njeanne’s blog

 April 22-24

Students Who Teach Us

 

            Selfe uses the term “new media texts” when referring to texts in multiple media: film, video, audio, and others. Visual elements are emphasized, and she introduces these sections in bold print: This chapter argues that this system should be in classrooms “to teach new literacies. She believes that David taught her about composition using the new media texts as she learned about him and his life. The author devotes over four pages informing the readers of the “turbulent years” in which he was moved from one family to another in different states. David had no access to computers until high school and took “a computer literacy course.” It was here that he became successful in moving ahead. In later years, however, despite his success in web work, his Standard English was not developed, and as he continued Web design, his GPA dropped, he failed and was out of the university because of English standards. Selfe believes that David’s case proves that “new forms of literacy” have life spans and compete with pre-existing forms of literacy. Understanding of new media texts is necessary in a “postmodern world…” 51. In the closing pages, the author poses questions and exercises for teachers’ use (59-65).

 

I found the story of David Damon very interesting and proof that other alternatives using new media texts are necessary.

 

 Paradigms Lost and Found: The “Crisis of Representation” and Visual Anthropology

 

            Lutkehaus and Cool refer to the “paradigms lost” of the problem that occurred in the 1980s. There have been implications that anthropologists in a “postmodern, postcolonial, post feminist erosion of paradigmatic authority” have resulted in an authorative challenge in anthropology. The experiments in the “new ethnography,” however, have influenced recent ethnographic films, and many of these films and videos are the successful products of filmmakers and anthropologists working with the Center for Visual Anthropology (CVA) at the University of Southern California. This effort at CVA began in the late 1970s (435). Lutkehaus and Cool present a “dialectic relationship” that occurs with both the written ethnography and ethnographic film. The authors refer to the “narrative structure” in the video created by Sensiper of “stereotypical representation” such as those in Hollywood’s version of Tibet as “Shangri-La” in the classic film Lost Horizon. Sensiper discusses how the effects of these “romanticized images” and there effects contrast dramatically with the Tibet culture of today. Sensiper also meets a Tibetan refugee whom she accompanies to Tibet, where he has not visited since he left as a child in the 1950s. The anthropologist’s video of the refugee and his return home as an adult portray “an additional layer of irony” to the simplistic hopes at the beginning of the video (439).

 

Interestingly, I am old enough to have seen the film Lost Horizon, and it was a wonderful dreamlike environment, unlike the Tibet of today.

 

njeanne’s blog April 15 – 17 Part 1 and Hill’s essay

            Craig Stroupe introduces terms that have been somewhat of a mystery: hypertext, lexias, hypermedia, and web design in the “new work paradigm.” This is in contrast to Aristotle’s rhetor, the present “verbal contentmaster is not necessarily the controller of the form and rhetoric of the site as a whole but may work far down the chain of command” (14). Stroupe refers to Cynthia and Richard Selfe’s question as to the “social consequences of composing through an interface that is visual and iconic in its focus…and not exclusively verbal…?”(17). Stroupe states that there is contrast to Elbow’s “metaphors” of a solitary “process of invention” and the Web page where “everyone can publish” and this contains a very different environment that is less like Aristotle’s public speaking, which is a “one-speaker-at-a-time orderliness” (19). Stroupe also includes another philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, who visualizes English studies “as a theoretical vision of hybridization that goes beyond invention processes” (25). Strupe’s attention to the image of Ulmer’s “The New “Atlantis” (31) concludes his article on this demonstration of “a synthesis of poetic and rhetoric…(35).

 

            Charles Hill’s article was a pleasure to read, and his descriptions are clear and informative. He quotes Jay Bolter’s claim that we are now in “the late age of print” (2), and today’s students have probably been exposed to more “texts”, in a visual form, than “any other generation in history” (107. Hill contends that there is a difference between “the act of seeing an object…and seeing a visual representation of it” (114). “Rhetorical images” do not have to “portray and object,” and older representations have meanings both visual and verbal because the “new representation” can be associated with the past (115). Hill believes that in addition to images of “cultural artifacts,” students need to discover “psychological processes” which these images portray (119). Hill also presents an “older” philosopher, Kenneth Burke, who believes that “images can be rhetorically powerful, and “an evocative image” can be associated in individual’s minds with “many kindred principles or ideas.” Hill points out that Burke discusses the use of “verbal imagery as in poetry” (120).

 

njeanne’s Blog

Finally, I have reached this point, and I am happy to be here. I am late with responses to the following readings, but here they are:

Week 2 – April 8-10 VRDW readings 9-12

Richard Lantham’s statement in that “deciphering complex images and sounds…means being at home…” (Introduction1). Today writing classrooms are often completely networked campuses with access to servers that take students to the World Wide Web which contains information and images (1). A question asking how this visual access might be used in the classrooms along with the verbal, apears with various methods in the forthcoming readings, which lay out reasons why written text alone is not sufficient in the hybrid world of “Literacy and Visual readings, which lay out reasons why written text alone is not sufficient in the hybrid world of “Literacy and Visual Authorship on the Web.” Stroup, for one, states the importance in “studying the visual.” He then refers to a negative effect of the “poetic-rhetoric divide.” (9) Catherine Hobbs is hesitant to participate in the latest historical struggle between word and image, and Lemke believes that effective literacy is based on the present time when word processors, including various images, will improve today’s learning and “ultimately” transform humanity (11). Students, although not “manipulating images” should be exposed to this new media (1).

WNM reading – 1-42

Anne Wysocki uses the analogy of comfortable “richly-printed rug” that was removed from those who teach writing from a printed [text] book. Wysocki calls on Gunther Kress for his list of changes taking place today: social, economic, communication, and technological…effects in communication (1). Within the beginning pages, the author uses the word “change” to emphasizsse what is taking place in composition pedagogy. She moves on to the term “New Media” and argues that there is very little written to satisfactorily encourage “complex representations” inviting argumentation (Brodkey 291). Wysocki believes “new media texts” are introduced by those she calls “composers” who are aware of many texts and they do not have to be “digital.” Her defining of these texts continues to emphasizse “materiality instead of digitality” because the text is “broader” than the technology (19). In the remaining pages, Wysocki continues to stress that she hopes teachers will be alert to the various modes that are available, and she concludes with various exercises for a visual world New Media.

Response: At this time, I do not uderstand the negativity of the “poetic-rhetoric divide.” I have used this term without the “divide” word as a thesis title. Actually, I have never heard that term before I chose it. Of course, the cliche, “There is nothing new under the sun” might apply. We as composition teachers are being introduced to a new way of looking at writing. Visual analyses of photographs are required in some classes, but these have not usually progressed into the technology of producing images along with the texts. I have no experience doing this and a blog has been a relatively unknown experience for me until this class began. Obviously, there is much for me to learn.

 

 

 

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