Shifting Social Relations in a Digital Age

If research about digital, network-enabled information and communications technologies and the extent to which they are transforming social, economic, and political relations in unanticipated—and in many cases, undesirable—ways (concerning innovation, creativity, the free-flow of information and ideas, democracy, labor, and the public interest) is of interest to you, you might enjoy any one of the following reads this Summer:

Bauman, Zygmunt. The Individualized Society: How to Change Our

Experience. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. Print.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. New

York: New Press, 2001. Print.

Conley, Dalton. Elsewhere U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man,

Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. New York: Random House, 2009. Print.

Deibert, Ronald J. Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication

in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Print.

Garson, Barbara. The Electronic Sweatshop. How Computers Are

Transforming the Office of the Future Into the Factory of the Past. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Print.

Gee, James P. “Communities of Practice in the New Capitalism.” Journal of

the Learning Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2000): 515-23. Print.

Hughes, Jason, Nick Jewson, and Lorna Unwin. Communities of Practice:

Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Lanier, Jared. You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage

Books, 2010. Print.

 Niedzviecki, Hal. Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New

Conformity.  San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006. Print.

Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the

Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Print.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and

How to Take It Back. New York: Random House, 2009. Print.

Teaching Critical Literacy in a Digital Age

For those of you interested not only in how and in what ways new media and information and communications technologies can be adopted and used in educational settings, but also in how to teach students to become more aware of and able to critique the numerous social, cultural, and ideological functions that rhetorics of technology serve, here is a list of some books and articles you may find useful.

I highly recommend Mark Andrejevic’s iSpy as a must read.

Ebert, Teresa L. The Task of Cultural Critique. Urbana/Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 2009. Print.

Andrejevic, Mark. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era.

University of Kansas Press, 2007. Print.

 Gee, James Paul, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. The New Work Order:

Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Print.

Thomson, Iain. “From the Question Concerning Technology to the Quest

for a Democratic Technology: Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg.” Futures of Critical Theory: Dreams of Difference. Ed. Peters, Michael, Mark Olssen, and Colin Lankshear. NewYork: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Print.

Selber, Stuart A. “Technological Dramas: A Meta-Discourse Heuristic for

Critical Literacy.” Computers and Composition Vol. 21 (2004): 171-95. Print.

Toscano, Aaron A. “Using I, Robot in the Technical Writing Classroom:

Developing a Critical Technological Awareness.” Computers and Composition. Vol. 28 (2011): 14-27. Print.

Warnick, Barbara. Critical Literacy in a Digital Era: Technology, Rhetoric,

and the Public Interest. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Customized Search and Information Delivery=Censorship

I recently came across an interesting TED Talk about “filter bubbles” while doing research on critical literacy in a digital age.

In it, Eli Pariser reveals the extent to which the combined use of algorithms and consumer/user-mined demographic information is leading (perhaps inadvertently) to significant degrees of censorship by omission, as individuals receive search results reflective not of information most relevant to what they are looking for, but filtered by companies like Google according to information as seemingly irrelevant to a topical search–say, about coverage of the uprisings in Egypt for example–as the kind of purchases a person makes, the make and model of the computer they use, their geographic location, etc.

Essentially, Pariser’s research suggests that the quest to deliver customized, highly targeted information to individuals is currently resulting in unanticipated dangers with regard to the Internet’s claim to provide equal access to information for all. What Pariser advocates is that users be informed, and put back in control, of the kinds of filters search engines like Google are using such that individuals—not algorithms and databases—determine what details are deemed relevant and made available.

This subject is particularly important if/when we consider the fact that Google search has become a first line go-to source for information and everyday research.

More resources regarding motivation and new media

I have added two more articles to my paper. The first is Ruth V. Small’s editorial published online for the Association For Educational Communications and Technology entitled Motivation and New Media: an introduction to the special issue.  The other is an article entitled The Studio experience at the University of Georgia: an example of constructionist learning for adults by Gregory Clinton and Lloyd P. Reiber.  Both articles can be found via the SFSU articles database.

Both of these articles addressed theoretical and practical implications regarding reshaping the tradtional classroom into one that incorporates new media into a studio-like environment.  The University of Georgia article was particularly interesting because it detailed The Studio graduate program which prepares its graduate students to work in careers where collaboration and projects are the norm and expected.  While this program is mainly geared towards Instructional Design students I thought this would be an interesting composition teacher training program for a new wave of composition teachers who want to incorporate studio concepts within the composition classroom.  The main philosophy behind Small’s and The Studio’s work is the idea that within a classroom which incorporates the freedom of new media and the environment of a collaborative studio, students will be personally invested and motivated to construct and design their own learning environments while also learning the skills needed to work in collaborative and innovative environments.

This article might be of interest. I did not get a chance to read it. Self-regulation of motivation when learning online: The importance of who, why and how. Written by Carol Sansone, Tamra Fraughton, Joseph L. Zachary, Jonathon Butner, Cecily Heiner.

Resource Blog # 4 Writing Without Teachers

Though I know we only had to do three Resource Blogs, I thought I should do one more as one of my resource blogs was from our class readings. The  Resource Blog which I will be using not only for this class but for other classes to come  is the classic book written by Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers. My version is the 25th Anniversary Edition published in 1998. In 2013 it will be the 40th Anniversary Edition, and this book will prove to be a valuable asset in the composition field if you agree with Elbow’s teaching.

One of the most interesting things Elbow writes in the book as far as I am concerned is in the beginning chapter he discusses “Freewriting  and Garbage.” He suggests that as you let yourself go and just write not being concerned what you say if it is correct or not, or if it is grammatically correct or spelled correctly but the importance is that you write and from that writing will come better writing that if you restricted your self by stopping to make corrections as I was doing when I began writing or typing but that now that I am letting go by the wayside to come back and to “clean up my mess” later as Elbow would say.

Elbow suggests “that writing is a process”  and he also suggests that, The Process of writing is growing as a writer…His point for those people who have writers block is to start writing and not to stop until You have a pageful of writing from what others would consider garbage is where some of the best writing begins…

Resource Blog #3 Weblogs and Literary Response Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in Class Blogs by Kathleen West

I found this interesting article in relation to English composition and using Blogs written By Kathleen West. Though the article  written concerns an 11th grade high school class,  I believe that this article can also be used in reference to a first year composition course. Though the article leans toward using Blogs in a Literary analysis format, what I think is great about this article is that the students in this class are drawn to use the Blog as a way to connect to their English class assignments.

Some of the students in the class were proliic Bloggers acording to West. Part of what I kikes is some of the students connected  with “audience ,” “identity,” and “voice.” west writes concerning on of her students, “Lucy has a strong sense of audience, which helps her build the identity of ‘pop-cultured humorist’ in this entry. She includes in-jokes for her classmates in the form of class and popular-culture references.”

What I got out of this article was that  there were no requirements over ‘correctness ‘ or “format.” This allowed students according to West to “forge new identities” online. The students were encouraged to “explore the facets of the text,” (588).

My Prezi, My Culture

I’m glad to have been introduced to Prezi. I think it has some great potential for the writing classroom. I’ve seen a few sites where it has been used to teach poetry, for example. But I think it has interesting application for a range of composition approaches. It allows you to easily fly words and text around, along with images and video. I see it as a pretty cool way to to present lesson material, but I think putting it into the hands of students, with the combination of graphical composition of their own words and publishing their work to their fellow classmates, would offer a compelling invitation to the composition process.

I’ve included some links below to a few Prezi poetry and composition sites that I took inspiration from for the Prezi I made for my final New Media Text document.

My Culture, Richard’s final new media text doc

Stop Drilling, Natasa Bozic Grojic

Revealing Meaning, Broadcasting History, Bill Wolff

What is Poetry, Josh Flores

More posts, more research resources

http://jenougher.wordpress.com/

Resource Blog #3

My third resource is a book titled Good Faith Collaboration written by Joseph Reagle Jr. This book is more a philosophical and anthropological examination of the phenomenon of Wikipedia. The beginning chronicles the history of encyclopedias and of Wikipedia. Then, Reagle moves on to more of a reflection on the spirit and ethics of the Wikipedia community. The Wikipedia community is something of a surprise and seems to contradict the popular notion that people are inherently mean and nasty on the internet. The Wikipedia community is usually calm, collected, and civil with each other. This book made me think through some of the reasons why writing for Wikipedia could be academic in a sense. The Wikipedia community is quite demanding but it is also quite polite.

Resource Blog #2

For my presentation, I used a book titled How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It, written by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. This book was used for it highly specific advice on how to navigate Wikipedia. It covers a range of issues from how to write an article, what makes a good article, resolving disputes, how to ban or block a fellow Wikipedian, etc. I used the book to capture a nuanced understanding of what assigning students to write for Wikipedia would look like. There is even a chapter on Wikipedia for teachers as well as many chapters on Wikipedia’s sister projects.