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Article
Using Games to Make Something: Of Our Students, Our Pedagogies, Our Field.
Journal of Teaching Writing (2014)
  • Carly Finseth
Abstract
If there's one thing that writing instructors are known for it's innovation. Compositionists, because of our connection between academia and industry, the humanistic and the technical, the creative and the practical, are often some of the first to explore and adopt new technologies. In 2000, Susanmarie Harrington, Rebecca Rickly, and Michael Day published The Online Writing Classroom, providing insights into how teachers of writing could incorporate digital technologies into their instruction; in 2004, Anne Francis Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc captured our imagination with Writing New Media, a compilation of innovative techniques for incorporating multimodal instruction and assignments into our pedagogies; and in 2007, Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Devoss's Digital Writing Research helped us move one step further by introducing methodological insights into researching technologically advanced texts. These are just a few examples of how our field welcomes technology into our theories and practices. And our tendency toward early adoption only makes sense. After all, technology is a means to a societal end of innovation and survival (Gehlen 214). To survive and succeed in a changing world, we must embrace new technologies as part of the future. Early adopters are often innovators, those willing to accept and experiment with new technologies as they arise. It therefore follows that compositionists—rhetorical, linguistic, and writing scholars who often specialize in technological areas—would be innovative as well. This innovation is perhaps most prevalent among those who specialize in new media studies, which often "attracts innovators, iconoclasts, and risk-takers" (Manovich xii). From encouraging multimodal composition to visual and digital literacies, our field is centered on the very idea of change.
Keywords
  • games,
  • rhetoric,
  • composition,
  • writing,
  • pedagogy
Publication Date
Fall 2014
Citation Information
Carly Finseth. "Using Games to Make Something: Of Our Students, Our Pedagogies, Our Field." Journal of Teaching Writing Vol. 29 Iss. 2 (2014) p. 85 - 98
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/carly_finseth/8/