Class Monday February 4

You might have noticed I have not updated the News Page at Google groups - there are "technical difficulties" accessing the page. I will update it later today -as soon as the "difficulties" subside.

Meanwhile - in class we talked over Glister. We focused on his representation of digital spaces and the corresponding emergence of digital literacies - practices for interpreting and representing meaning through different media. Though Glister was sticking with a text-based meaning for the term "literacy" - from my perspective - literacy skills are also involved in interpreting images, sounds, motion and the relationships among these elements. We "read" online texts by creating meaning through understanding relationships among images, sound, motion, text, as well as by connecting to meanings those elements have had in other texts. For example, how did you "read" the Bush & Blair love song we looked at? What meaning did it have for you and how did you create it?

As I built on what Glister wrote about digital literacies - I shifted his focus on a "paradigm" shift - from an exclusive to an inclusive medium - from a place where "reading and writing" become using or consuming - to a focus on the changes in assumptions, values and beliefs that take place in the users. Digital literacies place value on learning through doing and the exploration and "mistakes" that unfold in learning through doing; on interactive collaborative creation of knowledge (truth is created rather than discovered). There is no index to the internet so elite users and communities of users create "information structures" to help the rest of us find what we need to find. This discussion of how the digital literacies differ from print literacies, how the net conditions us to make meanings in ways quite different from the ways we make meaning in the "real" world has been discussed in some detail by Collin Lankshear and Michele Knobel in their book New Literacies.

At the end of class we did some brainstorming on a list of possible topics for your research projects, and you signed up for a conference with me. I will post the times on the Google.groups page when I have access. The first appointment is for Wednesday this week. I will be looking through your blogs and will get back to you by the end of the week.

Wednesday we will be talking Rheingold. See you then.

Digital Literacies - a blast from the past

As you read Glister's description of digital literacies - you might want to remember that he is describing the internet and practices for communication on /through/with the interet from 1997. So how is the internet the same or different? I was particularly struck the section on changing models of access, that the model of access has changed radically from the one of commercial providers Glister describes. For another description of what internet service/communities were like "back in the day" you might want to look at this article on "Commercial Internet Providers" by Geraldine MacDonald. In reflecting on how your relationship to your internet service provider is the same or different from what Glister and MacDonald describe - think about what role the nature of the internet might have played in effecting the move from 1997 - 2008?

Also, as in your reading of Woolley, Heim, and Bolter and Grusin - look for internet topics that are "missing" from Wikipedia. Our list so far includes: remediation, hypermediacy, immediacy, Friday the 13th Virus, and from this reading I found that DELPHI was not listed (unless you count the entry on the site of the Greek Oracle.)

What to do with your blogs and other questions

You all created blogs on Monday (while I was at meetings) => good job! I am still in the process of linking your blog to my blog. By next class we should all be connected - so that we can keep an eye on what we are writing.

Reading through your summaries, I noticed that many of you are not familiar with MLA format. If you did not create your summary in MLA format, and / or are not sure how to do so, check out the Purdue OWL's presentation on MLA format.

In addition to reviewing what Woolley, Heim and Grusin and Bolter have written about cyberspace and new media "writing," we will use today's class to begin to put together a list of topics of interest. I will keep an ongoing version of this list -here- on my blog, so you can refer back to it. This list can be a starting place for your ideas about what to write about for your web essay, or for your entry on Wikipedia.

So as you can see - we will be using the blogs for a variety of purposes, and the way you use it will evolve over the course of the semester:

• to summarize & reflect on readings
• to find a topic for the web essay + wikipeida entry
• to find out what classmates are thinking/writing about
• to communicate with classmates
• to gather and develop information on your topic (once you find it) for your web essay

For this course, your blog will be like a journal in that you will use it as a place to think - and as a place to develop writing. But a blog is not like a journal in that it is a public space - and that is a point to think about as you develop your entries.

Web design

I've been reading through your wikis and looking for sources for your web projects. Hopefully each of you has signed out a book, or received an email from me which contained some useful references. As soon as you get the content (or at least the sources for the content) lined up, we can move on to figuring out how to organize what you have to say as a web presentation. The wiki software is pretty clunky (though I am impressed with what some of you have done with it), but creating your website should open up some possibilities for using elements of design to enhance your discussion.

On Tuesday, I will present some materials available for teaching multimedia and/or visual rhetoric and design.


To give you an idea of what web essays look like, you might want to check out Kairos a web journal on writing. These essays are about teaching digital writing, and they are presented in web format.

If you want to see *advanced* design in action, check out entroyp8zuper, a web design studio. Their work is interactive, beautiful, and provides excellent examples of visual communication (for a range of purposes). I do not expect anything so elaborate -- but I thought you might enjoy looking at their work.


You might also want to look at TECFA's links for design. TECFA is an academic unit in the field of educational
technology. It was created by the School of Psychology and Education at the University of Geneva. Scroll down to 2.1

If you scroll down further, you will discover the web style guide,the web design group's elements of design. These sites contain different presentations of the material which we will go over in class -- or to put it more accurately -- which you will present to your classmates.

After you review/rate one another's wiki sites, you and your group will read through materials for teaching visual/multimedia composing (web design). Then, next week (as scheduled on the new calendar) each group will give a presentation on one set of materials. In the presentation, you will:

1. Give an overview of information in your material which is relevant to web writing; your discussion should cover elements of design, visual rhetorics, relationships between print & text, role of the reader, and so on.

2. Discuss how you could apply this information as you construct your web essay.

3. Evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching material you have reviewed.

The format for the presentation can be interactive, collaborative -- how ever you think will be most engaging for your classmates.

eBay: taking a hard look at the ordinary

So you read one more article that went into great analytic detail with respect to something that seems ordinary. Just as we belabored defining cyberspace and then spent two classes examining the "meaning" of links and genres -- concepts which you understand and can use intuitively -- now we spent a class examining the "literacies" associated with eBay. At this point is might feel safe to say that this class is about making "mountains out of molehills." Yeah. I guess it is.


Applying critical, reflective analysis to "ordinary" practices allows us to understand our culture and our selves in more depth. It allows us to identify and generalize why particular interactions play out as they do. Saying that online writing is like both speech and print is both obvious and profound. It is obvious if we leave it with the surface generalization, and it is profound if we identify the features of writing and the features of speech which online writing has appropriated, and then try to theorize and understand what these features allow us to say and the kinds of social interactions they structure. So, yep, that's what we're doing. We are spending a great deal of time taking an exhausting, if not exhaustive, look at what is happening to literacy and writing in the digital age.

For any of you who were interested in my brief overview on the future of internet governance, a copy of the report can be found at http://www.wgig.org. Reading the background report will help you understand the recent political history which caused the group to be formed. The speaker at the conference was Peng Hwa Ang, Dean of School of Communication at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Chicago

So here we are. If you want to read the abstract for our talk, it is available atAOIR Conference papers.

There is a print version of my paper at this site. Jackie and Josh have their own sites and should have their papers posted shortly.