What are your key takeaways for assigning writing in a digital
age?
Me, as a mid-20-year-old student, I honestly cannot imagine
how I could live without technology in school. We have discussed in last class
regarding the use of technology in classroom, and it made me think of teaching composition
in the 21st century. I would say that skills for interpreting and
producing visuals need to be taught in composition classrooms, rather than
discussing if writers need to handwrite or type. Students need to acquire the
skills to examine what the online text and visual images are really saying. But,
I am not fully sure how I could assign writing in order to foster the skills.
What do you agree with?
I agree with Trimbur’s idea of “to see writers not just as
making of meaning but as makers of the means of producing meaning out of the
available resources of representation” (366). Writers need to improve skills of
how to operate tools, such as, words, thoughts and language, to produce meaning,
not simply use those tools make meaning. Working with technology allows
students to acquire the skills through different kinds of texts and visual
images.
What do you take issue with?
I am not sure if I want to agree with Trimbur’s idea of “to
follow Derrida out of the morass created by the Alphabetic Literacy Narrative
and to picture writing not as a derivative speech at all but instead as a
typographical and rhetorical system of sign making” (365). Although I support
that he pictures writing as a typographical a rhetorical system of sign making,
I also believe writing could be a derivative speech in some contexts, such as
texting acronyms.
It’s definitely a challenge to consider ways we could use technology and the visual/material aspect of writing to inform our teaching! Like you said, I’m not sure I quite understand how to assign writing that teaches the relevant skills, either. However, I do think a composition class lends itself nicely to certain experiments with digital/visual literacy. One of our goals is to introduce students to a variety of writing contexts, and each of those contexts requires unique formatting choices. While our final essays require a standard, MLA format, maybe we can consider the huge variety in reading material that online spaces provide?
ReplyDeleteI can’t help but link back to the current essay we are working on. So many short articles are designed to be read and understood in today’s “browsing” environments, and to compose effectively through such a medium is a skill that I think evolves alongside technology. I wonder if our students have acquired some ability in this area just by having grown up alongside innovations like social media…
Maybe it would be interesting to call students’ attention to the sorts of decisions they (and others) make with regard to fonts, size, white space, etc. outside of the constraints of MLA, recognizing that these choices are rhetorical. You cited Trimbur’s quote about making meaning with the available tools, and I suppose these are the types of decisions he’s talking about?
People have such a wide range of online mediums to choose from when they want to convey a message – from restricted character counts in tweets, to blogs, or comments, or status updates… and a whole other layer is added if we think about videos and pictures. They have all this information flying at them as they scroll through a webpage. Even though it’s overwhelming, maybe for us teachers it poses an opportunity as well as a challenge. Maybe incorporating these digital/visual literacies into our teaching will help students understand the relevancy of their composition course to other areas of their life? I hadn’t thought much about these things before!
Thank you, Yuki and Brian, for your thoughtful discussion here. I agree that the consideration of visuals as part of a text to be read to be really important, and I think it's exciting to think about how we might show our students how to use visuals to create and distribute communications!
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