Welcome Fall 22 Students !

Dear Students,

Unfortunately, even though it’s our first day, I can’t be with you. There’s a death of a loved one in the family, and I’ll be attending the funeral in Florida on our first day of Tuesday, the 30th.

Here’s some of what I had planned to go over today in class.

  1. Introductions and getting to know each other. (We’ll wait till I get back.)
  2. Syllabus Review (we’ll wait until next week to go over it together).
  3. Get set up with the OpenLab account and join the class. I figure that you can spend time in class getting set up with this. If you have an OpenLab account, great. If not, you’ll need to create one. The course is open, so once you request membership, you will have access.
  4. In the menu above, you will see links to the syllabus and course packets. I’d like to get these course packets printed out and bounded, but for now, we’ll just use the electronic versions. After you read through the syllabus, you will see in the schedule that “BP 1” is due next Tuesday, 9/6. BP 1 means Blog Post 1. So your first blog post is due Sept. 6th, before class.
  5. Much of our course focuses on the shifts between the relationship between language and technology as it’s been historically situated, so I wanted to spend some time orienting you through a discussion of some related terms, such as “paradigms,” “epistemologies,” “ideologies,” “circumferences,” “final vocabularies” and the like. Again, we’ll still have this discussion next week, but I do have a reading to get you started that is listed on the syllabus. This is Maxine Hairston’s “The Winds of Change.”  Maxine talks about the idea of paradigms and how she sees it as applied to the field of writing studies (formally known as composition). The changes in the field of composition aren’t the important thing for us (though it is for her). What’s important are the paradigmatic changes she discusses and how composition serves as a useful example to illustrate what those changes are about.
  6. The other thing I was planning on doing in class was to show you a few of the “Ulmer Tapes” in class. Greg Ulmer is a theorist we’ll be working from, but I think this can wait until I get back.
  7. This is what I’d like you to do during the time you have in class today.
    1. Get logged into the OpenLab site.
    2. Write a warm up Blog Post in class.  Do the following two things:
      1.  Tell us about yourself. Give us a sense of your background, where you were educated, what you’ve been exposed to culturally, are you from NY originally? Another place? Where have you lived? Where do you live? Try to give us a sense of who you are, where you come from, if you work, what you like to do, etc. Also, let us know what your goals are. They can be career goals or any other kind of goal.
      2. In the next section, pick a section from Hairston’s essay that struck you. Go ahead and quote the passage, and then respond to it. Tell us what you think it was saying (summarize), what it made you think (intellectualize), and what it made you feel (emotionally).
      3. Once you have this Warm up Blog Post done, you can go ahead and go.
  8. For next week, take a look at the syllabus. You have two readings. One by Gee and one by Postman. Go ahead and read them both through to the end. We will discuss them in class. But before class, get your BP 1 complete. In the title box, write BP #1 so we can keep track of things. Similar to the Hairston response, pick one passage or “chunk of text” from Gee that had an impact on you. Quote it and then respond to it in four ways:
    1. Literally: What is the passage literally saying? Put it in your own words.
    2. Intellectually: What does the passage make you think about? What mental associations do you make?
    3. Emotionally: What does the passage make you feel? Can you try to explain why?
    4. As a Writer: This asks you to think about how the writer writes the passage, how the words are put together, how the writer expresses the idea. What do you notice, if anything, about the craft of the writing?
    5. Repeat the same thing for Postman, and that’s it.
  9. Again, sorry I can’t be there, but this happens to be out of my hands. We will reconvene on the 6th, and get rolling again.

 

 

 

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