W412 Blog

After reading the article, I was not surprised that weblogging gained popularity over time. There are always going to be a few people who don't like it and would prefer a different writing genre. I personally don't really like doing the online blogging for classwork, mainly because I have 5 classes and several of them have a decent amount of online work. I am a visual person, so I like having assignments handed to me and I like turning in hard copies. I see it go from my hand to my instructor, instead of seeing it posted online. Something about handing in a hard copy is more comforting to me I suppose. I think I could enjoy online blogging for class if I only did online work for one class, but doing it for several gets overwhelming. I lose track of what I'm supposed to do because I don't have a handout in front of me telling me "you need to..." I do enjoy blogging from time to time for my own personal reasons, so you'd think I would enjoy doing it for class. But I just don't. In the article, others were similar to me though. Everyone liked doing it for different reasons. But in a classroom setting, what does one do if they don't like blogging for a grade? The only solution I can think of is that those people could be given an alternative assingment that actually gets handed in periodically, or maybe one could type up the blogging assignment as a paper in Word and then copy it into the blog. Perhaps that would make it seem like a paper and not a blog. With any assignment, however, not everyone is going to enjoy it, so I guess those that don't like blogging just have to suck it up for blogging assignments. I don't know what else one can do.

The first interesting thing I came across took me back to my elementary school days. They discussed how teachers used to spend at least one full day, if not longer, taking kids to the library and showing them how to use the different reference techniques, like finding books using the Dewey Decimal system or using Michofiche, but now they don't have to spend all this time doing that. Instead they just sit the kids down in a computer lab for a day and show them specific online databases they can use for research. In general, kids know how to access the internet itself and how to use a oomputer, so now teachers simply have to point them in the right direction of reliable websites. What a time saver!

At one point, they also discuss how word processing can now be a collaborative process because people can quickly view and edit work done by others without actually having to meet. For businesses that rely heavily on team work, this can be very helpful.

Also, I found the topic of editing online texts vs. written texts to be interesting. They stated that editing text that students send through an e-mail seems like they "authoring" because they simply change the work. But with a written text, they strikethrough the text that needs changed and makes "suggestions" of how to make it better. I never thought about that before, but that is kind of how that feels. I sometimes edit things for friends and I also have written lyrics with other people before, and when we do things like that online, I feel like I'm changing their work and they are changing mine, which gets particularly personal when editing lyrics. There are certain times when written work is just easier and more appropriate to work with.

And finally, the discussion on spell checkers and grammar checkers caught my eye, as well. I work for a doctor and type dictation all the time, so it is important to have things spelled correctly. The problem with that is that most spell checkers don't have extensive dictionaries that incorporate words from certain professional areas, like medicine. And with the increasing technologies around us, most spell checkers don't include words that have recently been added to the language. I agree, spell checkers can be very helpful, but they are not perfect, and they never will be. Not in my lifetime anyway.

One last quote I liked on page 43 was, "Again, one way to assure the failure of a pilot is to 'add on' technology rather than integrate it." This is important for teachers to consider. When adding more work outside the classroom so as to incorporate new technologies, they have to realize they need to maybe cut-back on some of the old exercises they always did, otherwise students could feel overwhelmed. But this should get better over time.

Quotes from the readings:

"A more complete approach to computer literacy, then, would be more additive than
substitutive: Students need both functional and critical literacies (as well as
other types of literacies like the rhetorical and visual literacies involved in Web
site design and production)." (472)

"Moreover, functional literacy has been equated with a multitude of flawed practices and perspectives that undermine responsible educational objectives: Critics have argued that limited approaches to teaching functional skills overlook cultural contexts, focus on vocational requirements, and reinforce social norms and values. In
considering the purposes and settings of literacy, critics have denounced functionalist
approaches (oftentimes with justice) for supporting and maintaining the economic, cultural, and political status quo and for domesticating and dehumanizing students.

Such criticisms should certainly not be dismissed, particularly in a digital
age where competency is so frequently understood and measured in mechanical
terms." (472-473)

"Indeed, for teachers of writing and communication, constructing a workable functional literacy is crucial for several reasons..." (475) *List follows*

"A functionally literate student is alert to the limitations of technology and the circumstances in which human awareness is required." (477)

"After pointing out the possibilities and limitations of these functionalities, Vernon offers two reasons why teachers should incorporate grammar checkers into writing instruction: the checkers can catalyze interesting discussions about language conventions and usage authority, and they can help students improve their revising and editing skills." (477)

"The job of teachers is to help students negotiate the multiple and contradictory discourses in which they will be implicated as writers and communicators. In a digital age, these discourses invariably include the various rhetorics that inform the design of literacy technologies." (485)

"A functionally literate student resolves technological impasses confidently and
strategically. Students reach technological impasses when they lack the computer-
based expertise needed to solve a writing or communication problem." (493)

Notes from Hawisher and Selfe:

Lu's family began teaching her English and working on her literacy at a very young age so that she would be well prepared and educated in life. She was from China but her family felt English was very important to learn. Neither of her parents graduated college.

Her first encounter with technological literacy was in her freshman year of college when she took a computer course at the foreign language university at the age of seventeen.

Classes were taught in Chinese but she had to know English to read the computer programs. Therefore, her main language was Chinese, her second language was English which she was still learning, and her third was the computer language, BASIC, that she had was also learning. She couldn't have learned BASIC without knowing some English.

Lu got through the rest of her schooling in London using a used laptop and then she used e-mail to connect to people in the U.S. She then came to Purdue and got a desktop and was regularly using the computer and the internet to do research, communicate, and produce creative projects.

"Today, Lu reads and writes online in Chinese and is able to use a Chinese interface
to connect with people and to access Chinese Web sites. She also finds, however,
that her Chinese can prove inadequate for the technological terms she wants to
convey." (624)

Yi-Huey from Taiwan grew up with an educated family. Her mother was an English teacher and her father was a professor, and both stressed the importance of being educated and knowing English. Both Yi-Huey and her two brothers now have master's degrees or above.

They spoke Taiwanese at home, learned Mandarin Chinese in public school, but then transferred to a public school that had an excellent English program.

Yi-Huey also first experienced computers when she got to college. Because she'd never used computers before, she had to go to a private institution for computer lessons on top of taking her regular computer classes in school.

After going to grad school, she was using computers more and more, but she still feels that her skills are not as good as they should be with computers. (627)

Quotes from the reading:

Quartet 1:
"As important for our purposes, these novels were often published in another form first, typically in serial installments that the public read monthly."

"And the readers were more than consumers; they helped shape the development of the text-in-process. Put differently, the “fluctuations of public demand” influenced the ways that
Dickens and other novelists developed future episodes."

"People read together, sometimes in “reading circles,” sites of domestic engagement, but also in public places. Technological constraints—bad lighting, eyesight overstrained by working conditions—encouraged such communal readings, since in this setting no single
pair of eyes was overly strained."

"And I repeat: like the members of the newly developed reading public, the members of the writing public have learned—in this case, to write, to think together, to organize, and to act within these forums—largely without instruction and, more to the point here, largely without our instruction. They need neither self-assessment nor our assessment: they have
a rhetorical situation, a purpose, a potentially worldwide audience, a choice of technology and medium—and they write."

"But our experiences are the same in one key way: most faculty and students alike all have learned these genres on our own, outside of school. Given this extracurricular writing curriculum and its success, I have to wonder out loud if in some pretty important ways and within the relatively short space of not quite ten years, we may already have become
anachronistic."

"According to the list of departmental administrators published in the PMLA, over the last twenty years, we have seen a decline in the number of departments called English of about 30%."

"And when plotted against another trend line—the increase of units called something other than English, like departments of communication and divisions of humanities—it seems more plausible that something reductionist in nature is happening to English departments generally. They are being consolidated into other units or disappearing."

"And the worst-case scenario has already been proposed in Colorado: take all funding for public institutions and distribute it not to them but directly to students"

"Specifically, she (Elizabeth Daley, Dean of University of Southern California School of Television & Cinema) proposes that the literacy of the screen, which she says parallels oral literacy and print literacy, become a third literacy required of all undergraduates."

Quartet 2:
"only 28% of Americans complete four years of college."

"We know that writing makes a difference—both at the gatekeeping moment and as students progress through the gateway."

"Given the course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT, we have committed to the screen for administrative purposes at least. Given the oral communication context of peer review, our teaching requires that students participate in mixed communicative modes."

"And thinking about our own presentations here: when we consider how these presentations
will morph into other talks, into articles for print and online journals, into books, indeed into our classrooms, it becomes pretty clear that we already inhabit a model of communication
practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school."

Quartet 3 (in-class)

Student-teacher conferences generally help the student to do work that is good for the teacher, but they need to also do work that is good in their own eyes as well as society, their parents, their peers, etc. Classrooms are smaller and teachers are giving more time to the students individually, but again, they individually are shown how to please the teacher, not the world.

1. Literacy as Adaptation:

"Today, functional literacy is conceived broadly as the level of proficiency necessary for effective performance in a range of settings and customary activities." (pg 9)

"Some argue that, as economic and other activities become increasingly subject to computerized techniques of production and information handling, even higher levels of literacy will be required of all. A contrary view, popularized by McLuhan is that new technologies and communication media are likely to reduce literacy requirements for all. A responding argument is that some of these technologies are, in effect, new systems of literacy."

"The functional approach has been hailed as a major advance over more traditional concepts of reading and writing because it takes into account the goals and settings of people's activities with written language." (pg 11)

2. Literacy as Power:

"the literacy-as-power metaphor emphasizes a relationship between literacy and group or community advancement." (pg 11)

"The one undisputed fact about illiteracy in America is its concentration among poor, black, elderly, and minority language groups - groups without effective participation in our country's economic and educational institutions." (pg 12)

3. Literacy as a State of Grace:

"I have variously called it literacy as salvation and literacy as a state of grace. Both labels are unsatisfactory because they give a specific religious interpretation to the broader phenomenon I want to depict--that is, the tendency in many societies to endow the literate person with special virtues." (pg 13)

"Literate and nonliterate individuals presumably are not only in different states of grace but in different stages of intellectual development as well." (pg 14)

What I take away from this reading is that everyone looks at literacy in a different way. Some people view it as one of the three metaphors and others combine the metaphors to come up with their own interpretation of literacy. I generally do think that one is literate if they can adequately communicate with their peers. So being literate in America might not be the same as being literate in a small African village. This is because the culture is different, the language is different, and the needs of the people are different. Even though a tribal person might not be able to intelligently discuss or comprehend technology, they are still literate because their culture doesn't depend on technology currently. So to say one is literate means they are able to communicate within their specific culture.