Author Archives: Jeff Grabill

North Dakota State University is hosting a meeting in October that plays with “WIDE” as a name and theme and that features presentations from us. The meeting, themed “WIDE Open Spaces” focuses on digital environments in relationship with open sources, … Continue reading →

In this second installment of WIDE’s idea documents that take up challenges to and opportunities for writing programs, Jeff Grabill addresses a range of issues that writing programs might consider as they adjust to the new economies of higher education. Grabill attempts to work back and forth between the general and the specific, but as with Julie Lindquist’s document on possible relationships between writing programs and English Education, this piece is situated within the case of the writing program at Michigan State. Continue reading →

WIDE recently announced that we were interested in generating and sharing a set of idea documents that proposed innovative approaches to a set of writing program issues that took into consideration the severe economic conditions that higher education must navigate … Continue reading →

WIDE would like to give a heads up to friends and colleagues that a key project for the Center this year will be to generate and discuss issues and concerns connected to what writing programs should look like in the … Continue reading →

By way of Bruce Maylath, I came across Cathy Davidson’s “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions” (couldn’t find an online version, and so: PMLA, 2008, Volume 123, Number 3, pp. 707–717). This is a pretty good read, as Davidson takes up … Continue reading →

I have been dwelling for some time with ideas for rethinking the professional writing major in response to phenomena that aren’t going away, such as the inadequacy of the university for life-long learning and the unsustainable way that public education … Continue reading →

I have been reading John Borthwick on The Rise of Social Distribution, which I picked up via Jyri Engestrom’s stream. This is an interesting read for lots of reasons. He touches on content distribution models, noting that it used to … Continue reading →

A new study published in First Monday calls into question findings from an Ohio State University dissertation that showed a link between frequent Facebook use and poor grades. The earlier study by Aryn Karpinski garnered a lot of media attention … Continue reading →