Network Culture

What does "network" add to culture? What does network add to composition and

literacy practices?

Old Text, New Text: Delivery, Arrangement, Invention

As some of you know, I've written about new delivery leading to new arrangements and thus to new inventions--notably of the author as well as of new texts. Fitzgerald was making the same argument about books in her discussion of structures, and I've made them in part through the lens of portfolios and in part through the lens of curriculum and pedagogy. In those discussions, I've often visually cited or incorporated student work (always with permission). For whatever reason, I haven't worked visually. But the image here, it seems to me, makes a different claim than the one on the earlier post. An idle question: as we think about new texts and old texts, how/do these visuals matter?

Old Text, New Text

Our discussion this term has included older texts, newer texts, some systems of distribution, etc. What do you make of the relationship of older texts to newer texts now, at this point in the term?

Top Terms for Literacy from Convergence Culture

Blogging

So what do we make of blogs?

Interface Culture

Very nice notes tonight on interface and culture. Interface is a pretty interesting concept that became especially obvious relative to texts only after it was applied to the world of electronic texts and the windows into them. (K. Hayles has made this point repeatedly: the materiality of one kind of text helps us understand the materiality of another.)

For some (short) additional discussion of this, see the link below.

For additional discussion (if you *really* like interface), see Anne Wysocki and J. Jasken in the 2004 anniversary issue of Computers and Composition. Good news: you can get to it online in the library.

Not least, if you want to see an interesting combination of interface culture and convergence culture, take a look at the MIT Press website where Hayles' Writing Machines is available. You'll see that you can purchase a "web supplement," which is identified as an "extension of the book": "the Web Supplement includes the lexicon linkmap, scholarly apparatus, and offers alternative mappings of the book's conceptual terrain with functionalities unavailable in print." For free, you also can view a text they call a "webtake," which is a Flash-based commentary on the limits of the book as a form. Here is the link:

http://http//mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/mediawork_about.html

http://http//webstyleguide.com/interface/web-conventional.html