Presenting Locke Carter and Hypertext

Mini presentation on Carter's article

Hypertext Examples

K A I R O S, Issue 1.1 

K A I R O S, Issue 1.3
My boyfriend came back from the war

Review Assignment Sheet

Blogging Exercise

Due to blog: What composition you're reworking into a website & your group member(s) if you are working in a group.

NPR joining our discussion

I've been listening to NPR during my drive to places for the past few weeks, and today, my heart did a jolt when they started talking about how technology has changed the ways people consume the news. It was exciting to hear echoes of our class discussions on the fate of the newspapers. A caller, who is a journalist, said he doesn't see himself being employed five years from now. The article is shorter than the radio segment, but it has some good points relevant to our class discussions. I will try to see if I can find the radio segment, which features a fuller discussion and includes a short discussion of the pros/cons of Craigslist.

My current favorite song

Train-Hey Soul Sister

and the frustration sets in

The excitement is over. I am now frustrated, having spent the last 20 minutes trying to find out how I can upload pictures onto my Posterous site. User friendly? It most certainly is not. Maybe I will have better luck the second time.

Should I do a review too?

The students in the class are all doing a review of an electronic writing space or writing tool, and I've been toying with the idea of doing one myself. Mine won't be as intensive as theirs since I'm not being graded, but I find the idea of doing a review along with the rest of the class exciting. Cathy taught me a new term on Tuesday: WOT (wall of text). I will admit that I am guilty of producing blogs that are these. I still consider the blog in the sense of an online journal, and I've never included photos in my paper journals so the idea of making the blog more dynamic and aesthetically pleasing by including pictures, videos, etc...didn't seem very important. But now that this blog is for the public's eyes, I need to spend less time producing WOTs.

I first learned of Posterous through a friend, and when I was working on the list of e-writing space/tool, I thought this site would fit this unit. I made an account on Tuesday, and now am proud owner of a Posterous account. The page is empty at the moment, but I plan on cluttering it soon. My goal this semester, regardless of which writing space I use, is to post more pictures, embed more links, and in every sense of the word, make the page more alive.

Lore Journal

Making use of this writing space, I decided to post my lesson plan here instead of putting it on the discussion board. 

Lesson Plan February 23, 2010

10:30 Housekeeping business

10:35 Check in

• How was the blogging experience? 
• Was this a more friendly technology than the discussion board? How so? 
• Did it change the way you compose?

10:45 Class Discussion

1. What is the nature of blogging? What can you do with a blog?
2. Is it a writing tool? Or a writing space? Or both?
3. What different genres of blogs have you encountered? Most familiar with?
4. What conventions (writing style or other) do you see already in terms of blogging?
5. What about in terms of identity/persona creation?
6. Does knowing you have an audience affect the ways you write?
7. The act of blogging as a performance? How true is this?

•  Community building (the idea of the discourse community. (a term in composition studies to refer to a group of people with shared assumptions, common knowledge, and similar ways of interpreting things. Oftentimes, a particular discourse community will involve a different set of vocabulary.)
• Persona/identity building 

11:10 Introduce New Concept

• Hypertext: a remediation of print
• Refers to a network of interconnected writings
• Discrete units of a hypertext: pages, paragraphs, graphics, and links. One can say that these are some conventions of the blog, of a hypertext
• Defining characteristic of a hypertext—its ability to allow for highly associative writings (writing based on connections)
• Unlike the printed text, the hypertext is more dynamic
• The pages are “hot” changing as one link brings up a new page and so on and so forth
• The authors use links to define relationships and these links become a rhetorical tool
• The readers interact with the text, depending on what link the readers choose to navigate to, they’re determining what connections to make. Different ways of “reading” a hypertext  

11:15-Class Activity