WwNM: Blog-o-Readings

Cooper:
I really enjoyed Cooper's chapter over Learning Digital Literacies. Personally, I kind of wish I read this chapter earlier (which is what I get for not exploring the book). I liked it that even though her five strategies kind of seemed obvious, it something that needed to be said and seen. To put it simply, it is kind of like common sense, yeah, you should know it but it takes somebody telling you, or you reading for it to "click" (and sometimes you just gotta learn the hard way...you know, like when your parents told you something trying to keep you from making that mistake/having that experience, and you ignore them, then BOOM! it happens, and in your mind you have a revelation: holy *&%#, mom and dad were right!) Yeah, like that.

Now, what I wrote in my margins were not about revelations but were questions (let's explore the ink in the margins): ""content" rather than skills" Archaic? and then, Can meaningful and Academic go together? Now, the archaic comment was at the end of the first paragraph where Cooper was talking about how teachers are afraid to teach digital literacies because they are worried that "skills" will take away from "content". Is this the new archaic, where we are so scared of the scary eyes that are watching and fear they are going to come to our classroom door and haul the instructor away from the students *dramatic high pitch cry: won't someone please think of the childre....Students!* I think that is the point of Multimodal Composition. Content can be taught with skills. Skills can help shape and inform content. We just need to be told that. Kind of like how some articles you read have you thinking: i thought everybody knew this? Well, it may be that way, but it wasn't written and published. Even though we are beginning to champion the cause of mutlimodal composition, it still needs to be written and "published" for it to become true. Precedents need to be set.

Griffin

I like Griffin. I liked it that she talked about writing centers and their position in all this multimodal happenings. I really found the section "Discovering Rhetorical Correspondences" interesting. I think it's because of the work I particpated in during my Master's about writing centers. During the work, I kept seeing the theme of tutors/consultants (whatever you label you want to give them) that when they were at a loss they turned to grammar. So, you have the idea of the writing centers begging their false persona of fix-it-shops and editing services be dropped, but the people who are asking for this are helping to perpetuate the idea of "fix-it". I'm starting to digress here...perhaps this also ties to the idea of the perfect paper, and the specific focus of the end product.

MMkay, where was I? So, I find it interesting that tutors who probably surf the web in their downtime, are afraid to touch multimodal compositions. I mean, am I the only nerd out there that when watching a movie or tv show, or even an commercial/ad just start to automatically apply ideas and concepts leaned from English classes. Really?! Some shows/movies reek of ideas, REEK! (You're looking at someone who took the movie Starship Troopers and wrote a paper over it about how it fits into ideas of rhetoric. Mayhaps the real problem is the defining and categorization of something multimodal into "Composition". We are having to update a catergory of English that still has stereotypes surrounding it. So, people in the field must battle stereotypes of what Composition and Rhetoric is, as well as defining a new category to include a new class of composition.