Cynthia Haynes is Director of First-Year Composition and Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, electronic pedagogy, virtual systems theory, feminist theory, critical theory, computer games studies, digital aesthetics, and the rhetoric of war and terrorism. She is co-chair of the RCID PhD Colloquium on Serious Games at Clemson. One of her main projects has been designing and teaching rhetoric and writing in synchronous multimedia learning environments (MOOs), and with Jan Rune Holmevik she co-founded Lingua MOO at UT-Dallas (1995-2006). Most recently she and Jan Holmevik launched the "gaming-across-the-curriculum" research collective and the World of Warcraft academic guild, Venture. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Beta Rhetoric: Writing, Technology, and Deconstruction.

Jan Rune Holmevik is Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University. His research interests are interactive media, computer game studies, humanistic informatics, visual communication, and experience design. He is co-chair of the RCID PhD Colloquium on Serious Games at Clemson. With Cynthia Haynes, he co-founded Lingua MOO at UT-Dallas (1995-2006) and was principal programmer and designer. Sample publications are High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs, published by the University of Michigan Press in 1998, and MOOniversity: A Student’s Guide to Online Learning Environments, published by Allyn and Bacon in 2000. Holmevik and Haynes have organized the World of Warcraft academic guild, Venture. He is currently working on a book manuscript, On Electracy: The Ludic Post-Literate Transversal.

Jonathan Alexander is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. The author or editor of six books, he is also a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for best articles in the field of computers and composition studies.

Jennifer deWinter is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and associated faculty in the Interactive Media and Game Development program there. She is also a member of the Learning Games Initiative.

Daniel Griffin is a masters student in the School of Information Resources and Library Sciences at the University of Arizona. He is a member of the Learning Games Initiative and studies the archiving and preservation of digital materials.

Trevor Hoag recently finished his second year in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working on his first dissertation chapter. He works at the intersection of rhetorical theory and continental philosophy, particularly in the areas of memory, ethics, and pedagogy.

Kimon Keramidas is the Assistant Director for the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center where he is responsible for the development and implementation of digital media practices across academic programs. Kimon received his PhD in Theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center, where he also completed the CUNY Graduate Center's Certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. He has taught courses in new media, digital information fluency, theatre, and performance at Marymount Manhattan College, The Cooper Union, Bard Graduate Center, and CUNY's Online Baccalaureate and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy programs. Kimon's research focuses on digital media through the lenses of political economy and sociology of culture with particular focus on intellectual property, information access, and video gaming. Kimon is currently working on developing his dissertation on intellectual property rights in theatrical production into a book, has recently had articles published in the collections Theater und Medien: Theatre and the Media and Studying the Event Film: The Lord of the Rings (co-authored with Henry Bial and Ryan Reynolds), and has upcoming publications in the collections Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (co-authored with Aaron Glass) and the conference proceedings from the 2009 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA).

Matt King is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.  Over the last few years, he has been one of the main developers of Rhetorical Peaks, a video game created by the Digital Writing and Research Lab.

Max Lieberman is a graduate student at the University of Arizona South, where he will receive his MS in Educational Technology in 2010. He is the editor of The Educational Games Database, a resource designed to help educators understand and use video games in the classroom. His current projects include online course design and methods of introducing game-based motivational elements into traditional and online courses. This is his first publication.

Elizabeth Losh is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes. She directs the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College at UC San Diego. Before that she was the Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine. She writes about institutions as digital content-creators, the discourses of the "virtual state," the media literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices. She has published articles about videogames for the military and emergency first-responders, government websites and YouTube channels, state-funded distance learning efforts, national digital libraries, political blogging, and congressional hearings on the Internet. Her next book is about the rhetoric of the instructional technology movement in higher education.

Ken S. McAllister is a Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, where he is a Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative.

Ryan M. Moeller is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Utah State University. He teaches courses in professional writing, rhetorical theory, and the rhetorics of technology.

Scott Reed is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College.  His research focuses on the intersections between gaming and rhetorical theory, with a particular focus on how gaming challenges assumptions of agency and discourse production. His goal is to leverage that understanding into pedagogy that engages the playful and multimodal aspects of composition, with a particular emphasis on multimodal portfolios.

Judd Ethan Ruggill is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Arizona State University and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.

Tekla Schell is a PhD student and Assistant Instructor in English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is working on a dissertation that examines the procedural rhetorics of fan fiction. She wishes to thank Matt King for his generous permission to use his classroom as a laboratory for this project.

Zachary Waggoner, PhD, teaches writing and rhetoric courses for Arizona State University. To date, he has authored two books: My Avatar, My Self: Identity in Video Role-Playing Games, and Argument in Composition (with co-authors Ramage, Callaway, and Clary-Lemon).
 

Peggy Weil and Nonny de la Peña are co-creators of Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility on Second Life. Their collaboration began in 2007. Peggy Weil is currently a digital media artist teaching at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She was formerly a professor for many years at the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division. Nonny de la Peña is a Senior Research Fellow for Immersive Journalism at the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Serious Games Interactive is an award-winning, research-based developer of serious games, simulations, and virtual worlds, offering a unique blend of competences within games, learning and storytelling. SGI's products include the Global Conflicts series, the Playing History series and the coming Trunky Colorful Adventure; in addition, SGI works together with corporations, state agencies, NGOs and other organizations to meet their specific needs through digital game-based solutions.