| Dr.
Lori E. Amy
Georgia Southern University Department of Writing and Linguistics |
lamy@gasou.edu
2225 A Newton Building (912) 681-0625/fax (912) 681-073 |
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description | grading | policies | academic conduct | syllabus | readings and web links Electronic communication in a digital culture, such as email, real-time conversations through various forms of chat rooms, Instant relay messaging, and Moo's, combines the conventions and protocols of informal conversation/discussion-- spontaneity, digression, punning, dialogue, fluidity, impermanence-- with the forms and structures of writing-- the printed word, the permanence and fixity of the textual record. This combination of the practices of oral discourse with the forms of written discourse makes "writing" in an electronic digital environment different that "writing" in traditional print culture. As well as changing the ways in which our "talk" can be recorded and used as "writing," electronic writing forums change the roles of "reader" and "writer." During electronic discussion, threads of conversation interweave, and "readers" immediately respond to "writers"-each person, then, is both a reader (of his/her own text as well as that of the other participants) and a writer, and each person's reading and writing immediately shapes and directs/redirects the reading and writing of all the group participants. The social, dialogic nature of textual production is thus both immediately apparent and traceable in an electronic writing environment which illuminates the intertwined relationship between reading, thinking, discussion, and writing. Technologies of Writing explores these changing roles of reader, writer, and text in a digital culture from a number of different perspectives. Among the questions we will be asking are: What is the relationship between narrative form and the technologies of production and dissemination? How does the digital age into which we are moving involve radical transformations of the ways in which we think, communicate, and interact? How have we begun to see these shifts already? What are our emotional and intellectual responses to them? What do we imagine the digital future will bring? What kinds of literacies are necessary in a digital culture? What is at stake politically, socially, and economically in the unequal development of a global technological culture? What are the race, class, and gender issues at stake in all of this? In order to explore these questions, we will be reading a range of texts, including print and electronic journal articles and hypertext narratives, that analyze different aspects of the ways in which industrial, technological, and digital evolutions have and are continuing to transform culture and literacy. (See readings.) As we progress with our reading and our thinking, each class participant will define a particular area of interest from which to develop a research and a writing project. The class projects are ways to frame and explore key technology and writing issues. For instance, projects might ask: How do narratives shape cultural groups and how do cultural groups shape narratives? How does discourse act on and through us? How have the forms and practices of writing in a print culture evolved from the politics and practices of colonialism, and what to the politics and the practices of current geopolitical economics and technology bode for the forms and practices of writing in the emerging digital culture? How did print culture produce the text as "product," the audience as "consumer," and the means of production and distribution as capitalist enterprise, and how are these modes of production and consumption different in a digital culture? How do radical changes in textual production and distribution in a digital culture produce differences in audience/consumer and producer/distributor/author, and how are these changes changing narrative forms and the ways in which narratives disseminate into popular culture? What are the roles of writer and reader in a digital commodity culture? What are the ways in which "to look" and "to write" collapse in a digital culture? How does the 24 hour live digital video and audio feed of news web sites produce "others" for the consumer's gaze, and how might competing representations challenge this cultural production of identity narratives? We will each be developing our own web projects (including MOO realms and hypertexts) for this course. In addition to our individual projects, which we will propose and develop according to our research interests and creative/intellectual vision, we will as a class create a collaborative Home page. Through the collaborative class home page, each class participant has the opportunity to shape the direction and the "voice" of the course, and our collective work will in turn become the baseline for future technology and writing projects. Fundamental to this course is the belief that the future of education, of writing, of our professional and personal relationships, will be transformed through the changed nature of thinking/writing/communicating evolving with technological evolutions. From this assumption, our collaborative home page figures as a beginning point from which we and future participants in this course can engage with writing and technology, and to which we may all return as we refigure our relationships to technology and writing in the emerging digital culture. This course will involve some technical instruction in hypertext markup language, as well as the nuts and bolts of navigating the internet, creating and managing files, using file transfer protocols, and manipulating images. We will be doing a fair amount of our work in educational Moo's, and at least one third of our class time will involve online collaboration with students at Penn State University. Students do not need their own computers for this course, but they will have to be able to have significant out of class access to an Internet-connected computer. Wk 1 Evolution of print
technologies and emerging digital technologies
from Brunk, Diamond, Perkins, and Smith's Literacies:
J. L. Lemke "Education, Cyberspace, and
Change" and "Cultural Dynamics and Virtual Culture" from the Arachnet
Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/e/ejvc/
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