CandCBlog » Literacy

What is Composition?

Joe Erickson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:19:44 +0000

Find out next week when you attend the CCC Webinar featuring Doug Hesse and Cindy Selfe who will be “continuing the conversation” they began in recent CCC articles. Here is a more detailed description of the event, as described by Kathleen Yancey on the WPA listserve:

During the first Extending the CCC Conversation, on March 4 at 4:00 p.m. EST, Cindy Selfe and Doug Hesse will continue a conversation they began in the Interchange section of the current issue of CCC. They invite you to join the conversation as they consider two questions. First, how do we define composition? And second, what does this definition mean for our teaching of first-year composition? The seats for this virtual conversation are limited, so please reserve your seat early. And when you sign up, feel free to identify additional questions you’d like to add to the conversation.

Just a few seats are left . . .…

JUMP: Publication Venue for Undergraduate Multimedia Writing

Joe Erickson — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:32:53 +0000

The JUMP: The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects is an online journal focused solely on publishing multimedia projects produced by undergraduates. I think this is such a great idea considering ho much work is produced by undergraduates in various writing programs around the country every semester. A journal like this can not only inspire ideas that will help spur creativity among burgeoning undergraduate new media writers, but it also provides a place to share and validate their work. For anyone who teaches new media writing courses to undergraduates, this could be a great resource to introduce to your students. Check it out.

Hybrid Books, or “Vooks”

Joe Erickson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:12:41 +0000

The New York Times is running an interesting story on an emerging hybrid genre in fiction, what they refer to as “Vooks,” or Video Books. One publisher, Simon & Schuster, is introducing short video clips into electronic novels. Apparently, the videos mostly add depth to the textual plot points, but in some cases they actually advance the plot. According to the article, this experimental genre is a response to growing interests in e-readers, and an acknowledgement of diminishing interests in purely textual fiction.

As a person deeply fascinated with the potentials of new media for crafting both fiction and non-fiction, I think this is a promising development. Check it out here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/books/01book.html?_r=2&hp

Andrea Lunsford on New Literacy

Joe Erickson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:17:58 +0000

Clive Thompson of Wired.com has an article on “New Literacies” in which he cites Andrea Lunsford. Lunsford has collected a ton of writing samples from students at Stanford between the years of 2001 and 2006, including school assignments, blog postings, chat sessions, and many other formal and informal types of writing. After looking over her data, Lunsford, argues the following:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization”

Thompson offers Lunsford’s remarks as part of his response to the typical doom-and-gloom conversations about how technology has supposedly reduced writing to a state of impoverishment.

A short, but utterly relevant and insightful article -