Logging On

Cheryl Ball, Editor

In this issue

In this issue, we offer a blockbuster Inventio text, "What's in a Name: The Anatomy of Defining New/Multi/Modal/Digital/Media Texts" by Claire Lauer. This webtext provides interview clips with scholars in digital composition and multimodal studies, remixed around their definitions of terms we use to describe the texts we study.

We also have two other Interviews in this issue. The first is a combination interview-review with Beth L. Hewett, about her recent book The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors. Geoffrey Middlebrook conducted an extensive video interview with Hewett to discuss her thoughts and methodologies behind the theories in her book. Next, an interview with James Gee is presented as an interactive Flash game to highlight Gee's take on contemporary education. Authors Crystal Benedicks, Rose Benedicks, and Michele Buddie send readers on a quest to find objects in the interview-game that will pop up hints to different parts of the transcript. Good luck!

In PraxisWiki, Andy Buchenot and Kristin Prinz present "Doing Digital: A Production-Focused Pedagogy", in which they articulate the ways that benefits and constraints of technology should be part of our writing pedagogies. We also include Ben McCorkle's "Keeping it Real: The Spaces and Places of the Digital Citizen", a short film that chronicles a lower-level digital media composition class.

In Reviews, we have Erin Presley's review of Who Owns This Text?: Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures (Carol P. Haviland and Joan A. Mullin, eds.), which speaks to how plagiarism is viewed by instructors across the curriculum, reminding us that there is no one-size-fits-all definition of plagiarism.

Rachel Parish presents our first Disputatio piece in this issue, "Sappho and Socrates: The Nature of Rhetoric," as a graphic-narrative discussion between these two philosophers. Then, Kathryn Perry's "The Movement of Composition: Dance and Writing" presents a 60-second video comparing the gestures of dance with multimodal writing. This piece functions, unintentionally but smartly, as a trailer for a full-length webtext in our upcoming January issue about these same issues.

Moving on

In May, we said a fond farewell to Andréa Davis, who has worked with Kairos for the last six years, first as a section editor for Praxis, then as co-editor since 2009. Andréa oversaw the final transitions of Praxis to a fully peer-reviewed section and helped me implement a new review and copyediting procedure with the Praxis assistant editors and her new co-editor in 2010, Christine Tulley. She stepped down to focus on her writing program administrative duties as well as her own research agenda. We wish her all the best. Christine Tulley remains as Praxis Editor.



  • About Kairos

    Kairos is a refereed open-access online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. The journal reaches a wide audience -- currently 45,000 readers per month, hailing from Ascension Island to Zimbabwe (and from every top-level domain country code in between); our international readership typically runs about 4,000 readers per month. Kairos publishes bi-annually, in August and January, with occasional special issues in May. Our current acceptance rate for published articles is approximately 10%.

    Since its first issue in January of 1996, the mission of Kairos has been to publish scholarship that examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media. Kairos is one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in English Studies, made so by its dedication to academic quality through the journal’s extensive peer-review and editorial production processes.

    We publish "webtexts," which are texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. Webtexts are scholarly examinations of topics related to technology in English Studies fields (e.g., rhetoric, composition, technical and professional communication, education, creative writing, language and literature) and related fields such as media studies, informatics, arts technology, and others. Besides scholarly webtexts, Kairos publishes teaching-with-technology narratives, reviews of print and digital media, extended interviews with leading scholars, interactive exchanges, "letters" to the editors, and news and announcements of interest.

    Because questions of copyright, intellectual property, and fair use often arise for scholars who wish to create digital publications, we have developed a statement of copyright that encourages authors to carefully consider their rights and responsibilities while advocating for a strengthening of fair use. Our copyright statement also provides authors with the opportunity to build upon and republish their work because we are committed to the continuing development of intellectual work and believe that authors should retain the rights to scholarly production.

    We invite you to share your views about Kairos, and we hope you'll consider submitting your work for our editorial review.


     —Douglas Eyman, Kairos Senior Editor/Publisher, kairosrtp@gmail.com. Virginia, USA.







  • Kairos Staff

    • Senior Editors

      • Douglas Eyman
      • Cheryl Ball

    • Editor

      • Michael J. Faris

    • Managing Editors

      • Christopher Andrews
      • Erin Kathleen Bahl

    • Praxis/Wiki
      & Topoi Editors

      • Tim Amidon
      • Elizabeth Fleitz
      • Kristi McDuffie

    • Disputatio Editors

      • Ashley Beardsley
      • Rick Wysocki

    • Reviews Editors

      • Ashanka Kumari
      • Jonathan Marine

    • Interviews Editors

      • Brandy Dieterle
      • Monica F. Jacobe

    • Communications Editors

      • Cameron Cavaliere
      • Vyshali Manivannan

    • Special Projects Editor

      • Traci Gardner
    • Member of CELJ