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.