Current Project (personal): The Addition
The BIG motivator in my life right now is that my wife Nicole and I were recently blessed with our first child. Gavin arrived on August 11, 2008, and has been an amazing experience thus far.

I created a blog to allow family who are "out of our touch" to stay "in touch" with the experience of our first child. Click here (or on the image at right) to see the blog (it includes images, videos, texts...the usual--if it isn't multimodal, then it's at least 3 modes shy of effective, right?)

Current Project (research): Dissertation
Digital networks are reshaping the possibilities of rhetorical invention, but academically we still place rhetorical invention in the service of restrictive (logocentric) economies (i.e. hermeneutical or heuristic practices).  The subjugation of rhetorical invention to logocentrism stems from the division of topoi into a logical/nonlogical binary (in D'Angelo's sense, in A Conceptual), while excluding the paralogical (in Lyotard's sense). But Greg Ulmer's work on electracy—with its emerging paralogical associations based on puns and homonyms as well as on linguistic accidents, mis-informed by logics of conduction—opens other possibilities for rhetorical invention by providing antidotes to the limitations of exclusive, restrictive economies.  My reconsiderations of the potential of rhetorical invention, utilizing Ulmer's work, focus on generative practices re-informed by radical multiplicities, which allow me to move closer to 1) addressing the limitations of an alphabetic/literate set of logoi, 2) addressing the "call to invention" or call for a new set of topoi that went out in the 1960s, and 3) addressing electronic discourses in the University at the levels of knowing, doing, and making. 

My project, which at this point is my dissertation, is two dissertations: one in the traditional, print-based medium (as required by Clemson University) and one in the digital/electronic apparatus, using the Sophie2 platform, which is an open source software created by the Institute for the Future of the Book (under the direction of Bob Stein) and the University of Southern California.  My dissertations attempt to explore possibilities for rhetorical invention in relation to technologies.  While others may be working on these same issues, following print-culture protocols, I felt that if I were only to work in the print medium then I would be engaging in a performative contradiction: to use literacy to talk about potential limits of the literate apparatus may be considered "begging the question," which is why Walter Ong indicated that we must use the highest technology available for investigations of technologies of the word; thus, with current emerging cultures of technology, we need to use more than print cultures to explore these issues. 

Recent Project (pedagogical): Professional Rhetorics Pilot Project
At Clemson University in the Spring of '08, I implemented a pilot project that integrates English 304 (Business Writing) with Communications 250 (Public Speaking). The project, emerging from my work in the area of Professional Rhetorics, is focused on 1) a returning-to or a re-merging of writing and speaking with the concept of rhetorics (rather than the more prevalent tradition of making rhetorics a sub.class, sub.ject, or sub.stance of writing and speaking), and 2) is designed specifically to help students develop writing, speaking, and multimedia authoring skills, abilities, and understanding needed as they venture into professional environments.

I have a course design on the project for Composition Studies (forthcoming) and I will include the link here when it becomes available.