People
Spencer Schaffner
Spencer Schaffner is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Contact Information
300 English Building | MC-718
spencers@illinois.edu
Website:
metaspencer.com
Education
MA, Literature, Boston College
PhD, Language and Rhetoric, University of Washington
Research Interests
Teacher training, new media composition, rhetorical theory, environmental rhetorics.
Course Description
Spring Semester, 2009: "Writing for the Web: The Informatics of New Media Authoring"
This seminar is for students interested in studying and creating innovative digital scholarship. The theme of the course will be the informatics of writing and composing online digital texts. Students will read scholarship on new-media authorship while learning to code an array of web texts "by hand" in html, css, and using simple javascript. The seminar will meet for a two-hour discussion section followed by a one-hour coding tutorial. The projects will involve such things as an inquiry into digital literacy, an invent-your-own-typeface site, a moving-image project, the creation of a video game, a simulation and more. Students need not have any experience creating web sites; experienced students will be able to move at an accelerated pace.