Increased mobility is often touted as a good thing by purveyors of consumer electronics. And while it very well may be a good thing, it is presented as a new paradigm for workers and consumers to engage in productive activity during leisure time or at their convenience. I am interested in the ways in which these perceptions of mobility affect consumers and their uses of mobile technologies. For example, in "Wi-Fi Rhetoric: Driving Mobile Technologies" and "ReWriting Wi-Fi: The Surveillance of Mobility and Student Agency," I critique the wireless networking (wi-fi) industry for disseminating a potentially liberating technology under the rubric of mass consumption, thereby facilitating a consumerist agency amongst users. The latter article applies this consumerist model to the writing classroom, discussing the implications of deploying consumer technologies on university campuses. In "Accounting for mobility," I study about 750 student writing events that demonstrate some of these effects.
representative publications
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Metz Bemer, A., Moeller, R.M. and Ball, C.E. (2009). Designing collaborative learning spaces: Where material culture meets mobile writing practices. Programmatic Perspectives, 1(2), 137-64.
Moeller, R.M. (2009). ReWriting wi-fi: The surveillance of mobility and student agency. In A.C. Kimme Hea (Ed.), Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless & Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers (pp. 69-85). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Moeller, R. M. (Fall 2004). Wi-Fi rhetoric: Driving mobile technologies. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 9(1). Retrieved from http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/9.1/index.html