Workshop: "This is How We Think"--Getting Beyond the Personal: Research and the Visual Essay

When & Where
Friday, February 19, 2010
12:30-3:00 PM
Media Arts Conference Room
Humanities Building, Second Floor

"This is How We Think," continues the line of thinking begun in Miller and Hammond's YouTube piece, "This is How We Dream."

Part I / Part II

Professors Miller and Hammond will discuss the impact that digital technology is having on the organizing concepts of higher education: mastery, literacy, individual achievement. In a world where information abounds, where reading and research have moved from paper to screen, and where collaboration and networking have replaced the isolated scholar in the garret, what is the work of higher education? What does it mean to learn, to think, and to write in any discipline when literacy goes online? In this collaborative talk and multimedia presentation, Professors Miller and Hammond will introduce their most recent work with students from across the disciplines on writing with new media and on contending with the challenges of sustainability.

In this workshop, we will consider practical ways to get students from across the disciplines to reflect on what it means to do research when Google is always ready to hand. How do we generate thought in an information-saturated environment? What happens when students from the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences are asked to compose with images, interviews, sound, and text?

Richard E. Miller, Executive Director of the Plangere Writing Center, is the author of Writing at the End of the World (Pittsburgh, 2005), As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education (Cornell, 1998), and co-author, with Kurt Spellmeyer, of The New Humanities Reader (Houghton-Mifflin, Cengage, 3rd edition, 2008), a textbook used in first-year writing courses in high schools, colleges, and universities across the country.

Paul D. Hammond is the Director of Digital Initiatives in the Rutgers University Writing Program. He has a Ph.D. in German Literature and a forthcoming book on Thomas Bernhard, A Private Life as Public Discourse, but he is primarily interested in developing participatory, collaborative curricula for new media research and teaching across the humanities disciplines, which includes designing next generation teaching and learning spaces.

This event is sponsored by: The Richard L. Conolly College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Project Quest (Quality Undergraduate Expanded Science Training) at the Brooklyn Campus, and the Long Island University Teaching & Learning Initiative.

Click image to see flyer for this event.