a course through that's like CIWIC or DMAC over a 15-week period, I bet you good stuff would come out, but I would need the genie's help to get that through the whole university course approval process.

Alanna Frost: Mm-hmm.

Les Loncharich: I'd like to see three things: I'd like to see an initiative within my current department to build bridges between various forms of writing. So we have creative writing, we have the techni-com presence, we have writing studies, there's a little bit of linguistics in there. But we don't really have any particular reason to all be together. But I think some initiatives, some well-funded initiative of course, that would enable say the creative writing people, especially the ones who are interested in what I identify as digital writing to get professional development and come back and start doing collaborative, creative projects; I mean creative's broadly defined because I think technical communication is very creative.

Les Loncharich: Another thing I would like to see is some initiative, well-funded initiative to move towards video composition because I think that technology provides the greatest multimedia affordances. And I think it also provides a great deal of agency particularly for students. And it's a kind of technology that's not likely to be outstripped right away like almost everything else seems to be. For example, when I was a technical writer, I would have died for something like Vine where I could incorporate 30-second videos with alphabetic writing that would have just been, would've just been wonderful.

Les Loncharich: So something that deals with sort of micro things like Vine to a more larger video projects as writing. And then the last thing I would like also well-funded are crayons and paper because I think people, students need to draw. And that analog thing, even though we're all talking digital, that still had a presence at CIWIC and had a presence at Writing New Media...

Rik Hunter: Definitely.

Les Loncharich: And I don't think we need to walk directly away from that.

Alanna Frost: Good one.

Rik Hunter: That's a wrap.