Tuesday, January 12: Writing Studies and Multiliteracies

Reading

Bedford/St. Martin’s – The Bedford Bibliography: History of Rhetoric and Composition. (n.d.). Retrieved December 27, 2015, from http://www.macmillanhighered.com/Catalog/static/bsm/bb/history.html

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. (emailed to class) (reserves link)

Writing/Thinking

Before class

  • Think about how your current research interests might articulate with one or more elements of writing studies detailed in the brief history of rhetoric and composition.
  • Develop a question about the multiliteracies article that you think might spur discussion.

In Class

Measuring Cell-Phone Electromagnetic Radiation.

  1. Describe the resources employed for meaning making in each representation.
  2. What, in particular, does one version make salient that the other does not? Or, how do the representations provide access to the activity in different ways?
  3. How do the materials involved in the experiment provide clues about how they might be used?

Describing multliteracies. (exhibit)

  • Describe this visual for someone who might not be able to see it.

Re-inscribing multiliteracies.

  • Reconfigure the preceding visual in a way that might be more accessible to someone who can see it.

Sign up for initial discussion leadership.

Timeline development

Represent what your group views as one important strand in the development of rhetoric and composition studies by creating timeline that can be shared via the web:

  1. Find a free tool that will enable you to show the development of the thread by representing both events and time spans. Probably the easiest to use is TimeToast. TikiToki isn’t bad, either.
  2. Include at least three points and one span on your timeline. These need to be developed with a brief description of the event and what you see as its significance. You should also include a creative-commons licensed photo for at least one point and the span.
  3. Develop a simple claim (thesis) about the ensemble of points and spans you’ve included. This claim will serve as the caption for the timeline when you link to it or embed it in a webpage.

Share the link to your timeline here. Caption it with your claim.