Literacy in the 21st Century

It’s kind of interesting to look at the Guitar Hero main page.

One interesting thing I learned is that the newer versions of the game allow you to write your own music and produce it through the game, therefore allowing you to play your own songs through the game.  Cool!!  This brings up the discussion we’ve often had about “art” in the 21st century and how now anyone can be an artist thanks to new technology (other examples of this are Photoshop, digital cameras, Apple’s Garage Band, etc.).

DDR main page

Questions to ponder:

Does DDR actually count as exercise?  Check it out.

How do games like DDR affect America’s growing problem with obesity?  Here’s what the New York Times had to say.

Can Guitar Hero and DDR actually teach you anything about music and rhythm?  This guy thinks like I do.  And if academia’s getting on board, it can’t be wrong, right?

Here’s some rockin’ footage.

And last but best:  Noelle, I think this kid wants to challenge you to a throw down!

Okay, brief second post (I’m gonna count this one for next week).  A good chunk of my job includes surfing thousands of sites and mining data from them.  Usually that means a careful setup with two firefox windows, one for viewing, and one for pasting.  Typically, I’ll have six or seven sites open in one window.  Those sites are found by a googlespreadsheet with a list of names and urls.  So, I go down the list, click, click, click, and they begin to pop up as one tab after another.

Most of the time, that’s no problem.  Maybe I have to skip an advert here or there, but typically it’s a smooth process.  That’s what makes me hate autoplaying, embedded videos more than anything.  I will have six or seven tabs open, and ONE of them starts screaming at me through my small, but formidable sound system.  I then have to search through all of my open windows in a clicking frenzy to find and terminate the offending site.

I cannot conceive of a more annoying feature for a website.  Never once has a video automatically played on a site and I have sat and watched it.  Marketers have gone too far!  They assume because it makes noise, Web surfers will fixate on it.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  No person is as impervious to extraneous advertisement as an experienced internetitian (I want a copyright on that!). We close popup windows in split seconds with fluid motions, scroll past rows of advertisements, and ignore the constant movement of banner ads. The marketers know this, and thought to go one step beyond. Make a noise and surely your message will break down us browsers’ normal ad-impervious nature.

Yet, their jack-terrier like need for attention fails utterly, serving only to rile me up while I surf the web. Should I actually manage to pick up a name or product while experiencing the obnoxious yip-yip of an autoplaying embedded video ad, I make it a point to never purchase that product.

Good job marketers, your job is based on a mass hallucination whose extremities were congealed on nothing more than the interconnected network of corporate CEOs’ goal-(not logic)-driven minds. I should know, I work for a marketing company.

Multiliteracies
Chapters: Introduction, 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11

Due: In Class Tuesday March 17th

In this selection of chapters from Multiliteracies, we’re getting a taste of what the New London Group’s big idea (hint: it’s multiliteracies) is and why it’s (according to them) important.

For this Response, go to the course blog and select one of the posts that particularly interests, disturbs, or otherwise provokes you.  Compose a brief response (~1-2 “paragraphs”) to that post (or to its subject matter) in a multiliterate fashion.  Then, take ~1-2 prose text paragraphs to explain how and why what you did was multiliterate.  You’ll probably want to quote from, and cite to, the text for this part.

Your Reading Response may take whatever form and be rendered in whatever media/medium you feel it requires for its fullest expression.  If your Response is electronic, feel free to e-mail it to me anytime before our class meeting.  If it’s physical, please bring it to class with you.

Quick reminder: next week we’ll be reading Gunther Kress’ Literacy in the New Media Age instead of the Multiliteracies book.  And yes, we’re reading all of the Kress book.

Your Reading Response prompt:  RESPOND TO KRESS.  This is due by 10am on Tuesday February 24th.

Your mission: GET THE MULTILITERACIES BOOK!!!

That is all.

The topic for the Reading Response to Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing is:

Choose-Your-Own-Response

Lindqvist explains the way to move through the “labyrinth” of the book, which appears to resemble a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, but isn’t. In the CYOAs you get choices. In Bombing, Lindqvist makes those choices for you.

So now I give you the freedom (burden?) of choice. Which choice(s) will you make?

Jeff Gomez’ Print Is Dead
(Yes, the whole thing)
Due: 10am Tuesday February 3rd

Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.
(Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre chapter 19)

For this Response, we shall say goodbye to Wolf’s Proust and the Squid while saying hello to Gomez’ Print Is Dead. Wolf ends her book by noting, oxymoronically, that: “A book about how our species learned to leap beyond the text shouldn’t have a last sentence. Gentle readers, it is all yours….”

Gomez’ book, on the other hand, is not interested in giving its reader the last word. Gomez is presenting an argument (or series of arguments), and the purpose of an argument is, often, to forestall all response from the audience except rapt, mute assent.

Poppycock!

For this Response, you are to write the last word on, against, for, or beyond Gomez’ book.

My advice: have fun with it.

Proust and the Squid pp. 163-236
Due: 10am, Tuesday January 27th

I can’t explain it, the things they’re saying to me,
It’s going ,em>yayayayayayaya, oh yeah,

‘cause I’m a 21st Century digital boy,
I don’t know how to read but I’ve got a lot of toys,
My daddy’s a lazy, middle-class intellectual,
My mommy’s on valium, so ineffectual,
Ain’t life a mystery?
I tried to tell you about no control,
But now I really don’t know…
– “21st Century Digital Boy” Bad Religion

The last section of Wolf’s book addresses the brains that cannot read “normally.” For this Reading Response, I’d like you to think about this passage (arguably, one of his most famous) from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text:

Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to so with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading. (11-12)

Bringing together the first two sections with the third, I’d like you to think about what it means to read as an academic. How is this different from “regular,” or “normal” reading? Do you read in different ways, and if so, when, how, and why? Do you see any connections between the way(s) academics (especially Humanities academics) read and the ways people with dyslexia and other reading challenges do? Again, you may want to use a passage from a work to ground your discussion, but you certainly don’t need to do so.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1973, 1975.

As you’ll all be checking this blog regularly to post and to comment, I thought I’d also use it as a reminder for upcoming assignments and readings.

For next week’s class (Jan. 20th):

• Read pp. 1-162 in Proust and the Squid
• Compose Exploration 1 (which, starting next week, I will refer to as “Reading Response” 1, to conform with the syllabus and reduce confusion)
• Read your classmates’ posts (and my posts) on this here course blog and add at least one substantive comment to one of them
• Think about which course text you want to introduce (Discussion Openers)
• Think about what you want to present as your eLiteracy and “Problematic” Literacy report
• And if you find yourself sitting around with nothing much to do, why not head back to the course blog and add another comment? Everyone loves getting comments…

Click the link below for the text of Exploration (Reading Response) 1.

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