RAW!

On The Rawness Of Reading And Writing New Media

s2ceball — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:13:38 +0000

Cheryl E. Ball and James Kalmbach set the pretense for their compilation of Raw: Reading and Writing New Media, “The rawness of new media as it converges with English studies is a moment worthy of articulation.” The book is divided into four sections. The first two sections introduce readers to a wide variety of new media work, the third section then situates the work by bringing a variety of theoretic and disciplinary lenses to our examination of new media. The fourth section focuses on pedagogical issues, from theorizing pedagogy in regards to teaching so-called digital natives, to larger issues of designing support centers for new media teaching, and the issues that frame the creation of new media-based first year writing curricula.

Cheryl E. Ball

s2ceball — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:39:38 +0000

Ball

Cheryl E. Ball, coeditor of RAW: Reading and Writing New Media, is an assistant professor of new media in the English Department at Illinois State University. She received her PhD in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological Institute. Her areas of interest include born-digital scholarship, new media, multimodal reading and composing practices, teaching with technology, and sustainable technological environments. She is also the editor of

Kairos:A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

James Kalmbach

s2ceball — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:38:01 +0000

Kalmbach

James Kalmbach is the Associate Chair and Professor of English at Illinois State University as well as the co-editor for RAW: Reading and Writing New Media. He received his PhD in English from Michigan State University. In 2007 he was awarded the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field. His interests include the teaching and rhetorical uses of technology in the classroom and the use of image and space on the computer screen to communicate ideas.

Chapter Summary

s2ceball — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:42:18 +0000

This chapter examines the process of developing pedagogical and administrative approaches for a newly created Center for Multimedia Communication Design (CMCD). Jennifer Sheppard argues that new media scholars can benefit from attention to the concepts of situated practice and communities of practice as a theoretical and practical approach to building learning spaces devoted to new media work. Both concepts relate the process of learning to the importance of immersive activity done in collaboration with others and support the idea that expertise develops through opportunities for authentic practice over time.

Chapter Summary

s2ceball — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:38:31 +0000

Amy C. Kimme Hea and Melinda Turnley make an argument in this chapter that there could be a productive tension in an interface agent if that tension was both transparent and reflexive for the user. The authors see themselves not only as users of technologies, but composers, bringing together different elements to create an artistic contrast. They also see technologies as being invested in complex, dynamic relationships among people rather than being a merely neutral tool. The authors write, “As computer compositionists, we strive to pursue active, critical engagement as users and producers of digital texts.” By understanding this, the authors create an interesting juxtaposition which combines art, cultural references, and the user’s interpretation. Below is a video of Turnley and Hea’s Interface Agent program.

Chapter Summary

s2ceball — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:34:51 +0000

New media is as much a political category as it is a critical category. In providing a framework to discuss the many forms of digital communication that developments in computer technology have made possible, this chapter prescribes an approach to these developments. The chapter offers a theoretical position that determines how readers construct themselves in relationship to forms of media they encounter. The author, Kevin Moberly, argues for a theoretical understanding of the relationship between meaning, reading, and writing that is predicated on the recognition that all media, new or otherwise, is not produced by technology, but ultimately by the labor of the people who are subjected to it.

Chapter Summary

s2ceball — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:16:57 +0000

This chapter explores the author’s process of remediating a print text for publication as a piece of new media scholarship. Robert Whipple found that there is a profound difference between the composing processes involved in creating a linear text as opposed to the production of a new media text. However, in discovering these differences, he also discovered how the new media version of his text still shares many similarities. As a writing professor, he humbly admits that he found it less difficult to teach new media than to produce it. He writes, “In remediating scholarship, we are simply—or perhaps not so simply—learning to write again, developing new media writing processes.”

Chapter Summary

s2ceball — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:14:14 +0000

From the front of the classroom, writing teachers often gaze upon plugged-in, turned-on, digitally mediated student bodies. Yet student participants in the Embodied Literacies research project at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville indicate that even when digital technologies are a visible part of their façade, literacy practices associated with those technologies may feel quite invisible to them. To encourage developing writers to reconsider themselves as reading and writing bodies mediated daily by different (sometimes competing) technologies, this chapter offers five easily adaptable applications for critically analyzing the creation and reception of new media texts. Building from reflective discovery prompts and working toward writing attached to major assignments, these activities extend the work of scholars who reflect on the relationship between the body and rhetoric and literacy-learning. The focus is on how both teachers and students might pay more attention to what is always physical about new media reading and writing, how students already? embody? digital conversations, and the playful nature of online discursive body constructions.

Stacey Pigg’s classroom applications:
1. Thinking About Physical Writing Situations
2. Medium/Message Journaling
3. Evaluating Group IM/Chat Transcripts
4. Digital Role Play on a Community Blog
5. Remediating and Revoicing a Digital Role Play Text

Chapter Summary

s2ceball — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:10:19 +0000

Although there is an ample amount of theory about new media and digital texts, especially as a way to transform composition studies, there is much to be done in new media with empirical, contextual inquiry. This makes new media look a lot like hypertext inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s, which is the point this chapter makes by comparing two prominent hypertext fictions with two recent new media texts, complemented by protocol analyses with commentary available on the DVD and online supplements. If new media is to escape the trap of hypertext?s history, its authors and researchers must develop constructive production and inquiry methods.

Chapter Summary

s2ceball — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:06:05 +0000

In this chapter, Barry Thatcher examines the differences in how cultures are first defined by the media, and then how those cultures reject those definitions in their own forms of rhetorical communication. He goes on to define the contrasts between certain forms of cultural communication, such as ascriptive and achievement-based cultures, where the community assesses an individual?s worth in varying degrees. He then relates these ideas to new media design, thereby analyzing patterns of specific website design in a way which fits the diagram of the culture which possesses it. In this way, he sees new media not as an isolated event, but an unconscious evolution created by the specific type of culture whereby it produced the media for a specific rhetorical purpose.