English 640 Technologies of Meaning-Making: Oral, Print, Digital

Instructor and Contact

Susan Romano

MW 4-6 HUM 216

Office Hours Wednesdays 1-3 HUM 362 and by appointment.

Overview

Not only do we twenty-first century human beings bear witness to the radical shift from print to electronic reading and writing technologies, we are primary producers and consumers of the new and ever-expanding digital culture. In this seminar we’ll develop a critical understanding of how the historical shift we’re immersed in alters the way we read, write, teach, learn, and interact. Using the theoretical lens of “everyday practice” (De Certeau), we’ll examine people’s literacy practices (including and especially our own) as responses to the demands of historical moment. We’ll read scholarship on comparable historical shifts (orality to literacy; script to print), questioning grand narratives of technological advance and decline and seeking out those smaller narratives undermining techno-centric views of progress and pointing to the reinscription of power structures that impinge on human agency. Further, we’ll examine how the Humanities have already colonized digital culture and we’ll lay out plans of our own for further colonization in light of the knowledge we develop about digital and other literacies.

Foci or Perdurant Questions

How can we characterize literacy in our times? What determines how people enact and organize their literate lives?
What are our personal/professional literacy practices—consumption and production and arrangement—and how do we wish to represent these practices before others?
Why is an “authoethnography” a useful explanatory genre?” What is it? How does it differ from personal or literacy narrative?
How are academic literacy practices (scholarship and teaching) changing? What’s available? What’s necessary? What should we be teaching?
What instructional software is available at UNM or on the market and how do we take advantage of UNM’s new media support?
What are the economics of digital media? Who pays? Who controls?
How is digital literacy a situated practice that includes oral and print technologies? How do we best consider and organize the relationships among literacies in our personal/professional lives?
What can we learn from the history of technological change?
What do new generation Western culture youth know and do that is digital? Oral? Print? How do youth practices impact what gets taught in the academy or schools?
What’s the Digital Divide? Why think about it?
What new metaphors do digital economies offer or impose on our self understandings? What are digital selves?

Requirements

35 points Personal	Autoethnography (semester-long work in progress with checkpoints and final product)
35 points Professional	Multiliteracies Project: course design and public argument for/against “cool” and “economics” criteria (end-of-semester product only)
30 points Research	MySpace participant investigation; blogs/reading journals and observations, response papers (semester-long project with checkpoints only)
Attendance: Required

Calendar

Unit 1 Autoethnography (Definition and Execution)

January 17 Assignment

http://www.unm.edu/~sromano/rw/640/jan22.htm

January 22-24

January 29-31

Unit 2 Multiple Literacies and Practices (Scholarship, Teaching, Critical Literacy)

February 5-7

February 12-14

February 19-21

February 26-28

Unit 3 History of Technological Change (Oral-Script-Print Revolutions)

March 5-7

March 12-13 Spring Break

March 19 (no class March 21)

Unit 4 Big Picture (Publics, Globalization, Access)

March 26-28

April 2-4

Unit 5 Teaching (What’s Out There and What’s Here)

April 9-11

April 16-18

Work on Projects and Presentations

April 23-25

April 30 May 2

Required Books

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1983. (very cheap on Amazon ($2)

Hawisher, Gail, and Cynthia Selfe. Passions, Pedagogies and 21^st-century Technologies. Logan, UT: U of Utah State P, 1999. (Amazon $11 used)

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2005. (Amazon $13 used)

Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. (Amazon $15 used; $20 new)

Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. (Amazon $15 used)

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. (Amazon $7 used)

Plato, Phaedrus. Available at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html

Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale; Southern Illinois UP, 2004. (Amazon $25 used)

**Selfe, Cynthia, and Gail E. Hawisher. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. (Amazon $55 new and used)

Tuman, Myron. CriticalThinking.com: A Guide to Deep Thinking in a Shallow Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002. (Amazon $15 used)

Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2003. (Amazon $14 used)

Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan: Utah State P, 2004. (Amazon $19 new; $18 used)

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Articles and Chapters on Ereserves or Online or via Zimmerman Databases

(Note: This is a working list. We’ll read some but not all of these, and you’ll add to the list if you so desire.)

Anson, Chris M. "Distant Voices: Teaching Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (1999): 1-20. (Zimmerman Gold Rush ejournal database)

Barrios, Barclay. “Blogs: A Primer.” C&C Online (Spring 2005). http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/barrios3/barrios3.htm

Barton, Matthew D. “The future of rational-critical debate in online public spheres.” Computers and Composition 22.2 (2005):177-90. (erserves)

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis, eds. Excerpts from Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 2000. (ereserves)

Brodkey, Linda. Excerpts from Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. (ereserves)

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Tr. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Part IV on Language (ereserves)

Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” Chapter One of Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life, 1998. (First published in somewhat different form in The Village Voice, December 1993.)

http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html

Dibbell, Julian. My Tiny Life. Selections available at http://www.juliandibbell.com/mytinylife/tinyexcerpts.html

---. “The Writer a la Modem or the Death of the Author on the Installment Plan.” First published as "Let's Get Digital" in The Voice Literary Supplement, March 1993. http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/alamodem.html

Gitlin, Todd. From “Styles of Navigation and Political Sideshows.” Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. 118-75. (ereserves)

Hanrahan, Michael, and Deborah L. Madsen. Teaching, Technology, Textuality: Approaches to New Media. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Excerpts. (ereserves)

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature New York, Routledge, 1991. 149-81. Available at 181.http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Excerpts from Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 1996.

Miller, Carolyn R. “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” first author with Dawn Shepherd. Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, ed. Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. University of Minnesota Libraries, 2004. (ereserves)

Norris, Pippa. “Understanding the Digital Divide.” Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge, UK Cambridge UP, 2001. 26-38. (ereserves)

---. “Social Inequalities.” Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge, UK Cambridge UP, 2001. 68-92. (ereserves)

---. “Wired World.” Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge, UK Cambridge UP, 2001. 39-67. (ereserves)

Walter J. Ong, "The Literate Orality of Popular Culture", in: Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. (ereserves)

Perloff, Marjorie. “Teaching in the Wired Classroom.” (President’s Column). MLA Newsletter (Winter 2006): 3-5. (ereserves)

Pandey, Iswari P. “Literate Lives across the Digital Divide.” Computers and Composition 23.2 (2006): 246-57. (ereserves)

Porter, James E. “Legal and Ethical Issues in Cyberspace.” Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1998. 101-31. (ereserves)

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 9 (1991): 33-40. available at http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~stripp/2504/pratt.html

Rice, Jeff. “21^st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging.” Ctheory. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=484

Slevin, James. (excerpt Life Strategies and the Internet). The Internet and Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 2000. 162- (ereserves)

Smith, Beatrice Quarshie. “Teaching with technologies: A Reflexive Auto-ethnographic Portrait.” Computers and Composition 21.1 (2004): 49-62. (ScienceDirect)

Welch, Kathleen E. “Classical Rhetoric and Contemporary Rhetoric and Composition Studies: Electrifying Classical Rhetoric.” The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990. 143-65. (ereserves)

Van Dijk, Jan. “Networks: The Nervous System of Society.” The Network Society. 2^nd ed. London: Sage Publications, 2006. 19-41. (ereserves)

Zappen, James R., William Hart-Davidson and S. Michael Halloran. "On the Formation of Democratic Citizens: Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition in a Digital Age." The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 125-40. (ereserves)