MnCUEW Reflection

Short reflection on MnCUEW Conference in Brooklyn Park, MN at North Hennepin CC (March 2011)

The MnCUEW (Minnesota Colleges and Universities English and Writing) conference was the first conference of my life to which I was invited to be a speaker. (Normally, professors need to apply to present at these conferences.) Lynda Milne suggested my name to David Beard from UM-Duluth, the gentleman running the conference, and he personally invited me. He informed me that the larger topic for the plenary speakers was "The State of English in Minnesota." I decided that I wanted to argue that "English in Minnesota" should include teaching with digital tools. I therefore accepted the invitation and prepared a presentation on digital writing tools for English teachers to use. In essence, my goal was to present some of the information that I'd learn through my research at the CTL (Center for Teaching and Learning). During my plenary presentation, I focused on eight tools in particular, and each one serves a different function for English teachers: Wordle (for prewriting; Diigo (for online research); Vocaroo (for oral feedback); TitanPad (for peer review); PbWorks (for collaboartive projects, such as wikis); Vokis (for visually-based assignments); Crowdrise (for service learning work); and E-Folio (for online composition portfolios). I added two more to the handout I distributed as well: AdobeConnect (for online conferencing) and Tondoo (for cartoons). My delivery method for the presentation even used two tools with which I had been unfamiliar previously: Prezi (a presentation software) and WebEx (a conferencing software). After presenting to this audience of about 50 English faculty, I helped to facilitate a smaller follow-up group discussion with the other plenary presenters on the larger topic on "The State of English in Minnesota." In this open discussion, we identified the issues and pressures facing English studies and what actions English faculty might take as a result. Even though I had to leave the conference after that discussion due to illness, I feel that I still manged to impart and learn about valuable information within the span of one brief morning.