The CWRL's game design work group has been developing a video game for rhetoric classrooms. The game is called "Rhetorical Peaks," and you can read more about it in the whitepaper they published last semester.

Due to the recent events at Virginia Tech, the local news did a story on the Science Technology and Society Digial Game Design Competition. The competition was focused on the development of games that "involve art, education, exercise, music, humor, relationships, etc. but is not socially destructive."

The CWRL designers entered their game in the competition, and Fox News 7 spent most of their report discussing Rhetorical Peaks. Check out video of Fox 7's report.

In this issue on "The Writing Center and the Classroom," our articles overwhelmingly call attention to the hybrid forms emerging from meetings between these two sites of writing instruction.

“Hybrid” is the keyword in our Focus section. In presenting research data from two composition classes featuring writing tutors, Holly Bruland argues that classroom-based tutoring (CBT) is a “hybrid genre,” with tutors moving from tasks traditionally associated with writing centers or classrooms into roles typical of neither traditional context. Steven Corbett’s article on the history of CBT provides helpful background for Bruland’s discussion by outlining the current theoretical and practical conversations about CBT. Melissa Tedrowe, associate director of the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looks at another kind of “hybrid form” produced when writing centers offer composition classes of their own. This topic gets further treatment in later sections as well, in Lisa Leit, Michelle Lee, and Andrew Jones’ Column discussing classroom presentations offered by the Undergradute Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and in this month’s profile in Consulting of the University of Iowa Writing Center, which holds regular non-fiction and fiction-writing workshops. Rounding out the Focus section is an article on the Purdue Writing Center by Serkan Gorkemli and Tammy Conard-Salvo, who explore various types of professionalization in the writing center, including programs that integrate tutors’ academic pursuits and writing center responsibilities.