Dr. Harrington’s Blog

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Of the three pieces for this week, Scriber’s uses the most formal, academic tone and conventions. But she addresses a question you’ve already written about this semester: what is literacy? As she points out on the first page (6), how you answer the question of what literacy is leads to different ideas about the problems […]

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Brandt summarizes her argument on 649-651: she opens with two stories, and then summarizes the argument they illustrate, and argument she says results from the 65 interviews she conducted about literacy development (see methodology description on 651).  If you want to orient yourself, stop around here and see if you can paraphrase her argument in […]

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I’m struck by this quotation in the 1982 Person of the Year article: ” As both the Apple Computer advertisement and the Las Vegas circus indicate, the enduring American love affairs with the automobile and the television set are now being transformed into a giddy passion for the personal computer.” […]

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“Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention.” CCC 50.3 (1999): 411-436.
This article is one I’m re-reading and I move into it pretty comfortably–I’ve read it before, I heard her give the original address, and I’ve read several of her books and other articles that follow from this one. […]

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“Among the Greatest Benefactors of mankind”: What the success of Chalkbaords Tells us about the Future of Computers in the Classroom. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 33, No. 2, Computers and the Future of the Humanities (Spring, […]

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I’m rather charmed by the subject line and personalization of Mr. Wordpress, so I’ll leave this post here.
I’m usually a take-notes-in-the-margins reader, so I’m curious how this will all pan out…but searchable notes seem like a cool thing to have.

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