As I said in class, my experience with technology in teaching was so limited. I can say that the only course I encountered technology in was Rhetoric of Contact Zone last Semester, which provided me with a social space in which I could interact with my classmates in a “home-academic” discourse. It was academic in the sense that I was responding to academic issues that we went through in the syllabus and it was home-like in the sense that I did not feel the stress and formality of the classroom. I often blogged while I was sprawling out on the bed. I was not bound up with time and place and did not care about my style and registers. I always thought of Dr. Barbara as a host, her website as her house, we as her guests and our blogs as our conversation.
Doubtless this feeling of informality will help our students write in a better way. I always say that our students socially interact with people in a successful way. They can always talk about politics, economy and social practices. They can pose arguments, support them with evidences, refute counterarguments and reconcile disputes with others. However, when it comes to writing, they fail to do all that. The reason, in my point of view, is that our classical classrooms ( those without technology) instill in our students’ minds the idea that writing is another realm with different components and that it does not share with speaking any characteristics. And this is a fallacy. Both speaking and writing have the same components: the sender (speaker or writer), receiver ( listener or reader), and a message ( letters or sounds). However, when our students write, they do believe that there is no one there to argue with or to convince. They do not know that their ideas can be formulated in sounds or letters. In a social place like Rhetoric of Contact Zone, students will realize that their peers have access to their writing and can evaluate them, which can turn the writing process into a conversation in students’ eyes.
I totally disagree with Wysocki et al when they define new media texts as texts “designed so that its materiality is not effaced”. We need to know that not all people see the values and materiality a text embodies. Aristotle argues that this world consists of appearances seen in different ways. Each person tries to discover a rupture in an appearance and connect it to the whole. For example, since a piece of composition is an appearance, readers will understand it differently according to their political, economical and social backgrounds. Take Shakespeare’s work The Tempest as an example; Hundreds of articles and papers have been written to interpret it.
Hi Anwar,
ReplyDeleteI agree that we all approach texts in different ways. Our interpretation of texts can also vary and this depends on the ideas that we bring with us.
You mention in your blog that when students are asked to interact in a social space, their reactions differ in the classical setting (and that students are perhaps more productive in that classical environment). In many ways, I think that Wysocki's idea of materiality is getting to this notion of the classical...but I think that she uses the term new media to make the classical cool; she is attempting to use new ways to present the classical material. So, in some weird twist, your idea about the classical actually coincides with Wysocki to me. If this is true (if Wysocki is simply trying to use new ways to present the classical), texts will still be interpreted differently depending on one's background, but the nature of the writing, the classical framework for the assignment, would be the same.