480 skeleton
This fall I’m once again teaching ENG 480, “Computers & Writing.” Since my request to establish a second digital media studies course was approved, and ENG 489, New Media goes online in Spring 2006, I get to redesign 480 as one part of a two-course sequence. I’m really enjoying this process: instead of thinking “How can I cram all of this into 16 weeks?” my focus is a broad-spectrum introduction to relevant concepts, issues, and forms.
Right now, that breaks down like this:
- Writing (literacy, ease, style, code, metadata, usability)
- Some data and word processing, talk a bit about the history of technology and the computers-writing relationship, use electronic mail and messaging, get started with weblogs, get started with web pages. Talk about ways writing is changed by computers, new practices of writing, new forces which influence it.
- Community (network, accessibility, standards, intellectual property)
- Expand on the first unit, thinking about online communities, online value systems, social networks; do some work with wiki and Moodle.
- Media (imaging, new media, interface, design)
- More intensive work with web pages and weblogs, definitions of new media, interface as genre, why design has become important. Digital imaging, photo manipulation.
I have built a list of prospective readings with links to quite a bit of source material. Tomorrow I begin the day with another library visit, then some more reading and thinking about the course content. I welcome all suggestions…
August 8th, 2005 at 9:53 am
The class looks very cool. As for Ong, have you seen either “Information and/or Communication: Interactions” (Communication Research Trends 16.3 (1996): 3-17) or “Digitization, Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers” (Communication Research Trends 18.2 (1998): 3-21), both of which are reprinted in An Ong Reader? They’re both dated now and may not be what you’re looking for, but they do help update Orality and Literacy some. Ong seems to have been making what I’m calling a “digital turn” in the 1990s (making a distinction between electronics and computers akin to the distinction between “writing” or “literacy” in general and chirography and print as specific instances. The two essays mentioned above are just a small amount of Ong’s digital work. I purposefully haven’t delved too much into it yet because I’m scared it might consume my attention. When I hand my dissertation over to my committee, I’m going to start reading the 40,000 word manuscript (planned to be 50,000 words) titled Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization.
August 10th, 2005 at 9:06 am
I haven’t seen those articles; thanks for pointing them out. I’ll dig them up, though I’ve decided to make Ong optional reading only for those whose interests converge on historicizing the literacy/electracy shift.
I hope to post an updated schedule later today…
August 11th, 2005 at 4:38 am
This is a very cool list, Bradley. I’m going to link to it of that’s okay with you. And I’m liable to steal/borrow from it. Feel free to do the same to me….
August 11th, 2005 at 4:43 am
[...] Bradley Dilger has a really nice reading list on his blog for a course he’s preparing called “Computers and Writing.” I’m linking to it now because, in a few days at the latest, I’m going to have to start planning a revamped version of English 328, and I’m always looking for things to do with my Writing for the World Wide Web class and Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice. [...]