January 26: cultural ecologies & the internet

We talked through Mowery and Simcoe's essay,"Is the Internet a US invention?" not so much for the sake of prooving the US claim to the Internet's creation - but as a way to look at the relationships between the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances in the US as the Internet was evolving - and the particular form the internet too - and is taking. We will build on and extend the ideas we developed in this discussion for the rest of the term. In their book, Literate Lives in the Information Age, Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher point out that technologies evolve and take root in individual users within "cultural ecologies" => the particular sets of political, economic, social, and personal circumstances surrounding a given technologies development, dissemination and use. What is more, the national cultural ecology, will be made up of a wide range of local cultural ecologies.

In our next several classes we are going to continue to think about how and why digital communication technologies have the particular forms/effects that they do - only we are going to take up the exploration at a much more local level as you begin to reflect on your personal experiences with technology. We very briefly looked over the assignment sheet and the prompts for the literacy and technology assignment, and hopefully you will spend the next couple of days musing on some of the "formative" experiences that have made you the writer you are (and the writer you are becoming.

FOR CLASS THRUSDAY
1. Create your blog. Then send an email to ENG3080@gmail.com with your blog address.

2. Enter your first post on your blog. Use Blog 1 to reflect on your experience contributing to the timeline on google.docs. ALthough none of you seemed to want to say anything bad about the assignment in class, when I talked to you individually a number of you pointed out concerns about deleting/correcting classmate's work, about not being able to figure out how to add different features and worrying about messing the whole thing up, about the lack of resources for figuring out how to use the page. . . . There were LOTS of complaints. In this blog - give air to those grievances! And suggest how you might design a better, less confusing site for collaboration. What issues would need to be addressed? What features of google.docs kept it from being an EXCELLENT space for collaboration?

3. Read through the prompts for the literacy and technology narrative (posted to the right) and think about/talk about your past literacy experiences. Spend some time there so you are ready to write on Thrusday.

4. Make that History of the Internet Timeline come to life! Give some of the details of what happened during your lifetime and what was important to YOU. We're not there yet.

Great class today. Thanks for your questions and comments. It was sort of lecture-y - but there was a lot of material to cover.

See you on Thursday!