English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

And without further ado, here is the link to my individual project--a lovely online essay about reimagining ad use in the composition classroom. It's got pretty pictures and I hear that reading it might even be good for your health!

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/adsinclass

Before and After Page Design looks like a very interesting and useful book that I'll be sure to use at some point in the future. However, I noticed some interesting things in the introduction. First, there's the linking of design to "cool." We just read an introduction to cool studies by Liu in Postmodern class, and design is certainly a major part of cool. Liu writes how cool is an attitude or stance taken towards information-- a kind of meta-awareness of how something is making us aware, and often linked to technological skill or prowess. Mcwade writes "design doesn't belong to a certain class of people" (xi). Good, and this is actually accurate with Liu's notions of cool, which requires taking the "right" stance towards information, which is technically possible for anyone. But Liu ignores how there are battles for cool and attempts to define oneself against others who are not cool-- in other words, I think their are power-plays in cool and design which I have not seen fully addressed.

Exploration project is attached . . . cause it's long . . . and, uh, exploratory.

Interesting little site here at http://atten.tv AttenTV claims to be "the Truman Show for attention economy." I haven't checked it out too much, but appearently it tracks your clickstream on the web and then broadcasts that for others to watch.

I'm working on a paper about snobbiness and cultural capital for Pat's Public Rhetoric class, which lead me to notice an interesting visual rhetoric of space in a book store this weekend. It was a fairly large store, plenty of different categorized sections. What was interesting was the placement of the Literature section. The store's check out counter was a big raised oppressive affair, truly signifying: you the customer can not come back here.

Lo and Behold, the Second Life group actually filmed some footage, recorded some audio, and have a rough cut of our first scene basically done. Making machinima, easy right? Well, it's not brain surgery, but it is trickier than expected-- partly because we're working with Karen's husband who is a bit of a perfectionist (which only helps us in the end). Anyway, it's only a two minute scene so fa

Everything is something-tube now, and added to this growing list is teachertube.com.

Is this an attempt to make the lives and workings of teachers more visible to the public? Is it a visual resource for teachers to share community with one another? Is it potentially frightening, horrifying, yet oddly fascinating at the same time?

Check out Mrs. Burk's raps and rhymes on math . . . you'll b

Per one of the discussion questions, I got to thinking that maybe the real issue isn’t as specific as should we/and how do we incorporate more visual rhetoric into the composition class. At least not for me. As George asserts, it’s probably a bad idea to if your justification is merely holding student interest or making the class more “fun.” Don’t get me wrong, I believe these are great things to strive for, just not good enough for the sole base of a pedagogy. I think the real issue is how can we create assignments that better reflect the composing processes that students are all ready participating in and simultaneously help them better understand and interpret the arguments that surround their daily lives. I don’t feel the tired ol’ academic essay fits any of these requirements. The world does not come at them in the form of well-wrought and logically-based essays, it comes at them in a wash of visuals, text, emotion, and desire. They don’t sit down to make sense of/or contribute to this interplay by writing an essay, but many of them compose in multimedia environments on a daily basis (have you seen the loving visual rhetoric some teens put into their Myspace pages!).

So Cat's log detailed the devloping website and the script is being polished for filming. In other happy news, Sarah Robbins "Intellagirl" will be at Purdue the first week of April and we're gonna chill with her and talk about lofty things.

I'm pretty much throwing myself into the Second Life Online Annotated Bibliography right now. It's growing quite large, and I can say with only a bit of ego that it's already the most comphresive site of its nature out there. I've semi-publicized it on some listervs and boards, and am getting great feedback from some of the SL education community. Along with praise comes critique. One guy suggests I stop HTMl coding and use a delicious link roll. Why yes this is easier and more helpful (kinda) to a social networking community, it's not a very visually appealing option. Visual rhetoric wins! I think people will ultimately enjoy the more personal look of our bib and this will make it more successful.

A I wrap up Jenkins’ book, my mind is swimming with ideas and ramifications (much as it has been since I started it). What strikes me on a grand scale is the desperate need to reconsider, redefine, and recontextualize copyright and usage laws as we go further into convergence culture. Creative Commons is an excellent start but does not even begin to address the kinds of fan wanking (and I really do mean that in a good way) that Jenkins discusses. The Harry Potter chapter really crystallized this for me. Here we’re talking children not only wanting to read– but to write and participate with their own fictions and imaginations. How is this doing anything but good (silly fundamentalists aside)? You’d think anything that encouraged kids to explore their imaginations and creativity would be championed . . . then again, I suppose there are some groups (well hello again fundamentalists and conservatives!) who do sometimes see creativity as a dangerous thing.