00:04 Rik Hunter: Well, it wasn't that they were inattentive, it was more that there was a total lack of technological professional development, not even a total lack. We can talk about some of the things that Wisconsin was doing well, but we didn't have any faculty members who specialized in new media, or digital rhetoric, or digital literacies whatever you wanna call it. We didn't have faculty who were teaching courses in those areas. And you know, soon after arriving at Wisconsin, I really started to see how I needed to incorporate technology into my own teaching. And I was doing things like reading blogs by Jeff Rice and Derek Muller and getting an idea of how people who were already doing this work in the classroom were doing it, carrying it out. And then I saw Anne's sort of call for attendance on the WPA list and I knew I needed to do this. It was close enough to where I could afford to go as long as I could get the student loans and it was gonna be something that was really foundational to this new way of seeing myself as a teacher.

01:00 Les Loncharich: In my case, the importance of a mentor to being able to attend these workshops, I can't overstate it. Marshall Kitchens was an alumni, alumnus, of CWIC and I think he recognized that what I was doing in first year writing classes was very much in the CWIC mold of things. But I was uninformed about the pedagogy of computers and writing. I attended it because really he thought it was a good idea, at least in the case of CWIC. And then after that, I was pretty much hooked and was very eager to attend Writing New Media. But mostly, my interest... I don't know that there was a lot of institutional support other than Marshall. I think he knew the ways to get money, he knew how to work things in the department and how to be successful in academia and procuring funds.

01:56 Moe Folk: Instead of getting away from my school as others may have had to, I was incredibly lucky 'cause I was at Michigan Tech and because of our wonderful faculty, people were coming there for CWIC, plus the rest of the faculty were just really supportive of grad students. Our grad program coordinator was incredible, so we were really encouraged to take part in professional development. So my biggest dilemma was whether to do Anne or Cindy's session, that's a great problem to have when it comes to professional development. So even though we were already immersed in teaching multimodal composition, I still wanted to become more informed about the theory and pedagogy behind that and plus I got credits and didn't have to pay for them. So it was a total win-win for me.

02:39 Rik Hunter: Nice.

02:40 Alanna Frost: Yeah, I think I'm somewhere in the middle on the spectrum if we can... If the spectrum is from Rik doing all the legwork to Moe being fully immersed. I'm somewhere in the middle. I, excuse me. I knew I wanted to learn more about the theory and pedagogy as sort of something that's coming and I know my institution was definitely pushing, "be more technological" with really no support for it or understanding of what that meant. But I was able to play that card, so I have my application and then I say something like, "If I attend this workshop, I'll be able to offer a better multimedia presence on campus through the writing center that I direct and meet the needs of a diverse learning community. I can use my DMAC OD to use... " I used some buzz words, like I'll start using "synchronous chat" and "multimedia outreach" in my program once I get back. And I probably had a vague understanding of what I even meant but I used it like crazy in the proposal.

03:46 Alanna Frost: Yeah, so it's interesting we've kind of covered how the institution sponsored us or why we got there and how we got there. Now, so now what? What do you kind of draw on now that was specifically sponsored by DMAC or CWIC, if we can keep going on that sponsorship thread?