Computers & Writing Conference 2015: A Student Perspective

August 9, 2015

Photos provided by Kelsey Worthington and Deviant Art

Written by Kelsey Worthington, GC Undergrad Student

GC Special Projects

In summer Mini-semester A, Mr. Jacobs offered the first GC2510 special projects course. This course was intended to introduce students to the unique challenges of designing and implementing training workshops. It is fairly common for graduates of the GC program to do some form of in-house training within their first year of employment, and most recent graduates feel underprepared for the challenge. This was Graphic Communications’ first attempt to address the issue.

This Summer 2015 GC2510 project was to design an Adobe Muse introduction half-day workshop for the Computers & Writing Conference. The Computers & Writing Conference is an annual academic conference for language composition and humanities instruction through the use of computer and digital technologies. GC2510 students worked with Mr. Jacobs to design and teach an introductory workshop to composition and humanities academics who are not normally well-versed in web design, HTML, or coding.

Muse Workshop

The purpose of the Adobe Muse workshop was to teach anyone and everyone how to use a non-intimidating platform for creating rich and dynamic digital spaces for authoring on the web. As Mr. Jacobs says, “Muse is like riding a bike – you need training wheels at first, but after a few short rides you’re off on your own and loving it.”

Before helping teach this workshop, I had to learn how to use this software myself! During the week and a half leading up to the workshop, I began learning all the ins-and-outs of Adobe Muse: going through step-by-step tutorials, researching tips and tricks, and using the “Teach Yourself” textbook as a guide. Of course, there were times where I found myself in a bit of a pothole but I directed my questions to Mr. Jacobs and online resources and eventually worked out all of the issues I was having. After a few short tutorials from Adobe’s website, and a lot of experimentation, I found that I was suddenly building my own websites in the blink of an eye. I would say that Muse is basically InDesign but instead of catering to print, it’s catered to websites.

After arriving at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, Mr. Jacobs and I checked out the room in which we would be teaching and tested our set up to make sure things would run smoothly. As we waited for our students to arrive, we began to wonder “Will we have any students? And if we do, how many will we have?” We set up the class into a two-part session: first the presentation, and then the step-by-step creation of a website. Due to the number in attendance, we were able to go more in depth into the software than we had initally planned which allowed for lots of hands-on exploration of the software features.

I went into this class not knowing that Muse even existed and came out having created four professional looking websites that are even accessible to anyone on the web. After going through the learning process, and a bit of frustration, I would say to just try it. You might find your fears are unfounded.

At the Conference

As for the Computers & Writing Conference, getting to hear speakers from universities all over the United States was a great learning experience and it brought a lot of knowledge to the table. Looking at the schedule, I was able to choose which panels sounded the most interesting to me and quite a few of the ones I chose were on Social Media.

After attending this conference, I feel more aware of what changes professors are pushing for across universities and how they would go about making these changes. The majority of the attendees were either professors or grad students, but I feel that my undergrad status only hindered me a little bit when speakers began talking about their dissertations and other information that was somewhat “over my head.”

The Computers and Writing Conference was my first ever academic conference and I would have to say that it was an enriching and very enjoyable experience!