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.
