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I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
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PowerBox: Plato and Community Literacy? (275) PowerBox Productions is a multimedia company (one person show?) that has interesting resonances for Intro to Writing Studies. The site's header quotes McLuhan, a featured exhibit is the "Magic Cave" (inverting Plato's dark cave, perhaps), and PowerBox productions seems very concerned with education children, working with community organizations, and bringing multimedia expression to those who might want to explore it.
Service Learning In Writing Courses (275) The always fabulous resources at Colorado State University include what amounts to an online guide to service learning in writing courses. This site starts with background information and definition, suggests syllabi, and takes into account students' concerns.
Domain knowledge for reading and writing (275) The Spring 2003 issue of American Educator is dedicated to the issue of reading comprehension, explanations for the significant gap among socio-economic groups and reading ability, tips for effective vocabularly building, etc. Great issue for anyone in English studies or English education. Many articles talk about the importance of strategic and well-informed "intervention" through literacy progams along the lines we are considering in Introduction to Writing Studies. One paragraph from E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s essay "Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge--of Words and the World," really jumped out for me as relevant for teaching composition at the college level. "immersion in a topic not only improves reading and develops vocabulary, it also develops writing skill. One of the remarkable discoveries that I made over the many years that I taught composition was how much my students' writing improved when our class stuck to an interesting subject over an extended period. The organization of their papers got better. Their spelling improved. Their style improved. Their ideas improved. Now I understand why: When the mind becomes familiar with a subject, its limited resources can begin to turn to other aspects of the writing task, just as in reading. All aspects of a skill grow and develop as subject-matter familiarity grows. So we kill several birds with one stone when we teach skills by teaching stuff." (28)
Service Learning resources (275) A quick PALs search for Service Learning turned up 80 hits, including Service Learning and Higher Learning by Robert A. Rhoads (an e-book you can access right from PALs), and the much different Service Learning in Higher Education by Barbara Jacoby ; ). Both are very recent and look inteteresting to me. Thomas Deans Writing Partnerships: Service Learning in Composition would be the book that is most directly relevant to our study, and I notice no one has checked it out yet. Amy Rupiper Taggart (my colleague) has not published her dissertation from last year, but she looked closely at three institutional models. Deans doesn't appear to maintain a high profile web site, but here is a nice review of his book.
Seeing through McLuhan's eyes (275) Two random notes on seeing the world through McLuhan's eyes, or at least seeing the way the world talks about and uses technology. 1. I was sitting in a Dr's office and saw a talk show; the guests and audience were debating whether it was appropriate or not for a publisher to have made "bubble gum cards" or "trading cards" of victims and heroes of 9-11. Most people liked the idea of commemorating the lost and the heroes, but were disturbed by the medium / genre, and disturbed that someone could make a profit off the venture. A spokesperson for the card company said, "in this case, the medium is not the message," but of course he was wrong. The medium continued to be the message, and even though the manufacturer wanted to send a different message, the history and power of the medium / genre could not be overcome with one gesture. 2. In Wired, April 2003, designer Bob Greenberg succinctly a kind of media ecology: the ways in which new media "remediate," change, push-around other media: "MTV combined film and music with faster editing and graphics, which really grabbed a younger demographic. It was really an extension of film language, adapted by television. The web is a new language, the first new one to come along since the introduction of film. The difference is that it's global and it's local and it cuts across age groups. That's why the impact of the Web will be much greater. The Web is MTV on steroids." In tetrad terms: Enhancement. When asked what the downside of "the web changing everything" is, he says: "I particularly notice the loss of the individual creator. There used to be one person sitting in front of millions of dollars of equipment--now there are eight people working collaboratively. This is one reason I collect outsider art‹to remind myself of the importance of singular vision. You have to have a point of view. " In tetrad terms: Obsolescence.
Developing Surveys (275) (320) For a comprehensive discussion of who uses surveys, how to use surveys, how to design and distribute surveys, visit the Colorado State Writing Center site. For a shorter introduction to writing and designing surveys, visit the resources provided by a high school teachers in Logan Utah. For the one-screen, bare-bones introduction and overview to surveys, visit this site prepared by an educator in Australia.
Networked Learning and Online Home-Schooling (275) Sarah Brown is working on a paper about the education of Charlotte Bronte, and her paper has got me thinking about the ways in which the current home schooling movement is in part connected to the emergence of a digital, electronic, networked culture. Another student, at University-College of the Cariboo in Kamloops, BC, Canada, has explored some of these connections in a paper about "Networked Learning and Online Home-Schooling." To the extent that the printing press fueled public education, the separation of church and school, the privileging of the rational individual over the spiritual communal identity, it makes sense that people are withdrawing from the public system if they are seeking communal and familial values via education. The irony of the current technological-digital revolution is that it largely supports "organic" and "anti-technological" thinking. Maybe.
A recent article by Deb Brandt (275) The Teachers College Record, March 2003 v105 i2 p245(16) Changing Literacy. D. Brandt. Abstract: Current discussions about literacy often focus on how economic changes are raising expectations for literacy achievement. The emergence of a socalled knowledge economy or learning economy requires more people to do more things with print. Less attention has been given, however, to how the pressure to produce more literacy affects the contexts in which literacy learning takes place. This article looks at the literacy learning experience of an autoworker turned union representative, a blind computer programmer, two bilingual autodidacts, and a former southern sharecropper raising children in a hightech university town. It uses the concept of the literacy sponsor to explore their access to learning and their responses to economic and technological change. Their experiences point to some directions for incorporating economic history into thinking about cultural diversity and for using resources in school to address economic turbulence and inequality beyond the school. I found this abstract via InfoTracs--no other returns for the search "sponsor of literacy".
McLuhan on the Photograph (275) (399) Today, I started thinking about the visual culture and language class I will teach in the fall of 2003 (399) because I have to decide on some books. While I won't use McLuhan's Understanding Media, I did read his chapter on the photograph. From Understanding Media (1964). "Photography was almost as decisive in making the break between mere mechanical industrialism and and the graphic age of electronic man. The step from the age of Typographic Man to the age of Graphic Man was taken with the invention of photography" (171). ["The graphic age"--I haven't seen McLuhan use that before. His use of "visual culture" to describe print culture is often confusing. The graphic age might be a more useful label.] "If the phonetic alphabt was a technical means of severing the spoken word from its aspects of sound and gesture, the photograph and its development in the movie restored gesture to the human technology of recording experience. In fact, the snapshot of arrested human postures by photography directed more attention to physical and psychic posture than ever before." (174) "The photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture. Thus, the traditional figures of rhetoric were individual postures of mind of the private speaker in relation to an audience, whereas myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture" (174). [I was reading an online essay in Enculturation about the remediation of style, and the author drew on classical rhetoric as a means of making sense of the new style. If McLuhan is right, the new styles of visual communication that we will / might be teaching need to draw on myth and archetype, not classical rhetoric, to work effectively, appropriately, in our graphic age. ] "Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and condenscension to "pop kulch" and "mass entertainment" (175). [It seems to me that the literate of today (the specialized, highly literate English professor and students) has to make a case for what should be read and valued in literature, as well as figure out how to meet and use the new media on its own terms.] "In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose "meaning" belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters" (176). [see above: the mythic basis for visual communication] "The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes." (177) "To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible, then, without grasping its relations to other media, both old and new. For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur" (181).
E-fuse: tips for everyone (275) (320) This website is designed primarily to help others build websites, but it has tips on writing that are relevant to most writing situations, and it has a section on leadership and group dynamics that will be relevant to anyone working on a group project.
Community Literacy Centers (275) It's spring break--time to blog! Starting to assemble resources on community literacy. The Carnegie Mellon Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh is one we will read about, and perhaps is the most famous in the country. The Center's focus is working with youth collaboratively to help them realize their goals. The Lindy Boggs National Center for Community Literacy is based at Loyola University in New Orleans, and seems to act as a major information resource for community literacy professionals. A model like this one might be more appropriate than setting up a center off campus.
McLuhan on writers (275) This screen is an essay by Peter Montgomery from 1984 about the influence of various writers on McLuhan's thinking: "Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce, and Percy Wyndham Lewis were Marshall McLuhan's beacons in the dark confusion of the modern technological explosion. " The piece does a nice job of devoting a paragraph to each, although Wyndham Lewis gets more attention than the rest.
A webtext with McLuhan, Plato, and friends (275) Robert P. Yagelski's "Computers, Literacy, and Being: Teaching with Technology for a Sustainable Future" is a long essay, but within it you will find a set of pages entitled "Plato Lives: Writing and the Western Self," and within that grouping you will find a screen entitled "The Sensual Reconfiguration of Communication". Yagelski summarizes McLuhan's ideas about a techology changing our sense ratios (from oral to visual for example), but he also offers a challenge to those ideas, drawing on philosopher David Abrams. The content of this essay should be relevant to IWS, and the screen on McLuhan is in itself a reasonable model for the essay I am asking you to write. Yagelski summarizes McLuhan (you would probably want to summarize a bit more than he does), puts McLuhan in a context, then offers a challenge to McLuhan via the argument that McLuhan, Ong, and others have not thought enough about the influence of the natural world on the self. They have focused, instead, to heavily on technologies. The "so what?" element is pretty strong--Yagelski and Abrams are saying that if we are going to use / develop theories of the self, they should account for nature's influence, not just technology's influence.
Information Graphics (275) (320) Learning to communicating visually, and specifically learning how to create effective information graphics for my courses is probably my #1 professional development goal right now. But ironically, my first blog entry is about a very cool, text-heavy weblog devoted to information graphics. This weblog lead me to the website of Edward Tufte, information design guru, and then I had to track down Robert E. Horn, the author of Visual Language and the inspiration for the information graphic assignments in these courses. He has an essay on his site, "What kinds of writing will survive in the future?" This might become required readings in my courses.
McLuhan and the Middle Ages (275) A succinct essay by Franceso Guardiani on the ways in which McLuhan sees the modern era as a renaissance of the middle ages. The key insight: "we have re-entered a world of multisensorial perception that recalls the world of our pre-modern forefathers." This essay is part of a short-lived web project on McLuhan studies. Essays by McLuhan and other scholars can be found here.
Paper in the 19th Century (275) Project Muse is a good source for scholarly articles about literature and culture. I found a relevant, although detailed and challenging scholarly essay about the value of paper in the 19th Century. Kevin McLaughlin's "The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin," makes the insightful argument that the increasing importance of paper in the 19th century (for beaucracy as well as literature) challenged prevailing notions about what was "valuable." "value in economics and aesthetics is a matter of lasting--of persisting in time--and paper, as noted, had long been seen as an ephemeral medium, a medium lacking in substance or weight. Paper was thus troubling because it challenged the traditional identification of value with substance. What comes to the surface with paper in the nineteenth century, then, is an alternative understanding of value, one with important, and complex, affiliations to a widespread discourse of virtuality that, as several historians have shown, emerged in nineteenth-century natural and social sciences" (second paragraph) Those of you taking Brit Lit II should find this essay particularly relevant.
McLuhan one liners (275) I was thinking about my claim that readers should look for the nuggets in The Gutenberg Galaxy, when I remebered that I had read about a McLuhan quote generator. Traces of the website can still be found, but it is no longer active. I did find a collection of audio-clips--not so helpful in our sound-disabled campus clusters, but a site you might want to check from home. I found the clips via a project posted in 1999 by an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University; he was asked to wrestle with McLuhan, too, and found it no simple task. Is that fact consoling? Check out his links! You should definitely go to matx.ca -- Canadian, and a Mac-user. We are practically brothers.
Images of Literacy (275) My son rented two movies for this weekend: Digimon--The Movie and Bravel Little Toaster to the Rescue. I was pretty interested in Digimon because I wanted to see how the movie represents the Internet, and I was not disappointed! Many things to say, but most interesting were the frequent sequene of shots of children all around the world huddled around a computer, all watching the same digimon internet battle and emailing the "digidestined" kids who were battling. The movie projects an image of world-wide access, and Internet activity as thoroughly social--both face to face social interaction and email interaction. The Brave Little Toaster caught me completely off guard. There is a phenomenal song and dance routine in the movie about the Internet: how it can make everyone smarter, but smarter is only worth while if it also makes us all better, and if we are smarter and better, we can unite the world in peace and harmony (Coke can't do it alone, anymore, I guess). These two movies got me wondering about how older movies used to represent television, and as far as I can tell, movies didn't deal very extensively with the presence of television until the early 1980s. I'd welcome titles of movies that are about television. The movies also got me wondering more generally about how existing technologies represent the new technologies, and I found this website with images (mainly on pottery) of Greek representations of reading and writing from the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries, BCE.
Walter Ong and Dennis Baron (275) Thought I would personalize the authors we will be reading this week. I've already given Plato and Phaedrus their own page, but Walter Ong and Dennis Baron deserve an introduction. Walter Ong is considered one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, but there is surprisingly little good material about him on the web, and he hasn't put any material on the web. His book, Orality and Literacy, is frequently taught in courses about the history of writing, history of rhetoric, or even history of literature. I used it in Electronic Communication a year ago. He and McLuhan crossed paths early in their careers, and you will see Ong's name come up in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Dennis Baron is the department chair of English at the University of Illinois. In addition to "Pencils to Pixels," he has made a number of his essays available on his website, including one on "How to Write a Paper." He is an example of a professor who combines linguistics and writing instruction in his teaching and research. About this site |
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