What we did in class February 9

We talked through the concepts in the remediation reading with a focus on the facts that media are produced through different technologies, and that remediation is the process of re-creating a text from one medium in and through the forms, conventions,and technologies of another medium (e.g. making a movie from a book, a video game from the story line of traditional mythology, etc).

Bolter and Grusin emphasized the features of immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy draws us into the text and makes the world disappear. It makes us feel as if we are there; while hypermediacy draws our attention to the textual/representational nature of the medium - and to that medium's connections to other media.

We made a timeline of technologies and you then did some group work to identify the practices/conventions for "reading" texts in one particular medium.

We didn't get to spend as much time as I'd hoped on the Star Wars links - texts that borrow heavily from and "re-mix" texts from a number of different technologies.

For Thursday:
Read the Hayles text on Materiality and Technotexts.

Blog 5: Exploratory writing for your wikipedia project/hypertext essay.

This post is to give you a chance to respond to, reflect on, speculate about the ideas we have considered so far, and think about what you might like to dig into a little deeper and develop into an area of expertise so you can post to wikipedia on your subject, and so you can develop your hypertext essay. You do not have to write about the ideas posed in this post.

Summary of ideas raised in the course so far:
1. Literacy values and practices reflect the historical cultural conditions that surround them (illustrated in timeline, your literacy narratives, the history of the internet article + discussion).

2. New literacies are products of the new technologies AND the new ways of thinking and being (DISCOURSES) that evolved with those technologies (Lankshear and Knobel).

3. New literacies and "old" literacies and the technologies that embody them are constantly making and re-making one another (Lankshear + Knobel; Remediation; Phone Novels).

For your post, choose some aspect of the focus of the course and develop it in terms of your own particular areas of interests. Pretty much anything connected to writing, digital technologies, and the internet will work. For examples of hypertext essays developed by students from last years' class, see ENG 3080 This post is meant to get you started + open up some ideas, put your interests out there; your classmates will give you feedback on it in our next class. If you are really stuck - say what you are stuck on and ask for some suggestions, make a list of your interests, etc.

See you Thursday.