By Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences welcomes a strategist, futurist and technologist to campus to discuss a timeless and wholly necessary skill.

Craig Saper, a professor in the Language, Literacy, & Culture doctoral program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will give a talk titled, "WRD UP 2.0: Teaching\R\E\A\D/I/N/G/ as Genre & Practice," at 3 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11, in Room 211 of the Student Center Addition. Refreshments will be served.

"Teaching has begun to respond to our multi-modal contemporary situation with digital assignments," said organizer Jeff Rice, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' Division of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Media (WRDM) who currently holds the Martha B. Reynolds Endowed Professorship for Digital Media. "Once we look at the elements involved in these new forms of writing, teachers recognize new forms of reading and literacy."

Referencing experimental results, Saper will propose a course sequence that addresses the poetics of reading as a practice.

"We will need to learn different types of reading practices the way we have learned types of rhetorical appeals in writing, genres in poetics or medium-specific practices in the arts," Rice said.

Saper is the second participant in Rice's Martha B. Reynolds Speakers Series this year.

In addition to  numerous articles on digital culture, Saper is the author of "Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention," "Networked Art" and has returned to print Bob Brown's 1930s work on the Readies, an early version of the E-Reader concept, with Rice University.

For more information on Saper's talk, which is open to the campus community, please contact Rice at j.rice@uky.edu.