Sorry this is 2 hours late, I was working at the writing center. These are kind of the same questions that I tweeted but knowing how Twitter and I don't get along, here they are again:
Number one:
What do people think about Lessig's suggestions to revise the currently exisiting copyright laws? Do you think he has a chance?
Number two:
What criteria place one in RO or RW culture? Are there criteria? I feel like I'm stuck in the middle.
I love Lessig's cyncial view of the current copyright laws and his anecdotes on firms prosecuting teens for creating RP Harry Potter games. I was confused by the description of "community spaces," "collaboration spaces," and "community." But what I love most about this book is that I can get it on my Kindle. Not that I did, but I can! Yay for multimedia.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
...So very late...
First off, because I'm so late with actually posting this blog, and I know that no one except you, Professor Arola will be reading it at this late date... I'd like to apologize once again for missing this assignment. It won't happen again.
Let's me just start without an tip toeing around a cheesy introduction that says nothing. Basically, what Johndon Johnson Eilola (that is a mouthful of a name huh?) is talking about it what we discussed in class. He wants to use symbolic-analytic work as a means to cross bridges and solve conflicts. Prof. Arola asked us in class how we might use it as a framework for any class in the whole world we could teach. It was a fascinating question and now that I've had an extra week (shame on me) to think about it, I have a more developed answer.
Originally I wanted to teach a class about breaching the gap between print and electronic writing. But now, after re-reading Eilola's definition: "...symbolic-analytic workers are valued for their ability to understand both users and technologies," I would like to hone that potential class down to teaching students the most efficient ways to combine print and electronic sources for research (201). So many electronic sources are looked down upon as being "unworthy," so to speak, and Eilola suggests that it might be possible for me to teach a combo of print sources and e-sources for students to get the most out of research. If I get his theory right. Which I hope I did.
In this potential class I would like to teach, I see a connection to the next article we read, "Web Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for Research in a New Medium," by Sorapure, Inglesby, and Yatchisin. They speak of using the "World Wide Web" as a source, and the ways to do so effectively (Sorapure et al 333). First they suggest that to use it ("it" being the internet), you must ensure that students have literacy in this type of source. They go on, in sectionalized lines of thought, about evaluating websites, what to value -- "content and authorship -- in a website before using it as a source, how to teach the visual literacy that accompanies the web to students, and the intertextuality that the internet ultimately offers ( Sorapure et al 337).
By linking a potential user to new information, they make using the internet as a source fun and challenging without the risk of a student using "BobsCivilWarSiteGOCONFEDERACYORGO HOME).com" as a legitimate source.
Now, in our FYC classrooms, we know and hopefully encourage students to use the internet as a vast resource at their fingertips. Countless original documents are electronically archived for academic access and to sift through the pile (because there isn't an online reference librarian...yet) takes a literacy that we hope we can teach our students. Michelle Sidler, author of "Web Research and Genres in Online Databases: When the Glossy Page Disappears," states that databases can help narrow the search for the needle in the haystack. The metaphorical needle is of course the one article by the one author who agrees with your reserach.
To know where online to look is something Sidler dubs spatial orientation and it can be used to oriente oneself into an ongoing academic conversation. Databases help with this . Citing Eilola (ah, I'm seeing your connections between these articles a little more clearly now professor), she states "...systems like PROQUEST present 'immense, dynamic spaces through which users move'" (qtd. in Sidler 355).
Okay, now I'm losing my train of thought so I'll just wrap this up. It is our duty as FYC teachers to engage with electronic sources and teach them to our students to bridge the gap between bad and efficient research. Their job is to use the lessons we teach them in future classes and reminisce with bobscivilwarsite.com even for nostalgia's sake.
Let's me just start without an tip toeing around a cheesy introduction that says nothing. Basically, what Johndon Johnson Eilola (that is a mouthful of a name huh?) is talking about it what we discussed in class. He wants to use symbolic-analytic work as a means to cross bridges and solve conflicts. Prof. Arola asked us in class how we might use it as a framework for any class in the whole world we could teach. It was a fascinating question and now that I've had an extra week (shame on me) to think about it, I have a more developed answer.
Originally I wanted to teach a class about breaching the gap between print and electronic writing. But now, after re-reading Eilola's definition: "...symbolic-analytic workers are valued for their ability to understand both users and technologies," I would like to hone that potential class down to teaching students the most efficient ways to combine print and electronic sources for research (201). So many electronic sources are looked down upon as being "unworthy," so to speak, and Eilola suggests that it might be possible for me to teach a combo of print sources and e-sources for students to get the most out of research. If I get his theory right. Which I hope I did.
In this potential class I would like to teach, I see a connection to the next article we read, "Web Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for Research in a New Medium," by Sorapure, Inglesby, and Yatchisin. They speak of using the "World Wide Web" as a source, and the ways to do so effectively (Sorapure et al 333). First they suggest that to use it ("it" being the internet), you must ensure that students have literacy in this type of source. They go on, in sectionalized lines of thought, about evaluating websites, what to value -- "content and authorship -- in a website before using it as a source, how to teach the visual literacy that accompanies the web to students, and the intertextuality that the internet ultimately offers ( Sorapure et al 337).
By linking a potential user to new information, they make using the internet as a source fun and challenging without the risk of a student using "BobsCivilWarSiteGOCONFEDERACYORGO HOME).com" as a legitimate source.
Now, in our FYC classrooms, we know and hopefully encourage students to use the internet as a vast resource at their fingertips. Countless original documents are electronically archived for academic access and to sift through the pile (because there isn't an online reference librarian...yet) takes a literacy that we hope we can teach our students. Michelle Sidler, author of "Web Research and Genres in Online Databases: When the Glossy Page Disappears," states that databases can help narrow the search for the needle in the haystack. The metaphorical needle is of course the one article by the one author who agrees with your reserach.
To know where online to look is something Sidler dubs spatial orientation and it can be used to oriente oneself into an ongoing academic conversation. Databases help with this . Citing Eilola (ah, I'm seeing your connections between these articles a little more clearly now professor), she states "...systems like PROQUEST present 'immense, dynamic spaces through which users move'" (qtd. in Sidler 355).
Okay, now I'm losing my train of thought so I'll just wrap this up. It is our duty as FYC teachers to engage with electronic sources and teach them to our students to bridge the gap between bad and efficient research. Their job is to use the lessons we teach them in future classes and reminisce with bobscivilwarsite.com even for nostalgia's sake.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Blogger.com doesn't like me today...
Sorry all, I took this blog posting deal right past the 5pm wire. I fought a battle with Blogger and won however, so all is well. 
"A building circular... The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference. The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed... from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence. The whole circuit reviewable with little, or... without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell." - Jeremy Bentham
"A building circular... The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference. The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed... from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence. The whole circuit reviewable with little, or... without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell." - Jeremy Bentham
My undergrad degree was a B.A. in Technical and Professional Writing, but I actually also have a minor in Criminal Justice, so I'd actually explored the writings of Bentham before, which I found really interesting. The one thing I'd never conceived of would be the applications of Bentham's machine through a Foucault lens. This MA program got me thinkin' I'd left my CrmJ roots behind...not true apparently.
From a Criminal Justice perspective, some theorists saw the Panopticon as the ideal containment method. It reduced the number of guards, bars and patrols. Foucault reduces this feeling to a discussion of power relations, in which the prisoner knows they are being watched but cannot see by whom.
It reminded me of the computer labs at my high school. Of course they were firewalled so that MySpace (back when it was the "thing") and PartyPoker were not the order of the day, but instead studying. Everyone knew that they (the nebulous "they") could tell who was logged on where and at what time, but no one knew who monitored these sites or when punishment might occur.
"...if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time..." (qtd in Foucault 201).
To apply this sort of control to the FYC classroom, is to cement the hegemony of instructors in place. To expect each student to act -- and learn -- in the same way is ludicrous, an age old lesson that seems to be having trouble exiting the teaching methods of some. "...the worker would sink to the level of general and undifferentiated labor power, adaptable to a large range of simple tasks..." (qtd. in Ohmann 24). If we expect our students to succeed we need to, as Selfe encourages, accept all the literacies that our students bring to our attention but also endow them with the ability to expand those literacies as the definition of that very word changes with them.
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