A poem to honor the meeting of the literary and the technological

Google Earth

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from
earth to heaven.
……….. Theseus, from a Midsummer Night’s Dream
……….. (Act V, Scene 1) Shakespeare

We started in Africa, the world at our fingertips,
dropped in on your house in Zimbabwe; threading
our way north out of Harare into the suburbs,
magnifying the streets–the forms of things unknown,
till we spotted your mum’s white Mercedes parked
in the driveway; seeming–more strange than true,
the three of us huddled round a monitor in Streatham,
you pointed out the swimming pool and stables.
We whizzed out, looking down on our blue planet,
then like gods—zoomed towards Ireland–
taking the road west from Cork to Kinsale,
following the Bandon river through Innishannon,
turning off and leapfrogging over farms
to find our home framed in fields of barley;
enlarged the display to see our sycamore’s leaves
waving back. Then with the touch of a button,
we were smack bang in Central London,
tracing our footsteps earlier in the day, walking
the wobbly bridge between St Paul’s and Tate Modern;
the London Eye staring majestically over the Thames.
South through Brixton into Streatham–
one sees more devils than vast hell can hold–
the blank expressions of millions of roofs gazing
squarely up at us, while we made our way down
the avenue, as if we were trying to sneak up
on ourselves; till we were right outside the
door:
the lunatic, the lover and the poet– peeping through
the computer screen like a window to our souls.

by Adam Wyeth
from Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland
Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2010

Online Comp–Suitable for IRW or Basic Reader/Writers?

In reference to Scott Warnock’s book Teaching Writing Online: How & Why: Personally, I buy into the notion that the more writing you do, the better you become at it. The same is true for reading, and furthermore, the skills are interrelated and mutually supportive. For these reasons more than any others, I love the idea of online  courses for composition-only courses. However, I wonder about the viability of setting an integrated reading and writing course in cyber space, especially if the course is aimed at basic readers/writers. My concern is threefold. First, much of the work we do in such courses involves the discussion and practice of metacognitive tools, such KWL, double- or triple-entry journals, PPPC, etc. I think it would be difficult to demonstrate the use of these tools if you couldn’t hold up a book in one hand and write on the board with the other. Second, though students may become better readers through sheer dint of having to read all their classmates’ postings, the fact of the matter is  they arrive not yet having reading skills or metacognitive tools adequate to the task. I’m not sure where a teacher would begin to get students up to speed so they could participate effectively in class. Third, as Warnock says, “…students who enroll in [online or hybrid] courses need to consider… their own ability to be a self-starter….” (14). Basic reader/writers are already on cognitive overload, so it’s not a great idea to add another make-or-break complication to their lives.

What do you think? Using a hybrid format may solve the first two problems, but maybe not the third. Any other ideas or solutions?

Visual Rhetoric: Whose Bailiwick?

In The Low Bridge to High Benefits by Anderson and The Sticky Embrace of Beauty by Wysocki, the authors call for composition education to include visual rhetoric. While I agree that form carries function and that learning to analyze these forms makes us better readers (and publishers), isn’t visual rhetoric the bailiwick of art class? One takeaway from these articles could be that we desperately need to restore funding for art education at all levels of education, and that perhaps art & visual rhetoric should be a required class at the college level.

Q: To what extent is visual rhetoric the domain of the comp class?

Richard Miller and the Future of Publishing

Richard Miller starts his presentation with a statement about new media being the biggest communications revolution ever because it is now possible for anyone to publish globally, instantly. In a similar vein, the SF Chronicle ran a story today (“Award to amateur video shows industry change”) about a prestigious journalism award being awarded to an anonymously produced cell-phone video that recorded the recent death of a woman protesting in Iran.

Questions: What does this say about the evolving nature of publishers (of books, news, etc.)? Who are the arbiters of truth and quality?

Confessions of a FanFic Writer, D&D Player

I am thinking of Andrea Lunsford’s guest lecture on performative text as I try to tie together some ideas that have come up after reading “New Literacies: Research and Social Practice,” (Lankshear & Knobel’s plenary address) and Jessica Hammer’s “Agency and Authority in Role Playing Texts” (New Literacies Sampler, Knobel & Lankshear, eds).

Like many children, when my friends and I were young, we entertained each other by writing stories set in the worlds of other texts, especially Star Wars, inserting each other as characters. I didn’t realize there was a term for these texts we created: fan fiction or fanfic. We spent recess at school acting out Star Wars-based stories we made up spontaneously, complete with sound effects. This too was fanfic—the multiplayer kind. As teenagers, we became serious D&D players, often playing all-night, sometimes making up our own rules, donning costumes, and running around in the woods while in character. Hammer would say we had the psychological agency (the sense that we were empowered) and cultural agency (the power recognized by others, namely our group) to exercise agency over the text (the D&D world) and the narrative (the scenario in which we played). Strangely, I was a reluctant writer of school papers, though out of school I wrote constantly in the service of my favorite texts (Star Wars and D&D).

In their plenary address, L&K discuss the growing recognition of preteen fanfic authors within the fanfic community and decry the lack of investigation of fanfic writing in the primary classroom because “it is rarely considered in terms of intertextuality, ‘media mixing’ and the like, notwithstanding the importance attached to such literary techniques within high school English classes in relation to ‘the canon.’” Consider this in light of Lunsford’s comments about the power that composition in any media can have when it is inspired. The subjects in the Stanford Literacy Study did not ask for permission to compose. They used composition outside of the class because they wished to. They exercised authority, borrowed images for flyers, integrated their words into the poem of another, and made professional-grade, multi-media learning tools.

If we accept as fact that the more literary events you engage in, the more literate you become, then isn’t it strange that we limit the variety of literary events valued in school? What if all acts of composition were at least encouraged and acknowledged? Think of the effect it might have on a student’s sense of agency and authority, as well as supporting the development of an understanding of one’s own idealogical situatedness as a writer and a reader, and general textual saavy.

The Literacy Revolution and Preliteracy

In his Wired Magazine column, “Clive Thompson on the New Media” (posted 08.24.09), Thompson considers the findings in the Stanford Study of Writing by Andrea Lunsford, a well-known figure in the world of composition studies. Thompson notes Lunsford’s observation that contrary to popular belief, young people are actually writing more–not less–than previous generations, which is spurring what Lunsford refers to as a “literacy revolution.” In other words, all the texting, blogging, and FaceBooking that people do is increasing their literacy. I’m not surprised to hear this because one of the truisms of literacy theory is that the more you read and write, the better you are at reading and writing, and the better you are it, the more you do it. It’s an upward spiral of increasing and using skills, and a very good reason to read to young children and engage them in writing games in order to give them preliteracy skills that will later develop into actual literacy. In light of Lunsford’s findings, can we broaden the definition of preliteracy skills to include playing with computers, learning how to turn them on, knowing what an email is, writing pretend emails, etc?