What other 'teachable moments' can you share with us from your own experience?

Here's a mundane example, but I think it's suggestive of the approach: My classes typically involve a lot of email, so early in the semester we spend some time looking at interfaces to email clients and discussing how to design a useful subject line for an email message. We go into rhetorical purposes, interface elements, and usability issues driven by interface design.

I've also periodically had students collect then analyze their own instant message exchanges in order to talk about rhetorical issues like audience, purpose, etc.

I also frequently struggle to get students to understand computer-based composing as simultaneously functional and conceptual. That is, people have a tendency to see mastering the technology as a fundamental end-goal for things like designing websites or other media: If they learn how to code a specific type of function, or how to set up a widget to do something, they often don't go beyond that to learning how to use those functional things in rhetorically aware ways.

It's another version of the 'ransom note' model of document design that was common in early days of desktop publishing: just because you CAN use forty different fonts in a document doesn't mean you should . At the same time, I don't want us to get trapped into the modernist sense of efficiency, which can be just as debilitating. It's often useful to contest boundaries and make readers (and writers) a little confused. Look at David Carson's work in graphic design for things like Trans World Skateboarding and Ray Gun. Sometimes typographic confusion is useful.So in my classes, there's often a lot of students who have mastered the functional aspects of a particular piece of software, but a much smaller number of students who can use those functional things in an effective design. I don't expect this situation to change; new tools and new environments for composing will probably always engender this type of learning. (I should say that I'm guilty of it myself frequently. All those 'hello, world' statements I've programmed in various environments are an example of that—I often don't get beyond that stage.)

Ok, this is interesting to me: your admission of being guilty of 'not going beyond that stage.' How has his affected you professionally? In this question, I'm trying to relate to the teaching moment, but in the context of the profession. I guess the better question is: what have you learned about yourself as a professional as you experiment/play with 'various environments'?

I've learned that there aren't enough hours in the day for me to do everything I'd like to. When I look at the sort of work Anne Wysocki does in Flash, or what Todd Taylor's been doing with video, or the KairosNews people have been doing with their website, I wish I did more of that. The problem is that I've sort of lost the ability to focus on one medium, so I end up being spread pretty thin. This inability to focus shows up in my reading and research as well. I think I've been able to turn some of this into a strength, because it allows me to have a much broader range of material to draw on and analyze, and it allows me to make connections among disparate articulations that I might not be aware of otherwise.

I am working on a video documentary about a jazz musician with Steve Doheny-Farina that's been really interesting. But since I still haven't learned enough about Final Cut Pro, I mostly sit behind Steve and act as a backseat editor, offering comments on how long to hold a shot or how to sequence things. Occasionally, we have to call in one of our students, Mark Zegerelli, to show us how to do things that neither of us can do.

One of the things you discover as you get more entrenched into the life of a faculty member is that you no longer have the time to get as deeply into issues as you had as a graduate student: committee meetings, administration, working on grant applications, running community service projects and your family all tend to pull on your time. Of course, grad students have many of the same competing forces, but in general it gets worse the farther into academia you get.