AH: As the head of the graduate program in rhetoric and composition at FSU, how will you prepare your graduate students, many of whom are going to be teaching writing, to incorporate “textured literacy” into their classrooms as they move into this “fourth wave” of writing?

KY: That's a really good question. I will tell you that Clemson is a laptop campus, and wireless is everywhere.  There is also a Studio, so it's “all media, all the time,” and it's just fabulous. Florida State is not a laptop campus, though it will be in fall 2007. Parts of the campus are wireless, but the English Department is in a building that was just renovated. Because our digs are so nice, we are now low on the list when it comes to getting wireless.  That's one context.

But there is so much good news here, it's astonishing. In the first place, there are two computer classrooms that have 18 seats in them, so that's all the students  you're able to accommodate. And you have a lot of graduate students who are already doing new and interesting things, working with blogs, for example, and creating digital portfolios on spaces like LiveJournal: very cool and lots to learn. The English Department has its own servers and has a full-time IT person, Scott Kopel, who equips us with all of our IT stuff. He's teaching me to use Drupal as we speak, soone project I'm planning is an e-portfolio research group beginning in the summer of 2006. Stay tuned!

The second thing that's really wonderful is that the president of FSU thinks he can persuade the legislature to give us 200 extra faculty hires, that is, the whole campus.  We've been encouraged to think about how we might use those hires, and, in particular, we're being encouraged to think about cross-disciplinary work.

One of the ways I've spent my time over the past couple of weeks is working with some other people in English and in Communication Studies creating a cluster in digital mediaculture.

AH: Oh, great.

KY: Oh, yes. As part of that proposal (should it go through), there's a studio built into it. We have planned it out in stages, and the studio is a second, not a first stage effort. I was asked to identify hires we would need to make this program go, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I did this. What was really exciting about it is that the Communication Studies people already have a certificate in this area that is a combination of production and mass communication.

On the English side, there's a lot of interest. There's a film and literature conference that's actually fairly well known held in Tallahassee every year in January. What we’re trying to do is build on some strengths that the units already have. So that is wonderful.

There are also some wonderful colleagues in English and Education. What we're hoping to do there (with or without these extra hires) is a project that will connect high school and community college. There's also a historically black college in Tallahassee called FAMU and some wonderful people at Tallahassee Community College. Bringing together high school, community college, FAMU, and FSU in a project would allow us to redefine “literacy” so that it's multimedia and redefine the way such a curriculum is delivered and the way it's assessed.

AH: Wonderful.

KY: Yes and again, these are really smart, wonderful people, and we have a site of the National Writing Project.  The person who directs that is a part of this project.  We also are making two hires, and I am hoping that one of those will have a “complementary” set of skills and theories to contribute to this effort.  I see a lot of ways to make this happen.