Wednesday Jan 24 Assignment

1. Review Pandey and Pratt carefully and note what elements constitute a literacy narrative and an autoethnography—according to these two examples.
2. Email me and tell me which of the Selfe and Hawisher narratives you want to read. I’ll copy the two most requested chapters.
3. Bring your laptops in and use the wireless network to get on line. Robert can give you alternative passwords for other areas of English. You’ll each connect your laptop with the projector. Purpose: you can now take your laptop and the projector into your classroom if you wish—and other things.
4. Friend everyone. I forgot to copy the list so I’ll have to wait for you all to friend me so that I can accept.
5. Keep fiddling with your myspace accounts—see what else you can do. Set up your blog.
6. Write in your blog. For sure do the following: compose a couple of anecdotes from your literate life. Note that Pandey’s anecdotal moment—which he comes back to at least once—is the letter in Nepali to his neighbor from her son in the British Army—a letter with some English words in the middle. He says “I was flabberghasted by my failure to decipher . . . .” Such anecdotes may serve several purposes: a) to just get you started thinking and writing, b) to situate your practice and motives within a larger cultural/economic/social situation, and/or c) to provide a framework for what else you want to say (this is called the representative anecdote). I’ll post a couple of my own anecdotes that have served me as “inventional sites.” You might also get started with your hierarchizing project: which kinds of literacies do you value most, less, least? How do you distinguish between your reading and writing literate behaviors? (e.g., you may love novels but not write them). What do you currently feel is your most valuable writing? Does this question have complications we need to consider? You can do other things with your blog as well if you wish.
7. Read someone’s blog; comment if you wish.
8. Research a) this history of myspace, and b) the stats on demographics and computer access in New Mexico (see Selfe and Hawisher p. 225). Notice the comment about access as but a preliminary to the much needed teaching training (225). The course or workshop designs you’re going to create will reflect your sense of what people should be doing with media (practice) and why (ideology). Everything you write or advocate writing is loaded.