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?

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

Case Study of Remediation/Circulation

Looking forward to reading them!

Convergence 2: Writing as a Material Practice

Convergence 2: Writing as a Material Practice

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/arts/design/14cott.html

A discussion of collage and poetry as materially related forms and inventions.

Texts and Contexts: Books and Libraries in the Early 20th Century

Many of us think of books and libraries as "natural," but as recently as the 1930s and 1940s and into the 50s there were campaigns encouraging people to incorporate books into their lives and libraries into their routine stops. The idealized family read together, of course.

Quotes from Remediation (Sept 15)

Due September 15:

1. most provocative quote;

2 why/how provocative;

3. connection to any educational or scholarly experience and explanation.

Now, the first person posting will have virtual "carte blanche" since no one will have posted yet. Those who post after the first will have an additional task: connect your response to that of at least one other person, and multiple connections are welcome.

Likewise if you want to link to something outside of this particular blog, do:

for instance, http//www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev9/r9kir.htm ,

is a review of the book you might find useful. Or not? ;)

Visual Representations

There is a website that allows one to make "visual clouds" of verbal information

-->wordle.net To see where you all were re material practices of composition, I took what you had written--and about half of you have posted so far--and pasted it into wordle. Not surprisingly, the topic at hand (no pun intended ;) is writing, so it gets a lot of visual play in both representations. But you can see that other words are important, too--like author; paper; technology; computer; literacy--and in the second image, can.

Of course, what you see in a wordle is also what you create: the layout, font, and color all matter, as the differences in the two images demonstrate.

Here is the logic for the size of different words, from the wordle site itself:
"Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size. . . . The size of a word in the visualization is proportional to the number of times the word appears in the input text. So, for example, if you type apple banana banana grape grape grape into the create page's text field, you'll see that banana's font size is twice apple's, and grape's font size is 3/2 that of banana's."

From me: Apart from amusement, is there any value in these multiple representations? What do we learn from them, and how might they be used in different contexts?

I'm posting a bit more about some of this on another blog, here-->http://kbyancey.wordpress.com

Free feel to take a look ;)

Old Media New Media

The current Democratic Convention in some ways provides a case study of old and new media interacting with and informing each other.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/us/politics/27web-seelye.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

And there is a case of this connected to the Republican VP nomination as well, according to Yahoo. See

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/aug/29/colorado-blogger-saw-palins-star-quality-first/

Writing as a Material Practice

What difference, if any, does the materiality of literacy make?

Toward that end, please identify and consider your favorite space
for textual inscribing--screen, paper, board, sidewalk--and tell us
about it. Include in your thinking what you are writing with, as well.

What are the affordances of these specific writing/composing materials
that, in part, construct you as an author?

Welcome to Convergence 2

We'll use this space to do all kinds of thinking

--individually and collectively.