Reflection on the course title

Lately I’ve been thinking about how appropriate the course title of ENG 708 is: Teaching Writing in a Digital Age. The emphasis is still on writing and its central importance to critical thinking. I don’t think we need to be taking on the teaching of aspects of all new media, nor do we need to be concerned about ways new media may be supplanting written language, nor is it that we must now teach new media composition instead of English composition. But written language and the service it performs as vehicle for critical thinking certainly must be examined in its application to new media (as we are doing). In reference to Ong, just as language adapted to technological evolution like the printing press and the computer screen, writing will, I believe, always play the central part in how understanding is gained and knowledge is conveyed. This is because language is the primary medium for thought and composed language is still the optimal manifestation of that medium. We still need to teach English composition, but the medium of language will be applied to blogs or games or digital videos, as well as the printed page. Composed language will remain the underpinning, if not the central core, of the thought involved.

Certain species of flora and fauna, it is understood, have been with us for eons. The same may be true in the future for topic sentences and 5-paragraph essays, even as ever more highly evolved forms of media make their way into being.

“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

IPhone post: producing critical readers

I’m having some serious technical issues today, which is why I’m writing and posting my blog post via my iPhone. Hopefully, Internet in my apartment will be resolved tomorrow at noon, but until then, I have my trusty smart phone to lead me through the darkness. On a side note, I have never had a problem with my Internet in the whole year and a half I’ve had AT&T. I feel like I’m living one of the major concerns of using new media in a classroom; what happens when it fails and the coffeeshop on the block with wifi is closed?!

This week focused on visual rhetoric, and specific activities to do in the classroom. While selfe discussed the composing of visual rhetoric, I was refreshed to read Anne Frances wysocki advocate for teaching critical reading of visual texts. For my thesis, I’m looking at Guy Debord’s Society of the spectacle, and how the ideology transformed into visual masks the complexities of real life. A great debate in the world of cultural criticism and Marxism is whether society has the tools or the will to debunk the spectacle. All of this praise of visual rhetoric has left out any skepticism about the nature and power of the visual. More than just teaching students how to compose, we must teach how to read critically.

This provides a great opportunity for students to think about visual representations of the body, gender, race, developing countries, and other categories in a deep, nuanced manner. Yes, students are mostly reading/viewing visual rhetoric at home, but who is producing the new media they are consuming? What underlying messages and ideals are embodied by the visual/ the culture of illusion/ the spectacle?

Debord asserts that to undo the power of the spectacle, society must engage dialectally; that is the recipe for liberation. The classroom provides this foundation, and like Wysocki, I believe it is our responsibility as teachers to provide that space.

I’m curious to see how and when cultural criticism about the spectacle and the culture of illusion merge with new media studies. Both are concerned with the visual, how it manifests and how it is consumed, but they have a slightly different agenda. Thankfully, compositionists, like Wysocki, are bringing these issues to the forefront.

I apologize for the shortness and the formatting of this post. My thumbs are tired, and I hope the words speak for themselves!

Ushering In a New Order for the University

Has anyone else been thinking of the larger ramifications of subsuming new media texts into the composition classroom?  – Not just what it will mean for us in our classes or the shift in and expansion of our field of study as we integrate various fields of study (psychology, depth psychology, communication&media, computer/software programming, art, music, sociology, anthropology…etc.), into our teaching, as our readings showed us this week, in order to accommodate the needs determined by the global direction of the world’s new means of composing meaning and communicating. But what implications our decision might have, what possibilities it might open for restructuring the university? And I don’t mean the difference between face to face and virtual classrooms.

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?