A remarkable symposium on April 9th might well be considered a signal moment in the birth of the 21st-century technological university.

English professors from around the country gathered to engage the future of English studies, exploring conceptual and curricular innovations that are developing nationally and being delivered at Georgia Tech, where the Writing and Communication Program is among the national leaders in rhetoric, multimodality, and digital pedagogy.

Rhetorical Reflections: Borderless Communication in a Multimodal World was hosted by Georgia Tech's Writing and Communication Program, headed by program director, Professor Rebecca Burnett. Extending the symposium's concurrent sessions, the Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows in Burnett's program presented 23 posters, showcasing the program's innovative approaches to curriculum in first-year composition and in technical communication.

Among the first-year composition posters was one by program instructor, Dr. Melissa Graham Meeks, who uses wikis (online encyclopedias) to engage students. This semester, she assigned Thomas Friedman's book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. As a way of encouraging students to learn research techniques, she had them build a wiki indexing key ideas, terms, events, and people mentioned in Friedman's book. Students' work on the wiki encouraged reflection on Friedman's influential thinking as well as the pros and cons of online encyclopedias. The wiki required advanced writing skills that leveraged design and Web features to meet the needs of undefined, online audience. The assignment also prepared students for a traditional research paper.

What's going on in Meeks's classroom is leading-edge digital pedagogy (d-ped). It is the norm across Burnett's program.

"D-ped allows us to take advantage of complex cognitive, affective, and social factors that affect learning in ways that enable us to move beyond linear text encountered in print books," says Burnett. "A wiki, for example, allows a kind of hyperlinked synergy that more typically reflects the way today's students think about and engage with the world around them."

Also featured prominently in the symposium was the program's multimodal approach. Where most English/communication programs emphasize writing and perhaps one other mode of communication, Burnett's program focuses on WOVEN communication, with an emphasis on written, oral, visual, electronic, and non-verbal competence. The WOVEN approach was highlighted in the symposium's keynote presentation by the program's Assistant Director, L. Andrew Cooper, and Kimberly Hampton, the Editor for Custom Media at Bedford/St. Martin's, a leading publisher of educational books and a co-sponsor of the symposium. The keynote presentation focused on the program's groundbreaking electronic-textbook for first-year English. Cooper spearheaded the creation of the e-book, which embeds video and audio and includes sections encompassing all five WOVEN modalities. Bedford/St. Martin's is using the program's e-book as a national model for e-textbooks.

Innovation generally engenders tensions and concerns over what is being lost and gained, and the refashioning of English curriculum is no exception. The symposium embraced the debate that is raging in academia over the transition to digital and multimodal pedagogy. When introducing plenary session speaker Andrea Lunsford, Interim Dean Kenneth Knoespel noted that the Stanford professor "is not one of the hand-wringers who believe that student writing has gone into a state of sad decline because of texting and Facebook." Lunsford believes that "we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." (Wired magazine interview)

Despite or perhaps in support of the revolution, Lunsford emphasized an underlying theme of Burnett's program and the symposium: no matter how fun and glitzy the technology, rhetoric remains central to what is taught.

Also central, is the ability of professors to assess students' work across the spectrum WOVEN communication. A set of criteria and strategies to apply them were outlined by Lee Odell, professor at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, and Susan M. Katz, professor at North Carolina State University.

Informing the dialog that unfolded at the symposium was Burnett's support of borderless communication.

"Historically, we have put borders around classes, but what students learn in our 21st-century classes links directly to what happens beyond the walls of our classrooms. Students should understand what they learn in classes is designed for a broader purpose and situated in a broader context," says Burnett. "We're helping students learn processes. We're helping students construct arguments and analyses that move beyond the borders of specific classes. We want students be skillful as they engage in borderless communication in a multimodal world."

Burnett hasn't abandoned traditional pedagogy, but innovation means embracing technologies in use every day by students and instructors, meeting students on their own ground. This symposium offered a directional call for the discipline.