Archive for the ‘new media’ tag
Putting It All Together (Part VI)
Process-Oriented, Collaborative and Shared
With new media, what matters most is the process, not the product. Unlike previous kinds of free-writing and generative assignments, discarded once the final product is turned in, new media gives each step of the writing process its own validity and its own separate existence. Text on a message board is not preserved, but serves its own purpose and exists in its own right, as do questions and responses to the class forums. Writers may use material, ideas, and insights later for more formal blog posts.
Putting It All Together (Part V)
Using New Media in the Classroom
The danger of trying to connect everyday and academic writing is setting up a kind of creepy treehouse effect, an artificial environment that supposedly recreates the familiar, more entertaining worlds that students move through, when in fact an overwhelming, but hidden presence of a teacher hovers over all interactions, turning child-like spontaneity into poorly disguised adult intentionality.
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Putting It All Together (Part IV)
Integrated reading and writing
Research and writing used to occur separately in space and time. Students would do their research in the library and then do their writing elsewhere. According to James P. Purdy in “The Changing Space of Research: Web 2.0 and the Integration of Research and Writing Environments,” the physical and temporal separation “disconnects research from writing, artificially separates the academic from the non-academic, and misrepresents how knowledge is created. This compartmentalization incorrectly leads students to believe that research and writing are wholly separate and separable, that they are uniformed by one another” (Purdy 48).
Putting It All Together (Part III)
Bridging Everyday and Academic Writing
How can a teacher connect out-of-class and in-class writings? First of all, teachers should make students aware of the skills most of them already have: familiarity with different modes of writing, descriptive, narrative, and persuasive skills, awareness of audience and purpose, and ability to write in different tones. I propose an activity in which students find examples from their own writing, the writing of friends, or the writing of peers who are strangers online or off for as many different modes of writing they can discover, including, but not limited to, text messages, online chatting, posts on social network sites, emails, and blogs. This exercise should also include paper-based media such as postcards, letters, comics, zines and fanfiction. If the assignment is open-ended, many unexpected forms of text should also appear.
Putting It All Together (Part II)
Acknowledging Out-of-Class Literacies Creates Continuity
Taken as a group, young people today are reading more than ever before: surfing the internet, playing text-based video games, reading blogs, zines and fan fiction. They are writing more than ever before: designing webpages, sending text-messages and emails, and writing for social-networking sites, discussion boards, and blogs. Yet some teachers complain about a decline in literacy, a new informality to writing, a slip in spelling and grammar, a lack of organization, an inability to focus deeply on one topic for extended periods.
Putting It All Together: Collaborative and Integrated Reading and Writing
Introduction
Scholastic writing used to be disconnected. From research: reading and writing took place in different spaces at different times. From other writers: writing was a solitary activity. From previous steps of the process: each piece of writing produced along the way was discarded. From a real audience: students wrote to prove something to a professor who claimed they were engaged in an imaginary “academic discourse.” From authentic purpose: writing ended up in the garbage can and all the student’s hard work, knowledge, insights and craftsmanship were wasted.
“HOT Blogging”: An Article by Lisa Zawilinski
Zawilinski’s article “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking” gives an excellent overview of the potential benefits of blogs in the classroom for teaching Higher Order Thinking (HOT). She claims that the Internet is this generation’s defining technology for literacy and that this population is both self-guided and in need of guidance. Classroom blogs help bridge the gap between out-of-school literacies and in-school literacies, and most importantly provide an authentic audience for student work. Blogging can help develop online reading comprehension as students are asked to analyze and critically evaluate information, synthesize across multiple texts and communicate with others. She identifies four types of classroom blogs: Classroom News Blog (syllabus, homework assignments, updates), Mirror Blogs (quotes, impressions, reflections, new ideas), Literature Response Blogs (question and response, summary, synthesis), and Showcase Blogs (student works in various media published). Integrating the blog into classwork could include these steps: Bolstering the Background (finding out what students already know, research projects on author and time period, lists of resources), Priming the Pump (first impressions, summaries, confusions clarifies, connections to themselves, other texts or the world), Continuing the Conversation (summarizing and synthesizing across multiple textual units and classroom discussion), and Making Multiplicity Explicit (requiring students to address others’ comments and respond with evidence and clear explanations).
Zawilinski, Lisa. “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking.” Reading Teacher (not yet published). University of Connecticut. New Literacies Team. Web. 7 March 2010.
Consider Your Audience
Recently a professor told me to consider my audience. She said that my style was far too informal for a grad paper. I needed to consider what writing was appropriate for academic discourse. Academic discourse? Who did she think I was writing to? She was my only reader. I felt, then, that I could play around a little bit with the essay form, experiment a little. I even included a couple of allusions that only she would understand. It did not work. She wanted me, I realized, to speak into an imaginary space where scholars speak, not to each other, but into an imaginary library.
Who is Writing This?
I am not writing this. This blog is writing me.
I did not want — nor was I able — to write this myself. I will create a persona as I go along, let’s call him Ronosaurus, that will do the work for me, someone simpler, who does not get pimples nor have a crick in his neck (such things will not be mentioned). Not only will I simplify, I will fictionalize myself and make myself seem smarter, more well-read, wittier, and, while I am at it, better looking. But this is not a story about me, it is a story about stories. To tell it, I must invent a speaker, which I will call, for convenience, myself. The needs of the blog will determine the voice I use. If you know it is a lie and I know it is a lie, then I will be telling the truth.
