ENGL 680M: New Media

I was playing Team Fortress 2 this evening, and our team was losing. A couple of the more skilled players on the team chose to deal with this by openly insulting everyone else on the team, to the point where people were quitting. Finally, I responded with, "Dude, take it easy."

The reply of A**hole #1? "Shut up, b**ch. You're just a chicken-eating n***er."

I don't even have a real commentary on that. Anything I can think of to say seems painfully obvious to rational people.

I'm certain we all have a vested interest in theorizing and applying new media to our teaching and composing otherwise we wouldn't be in this class.

But I'm curious to know how people feel about new media in a class like 106. Having new media projects often makes my students more engaged, but I also feel frustrated sometimes by the amount of information I feel obligated to cover over the course of 16 weeks. It seems like so much can slip through the cracks, and we all know that alphabetic texts are difficult to produce as they are.

I'm teaching Business Writing this semester for the first time, so I'm in the PW mentoring class. This is the first time in a long time that I'm teaching a brand spanking-new class, and it's that way for many of the folks with me in mentoring. Teaching the new course and taking mentoring has led me to return to many of the same fundamental questions about teaching writing that I first had when I started. The one that comes up more than any other is, what exactly is the range of what we should be teaching in writing courses?

I recently created the following assignment for my students and given the subject of our class and recent discussions of avatars and social networking, I thought that I'd share This is actually three (related) assignments in one. The first has students analyzing their own Facebook entries; the second requires them to locate and annotate two articles pertaining to Facebook; the third requires them to create two avatars to represent different aspects of their self. Since these are business writing students, I asked them to create one avatar that represents their "personal" identity and a second one that represents their professional identity. (We've discussed the emergent popularity of social networking sites as tools for business networking. In class conversation we've at least mentioned Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SL, and LinkedIn.) I'll share the results with you. Feel free to borrow and adapt the assignment. It will also be located on our Student Avatar site, so putting our url [http://www.studentavatar.com] in any online posting of the assignment would be appreciated.

Creating Avatars in the Business World

Many of you, I know, have accounts on Facebook and recently I've read quite a few articles about how folks are using Facebook. Of particular interest are the articles that discuss Facebook as a business networking tool. Not only are young professionals continuing the networking that they began when using Facebook in college, but many people in older age groups are also joining Facebook. A search on the Business Week website pulls up fifteen pages of content dating back to 2005. You can find the list of articles, sorted by date, here; and this is barely a drop in the bucket compared to all of the articles available in other publications. Just in the past two months I have read, in print publications, several articles concerning Facebook, including: Wired magazine, MIT's Technology Review, and Newsweek. These are just a few examples out of many and the number of articles found published on the web far outnumber these. Quite a few of these concern the negative repurcussions of some Facebook content. For example, the colleges who have used photos on Facebook to locate and then charge underage drinkers, like Brad Davis at Emory or students who are rejected for internships as a result of Facebook content. As business writing is very much concerned with ethos, I'd like for you to consider your Facebook entries in the context of both your present and future.

GamePolitics cites a new study about spatial reasoning and gaming. "While research has consistently shown that the male brain has advantages in spatial skills like geometry, interpreting technical drawings and reading maps, a new study says that playing action-oriented video games can equalize the sexes in that regard."

Link to full article on GamePolitics.

okay, tonight i'm doing the "pretend-to-be-reading-while-actually-watching-television" game. I'm not sure what i'm watching, but this crime show just used this girl's Another Life experiences and avatar in order to track her whereabouts in a kidnapping.

I loved Turkle's article, but did anyone else notice the sexist examples she used for her discussion of open-ended role playing on page 50?

Yes. I did it.
I bought the Wii.
There it was at best buy. Shinny and clean and contained and begging to be bought: and I went with it. Then, today, I bought two Wii games and another Wiimote too.

And then I bought a new Laptop so I can play games.

It's a dangerous thing this 'new media'.

I blame all of you if I become a game addled addict.

Fellow binary lovers, enjoy!

I'm going to try to make the assignment pretty general so that you can take it in any direction that appeals to you. Your group should consist of no less than 3 people. Using the readings/topics/discussions of the first weeks of the syllabus as a starting point think about how they can operate pedagogically.

Consider any number of things including (and more):

    * What you pedagogical practices are or were
    * How they may have change, may change, or are reinforced by what we have read and discussed