Wyrd! Making connections between and reflecting upon the our 'Zine culture community and the metaprogramming class at Penn State have sprouted a new narrative. The "Emboldened Linking" page will be a contribution to PraxisWiki, a wiki about the uses of emergent technologies for teaching and scholarly practice. Check it out, add your insight, make it bettah, roll your own, link it to and fro! I'm thinking that our fantastic real-time and between-class writing and linking to/from/within/for all of our 'zine projects is setting the tone and showing the way. Keep writing for each other, it's working!

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Wyrd is Common more wiki for remixing, 'zining

ENC 4931: Piloting Pedagogies

ENC 4931 ST: Making a Mesh of Things: Piloting Pedagogies

Professor Trey Conner

When: W 6-8:50

Where: DAV 253

ENC 4931 is an outcomes-based, writing-intensive multimedia composition course open to both undergraduates and graduate students, technology novices and experts, and and to all students who care about writing and open access to technological resources for creative practice. The course will be of special interest to teachers-in-training who expect to teach writing upon graduation and computer science majors who want hands-on experience. We will directly investigate the effects of wireless technologies and open-source software on writing instruction in our school systems and communities. Students will form groups, and each group will conduct research in 3 phases:

1. conduct library and field research on case-studies in multimedia composition.

2. investigate feasible hardware and software solutions for the design, implementation, and maintenance of small open-access wireless networks for multimedia practice, and propose a design for an off-campus multimedia composition laboratory, where students, teachers, and community members can discover and share technical, social, and rhetorical possibilities between different media.

3. Class participants will then initialize actual writing-lab spaces and pilot-test these spaces in the community. These lab spaces will then be used as sites to consider the convergence of teaching, writing and technology in today’s culture. Group research projects may include questions about the role of emergent technologies, music, literature, visual rhetoric, information-processing, and communicative performance in shaping digital literacy. Groups will host skill-shares, organize colloquia, and design participatory research methodologies that address the politics and ethics of open and distributed technologies, and compose a narrative that describes the participatory research methodologies they use, reports on the pilot experience, and proposes future research.

Nota Bene: Grant funding will provide resources for technology and for an expert technology consultant. Additional resources will include a course wiki, where we will collectively imagine, discuss, and write our projects. While technological expertise is not required, enthusiasm for the potential of low-and-no-cost digital technologies as teaching and learning tools is crucial.

For further information contact Dr. Conner at conner@stpt.usf.edu

Starter Links:

St. Petersburg WiFi

Community Wireless Solutions

Thin Client How-To

what's up with free software?

State Technology Report a supplement to the 10th edition of Technology Counts, assesses the status of K-12 educational technology nationwide.

Hey Trey, Check out the video I animated. This

So... when are you going to make copies of those comics I gave you? Ninja

Here's a story that explains how Trey got here.

January 16th

Emery and I opened our chat clients and created a rhythm that will inform my first blog. Although we weren't interviewing each other, we focused each others' attention in particular ways on particular ideas, such as, for example, the significant role linking plays in wiki-thinking.

Close 9 Tabs : a set of instructions, a freesound composition.

Biking for MLK

Little Manatee River

School Shopping: hacking the transition from elementary to middle school

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on timing, placement...and browsing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_B._Weinstein

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_01.php#005058

http://zyprexa.pbwiki.com/#Whatisthissiteabout

Writing in Freesound with Afram considering our rhetorical choices, as they emerge between one freesound, and another!

In the Freesound assignment, we begin by working with sound. We learn how to tune in on an audience for our writing, and we discover that we already have an inchoate but intuitive and therefore reliable sense of audience. We can listen, look, browse, and read for patterns in our writing and the writing of our peers. We can make rhetorical choices. Writing together: we go beyond our traditional understanding of audience: readers become allies, informants, and contingent cooperators. If we take the repetitions of tabbed browsing (the simplest and most often repeated gestures we use to navigate the informational ecologies we find and make on the web), and mix these repetitions with sound, we can bring explicitly rhythmic compositional strategies into our writing process. Jump into Freesound!

Let me make an analogy: Swimming,” Avital Ronell (1989) tells us in the classified directory of her Telephone Book, “creates a sonic space” (p. 432). Martin Heidegger's "What is Called Thinking?" (as cited in Ronell 1989) offers swimming as the exemplar of activities that we can only learn about by full immersion. “We shall never learn what 'is called' swimming...or what it 'calls for,' by reading a treatise of swimming. Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming.” Likewise for the immersive medium of sound. And likewise for wiki, too!

now that we're rehearsed in tabbing, time for tagging..

tagging assignment: name that trope, tag it, search it with SearchTag. Make patterns in wiki

mash up assignment, then culture jamming assignment

http://www.businessweek.com/@@76IH*ocQ34AvyQMA/magazine/content/05_30/b3944108_mz063.htm

http://www.mashupcorporations.com/about.html

Trope!

psychetropic

Setting up definitions by telling stories: what is the Napster Effect?

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In a way, the RIAA's infamous cease-and-desist campaign these past few years clarifies and even substantiates the large body of literature that takes up the distributed and electronically mediated nature of writing in today's global corporate workplace. Appealing to measure and designing proofs to illustrate bottom-line effects on worker efficiency, the RIAA “scare packet” (find packet, make link here) correlated information leaks, viruses, slow connection speed, and bloated bandwidth costs directly to piracy, their preferred synecdoche for filesharing. Here, we can finally find, in a wash of widely broadcasted business and legal rhetoric, a reminder that the Napster effect on collaborative writing and decentralized circulation was already in effect before Napster. But when Penn State signed a licensing agreement with “new Napster” at the end of 2003, it brought home and made palpably exigent a shift in creative production, a shift that catches English studies, and writing instruction in higher education in particular, by surprise. With electronic workplace environments, we get a noticeable redrafting of the nature and work of writing (affect!), and a radical redistribution of the time-space coordinates of collaborative writing activity (virtual!). And research has established that the collaborative writing, document and archive sharing, and team models of project research, development and design do not necessarily harmonize with the Copyright Act as it is written and enforced. The Napster effect has reminded businesses and venture capitalists all over the world of the early Internet’s promise. "Every user is not just a consumer, but a producer of value,” is the refrain, and the scramble is on to harness what the editors at O’Reilly call the disruptive power of peer-to-peer. However, although we should and must prepare students for dwelling in legal/technological complexities, the RIAA's activity since about 2003 suggests that it is high time to think about so-called “collaborative writing,” “decentralized circulation of information in the workplace” and other similarly clumsy rubrics somewhat differently.

designing assignments:

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-design a flier (mission statements, timing and placement (kairos), audience-finding)

-design a bumper sticker (compression, distribution)

Charting the rhetorical terrain of most planets is a relatively straightforward endeavor. Certain patterns of expression are used in certain standard situations for certain fairly discernible ends. For rhetoric is, after all, the use of language to produce results. But Earth stands alone in the subtlety and obscurity of its rhetorical techniques...