This week’s reading is a trio: two on-line pieces (by Wysocki and Boese) and a print article by Mary Hocks. Hocks’ piece discusses the two online pieces in terms of visual rhetoric. Read through Hocks to get a sense of the framework she proposes, and then look to the online pieces to experience the rhetoric–and then develop your own response to, and theory of, the visual.
Hocks begins from the assumption the “new technologies simply require new definitions of what we consider writing” (630). She calls what new media develops “hybrid forms,” blending word and image. At the bottom of 631 she previews her own structure: she first analyzes two pieces, and then turns to discussing how teachers can teach visual rhetoric.
Important terms appear on 632, her three-pronged frame for understanding how digital rhetoric works (audience stance, transparency, and hybridty). Focus your attention on this middle part of the article–read through it first to Hocks’ reading of the online pieces, and then turn to the pieces themselves to see what you think.
Come back to Hocks’ ending section (644 ff.) to see the implications for teaching.
Ryan, Becky, and Alan can share with us some more of Wysocki’s approaches to teaching through the reading they’ve done in Writing New Media. So I hope the W510 students will be asking themselves “how does teaching change with new media in mind” as they prepare for class this week. I’ll ask them to start off class discussion with some thoughts from their own reading.
But all of us should be asking, “what’s it like to read hybrid forms? what demands do they make on writers and readers?” Use your blogs to explore the role of hybrid texts in your life, and to explore what visual rhetoric means in your literate life.
And enjoy the browsing of these hybrid texts. It’s a great week for the Xena fans amongst us!
This week’s reading is a report addressing issues arising from teaching with blogs. I’m guessing that you’ll find parts of it dense, and parts of it quite easy to follow. Brooks et al.are pretty clear about their aims: ” Our goal in this paper is to bring some greater specificity to, and advance the understanding of, weblogs as educational tools relevant to any class that takes writing and reading seriously.”
The introduction does a wonderful job of laying out their research questions. Remember to read with an eye toward what they did as writers and researchers, as well as with an eye toward what they have to say about blogs. Their introductory section displays their curiousity beautifully, ending with a specific research question (”which weblog genre(s) (if any) engage or motivate students to make significant contributions to their personal or class weblog?”).
They approach this task with a very thorough literature review covering their key terms of remediation, genre and motivation. Amanda will find this great for her bibliography! Don’t get bogged down with authors’ names, but do look for definitions of those key terms, and look for their research method.
This is a great example of teacher-research or inquiry, too. So look at the relationship between their teaching and their writing.
The second half of the paper discusses their research findings; you may be interested in how they present their findings as well as what they found.
As you blog this week, think about the role of teacher inquiry. What kinds of questions can you imagine asking based on your educational experiences? What kinds of questions might emerge from our class? How does your blogging practice, or your experience with other sites, map against Brooks et al.’s findings?
Enjoy! And remember, James Gee is speaking tomorrow on campus–details, including a map, are in Oncourse mail.
I have never before changed a reading assignment in between class readings, but when I saw the announcement that comic creator and historian Scott McCloud will be speaking on campus during our class time next week, I couldn’t resist. Class will begin as usual at 6:00 in CA 237, and we’ll spend the first hour talking about writing out of school: browse the readings by Hourihan, the pieces about writing online (teens and myspace, and a cautionary tale about law students and MySpace), and look at the executive summary of the Pew Internet Project’s study of bloggers (all readings linked from the readings page on the course website).
How to manage the reading for next week
The readings page on the course site lists 7 different readings or sites. Most of the reading is short and written for a popular audience. Think of them as in three sets:
- Scott McCloud: you have a link to Porphyria’s Lover, his first online comic (from the Browning poem, btw), to his “I Can’t Stop Thinking!” columns, and to his website. Via his website you can learn more about his books, or see his online comics, or read his family’s blog about the book tour they’re currently on. Follow your interests here, but read enough to
- see examples of McCloud’s comic art style
- see some of his thinking about what computers make possible for comics (that’s in his “I Can’t Stop Thinking!” columns)
- smile or chuckle. He’s fun!
- Blogging. Meg Hourihan’s article is short and smart. She’s a blogger explaining why bloggers write and how blogging works as a genre. If you read blogs, or write a blog yourself, think about how her analysis makes sense of what you know. The Pew Internet Project report on Bloggers is a longer document, but you can focus on the executive summary to get a statistical picture of American bloggers as a group. As you look at these two pieces, get a sense of the energy and excitement pouring into out of school writing. This is part of the phenomenon Yancey was talking about in her piece: look at all the writing people are doing without any help from English teachers or school. What does this mean for us, for writing, for culture?
- MySpace and privacy: these are two articles raising issues that we’ll come back to after break. I’ve left them on the syllabus because some of you might want to explore issues about MySpace in your final project. These are two short news articles (one a report, the other an opinion column) making observations about who uses MySpace, why, and what some consequences might be. (Negative consequences of MySpace get attention in the media: I’m wondering what some positive consequences might be, too.)
Take notes according to your personal styles.
Some leading questions to help focus your blogging and thinking:
Hourihan and the Pew Internet Project study look at the social networks created by bloggers. What kinds of social networks do you participate in out of school? Hourihan talks about blogging as a “native format.” Do you consider yourself a “native” writer on a blog or any other new technology? What are the writing styles/elements that are native to the web? And how do those styles contrast with what you see valued at school?
What motivates people to write outside of school? How does motivation to write get encouraged by different writing technologies? (what does blogging to to encourage people to write, for example? What kinds of writing seems to be encouraged or valued on the blogs you may read, for example?)
What kinds of graphics do you read regularly? (signs, comics, graphic novels, illustrated magazines, newspapers…?) What is the relationship between words, graphics and ideas in what you like to read? what words and graphics have you written with?
We’ll use the first hour of class to discuss questions flowing from your own blogging and your ideas about the final project, and then we’ll switch gears and see McCloud together.
This chapter is from the text W510 students have been reading, Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi (an IUPUI alumna!) and Brian Huot. Janet Carey Eldred and Lisa Toner, writing for an audience of people who are just starting (or soon to be starting) to teach writing, outline ways writing technologies not just “augment” our traditional ways of teaching, but (potentially) transform ways of teaching instead. The chapter opens (33-36) with their argument. You’ll see (again!) the influence of Cynthia Selfe’s arguments about “paying attention.” Remember what we talked about in class: don’t just walk away from what appears to be repetition, convinced you already know it. Look at it this way: Eldred and Toner read the same piece by Selfe you did, and it has led them to think and write. See how the influence worked out.
Some particular things they took from Selfe include the notion that “students….are coming t our classrooms having been changed by new digital technologies….teachers who are educated in and committeed to print culture” are sometimes resistant to the “new digital literacies” they bring to class (34, the first quotation is Selfe’s words, the second term is Eldred and Toner’s words). Eldred and Toner seek to outline ways we might think about technology playing a role in writing classrooms (focusing on traditional classrooms, like ours).
The bulk of their piece looks at aspects of writing that might be changed with technology:
- Beginnings (36 ff)
- Generating Ideas for Research (38)
- Drafting (38-39)
- Peer and Instructor Reviewing (39-40)
- Editing (40-41)
- Publishing and Grading (41)
- Whole Classroom Management (42)
- Pilots, Resources, Planning (42 ff)
Their notes and bibliography are valuable resources. As you read, think about what kinds of activities you have experienced with technology, and what kinds of experiences you dream about for school (or your own writing). This article is addressed to teachers, so many of you will see ideas here you might adapt for the future. Those of you who aren’t planning to teach, though, are students. So see this piece through student eyes. What would you think of this teaching approach in your classes?
This should also help you with your plans for the Really Useful Technology (or Teaching Strategy) assignment. There are plenty of ideas here for things to do and learn.
We talked in class about a possible change in the blog format. Unless you have a uniblogs blog, you’ve gotten feedback from me about your blog (uniblogs feedback to come this weekend, servers willing!). Especially if you’re Ryan and the notes on line are working well for you, keep it up. But if you want to explore some other possible approaches to blogging, you may. You might prefer to respond to one of the arguments in the text, or you might extend one of the arguments or outline an application of the text, for example. Or, you might address a leading question provided by me each week. We’ll use them to jump start discussion next week. Remember, this portion of your grade–the first assignment, blogging–is about your careful reading and class preparation. I’m interested in seeing a) that you are doing the reading and b) how you are working with the ideas in the reading as you get ready for class. So keep that in mind as you blog and comment.
Leading Questions for Blogs: How, specifically, have you been changed by your experiences of technologies? What do your digital literacies lead you to expect in school? What kinds of literacies do your teachers expect in school? What kinds of technology experiences have seemed useful to you in your previous schooling?
Blogging Buddies: Read the blog of one other student, and use the comments to have a little dialogue during the week (at a minimum, leave one comment each on the blog–you can comment on your own blog after your buddy leaves a comment). The buddies are:
- Becky-Ryan-Alan
- Alissa/Amanda M
- Robert/Britt
- Mica/Amanda R.
- Cherilyn/Glenn
- Trent/Amanda C
- Heather/Ashley
This week’s rabbit trail: You may be interested in Janet Carey Eldred’s varied career: I linked to her department profile in the first paragraph. She’s written articles on teaching, theory, and technology, and she’s also published a collection of essays, Sentimental Attachments (reviewed here), ruminating on personal and academic themes. You can see one of the essays, about her experiences of motherhood and adoption, in an earlier form here.
Stuart Selber is a professor of technical communication at Penn State University. This piece was published in CCC, like several others we’ve read. Selber writes, then, in a formal voice, and his vocabulary is often quite sophisticated. But his aim is clear: he wants us to consider how functional literacy—an emphasis on doing interesting things with computers—can be an important part of what it means to be computer literate today. So learn a few big new words and feel proud of enhancing your vocabulary, and look for the places where he is outlining what kinds of things students like you should be able to do with computers. We’ll use his essay as inspiration for the assignment that gets each of us learning some new literacy skills.
Here’s an outline to help you navigate the piece:
Selber’s introduction notes that universities are increasingly requiring students to meet a computer literacy requirement, and that English faculty are rarely consulted on such matters. On pg 471 he lists some of the questions that have gotten attention from English teachers and researchers, and he ends that list with a discussion of the most recent trends in the conversation, focusing on critical concerns about technology (see the top of 472 for a nice paraphrase of the kinds of questions asked by critical researchers—who include Hawisher and Selfe, by the way).
Selber explains that functional literacy has not drawn a lot of positive attention from English teachers. Functional literacy has been associated with very basic literacy activities (like decoding words out of context). While Selber notes that much criticism of functional literacy approaches have merit, the history of the term suggests things are more complicated. The first scholar to use the term was interested in promoting independent learning through functional literacy. Over time, though, functional literacy has become tied to work force productivity and has been tested with objective, not-in-context tests.
But Selber wants to reclaim the earlier senses of functional literacy, and he argues that there are four reasons that functional literacy should be an important concern for us (see 475).
So what would that look like? He’s not interested in listing skills that everyone should have. He outlines five parameters:–“educational goals, social conventions, specialized discourses, management activities, and technological impasses”—which can guide the development of a functional literacy program. In a way, the rest of the article is a manifesto on the subject:
Educational goals: A functionally literate student uses computers effectively to achieve educational goals. He or she learns to situate mechanical skills in a pedagogical context…(475-76). “pedagogical activities [should] stress three area: understanding what computers are generally good at, using advanced software features that are often ignored, and customizing interfaces (476).
You should have a sense of the various activities Selber links to this parameter—what kinds of software features he teaches students, for example
Social conventions: A functional yliterate student understands the social conventions that help determine computer use (481).
You should have a sense of the kinds of activities Selber invites students to do. How can social conventions be studied and learned?
Specialized discourses: A functionally literate student makes use of the specialized discourses associated with computers (484). He argues that we need to know the terms associated with different types of computer hardware and software in order to report problems and more importantly to use computers for our own rhetorical purposes.
You should have a sense of the kinds of ways students might get involved with learning some new terms.
Management activities: A functionally literate student effectively manages hir or her online world (488). Selber explains several ways in which students can learn to manage information online.
You should have a sense of some strategies Selber thinks are important for a pedagogically sound approach to controlling online resources.
Technological impasses: A functionally literate student resolves technological impasses confidently and strategically (493). Performance-oriented impasses (those that affect our ability to do something) shoule be our concern (vs. learning-oriented impasses, which involve learning basic aspects of how a computer works). On 495, Selber argues that teachers need to help students think about how things break down and what to do about them—not that we shouldn’t take advantage of the tech support available, but we need to think carefully about what our problems are and what might be causing them.
Selber ends by noting that he is aware of the links between literacy, culture, and power. He’s careful to show the ways his approach to functional literacy is in alignment, to some extent, with the calls for critical literacy skills. But, he concludes, functional literacy is one important part of an approach to computer literacy overall.
This article is a written version of Kathleen Blake Yancey’s Chair’s address to the annual gathering of college composition teachers. She delivered her speech to an audience of thousands of college writing teachers, in an auditorium in San Antonio, Texas, with two power point presentations on either side of the stage. The side bar quotations and photos you see throughout her text were part of the poweroint presentations, which served to illustrate or contextualize what she was saying. It was an impressive morning!
She asks us to imagine a whole new curriculum for writing, a whole new way of thinking about writing in school. Read this as a smart dream about the future, and think about your dreams for what school might be for you in the future.
You’re reading this piece as (under)graduate students–you’re not listening to it, and you’re not (all) coming from a classroom. Try to imagine that you are. Read, and listen for the spoken word. It opens “Sometimes, you know, you have a moment.” What does she mean, you may wonder. So think about who she is, where she was, when she was preparing this talk. Only once a year does the chair of our organization address the convention; probably only once in a lifetime does a teacher give a speech to thousands of people. It’s a moment. But it’s also, she will explain, a moment for all of us. Because of the changes in literacy, all of us who care about writing are in a moment, a point in time where important things are changing.
Yancey starts , on 297-98, with looking at what the moment is for writing teachers, what the world is like right here, right now, for people teaching and practicing writing. “Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change,” she notes, and she wants us to “note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing” that surrounds us (298). The questions she raises sound a moment, a significant moment, for the field of composition, for those who teach composition and those who practice composition. And in this talk, she looks at what this moment means.
Quartet 1 (focused on by Armato, Costello, and 412 students through Hartig), starts on 299. It looks at the 19th century moment about reading. Yancey says that the 19th century created a reading public, and she looks at the 19th century for what it teaches us about how public reading became widespread. “And all of this happened outside of school,” she points out (300). Today, “we are witnessing a parellel creation, that of a writing public…” (300), and she continues on 301 to explore what writers in the 21st century do as they organize themselves out of school. on 302 she looks at how traditional English departments are (mostly not) responding to this and wonders whether English departments are becoming “anachronistic.” On 302-305 she wonders what these changes mean for literacy instruction.
Quartet 2 (starting on 305) looks at first year composition and the first year of college. What should be the future of composition in college, she wonders? She looks at the way we are teaching, some of us, both digital and traditional composing. What composition means is changing, and this short quartet looks at some of those changes.
Quartet 3 ( this is the section Williams and Hockersmith through Roberson should read most carefully–you’ll start class talking about it) . Yancey takes up the question of what should be a new curriculum for composition. She notes the process movement was one of the biggest changes in our field in the last 30 years; one thing that has not changed at all is our focus on writers as school writers, in school writers. On 311, she lists things students are not asked to do in school, but that she wishes were part of school. She higlights three:
Yes, deicity is a hard word. She defines it on 318. It’s pronounced day-I-city, emphasis on the second syllable. (click here for a longer discussion)
Quartet 4, the conclusion , wraps things up, asking us to consider the spaces between school and home, work and school.
This is chapter 9 from Clanchy’s book From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, in which Clanchy explores the myriad uses of literacy in medieval England. He argues that literacy grew in this period because of the explosion in record-keeping; he’s interested in the spread of literate practices (the production of documents) as well as literate mindsets (how writing became socially important).
“Trusting Writing” looks at the issue of how people came to trust the documents they encountered. Whereas we assume, Clanchy asserts, that written texts are more reliable than spoken words, medieval people had to be persuaded that written records were trustable. Read here to understand how trust is created in documents, and to learn about a time when the notion that a written text is trustworthy was controversial. We’ll take the framework here and start to think about how we know when and why we trust texts.
What were the attitudes of medieval readers? What did medieval writers do to make their documents seem trustworthy?
There is a long history of distrusting writing–remember Krause’s discussion of Plato’s critique of writing–becuase writing stifles eloquence and human trust and substitutes impersonal paper (233). Medieval documents might be forged, and it’s curious that English practices didn’t folllow Roman models (using notaries and public registries) to verify the authenticity of documents).
Clanchy discusses problems in determing the date of documents and the evolution of writing down dates (236 ff); issues in signing documents (241 ff); the use of seals and other symbols to authenticate documents (244 ff); forging documents (248 ff.)
Dennis Baron is an English professor at the U of Illinois who’s written extensively about language history and technology/literacy connections. This piece looks at the ways in which technologies affect writing in very hands-on ways–the technologies available to us change the practices we have as writers. In this piece, Baron looks at what it takes to get new literacy technologies to become popular and embedded in culture. Hs summarizes his argument in The Stages of Literacy Technologies and then moves into examples.
Think back on Brandt’s notion of literacy “piling up” when he discusses the ways new technologies affect older technologies. Baron sums up his own purpose:
My contention in this essay is a modest one: the computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies. In many ways its development parallels that of the pencil — hence my title — though the computer seems more complex and is undoubtedly more expensive. The authenticity of pencil writing is still frequently questioned: we prefer that signatures and other permanent or validating documents be in ink. While I’m not aware that anyone actually opposed the use of pencils when they began to be used for writing, other literacy technologies, including writing itself, were initially met with suspicion as well as enthusiasm.
Baron looks at the relationship between humanists (remember, Selfe used that term) and technology, reprising an argument of interest to Selfe in looking at well-known humanists who have rejected technology. He offers a great tour of Thoreau and the pencil, arguing that the history of the pencil shows us much about the history of literacy.
In The Technology of Writing, Baron looks at writing itself as a technology that spread through the world. He ends up looking at What Writing Does Differently, looking at the way a new technology “goes My contention in this essay is a modest one: the computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies. In many ways its development parallels that of the pencil — hence my title — though the computer seems more complex and is undoubtedly more expensive. The authenticity of pencil writing is still frequently questioned: we prefer that signatures and other permanent or validating documents be in ink. While I’m not aware that anyone actually opposed the use of pencils when they began to be used for writing, other literacy technologies, including writing itself, were initially met with suspicion as well as enthusiasm..”
You may be surprised by Baron’s next section, in which you learn that the pencil was not invented as a writing tool, at least not a tool for writing down words. it was used for marking measuring points, not for words. But then it was adapted and the new uses for this technology overshadowed the old.
Baron looks at the way the telephone affected the communication, and then at the ways computers affected patterns of literacy. He ends with a section on fraud and issues of trust with texts.
The final section (Conclusion) recapitulates his argument. By the time you get through here, you should have a good sense of his argument. He’s not interested in predicting the effects of computers on literacy, but rather in looking to history to see what we can learn about what kinds of changes can be spurred by a technology and what it takes to make a technology invisible.
Look to the concluding portion of this piece to raise some questions we might pursue. You should be able to identify some good points of discussion, and some questions we might want the course to answer, in here. Have fun with this one.
I don’t know much about the Journal of Electronic Publishing. It’s an online journal addressing ways electronic publishing affects the industry, the academy, the workplace. They say that they are both magazine and journal–I’m not sure what that means. We’ll see what we think.
Ferris opens her piece with an overview of the effects of computers on writing–much of what she says here might be contested by other historians. Generally, read what she says looking for arguments. She makes a lot of assertions.
In the overview, she looks at the ways oral communication is distinctively human; the way written language meant that “human society could really expand and grow” (not sure Scribner would buy that assertion). Ferris here shows you the “great divide” approach to literacy, with that paragraph outlining the cognitive changes written literacy makes possible.
She loks at the ways written and oral language differ; she looks at the effects of written language on the world (print made possible research, the scientific method, the standardization of language, and modern schooling, she says, among other things).
So what of electronic writing? She says, in the Literacy to Orality section, that electronic writing brings “oral characteristics” back into writing (”temporal immediacy, phatic communion, use of formula devices, presence of extra textual content, and development of community”). Ferris offers a number of quite provocative claims in this section, like the claim that “roles of writers and readers…become unclear.” You might look through this section and make a list of the different claims she makes, and see whether you can validate the ones that interest you the most. Do you see evidence of that around you?
As I said in class, Ferris’ style is densely academic, and she assumes knowledge of a good bit of literacy history and scholarship on oral culture that we’ve not read. So I imagine that some of this may be tough going for some of you. But in the second half of this piece, every paragraph is chock full of claims about the effects of electronic writing. Pick any subsection and look for those claims, and see what you think. There’s lots of talk about here, since all of her claims can be turned into questions:
Do readers treat electronic communication as oral? (and if the answer is sometimes, what governs the choice?)
Hypertext organizes information diferently: what difference does the connectivity make?
What difference does the fluidity of writing make?
How interactive is electronic writing? What kinds of interactions are fostered?
What standards are emerging for judging quality of content?
Each of those bold-headed subsections has many assertions within. Look for them.
This piece, like Selfe’s from last week and Brandt’s, appeared in CCC (College Composition and Communication, the journal of the college section of the National Council of Teachers of English). Note the abstract at the beginning which summarizes their argument.
On 643 the authors establish the gap—the things we don’t know and haven’t studied—that lead them to start this research. “we still know less than we might about the relationship between digital and nondigital literacies” (643). On 644 they note the 5 themes that emerge from the work they have done, and on 645 they explain the methods they used to do the work (see Brandt’s influence!).
Then follow two stories: Melissa Pearson and Brittney Moraski. In each story, the authors weave historical/social/political/technological context in and around the biographical narrative. They call this context the cultural ecology of literacy. They end the article (664) with an expanded discussion of what these stories suggest about the nature of literacy.
You should be able to see the relationship between the stories and the themes—and if you can’t, use your note-taking to try to work out some connections. You should also understand their method, and be able to see what parts of the stories led them to which conclusions.
