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Greetings and welcome
to the Electronic Portfolio of Ivan Lerner, for the Digital Literacies class at
CCNY, Fall 2014.
This is my “cover
letter” or introduction to the work that I have completed for this class.
Digital Literacies
gives us the theoretical backing to do what it takes in regards to encouraging
writing. And the ends justify the means: If little Johnny or Susie is writing,
who cares how they are doing it, and how they got to that point?
It boils down to
this: Who do you believe in? The students? Or the system?
[In case you’re
wondering, the illustrations/photos all represent the future—where Digital
Literacies will be accepted and part of all curriculums.]
Let us start by
describing the “system.” In this case, it is the alphabetic,
words-on-a-paper-page, APA- or MLA-style essay or research paper almost
identical to what your great-grandparents might have had to turn in ages ago.
Not that this method is not still valid, but it needs to be realized that it is
no longer the only way writing can be done.
Today, humans are
writing more than ever—but this “new” writing is largely ignored, if not vilified, by many of the
Pedagogical Gatekeepers. Texting, tweeting and Facebook status updates are not considered
“proper” writing. While a term paper for a history class should probably not be
tweeted—although it would be fantastic to witness the attempt at tweeting a
term paper on, say, Napoleon at Waterloo—the contemporary explosion of
epistolary dialogs greatly exceed in volume any previous period’s letter-writing,
as well as crossing all class lines, unlike the postal correspondences of the
Victorian Era, for example.
These writers are our
potential students.
I take the idea of
“composition” to include the process of getting your thoughts in a coherent
order—being able to “compose” what you want to communicate—even when the
student in question is not using the written word, but perhaps only talking.
In a nutshell,
through this intense course, we were “investigating composition in the digital
age,” according to the syllabus. While we were forced to learn, experiment and
communicate with all sorts of weird new machines, we also investigated the
almost schizophrenic state of digital literacy in the U.S. (if not the world).
Because everybody is
using some sort of digital literary device these days—whether simple texts or
tweets to wild, multimodal personalized web pages—the interface between humans,
their computers (or other devices) and digital recontextualization of the
universe (isn’t that what you do when you take a selfie?) is blurring and
blending.
In 1983, David
Cronenberg released his brilliant and prophetic film, Videodrome, and in it, one major character says, “The television
screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is
part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the
television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore,
television is reality, and reality is less than television.”
But had Cronenberg
known how television would have been engulfed, devoured
and mutated by the Internet/computers/on-line life, he might have written, “The
device’s screen is the retina of the mind's eye.”
There is so much that
can be done with composition and rhetoric with the tools offered by
technology—and not only are these tools changing every day (especially when
compared to the glacial pace that technological transformation took before),
but people are already using them. But ostrich-like, many advocates of
compositional pedagogy do not see the value in a non-alphabetic, unprinted,
non-paper text. Heck, they don’t even consider it text. (While I personally
prefer In Cold Blood, I am reminded
of Truman Capote’s jealous comment about Kerouac’s On the Road: “It isn’t writing, it’s typing.”)
But I believe that
Digital Literacies is especially needed in situations like Adult Education. As
the New London Group point out, there is a limit to what schools can do, but
from my experience with the middle and high schools in New York City, many
educators—or their supervisors and administrators—do not take into account the
toxic poverty some of their kids struggle with daily. These so-called educators
refuse to realize that “a student’s experiences outside the formal education
setting…play a significant role in defining the purpose of the educational
enterprise.” (T&Selfe p5) We may wish that the out of school experience be
a positive one, “securing the active cooperation of the pupil” (John Dewey
quoted in T&S), but if anything the writings of danah boyd have shown is
that parents are scared of everything, and essentially do not trust their own
children.
Since these students
are denied the learning experiences they deserve as children, they will become
the future clients of Adult Education.
I am currently using
the blog I created for class, L&L&L Amalgamated, as the digital table
for my posts for the class.
I think it is
appropriate and somewhat meta- to use L&L&L since I created it as a remediation
for the Prezi.
Built for one thing
it has become something greater—sort of like Queequeg’s coffin…
Because this is my
first semester in grad school, I probably won’t change much of this for a job
application, say. By then I’ll have more literary pedagogy under my belt, and I
will have an ePortfolio more appropriate.
In two years, that
“appropriate” may be something that I have not even considered yet…
One thing that I have
learned, and something that I am really happy about, is that I taught high
school and middle school before taking this course—several theories/ideas/etc.
that we have covered, I can see how they apply to my experience. If I had read
these before teaching, it might have been useless (or harmful?).
I am here to gain
better knowledge to aid adults in their writing: my educational theory is very
much in line with what I call “backward-ated available design”—I want to assist
students learn to improve their communication and expression skills (via writing
and composition) whether computers are available or not.
I don’t know how yet,
but I want to introduce to them the fearlessness to express themselves
thoughtfully.
Available tools are
available tools: whatever is available! The man writing a message in a bottle
does not turn his nose up at the available paper and writing utensils; we must
“use what we have,” according to Sirc.
THANK YOU, and please
explore the rest of this site!
All of the work for the class was
completed and posted on the CUNY Blackboard Learning System. There would be no
way for a non-student to access these posts, so they have been reproduced on
the L&L&L Amalgamated site; see below…
THE CLASS READING SCHEDULE
& links to reposted Blog entries…
9/10
danah boyd, It’s Complicated Chapter 3: “Addiction:
What Makes Teens Obsessed with Social Media?”
Craig Stroupe,
“Visualizing English.”
Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word Chapter 2: “Digital
Rhetoric and the Digital Arts”
9/17
New London Group, “A
Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”
Dan Anderson,
“Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Production and Consumption in
Continuum.”
James Porter, "A
Cyberwriter's Tale."
Blog Post 2 [URL] (actually, this was a PREZI, and it can be found HERE) (But it's more fun if you visit both...)
9/24
NO CLASS [Insert unhappy face :( ]
10/1
danah boyd, It's Complicated Chapter 7:
"Literacy: Are Today's Youth Digital Natives?"
Mary Hocks,
“Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments.”
Diana George, “From
Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing.”
Blog Post 3 [URL] (Another PREZI...I think I will miss this unique system of presentation, and I hope that I remember to use it for other classes going forward...)
10/8
Anne Wysocki,
“awaywithwords: On the Possibilities in Unavailable Designs.”
Jeff Bezemer and
Gunther Kress, “Writing in Multimodal Texts: A Social Semiotic Account of
Designs for Learning.”
10/15
Cindy Selfe, “Students
Who Teach Us: A Case Study of a New Media Text Designer.”
Geoffrey Sirc, “Box
Logic.”
Johndan
Johnson-Eilola, “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as
Articulation.”
&
10/22
Jody Shipka, “A
Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing.”
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Pamela Takayoshi and
Cindy Selfe, “Thinking About Multimodality.”
10/29
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, “Introduction.”
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, Chapter 1: “Gin,
Television, and Cognitive Surplus.”
11/5
Cathy Davidson, Now You See It Part One: “Introduction,”
“Learning from the Distraction Experts,” “Learning Ourselves.”
11/12
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the
Hybrid Economy Introduction and Part 1: Cultures (1-116).
11/19
Kathy Yancey,
“Electronic Portfolios a Decade into the Twenty-First Century: What We Know,
What We Need to Know.”
Marisa Klages and
Elizabeth Clark, “New Worlds of Errors and Expectations: Basic Writers and
Digital Assumptions.”
And as one of our class' final projects: THE VIDEO REMIX!!!!
thank you for visiting!
--Ivan Figueroa Lerner (12/15/14)
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