Librarians and Cybrarians Save the Dead!

A book review from the NYT...on Marilyn Johnson's The Book is Overdue

KT's Syllabus Project Final 2008

I am doing a syllabus designed for ENC 3310 (article and essay) in which I will be teaching students about digital media and literacy. The two will be co-topics interwoven together as well as separate for readings, assignments, and discussions. The wordle above includes the key terms we will be exploring and which by the end of the semester the students should be able to define and understand (or at least come to some conclusion about them). Assignments will include both reading and composing on-line and in print. Some examples are blogs, digital journal, digital essay, powerpoint, paint, scrap box journal and more. Readings will include some excerpts form books we have read this semester (Jenkins, Bolter and Grusin, the network culture piece) as well as articles specifically targeting litearcy. The goal will be for students to learn that literacy is no longer simply tied to only definitions of reading and writing and that digital media is now a part of how literacy's definition.

Whither Institutions of Learning?

We have discsussed literacies from many angles: what do these changes mean for institutions—libraries, museums, schools—especially given that historically, these institutions have understood themselves as places knowledge is made, archived, and/or transmitted? You can focus on one institution or read across all three. Unless you are the first poster, please connect what you say to earlier posts.

Literacy Papers

Literacy Papers

The focus of the Digital Revolution and Convergence Culture course is, in part, on literacy: on how it changes over time (or not), and on how it is fostered by or is manifested in materiality; textuality; and technologies. At another level or from another vantage point, this course also focuses on culture and literacy—or is it literacies?—as they dialogue with, shape, and influence each other.

Given this context, one might wonder why this assignment is titled “Literacy Papers.”

Here are some ways of thinking about paper/s:

http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/19/40/frameset.html (Pickwick Papers, qua Dickens)

http://mekentosj.com/papers/ (adding science papers to a library)

http://edison.rutgers.edu/ (Thomas Edison papers, over 5M pages!)

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html (George Washington papers)

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/ (Martin Luther King papers)

http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/ (Susan B Anthony, with comments on editing them)

http://www.oppapers.com/ (term papers for purchase)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper (history of paper)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperless_office (paperless office, but with reference to the role of paper in knowledge-making: see http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/03/25/020325crbo_books?currentPage=all

In titling the assignment literacy papers, I was invoking several issues:

Your role as the creator of “Papers”
The role of materiality in literacy—literally, historically, ironically
Your opportunity to create an authoritative text on literacy

No more than 600 words, please. In email and in print.

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?