This ISUComm workshop will explore the role of electronic slide presentations in both foundational and advanced communication courses. We'll start by focusing on the PowerPoint debate engaged by Edward Tufte and others. Then we'll take a broad curricular view, sorting out the competencies and learning objectives that best serve students in lower- and upper-level communication classes.

Great Plains Alliance for Computers & Writing (GPACW) Conference

The English department and ISUComm are co-hosting the Great Plains Alliance for Computers & Writing (GPACW) Conference, November 7–8, 2008. The theme of the conference is multimodal communication pedagogies. The keynote speaker is Kathleen Blake Yancey, the Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Director of the graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University.

Daniel L. Everett is chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and a professor of anthropology and linguistics at Illinois State University. Everett began his linguistics work in 1977 as a missionary with SIL International (Summer Institute of Linguistics) in Brazil, where he studied the indigenous language Pirahã. He eventually began and completed an Sc.D. in linguistics at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). His current research is concerned with understanding how cultural values constrain language.

Jane Elliott, the adaptor of the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, will lead a three-hour presentation teaching about the anatomy of prejudice. The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, which she developed in her Riceville, Iowa, classroom, was the subject of the Peabody Award-winning documentary "The Eye of the Storm" and the follow-up PBS/FRONTLINE production "A Class Divided." She will show clips and discuss that film and explore with the audience the problems of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and ethnocentrism, and ways to eliminate them from ourselves and our environment.

Amy Sedaris is best known for her role as Jerri Blank in the television series and 2006 movie adaptation of Strangers with Candy, and, most recently, for sharing her domestic skills in the satirical guide to entertaining I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. Sedaris has appeared in the movies Elf, School of Rock, Maid in Manhattan, the film version of Bewitched and on television in Rescue Me, Monk, Just Shoot Me!