C&W 2007: A Usable Workshop on Usability

My colleague Susan Miller-Cochran (she’s trying to get going with this blogging thing…so give her some support!) and I are about to wrap a co-edited collection on the connections between Rhetoric and Usability, Rhetorically Rethinking Usability. Two of our good friends/colleagues who submitted a co-authored piece for the collection, Jason Swartz (check out that new baby) and Shaun Slattery, decided we should propose to do a workshop on usability in the composition classroom at the 2007 Computers & Writing Conference.  Those fools reading the proposals excepted it and approximately 12 people showed up (what were they thinking?).

Now Susan, Shaun, and I all felt hunky dory because we knew Jason would make sure we dotted all our Is, crossed all our Ts, and didn’t make general fools over ourselves while discussing usability. Of course, Jason’s brother decides he’s getting married the same weekend. EEK!

Amazingly enough, both Shaun and Susan have very clear heads and I can just babble about anything, the three of us pulled it off! At least the people who attended generally seemed happy with the information they got, the discussions we had, and the ideas they walked away with. I know that I was sincerely thrilled with how it went, walking away with a bunch of new ideas myself. I think one of the most exciting ideas we continued to circle around was using different usability inspection methods to co-develop and co-assign writing projects with the students themselves. Or, call us crazy, just doing regular usability testing on things such as assignment prompts. You know…those assignments that you can never seem to get what you want from the students…maybe if you ran a usability test getting data back on how/why they read and interpreted it in a specific manner.

Now that I’ll be playing instructional technologist on our campus the next year, I think it might be interesting to hold a workshop where faculty bring assignment prompts they are using and have one another read and respond to them (low stakes) and even possibly bring in a few test students (high stakes). It could make for fascinating discussion.

June 27 2007 | Posted in C&W