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.

Blog address for Amanda H.

I have added a link for Amanda H.'s blog -- so that is everyone. My links are in random order but the two Amandas are right after one another -- so be sure to add Amanda to your list.

Thinking about the Wiki assignment

On Tuesday, October 4, we will go over the assignment sheet for the wiki. For this project, you and your group will define, explore, and create linked discussions of a focused set of concepts important to online writing.

Several of you mentioned you might like to incorporate some aspect of gaming into your focus. The following links give an indication of what literacy researchers have been writing about games, learning, and creating "texts."

topics related to gaming and literacy

games+learning+society

I also overheard a buzz about fan fiction and about ethics/regulation/ownership issues.

(Matt I am still working on a good page with many references on virtual realities which is going to connect to *writing*)

For those of you who are still thinking in general terms, Virginia Montecino at George Mason University has put together a very useful cyberography of online resources for a range of issues. Montecino

As we go over the assignment sheet, we will talk about how you can narrow these huge conceptual areas to a list of concepts you and your group will define and discuss in your wiki.

Links and Genres: Blog Assignment for Tuesday

I posted at NEWS on WebCt that I would give you an overview of Kress. I acknowledge the article required careful reading, but I also think it is clear and that he makes us re-examine our intuitive assumptions about genre, and he offers a re-definition of the term which we can apply to cyber-genres.

We began our discussion by clearing up what Kress means by text -- and our interpretation was that he meant anything we could "read" -- or develop a "reading" of. We are developing genres for text in the large sense -- so that webpages and all the encompass are considered texts.

Kress defines genre as "that category which realizes the social relations of the participants involved in the text as interaction." So to begin with he is treating genre not as related to the symbols and forms of which texts are physically composed, but as the social interactions through which texts are "realized." To realize a text, I am assuming, means to interpret or creat meaning of a text.

He then identifies three types of relations structured by genres.

1)Relationships reported in the text: that is relationships among actors, objects, and events reported in the text (eg relationships within the content;)
2)relationships implied by the text; that is relationships between the participants who bring the text into meaning (eg between the implied reader/audience and the author);
3) and relationships within the social world or discourse within which the text participates. In the two examples from Kress's discussion the texts are a recount and a procedure, and Kress shows how these two forms participated in the conventions and expectations of the discourse or social world for "doing science." )

Kress' discussion illustrates how his definintion of genre can encompass discussions of the effects of design and of multigenre texts.

In his concluding section, he points out that texts have always been multigenre, and that an revised understanding of genre is necessary to enable us to analyze and think about text produced in a culturally plural, globalized world. In English, this means that the older conventions for naming genres were based in formal features connected to print technologies and that they named texts as a whole. In contrast, Kress suggests that his approach can be applied to aspects of a range of diverse texts in a range of modes.

BLOG ASSIGNMENT: In class, we created an intuitive list of internet genres - mail sites, search sites, shopping sites, IT sites, entertainment sites, review sites (this list is by no means complete and many of these categories can be broken down further). We then talked about how we would use Kress' definition of genre to analyze: 1) the modes of expression (image, text, sound, motion) within the text, 2)the design of the text (the relationships of the different elements in the text -eg between images, graphics, headings, blocks of print, etc)and 3) the relationships structured by the text as a whole.

Continue this exploration in your blogs. Choose a genre or sub-genre and analyze it using Kress' approach. Look at at least three sites within a particular genre and try to identify the kinds of relationships which caused us to intuitively identify it as a genre. Does the group you chose to analyze (say you chose shopping sites and looked at ebay, bestbuy's site, and amazon) really constitute a genre within Kress' approach? Or do they structure different relationships? Describe the relationships which you find at the sites.