Discussion questions

Selfe uses the example of David, who is technologically literate but fails his college composition classes because "he couldn't produce a traditional essay organized according to the print-based literacy standards of linear propositional logic, Standard English, argumentative development, and standard spelling (49). How does this complicate our considerations of the arguments against teaching the traditional essay?

Are theorists such as Selfe and Sirc placing too much emphasis on the art of composition as a primarily visual art? Can composition have an artistic influence without a specifically visual emphasis?

Questions Stem from Sonic Literacy

As much as I enjoy Comstock and Hocks’ study that focuses on sonic literacy, I have problem with the very beginning of their discussion, and this is a problem correlated with many of the concerns we expressed in our last blog posts in response to Sirc’s argument. Comstock and Hocks foreground their discussion by stating that “Even with the renewed emphasis on visual and digital rhetoric, however, we as writing teachers are still very text-centered in our classrooms.” I wonder how would they define teachers being text-centered, since most of the teaching methods or methodology we read so far are still text/word/expression-based no matter how many new media elements are being incorporated. How are the assignments they introduced in the article making writing teachers less text-centered if the process of composing (drafting, revising etc.) and the effectiveness of the voic-narrative (expression, speaking techniques, critical thinking etc.) remain what teachers value in evaluating the assignments? As the projects they describe serve well for the teaching of listening rhetoric, Aristotelian rhetoric (in which social relations and civic roles of writers/speakers are emphasized,) and sonic composition, how do they differentiate the teaching of writing and that of rhetoric, if there is any to them? Furthermore, how does this distinction help us in broadening while also specifying the definition of Writing and Rhetoric—the freshmen comp course we are teaching?

I want to assume for the moment that we all agree with Selfe's assertion that visual literacy should be utilized in composition classrooms as a possible stepping stone for approaching new media.

1.) Is their fluidity within her definitional binaries of composer/designer, design/compose, reader/viewer, and reading/viewing?

2.) How do we assess visual impact (76) on the audience? Do we use postmodern binaries and ask if it excites/subdues, pleases/offends, or entertains/informs? Or are we applying traditional rhetorical schemes such as Aristotle's rhetorical appeals, or audience and purpose? And if we use these interpretive frameworks, should we be using the same schemes to analyze visual texts that we use to analyze alphabetic texts?
AND
What is the difference between visual coherence and visual organization? Is it the like the difference between using transition sentences and overall coherence in alphabetic texts?

writing, graphic design, computer programs and now speech and audio editing?

The Comstock and Hock article asks us to emphasize sonic as well as visual and alphabetic literacy in composition classrooms, which also requires some instruction in new audio editing technologies if our students are going to compose sonically. At what point does it become beyond ridiculous for us to view composition as the Super Walmart of literacy instruction? If we teach visual and sonic literacy along with the technologies that students need to compose, even incompetently, in them in FYC, when would we have time to teach anything else? Are we just to abandon the "outdated" "outmoded" mode of alphabetic literacy?

Cynthia Selfe like many of the other new media scholars we have read, seems very confident that alphabetic literacy is or will be increasingly irrelevant (okay so maybe that's hyperbolic, but so are the assertions). Why? What evidence is there that alphabetic literacy has lost any let alone all of its dominance?

Selfe repeatedly refers to digital and alphabetic literacy as "competing literacies." What does this mean? Why should we see them as competing? Competing for what?

Questions

Selfe asserts that composition teachers are wary of teaching new media because "they have already invested so heavily in writing, writing instruction, and writing programs--and because we have achieved some status as practitioners of writing" and that learning new media "may also force us to acknowledge the gap in our own literacy sets" (71-72). I have to wonder if this is something people actually feel? I myself am interested in learning new literacies but am critical of a paradigm which asks us to be fluent in multiple disciplines / literacies.

On a similar note, what makes the pedagogy of Comstock and Hock's "Sonic Literacy" that much different from a Speech class offered by a Communications dept.? Where do we draw the line between these two disciplines/departments, English/Comp and Communications/Speech?

Selfe-examination! Questions for 1/27

1. On page 75, Selfe proposes the use of the visual essay to expand student literacy outside of the alphabetic text or form essay. How can a university like OU integrate this into the curriculum with value? In other words, would it be wise to include a visual essay in the 30ish page requirement for English 151? Why or why not? And how?

2. Selfe states that students bring in their own literacies to the classroom, "literacies practiced in the home, the community , the church and online; literacies dependent on oral, visual, and aural performance; literacies based in multiple languages, cultures, and contexts" (57). What literacies should be included in the classroom? Is there a way to include all of them? Would that be beneficial?

 Also, an informal one from Comstock and Hocks: "The combination of the music, the familiar schoolroom form of handwritten text on whiteboards, the smiles and the waving of hands all bring together this moment of closure into one gestalt of meaning where the modalities cannot be separated or you lose the irony of contrasts, the humor."--Did anyone else not get this from "Bertha?"

Questions for 1/27

1. Selfe sees focusing on visual literacy as a first step toward integrating new media in our composition classes (68). However, many popular composition textbooks (e.g. Writing Arguments, and Everything’s an Argument) already have chapters addressing visual arguments. In fact, when I taught at the University of Louisville, the first assignment I have my students was a rhetorical analysis of a visual argument (such as an ad, which also had some textual elements). My students did not actually create the visual argument, though. In making steps toward including new media in our classes, would it be better to ask our students to analyze the rhetoric of new media before we ask them to compose it?

2. Comstock and Hocks advocate the development of sonic literacies (which I kind of like, as I learn well from listening). In some way, is this a return to oral rhetoric, in which delivery and elocution hold a prominent place? How is it unlike oral rhetoric?

Questions for 1/27

What are the limitations and the strengths of using audio texts as a mode of expression and as a means of reflection?

Can voice be reduced to accent? What does voice gain/lose by this reduction?

Questions for 1/27

Regarding Digital Mirrors:

1. How does revision function in audio or visual reflections? If reflecting is a daily process, doesn't each reflection become a one-stop project?

2. What happens to the learning process when too many things are going on in a video? If someone is speaking and something is typed on a screen, how does the viewer decide which to give focus to? What rhetorical choices must be made in this instance?

3. Can you teach anything like this if you don't have the proper materials? If you said yes, can you tell me how?

Distance Learning and the Gaze hand-out

In color!

Handout from originality presentation

"Good artists borrow; great artists steal." - Pablo Piscasso

Place-Blogging Handout

Here's my presentation handout, a la Scribd.

Loudermilk-Garza & Hern_Handout

Here is the handout from my presentation.

Questions from the dying

I'm not there, and yet I am...

I don't have a great deal to say about the Vielstimmig article except to ask:

Does their embodiment of their ideas support or undermine their argument? What can I make of the fact that I found the article annoying, too self-satisfied with its own conceit (and I do want to imply both meanings of that word)?

Do we need to start defining more clearly what we mean by collaboration? Is collaboration a good in itself?

With the Kress article, I had some moments of disjunction in the beginning when it seemed to me that he was setting up a false controversy around the use and meaning of genre. Being pretty steeped in genre theory from Anis Bawarshi and others, I found the idea that scholars still maintain a more limited sense of genre as formal types of linguistic texts hard to believe. In the end, I agreed with his conclusions, mostly, but didn't understand the exigence for making the argument. Anyway, I'm prompted to ask:

Where do genres come from? Are writers empowered as much as Kress seems to imply to be creative in how they mix genres?

One of my key points of resistance to genre theory (at least those branches of it that posit genre as the sole key component of writing—if that reading isn't just my hyperbolic interpretation) is that I cannot see how genre itself provides for its own dynamism. Kress doesn't seem to be articulating an understanding of Genre in this vein, which is evident when he says he explains an understanding of design as "an understanding of what the social and cultural environment is into which my text is to fit" which seems to posit genre choice or mixtures as being within some larger understanding of the writing/cultural environment. So my question:

Is genre, as Bawarshi and others view it both habit and habitat, or is genre operating within a larger ecology? If genre is more codetermining and cosubstantiating with performance (the Bawarshi view) how does that affect a writer's level of "Choice" of genres? If genre is less determining, what are the larger structures that mitigate genre choice?

Hope you have a good discussion.

John W.

Questions for discussion

1. Is anyone else having extreme difficulties reading / navigating the Vielstimmig article?


and 2. Vielstimmig suggests that we imagine what text's might be capabale of when we allow poetic and rhetoric language to mix. How would such a mixture change how we currently assess student texts?

Questions for discussion

How do we gage the author's level of  "control" in the new essay, and should we?

Does the blending of authors in collaborative new media texts overlook the individual's materiality in a potentially negative way?

1. “[T]he category of genre is essential in all attempts to understand text, whatever its modal constitution” (Kress 39). (How) should our view of genre change with new media texts?

2. Vielstimmig’s text complicates the concept of Author. Does authorship matter as much for new media texts? (Or, as Barthes would contend, is the author already dead anyway?)

Questions for Vielstimmig and Cornish

1) It took me a while to get used to the constantly switching fonts and indention in Vielstimmig’s essay. I kept having the reflex that each paragraph has its independent persona and content and that the meaning wasn’t even coherent as I first start reading. Although the three authorship get clearer after reading one to two pages of the article, I wonder if I’m the only one who is experiencing this choppiness caused by varied fonts and indention. Before being able to identify the three personae, do fonts appear to lose their meaning of being different or their function as attention-grabbers or information-builders under such massive and frequent change? Is the text and its meaning entitled to larger flexibility under such design?

2) I agree with what is being mentioned in Vielstimmig that “hypertexual reading isn’t all that new” (106). Than is this piece of semi-wiki composition new enough in terms of the fundamental changes it brings to the coherency, textual flexibility, multiple authorship, navigation, and many other attributes of writing?

3) Cornish’s poem definitely gives numbers a fun representation. With similar playful sense, what elements of this poem contain pedagogical values to a freshman collage composition course?

Questions for 1/20

How much help/guidance should the author/multiple authors provide for her/their readers to navigate/read/browse a multivocal text?

“Writing for the screen is a new rhetorical act” (105).
“It involves multiple kinds of literacy” (105).
“It’s surprisingly collaborative; when authors compose together, new identities can be formed; new readership is assumed” (106).

How are we preparing our students to produce and read this new essay that includes multiple kinds of literacy?

Aesthetics and Assessment

The Vielstimmig and Kress articles both highlight the inherently creative and aesthetic aspects of new media. Kress concludes by talking about the need for a "new evalutation and description of the resources for representation and communication" (54), which gets back to a question that Matthew asked in response to one of my blog posts: How do we assess students' new media compositions? More specifically, I wonder: How do we evaluate the aesthetic components?

Also, Kress's discussion of the plurality of our society leads me to wonder if evaluating aesthetics wouldn't necessarily require the imposition of hegemonic and/or teacher-centered values? How can we avoid grading student work based on our own artistic tastes?

Questions for 1/20

1. Is "Petals on a Wet Black Bough" considered "new media"? In what ways is it a mix of media? Is the "new essay" just a variety of fonts and blocked text posing as innovated?

2. How will retention of rhetorical skills change if collaborative "new essays" are assigned in the composition classroom? That is, will rhetorical strategies change and if so, how will they transfer to other disciplines or discourses?

"The concept of group solidarity is much stranger in Western cultures than it is elsewhere, and I imagine that our unfamiliarity with it--our cultural reverence is for the individual--accounts for how difficult is out relationship to collaboration" & "We assign collaboration: we assess individuation" (95, 110)

If learning is collaboration, than isn't this hyperbolic sense of the individual a learning disability? Can technology change the way we grade so that we can assess and reward based on collaboration?

"Resistance to collaboration seems linked to invention." (97)

HUH?

Questions about/for Vielstimmig's "Petals on a Wet Black Bough"

1. Can a singular author create an essay of multiple authorship imparting a particular message?

2. What impacts do style changes have on the reader of a "new essay?" Can "new essays" impart new/never before discussed information that traditional essays cannot?

3. How does Vielstimmig's concept of collaboration mesh with the utility of Wikis in the classroom we discussed on Tuesday?

Google' word cloud'

Google word cloud

Wysocki_Jasken_handout

Here is the handout from my presentation. I designed the document in Adobe InDesign, exported it to .pdf and hosted it on the free document hosting site Scribd.

Kinetic Interface Design

Link to the video in my presentation.

Questions on What Is New Media (ch.1)

1. How can we define the materialities of new media texts or writing with the new media based on Manovich's elaboration on what constitutes the media and its renewal?

2. A lot of Manovich's explanation of the work of the new media is worth referencing for the teaching of writing. For example, with the understanding of modularity, the collection of discrete samples for a larger project, we can teach how writing can be assembled and re-arranged in various ways for different purposes or genres. How can we utilize the idea of hypertext and managing (access to) information in teaching writing so that our students can be opened to more agency as writers?Is teaching the idea of hypertext even suitable for a freshman college composition?

Questions on Manovich

Manovich claims that cultural transcoding is a process in which "cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on a the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones that derive from the computer's ontology, epistemology and pragmatics" (47). What might be the consequences for individuals with little or no access?

How might the overabundance of information available through the internet complicate the production of new media?

Does a post-industrial society value individuality, or is that what they want you to think?

Technology failed me and lost my post, so you get the shorter, revised versions without all the quotes:

Manovich asserts that variability exemplifies how media correlates to social change and then suggests that unlike industrial societies that valued mass production and a homogenous mass culture new media correlates to a postindustrial society that values individuality. Does our society value individuality?

Does the variability of new media actually create more variety, or does it rather make the use of templates more prevalent?

Is the homogeneity of texts a matter of available resources or larger social structures?

In light of this assertion about individuality, what do we make of Manovich's analysis of the myth of interactivity?

1.) Both Lanham and Manovich invoke the idea of the printing press to highlight how technology enables literacy to grow. What are the potential benefits of viewing the writing process through the lens of what new technology enables?

2.) Could the hyperlink replace the citation?

Questions for 1/13

1. Manovich states that “All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer. The result: graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. In short, media become new media” (25). If all new media has numerical representations, then do anything that might be considered “old media” become “new media” merely because it becomes computable?

2. Manovich and Wysocki approach new media from two different disciplines and have different ideas of what “new media” is. Exactly what are the differences between Manovich’s and Wysocki’s definitions of “new media”?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the flexible/easily changed structure of "new media?"

Manovich references the problem of storage space and searching capabilities for "new media" several times. Can there ever be too much material?

Manovich's "New Media"

How does Manovich's position as an academic within the discipline of Visual Arts influence his writing about and defining of new media? Who has more to gain from publishing work concerned with new media, Manovich or Wysocki?

Questions for 1/13

New media "values individuality over conformity" (41). But in what ways does automation hinder creativity and the process of creation?

The idea that interactivity allows the user to become the author boggles my mind. I have less of a question about that and more of a request to simply discuss what this means...or what it could mean.

Questions

1. Who is the audience for Lev Manovich’s book?

2. What’s the future of new media? How will it develop? Will it create new cultural forms that correspond with a new social logic or redefine old cultural forms?

3. How do Manovich’s definitions and explanations of “new media” technologies change our perceptions as writing teachers of time, space, public, private, and interactivity? How do these elements affect the production and the reception of new media in the writing classroom?

Questions from the Reading

Manovich seems to find it very important that we have clear-cut definitions separating "old media" from "new media." Why is this so important? Or maybe, what are the stakes involved in the ways we define "new media"?


He refers to new media's influence on culture (in the sense that transcoding results in a "computerization of culture" [47]). What might he mean by culture, in this context? DOes this only affect cultures with widespread computer access, or is it a global "culture" that is changing?

Purdue OWL got game

Purdue Writing Lab receives $1.5 million to create new interactive writing tool for high school students

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/outreach/2011/110110BergmannOWL.html

Welcome

Hello intrepid explorers of the outer limits of compositional boundaries,
Welcome to the multi-everything universe, a no-place of boundless freedom and constraint
Where we leave monomodal, monophonic discourse in its paper dust and set out for the realms
of polyphony, multimodality, hypertextual, re-mediated and playful multiliteracies.

Just kidding!