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April 30, 2009

ULM English professor’s work proliferates in national and state journals

Several national journals have accepted the work of an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

Claudia Grinnell, Ph.D., director of ULM’s English Writing Center, has been published in the spring issue of “Praxis: A Writing Center Journal.” Her article is titled, "Wagging the Long Tail: When Push Comes to Pull In Creating the Writing Center 2.0."

“Praxis,” a biannual electronic publication, is a forum for writing center practitioners across the nation. Writing center consultants and administrators regularly submit features for consideration, usually related to training, consulting, labor issues, administration, or writing center news, initiatives and scholarship.

The University of Texas Undergraduate Writing Center, a component of the Division of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, sponsors the journal.

“Her piece was chosen for its relevance to our current issue,” said Patricia Burns, “Praxis”’ managing editor. The current issue focuses on writing across the curriculum and writing centers.

Grinnell’s article explores the “new” world of Web 2.0 and writing center promotion, and is based on Chris Anderson's 2006 book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.”

Her article takes the position that universities must embrace a new approach to learning, one characterized by a demand-pull versus the traditional supply-push mode of learning.

“In demand-side learning, universities will find gold veins of motivated students either desiring to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make or perform something,” she writes.

Grinnell said that writing centers could value add to this proposition because as soon as user-centered spaces of learning are created, “information flows more freely, more democratically, creating a rich intellectual commons. “

Several other of Grinnell’s articles have also been accepted for fall publications.

“From Consumer to Prosumer to Produser: Who Keeps Shifting My Paradigm,” has also been accepted for publication by the journal “Public Culture.” In the article, Grinnell explains what a “produser” is – basically, someone who both produces something and uses it as well.

“The line between consumers and producers is being blurred in this new paradigm,” she said. “In other words, people are no longer producers or consumers, publishers or audiences, but both at the same time. They are not prosumers, but user-producers: produsers.”

Also, the “Louisiana English Journal” has accepted for its fall journal Grinnell’s article, “Spectacular Domination: Supervision for Every(wo)man,” while the “English Journal” has preliminarily accepted “Writing Round in a Flat World: The Writing Center in a Web 2.0 World.”

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