Today's Activity

One of the things image-based protocol was designed to show was the various ways multiple “modes” of communication (aural, visual, oral) are implicated in the writing process. Jenkins also points to the multiple mediums of communication that people now have at their disposal to make meaning, different kinds of manipulated images, blogs, podcasts, TV, viral internet videos, multimedia, etc. Computing technologies have made these media inexpensive to use.

This assignment is designed to make you think about how meaning changes as you move across different mediums of communication. Your groups are to take one of the main points from the Jenkins’ book and render it from writing  into a visual image. Here is an example of a politically charged Photoshop image that circulated in the wake of Katrina:

You can use the program Photoshop to make a collage, or otherwise manipulated image. You can pilfer and plunder images from the web and use them for educational purposes, but don’t post them on your blogs because there may be copyright issues. These will be pretty rudimentary, but they will also be fodder for discussion.

Some of the points you might consider that Jenkins discusses in various manifestations:

--Few of us know how to live in a world of convergence

--Students working from their bedrooms can influence the mediascape

--Corporations have tightened their grip on traditional mass media

--The Internet can provide a voice to those who are not in line with mass media, and this is good

--The Internet can provide a voice to those who are not in line with mass media, and this is bad

--Pop culture moves across multiple media in new ways because of the internet

--Everyday citizens now need to think about the legal dynamics of media production

--Grassroots media campaigns can influence politics

--Established institutions are trying to exploit the communicative practices of fan communities to leverage power

Writing in the Mediascape

As we move through the next text about modes and mediums of communication, we are going to keep the following quotation in mind:

"Writing is no longer just alphabetic text--writing is also audio and video. And writing is also hypertext and delivery of multimedia content via the internet and the web. And writing is chunks of tagged text and data floating within databases and underneath the internet in p2p spaces" (McKee and Porter, "Why Napster Matters to Writing" (179).

What kinds of affordances do we gain when we speak of writing like this? What might we loose? How does writing become aestheticized? How does speaking of writing like this change the rhetorical canons (e.g. invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery) of which we have spoken?

Learning in the digital age.

How might institutions of learning need to change to adapt to new information technologies?

Keywords from Davidson and Goldberg:

1)Self-motivated learning & hypertextual reading
2)Horizontal Structures & new forms of authority
3)From knowledge to knowledgeable
4)Lifelong learning

A vision of students.

A spoof of the office and teaching with technology.

Portals and Online Spaces of Writing

There are portals based around geography. There are portals based around share interest as well, like profession or profession.

Here is a link to Benkler.

Google Books

News about Google Books.

Books Made Sexy

Here is a trailer for a new book on digital memory.

Digital Labor

Why kind of work do you do online?