Hi, I’m Joe Erickson, and I teach English at Anoka-Ramsey Community College. I’ve been teaching English for around 11 years or so. I began teaching as a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota Duluth while I was a graduate student there. Um. Over the last several years I’ve also taught developmental writing, writing for business environments, technical writing, writing for the Web, and even a little bit of creative writing. I also had the opportunity to serve as the director of composition for about a year, which afforded me the opportunity to work with and mentor new teaching assistants as they learn the ins and outs of teaching writing for the first time. And all of these experiences have um really helped me develop a better understanding of how people in different circumstances can develop um new literacies as they encounter new circumstances. Um And I think that’s fed into my work on this project; it’s definitely served as sort of an important backdrop for me as I worked with Kevin and we worked through this project together.

By way of further introduction, I’ve provided a short textual narrative beneath this video that describes um an important sort of pivotal moment in my undergraduate education that served to steer um my course of study as a graduate student at both the M.A. and doctoral level and my focus on the intersection between traditional sort of alphabetic literacy and literature and new media literacies.

So I hope you enjoy reading that, and I hope it gives you a little bit of insight into where I’m coming from with this project, and I hope it provides a little bit of background on um sort of this overall project in and of itself.