Welcome to English 199

For young people in the 21st century, the internet has always existed, and they have grown up using email, instant messaging, blogging, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and more recently, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Twitter. That is, more people are writing more than ever before, and that writing can be read, commented on, and rewritten by others instantly. As a result, we are seeing a technocultural shift. People are not just consuming media but also producing media and through that media, participating in culture. What it means to be a writer and reader is changing. Literacy is in a transitional period.

In A New Literacies Sampler, Knobel and Lankshear (2007) explain that new literacies “involve different kinds of values, emphases, priorities, perspectives, orientations and sensibilities from those that typify conventional literacy practices that became established during the era of print and analogue forms of representation and, in some cases, even earlier” (p. 9). They argue that conventional and new literacies are different in terms of ethos: “New literacies are more ‘participatory,’ ‘collaborative,’ and ‘distributed’ in nature than conventional literacies. That is, they are less ‘published,’ ‘individuated,’ and ‘author-centric’ than conventional literacies. They are also less ‘expert-dominated’ than conventional literacies” (p. 9).

With the notion of “new literacies” as our jumping off point, in our readings, discussions, and projects we will consider the social, cultural, and legal implications of the new conditions for literacy arising from the emergence of new and social writing technologies on the second generation of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Our goals are to develop the abilities to effectively use computer technologies as tools for research and writing, to perform informed critique of contemporary technoculture, and produce with digital media in a way that stresses reflective praxis.

This course will require reading response blog entries and a research paper regarding online literacies.

Goals

• to help you become critical readers of research and scholarship
• to help you become familiar with some major research and scholarly genres
• to help you gain experience in posing research questions and planning a research project
• to give you experience in writing a research proposal—including crafting research questions, reviewing the relevant scholarly literature, and writing the design of a study