Week 8 part I Readings
CRAP by Mike Rundle and CRAP Design
Fast reads and everything made a lot of sense. These articles made me see online web pages in a new light. I never really thought of them as their own genre in the past, with conventions that make them “work” or not. I teach a workshop at the UWC about organizing and structuring your writing and these articles were like that workshop. It’s all about readability and making conscious decisions about the flow of a paper. I liked Rundle’s examples and thought they were helpful, demonstrating what he meant allowed me to see these four principles in a new light. Like the picture of the eyes, everything on that page stood out and my eyes flowed easily around the page. The Grumman’s example had too much clutter in comparison and proved that web designers need to put a lot of thought into how they implement the different functions on their pages. I’d probably say that’s the biggest thing I got from these articles, that like essay writing, web pages also need thoughtful decision-making in order to be successful in their readability.
Towards New Media Texts by Cynthia Selfe
In this chapter, Selfe is making the claim that one of the best ways to ease teachers into the teaching of new media texts is through the teaching of visual literacy. By using visual texts as a starting point, we will be introducing the topic and slowly integrating the materials into our classrooms. She says that many teachers are afraid they don’t know enough on the topic because our profession has been primarily alphabet driven. I liked her quote that “one productive route of approach” toward new media texts “is through visual literacy” (67). This made a lot of sense to me. Teachers need to start somewhere, and this is a great point. She says that if we can get comfortable teaching students to “read, discuss, and compose texts that depend primarily on visual elements” then we will become more willing to take a step in the direction of new media texts as well. She defines visual literacy and the terms she will use throughout the chapter, some of them being composer, designing, and reader/viewer. It makes sense that since we are talking about a new form of literacy that we give this new form its own vocabulary that is different from the “Words on paper” ones. She quotes Gunther Kress as saying that the visual is becoming more prominent in our culture and “taking over many of the functions of written language” (70). She mentions that teachers have usually presented visual texts as “second-class citizens” in the curriculum to keep the status of the words-on-a-page compositions they are so familiar with (71). With changes in global communication, she notes, we are making English studies irrelevant if we keep leaving out visual elements. I liked that she made visual literacy important, she says this can help us all “better understand the communicative power and complexity of visual texts by reading and looking at them, by thinking seriously about these texts and analyzing their components, by talking to other people about their interpretations of them, by composing visual texts ourselves, by sharing our efforts at composing with other author/designers, and by reflecting on the compositions we create and exchange with others as complex symbolic instantiations of the human need to communicate” (74). I really liked that all her assignment ideas brought in metacognition, making students aware of the ways in which they learn and have formed their ideology, etc. I really liked Assignment #3 and think a teacher could do a lot with that in the classroom based on themes in the novels being read.
Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box-Logic”
It’s good to know that even experienced teachers are asking themselves- just what do I teach these days? He found and now uses The Green Box to help guide him through this difficult period. It made him think about new ways to allow his students to compose in new and meaningful ways- ways that are meaningful to them. I wasn’t a big fan of the weird movement of his text, but I got his point. It was his conscious decision to compose in that way and compose in a less traditional mode. I really liked his quote by Peter Elbow on page 113. “life is long, college short; do we teach to life or college?” not an easy question to answer… which do we teach toward? I would like to think that life skills are more important, but I guess they can go hand in hand, right? The quote that “most of what we do is wrong and out of date” is pretty serious. How can we get away with teaching in archaic modes? It sounds like box logic uses a lot of juxtaposition amongst different objects. I liked his analogy of students as curators of an exhibit on page 116. Students as collectors, gathering materials that are of interest to them. He mentions “composition as craving; teaching students to feel desire and lack” and write because they have a desire to write on something that lacks their unique viewpoint. That’s a very interesting way of framing the conversation. He says he teaches students how to practice using search skills on the computer and annotating their materials (122). He also says that “arrangement of materials and notational jottings is a desperately important compositional skill” and I agree to a great extent- we teach workshops on organization and structuring of writing, so obviously it’s important to help readers read and flow through a page. Some of these activities involve students creating web pages and I’m not sure how comfortable I feel teaching that… I’d need some practice and help at first, but I’ve done something similar in the past for having my own teaching web page, so it probably wouldn’t be that hard.
Wysocki “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”
Already the chapter had my attention from the first page. Throw in some pictures and I am hooked. Something about the visual aspect grabs me, which is why I don’t think we can avoid it in our teaching. I liked that she applied the CRAP principles when walking readers through her interpretation of the naked photo. I always think it’s easier to understand a concept when I see it represented visually. Never mind, it sounds like she doesn’t agree with CRAP because it limits the way people can read things and the way we are instructed to read. She says that unless the text we’re looking at follows the “standardly efficient production and consumption” it doesn’t help us read the “other” types of texts out there. I don’t like the idea of standardization, but for web pages it might be helpful to have the clear, crisp organization. She teaches her students that yes, there are principles, but that sometimes it is good to push against them as well (172-173). I thought the handout she gives to students on page 179-180 would be very helpful walking students through the analysis process. I also like the idea of the second activity that has students comparing ads from different places and times. All in all this was pretty helpful, but the least favorite of all my readings this week.
Week 8 Part II Readings
Alexander, Johnathan. “Media Convergence: Creating Content, Questioning
Relationships.” Computers and Composition 25 (2008) 1-8. Print.
I think I am going to use this piece as a part of my research abstracts! I thought it was helpful in its discussion of media convergence to help me understand remixing better. I already came across Henry Jenkins’ book Media Convergence in my researching, but I can’t seem to find the actual text anywhere, and since I’ve bought quite a few books for my researching process, I decided not to buy this one as well because I found a copy of a good portion of it online in Google Reader or whatever that program is. Anyways, I found this article to be really interesting and since it brought up the amazing text Hugo Cabret, I was already set to love it J
But it’s true, Hugo is a multimedia text that deserves attention for what it does to the definition of a “text”. It mixes all sorts of beautiful pictures, real life and drawn, combines these different media-types for this final product that knocks you off your feet. Like he points out, there are “visual and textual modes of meaning making” and in this “media convergence” one has the power and potential to “create complex and rich sites of meaning” (2). Students have the potential to do so many things with the new forms of technology out there, they create YouTube videos and parodies on their own time with ease, videos that have a purpose and videos that force them to make conscious decisions about the things they choose to include in their videos and not. Alexander talks about the “mixing and matching” of media to produce these complex and incredibly rich and sophisticated texts, and this is exciting (2)! To bring this into the classroom is to open up new doors and I can’t wait to bring this to the classroom.
As he points out, the nature of writing is indeed changing and we need to change along with it. I liked that he brought the pop culture into his argument, that out media and pop-driven society is changing the way we think, process, and have access to information (3). We need to meet these challenges head on and in doing so, we can teach students to take agency over their work, practice authoring texts with multiple other voices, and participate in this new culture (3). These multi-modal texts allow us to “talk back” to the texts in which we have “read”. Creating alternative versions of the texts they come into contact with helps people, “understand, and critique, current political systems, situations, and trends” and I would say these situations and trends do not have to be political in nature in order for people to participate in critiquing them (5).
He mentions that one of the richest parts of media convergence may very well be the part where humans and machines begin to converge (5). Where humans learn to interact with these technologies in new and exciting ways to create meaning, deeper, more critical and analytical layers of meaning (my own words/thought to use in paper- 5). He asks some great questions about what all this means. I especially liked, “how does a technologically rich media convergence shift or alter our own understanding of authoring, composing, communicating- and thus of building connections and creating meaning with one another and with ourselves as reflecting, reflective being?” (5). I guess the best answer is something along the lines of, by forcing composers and writers of digital, mixed media texts to make conscious decisions about the writing process and how best to represent their thoughts and critiques of the original text in question, digital media is helps composers learn to work together with multiple authors who can discuss and come to conclusions about the text being created. Because people can recreate your “text” on YouTube repeatedly and alter it for their own interpretation, the original “author” is participating in a conversation if you will with these multiple authors, reflecting on their original work and the new works of others.
As English teachers, we don’t want to be the gatekeepers any more, we can’t be. We need to help students experiment with these types of texts and be willing to learn along with them, it’s an adventure (6). Mixed media projects in the classroom can and will “generate enthusiasm” amongst students and help them learn about what it means to be literate in today’s society (7-8).
“Low Bridge to High Benefits” by Daniel Anderson
I liked that during the slide show section he talked about how what the students did in their works reflected the traditional learning classroom as well. Making that “bridge” between words on a page composition and multiliteracy instruction. The example of Danielle’s project was also highly complex and showed that these “slideshows”- things that most parents might write off as easy and silly things to accomplish- are actually quite complex, time consuming, and difficult to accomplish. He says that the purpose of such activities is to, “create literacy experiences that engage students with learning and allow them into the flow of creativity”.
Maybe its just me, but I don’t like the name “low-bridge” it is too close to the idea of low-brow and makes it seem like it’s less important, or a cheap and easy way to teach students, or make it look like they’re teaching students. Idk. It’s a good concept with a poor name if you ask me. He says these are “low bridge paths to high literacy” which just makes it sound like a short cut. I know it’s because of “easy access” which is awesome, but “low-bridge multimedia” no matter how hands-on he claims it to be just sounds like something I wouldn’t want my kids to be a part of, but I guess this is all besides the point.
One of the things he mentions that I talk a lot about in my research annotations so far is the idea that allowing students to engage in miltiliteracies increases agency and motivation, two things Anderson cites right away in his article. I was also reminded of Sirc when he quoted the New London Group as saying, “literacy educators and students must see themselves as active participants in social change, as learners and students who can be active designers-makers-of social futures.” This reminded me of the Sirc part where he’s talking about students engaging as museum curators, curious collectors who make active decisions about what they gather and share.
One of the most important questions he asks is on page 52, “At some point we must ask, as responsible teachers and scholars of composition, how far can we walk from the written word?”. Sure these new literacies are bridges between the written word and the visual, etc. but he asks a valid question here.
Week 7 PART 2
NYT article by Cohen
I think this school is doing what most schools do, ban Wikipedia from citations and actual research, but they know they can’t ban it from student eyes. That would be silly and impractical, and every “close-minded” as they say because it’s “simply too handy” which is completely true!
I loved the comparison of banning Wikipedia to that of banning rock music, it’s a throw back to when the “grown-ups” just didn’t “the kids these days”. The older times are trying to hold out on the good old days and not wanting to change the way things have always been done. Their numbers that 38 million users in the US alone just in December was astronomical! You can’t argue that Wikipedia isn’t a cultural force with those kind of numbers and you can’t possibly ban it when it has that kind of force on the nation. I mean, Google anything and Wikipedia is probably going to be the first hit that comes up.
The idea of Wikipedia as a class project is interesting, I know some teachers here at eastern do this. I don’t know if I want to get my info from undergrads though… I guess you can call me an information snob, but undergrads aren’t as invested as professionals and they don’t necessarily know as much- even with a professor over their shoulder. I just don’t know how I feel about this so I guess that’s my biggest problem with the site- I don’t know who’s giving me this info, so while I can appreciate the heck out of it, I would never dream to cite it. As for the guy who takes the side of Wikipedia and asks for what this means for traditional research has a good point. It’s not necessarily that it makes traditional scholarship less valuable, but it gives higher value to “truthiness” which is not something I am ok with- wikiality can be lies and I don’t want to be told lies in my research any more than I do in my personal life.
I agree, Wikipedia is a good starting point, but not the final word on anything.
Doctorow “Shortcut to Omniscience”
My question is how do these devoted Wikipedia editors catch things so quickly? I mean, everyone has mentioned errors in the information and changes being caught within seconds and minutes, but how do they do this? Are they alerted by email? No one could possibly go in and check it that much. I don’t care how devoted I am to a subject, I would not go in and check the Wikipedia page for that topic hundreds of times a day just to catch vandals.
“Encyclopedias require expertise and control”. This quote stood out to me because I guess you can say, I agree in many ways. They ask the question, what is expertise? And who defines it? And I guess that’s one of those tricky things, I want to get my advice from experts- whether it’s from a medical doctor or a professional builder, if I’m dealing with me and things that matter to me, I need to see credentials or else I will not believe you, granted, doctors have been wrong, but their mistakes are the cause of a lot of different things and usually when a dr. is unsure of something, they seek numerous opinions and patients are free to get second opinions before they choose their final outcome. When people rely solely on Wikipedia, the info they get can be untrue, and people just need to be aware of this (in any online, non- credentialed realm). Both of these pieces reminded me of the Purdy article so I’m going to move on to him.
Purdy “When the Tenets of Composition Go Public”
I found this article to be very informative in a lot of ways, granted from all the readings we’ve been doing on Wikipedia I’d have to say he was confirming a lot of previous info, but it’s good to know that many people out there have a lot to say on the topic and it’s a valid worry. Purdy made a lot of good points, as I was saying for the Doctorow piece, one main problem I have with Wikipedia is that we can’t trace who is saying what. It’s not at all that I have a problem with pieces that are created by multiple authors, I do have a problem with not know where this information is coming from. Like he says, most articles don’t give citations on where this information is coming from, so for all we know, what we’re reading can be a part of conspiracy theory or unbacked ideas and concepts. They are “obscure about their sources” and that gives me “discomfort with departure from scholarly citation conventions”. Like he mentions, Wikipedia gives access to outside sources, but nothing is really cited which brings up a huge discomfort to many scholarly and serious academics.
He also mentions that the pages change so fast that people can cite the same info from Wikipedia but just slightly different versions of it. Who knows if I get vandalized info and my peer gets slightly corrected info and we both turn in papers that have the same page cited, but we both come back with different versions of the truth. I’m not saying other sources don’t have this same problem, even Purdy points to this, I’m just truing to defend my own issue with the source as a credible academic citation- it’s not.
Towards the beginning of the article he mentions how people have a problem with the idea of public knowledge making, and while I think public knowledge making is an awesome power that Wikipedia embraces, he makes the point that this challenges the academy’s control over “knowledge production and dissemination” and while I agree that is a problem to the academy, I’m not sure how much “power” these institutions should have. On the other hand, I’m not sure if the general public should be able to be the final word on any subject wither.
I know that Wikipedia is seriously misunderstood, but until there are more tweaks done to it and studies done on it, I still won’t consider it a scholarly source.
Week 7 Part 1
Cummings’ “What was a Wiki”
The introduction to this piece was pretty interesting. It was like mob-mentality. If everyone is responsible then no one is responsible, especially when it comes to sites like Wikipedia where the people who can contribute to the knowledge on the page can be anyone from a certified doctor with an MD’s degree all the way to the weird guy who sits in his basement all day. Ii especially liked the quote, “But Wikipedia has made it clear that the business of knowledge creation has been irrevocably altered”. Now, when we search for information online, we don’t always know who or what is telling us the news, nor do know if they have a hidden agenda or not. They made the excellent point that Wikipedia has “fundamentally and finally altered epistemology itself”. Its both a fascinating and frightening idea.
It is funny to think that Wikipedia is not the only wiki type out there, but many people have no idea what they are or how they can be used without the reference to Wikipedia. Wow! Wikis came out in 2004… it seems like Wikipedia has been around longer than that. It’s described as a platform that allows for collaborative authorship, something we’ve been talking a lot about in the TOW.
It sounds like wikis came about as a more scientific and software based program. An email list to help people in the fields discuss issues. They even mention that the definition of the term is something like, “a web page people can modify”. Makes it sound simple. The idea of “wikizens” was really cool. These are the people who are dedicated to the topic at large and will do anything to protect their field. Loved the “stranger needing directions” analogy, it helps to make the web seem like a much friendlier place. I also liked the link to Colbert and his truthiness and wikiality. This piece was humorous and informative. Like anything, if you ask a stranger for help, you never know what you’re going to get!!!
Phillipsons’ “Wikis in the Classroom”
This article made me think about the project we started in your summer class. The one where we were able to go on to the Wet Paint wiki and edit information that we learned as class went on. I think this could be a really cool assignment to teach the value of collaboration and joint authorship. Teachers could use this technology is many different and exciting ways, and I think the class would really take to this type of project. The teacher could even go on and randomly change information the students put in there to things that are false if she wanted to teach some of the perils of trusting Wikipedia as the final end-all-be-all of researching. The author even gives a quote that says wikis invite “the rewards and perils of collective constructivism”. This can be used for novels the class is reading together, the teaching of theory, etc. the ideas seem pretty limitless. Like mentioned, wikis give students a platform to demonstrate learning and understanding of a concept, while “teaching” others in some new way.
I have to admit, I was a little confused by the simulation wiki, but I think I understand its basic premise. Just not as straightforward and the resource types. All in all, I think using Wikis in the classroom has a lot of potential to get students excited about learning and writing as a collective rather as individuals. And since so many businesses and future career paths require collaboration, this will help students learn the importance of working with others in the creation process.
Shirkey “Here comes Everybody”
I really liked the introductory quote that collaborative writing, while more difficult, can be much more profound than individual work. He too, like Cummings, talked about the start of Wikipedia from Nupedia (which didn’t work because it did not allow for such a wide authorship. He brings up the hyperlinks to other topics, which can range in the hundreds for any given Wikipedia page. I have to admit, I always liked that feature. It lets me explore new topics and ideas that I never knew about when I go to search for information about something. It can be distracting, but it opens up the door to a greater knowledge base. As pointed out, even though the rate of quality is high, there is still a lot of skepticism about the information gathering system.
He gives the example of the way Wikipedia works as a Vegas casino through a division of labor- one where people step aside and let others take the lead on topics they know more about. They’ll add “stubs” to indicate to others where new info should be placed. Like an assembly line J
Wow! Less than 2% of Wikipedia users contribute, yet that’s enough to drive this beast of a machine! That’s crazy. He goes on to mention that many people will reword anf ix things up for the “Kilroy” effect, or just to leave their mark on the world in some way or another. Which is true. People want to feel needed and like they can make something better than it was- it’s an ego boost for sure. Because of al this, people work together to stop the vandalism and keep watch over the things they care about. It’s extrinsic motivation he says, but it’s intrinsic I would think as well. Lots of new words coming from all this- now we have “wikitorial”- the project that definitely did not work out. Wikipedia can lock pages as well to help prevent vandalism on a large scale.
Week 6
I’ll start with Petals on a Wet Black Bough. The quote at the beginning moved me. “Working on email- constructing the messages within a pre-genre that is still being shaped itself- is constructing us, too” not only are we constructing new media technology, but we are being constructed by it as well! We are not outside the influence of technology like it is not outside of our influence. It made me wonder who is really in charge here. With all these new technologies coming out, who is the constructor and who the constructee?
Ulmer suggests that narrative, exposition, and pattern are the three ways of constructing information. But others disagree. I agree that as we move towards the digital realm, the essays and narratives will become obsolete- or at least irrelevant to our students’ lives. There is much more to authoring these days, one cannot put a headline on Facebook (your own personal narrative) without many others coming in and commenting or changing it to suit their own thoughts and feelings. We are a country of multi, co-authoring writers and we need to figure out how to embrace that in the classroom!
The new essay is “a place where multiple ways of knowing are combined.” I really liked this concept. We need to embrace these new ways of knowing and combine genres, experiment, take risks, and see where it takes us- and students! I wonder how to introduce this new essay with its shifting margins, multiple fonts, multiple voices, genres… I wonder if this is like the “crots” we use in 120. Students had a super tough time creating in those though. Maybe because they aren’t used to them! Teach students the writing that resists one master narrative just as much as they write the master narratives. These new essays still have narratives, exposition, and patterns. Online writers seem to be more onboard with these concepts- probably because they’re already open to the multi-vocality of their area.
It sounds like the authors are saying that the classroom is ready for this. We have realized the need for “new textuality” inside the classroom because we have seen its importance outside of the classroom.
As for the Salvo piece, it sounds to me like he is saying that academic and scientific writing has eliminated the ethos, logos, pathos interplay that should be included in a piece of writing. I thought it was interesting about how he claimed his researching the holocaust made the event go from unreal to hauntingly vivid in his life. I enjoyed the “stream-of-consciousness” flow and narration of personal stories. It kept my interest and made me wonder where the heck he was going with all this. I trusted he would tie up the loose ends as he promised he would, and read on. I like that he combined the technorhetorical- I think that as technology grows we will continue to create and combine words.
I thought it was interesting how his story came to be linked to his experiences of the past. He wanted to make connections and links between himself and a different culture, to find the connection through “technorhetorical” connections. The database brought history to life and allowed him to see the world in a way that would never have been made possible without the advent of such amazing technology. If we could bring this into the classroom more, students would be highly motivated and find the relevance of the materials we are teaching to their own lives!
The NEA’S To Read or Not to Read was a “doom and gloom” fact dump about literacy rates today. Making such claims such as all progress is halting in teenage years, there is a general decrease in reading among adults and teens, that reading and writing decreases dramatically with college students and adults, and so on. My question from this article is, how do we know these drop sin literacy are true? If they don’t have cause and effects listed here, how do we know that associations like the NEA aren’t to blame? Students are reading and writing more in the digital realm these days, are they taking this into consideration? It doesn’t sound like it. And if we aren’t taking the digital literacies into consideration, how can we say the materials we are teaching students is relevant to their lives? And if the material we are giving students is not relevant to their lives, why would they be engaged? They wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t be motivated to read, write, or appear proficient in those fields. We can’t blame students for our own laziness or ignorance in the classroom. We always want to blame the students and ask what’s wrong with kids today, but it’s rarely kids’ that are at fault and usually the fault of the adults.
They say this is a call to action, but I think this should be a call to teachers to get with it and start finding ways to make the classroom and their curriculums important to students’ lives OUTSIDE of the classroom.
As for Kaplan’s piece, one part that stood out to me was the quote that read:
“Reading books in one’s leisure time strongly correlates with reading proficiency so that when rates of voluntary book-reading decline and we also see a decline in reading proficiency, it is reasonable to suppose that people become less proficient readers because they are spending less time reading books for pleasure. “
This made me think of standardized tests. Students are often good at reading and writing, but they aren’t good at taking these tests that are meant to standardize their knowledge and “smarts”. But what are we really testing here? From my experience, students can explain what they read in my classes. Maybe they just test poorly.
I also thought this quote was quite interesting: “they nevertheless seriously distort the data set from which they were derived in two key ways: by truncating the data set and by representing irregular time intervals with regularized spatial intervals. The first distortion creates a trend where none exists. The second distortion magnifies the effect of the decline in scores by making the slope of the line between the scores in 1999 and the scores in 2004 steeper than it should be. The steeper slope, then, suggests a more rapid and deeper decline than the underlying data support.”
So again, the NEA is trying to make the data suit their needs. They manipulate their findings to reflect the tone and make their point. This article really calls the NEA out on the carpet and points out all the ways they seek to manipulate their data.
SEED Magazine’s
NEARLY UNIVERSAL LITERACY IS A DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF TODAY’S MODERN CIVILIZATION; NEARLY UNIVERSAL AUTHORSHIP WILL SHAPE TOMORROW’S
I liked this article. From the very beginning it got my interest. With claims like, “Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.” It’s hard not to get pumped up by positive thoughts like this! People really are reading and writing these days, but they pose an interesting question. Does this matter? Does it matter that authorship numbers are on the rise? They cite cases of people twittering and getting people fired for the way they behaved. So obviously this technology and authorship really is important! They worry about the decrease of this authorship trend, but I don’t see it going anywhere. People love this stuff and get behind it and that’s cool. Like they said, we are all creators and writers and consumers. Put it together and you have recipe for success!
Doug Hesse’s “Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy”
Already had my attention with the title. After everything we have talked about with new literacy’s, I wanted to know what this guy had to say. I guess I do think that essays allow students to get their thoughts together in a professional manner and conquer form and structure, but they’re not the only way to do this. He mentions that students on campus only see writing as essays; I think Eastern does an excellent job of changing that stereotype and creating genre-based composition courses that allow students to compose across many different genres, not just the essay. Although I agree that there could be and probably should be a place for the essay in the classroom, I do not, by any means, think we can only focus on the essay. I think it is one more genre within the huge breadth and depth of writing we should have students composing in.
He says, “it is that narrativizing of experience, information, and idea- the imposition and making plausible of a certain sequence of textual moves- that characterizes the essay”. These things can all be done in other digital ways as well. I don’t think writing online on digital literacy is anti-essayism like he claims later in the text. He says home pages are like essays, but the difference is that essayists interpret their points. I don’t see why this can’t happen on home pages as well. Because he’s not arguing that the essay should be the only type of writing to be taught, that it should just be left “in the mix” I don’t see why we should really argue against him. I believe in a multi-genre approach as well.
Steve Johnson’s Everything that is Bad is Good For you
I really liked that he mentioned that we have such a hard time trying to think from a different viewpoint than that of the NEA article- that reading and canonical texts are of the highest importance in our society. It’s so deeply ingrained we can’t escape it. The idea of imagining a world where video-games came before books kinds of blew my mind, lol. What would be different??? Wow, I must admit, it made me start altering my thoughts on video-games that I didn’t think was possible. Both books and games have positive things to offer our students, we just need to be open to the possibilities. Games can be judged and characterized just as much as books. But like he said, it’s because society has put so much emphasis on books that we have a hard time seeing the potential importance of games.
Week 5
This week’s reading was super informative, a bit confusing, but really relevant to my classroom practices. Issues of copyright and plagiarism are always at the forefront of any teacher’s mind and as we continue down the path of information technology and the digital world, we MUST come to understand what is fair use and what plagiarism is so we can help our students not to make mistakes in their writing.
I really think that students are pretty familiar with what constitutes plagiarism. I know a lot of my coworkers won’t agree, BUT teachers are starting to educate students on plagiarism and internet sources from a really young elementary age. By the time they get to high school and college they have been inundated with the topic. They are BORED by the topic and think they “know it all”. While I definitely don’t think students know it all, we need to find new ways to get them involved with the idea of what constitutes plagiarism. like the DeVoss article points out, we could have students create their own pamphlets on what constitutes plagiarism, students could have class discussions or debates on why their voices need to be heard, they can compare and contrast the learning experience of someone who writes their own papers and someone who plagiarizes. I don’t know what the “right” answer is, but until we teach students to value their own thoughts and work, to value the writing process, and to put the effort into their writing that is required to succeed, they will continue to plagiarize whether intentionally or not.
I had no idea that the laws had become so strict! Especially for teachers. In the past I always thought that teachers had the ability to use whatever materials they wanted in good faith. They obviously could not copy entire books and reproduce them for everyone in class, but if they’re doing just a few pages, why not? Who is this hurting? It’s for education for goodness sake! I don’t know, I don’t think it’s ok to limit teachers more than they already are. I’ve been in districts where the materials we were expected to use were old, outdates, and boring! What is so wrong about making copies of short stories or poems not in our anthology from 1972?
But on the other hand, I also want to be published in the future and if you can’t make a living from your writing, what’s the point? On the other hand, I would also like to think that I would love to hear that classrooms were printing out and studying my poetry. If a classroom on a documentary was reading my poem, I would NOT ask for money to have it repeated on the movie. I just don’t understand it I guess, it seems petty on some level to me.
Week 4
What’s the matter with the kids today?!? Something every generation has uttered, but a saying that this generation is really used to getting thrown at them! They’re called lazy, corrupted by tv and video games, they’re just not as smart as past generations, they want everything given to them and in an immediate fashion. etc. The list goes on. A few things that really stood out to me in all this was 1) online predators aren’t as prevalent as we thought, 2) online predators let themselves be known to a greater extent than I thought possible, 3) kids are seriously wired in technology these days, but 4) many still lack the access.
I have to admit, the topic of access makes me angry. I taught in a weird school in Vegas called Bonanza. I love it there, but it was the last of its kind in LV. Most schools were EITHER extremely rich with all the best students and technology (these were mainly the rich, white mormons) or minority school who had huge gang problems few computers and little access to the same materials that the rich white schools got IN THE SAME CITY! It was truly disgusting to see schools like Rancho and El Camino get dumped on while Green Valley and Durango got everything. Out of LV’s 30 some high school, Bonanza was the only one that was split down the middle. we had the extremely rich and the extremely poor, gang-related populations. The rich kids had it all, computers at home, all the latest gadgets, they were the honors and AP kids of the school. The minority kids came from some of the most broken homes I had ever seen, worked until 2 am oN SCHOOL NIGHTS, paid the bills for their families, and still made it to school as much as they could.
I’m not going to lie, it was hard to watch all this. Some days I hated my honors kids, they were spoiled and had everything at their finger tips and the worst part was, they expected everything handed to them, including their grades. My minority kids and lower class whites worked so hard, they put all their effort into school and still kept getting pushed back down below the rich kids. Issues of access piss me off to no extent and you know what? There’s nothing I could do about it.
I have also learned that I, in many ways, am a digital native, yet need to be aware of the fact that many are immigrants in this world. I need to help students learn how to use technology in the best means possible.
Week 3
This week I’m still a little frustrated on the idea of literacy. I feel like no one can really define it, and I get that it’s not a term that can be defined or put into a nice, neat box, but the uncertainty of it makes me wonder if I’m teaching it or not. If that makes sense. How can i know I’m putting into place the best literacy practices if no one can define it- not even the experts. I do agree though, English and the new media literacy isn’t just the job of the English department. Everyone needs to be in on making literacy a priority and teaching in methods that will help students in the future. We cannot ignore the importance of digital literacy and visual texts. I think that any and every students can benefit from reading and discussing people like scott McCloud.
The Maifesto was really cool to me because it made me think of the seriousness of this issue. I think we do need to move past powerpoint and calling that technology and finding ways to make it relevant to the lives of our students. I think these articles did a good job pointing to the fact that we, as a discipline, are going to become obsolete if we do not start adding relevant materials to our classrooms.
The seeing exercise was pretty cool as well. It reiterated the fact that we need to teach students to “read” visual texts and then talk about them. They need to gain agency over their ideas and back up what they are saying with evidence in front of them. This is how we dream made me want to go out there and create my own version of a reality. I think this would be a cool project to do with students. Have them take the real news or a real article and play with it, make it from someone else’s perspective or just mess with something until it’s no longer the original text. They could talk about the decisions they made in the process and who their new audience was. What the the purpose behind their decisions, etc. They could also talk about the credibility of sources here too. AND they’d have fun with it 
Week 2
I think I liked the “Pencils to Pixels” article best. it was a fun, fast, and easy read but at the same time, it really outlined the history of these writing technologies. Who knew the pencil had such a rich history! These authors also made obvious our dependency on writing and the fact that we all tend to take it for granted. Baron says, “writing itself is always first and foremost a technology, a way of engineering materials in order to accomplish an end” and that couldn’t be closer to the truth. Going back throughout history, writing in all its forms has been a means to an end and has some sort of purpose in mind. We need to be aware of the choice we make when writing and the hidden ideology behind the technology.
As much as I know the Phaedrus is super important to the world of composition and rhetoric, it drives me crazy. I think it’s because I love books so much and Plato says he doesn’t like static words on a page because we cannot learn from them and question them. We can’t talk to them like we would a person. But the beauty of books is just that. We can see our rich history of thought and growth as a race throughout time. We can read about how those in the past thought the world was flat but we can see how we have evolved through science and exploration. While I do see what Ong is saying about how we can lose memory, face to face interaction, debates, and such from technology, is it worth it to have the conveniences that we do? I kind of think so…
Week 1
Lots’ to do to get started for an online class! Thankfully I already have facebook, twitter, and wordpress accounts all set up. I really like Word press and think it will be a really useful tool to bring back into the classroom. I would also like to have my own blog in the future (hopefully when I am a wildly successful author) for my books and poetry and such… we’ll see how that goes I really like the informality of it though.
The brief history of writing technology was pretty interesting. It’s weird, but I have NEVER thought of writing as a technology before. I know that’s weird, but I always took it for granted. Even though I lived through many of the eras in which huge changes were taking place in the literacy/writing communities, I never really paid much attention to it. This outline and the invent your own writing technology really opened my eyes to what i had made invisible.
