Jeff Rice contends in his, "What Should College English Be? Networks and New Media", that college English should be new media. He does not reject the current curriculum but wants people to recognize the importance and prevalence of the network in today’s society. He defines the network as “spaces of connectivity”. Traditional English writing deals with individual space and one author, while new media writing works with many spaces and authors. Rice believes that we need to “rethink the old English model” and incorporate some of its components with some of new media’s aspects.
Daniel Anderson, a college English professor, would agree with Rice’s view that today’s society needs to adapt and take on some of new media’s elements. In his “Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Production and Consumption in Continuum”, he asserts that people should become “prosumers”, a blend between a producer and a consumer. Prosumers break down the barriers between being strictly active (producers) and being passive (consumers). As a prosumer, one is able to receive information from other’s via new media while making their own opinions and perspectives known.
I found this reading and video to be quite interesting. I agree with Rice’s view that college English needs to encompass both traditional English styles as well as new media. However, I think this could be taken a step further and be applied to English courses in general. This process of incorporation could even begin in elementary schools. That way, when students reach college, they will be familiar with styles like web writing. However, I do think that traditional English ways of writing have their own benefits. They allow ample time for revision and a very structured way of writing.
I thought that Anderson’s video was groundbreaking in a sense and inspirational. I had never seen an English class structured in this way. I admired the fact that he gave his students the option of either writing a paper or creating a video for their final project. By letting his students become “prosumers”, they were able to not just choose between “old” and “new” media, but even combine them. As a future elementary school teacher going into Language Arts, I found this video to be very useful for my future career. I know that my students will have grown up in an even more fast-paced and technologically-based society. I realized that incorporating new media into my curriculum would benefit both my students as well as myself. Both the reading and video put a new “spin” on my traditional way of thinking about my future Language Arts class.
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I thought the idea of the prosumer movie was good but did you find it really difficult to listen to him, the background music, and trying to look at the writing on the side at the same time? I think I missed a lot of info because I felt overloaded with sounds and words all at once.
Yes, I did find it pretty difficult to process all of that. I liked how you could stop the video and explore the other parts of the presentation. However, I sometimes felt like it was hard to return my focus to the original video and remember where I was.
I'm glad you found Anderson's webtext useful (and inspiring!). Like you, I really like how he introduces media options into his assignments. Interestingly, when I've done this in the past--giving students an option to write a paper or produce a new media project--I've noticed that the students who choose the latter often spend more time (in many cases a LOT more time) producing and revising their projects than those who choose to write a paper. This is, I think, an important lesson for teachers, particularly given the way print-based media are often imagined as more serious, more complex, more challenging than other media.
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