|
U-blog, I-blog |
||
 |
||
|
I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
 |
|
Research note to self An announcement for the NEH summer stipend came through my email. I should think about proposing my comp in RRV project, with an emphasis on explaining "literacy" in the the 21st century. Historical portion: the ways schools in the RRV have gone about educating literate citizens, the ways they might need to go about it in the 21st century, and the ways academics might need to go about writing history--to themselves, to the public, to their students.
Sean D. Williams on teaching integrated composition I just spent a couple of hours getting to know the scholarship of Sean D. Williams, currently at Clemson. He wrote a 2 part piece for Computers and Composition in 2001 (18.1 and 18.2), and his essay in JAC 22.2 builds on that work. His fundamental argument in C&C isn't going to get any arguments for those of us who want to encourage/teach digital literacy--he says we need to expand the definition of composition to include visual as well as verbal components. The actual work that he envisions students doing, however, is always presented as hypothetical--no specific examples are used--and he always labels these integrated compositions as "arguments." He works from Mark Berstein's notion of neighborhoods to visualize hypertext, but I guess since I have started blogging, I have been thinking and worrying less about the structure of hypertext. Now I think in terms of database and scroll, not neighborhoods. And while I am engaged in an argument with William's text right now, I see the central purpose of my weblog as not being argumentative, but as being connective. I hope a few people will google by, and maybe exchange some ideas and observations, but I don't really want to argue with them. Sean, if you read this, I am not arguing with you--I just want to talk more, and flesh out our similarities and differences. I suppose I am starting to split hairs about what an "argument" is, but let me wrap up with one more observation. In the JAC article, he turns to Toulmin's The Uses of Arguments to continue expanding on his notion of how arguments on the web work, but I can't imagine a more print-based theory of argumentation than Toulmin's. I know I am being ego centric to wonder why he doesn't turn to McLuhan to think about web arguments, or turn to McLuhan to understand that the web is not primarily a medium of argumentation. Sure, there are lots of arguments going on via the web, but a cool medium like the web encourages participation and engagement, it encourages images and associations, and it encourages collecting, but not the sustained kind of argument that Toulmin theorizes, and that Williams seems to be imagining for his studetns. I just read the other day that web-readers, on average, spend less than a minute on a screen when they are surfing--no time for engaging in an argument! So, yeah, I guess if I want my students to construct a good old fashioned web argument that is still pretty print-biased (spiced by an image and associative logic), Williams is definitely on the right track. If I want a videossay, a probe, a killer power-point, I think I slightly need a different frame of refernce. I hope this doesn't sound to argumentative. These are good pieces--I'm just more interested in understanding how my own take on digital literacy, on integrated composition, is different from the views of leaders in this field.
Online Lives: Blog essays The journal Biography published a special issue about "Online Lives" in winter, 2003. I've skimmed the first two essays, and both authors are in one way or another disturbed by weblogging. Having been blogging for about a year now, and having included very little of my personal life on this teaching blog, I sometimes forget how raw and perhaps disturbing the journal / personal blogs might be. But to be honest, when a reader is disturbed by somebody else's presentation of self, it seems likely that the reader is, in general, disturbed the huge cultural barrier that is being broken. The self-contained, private, individual self of print culture is, McLuhan might say, "imploding," or turning him or her self inside out. Neither article draws on McLuhan or Ong or any of the scholarship that has really tried to trace the historical changes in orality, print, literacy, electracy. Manovich is well used to talk about blogs as personal databases. I will definitely need to come back to this issue later.
Moby, the Prolific One I've missed my blog. Phone line was out for about a week and a half, I was moving, the end of the semester was crazy--I have new admiration for those who can blog amidst adversity. And then, to start my summer blogging in preparation for fall courses on music, new literacy, and other miscellaneous topics, I read a May 24 weblog entry from techno-muscian Moby saying he has averaged 1.375 blog entries per day since 2000.
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)
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".
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.
JStors: for Orality and Literacy I hadn't gotten around to searching the databases that NDSU subscribes to, but tonight I visited JSTORS (I'm not putting the link in; enter the site by going to the NDSU Library first so that you come in as an authorized user), which has electronic versions of journals in Anthropology, Education, Literature, and Philosophy -- to name the four disciplines I searched). I got 167 hits for "orality and literacy"--many of the articles seem very promising! Have someone in your mosaic tile group check this database out!
Gutenberg Galaxay node Semester is wrapping up, I'm starting to think about next semester's courses (spring 2003), wondering if I can sustain my weblog. This is a transition entry--relevant to my class on technology and literacy, as well as the spring class, "Introduction to Writing Studies." I found a very brief summary/commentary on Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy in "The Electronic Labyrinth," a project from the early 1990s about electronic and hypertextual writing. The "Labyrinth" authors write: "McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He [McLuhan} writes: the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. (136)" The Labyrinth authors doubt that a return to language (called "secondary orality" by Walter Ong, or sometimes referred to by McLuhan as a return to tribalism) will bring about a return to diversity, and use the homongeniety of American popular culture as their example. Most readers of McLuhan are concerned about his apparent technological determinism (technologies invent selves) and concerned about some of his conservative, utopian, speculations. I don't have good answers to these issues yet--his work, however, is always provocative and engaging.
Weblogs, What's the Use? I asked my students to answer this question about 1/3 of the way into the semester (after having researched the topic, weblogged a bit on their own, read some weblogs, etc.). Having slowly neglected this blog over the course of the semester, I have to answer this question for myself. 1) This weblog might be a valuable record of a course. It certainly shows early enthusiasm and gradual exhaustion--an accurate representation of the course (and a typical semester, to be honest). What I will do with this record has not been determined. 2) The blog contains many valuable links. My students turned up some great sites relavant to the topic "new literacy," and I certainly found a truckload of interesting sites on my own. Will I get back to any of those sites? Another good question. Will I ever have time to draw on any form of personal archive, or will I just keep running as fast as I can to stay a few days of my classes and my next tenure review? Okay, my life isn't that dramatic. I'll get back here. 3) The weblog hasn't been particularly valuable for my own writing, yet. If my collaborators and I stick with the project, we will reap more rewards from our work. Cindy and Sybil report similar blog fatigue. Okay, same theme for all three. What do I need to do in order to make blogs work? 1) A categorizer. Other blogs have them, I have to figure out how to make one work here. 2) Comments. I'd like to hear from readers, if there are any. A form of motivation for me. Just read that I could incorporate them in Tinderbox, but need to get that figured out. 3) RSS feeds. I've been trying to figure this out, but still struggling. I was talking with a friend last night about writing in a networked culture/space, and I got rapping about writing in spaces like a Tinderbox blog/website. Our writing spaces will increasingly be a hybrid of our own writing and collections of other feeds. Mark Taylor uses Chuck Close pictures to illustrate the complex new grids of networked culture--that image seems particularly relevant to a site that draws content from other places. Another friend maintains one of those personalized Yahoo pages--not sure if they have any room for people to write. They just feed content. What's the theme here? Improve the archive (categorizer--oh yeah, search engine too!), but mainly improve interactivity. Make this a space I want to come to see other people's writing, not just my own. Familiar ideas for those who reflect on e-writing; gotta see what I can make happen.
21st Century Literacy Website I'm a little embarrassed to say that I missed the 21st Century Literacy website as I was putting the course together, but I guess that says something about how much information in available on this topic. More than one individual can make sense of. But thanks to the collaborative nature of the course, Chad dug this one up. Don't miss the definition of "new literacy" provided on the site!
Literacy defined I've become a blogosphere blemish--the once a week contributor. I'm ashamed, but continue none the less. This weekend, I read an essay by James Paul Gee, whose work came up in the Moje and Young essay and in the Snyder essay. He is a highly respected linguist. Before defining literacy, Gee defines "Discourse" as not only a way of talking and writing, but a way of thinking and acting. He also says most people have at least two dominant Discourses in their lives--the Discourse of home, and the discourse of work, or what he calls primary and secondary Discourses. We are never explicitly taught the Discourse of home--it is the language and way of thinking and acting that we pick up from our family, our place, our socio-economic position in the world. Secondary discourses we can pick up when we start to go to school, they have the potential to "liberate" us, and Gee defines literacy as "the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse." (529 in Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook; originally published in the Journal of Education 171.1 (1989): 5-25. His definitions seem to me a very clear and effective way for thinking about "new literacy." The explosion of affordable and accessible technologies of communication do not require that we become literate in all technologies, but in a fairly short time there has emerged a need to pick up mastery or fluent control of more secondary Discourses, or more kinds of literacy. We can dabble in these new literacies, and never achieve matery or fluency, but if we do adopt this new Discourse, we begin to see the world differently, and perhaps act differently. I have a friend who has been teaching his students Flash, and interviewing them throughout the process (a bit like our classroom study). He says his students definitely start to see how the Web and television "work" (how certain effects are created), and they become very reflective and analytical about their own work. He is pretty convinced they are picking up a new Discourse.
Two notes: Leadership and flash I was reading Chad's blog entries (getting caught up), and thought--I wonder what a metacrawler search on "knowledge management" and leadership would turn up. Wouldn't you know it: a weblog: ManagementFirst: Leadership. Updated earlier today, it has nice filters of some interesting articles, including one about the role of narrative in leadership--appealing to English teachers! Flash aficionados might get something out of Lev Manovich's "Generation Flash." Pretty heady stuff, but his argument is similar to others we have read about new literacy--that the generation flash isn't interested in critique, but is interested in making and doing. I am always sympathetic to this argument, although it runs counter to the other great cultural story of the TV/ MTV generation being passive couch potatoes, materialist, and without political savvy. What say you, Generation Flash?
Learning to Unlearn Another "Web Tools Newsletter" entitled "Learning to Unlearn and Relearn," with many links to sites on information literacy. The newsletter starts with some links to Alvin Toffler, a futurist who made a splash in the 1960s, and touches on one my new literacy heroes, Marshall Mcluhan. I had to check out "Measuring What Matters" by Tom Hespons because he says we need to learn from Star Wars. "One of my favorite scenes in the "Star Wars" trilogy comes from "The Empire Strikes Back." Luke Skywalker runs into a difficult challenge while training under the Jedi master Yoda, and he ultimately fails to use the Force to his advantage. Yoda's advice to Luke was somewhat cryptic, but sound. "Unlearn," said Yoda. "You must unlearn what you have learned." Cullen and Derek posted good filters on the relationship between old and new literacy. Cullen's filter is linked to the source--can you add a link or just post the URL, Derek?
Numeracy I have mentioned numeracy a few times in class and on a few handouts, but this if the first filtered essay on numeracy. Lynn Arthur Steen's "Numeracy: The New Literacy for a Data-Drenched Society" is a concise essay that defines numeracy in the context of new literacy, and defines numeracy in the context of a curriculum. This is worth quoting: "However, numeracy is not just an expanded list of topics to be added to the mathematics curriculum. The test of quantitative literacy, as of verbal literacy, is whether a person naturally uses appropriate skills in many contexts. Educators know all too well the common phenomenon of compartmentalization, in which skills or ideas learned in one class are totally forgotten when they arise in a different context. Students need to learn numeracy in multiple contexts‹in history and geography, in economics and biology, in agriculture and culinary arts." The theme of interdisciplinary or situational application is coming up in many of the readings about new literacy because we can't simply keep adding more and more content to our curriculums. It seems to me that we need to get more radical about rethinking the way we structure education-- k-12 and college.
Leadership readings I know that Chad is interested in "new literacy for leaders" and I am interested in desinging an English 120 class focused on leadership, so here are a few notes towards that subject. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse and Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley are recommended readings on leadership by Dr. Roger Casey, Dean of the Faculty at the Olin Library, Rollins college. "From both authors, I have learned important lessons about change, renewal, and paradox, which to me are the three most important challenges facing any leader in any organization," says Casey. The Rainforest Market Place lists three books under the category Books about Leadership and Activism: 1) The World is Burning: Murder in the Rainforest; 2) Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries; and 3) The Environmental Crusaders. Wired Magazine has some features that roughly fit into the category, "essays about leadership." The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden describes the kind of optimism that will be needed to tackle the challenges of the next 20 years. Sherry Turkle's "Who am We?" might influence your thinking about leadership--maybe it is just one role, one window we keep open, along with all the other identities we posess. Mary Sellan's article, "Information Literacy In the General Education: A New Requirement for the 21st Century," is another academic piece that will challenge you--particulary with its vocabulary--but it is also another piece that is very clearly organized, and contains some very valueable information. The first section of the essay is entitled "The New Definitions of Literacy" and it provides specific examples of how different disciplines or majors are chaning their sense of literacy. Sellan says historians are exploring electronic publications with The History E-Book Project (http://www.acls.org/ex-epub2.htm), scientists are starting to represent their concepts visually and dynamically, rather than through text only approaches, and that creative writers are expanding their notion of writing (For example, Donna Leishman's retelling of Little Red Ridinghood (http://www.6amhoover.com). Sellan does not offer a succinct definition of new literacy, prefering instead to say that the definition is in flux but can be seen operating in various ways in these various fields. She also says "The use and understanding of information and technology are central to the intellectual development of every undergraduate, contribute to a successful academic life, and are part of the fabric of everyday life with the increasing use of home computers." Writing note--the last paragraph of her introductin is a perfect forecast of her essay. She identifies the four topics of her paper, and then uses sub-headings that restate exactly what she forecated.
Digital, Computer, and Information Literacy in Health Services I know nobody in class is planning to major in Health Services or related majors, but this particular web page on digital, computer, and information literacy explains a module from a whole course called "Knowledge Management in Health Services." This site and this course is a good example of how a specific field and occupation is trying to teach its practitioners the kinds of skills and "competencies" [key buzz word!] they will need to be literate in the 21st century. This kind of application of new literacy skills to a specific field is the sort of thing I am asking you to research over the next 2 weeks. Try search terms like "digital literacy" and your planned major, or "technical literacy" and your major, or even "knowledge management" and your major. Good luck.
International Visual Literacy Association The existance of an International Visual Literacy Association might give you an idea of how long people have been thinking about visual literacy as a key component or "competency" for literacy in general. This site can give you a definition of visual literacy, a link to a pretty good online link farm for visual literacy, a link to the Journal of Visual Literacy, and a link to a more traditional bibliography of primarily print sources.
I'm Feeling Lucky: New Literacy I thought I would kick off the Unit 2 blog entries by using Google's "i'm feeling lucky" button when I searched for "new literacy". And boy, did I get lucky! Instead of starting with a complex, multi-facited, researched-based site, I found a very straight forward, 4 paragraph, reflection called "Literacies." The author (I'll get to her below) talks about how she felt highly literate until recently, and that the new information technologies are causing her to question her own literacy. She is also worried about the gap being created between the new literate and the new illiterate. She doesn't know what to do about these changes--she is just begin to explore the issue--so she ends with questions including this one: Is the new literacy creating an illiterate society? Check it out‹she refers to books and articles that might interest you. This web page poses some problems if you want to use it in an academic paper. The author hasn't put her name on the page, and although it appears to be hosted on an academic server, it also seems like the author is a student. That isn't bad, but it changes the "status" of the webpage. I figured out the author's name by using "view" then "source" on the page, and looked for the author's name near the top of the sceen -- Terri Franklin. The URL says tfranklin, so I am confident in thinking that the person who owns the account also wrote the page. I figured out that she is/was a student in the University of Illinois's "Technology Studies in Education" graduate program by first going to her own root URL http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/, and then following the link there to the TSE home page. Having figure this out, I feel like the status of the page is pretty solid--done by a graduate student, probably in 1999 or more recently based on the dates of the sites she links to.
Reducing Anxiety Yesterday, I read the introduction to The Writing Cure : Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education by Mark Bracher. Bracher argues that many writing blocks, avoidance, and resistance, are often connected to subconscious elements in the writer's psyche. He writes about the importance of reducing anxiety in writing classes, and the importance of the teacher helping students pursue their desires, tastes, fantasies, and interests. I fear that weblogging, and the first assignment, "Weblogging: What's the Use?" has created more anxiety than I anticipated. I typically do what ever I can to reduce anxiety in writing classes, and I thought that the sharing of information and ideas via weblogs might be a good mechanism for reducing anxiety. Looks like I was been wrong about that one. Let me know what I can do to help aleviate some of your anxieties--hearing from you, and helping out, will in turn aleviate some of my anxieties. As for the second part of Bracher's advice, let me remind you that the second unit of the course is about defining your new literacy, and pursuing a project of interest to you. If weblogging has been inhibiting, rest assured that you will not need to continue posting after the first unit.
A brief reflection on class Okay, last one tonight. I just wanted to say that I read your in-class writings, and was pleased to read that most of you thought that the discussion of literacy and technology was helpful. I will also try to address some of the questions that remained--about technology and literacy, and about the class in general. But the really important thing I need to do is find us a bigger classroom. I'll keep you posted.
What am I doing here? I have asked my students to write, and post to their weblogs, a classic five paragraph theme that answers the question: what are you doing in college, at NDSU, and in this class (English 110, Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century). No reason why I can't tackle the assignment myself. I've never seriously considering doing anything except being a college professor, being at NDSU is the product of serendipty (or so it seems), and I'm in this class because I think figuring out how to help students acquire the literacy skills needed in the 21st century is the most important task English teachers face. I don't remember precisely when I started thinking about being a college professor, but I do remember being thirteen or fourteen when I started reading the essays of Stephen Jay Gould and Lewis Thomas, and got such a rush that I knew I had to be able to find a way to write arguments for my living. I also remember one of my first visits to the University of Manitoba's campus and thought--very cool, a city within the city. The space and architecture of universities has always held tremendous appeal for me. A. Bartlett, Giamatti, Yale Professor and Commission of Major League Baseball when he died, has written about the appeal of "sacred" places like baseball diamonds and universities--I couldn't agree more. I could go on and on about why college, but why NDSU is simple: the English department was hiring in 1997, and I was looking for a job. The real question is probably "why have I stayed?" because turn-over at NDSU is a common occurance. Again there is a simple answer: no one else has offered me a job. But there is a more complex answer. As someone from the region (born and raised in Manitoba), I immediately sensed that I was "home" when I interviewed and when I first started working here. I'm close to family and friends, I'm not afraid of winter, and Fargo is a comfortable, if not always exciting, place to live. I'm also still at NDSU because the department and college have given me an opportunity to design and teach a class like this one. I've been dabbling with the complications of teaching 21st century literacy skills since 1995, when I taught a computer-intensive course, started building web sites, and saw the excitement that students felt when they put together a web site for the first time. I'm excited about exploring the possiblities of weblogs as a tool for learning because they make few technological demands on writers, and I am excited to see what students produce when they stretch themselves. I'm in this class because I think it has the potential to help me rethink almost every class I teach. The final paragraph of a five paragraph theme is the most difficult, because the essay is so short, I don't really need to sum much up. But if I bring these three points together, I would say that I think University education has to distinguish itself from high school teaching. As a professor, I need to keep abreast of developments not only in scholarship, but in the tools of literacy. This course will hopefully generate new scholarship through the research component built in, and it will give me insight into what tools students think they need. A course like this is especially important to teach at NDSU, as it undergoes a transformation from a quality state university into a world-class teaching and research institution. About me!My TeachingBlog will contain a mix of filtered entries related to the courses, notebook entries related to readings I am doing, and occasional reflections on teaching and learning. If anything interesting happens in my personal life, I'll let you know, but don't hold you breath waiting for juicy stuff. |
|
|
Home | About | Recent | Archives Copyright Kevin Brooks, 2002-03. |