Reading Notes Nov. 19 (week 13)  -- This week, due to time constraints and heavy grading load, I settled for a bullet point list of some of the key concepts I found in these two articles. The bold / blue / indented deviations are some of my “talk back” moments, my aside moments as I stopped to contemplate some of the possible connections. Neither of these articles seemed surprisingly new or groundbreaking to me. Could that be a hint that I’ve read through these conversations (but not the articles) before?

Schmidt, Christopher. “The New Media Writer as Cartographer.” Computers and Composition 28 (2011): 303-314.

·      **Reminds me a lot of Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.

·      About the importance of the “writing of place” thanks to new technologies, refocusing on the “rhetoric of place” is needed (304)

·      Essay “outlines a curriculum for teaching digital mapping in a composition-rhetoric course” (303)

·      Revisits the claim that tech “affects not just how we write…but also where we write” (303)

·      Talks about the impact of “virtual dislocation” (304) thanks to using mobile technologies to write

·      Pays attention to the “affordances of such mobile writing technologies” and their interfaces (303)

·      Key term: “digital maps and indexicality” (304) – “anchoring a blog post or photograph to satellite-determined geographical coordinates” (303)

·      Mobile technology has increased attention on rhetoric of location  -- “boundary between real and virtual worlds grows less distinct” (304)

·      “tension between narration and spatially-based writing” (305) – claims made of “real” vs virtual, lead to more use of location-based technology, perhaps to compensate for the virtuality? It’s reactionary (305)

**Seems ironic, since we ask our students to compose in digital spaces and then suggest it draws on their real-world experiences (see Sabatino article, where she argues this is a necessary bridge between play and writing for academic credit)

·      “teaching the rhetoric of maps” 307

·      she wants to help students acquire “skills necessary to read critically the rhetoric of place” (307)

**Cites the Dinty Moore Google essay, and the Snow’s cholera map

http://youtu.be/KvHL0dHj3RM

·      Her stated goal is teaching critical thinking (308), using “the rhetorical affordances of cartographic representation” and the biases therein (308)

·      Points out the Mercator Projection map, how it represents one view of the world, an ideology

**Think about the obsolescence factor from last week – are digital technologies subject to similar skewed representative controls?

·      Using cognitive maps – GPS systems may actually be leading to atrophy of our ability to create “cognitive maps” (312)

**What does this mean when we ask students to Play in Games in lieu of getting dirty in the sentence structures of writing?

·      Final conclusion: because writing / reading are becoming “more mobile and untethered, it is crucial for the teachers of rhetoric to remind students that the place of writing…is still a crucial aspect for the crafting of rhetorical arguments” (313)

Sabatino, Lindsay. “Improving Writing Literacies through Digital Gaming Literacies: Facebook Gaming in the Composition Classroom.” Computers and Composition 32 (2014): 41-53.

·      Acknowledging the advancements in digital media and its impact on literacies

·      Recommends trying literacies of “everyday lives” to enhance writing, specifically in terms of “engagement, problem solving, collaboration, and audience” (41)

·      Discusses specific ways she used a FB game to emphasize key skills into the classroom, arguing it serves as a bridge b/w real world behavior and classroom goals.

**I wonder how obsolete this game becomes, though? Thinking of last week’s article on obsolescence, when does such a game change so much that it loses its relevance to these students, and just seems like a forced effort on our part to make what seems like an obvious parallel (to us, anyway)?

·      Points out some of the potential complications, like access and (not as much) privacy (says students need not cross the boundaries b/w private personal account and the classroom)

·      Points out several ways to use this game in the classroom

**This doesn’t really seem ground breaking, all that new. FB in the classroom for engagement, I’ve seen before.

·      Argues that the game is designed for short term engagement, promoting she says “multitasking”

·      Outlines how the practice of playing this game in “short bursts” encourages multitasking, and thus can be drawn into the classroom for short writing engagement activity

·      Cites Jenkins’ writing about games, play, critical thinking / problem solving

·      Gives examples of how she constructs activities in her own class to use gaming (Mafia Wars / FB) to help students see that what they do in the game is similar to what they do in writing: planning, collaboration, communicate, problem solving, “decipher multiple modes simultaneously” (42).

·      **Led me to think of a series of questions:

1. How is this learning THROUGH gaming, and not merely gaming in an effort to be more than just a parallelism, an analogous example?

2. How can this translate into writing the academic essay? Would gaming only be a useful introductory illustration, to help students see they already do some of this thinking? How would that be effectively transposed into producing writing for academic audiences?

3. Or is this parallelism merely comparing apples and oranges?

4. Shouldn’t play / gaming produce the learning, not simply provide a familiar commonplace?

5. I found myself asking, “so what?” (“These decisions in gameplay are similar to the problem solving that occurs in composition.” Pg. 48)

6. Why is it helpful, productive to “see the parallel between audience in the gaming world and audience when writing their papers”? (49)