Starting in the Fall semester John Jones will be joining the EMAC faculty as a senior lecturer.

John received his M.A. from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he studied rhetoric and composition. After graduating, he taught technical writing and composition courses at UT-Chattanooga before entering the English Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate at UT-Austin, where he studies writing practices in new media environments.

From 2007-2009 John was Assistant Director of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing’s Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT-Austin. While at the DWRL, John founded Viz., a website and blog investigating rhetoric and visual culture. In 2010, Viz. was awarded the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award by Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

John is currently working on a dissertation exploring the effects of digital networking on writing practices. You can follow him on Twitter.

We here at EMAC are excited to announce another new faculty member, Cindy Shen. Cindy will be joining us in Fall of 2010. Currently she is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Cindy’s research interests are social media, online communities, virtual worlds, and social network analysis. Her dissertation project examines the social dynamics among players in EverQuest II, a large massively multi-player online game. Cindy is a researcher with the Virtual Worlds Observatory, funded by the National Science Foundation and Air Force Research Lab. She is also an active member of VOSS: Understanding and Enabling Network Dyanmics in Virtual Communities, also funded by NSF.

In addition to to her scholarly work, Cindy is generally interested in exploring the motivation of various online behaviors, such as playing social games and paying real money for virtual items in Farmville.

You can check out her research page and/or follow her on Twitter.

Before you head off for summer, here are some final updates regarding Fall 2010 courses.

Undergraduate Courses:

EMAC (ATEC) 2321 – Writing and Research for New Media, two sections (Staff)

EMAC (ATEC) 2322 – Introduction to Electronic and Digital Communication, two sections (K. Knight, Staff)

EMAC 3326 – Emerging Media and Communication (D. Leeson)

EMAC 4325 – Digital Writing (D. Parry)

EMAC 4372 – Topics in EMAC – Social Change, Social Justice and Social Media (M. Kasra)

Graduate Courses:

EMAC 6300 – Introduction to Emerging Media and Communication

Introduction to interdisciplinary study of the implications of interactive technology for the creation, dissemination, and impact of communication.Establishes basic theoretical concepts and principles underlying the graduate program in Emerging Media Communication. (K. Knight) W 7 – 9:45 pm

EMAC 6372 – Approaches to Emergent Media and Communications

Approaches to Emergent Media and Communications focuses on the study of emergent media from a theoretical frame, exploring the political, technological, cultural and historical forces which inform the way media and communication develop. (C. Shen) T 7 – 9:45 pm

EMAC 6373 – Emerging Media Studio 1

This course explores media production across multiple media. Students work in teams to develop meta-media projects in a variety of content delivery environments. Class will require students to develop a range of rhetorical (text, audio) and visual (image, video) strategies appropriate for emerging media. (D. Terry) R 7 – 9:45 pm

EMAC 6V81 – Special Topics in Emergent Communication — CANCELLED