Engaging Experiences
User Experience and Sophocles View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Girard
In design, there is a notion of a maker. Maybe that person is a ceramics artist, maybe a construction worker, maybe an electrician, maybe a product designer. These people make real physical things that come into the world. Design legend John Maeda talks about the shift away from these craft based makers into a world where people do this through writing, sound, and code, a shift away from the maker. However I don’t see this as a shift. I see writing, sound, and code as forms of making as well. Sure, they aren’t what we ordinarily see as making, because we are making transient things, abstract things, but they are things and they are coming into the world and they exist within us before existing in the world and this process, this transfer is something I call manifestation of ideas.
Featured Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Practical Reason and the Virtues of Social Resistance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Egidijus Mardosas
In this paper I discuss Revolutionary Aristotelian (RA) social philosophy and propose a direction for its further development. RA refers to the more radical readings of Aristotelian works of Alasdair Macintyre, readings that seek to develop Aristotelianism as a form of a critical theory of society. In my paper I seek two objectives. First, to discuss the notion of practical reason as developed by RA and to show its importance in the context of contemporary social conflicts. Central to this understanding of practical reason is the idea of virtues as certain qualities of mind and character that allow people to pursue their individual and collective flourishing against the corrupting power of market and state. Here I acknowledge a certain limitation of RA so far: that the place of social and political conflict for the development of practical reason remains insufficiently developed. Thus, secondly, I propose that in order to advance RA we must develop an account of what I name as "the virtues of social resistance“.
Cultures of Writing and Peer Review View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrea Feldman
University writing classes often use peer review as a guide to revision, yet they often do not inquire into the criteria on which that feedback is based. This paper discusses research conducted at the University of Colorado on the peer review of non-native English-speaking students’ writing. The research includes interviews with college-level writing instructors, a study of pre-collegiate international student writing, and a survey of first-year native English-speaking students. The purpose of the research was to gauge how native-speaking first-year writing students assess non-native speaking first-year writing students’ writing. In many of our English writing courses, we assign peer-review activities, and often assume that students are familiar with this practice from their high-school years. However, in many of our classrooms, we haven’t discussed explicitly how to comment on peers’ papers for revision. In practice, the results of this study suggest that peer review can be a helpful tool for native-speaker acceptance of multilingual and multicultural writing styles. The study found that other considerations, beyond linguistic conventions, affect peer review, as they do among papers written by native speakers of English. The main concerns of native English-speaking students among the non-native papers were in the use of emotional appeal, bias, and perspective, and they were not as bothered by surface or grammatical differences. A key component to a successful revision is trouble-shooting a text, considering multiple points of view, and presenting a fair-minded picture. This is done by encouraging the habit of critiquing, whether a published text or a peer’s paper.
