The Composition Commons

The Composition Commons delivers a timely take on invigorating higher education, illustrating how college composition courses can be dynamic sites for producing a democratic, just, and generally educated public. Jessica Yood traces the century-long origins of a writing-centered idea of the American university and tracks the resurgence of this idea today. Drawing on archival and classroom evidence from public colleges and universities and written in a lively autoethnographic voice, Yood names “genres of the commons”: intimate, informal writing activities that create peer-to-peer knowledge networks. She shows how these unique genres create collectivity—an academic commons—and calls on scholars to invest in composition as a course cultivating reflective, emergent, shared knowledge. Yood departs from movements that divest from the first-year composition classroom and details how an increasingly diverse student population composes complex, evolving cultural literacies that forge social bonds and forward innovation and intellectual and civic engagement. The Composition Commons reclaims the commons as critical idea and writing classroom activities as essential practices for remaking higher education in the United States.

The arrest of a friend's father and a school visit by an army captain who wants the children to write a composition entitled "What My Family Does at Night" force Pedro to make a difficult decision.

Service Composition for the Semantic Web presents an in-depth analysis of aspects related to semantic-enabled Web service modeling and composition. It also covers challenges and solutions to composing Web services on the semantic Web, and proposing a semantic framework for organizing and describing Web services. Service Composition for the Semantic Web describes composability and matching models to check whether semantic Web services can be combined together to avoid unexpected failures at run time, and a set of algorithms that automatically generate detailed descriptions of composite services from high-level specifications of composition requests. The book includes case studies in the areas of digital government and bioinformatics.