Revised Final Project

http://learningathens.blogspot.com/

Project Draft

Here's a link to my Athens place blog-in-progress:

http://learningathens.blogspot.com/

Storyboard

I formatted this more or less like an outline, with each basic section planned as an individual blog entry:

Storyboard

Introduction Entry

Why blogs?

              -Intersections of public and private writing

              -Exploring audience, genre, and civic participation

              -Community building

Sources:

•               Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog
•               Educational Blogging
•               Learning to Write Publicly: Promises and Pitfalls of Using Weblogs in the Classroom
•               The Year of the Blog
•               Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition

Why place?

               -Place as rhetoric

               -Place and identity

               -Place and citizenship

Sources:

• Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs
• Rural Voices: Place Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing
• The Locations of Composition

Blog 1: Prework Entry

• Category PreWriting
• Tentative Topic
• Research Plan
• Entry Outline
• Modal Planning/Considerations

Blog 1: Local History Entry

Topic: Naming Athens and Ohio University

Blog 2 Prework Entry

• Category PreWriting
• Tentative Topic
• Research Plan
• Entry Outline
• Modal Planning/Considerations

Blog 2: Local Culture/Language Entry

Topic: Scotch-Irish Influences on Local Dialect

Blog 3: Prework Entry

• Category PreWriting
• Tentative Topic
• Research Plan
• Entry Outline
• Modal Considerations

Blog 3: Local Issues Entry

Topic: Ohio University Beyond Coal

Blog 4: Final Reflections Entry

Tentative Project Proposal

My proposed assignment asks students to compose multimodal blog entries on a variety of locally-based topics, in order to allow them opportunities for exploring the rhetorical nature of the places they inhabit. They would also be gaining skills and experience in the construction of place-based knowledge and identities, skills Lindgren proposes are necessary for healthy citizenship in a given environment.

As it currently stands, the proposed assignment requires 4 separate blog entries, each one with a topic to be chosen from a specific category:

Blog 1, due week 3: Local geography and history

Blog 2, due week 5: Local language and culture

Blog 3, due week 7: Contemporary social issues (explore, explain, and/or argue a local issue)

Blog 4, due week 9: Reflection

For the final project, I would like to follow through with my proposed place-blogging assignment, completing each aspect from the point of view of a potential student. In doing so, I hope to explore each aspect's feasibility as well as to provide students with a specific example of the kinds of composing I would like them to do for such an assignment.

Specifically, I would be required to do the following:

-freewrite/plan in order to narrow a workable blog topic to fall within each proposed category, consider a rhetorical purpose and target audience for each entry, and decide on methods of research for each entry

-compose and post a multimodal blog entry for each proposed category

My thinking at this point is that for each of the 4 blog categories, I would post two entries. The first would show my prewriting/planning for that topic, along with extended research in the area of blogs and blogging pedagogy. The second would be the polished entry regarding the topic.

…....

Sample Prewrite

Category 1: Local geography and history

I already know a good bit about the geography of Athens County, in part because they're so similar to the rest of southeastern Ohio and share connections with conditions throughout Appalachia. I know less about the specific history of Athens County, such as local settlement patterns, university history, local legends and myths, etc. These are things I would like to learn, and that I think are valuable to feeling like a citizen of Athens County. (I went to a talk Craig Meyer gave about his research on the Civil War experiences of Springfield, Illinois; he claimed that after all the research he felt like Springfield was his hometown, even though it wasn't, simply because he'd learned so much about it. That seems like a very powerful statement about the influence of place knowledge and our interpretations of what it means to feel at home in a place.)

In thinking about the historical conditions of Athens County, I'm realizing that, unlike my home county, I don't really know the story behind the county's naming. I'm assuming that it was named after Athens, Greece, as several locations in this area reflect classical names (Troy, Carthage, and Rome townships come to mind). Is it solely due to the influence of Ohio University? Whose idea was it? Why Athens and not another famous seat of learning (such as Miami University's town of Oxford)? What can we learn about the early county residents from this name choice?

I think it would be worth knowing this information for its own sake, but also in order to understand the rhetorical power behind such a name. Living and attending a university in a town and county named for one of the great centers of learning was intended to mean something. It's a responsibility as well as a name. My target audience for this blog entry would therefore likely be a local one, of university and county residents. However, I would like to convey something about the power of naming that could have an effect for readers in multiple locations. Place names are (usually) chosen thoughtfully and with a purpose. Maybe knowing what this purpose is can teach us something about ways to live there.

Modality: In the blog entry, I could include links to any relevant information found online. In order to better illustrate the connection between Athens, Ohio and Athens, Greece, (again, assuming this is the origin of the name), I could include images of the county's founders, the early campus, ancient Greek ruins or famous Athenian intellectuals. If a personal interview becomes necessary in order to ascertain information, I could record and post it on the blog (assuming, again, that I could accomplish this).

Research Plan: My first source would probably be an internet scan, as most counties have a webpage, visitor's bureau, and a historical society that could give me more information about county origins. Beyond that, the reading room at Alden Library's rare book collection has copies of Ohio county histories which would likely prove useful. Failing this, direct contact with staff at the historical society might provide needed information about the county's formation and naming. 

Conference Revision

Proposal Revision (Thanks, Ashley!) , CEAO Spring Conference, 2011

Amanda Hayes

Place-based Blogging as a Pedagogical Tool

In 2005, Tim Lindgren's article “Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs” explored the nature of blogs as a means of writing ourselves into specific environments, and of encouraging, even inspiring, others to do the same. Lindgren perceived in such a practice the potential for greater environmental health and well-being available to humans with a cultivated affinity for the places they spend their lives. In this perception, Lindgren joins theorists such as Derek Owens, Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser, all of whom have written about the place-based nature of writing and teaching. However, Lindgren's sees the blogging genre's adaptability and wide range of potential audiences making it uniquely fitting as a form of writing adaptable to multiple physical and communicative ecologies.

However, while he explores the genre traits, pedagogical potential, and rhetorical agencies of place-based blogging, the focus of Lindgren's article never quite makes it into the classroom. And if he, along with other theorists, is correct in fearing that we as humans are forgetting how to connect beneficially with our physical and rhetorical communities, the classroom seems like an important place to cultivate these skills.

My proposal is to explore place-based blogging's function in a first-year composition environment, utilizing my experience with such a project to investigate Lindgren's theorized potential for place-blogging as a pedagogical tool. My students' blogs were intended to achieve a greater understanding for themselves and their readers, of the nature and value of place-based knowledge, community participation, and thoughtful living in a unique environment. My presentation will outline this project, exploring the ways in which place-blogging functioned, or failed to function, as a means of rhetorically and physically connecting first-year students with the campus environment, as well as providing a means of place, self, and cultural exploration.

Assignment Revision

The revised assignment...

A Reflection

I'm noticing that my first blog entry was a bit of a mix between conventional academic format (I included a photo of the book's cover, and made sure I stated the title and author of the work I was analyzing) and more open writing (I notice now that I didn't go for the standard layout—introduction, discussion, conclusion). I think the reason I skipped some of the academic formalities, even though those tend to be my throwback options for unfamiliar writing situations, is that even though I'd never blogged, the blog genre is becoming increasingly pervasive in society. In other words, I'd seen blogging done even without having directly written, or even read, a blog entry myself. I'd read the book The Broke Diaries, which started as a blog, and I'd seen the film version of Julie and Julia, which incorporated blog writing into the plot. This experience of the blog genre was limited to what might be called entertainment blogging; I wasn't sure as to what sub-genres like academic blogging or political blogging within the blog sphere might look like. The result of that uncertainty was an entry that seems to mix academia with less trenchant formalities. Even my graphics echo this mixture. As stated, the first image is a photo of Wysocki's New Media; the second is a still frame from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

I'm not sure I ever really stopped mixing genres and styles in my blog writing. (Of course, according to Tim Lindgren, that's what blogging is: an ecological mixture and adaptation from many genres.) I did surprise myself by the tenor of my reflections. In pretty much each entry, I focused on something that I didn't like or that troubled me, rather than something I did like or agree with:

Blog 2: disagreement with Clark's classroom dependence on Second Life—why not take real field trips?-- and her appropriation of “our” cultural identity (I'm pretty sure she and I are not culturally identical)....

Blog 3: Geoffrey Sirc's colonization of language (You don't see it? Really???)....

Blog 4: Cleary et al's attribution of wiki failures to faults with their students (if students didn't like wikis, it was their own fault, 'cause wikis are great)....

Blog 5: Multimodal Composition's comfort with teachers assigning projects they could not do themselves, which in my case is a good bit....

I think my eagerness to be negative comes from a few sources. For one thing, all my years of critical training have made me, well, critical. However, this isn't the most compelling reason; critics also explore things they liked, whereas I focused largely on the dislikes. Perhaps its because, to a large degree the things I disliked were matters of language, how the authors expressed their thoughts, and not always the thoughts themselves. This kind of analysis, of course, is what I'm comfortable with. I feel less qualified to critique multimodal composition concepts than I do language. So if we're going to get psychological, my guess would be that my technological insecurities make it easier for me to vent my dislikes. Hello, my name is Amanda, and I'm technologically insecure...

I think the most valuable aspect of the blogging assignment, with regard to my personal insecurities, was the responses from my classmates. I seriously doubted anything I could say on the subject of New Media would be worth responding to. When I did my first entry, I imagine I somewhat resembled the scrawny kid in gym class who knows they'll never get picked until the end. Only instead of “please pick me, please pick me,” it was “please write a response, please write a response.” (Of course, I was also hoping for a nice response, but I don't think academics are supposed to admit to that.) The first responses I got were from Matthew and Ashley:

Matthew said...

Like you, I'm drawn to the idea the "new media" doesn't necessarily mean new technology, but instead an emphasis on the materiality and agency inherent in different types of texts / medias.

As you say, this ensures that human thought and insight isn't separated from technology such a definition also inspires us to consider multiple forms of media and communication in terms of rhetorical / material consciousness. How much compositional awareness goes into the production of a particular textual or iconic object. More importantly, how is that object read in terms of materiality / agency.

Good post that got me thinking.

Ashley Evans said...

"For too many people, just that we can (or, I suppose, at least they can) use advanced technology is enough to make it mandatory, without significant attention as to why."

This is so perfectly worded, and it allows me to digress a bit:

There now exist jobs that are devoted entirely to social media. (I have a friend from undergrad who makes OBSCENE amounts of money simply tweeting and making goofy videos for Pancheros.) These people are paid to communicate professionally on the internet. Where are they taught the rhetorical skills--or the grammar or the importance of word choice--that helps them become successful? The composition classroom, of course!

I think my point was that so many people have jumped on the technology bandwagon that it is now unclear who should be responsible for teaching it. Or that what we are already doing in the composition classroom can transfer to any discourse community. Or that learning rhetorical strategies in essay writing can transfer. Something along those lines.

I'll admit, I was pretty close to flying after this. (I don't think anyone has ever told me I worded something perfectly before...happy sigh...) The continuing comments throughout the quarter were similar in tone; this is not to say they were all praising—though I do think I needed that in the beginning—but everything my classmates noted was done kindly and in a spirit of inquiry. In other words, no one ever called me out on my ignorances. (How dare you criticise Geoffrey Sirc?! The man's a genius! was a response I never received.)

I think my blog collection is a fairly authentic representation of where I stand now, as a student and a teacher. I've been exposed to new and unfamiliar ideas, certainly; I've done some forms of composition I never had before. And mentally, I'm somewhere in a middle territory. I've begun the process of learning, perhaps, but I'm not finished yet. Maybe I'm in the Wunderkammer state...

A Taste of the Things I Do Not Know

I woke up today with the urge to make a running tally of things I can't do.

Well, that's not entirely true. I did some more reading in Multimodal Composition before this urge really took hold.

So, let's see. I can't shoot a movie on my iphone. For the following reasons:

1. I don't have an iphone.
2. Even if I did, I probably couldn't use it. (I can't hardly use my current cell phone, which I bought because it was the cheapest one. Maybe it can shoot movies? I doubt it though.)
3. Even if I could figure out how to hit record on a video camera of some sort—and I have a very tenous grasp of how to do this with my regular digital camera—I wouldn't know what to do from there. Using editing software? No clue.

I can't record or edit audio. I've never used a microphone. Even if I could record the audio, I don't know how to store, play, or edit it on a computer.

These facts trouble me more nowadays than they used to.

What's interesting to me about Multimodal Composition, however, is that they don't seem to think I should be bothered by this. Even if, or perhaps especially if, I'm using multimodal assignments in my class.

Take, for example, chapter 10: When Things Go Wrong. They make a point, repeatedly, that has been made before not only in earlier chapters but also in previous readings. Students are becoming increasingly familiar with media technologies, often more familiar than their composition teachers. Therefore, teachers should let “the students pool their understandings and information” (133) because “a class, collectively, can identify a solution” (133) to technical problems and individual shortcomings. They repeat several times throughout that we should “Encourage students to help each other” (144) understand the technologies and potential problems involved in their usage.

One one hand, I can understand how this could be a beneficial practice. Many people learn best by doing, and therefore hands-on training is a good thing. (Did anyone else laugh at the chapter's technical advise of “Read the instructions” (136)? Gee, I hadn't thought of that...) And I can see the potential empowerment involved in students functioning as de facto co-teachers for their less technologically-advanced classmates.

Here's the problem. (And you know, I ALWAYS find a problem, cheery soul that I am...) I have an ethical issue with assigning my students to do something I could not do, and then judging them on what they produce. This is not a soundly logical problem on my part. I wouldn't say it's somehow unethical to criticize a James Cameron film just because I could never make a James Cameron film. I don't think it's unethical for less skilled students to peer critique the work of their classmates. I think the crux of my issue is this: I don't like to take credit for work I do not do, and I don't like to make others do the work I do get credit for. In essence, those students who take the responsibility of teaching technology usage in a composition class are (probably) not being paid to do so. The teacher is getting paid. The students, in fact, are paying for the privilege. I simply cannot see beyond the smack of exploitation inherent in this proposed system.

I don't otherwise consider myself a classroom control freak, nor do I think it's necessarily a good thing to think of the world in monetary terms. (Perhaps the benefit to self-esteem and knowledge-building that the students gain in such a case are far more valuable than any actual salary.) Like I said, I recognize the logical discrepancy in my own conundrum. So why does my stomach hurt when I think of asking students to teach each other how to shoot movies and edit sound for an assignment I've given them? Is it wrong that I feel like I'd be asking them to do my job?

See, I Even Nitpick the Things I Like

Let me state at the outset that I'm so glad Lana did her presentation on wikis...I feel like I understood the Cleary et al article much better, having some notion of what wikis could do and how they could function.

And I'm glad I could understand it, because this article has some significant things to say about the ways composition seems to viewing wikis as components of the writing class. And, although the article is overall pretty enthusiastic about the potential wikis have for writing students, from my perspective it is the "negative" things the authors have to say that I find most valuable.

Perhaps negative is a strong word. I'll say instead, "honest," which is what I marked several times in the margins of my article print-out. (On a related note, let me also add that online publishing is all well and good, but I will likely never become comfortable with reading longer articles on a computer screen. If for no other reason than I'd miss scrawling my marginalia.)

My first margin scrawl came toward the end of the introduction. I'm much more used to articles written largely to expound on successful classroom tools or practices, so I was a little taken aback to see the authors, who like wikis, admitting that their classroom successes could not be attributed "to our use of wikis." I was also at this point much less certain about what I would be reading  over the next 29 pages of my print-out. (And let me tell you, I wasn't all that excited about reading 30 pages of Wikis: YAY!!! at the beginning. Ten or twenty pages, maybe, but 30 pages of pedagogical exuberance is pushing it for me, especially since I think the word "wiki" sounds like it should be the name of a candy bar.)

The "Improving Skills" section also got an honest rating from me, for its discussion of a subject I find somewhat vexing: collaborative writing. Any teacher who says that every collaborative writing project they've ever assigned has resulted in sterling work and phenomenal student growth needs to contact me, 'cause I have some questions. Apparently Cleary et al do too, because they stated that "collaboration did not always result in improved writing." And while the authors don't necessarily attribute this failing to the use of wikis, they recognize that the wikis didn't solve it, a fact that runs contrary to the concept of wikis as the ultimate collaborative writing technology. As the authors later state, their previous understandings of wikis led to "overly inflated expectations," which were not met.

As much as I love their honesty (and I do, honest), I'm still critical--and perhaps cynical--enough that I found a point to nitpick. In the “Student Response to Wikis" section, the authors state:

              "Because technically wikis are quite easy to use, we attribute (student) resistance to the challenge     and anxiety generated by one more new thing to learn for non-traditional students for whom much of the college environment is already foreign as well as to the learner-centric nature of wikis, which gives students more responsibility for structuring their learning."

Let me unpack the problem I have with this section. A) Don't state categorically that anything is easy to use, because nothing is easy for everyone. Would you tell someone with dyslexia, "What's your problem? Reading is EASY!"???? B) People who don't find it easy, or just plain don't like it, dislike it because they aren't up for a challenge. And C) People who don't like wikis may also not like them because they are somehow more lazy than other students, and don't want to take the extra "responsibility" for their own learning. Ok, ok, I don't think the authors were intentionally stating that they thought non-traditional students were timid and lazy--in fact, anyone who has worked with non-traditional students pretty much knows that the timid and lazy never return to academia to BECOME non-traditional students. But I do think the authors were a little too desperate to defend their pedagogical work in the end, and tried to pass some of the blame for any failures onto their students. Next to the above quote, my own marginalia response to the authors states, "Hey, don't be mean."

In conclusion, I think this article was valuable not just for its insights regarding the use of wikis as classroom writing tools, although the treatment and suggestions offered by the authors were logical and helpful. It was also useful as a "what-won't-work (necessarily)" discussion, which is something I haven't seen much of, all told. Even if they tried a little too hard to justify their wiki-work at the end, arguably at the expense of their students. 

The Creepiness Conundrum

Geoffrey Sirc makes some good points....

We could try to make composition more interesting to students. (In fact, most of us do try this.)

Few of us are happy to think of ourselves as an “academic gate-keeper” (126).

That said....

...did anyone else reading this essay get a little creeped out?

Let me gather some examples:

Sirc seems to encourage authors perceiving text production in the way the artist Cornell “loved his objects, 'happy to possess them'...the materially interesting, then, is what should guide acquisition” (116).

Later, he affirms: “A primary goal now in my writing classes (is) to show my students how their compositional future is assured” (though in what way assured I'm less certain) “if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic” (117).

On that same page, he proposes “composition as craving; teaching students to feel desire and lack” (117).

Soon after, he celebrates composition materials “chosen on the basis of exoticism and strong interest” (118).

And he argues that “the grammar of the box can keep us grounded in the basic image, in things we really care about” (119).

***

In other words...Hey people, let's colonize composition!

Yes, this is probably not Sirc's goal. I highly doubt that, if asked, Sirc would feel we should take the same social aesthetics colonizing powers took toward empire-building and apply them to composition.

Unfortunately, his wording could not have been more ill-chosen, at least from my perspective. Many of his descriptions of composition or the way teachers should approach composition have tinges of either colonialism or sexism. The materials of writing are like “objects” that should be “acquired” and “possessed.” They should be “exotic” and “craved.” Composition itself should be focused on the aesthetic, as the “image” equates to “things we really care about.” (By the by, isn't caring only about the "image" of almost anything considered fairly shallow?) I'm sorry, I'm putting an “image” together in my head of composition as the unknowable, exoticised, eroticised female “other,” defined best in terms of what she lacks, and born to be controlled and possessed by the patriarchal gaze.

Umm...Excuse me. You're making Composition uncomfortable now.

C'mon, I can't be the only one who finds Sirc's use of this language weird, right? 

In fact, this language alienated me to the point that I'm sure I've overlooked much in this essay. Looking over it again, I can see there are places where I've marked “hmm,” in the margin, my go-to marginalia for sections I feel deserve deeper thought. But Sirc's deep, deep interest in aestheticizing composition (to the point that his noting that students should be learning “some kind of basic prose styling to help them avoid verbal pitfalls in formal settings” seems a grudging after-thought not included until page 128) rubs me the wrong way.  

It's What All the Cool Kids Are Doing

Of course, it's possible for me to dislike an idea, even to disagree with it, without necessarily thinking it's wrong. Just let me say that now.

J. Elizabeth Clark's article makes me flip-flop so much I feel...spin-ny. 

So ok, Clark and I started off on the wrong foot. She stated, "almost every facet of our personal and professional lives has shifted to new uses of communicative technology. With the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 comes a shift in our cultural norms" (27; emphasis mine). I'm a little wary of the assumption of "ourness", because it seems to oppose a "not ourness." Who is silenced in the assumption that there is a cultural and technological "us"? Teaching at community college, I've had many students who have never even typed a paper on a computer, let alone had fluency with email or internet. Does that mean they are not part of "our" culture? That they are abnormal? Maybe they are, by a strict definition of the term, abnormal--but what harm do we do them by insinuating that such people are not "21st Century" enough? Do they become invisible because they are not part of "our" culture as Clark conceives of it? 

However, Clark won me back a little bit with her John Dewey-love, and her interest with "the civic importance of education" (28). (I was also enamored with her history lesson on page 28—history minor, right here). In fact, I would have liked her to focus more on her definition of education for civic participation. I'm not satisfied with her insistence that we make “the now” our central focus. (Again, I wanted more explanation. My first instinct was to smart off about that very history section I just praised: jeez, for someone who's all about pushing “the now,” she seemed to have found something interesting in the “then,” didn't she?) I'm pretty sure she's not equivocally cutting off the past as a realm with nothing to offer us as teacher or our students as learner. But what is she saying about “now,” exactly?

I suppose most of my actual evaluation of Clark's proposals is dependent on how they are approached. For example, she seems to believe in the great success of Second Life as a teaching and learning space: “In my Composition 1 class, I am using Second Life as an environment for the equivalent of digital field trips for my students, and I base writing assignments around these field trips.” My gut response to this is a mild form of despair; why not take real trips, to real places? (Don't beat me up over definitions of “real” at the moment; I'm going somewhere with this.) I suppose I can answer my own question, in that it's likely such “real” places don't always exist that can coincide with her assignments. As she continues, “As a class, we take field trips from our college's computer lab to different sites in Second Life that intersect with writing assignments.” But again, my initial reaction is displeasure. Why not compose writing assignments that can help students engage with the physical places and communities around them? Why make these interactions exclusively virtual? Clark might say that its because in the world of “the now,” learning to make connections in the virtual world are as important as any others. Or, she (or any other instructor answering the call to her pedagogical banner) might say that she uses these virtual connections as a means of teaching connection with all places, connecting the skills it takes to be a good Second Life neighbor with the skills it takes to be a citizen of our physical neighborhoods. I agree that the digital world can be a powerful mediating force for learning how to interact with the world. But for me to feel compelled by Clark's pedagogy, I would have to believe that the teaching going on is considered in this light, rather than simply as approaching digital literacy of and for itself alone, as the “now” way to live in the (virtual) world.

New (and Old) Media

by Anne Frances Wysocki, et al.

I was trying to piece together Wysocki's definition before she directly stated it, and I kept noticing her references to the composer/writer's role in utilizing available materials. (For example, on page 7 she states that writing teachers “can bring to new media texts a humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption, which is currently missing”; in expounding what new media lacks, Wysocki seems to be indicating what to her definition is absolutely necessary: human thoughts manipulating and interpreting available means.) I also noticed a theme of visibility—in essence, that new media is writing's “material designs” (13) made visible. These themes seem to play prominently into Wysocki's ultimate definition of new media texts as “by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality” (15) in order to draw reader attention to the text's production.

I'm liking Wysocki's definition of new media largely because it speaks to my own concern about losing the human element in advanced technology. Wysocki foregrounds this concept, stating directly that she want new media to maintain a strong human agency, not to merely be technologically-composed products. Her definition—that new media is text specifically produced with an understanding and foregrounding of the material options available for production—makes human agency inextricably linked to what New Media, at heart, is. (I'm sorry, is anyone else finding themselves wanting to capitalize New Media—even though Wysocki doesn't? I must analyze this further...). By this reasoning, new media texts do not have to be digitally-produced, despite the sense many may have of new media as exclusively dependent on digital production.

I like this definition, because it makes even someone as technologically-remedial as myself capable of producing new media projects. (I could write with crayon on construction paper and it would fit Wysocki's notion of new media, provided that I produced that text intentionally, with a clear sense of the whys and hows of its purpose and audience effect.) That said, I don't think that just because Wysocki defines it that way, others would embrace my crayon-construction paper effort as new media, particularly if it were compared with the shiny video essay somebody else shot on their iphone, even if it covered the same subject as my crayon opus. (And no, I don't really know what I'd write about, or who for, that would best be served with crayons and construction paper. I'm still a new media fledgling.) Wysocki quotes Manovich's alternate definition of new media, which focuses it solidly outside of human intentionality, as “graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts that have become computable” (18).

Uh oh. My crayon opus ain't gonna cut it in Manovich's class.

So while I prefer Wysocki's vision of new media (a definition that “encourages us to stay alert to how and why we make these combinations of materials, not simply that we do it” [19]), I'm not sure it will carry the day as far as composition theory goes, given that digital technologies tend to whip us into a collective frenzy of the cool and computable. For too many people, just that we can (or, I suppose, at least they can) use advanced technology is enough to make it mandatory, without significant attention as to why. If a focus on how and why can help us maintain a solid connection to the kinds of rhetorical principles we try to teach regarding alphabetic writing, and if we can sustain a sense of human agency amidst all the shiny technology at our disposal, new media may yet maintain the “humane” vision Wysocki hopes for.

”And New Media's heart grew ten sizes that day...”

Just as the hatchling turtle must struggle through the heavy sands toward an ocean he has never seen, so too does Amanda struggle toward technological literacy. (Push, little turtle, push!)