Teaching Digital Composition Digital Rhetoric

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Teaching Digital Composition/ Digital
Rhetoric

• Douglas Eyman
• Michigan State University

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Writing is a Technology
Denis Baron "When we write with cutting edge
tools, it is easy to forget that whether it
consists of energized particles on a screen or
ink imbedded in paper or lines gouged into clay
tablets, writing itself is always first and
foremost a technology"(16).
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Writing is
Visual
Visual
Visual
Visual
Visual
Diana George "In fact, it has become common
today to talk of multiple literacies, to
encourage the uses of visual communication in the
teaching of writing, and to argue that writing is
itself a from of visual communication (27).
Remember the interplay of the verbal/textual and
the visual from Dánielles presentation this
morning
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What is Composition?
Carlos Salinas Composition today increasingly
concerns itself with the production and
consumption of words, images, sound, video,
animation, etc. (CCCC Presentation, 21 March
2003)
Gunther Kress individuals are now seen as the
remakers, transformers, of sets of
representational resourcesrather than as users
of stable systems, in a situation where a
multiplicity of representational modes are
brought into textual compositions (87).
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DigiRhet.Net
Community Critical Engagement Practical
Application
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Digital Comp/Rhet
engage students not only in the technical
(how-to) aspects of work with digital
communication and composition media and
technologies, but also with the critical analysis
of that media          encourage students to
explore different computer and communication
technologies so that they may choose the best
technology to facilitate their writing and the
rhetorical situation to which they are responding
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Digital Comp/Rhet
     encourage students to practice composing,
revising, and editing (through and with text,
graphics, sound, still, and moving images) using
computers and communication technologies to
improve their skills as writers           
promote the understanding of both writing and
technology as complex, socially situated, and
political tools through which humans act and make
meaning
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Digital Comp/Rhet
encourage students to recognize that composing
takes place within, is shaped by, and serves to
shape social, educational, and political
contexts and address the rhetorical
complications and implications of paper-based and
digitally mediated texts to enhance the critical
dimensions of students thinking and writing
                           
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Community

• Students need to engage community in a variety
  of ways
• Developing community in the classroom
• Explore networks as community support mechanisms
• Examine technologies that support or suppress
  community activities
• Work to produce digital compositions that enact
  or support community building

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Critical Engagement

• Ask students to examine and critique the
  interfaces of the computers they use
• examine where computers and wireless access are
  accessible (and not accessible) on campus and
  specific communities
• Give a narrative voice to an application or
  interface (cf Bruno Latours mass transit system
  in Aramis Or, The Love of Technology).
• Martine Rife, for instance, asks students to give
  such a voice to the course-management system in
  use at the university, providing it with the
  agency to talk back to its users.

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Practice/Praxis

• Praxis practice reflection
• Interface Literacy
• Provide opportunities for students to become
  digital producers
• students provide several different captions for a
  selection of images using image-editing software
  to manipulate the font, size, and effects of the
  caption
• students write instruction sets for specific
  tasks using particular applications (and user
  testing those instructions)

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Workshop Tasks
Address the following
A) Brainstorm ideas for digital composition
assignments that ask students to engage in
practical application/ critical engagement /
community. B) How does this framework work with
your current classes? How might you build this
into your courses given your particular
institutional goals? (e.g. tolerable to the
local context?) C) How might we resituate this
framework given the work weve done today with
the visual, assessment, and writing across the
curriculum
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Workshop Reports