Building Bridges Conference: On Friday, 6 February 2009, Region V benefited from the nineteenth annual Building Bridges Conference held at the Four Point Sheraton in Bakersfield. The first retreat was held in 1990 as a retreat focused on improving articulation between Bakersfield College and CSU, Bakersfield. Through the years, the day-long conference has grown and now includes seven colleges. In addition to CSUB and BC, participants now include the English departments of Cerro Coso Community College, College of the Canyons, College of the Sequoias, Porterville College, and Taft College. This year’s breakout session topics covered important college teaching issues such as Basic Skills, Learning Communities, English as a Second Language, Technology in the Classroom, Responding to Papers, Teaching Research, Teaching Reading, Critical Thinking, Grammar/Usage, and Learning Disabilities. This year’s conference was supported by Allyn and Bacon/Longman, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Thomson, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, and Prentice Hall. Visit the BBC website for more information.

Cerro Coso Community College: The Cerro Coso Community College English Department is considering moving to WriterPlacer, AccuPlacer’s writing assessment tool in order to place students. Currently, CC faculty score student placement essays holistically. The benefits of WriterPlacer are obvious: results are immediate, and much time is saved. However, some drawbacks exist: the prompts in WriterPlacer are not text-based and therefore do not test how well students can work with outside sources, which is a key distinguisher between placing students in Cerro Cos’s English 70 and placing them in 101.

Some CC English faculty attended TechEd 2009 in Ontario to learn about cutting edge education technology. Faculty found the following sessions particularly engaging: Camtasia Studio: Best Practices in Education; Snagit: What You Need to Know About Screen Capture and Editing; Jing: Simple, Quick and Free Visual Classroom Communications; PowerCounterPoint: How Working Memory and PowerPoint Can Work Together; Focused Discussion Groups That Engage the Online Learner (till next session); Authentic Learning in a Second Life; Beyond the Music: Educational Uses for iTunes U; Practices to Foster Informal Learning