Thursday, September 24, 2009

Videos for today!

Today everyone is turning in their first major paper. Whee! I'm excited to read them. Really.

We are now moving into our "Remix" unit. We will be asking the questions: What is writing? What is technology? How does this affect how we see our own uses of technology, and how we see ourselves as writers?

To start, because everyone's been so busy working on their papers, we are going to watch some movies. Here they are.



Thursday, September 10, 2009

Class blog assignment, 9-10-09

Instructions: sign in to your blog. Take one of the items for your “Ten things about me and technology” list, and make that item the title of a new post. Now, take that item and flesh it out—write 200 words explaining this statement, going into more detail, or free associating. Post it.

My title: I've had a computer in my house ever since I was born.

The first computer I remember using was an IBM desktop that my dad set up. It had a modem before there was actually anything called "the internet"--my mom used it to directly connect to WestLaw and Lexis/Nexis, two databases that she used for teaching. It ran DOS but my dad set up an interface that allowed me to use it easily, even though I was a little kid. There was a menu where I could choose between different games I had on it. They were mostly shareware games that he found for me--my favorite was this thing called Captain Comic, where you played a spaceman and jumped around. For some reason, the computer had two monitors, and it only booted up through the first one, which was really old and monochromatic (it was orange and black).

When we bought a new computer after that, I remember it being very important that I never bring food anywhere near it, at great peril to myself. I was really afraid of messing up the brand new computer. It had AOL on it, and that's where I first started sending IMs, and going to chatrooms. We had games on it but a lot of them were really hard (Myst, anyone). The favorite of me, my dad, and my brother was something called "Master of Orion" but we also had Sim City and Tetris and Chip's Challenge and a bunch of other random games. I still have never beaten Myst, but I think my dad did. I had to help him with the music puzzle though.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

My response to the 30 things assignment

10 Things About Me:
1. I sprained my ankle on Sunday during a tactical exercise in the swordfighting class I am taking.
2. I draw a zine comic called "Oh Shit, I'm in Grad School"
3. I got my BA from MSU in 2006, with a major in Social Relations from James Madison College, and an additional major in English/Film Studies.
4. My favorite movie is Tim Burton's Ed Wood.
5. I am lactose and gluten intolerant, and I'm allergic to mangoes and MSG.
6. I studied abroad in England and Scotland in 2003.
7. Both my parents, 3 uncles, and 1 aunt all graduated from MSU, and my brother is a junior here.
8. I only have my right ear pierced (and my right eyebrow).
9. I was an AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteer at the Allen Neighborhood Center in Lansing for two years before I came to grad school.
10. Teaching is my favorite job of all the jobs I've had in my life (although being a VISTA was a cool experience too).

10 Things About Me and Technology:
1. I have a pink Nintendo DS and I love it but I really want a DSI so I can play Ghostwire.
2. I play World of Warcraft (I have a Draenei hunter on Steamwheedle Cartel). I'm not especially good at it but it's a great way to relieve stress and talk to friends that live far away.
3. I've had a computer in my house ever since I was born.
4. I love vintage technology and old computers, and stories from people back when computers were new.
5. I use Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and GNU Linux (Ubuntu) operating systems on my computers.
6. I have four computers I use regularly.
7. I didn't learn to drive until I was 20.
8. I believe in a broad definition of technology, and yet, almost everything I want to put on this list is computer-related.
9. I am teaching myself how to program in Python.
10. This summer, I worked with computer scientists who create digital organisms and use programmable humanoid robots. (I helped them with their writing.)

10 Things about Me and Writing
1. I have thought of myself as a writer since I was a little kid.
2. I tried to write a novel one time called "The Philosopher's Daughter" but I never finished it.
3. I am good at helping people write about something they know a lot about, even if I don't know a lot about it.
4. I have written 2 full-length screenplays--one is sci-fi and is terrible, and one is a romantic comedy and it is at least not embarrassing.
5. I like to organized longer pieces of writing visually, like storyboarding, before I write them.
6. I also like to write down all my ideas on post-it notes and stick them to a blank wall.
7. I have to write my MA thesis this year and I am scared and excited.
8. I love using Gmail and Google Docs to keep track of things I am writing.
9. At the same time, I also like drafting things on paper--I actually wrote out this list on paper before I blogged it.
10. As much as I like writing and as much skill as I have, I still find it hugely challenging.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Welcome, WRA 110!

Hi to all my WRA 110 students. This is going to be a great semester, and I'm excited for us to all learn about writing together.

Our first exercise in this class will to get to know each other a little better, through writing. I don't know how many of you participated in the wave of people writing "25 things about me" lists last year, but I know I made one. Today, I would like you to make three lists about yourself: "Ten things you didn't know about me", "Ten things about me and writing", and "Ten things about me and technology". This will help me get to know you and your background as it relates to this class, as well as help you get to know each other (you will be posting these to your public blogs). To be fair, I will be writing these lists as well, and will post them here later.

Friday, March 6, 2009

What is a map, anyway?

Today was super fabulous, thanks to John Castronova and his rad students in WRA 1004 sec 002, the alternate universe version of my class. Or, the section that meets at the same time as we do in a different room. Today we met together in my classroom (307 Bessey is huge) and had a big group discussion about maps.

Both John's class and my class are going to be making maps as part of our third assignment for this course. His students are focusing more on discourse, and mine are focusing on literacy (literacies). I was really excited to see how well our students hit it off with each other--we had 47 students really engaged in small-group discussions and then the big group conversation generated some great conclusions.

So: what is a map? We revisited the literacy alien, because if WRA 1004 prepares you for anything, it should be the possibility of having your translation software fail while you are on an alien world. (That is a joke.) We talked about how a map shows relationships, and that maps are guides, but not necessarily physically (although they can be). We described "guiding" as showing an audience to specific information--leading your audience to knowledge. Maps are also often visual. They also have a rhetorical purpose, and an audience, and those can vary pretty widely.

John asked the question of this definition: how is this like an essay? Someone volunteered that it is very like an essay, and that you could describe an essay as a map of words. (That really blew my mind.)

So, I think everyone is looking forward to our classes being together again, and exploring this stuff further.

Here are links to all the individual maps I printed out for us to discuss:

Mind Map about creativity

Map of all the IP addresses of the Internet

Map of online communities (my favorite)

Map of Europe according to MTV Europe

Infographic about google search results for "it's a public health crisis" (is this a map? we didn't get to talking about this)

MSU Campus Map

Friday, February 27, 2009

What is literacy?

Someone said to me that today's class was the best one that we have had all semester, and I am inclined to agree. Today was amazing! To my students: I came out of the classroom proud of the great intellectual work you guys did today, and really excited for the rest of the semester (and to read what you are turning in tonight).

Somehow I managed to fill both the front and back chalkboards of our classroom with notes on our discussion--I tried to use a mind-mapping/webbing approach with a lot of lines connecting our trains of thought. I wish I had had a camera to capture it, it would be a good picture to use to illustrate what I do for a living...

We started with the question--"What does literacy mean to you?" Most people didn't know the word literacy at all. That branched into literature, and then someone offered a definition of "ability to read and write". From there, we went to "literate vs. illiterate", and someone said illiterate means you can't read or write.

The next question from there: what is reading? (I like asking the question, "What is it?" about lots of things in our class, texts, videos, artifacts...it's not always an easy question.) If you met a space alien, if you were on another planet and you met aliens who never wrote anything down, who had never even heard of such a thing, how would you explain it? Someone mentioned demonstrating it to them by writing on sand, and then we got into talking about comprehending and texts.

Okay: so if reading is comprehending a text, what is a text? I drew the distinction between "text" and "a text". One of my students jumped in to say that text is just some words, but a text is substantial--it is a thing that has (carries) meaning (like a text message).

So, then we defined reading as interpreting a text and writing as creating a text. Then, we went back to literacy--if literacy is the ability to read and write, but we define reading and writing in these ways then this is our working definition of literacy: interpreting, understanding, and creating X, where X is a text of any kind.

So: the aliens again. The space alien tells them that oh, well, their people make things that have meaning and interpret them, but they sing them. They sing songs that have their histories and stories in them, and they hear them, and remember them. Are they literate or illiterate? One student said yes and one said no--but the person who said no then talked about how it depends on your definition of literacy. By our definition, they are literate, but if you say reading is "understanding visual symbols for words" then they aren't. We transitioned into talking for a little while about why we use alphabetic writing and the difference between a story that's been written down and one that's told orally.

The big finish was the question: by our definition, what kinds of literacy do you have? We came up with a list: music, movie, poetry, text message, photography, painting, graffiti, computer, blog, and culture literacy. Then, I asked them where they had seen this list before...this is where it gets tricky. We realized that this list of literacies was almost the same as the list of our assets, and that our personal assets can also be seen as forms of literacy. We also compared this list to the list of genres we had talked about previously, and that you can also have genre literacy. This was the lightbulb moment--everything we have talked about so far in this class relates perfectly to literacy! Oh! Our teacher does know what she's doing!

Long story short, I can't believe we covered all this in 50 minutes and I am sooooooo excited to continue this discussion.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Homework for "The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography"

Your homework reading for Friday is "The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography" by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, a very famous disability studies scholar. The article is available on ANGEL under Lessons.

In this book chapter, Garland-Thompson identifies four different ways that people with disabilities are portrayed in popular photography (advertisements, newspaper images, and fashion photos, for the most part). This is an excellent example of deep critical analysis. I don't expect you to write a 20 page academic essay for my class, but this kind of thinking--taking familiar images and showing what they say about our culture--is what I would like to see in your Genre Portfolio writings.

Keep in mind what the author has to say about photography--it is not neutral and carries as much bias or prejudice as the person who took the photo. Check out this site for info on photo manipulation.

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Here are some choice quotes from the introduction to the article that might help you understand the author's purpose, audience, and rhetorical situation.

"...staring creates an awkward partnership that estranges and discomforts both viewer and viewed." (57)

"As a culture, we are at once obsessed with and intensely conflicted about the disabled body." (57)

"Photographs seem to be transparent windows onto reality that ensnare truth. But like all representations, photographs organize our perceptions, shaping the objects as they depict them by using conventions of presentation that invoke cultural ideas and expectations. Photographs evoke the familiar only to make it seem strange, eliciting a response Alan Trachtenberg describes as 'astonishment mingling with recognition'." (57-58)

"By exploring some of the purposes to which popular photography's "dialectic of strange and familiar" has been put, I aim here to suggest how modern America imagines disability and disabled people." (58)

"...I analyze more than I evaluate. These visualizations of disabled people act as powerful rhetorical figures that elicit responses or persuade viewers to think or act in certain ways." (58)

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And here are a couple of key terms:

ocularcentric-- focused on visuals and images (this is a really weird word)

signifier--something that carries meaning

visual rhetoric--the study of how images and visuals communicate. By "visual rhetorics of disability", I think Garland-Thompson means different patterns or methods of using images of disabled people to communicate a certain message.

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Your homework for this reading is to analyze a photographic image and critically analyze it in your blog. Write at least 200 words about the photo and how it portrays its subject. Pay attention to the choices the photographer had to make, and what impression you get of the subject of the picture. Does the subject seem strange? Unfamiliar? Exotic? Sentimentalized? Something else?

Link to the photo you look at in your blog entry. If you know how to, feel free to embed the picture in your blog as well.

Some sites you might look for photos at if you are stuck:
Foto Decadent
World Famous Photos
And Google Image Search is always useful too. (However, it might be good to know the context of the photo you are using, like who took it and where was it published?)


Good luck!

Clarification of Genre Portfolio Assignment

Okay, so everybody seems pretty confused about what exactly you have to do for the next major assignment. Here is the boiled-down version.

Your objective here is to:
-practice your critical thinking and critical analysis/response skills
-practice identifying and writing in different genres*

I want you to focus on doing deep thinking about the texts you are analyzing, and consider cultural narratives, rhetorical analysis, and Peters's "Five Ways of Interpreting a Text".

The point of critical analysis is not to say whether a text is good or not, or to point out mistakes, but to look for its meaning, and what it says about the culture it comes from.

What you are turning in:

You have to create three critical responses to three different texts. Each text has to be in a different genre. Then, you have to write a memo explaining each genre in your porfolio and some of its characteristics. (We will work on the memo in class Tuesday and I will give you a template for it.)

Each response you write has to be approximately 400-500 words or the equivalent in a different medium. You may write three short print essays, and turn them in in class, or you may write three blog entries, and post them to your blog by midnight on the day the assignment is due. If you are doing blog entries and analyzing online texts, you must include a link to your text, or embed it in your blog.

Types of texts that you might analyze:
-article
-book
-blog entry
-website
-photograph
-painting
-essay
-movie
-song
-youtube video
-cultural artifact

-or anything else created by people. You can't analyze a tree but I am open to almost anything else.


Note: you can revise and rethink writing you have done for homework and in-class assignments for this project. (So, you can re-write and extend the things you have posted to your blog.)

This assignment is due Friday, February 27.

Class is cancelled Monday and I will be holding extra office hours from 9-12, in addition to my usual Friday office hours from 10-12, to conference with you about this project. I will also be happy to talk with you about your grade on the first essay, which I am handing back this Friday.

*What is a genre? I came across the definition that genres are "dynamic rhetorical forms that are developed from actors responses to recurrent situations and that serve to stabilize experience and give it coherence and meaning" (Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995).

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

25 Things Meme

So, today in class, we are working on writing 25 Things lists. This is a meme that has been circulating around facebook for a little while now. (It's not particularly new to me, I have written similar lists back when I used Livejournal all the time.) The purpose of this assignment is to practice the kind of casual personal writing that is more common to blogging that a lot of what we have written so far in class for our blogs, and also to get some experience composing our identities for the audience of the internet.

Here are the instructions from the meme:

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

You can't really tag people on Blogger in an entry (I think...can you?) so I invited my students to post this list to their facebook page, or other social networking site as well if they like.

As an example, I showed students my list. It is a little more...confessional than I usually am with them, but that's what is expected of this genre of writing. So, in the interest of fairness, here is my list.

1. I love chocolate desserts to be a little bit salty. My mom made me some chocolate cupcakes and I have been sprinkling sea salt on them before eating, for example.
2. I own a copy of Archie Meets the Punisher, one of the silliest comics crossovers ever.
3. I was as a kid and remain a pretty huge Babysitters' Club fan, and as an adult bought a bunch of the terrible straight to video adaptations on VHS. The graphic novel adaptations, however, are actually good.
4. I also collect Barbies and my favorite is Barbie's friend Chelsea, who has a nostril stud, wants to be a singer-songwriter when she grows up, and whose favorite food is gardenburgers. Queerest barbie doll ever. Thank you 1999.
5. I've been to London, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, but I've never been to New York City.
6. I correctly predicted the end of the last Harry Potter book.
7. I used to be kinda goth and I drew this squiggly Death line (faux eye of horus thing) on my face every day with eyeliner. Once I stopped doing it I found out a lot of people i went to college with had thought it was a face tattoo.
8. My family used to make fun of me for liking a lot of foods that smell like feet.
9. Among lots of other things, I'm allergic to mangos, they make my mouth break out.
10. I'm not a really big trekkie by any means, but I've had regular dreams that I was on the Enterprise with Picard and everybody for about the last 15 years.
11. I love Victorian medical manuals.
12. I only have one ear pierced. So does my mom, but she has two holes in it.
13. Deep down inside, what I really want to do is rove around with a pack of friends and solve mysteries.
14. I think Bull Durham is one of the sexiest movies I've ever seen, minus Susan Sarandon's terrible wardrobe.
15. The most upset I've ever gotten over a celebrity's death was when Shari Lewis died. I cried.
16. I have a really good ear for identifying voice actors, developed from watching a lot of Warner Brothers and Nickelodeon cartoons in the 90's and reading the credits obsessively.
17. There are only two movies I got creeped out and couldn't finish watching, Se7en, and Eraserhead.
18. My girlfriend and I were the stars of a stock photo that the State News used a couple times when they needed a picture of gay people to go with AP wire stories. It was a bad photo too.
19. I think my favorite raw vegetable is kohlrabi.
20. I used to identify as "anthrosexual" to protest the gender binary implied by "bisexual" but I went back to "bisexual" because I got really, really tired of explaining my unique snowflake sexuality.
21. I tried to write a novel this one time and it didn't really work out but I think it helped me get chicks. Or maybe, chick. Uh cause female Holden Caulfield drives freshmen in college wild.
22. I have a signed picture of Julie Newmar in my hallway. She was nice.
23. I have a week's worth of webcomic t-shirts and hoodies, and a week's worth of t-shirts that say "vagina" on them from being part of the Vagina Monologues for a number of years.
24. I like dry, dirty martinis, and I get a lot of compliments from waiters and waitresses for ordering such a thing. I guess they are bored with serving people beer. This has happened at Pizza House twice lately.
25. I got to have a guest appearance in my friends' webcomic. They drew me very flatteringly. Although I really hope they turn my character into a supervillain.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Continuation of discussion from 2-16

Class started off pretty slow today; I will blame that on the fact that I made today's PowerPoint last December and I've started doing them in a different style since then. But, everybody woke up once we starting talking about sports movies and horror movies and genre and cultural narrative and all that good stuff.

I love talking about cultural narratives.

We watched this trailer for the movie A Knight's Tale, which is sort of a movie about jousting and knights, but really, it's a sports movie. An underdog, who starts out as nobody, trains really hard, overcomes obstacles, meets a final big challenge, almost loses, but wins in the end (and gets the girl). Here's the trailer:



We also watched the trailer for Coach Carter, a movie I haven't seen but someone in class mentioned. Actually, from the synopsis on IMDB it looks like a sports movie that also follows the "inspirational teacher" narrative (see: Dangerous Minds among many, many others).



We got into the beginning of a really interesting conversation about the horror genre that I would *love* to continue later. Here is an interesting article about some of the feminist response to horror that I started to bring up.

Also, we watched the video for "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails (directed by Mark Romanek). I didn't plan to show this today but things just kind of went in that direction. (I own it on DVD, the resolution is way better than youtube...) Here it is: beware, if you haven't seen it, the song is very sexually explicit. No one actually has sex or commits an act of violence in the video, but somehow it gives people that impression. I wonder how that works?

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Homework due Monday, Feb 16

The reading for this assignment is "On Reading a Video Text" by Robert Scholes, on page 369 of "A Reader for Writers".

In this essay, Scholes talks about ideology and cultural narratives. It is a short essay, but very dense with ideas and theories you may not be familiar with. If you are having a hard time with these concepts, I suggest you check out the wikipedia articles on ideology and metanarrative (which is similar to what a cultural narrative is).

Scholes, to give an example of American cultural narratives, analyzes a Budweiser beer commercial about a rookie umpire. Here is that commercial (isn't YouTube nice?):



Your homework, then, is to do the same thing, in your blog. Find a video of a commercial or a music video on YouTube, embed it in a blog post, and write a short analysis of it similar to what is done in the reading. You will have a chance to revise this later if you have some difficulty with it. (This kind of writing is similar to what I expect you to do for your Genre Portfolio assignment, FYI.)

For tips on how to embed a youtube video in a blog post, click here.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

My slogan

Today in class, I had everyone choose a sticker from Srini Kumar's Sticker Nation: The Big Book of Subversive Stickers Volume 1 and write about it (there is also a Volume 2 but I don't have it). It was a simple exercise, but I am very happy with the interesting writing that it generated. Also, people love stickers, and I am happy that everyone was so enthusiastic.

To be fair, I participated in the writing exercise as well. Everyone is posting their responses to their blogs, and so am I!

"YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU OWN"

I have followed Unamerican.com for many years, through two (maybe 3? I can't remember when I first went to this site) presidential administrations and I have seen these slogans evolve.

This slogan has always stuck otu to me. I am a collector--and I tend to hoard things, even immaterial things like files on my computer or memories. When asked to do that 25 Things meme, a good number of the things I have thought were most interesting about myself were things that I own. I was embarrassed to realize that when i saw other people's lists that I had focused so much on my posessions. I try not to get too attached to material things but collections--comic books, toys--are sometimes easier to deal with than people. Oh, life.

This slogan is subversive because American (and global capitalist) culture values posessions as status symbols so much that ownign more stuff becomes people's motivation in life and defines them. This sticker challenges us to re-think our consumption and our drive to die with the most toys.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Blog genre assignment for February 10, 2009


Blog Genre Assignment!

What is a blog? We have been using them to keep track of our reading responses in this class without deeply exploring what a blog actually is. This assignment will take you through a number of well-known blogs that people write on a number of different subjects. I hope it will give you a better idea of what you can do with your own blog.

Part 1: Blogs on the internet

Please take a look at the following blogs. Read at least one entry in depth and explore their website. Look for similarities and differences between them. Treat this like our genre practice assignment in class last Wednesday. How are they similar or different in form? How are they similar or different in content?

blag.xkcd.com Personal blog by a guy who draws a comic strip (Please checkout xkcd.com too, the blog goes with the comic)
wilwheaton.typepad.com Personal blog by Wil Wheaton, former child actor
Cake Wrecks Blog about ugly cakes
The Post Punk Kitchen Blog about vegan cooking—very pretty pictures
Five Thirty Eight Political blog
Bad Astronomy Science blog
43Folders Blog about how to get more organized and be more productive
A Nun's Life Blog about being a Catholic nun 
Blog @ Newsarama Blog about comic books 
Freakonomics Blog Blog about economics
Kotaku Video game blog
io9 Science fiction blog

Part 2: Features of the Blog Genre

There are some features that a blog often contains that we have not explored yet in class. We have only posted writing to our blogs. This section of the assignment asks you to log into blogger.com and edit your blog to add these features.

1. Blogs often contain a description of what is written about in them. Click on the “Settings” tab in blogger so that you can view the “Description” box. Write a description of your blog in 500 characters or less (that’s 500 letters, not 500 words). Add this to your blog and save it.

2. Bloggers usually include a short bio or description of themselves. Click on the “Layout” tab, and then click on “About Me” bar to add a profile to your blog.

3. Blogs often contain a sidebar with links to other blogs or websites. Some of you are already using the “follow” feature of Blogger to link to each other’s blogs. You can also link to other websites, or add additional features to your sidebar automatically. Click on the “Layout” tab and then click on “Add a Gadget”. A menu will pop up that allows you to add many different features to your blog. Play around with them and add any that you think are interesting—there are hundreds of blog gadgets that you can add in many different categories!

4. Blogs almost always allow other people to write comments about your post. We have not yet done this as part of an assignment. Please read the blogs of some of your classmates (we all posted links to our own blogs on ANGEL and they are still there) and comment on an entry on at least two of your classmates’ blogs.

Part 3: Final note

When you have completed all parts of this assignment, please comment on this blog entry with a link to your blog so I can take a look!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Welcome to my teaching blog.

I will be using this blog to communicate with my WRA 1004/0102 class, Preparation for College Writing. Please stay posted for exciting developments