Lingua Fracta: Collin Brooke discusses Ecology

Brooke, C. (2008). "Lingua Fracta: Towards a rhetoric of New Media" - Chapter 2 in a book forthcoming: Hampton Press

The trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic should be rethought as layered ecologies because "The elaborate dance of competition, cooperation, juxtaposition, and remediation that characterizes our contemporary information and communication technologies has rendered obsolete some of our most venerable models for understanding today's rhetorical practices" (1). Ecologies are constantly changing and fluctuating to create and recreate balance. They are hybrid and intertwined.

Five canons of traditional, classic rhetoric are invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. The three proofs are ethos, logos and pathos. The web makes us reconsider these, in particular because it "resuscitated the question of delivery" We may need more for delivery with visually rich media.

Brooke notes "ecology" works because an ecosystem is in constant motion like the web. Noting that at conferences more than usual texts are being discussed and read, it seems logical that more should be invented from writers within such surroundings. Keeping weblogs, or instantaneous places for writers to write, seems appropriate and a good use of time.

Brooke suggests a more recent trivium: code, practice, and culture. Code is comprised not only of grammar but includes "visual, aural, spatial, and textual elements, as well as programming codes" (17). The shift moves away from what a student is to master and into an ecology where one is surrounded by and practices within it (noting that language is only one of the media forms within). Cultural refers to the interfaces of interpersonal relations, competing ideologies, and multiple contexts that any one exchange can create. "...acts intervene simultaneously at several levels" (18).

Overall, I follow Brooke's conversation here and feel it parallels a lot the ecological arguments made by Yong Zhao discussed earlier on this blog. The rhetorical conversations rooted in academic traditions are somewhat new to me even though I've been teaching writing for several years successfully without the discourse for what I was actually doing. I keep thinking back to the piece I wrote for Arts Based Research Methodology called "Before It Had a Name." So much of what I achieved as a practitioner existed without fancier names for it. It makes me question the power-play of knowledge as it intersects between k - 12 schools and Universities. K - 12 schools are responsible for 100% of America's youth, where as college/universities only contend with 30%. Is education, then, all in how one uses their rhetorical skills?

Diana George - Visual Communication

George, D. (2002). "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing" in CCC, 54.1, September

Because of the debates that typically surround the teaching of writing in terms of visual literacy, the kinds of assignments limit the imagination for composition. There's more to be accomplished with using visual communication in the composition classroom. Drawing, again, on the New London Group (1996) and multiliteracies, George encourages the use of visual communication. Specifically, she writes, "I actually believe that some tug of war between words and images or between writing and design can be productive as it brings into relief the multiple dimensions of all forms of communicatio" (14).

This argument is the same being made by Arts Based Research Methodology and one I explored at Rethinking Validity.

Students have grown up in a "visually aggressive culture" (15) that should be addressed in composition.

Visuals assist writing with a purpose and so George asks students for a "visual argument" (28) that "make a claim or assertion and attempt to sway an audience by offering reasons to accept that claim" (29). History has traditionally linked words to high culture and visual to low culture (31)

George concludes, "For students who have grown up in a technology-saturated and an image-rich culture, questions of communication and composition absolutely will include the visual, not as attendant to the verbal but as complex communication intricately related to the world around them.

Anne Frances Wysocki; The Multiple Media of Texts

Wysocki, A. F. (2004); "The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media"
in What Writing Does and How It Does It; An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual
Practices, Ed. by Bazerman, C. and Prior, P.; New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

In Chapter Six, Wysocki asks readers to think about the relations of visuals/material presentations within our texts and the values placed upon them. Whereas words are seen as "serious" are visuals/material presentations meant to be "non-serious"? Wysocki notes, "All page and screen based-texts are (therefore) visual and their visual elements and arrangements can be analyzed" (124). Because there are associations between genres of writing and the way such genres are visually arranged, the visual arrangements do some of the work for the genre. These arrangements do "persuasive work" (124), too, but "Attitudes toward the visual aspects of texts change over time" (125). Modern readers expect quick and efficient reading experiences and the layouts help readers get to what they want, faster (125).

Wysocki is asking for new arguments about visual representations and what these arguments will look like if allowed to academic pages. Noting that "The visual aspects of text are (therefore) to be understood not simply in terms of physiology but also in terms of social context" (126)

Further, Wysocki writes, "Composing a visual text (thus) involves choosing strategies for shaping what is on a page or screen to direct a reader/viewer/browser's attentions, within the context of other texts" (126). One who uses visuals must make choices about the visuals they use to attract desired audiences and to deliver to them.

She goes on to discuss shapes, colors, photographs, drawings and paintings, charts and graphs, animations, visual transitions, video and sound and asks to explain:

1. the visual elements in a text
2. the design relationships among those elements
3. how the elements and relations connect with different audiences, contexts, and arguments. (137).

Readers must, then, learn "to observe well" (159).

Janangelo and the Hypertext Collage

Janangelo, Joseph (1998); “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive
Hypertexts” in CCC; 49.1

The onset of computer technology as placed students into the pre-figurative era where adults learn from young people and where change is so rapid that finding models aren’t readily available.

“Discussing hypertext in terms of a collage is understandable because both forms make use of readymade materials.” (27)

Writing with hypertext offers a reader a collage of ideas: “..hypertext scholars are intrigued by this complex matrix of intertextuality and postmodern monumentality, they also realize that, when it comes to written discourse, these same features can complicate acts of reading. One complication involves size.” (29). Reading a text with hypertexts imbedded as departure points can “..turn a reader into a wanderer” (30). Such “mutability and ambiguity have important consequences for composing and interpreting text” (31). The result is that readers (viewers) must “have a specific knowledge base in order to appreciate the meaning of the seemingly disparate texts he has linked” (35).

The result of thinking of Joseph Cornell’s collage-pieces as a metaphor for hypertext writing is two fold. The first is with the ways of composing persuasive, nonsequential texts (45) and the second is with pedagogical responsibilities and opportunities (45). Educators can work to assist students to navigate such written texts by reconsidering the links they design.


Three writers revisit Joseph Janangelo’s Joseph Cornell piece from 1998:

Wysocki, A.F. (2007); “It is Not Only Ours.” in CCC, 59.2/December.

Anne Frances Wysocki writes “This article models how writing teachers can help the people in their classes makes texts that fit the expectations of our academia while also helping writing teachers understand that and how some new compositional logics might be made to fit…when we build texts, the relation towad others that the texts shape should not go against what they expect; as readers, we are to expect composers to make their ideas fit us” (279).

Wysocki draws on the multiliteracies discussed by the New London Group (1996).

In addition, Wysocki writes, “It is not only that technologies for designing, producing, distributing, sharing and consuming texts make possible new compositions; it is that these compositions can give us new positions for seeing and for criticquing and reworking Available Designs” (282).

Of important note, here, is Anne Frances Wysocki’s discussion of Audience and Ethics. She writes, “How does one take audience and audience expectations into account in such composing, given the contexts surrounding the text’s production and reception, as Sonja Foss considers in her writing about how visual appeals in particular need to balance the new and the expected if they are to succeed? In an audience expects an academic text, and one’s purpose suggests that strict academic structures hinder one’s purposes, how to design and compose a text that addresses those expectations and justifies not meeting them? What ethos, what arrangements and other logics, and what emotional connections will help a composer construct a text that an unexpecting audience will not dismiss out of hand as stupid or incompetent simply because they do not get it?”

Brooke, C.G. (2007); “Joseph Janangelo and the Analogics of New Media” in CCC, 59.2/December.

Collin Brooke discusses the metaphor of the collage and, perhaps, that hypertext essays don’t accomplish what an academic essay requires, or perhaps the traditional essay, and the institutions that regard it have flaws that need to be considered. Janangelo’s essay was one that began a conversation of more literacies before composition studies found it more common to discuss them.


Rice, J. (2007); “Networked Boxes: The Logic of Too Much” in CCC, 59.2/December.

Jeff Rice asks an interesting question, “How, in the age of information overload, do writers account for an endless growth of ideas that are encountered on a daily basis and that are now foregrounded on the Web…the Web’s vastness has opened writing up to an enormous amount of information, connections, and applications. But how has this challenge been addressed in the teaching of writing? How has writing instruction accommodated the sense of “too much” to which Janangelo draws attention to in his essay?”(297).

Addressing “Boxed Writing” Jeff Rice notes, “…the accepted box logic of the typical composition course that stresses formula over exploration, thesis statement over discovery, card catalog-driven research over the collection and synthesis of ideas, is not actually an “in the box” pedagogy” (300). He argues that teaching new media literacy is actually in the box because it is the “cultural condition” that we live in.

Writing is “social” (304).

Stuart Moulthrop - Error 404; doubting the web

Moulthrop, S. (2000). Error 404; doubting the web in Metaphor, Magic, and Power, Ed. A. Herman and T. Swiss. New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 259-76.

The web is entertainment and pleasure, but it is also profitable business. It is porn, too. Even so, it changes the way we read. Online reading allows for more options than linear, from point A to point B, thinking.

"hypertext is apt to inspire horror. Not only does this sort of writing expand the scope of the textual universe by allowing links from one body of signs to another, it also invites users to complicate and exfoliate their textual productions. There is more and more text all the time and more discursive volume within the component texts. The burden on critics and editors, to say nothing of ordinary readers, expands exponentially" (http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/404.html)

Moulthrop draws on Barringer (1999, Ch. 1) with "Our mass media depends on an audience that no longer exists - a mass audience which is now fragmented."

In a consumer market, those with access to web can locate materials they want for free (well, paying an internet service provider).

With thinking on youth culture who grow up in this "market", I believe students are already navigating online learning to their own desire. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is all games, porn and entertainment, but I also believe that anyone with a question will head to their nearest google and make an inquiry. From here the adventure will take off.

Writing Now

Although NCTE's recent publication of policy research (2008) is a great starting point for English Educators to seriously begin to think about the teaching of writing in the field, I wish to address a few of the more important points they make in their recent publication.

They begin with, "We write differently - often digitally - and we write more than in the past" immediately on page one. Although no one can claim how the internet is changing the way we do things, there is no doubt that it truly is changing the way we do things. As NCTE notes, "...the way we write often predicts academic and/or job success, creates opportunities for civic participation, maintains relationships, and enhances critical thinking" (1). The emphasis is that instructional practices in writing, the genres assigned to write, and the assessments used to score writing needs to be "authentic, varied and holistic"(2).

Educators should be writing across the curriculum with their students, but also writing in the disciplines. From both, vocabulary should be emphasized, but so should modeling of what good writing looks like in the subject areas. Formative writing assessments are more important because they are process oriented: writing on drafts, workshopping, conferencing, etc. The grade is a final project.

"New-media writing" refers to digital writing online (2).

The report dispels the following myths:

Writing assignments should be designed primarily to measure the mastery of content material and writing skills
Instructors across the disciplines agree on a definition for good academic writing.
Grammar drills are the most effective way to improve student writing.
Genre refers only to formal features of writing.
One-time high stakes assessments of writing are the best way to determine students' preparation for college.
New Media writing simply transfers traditional writing practices into a digital-environment.

Finally, the report gives research-based recommendations for effective writing instruction and assessment which includes building a technological infrastructure, makes new-media writing a part of the composing process, and requires funding to support new-media writing.

Kudos to NCTE for offering this much necessary report.

National Council for the Teachers of English (2008), Writing Now, James R. Squire Office of Policy Research, University of Michigan, retrieved from the web at http://www.ncte.org on 21. September, 2008

Nancy Kaplan

Kaplan, Nancy (2006). "Literacy Beyond Books/Reading When All the World's a Web" in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory; New York: Routledge, Chapter 11

Kaplan writes "We are, as always, in the midst of a literacy crisis." The hyperstimulation of commercials, games, television, the internet, etc. is a new phase in the fears we have that civilization is falling apart. Going further, she writes, "In elementary schools, the phonics and whole-language partisans battle to control literacy education at its most basic level, though neither side has ever advanced any sound empirical evidence in support of its case. In colleges and universities, the arena is even more vexed since it involves defending advanced literacy, always an imprecise and fungible concepts. According to many professors of literature, the field claiming ownership of advanced literacy, hypertext - especially in the ubiquitous form of the World Wide Web - threatens to erode the ability of young adults to read with acumen and insight"

Kaplan has an interesting point to make: "In this literacy debate, the threat to reading seems to originate in a form of mediation almost indistinguishable from the one that is threatened. In other words, critics of the Web fear that reading is at risk not because photographs or television or Hollywood films or computer games have seduced people away from verbal texts, but because a new and radically different form of verbal text may be taking over the cultural space that printed words have occupied."

Visual Literacy is a new reality and finding its way into the language literacy educators use: for a beginning discussion, see my Rethinking Validity notes. Researchers in Arts Based Research Methodology question the difference between textual semiotics and visual semiotics and offer alternative approaches to doing research and understanding in academic writing.

More to come.

Nicholas C. Burbules

Nicholas C. Burbules (2002); “The Web as a rhetorical place.” Silicon Literacies, Ilana Snyder, ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 75- 84, read online: http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/burbules/papers/rhetoric.html, 10. September, 2008

Burbules posits getting lost on the WWW is actually a way to find out a lot that can't be found from knowing where one is navigating. Recognizing it is a contested territory. He wonders whether the use of hypertext and its binary form limits itself to represent the complexity of a multiple, multilayered and semantically complex society, and argues that linking from point A to point B closes a system instead of leaving them open.

Burbles prefers the Web to be called a "rhetorical place" rather than a space, because a space has an objective, locational dimension, and people can move within it: "carving out a more familiar, accessible subset of the Web as a whole, and marking in various ways(individually or collectively) a set of meaningful relations within that zone." The architecture of the web creates places, rather than spaces, because of 1) movement/stasis, 2) interaction/isolation, 3)publicity/privacy, 4)visibility/hiddenness, and f) enclosure/inclusion.

The issue with hyperlinks being to linear is with how they serve as "avenues of movement and as occasions for meaning making..Links contain within them already certain kinds of navigational and semantic possibilities, and they tend to encourage some kinds of interpretation and to discourage or avoid others."

Interesting to Burbules discussion is his mention of 3rd space/hybrid space: "places are not always harmonious with one another...positions that can yield up novel and important insights precisely because they do not fall into handy categories or distinctions".

Culture Wars - Peter Lurie

Peter Lurie who writes "Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left" is a lawyer with a polished education in the traditional sense of pedigree knowledge: Dartmouth and The University of Chicago Law School. His online editorial is sharply written and does stimulate thought. My point of departure with Lurie is with the politics of cyberspace. What's the difference between a democrat and a republican? The way it's spelled. I am unsure if "conservative" and "liberal" constructs can be applied to the online phenomenon, but I understand individuals will try. Why? Authority.

I am thinking about authorship after reading his editorial, because I am reflecting on old school constructs of knowledge (the history of higher education institutions and their ability to control the educated, the empowered, the economics and the thought processes of America - in other words the elite -- at least academically). A multicultural, pluralistic society has not always found its way into the ivory towers. Instead, the non-collegiate majority have labored to create the ease from which the educated minority can spew off statistics, quotes and privileged rhetoric. We are part of a system, and it is miraculous in the sense that it exists as it does. Deconstructing this system to the point of "no meaning" does nothing but promote one's intellectual career (I ask, does a teenager's online angst at Facebook or MySpace differ from a lawyer's intellectual meandering at ctheory.net?). When all is said and done. an analysis of how we understand our world will not explain how the structures, infrastructures, and social structures, will continue to exist and redevelop because tribal, village, pack and community designs seem to be innate. We can be individualistic, but this relies on rebelling the community: conforming to non-conformity. There are truths and perhaps the most important one is that humans like to have meaning for what they are doing and they make meaning through group interaction. In meaning making, they justify hierarchy, positions and competitive intellect. As dorky as this may sound, texts like Stephen King's THE STAND and Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS explore how structures fall apart and redefine themselves again on the ethics of good and bad.

I am babbling, I suppose, but I do wish to quote several pieces of Lurie's editorial that interested me. His editorial self- destructs in that he is using language to show how language is meaningless and so his signifiers of left and right, conservative and liberal, right and wrong, become sort of nonsense. Yet, I understand where he's going:

"The culture wars between the religious, traditionalist right and the liberal, pluralist left have started to look like a rout everywhere but in the larger, coastal cities. Conservatives are recasting communities to be more comfortable with, if not prostrate to, received authority in the form of literalist interpretations of religious and political texts."

I am unsure if the culture wars are that "black" and "white."

"The architecture of the web, and the way users navigate it, closely resembles theories about the authority and coherence of texts that liberal deconstructionist critics have offered for thirty years. Deconstructionists believe that close analysis reduces any text -- novel, statute, religious work -- to meaningless blather. The popular response to deconstruction has always been that it's counterintuitive, that no one reads that way, that it lacks common sense."

Again, I'm unsure if it is that easy to ascribe the demographics of freedom on the web as being a leftist construct in line with what their agenda(s) is/are.

"Unlike reading or breathing, however, surfing mimics a postmodern, deconstructionist perspective by undermining the authority of texts. Anyone who has spent a lot of time online, particularly the very young, will find themselves thinking about content -- articles, texts, pictures -- in ways that would be familiar to any deconstructionist critic."

Agreed.

"A person engages the web in much the same way that a deconstructionist critic approaches a text. Deconstruction, which denotes a process rather than a belief system, shows how novels, statutes and court opinions collapse upon themselves, making their underlying assumptions absurd"

Ah, but deconstructing text is a privileged, time-consuming game of dodgeball for the elite. The fight is nothing more than an instinctual drive to prove oneself inferior/superior to those around us. Does such a linguistic war really matter to the larger constructs of a society?

"The structuralist critic Ferdinand de Saussure set the foundation of postmodern thought by describing language as a system of signs. Each sign was made up of a signifier (the word itself) and the signified (the concept or meaning). [1] Saussure's first principle was that such signs are arbitrary. [2] The letters s, i, s, t, e and r suggest a girl or woman who shares the same parents as the referent, but the idea of this woman "is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-o-r which serves as its signifier in French." [3]"

I'm glad to be reminded of Saussere -- I use him in my own interests.

"Meaning, then, is not contained or conveyed by a word or series of words because it is dependent on what those words do not contain or convey. Meaning is part of a process, in which words are examined with respect to other words, which lend meaning only in relation to still more words"

Meaning does, however, follow a pattern of power designed through the traditions of higher education.

"The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective."

Only if one is aware of what postmodern is. The majority of people do not get involved with such rhetorical warfare. Education is not a norm, necessarily.

"Its influence is structural rather than informational, and its structure is agnostic."

"The Web invites, even demands that its users go back, forward, around and elsewhere in an associative search for meaning."

The globe is now up to being 7% online. Lurie is editorializing for a position of authority within this 7%. 93% of the globe is not allowed such a privileged position.

"In a pluralist society, then, there can be no consensus regarding good and evil. If it is not quite true that anything goes, tolerance dictates that we must respect the choices that others make, even if they are repugnant to others in the community. "

In a pluralistic society, conversations about right and wrong, whether online or offline are a necessity. Such conversations began way before our times (even if they excluded the truth of a much more diverse world) in Greece. They will continue long after this generation of online ranters. Such is the crux of ethics.

a video made by Collette Caton, a classmate

Digital Tech and English Pedagogy

Ciccoricco, D. & O'Steen, B; "Digitial Technology and English Pedagogy: From the Traditional Essays to Fabric of Digital Text" from Karois; a Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and PolicyIssue 13. 1, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.1/praxis/ciccoricco-osteen/index.htm, retrieved 8/5/08

Digitial Technology and English Pedagogy: From the Traditional Essays to Fabric of Digital Text reports there are two significant ways that their class web project exemplifies how reading and writing practices change online: "The first takes place not when students and teachers simply use digital tools but when they learn to use them reflexively, which is to say whenever they become aware of the peculiar affordances (and limitations) these tools entail in relation to other and/or older media.
The second grows out of the rhetorical and navigational stucture of the web project itself, which is intended to incorporate two ways of organizing and presenting information — two ways of writing — simultaneously and toward mutually enhancing ends. Specifically, it places an associative or lateral linking texture over (or under, or in between) a linearly directed (albeit looping) one."

The authors ask: Does digital technology have a place in English pedagogy? re we expected to expand our definition of literacy to include visual, mediated literacy?

Gregory Ulmer is a leading guru on this conversation and makes the point that the printing press also caused a stir amongst scholars in the Humanities.

Drawing on Wilbur Hatfield (1935), a post Dewey thinker, the authors report on experience being the best eduator for a student-centered classroom.
They argue, "Teachers and students should develop an understanding of English as a discipline that includes more than the skills derived from literature discussions and writing essays."

One interesting point made in this article is the digital reality of using images to coincide with text. The authors write:
"The result was that many students devoted a lot of time and energy into searching for and selecting images — even to the extent that it was taking some time away from the task of linking in the final workshop. The students enjoyed this aspect of the assignment, and their choices reflected a genuine and enthusiastic engagement with the idea of creating a dialogue between the image and text."

Perhaps most enlightening from this study is the implications they write at the end:

"First of all, it is an exchange between an English teacher and digital tools: English teachers who are conversant with digital technology can better recognize the changing face of literacy and are able to convey to students that traditional conceptions of literacy and new conceptions of "media literacy" are not mutually exclusive. Second, it is an exchange between the technological and the literary. This relationship is symbiotic and mutually enhancing — after all, as literary production becomes more technical, there is no reason why it should become less literary. Finally, the project is a conversation between students. The Web is a communal and participatory medium. Its application in academic settings should reflect this quality. It is, above all, an open-ended conversation."

I am still back in forth with my thinking about reading long texts online, but also with the way you can navigate from one place to the next. My eyes water and because I'm not built like E.T. with large, optical lenses with rich rods and cones, I get a big buggy about the lighting. This, coupled with the warmth of my lap top also doesn't make for comfortable reading. It does, however, make taking notes online a lot easier.

Why Digital Literacy?

WIDE (Writing in Digital Environments) Research Center Collaborative; 2005; "Why Teach Digital Writing?" from KAIROS, Volume 10, Issue 1, Fall, 2005: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.1/index.html

Why Digital Literacy is a great source for the argumentative rhetoric necessary for supporting the need for writing in digital environments. Although it focuses on the college classroom - and doesn't take into account the public school realm - this writing offers much to the high school writing teacher.

I became most interested in the small conversation of space: "It is near impossible for us to separate the considerations above from issues of space—intellectual space, technological/digital space, institutional space, physical space. We have found, on different campuses and within different institutions, that traditional classrooms work to separate students from teachers, students from each other, and, importantly, tools from production. Traditional spaces constrain our work in intellectual and in physical ways. And, often, the traditional model and layout of classrooms is remediated in computer-based spaces."

Everything is political, and so I'm wondering about the politics of an online, digital community. In so many ways, the mere introduction of such "spaces" changes much of the academic rhetoric and theorizing that has occurred since print-based composition studies began. With this said, I'm sure there are multiple parallels that can be carried over into the new realm of digital communities and composition.

Also of note from this source:

"The process of orchestrating multiple media makes possible a meta-semiotic knowledge of how various sign technologies work together to produce meaning."

I am interested in the cross-sections here with the work of arts based research methodology.

Going further,

"Writing isn’t just scripting text anymore. Writing requires carefully and critically analyzing and selecting among multiple media elements."

How an individual composes an argument or story or presentation of thoughts, etc. has the potential of merging text with multiple other ways of making meaning -- not only in the rhetorical, traditional argument alone.

And concluding:

"We imagine a pedagogy based on principles:
*Situated in contexts of rich affordances for writing
*Rooted in a rhetoric that is technological, social, and cultural
*Linked to a thoughtful, critical consciousness of technology
*Framed by learning how to learn
*Anchored by multimodal approaches to writing"

We are amidst a great, historical moment in time.

Back for another Semester of Posting

Spending the last six months looking at education and technology policy, it is now time to explore the rhetoric and composition theory of writing in a technological world. Enrolled in Dr. Collin Brooke's CCR 720: Interdisciplinary Influences on Composition and Rhetoric: Computers and Writing, I'm anxious to learn new ways and new ideas about how advancements in technology will alter a student writer's way of knowing.

I've begun by looking at Michael J. Cripps "Hypertext Theory and WebDev in the Composition Classroom" which addresses how hyperlinking disrupts the traditional way of reading a linear text and may alter the ways in which writer's organize their mode of communication (aside: it occurs to me that the hyperlink is actually the "old school" use of a footnote -- it is an aside...a point of reference to continue one's order of thinking, but that is stated 'outside' the essay as that material that brings the writer to the purpose of their writing).

Cripps discussion of visual rhetoric actually parallels much of the conversation being held by those discussing Arts Based Research Methodology and Visual Literacy.

If I am to critique the hyperlink style of composition, it is as follows: Wow. How easy is it to write a document that utilizes hypertext! Boo. Reading hyperlinked text becomes problematic...at least for me...because it interrupts the linear way of reading that I'm used to. Even so, I'm able to see the point of an essay faster, but get frustrated by moving from thought to back up thought as I try to understand a composition. With this said, I am growing more familiar with the difference in reading traditional print-text copies versus reading online and screen-text. Perhaps a day is coming where one can keep their "highlighted" versions of on-screen text (with their hyperlinked notes from their reading), but as for today, this doesn't occur.

As I build on previous knowledge, I am still in favor of a hard copy in my filing cabinet - but also see how an online filing cabinet might also suffice.

Cripps, M.J; (date-you tell me): "FFFFFF, #000000, & #808080: Hypertext Theory and WebDev in the Composition Classroom";
from Computers and Composition Online; An international journal: Elsevier Publishing:
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/cripps/index.html