After last night's colloquium and our work tracing binaries through George's and Miller/Shepherd's essays, I realize I forgot to mention this one: process/product. In a way, that binary undergirds most discussions of what a writing class should be and do.
Also, in response to some of your questions about blogging (i.e., What is blogging really and what are some of the reasons for it?), here is a somewhat random assortment of blogs maintained by folks in the early, middle, and/or late stages of their academic careers, and all reflecting some combination of expressivist/constructivist ideals in terms of audience and aim:
- Beth Bouquet's blog hosted by UP Colorado
- Irv Peckam's personal blog
- Dennis Baron's blog on language and technology in the news
- Debora Weber-Wulff's blog on plagiarism in scientific media (Germany)
- Fredrik DeBoer's personal blog
For next week, we are reading:
- Yancey's "Made Not Only in Words" -- (Cross-Talk) everyone reads pp. 791-93, plus either quartet 3 or quartets 1, 2, & 4 (of course, you are always encouraged to just read the whole essay)
- Delagrange's "Reading Pictures, Seeing Words" -- which is chapter 1 of her online book
- Hayles' "Deep Attention and Hyperattention" (CL in full)
Here are some of the questions generated after the colloquium that we will continue to apply to Yancey and Delagrange next week:
- What are they (not) pushing the boundaries of?
- What's being complicated through these particular visual or online forms?
- If we could consult only their readings for a definition of "multimodality," how would we define it?
- In their discussions of visual literacy and/or multimodal composing, what becomes of our ideas of reading, writing, text, audience, value, quality, and standards?
And a question we'll take up with Hayles next week:
- What is she providing us -- in terms of history building or theory building -- that Diana George did not in her essay on "Design"?
Obviously, these questions are asking us to read for more than basic comprehension. They are also asking us to read for more than just a summary of their arguments. Of course I want you to read for both those things, but I also ask you to keep track of these questions as you read each text. We should expect that most of them will argue for how their various modalities (blogs, wiki spaces, and multimedia) value the writing process as a respectable and long period of negotiation with images and words. But we should also expect that their arguments will diverge from one another (possibly even contradict one another), even if they seem similar on the surface.
Finally, as you read for next week, please keep in mind where we will go (or have started to look) for definitions of our key terms:
- Composition (George, Yancey)
- Design (Delagrange, George, Yancey)
- Genre (Miller/Shepherd)
- Hyper vs. Deep (Hayles)
- Intertextuality
- Mode (Delagrange)
- Pedagogy (Hood)
- Visual Literacy (George)
We'll spend some time defining these terms, after your working group has shared the results of TiRP 5.
Enjoy!
-Prof. Graban
