Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media
and you thought I’d stopped researching, eh? naw, just finally got finished moving…
citation:
Ball, Cheryl E., & Moeller, Ryan M. (2007). Reinventing the possibilities: Academic literacy and new media. Fibreculture Journal, 10. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/ball_moeller/index.html
abstract:
This webtext demonstrates the possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills applicable to the 21st century. It is a manifesto for what we think writing scholars should be teaching in general-education “writing” classes like first-year composition. In order to answer the question of what we should teach, we have to ask what kinds of academic literacy, if any, we value. We argue here that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers. We use the Ancient Greek concepts of topoi and commonplace to explain how designers and readers enter into a space of negotiated meaning-making when converging upon new media texts. That negotiated space offers a new-media space for learning critical literacies by means other than research papers. As examples, we discuss two student texts and the literacies they demonstrate.
from Adrian Miles’ (!!) introduction to the issue
Ball and Moeller offer a manifesto come “webtext” that can only ever be online. It uses a very simple alphabetic architecture as one form of navigation, but also uses typographic cues to indicate writerly voice, as well as providing internal links. Hence ‘Reinventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media’ can be read traditionally, from beginning to end by following the letters, or hypertextually by reading the internal links. They argue for the relevance of rhetorical frameworks for the study of what is best thought of as a digital writing, specifically identifying the value of “topoi” as places of ‘negotiated meaning making’ which allow for a variety of critical literacies to be experienced. The arguments here are rich, variable, and splintered, as they ought to be. It is a call to arms as much as a demonstration of other academic forms in the humanities and is what I would characertise as part of the first wave of such work.
note of interest to C&W readers:
In the lexia, New Media Outcomes, which - lol - happens to be the N node in the alphabet-block navigation, there is a link to a PDF in which we have taken the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Writing and modified it to see what it might look like if the goals of first-year composition were multimodal instead of linear, academic writing. (We jumped off from Shipka’s brief discussion of this in her fab 2005 CCC article.) Enjoy.