Composing for the blogsphere
This course seeks to develop rhetorical and compositional ability in online environments and communities. Rhetoric is the dedicated study of how a community creates and sustains itself through discouse, composition is the dedicated study of effectively communicating through discourse. As students, you will learn that every university discipline (e.g. chemistry, English, engineering, pharmacy, aviation) has its own way of defining, collecting, validating, exchanging, analyzing, critiquing, and inculcating, knowledge; in the coming months and years you will select a major and be expected to assimilate to these practices. This course seeks to expidate that process by providing you with the tools to analyze and enter such a discourse community. My focus will be on stressing the unique presence of "audience" and extreme importance of kairos and context in online environments; learning how to adjust to the norms and epistemological expectations of one community should help one adjust to other communities, thus helping students adjust to university discourse communities. This semester we'll work with traditional text, photo and video editing software, and social authorship tools. I steadfastly maintain that learning to integrate oneself into a vibrant, social community is an important activity for any 21st century citizen.
Obviously, this is not your traditional composition course. As my playful title for the course makes clear, we are piloting a "new" approach to composition--one that treats writing less as the isolated activity of a sole writer, and more as the collaborative activity of a community--one built on cooperation, exchange, and trust. Put simply, I believe the internet is profoundly changing the way people, especially educated people, collect, analyze, exchange, evaluate, distribute, and respond to knowledge and culture. Traditional composition is not properly equipped to equip you with the practices necessary to maximize the potential of these changes. Composition 2.0 will attempt to be. It could potentially fail to do so, but those who travel om digital streams understand that risk is an inherent factor in a world constructed on perpetual beta.
Throughout this course, you will craft and maintain a web presence in a field of your choice: politics, literature, music, movies, sports, fashion, web design, video games, hacking--basically anything you (and at least three other people) find intellectually stimulating enough to research and write on for an entire semester. Working with a group of other students, you will maintain an active blog and participate in discussions in your community. This will involve using Web2.0 applications such as Blogger, Google Reader, RSS, Digg, and del.icio.us to locate "hot topics" and credible sources. My goal is to help you become a productive net-zien in the community of your choice.
Those with techno-phobia should not run for the exit--for two primary reasons. First of all, I myself am fairly new to technology. I only started using a computer for anything other than word processing four years ago, and now I work as a technology mentor for Purdue's Graduate English program and teach standards-compliant web architecture and design. It can be done, its not that hard, and I will be senstive to your learning curve. Second, given the exponential increase of technology in the last decade, learning how to navigate this digital terrain is an essential part of a 21st century education. Do not think that "I'm going to be an X, so I don't need to learn computers." Everyone, I repeat, everyone will need to learn computers not only to integrate into the 21st century workforce, but also (and to me infinitely more importantly) to fully participate in 21st century democracy. In short, you cannot afford not to learn this stuff.
