Beyond ‘new’ literacies

Hi all!

I just found out about this through a listserv I subscribe to, and it looks like there are some interesting articles in this special themed issue: Beyond ‘new’ literacies, edited by Dana J. Wilber, and published by Digital Culture & Education, an interdisciplinary, web-published, open-access journal, which looks really cool and worth checking out. Some of the articles talk about constructivist pedagogies, visual literacies, definitions of literacies, etc….

“Broken Syntax in Cyberspace: The Future of Language?”

Hi all –

A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook, and I thought I’d pass it along. It made me cringe a little bit. What do you think?

Here is the link: http://newsblaze.com/story/20100516065353delm.nb/topstory.html

Collaboration and Negotiations

After reading Scott Warnock’s Chapters 10-18, I found myself drawn to two main ideas: collaboration and assessment. They may seem like two separate topics, but I am thinking about them in terms of collaborative assignments and how we would go about grading/assessing such assignments. Scott Warnock’s chapter on “Collaboration” is short, but when read in conjunction with the other chapters on “Assignments,” “Peer Review,” and “Grading,” it is clear that collaboration, cooperation, and the shared nature of knowledge are pivotal elements in Warnock’s ideas about an online class.

In Chapter 10, Warnock says, “If instead we see knowledge as being created by a community of knowledgeable peers and that learning is social, then peer review makes sense” (115).

Forum on Teaching with Technology

Hi all — I hope everyone is having a great weekend and enjoying the gorgeous weather!

Thought I’d let you know that there is a lively and awesome discussion forum happening right now hosted by the HASTAC Scholars (read more about HASTAC here). HASTAC is open to anyone, so all you’d have to do is register to join in the conversation… there are some discussion threads in there that definitely made me think about our class discussions.

The forum is on teaching with digital media, so it’s really relevant to the discussions we’ve had! Here is the link to the forum: “Blogs and Beyond: Teaching with Technology and Curiosity”

The Writing Self Being Written: Textual Beings in Online Worlds

How do we represent ourselves (digi)textually? More specifically, in terms of writing in online platforms, what kinds of new subjectivities arise when we write in online, digital spaces? When we teach writing online, what kinds of subject positions do we expect students to occupy and be aware of? How do we teach freshman students these rhetorical skills? These are some of the questions that struck me early on as I started reading Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. I was intrigued by what he said about self-representation: ”…the way you frame yourself will influence how your students write throughout the course” (1). I have been fascinated by conversations about identity formations in Internet communities, and how (electronic) writing is related to representations of the self. The relationship between representation and writing is an important question to keep in mind for teaching composition online — as students write and compose texts in online platforms, they also have to be mindful of how they represent themselves textually, visually, and digitally in the content and knowledge that they’ve produced online. The question of self-representation becomes even more striking when one thinks about online communities, where the invisibility of audience (as Warnock discusses in his book) can create a tension for the contending categories of private and public selves.

Warnock suggests, however, that “your writing students need to operate in a semiprivate, safe area of the Web” (xviii). What are the boundaries between private and “semiprivate, safe” areas of the Interwebs? What are the boundaries of “semiprivate” and “semipublic” online spaces, and how do they differ? If one of the goals of composition is for students to be mindful of who their audience is, do we lose something in the process of restricting first-year composition students (Warnock does make it clear that his main target audience is first-year composition teachers) to “semiprivate, safe” spaces of the Web, instead of allowing them to be exposed to other Internet communities and individuals? Or, is this what is appropriate for first-year composition students (an idea related to one I had in a previous class, where I proposed that in a first-year composition course, students could be restricted to the kind of “semiprivate, safe area of the Web” (usually restricted to the class community) that Warnock talks about — in order for students to achieve their learning outcomes and goals for a freshman composition course — and then, once they get to a more advanced composition course, they could then use the rhetorical and digital literacy skills they have developed in their first-year (online/hybrid) composition course to navigate their way around a larger Internet community. The leveling up would be from writing in “semiprivate” spaces to public, or perhaps semipublic, spaces.

Moreover, Warnock suggests that online composition courses could provide for “the possibilities of a progressive step toward a ‘better’ composition class.” If we take the hypothesis suggested in the previous paragraph, then perhaps Warnock is really on to something. Consider the goals of Cope and Kalantzis’ Multiliteracies approach to pedagogy: “creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for [students] to design their social futures…”. If we take these goals into consideration, then teaching students the art of writing and composition online, starting from “semiprivate, safe” spaces, and moving towards semipublic and public spaces, could potentially provide for a scaffolding process of learning and writing the self across different platforms and spaces, so that students can become better citizens socially, digitally, and more importantly, humanistically (I really like that Warnock talks about the humanistic dimension of teaching composition online).

One last question I’d like to raise is, how do we teach students to read and write multimodal texts in online environments (in Chapter 7, Warnock talks about multimodal reading and writing experiences)? It seems that if multimodal textuality is one of the components of electronic composition, then composition itself would have to be redefined, an issue which has come up time and time again in our class discussions.

Twitter Literacy – Howard Rheingold

I found this article by Howard Rheingold very helpful for navigating the world of tweets… He argues for the importance of new kinds of media literacies and says that “the difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it.” Ultimately,

“Whatever you call this blend of craft and community, one of the most important challenges posed by the real-time, ubiquitous, wireless, always-on, often alienating interwebs are the skills required for the use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.”

Read Rheingold’s article here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=39948#ixzz0kx2bMXjy

Ownership, Copyrights, and “YouTube’s Original Sin”

Hi all — I hope everyone is having a great time off!

Since a lot of our in-class and out-of-class discussions have been around ownership, copyrighted materials, etc., I thought you’d find this article interesting: “YouTube’s Original Sin: The video site danced with the devil to get a massive traffic boost. Now it might pay the price.”

Enjoy.

Better Spaces, Better Thinkers

I don’t know how I missed this the last few weeks (or maybe I did notice but did not pay much attention to it), but I think it’s funny that after each blog post here, there is a list of “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated).” Who generates these posts? How do they determine what are related to the blog posts? Much like MS Word’s grammar check, these automatic posts seem arbitrary and make one wonder how much of what we do here on these digital media platforms are structured and determined by these “unseen” forces. McGee and Ericsson’s article starts out with a quote from Mark Weiser that warns us of the “most profound technologies” that “disappear… and weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” This is the age that we now live in, where the ubiquity of digital technologies directly impacts how we communicate and perform literacy practices in ways that we don’t necessarily think twice about.

The connections that I was able to gather from the readings this week and which struck me as salient are

“Pushing literacy into cool directions”: New Media, Writing, and Multiliteracies

As reading and writing are increasingly performed on the Internet’s new/social media platforms such as blogs, wikis, and social networking sites, these new forms of “mixed media” writing practices (as the CCCC pointed out here) require new literacies in order for students to effectively and critically navigate the digital landscape as successful digital citizens.

In emphasizing the social and human life of writing in digital mediums, the CCCC is reinforcing the idea that information and knowledge production are social, an idea put forth by John Seely Brown in his essay, that “knowledge is inextricably situated in the physical and social context of its acquisition and use.” Similarly, the The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 states that “social media are the new laboratories of culture and knowledge making.” In light of the social life of writing in the Web 2.0 world (or “life writing,” as Andrea Lunsford calls it, as cited in Clive Thompson’s article), there is an urgent need for new forms of literacies (not a unitary, single form of literacy traditionally related to print-based texts, but literacies that include screen and digital literacies, visual literacy, etc.) as technology revives and pushes “our literacy in bold new directions.”

The multiliteracies approach to teaching and writing, an idea developed by The New London Group more than a decade ago, is still one that we need to foster, teach, and practice so that we can be better and more critical readers, writers, and (prod)users of knowledge in a digital age. The representation of knowledge in multimodal ways incorporating different media forms is important to navigating a culturally and linguistically diverse world. According to the New London Group, a multiliteracies approach can foster “the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment” (emphasis mine), an idea that is crucial for students to be critically aware of as they inhabit a world that is becoming smaller and smaller (as in McLuhan’s “global village”), and increasingly connected and collaborative via Web 2.0 technologies.

As Michael Wesch’s video shows, the mixed media form of writing and reading with hypertext, videos, etc. engage us in a very different world than the print-based model. With this in mind, what do we do with knowledge production that is based on a very social, collaborative, and open-access model? What is the difference between reading a print text versus an electronic text that allows comments, tags, and annotations? How do we focus our attention in these new forms of reading and writing so that we can still critically consume and interact with the new media texts at hand, rather than being distracted all over the Web? New forms of literacies will allow us to be able to navigate these new media waters more effectively, efficiently, and critically as we think about these questions more deeply. These new literacies will allow us to develop the skills to be more mindful of what we produce and consume in the digital age.