Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Discussions by both sections...
You'll notice there are links on the side to the discussion areas for both sections of 101 I'm teaching this semester. Courses never run on exactly the same schedules, but you may want to take a peek at the discussion/questions from the other course, as well as your own. Might find something interesting...
Thursday, January 25, 2007
New Literacy: New York Times Article
This is the NYT Article I've been referencing in class this week:
The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
November 3, 2005
Melissa Paredes, a 16-year-old in Lompoc, Calif., maintains a Web site where she writes poetry, posts pictures and shares music. So when she was mourning her stepfather, David Grabowski, earlier this year, she reflexively channeled her grief into a multimedia tribute.
Using images she collected and scanned from photo albums, she created an online slide show, taking visitors on a virtual tour of Mr. Gabrowski's life - as a toddler, as a young man, at work. A collage of the photographs, titled "David Bruce Grabowski, 1966-2005," closes the memorial.
"It helped me a lot," Melissa said in an instant message, the standard method of communication among the millions of American teenagers who, according to a study released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, are fast becoming some of the most nimble and prolific creators of digital content online.
For all of its poignant catharsis, Melissa's digital eulogy is also a story of the modern teenager. Using the cheap digital tools that now help chronicle the comings and goings of everyday life - cellphone cameras, iPods, laptops and user-friendly Web editing software - teenagers like Melissa are pushing content onto the Internet as naturally as they view it.
"At the market level, this means old business models are in upheaval," said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew project. "At the legal level, this means the definition of property is up for grabs. And at the social level, it means that millions of those inspired to create have a big new platform with which they shape our culture."
According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all teenagers between 12 and 17 who are active online - about 12 million - create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. Some 20 percent publish their own Web logs.
That reality is now inextricable from the broader social, cultural and sometimes, as in Melissa's case, deeply personal experience of being a teenager. And it is one that will undoubtedly have profound implications for the traditional managers of content, from big media companies and libraries to record labels, publishers and Hollywood.
From school libraries and living rooms, millions of teenagers are staking out cyberterritory in places like MySpace.com, Xanga.com and Livejournal.com, where they matter-of-factly construct their individual online presence, often to the chagrin of parents and schoolteachers who have belatedly discovered whole nations of teenagers churning out content under their noses.
"Ever since 3rd period today, I now know that I have sex appeal," wrote Krista, a 15-year-old bass player from Fresno, Calif., who enjoys dirt bikes, surfing and skateing (her spelling), on her personal Web site at Xanga. "It rox!"
It's that kind of enthusiastic self-revelation that has begun prompting parents and school districts to begin monitoring - and in some case outright banning - sites where teenagers have taken up residence.
Last week, Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta, N.J., announced that students who posted on MySpace.com or similar sites faced possible suspension from school, citing concerns that students were unwittingly revealing too much information about themselves to potential cyberpredators.
In September, the Hopkinton Middle High School in Contoocook, N.H., sent e-mail messages to parents warning them about sites like MySpace. But the Pew survey seems to suggest that the concern over the dangers of adolescent activity online - while perhaps well placed - is a mere cul-de-sac in a larger landscape where a new generation, armed to the teeth with digital sophistication, is redefining media on its own terms.
"The more kids are involved with digital content creation, the more thinkers will emerge that will eventually produce tomorrow's innovative products," said Brendan Erazo, a 15-year-old student at Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Fla., who mixes and publishes his own dance tracks at the Kids' Internet Radio Project.
The rise of "screenagers" like Brendan, says Bernard Luskin, the director of the media psychology program at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif., cannot help forcing traditional media companies to rethink the creator-audience relationship. "These young kids are very sophisticated and phenomenally intuitive," he said. "This is the first generation that's been born into digital life, instead of transitioning into it."
Most teenagers online take their role as content creators as a given. Twenty-two percent report keeping their own personal Web page, and about one in five say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations, whether as composite photos, edited video productions or, most commonly, remixed song files.
The Pew survey shows "the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content," said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. "They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it."
Professor Rothbauer calls this kind of engagement "emancipatory" because "it helps young people fashion their own identities, on their own terms, using whatever content they choose."
Of course, that includes proprietary content, which remains something of a fuzzy concept among teenagers.
For instance, among the teenagers surveyed who said they had some experience downloading music files, 75 percent thought it was "easy to do" and "unrealistic to expect people not to do it."
On the upside for the recording industry, teenagers are migrating to paid music sites, and about half thought downloading and sharing copyrighted material without permission was generally wrong. Roughly the same number, however, said they did not care about copyright.
"There's still a long way to go, but we have undoubtedly come a long way," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "To reach this increasingly tech-savvy generation, we must continue to adapt and appeal to their consumption patterns. And music companies are doing just that."
In the end, the survey suggests, they have to. "Today's teens are breaking down the traditional barriers of the mass media age that had producers of media on one side of the fence and consumers on the other," Mr. Rainie said. And in that respect, he said, teenagers are the agents who will challenge every maker, manager and distributor of content.
Whether bloggers like Brendan and Melissa consider themselves at the vanguard of change, however, is an open question. To many of them, they are just tinkering with the toys that the digital revolution has put before them.
"I taught myself how to use the Internet," Melissa said of her Web site and her photo slide shows, "so basically it was just a step-by-step process that clicked into my head. I just read directions and that's how I set it up. Pretty simple."
The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
November 3, 2005
Melissa Paredes, a 16-year-old in Lompoc, Calif., maintains a Web site where she writes poetry, posts pictures and shares music. So when she was mourning her stepfather, David Grabowski, earlier this year, she reflexively channeled her grief into a multimedia tribute.
Using images she collected and scanned from photo albums, she created an online slide show, taking visitors on a virtual tour of Mr. Gabrowski's life - as a toddler, as a young man, at work. A collage of the photographs, titled "David Bruce Grabowski, 1966-2005," closes the memorial.
"It helped me a lot," Melissa said in an instant message, the standard method of communication among the millions of American teenagers who, according to a study released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, are fast becoming some of the most nimble and prolific creators of digital content online.
For all of its poignant catharsis, Melissa's digital eulogy is also a story of the modern teenager. Using the cheap digital tools that now help chronicle the comings and goings of everyday life - cellphone cameras, iPods, laptops and user-friendly Web editing software - teenagers like Melissa are pushing content onto the Internet as naturally as they view it.
"At the market level, this means old business models are in upheaval," said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew project. "At the legal level, this means the definition of property is up for grabs. And at the social level, it means that millions of those inspired to create have a big new platform with which they shape our culture."
According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all teenagers between 12 and 17 who are active online - about 12 million - create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. Some 20 percent publish their own Web logs.
That reality is now inextricable from the broader social, cultural and sometimes, as in Melissa's case, deeply personal experience of being a teenager. And it is one that will undoubtedly have profound implications for the traditional managers of content, from big media companies and libraries to record labels, publishers and Hollywood.
From school libraries and living rooms, millions of teenagers are staking out cyberterritory in places like MySpace.com, Xanga.com and Livejournal.com, where they matter-of-factly construct their individual online presence, often to the chagrin of parents and schoolteachers who have belatedly discovered whole nations of teenagers churning out content under their noses.
"Ever since 3rd period today, I now know that I have sex appeal," wrote Krista, a 15-year-old bass player from Fresno, Calif., who enjoys dirt bikes, surfing and skateing (her spelling), on her personal Web site at Xanga. "It rox!"
It's that kind of enthusiastic self-revelation that has begun prompting parents and school districts to begin monitoring - and in some case outright banning - sites where teenagers have taken up residence.
Last week, Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta, N.J., announced that students who posted on MySpace.com or similar sites faced possible suspension from school, citing concerns that students were unwittingly revealing too much information about themselves to potential cyberpredators.
In September, the Hopkinton Middle High School in Contoocook, N.H., sent e-mail messages to parents warning them about sites like MySpace. But the Pew survey seems to suggest that the concern over the dangers of adolescent activity online - while perhaps well placed - is a mere cul-de-sac in a larger landscape where a new generation, armed to the teeth with digital sophistication, is redefining media on its own terms.
"The more kids are involved with digital content creation, the more thinkers will emerge that will eventually produce tomorrow's innovative products," said Brendan Erazo, a 15-year-old student at Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Fla., who mixes and publishes his own dance tracks at the Kids' Internet Radio Project.
The rise of "screenagers" like Brendan, says Bernard Luskin, the director of the media psychology program at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif., cannot help forcing traditional media companies to rethink the creator-audience relationship. "These young kids are very sophisticated and phenomenally intuitive," he said. "This is the first generation that's been born into digital life, instead of transitioning into it."
Most teenagers online take their role as content creators as a given. Twenty-two percent report keeping their own personal Web page, and about one in five say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations, whether as composite photos, edited video productions or, most commonly, remixed song files.
The Pew survey shows "the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content," said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. "They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it."
Professor Rothbauer calls this kind of engagement "emancipatory" because "it helps young people fashion their own identities, on their own terms, using whatever content they choose."
Of course, that includes proprietary content, which remains something of a fuzzy concept among teenagers.
For instance, among the teenagers surveyed who said they had some experience downloading music files, 75 percent thought it was "easy to do" and "unrealistic to expect people not to do it."
On the upside for the recording industry, teenagers are migrating to paid music sites, and about half thought downloading and sharing copyrighted material without permission was generally wrong. Roughly the same number, however, said they did not care about copyright.
"There's still a long way to go, but we have undoubtedly come a long way," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "To reach this increasingly tech-savvy generation, we must continue to adapt and appeal to their consumption patterns. And music companies are doing just that."
In the end, the survey suggests, they have to. "Today's teens are breaking down the traditional barriers of the mass media age that had producers of media on one side of the fence and consumers on the other," Mr. Rainie said. And in that respect, he said, teenagers are the agents who will challenge every maker, manager and distributor of content.
Whether bloggers like Brendan and Melissa consider themselves at the vanguard of change, however, is an open question. To many of them, they are just tinkering with the toys that the digital revolution has put before them.
"I taught myself how to use the Internet," Melissa said of her Web site and her photo slide shows, "so basically it was just a step-by-step process that clicked into my head. I just read directions and that's how I set it up. Pretty simple."
Monday, January 8, 2007
Syllabus
This course takes up reading and writing through an introduction to semiotics: the study of how things mean. From a semiotic vantage, we are engaged in "reading" during every moment of our lives. All cultural phenomena---visible artifacts such as film, architecture, food, or clothing, as well as abstract concepts like gender, family, beauty or justice---constitute "texts" we must learn to de-code and interpret in order to function in human society. The text for the course, Beyond Words: reading and writing in a visual age, combines semiotic analysis with an examination of the increasingly visual nature of global culture.
Beyond Words also makes a case for an updated notion of “literacy.” Because of the rapid proliferation of microchip technologies, the authors argue that being functionally literate now means more than just competency with written texts; students must also become familiar with an increasing variety of technology-enabled communication media. In fact, most college students today are already comfortable with using a computer word processor and/or the internet for personal communication, school work, entertainment and more. But “using” and “understanding” media are not necessarily the same thing. The reading and writing assignments in this class will examine the function of various forms of communication: what difference do different technologies of writing and reading make?
Students will also be asked to critically reflect on the relation of language to broader issues of meaning in culture. Language is not only a private tool for personal expression, it is also a cultural and historical construction in which all people participate. It is, in fact, the medium through which our relations with other people are created. Marx and Engels call attention to the social character of language when they write, "language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well and only therefore does it exist for me; language like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of social intercourse with other men."
By raising these kind of issues and questions, I hope to produce students as critical readers, critical writers and critical thinkers. By "critical" I mean the ability to self-consciously question and understand the assumptions that structure our ideas and opinions: the values we are taught consciously and unconsciously through our schooling and the ways of looking at the world that have been made available to us. Throughout the course, then, students will be asked to think about the social effects of reading and writing, to explore how the way we understand the world is connected to our ability to act in it.
Papers and assignments
Students will be assigned both graded papers and ungraded in-class writing assignments. Although in-class writing is ungraded, it is still important to your class performance and final grade. In-class writing is a place to extend class discussion and develop ideas for out-of-class papers. It is also one of the ways you can demonstrate your active participation in ongoing class discussion. Graded papers are formal, typed, critical analysis essays where students present the polished results of their reading and thinking. Some papers may have assigned re-writes, but any paper, except the final one, may be re-written for a possible higher grade. Students should see the teacher first if they want to submit a revised paper. There will be five graded papers assigned for this class---you must complete all of them to pass the course.
Grades
The focus of all composition courses at Nassau Community College is the development of the necessary writing skills needed to work at the college level. This means more than just proficiency in spelling and grammar; students must also learn how to make use of ideas and concepts. In-class writing and classroom discussion are places where students can become more familiar with abstract levels of thinking and analysis. That’s why regular participation in class discussion is a course requirement. The final grade is based on class participation, (25% of grade), completion of in-class writing (25% of grade), and graded essays (50% of grade).
Required text
Beyond Words: reading and writing in a visual age, Ruszkiewicz, Anderson and Friend
Writing Center
The English Department’s Writing Center is located on the first floor of Bradley Hall. The Writing Center provides students with tutoring and extra help with many kinds of writing problems. Tutors work with students on a one-to-one basis and can meet students for single or regular sessions. Students do not need to be taking a composition course or working on an English paper to use the Writing Center; they can get help with any kind of paper or essay while enrolled at NCC.
Academic and classroom policies
It is the official policy of Nassau Community College that more than 3 unexcused absences results in an F for the course.
Plagiarism is a serious academic infraction. The penalty for turning in any plagiarized work is an F for the course. Turning in plagiarized work can also result in possible academic suspension.
Turn off all cell phones and pagers upon entering the classroom. The first time your phone rings, you will be given a warning. If it rings a second time you will be dropped from the class.
Course calendar
The course calendar will be generated week-t0-week by the progress of the class. Check here for updates.
Beyond Words also makes a case for an updated notion of “literacy.” Because of the rapid proliferation of microchip technologies, the authors argue that being functionally literate now means more than just competency with written texts; students must also become familiar with an increasing variety of technology-enabled communication media. In fact, most college students today are already comfortable with using a computer word processor and/or the internet for personal communication, school work, entertainment and more. But “using” and “understanding” media are not necessarily the same thing. The reading and writing assignments in this class will examine the function of various forms of communication: what difference do different technologies of writing and reading make?
Students will also be asked to critically reflect on the relation of language to broader issues of meaning in culture. Language is not only a private tool for personal expression, it is also a cultural and historical construction in which all people participate. It is, in fact, the medium through which our relations with other people are created. Marx and Engels call attention to the social character of language when they write, "language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well and only therefore does it exist for me; language like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of social intercourse with other men."
By raising these kind of issues and questions, I hope to produce students as critical readers, critical writers and critical thinkers. By "critical" I mean the ability to self-consciously question and understand the assumptions that structure our ideas and opinions: the values we are taught consciously and unconsciously through our schooling and the ways of looking at the world that have been made available to us. Throughout the course, then, students will be asked to think about the social effects of reading and writing, to explore how the way we understand the world is connected to our ability to act in it.
Papers and assignments
Students will be assigned both graded papers and ungraded in-class writing assignments. Although in-class writing is ungraded, it is still important to your class performance and final grade. In-class writing is a place to extend class discussion and develop ideas for out-of-class papers. It is also one of the ways you can demonstrate your active participation in ongoing class discussion. Graded papers are formal, typed, critical analysis essays where students present the polished results of their reading and thinking. Some papers may have assigned re-writes, but any paper, except the final one, may be re-written for a possible higher grade. Students should see the teacher first if they want to submit a revised paper. There will be five graded papers assigned for this class---you must complete all of them to pass the course.
Grades
The focus of all composition courses at Nassau Community College is the development of the necessary writing skills needed to work at the college level. This means more than just proficiency in spelling and grammar; students must also learn how to make use of ideas and concepts. In-class writing and classroom discussion are places where students can become more familiar with abstract levels of thinking and analysis. That’s why regular participation in class discussion is a course requirement. The final grade is based on class participation, (25% of grade), completion of in-class writing (25% of grade), and graded essays (50% of grade).
Required text
Beyond Words: reading and writing in a visual age, Ruszkiewicz, Anderson and Friend
Writing Center
The English Department’s Writing Center is located on the first floor of Bradley Hall. The Writing Center provides students with tutoring and extra help with many kinds of writing problems. Tutors work with students on a one-to-one basis and can meet students for single or regular sessions. Students do not need to be taking a composition course or working on an English paper to use the Writing Center; they can get help with any kind of paper or essay while enrolled at NCC.
Academic and classroom policies
It is the official policy of Nassau Community College that more than 3 unexcused absences results in an F for the course.
Plagiarism is a serious academic infraction. The penalty for turning in any plagiarized work is an F for the course. Turning in plagiarized work can also result in possible academic suspension.
Turn off all cell phones and pagers upon entering the classroom. The first time your phone rings, you will be given a warning. If it rings a second time you will be dropped from the class.
Course calendar
The course calendar will be generated week-t0-week by the progress of the class. Check here for updates.
Getting started...
This is a place for students to find the syllabus, assignments and other information about the course. If you need to contact me off campus, email me rather than posting here.
IMPORTANT
Do not email your papers unless you have made prior arrangements with me.
My email is:
estevem@ncc.edu
IMPORTANT
Do not email your papers unless you have made prior arrangements with me.
My email is:
estevem@ncc.edu
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