Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Ryerson University

I'm in the Toronto airport waiting for my flight back to Austin. Toronto's a great city, about the size—and vibe—of Chicago. Downtown, among other things, is Ryerson University, where I spoke yesterday.

Ryerson is a polytechnic university. Among other things, it has a relatively new Master's program in professional communication. It's a one-year terminal MA for fast trackers, and it looks fascinating—and not at all conventional. The standout sight for me was the posters that students produced in a theory course: each poster graphically mapped out relationships among theories, and each was beautifully, professionally produced. Judging from the students' work, and from the students' questions during the presentation, this is a unique program in the best sense.

I've long been a fan of the work of Catherine Schryer, who is now the chair of the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson, so when she invited me to speak at Ryerson, I jumped at the chance. I'm really glad that I did.

Thanks to all the faculty and students who came to hear me talk about genre theory, Castells, Latour, spambots, hipsters, Galileo, SEO, Pokemon, shuttle buses, and cardiologists. (It was a wide-ranging discussion.) And thanks especially to Isabel Pedersen, who served as my liaison throughout the day. I hope the visit was as valuable for you as it was for me!

3 comments:

whatever said...

Hi Clay,

Do you have lecture notes or any prepared materials from the talk that you'd be willing to share?

Thanks,

Eric

Clay Spinuzzi said...

Sure - I have some slides from a similar talk I'm giving at the Genre 2012 conference at the end of the month. I'll plan to post those to SlideShare and here around July 1.

whatever said...

Great, thanks. Looking forward to the slides.