Our 2004 Writing Across the Disciplines Conference -- "Making Connections X," February 14-16, 2004, in Miami, Florida -- confronts several related themes.

How do we continue to create A Community of Educators, a "K-16 Program That Works"? How do community colleges and universities create partnerships between and among K-12 schools that enhance the quality of teaching and learning?

We also focus the 2004 discussion around the ways that "space, time, and opportunity" (Andrea Lunsford's phrase) continue to change who we are and what we do as teachers and learners. What new and creative notions of "space, time, and opportunity" will we create as the boundaries of teaching, learning, and writing expand?

In addition, Writing Across the Disciplines 2004 will host a Town Meeting on Testing. What are the effects of Testing on teaching and learning? On the subjects we teach? What are the effects of Testing on the classroom? On the school? On students? On teachers? On K-16 partnerships?

Our 2004 Conference will be our ninth annual event. We know of no better time -- no better place -- than Miami in February, before Presidents' Weekend: South Beach; the Coconut Grove Arts Festival; the Miami Boat Show; the Florida Keys.

Come on down. Join us.

"Something fundamental is changing. It's not just a matter of new technologies, new ways of producing the old materials, but there's a sense that there's a kind of qualitative, as well as quantitative, shift taking place, that there's a kind of change in sensibility or structure of feeling, that our sensorium is getting re-arranged by the means of communication.

"This is particularly evident for teachers in the way in which we think about and represent our students to ourselves. Increasingly, I think, teachers think about their students as a kind of 'techno-generation,' a kind of phenomenon of post-modern cyborg culture. These are a new kind of human being who are acclimated to a particular space in the interface between the human subjects and its technological representation.

"I mean, this is not just the first generation any longer that grew up never knowing a house without a television, but this is a generation that was represented in the fetus by an ultrasonic imaging. This is a generation that has already been visualized before they'd even entered into the world. This is a generation with the omnipresent beepers and cell phones who devote all their time to web surfing and video games. This is an online and plugged-in generation. It's wired. Media-savvy. And it expects immediate communication and connectivity."

-- John Trimbur, "Making Connections VII," 2/12/99