This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relatio... more This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relation to video game play. The author conducted an interview with the gamer and read texts the gamer produced-both creative and personal. The interview and textual analysis revealed evidence that the gamer's literacy practices are influenced by his immersion in the virtual worlds of gaming environments. Additionally, following scholars in New Literacy Studies and video game research, the author demonstrates how his interviewee enacts culture and absorbs literacy practices through socially mediated ways. This ethnographic study suggests ways in which other young adults may carry out literacy practices in our increasingly multimodal contexts inside and outside school. Charlotte. He teaches courses in technical communication, rhetoric/composition, new media studies, and women's and gender studies. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville. Althou...
Video games are growing as a subject for scholarly analysis (Gee, 2003; Selfe & Hawisher 2004; Se... more Video games are growing as a subject for scholarly analysis (Gee, 2003; Selfe & Hawisher 2004; Selfe & Hawisher 2004, 2007): This discussion argues that video games are another simulacra for postmodern cultural critique. Video games do cultural work by allowing gamers to play out socially constructed hopes and fears. As cultural products mediated by overarching values, video games enact the culture from which they come and to which they are marketed, including features of individualism, militarization, and perseverance. Following Brian Street’s (2003) ideological model of literacy, this analysis of a particular gamer’s literacy practices found them heavily influenced by contemporary culture: Video game environments require gamers to read dynamic semiotic systems (Gee, 2003) that position them to be cultural critics on the one hand and learners acquiring new literacy practices on the other. “Brent,†a creative writer, creates fictional worlds in his writing that reinscribe co...
This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relatio... more This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relation to video game play. The author conducted an interview with the gamer and read texts the gamer produced-both creative and personal. The interview and textual analysis revealed evidence that the gamer's literacy practices are influenced by his immersion in the virtual worlds of gaming environments. Additionally, following scholars in New Literacy Studies and video game research, the author demonstrates how his interviewee enacts culture and absorbs literacy practices through socially mediated ways. This ethnographic study suggests ways in which other young adults may carry out literacy practices in our increasingly multimodal contexts inside and outside school.
ABSTRACT This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian ... more ABSTRACT This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The wireless excited early twentieth-century audiences before it even became a viable black box technology. The wireless adhered to modernist values—speed, efficiency, militarization, and progress. Language surrounding the wireless is a form of technical communication, overlooked by today’s practitioners. This book establishes a broader definition for technical communication by examining a selection of the discourse surrounding Marconi's wireless. The book’s main themes are the following: 1) technical communication is all discourse surrounding technology, 2) the field of technical communication (or technical writing) should incorporate analyses of discourse surrounding technologies into its epistemology, 3) the wireless is a product of the society from which it comes (early twentieth-century Western civilization), and 4) the discourse surrounding the wireless is infused with tropes of progress—speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity.
ABSTRACT Charlotte Sleigh offers readers an analysis of the century-long (1874–1975) struggle to ... more ABSTRACT Charlotte Sleigh offers readers an analysis of the century-long (1874–1975) struggle to establish the discipline of myrmecology—the branch of entomology devoted to “unraveling the social arrangements of ants” (p. 2)—in Six Legs Better. Sleigh argues for the social construction of myrmecology by exposing three major periods of the discipline’s development, both in Europe and across the Atlantic. By showing who the key figures are and how they developed their understanding of ants and ant behavior through social lenses that influenced their methodologies and, ultimately, their theories of the “social” insects, Sleigh provides the reader with a vast corpus of evidence pulled from the scientific, popular, biographical, and political interactions of the century. This excellent book, especially in the last third, pieces together the multiple players and theories, from Darwinism to cybernetics, that had an impact on social entomology and negotiated—often stirring up heated intradepartmental animosity—myrmecology’s place as a serious scientific discipline. Sleigh devotes much of the book’s analysis to three key figures in myrmecology—Auguste Henri Forel, William Morton Wheeler, and Edward O. Wilson—but provides perspectives on the many others who interacted, supported, discouraged, and collaborated with the main characters. Sleigh’s immense reference list encompasses field notes, biographies, letters, diaries, reprinted proceedings, and textbooks, to name some of the primary research. Drawing on the methodologies of Gillian Beer and N. Katherine Hayles, Sleigh suggests that Forel’s metaphors have “cultural resonances that reach beyond [their] immediate application to the natural world and suggest all kinds of unintended connections, images, and analogies to readers” (p. 14); once established or simply offered, “the metaphor goes on to shape new exploration, experimentation, and representation” (p. 15). The three scientists’ similarities and differences are compared with regard to their social and academic positions as well as their sociohistorical contexts, which overlap somewhat. First, readers see Forel’s impressive taxonomic feat of cataloging “3,500 ant species of the world,” which were “half of those known at the time” (p. 42), combined with his training in “neurological and psychiatric methods” as the Swiss scientist’s context for furthering “the key nineteenth-century concepts of instinct and intelligence” (p. 22). Forel’s “science”—his methodology and filter for studying formic behavior—was heavily influenced by the social concerns he explored, especially his anti-alcoholism stance. Forel’s position within the late-Victorian degeneration anxiety and general evolutionary debates adhere to entomology’s (and zoology’s) penchant for transforming human psychology onto animal evolution. Second, Wheeler—Forel’s overlapping American contemporary—extended the sociological view of ants “for an interwar American context” (p. 64); again, social issues filtered into ant behavior. Wheeler viewed trophallaxis—food, secretion, or odor exchanges among insects in a colony—as “any kind of functional exchange among a community that holistically construed, went beyond the nest” (p. 81). Interestingly, the cultural awareness of communism as well as Herbert Hoover’s understanding that “without the worker caste there was no society, and the raison d’être of the worker class was food and its exchange” (p. 83) abounds in Wheeler’s descriptions of colonies. The Great Depression only strengthened the view that food distribution was a social imperative: “feeding was the key to society’s evolution and maintenance” (p. 84). Finally, Wilson transforms ants into communicative creatures while in the context of World War II and postwar communication trends. At this point, “big science” had endowed research institutions (often via grants from the military) and pushed myrmecology into cybernetics; now, the ant colonies become machine-like super-organisms, communicating through signs and signifiers representative of semiotic theories, from Pierce and Lévi-Strauss. Sleigh’s argument really gets going when she examines Wilson’s contributions—situating him within a postwar cultural perspective—that show myrmecology implicated within a military-industrial-academic context. Surprisingly, entomology, which moved from a curiosity of land-grant colleges in the latenineteenth century to a major discipline at Ivy League colleges over the century, became a major sub-discipline for biology departments and academic institutions. The study of ants, termites, and wasps after World War II stressed the communication question, which returned to the earlier myrmecology/entomology debates of...
ABSTRACT This article calls for technical writing courses to be more engaged in discussions on cr... more ABSTRACT This article calls for technical writing courses to be more engaged in discussions on critical technological awareness. Being critically aware of technology means looking beyond a socially constructed artifact's assumed practical benefit and critiquing its effects and development. All discourse surrounding technology should be the purview of the field of technical writing. Because much technical writing pedagogy ignores cultural issues related to technology, this article promotes student engagement in discussions about social constructions of technology to foster critical thinking. This article concludes with a discussion of student responses to an essay assignment based on Isaac Asimov's novel I, Robot. Asimov envisions a high-tech world where technologies of the 1940s are amplified and new ones imagined to create stories where humans must interact with not-so-perfect robots. The novel offers a chance for students to reflect on how contemporary technologies, such as computers, are enmeshed into the social fabric of twenty-first-century life. Additionally, I, Robot generates classroom discussions that bolster student engagement and highlight the impact of contemporary (and future) technologies on workplace practices and the culture at large. Some topics that I, Robot addresses are issues of gender in technological fields, military beginnings for consumer technologies, and labor issues.
… : Studies In Media & Information Literacy Education, 2009
Active learning and student-centered courses have been important goals for education research bec... more Active learning and student-centered courses have been important goals for education research because they appear to provide better, more effective learning environments for students. This article provides ways to bring a student-centered perspective to online and hybrid courses. By using rhetoric and composition theories that inform critical pedagogical stances, the author calls for incorporating online writing spaces for students across the disciplines. Because writing and thinking are connected, the author advocates that online and hybrid courses ask students to (re)present their understanding of course content online in order to have students move away from passive learning. These online spaces, similar to e-portfolios, are semester-long projects that allow students more chances for reflecting on the course material through media with which contemporary students are already familiar. Additionally, the online spaces in which students compose form an online learning community for individuals to showcase their work and, more importantly, their understanding of the course material. The article concludes by showing readers that students showcasing their work online makes the medium (the Internet) their message.
This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relatio... more This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relation to video game play. The author conducted an interview with the gamer and read texts the gamer produced-both creative and personal. The interview and textual analysis revealed evidence that the gamer's literacy practices are influenced by his immersion in the virtual worlds of gaming environments. Additionally, following scholars in New Literacy Studies and video game research, the author demonstrates how his interviewee enacts culture and absorbs literacy practices through socially mediated ways. This ethnographic study suggests ways in which other young adults may carry out literacy practices in our increasingly multimodal contexts inside and outside school. Charlotte. He teaches courses in technical communication, rhetoric/composition, new media studies, and women's and gender studies. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville. Althou...
Video games are growing as a subject for scholarly analysis (Gee, 2003; Selfe & Hawisher 2004; Se... more Video games are growing as a subject for scholarly analysis (Gee, 2003; Selfe & Hawisher 2004; Selfe & Hawisher 2004, 2007): This discussion argues that video games are another simulacra for postmodern cultural critique. Video games do cultural work by allowing gamers to play out socially constructed hopes and fears. As cultural products mediated by overarching values, video games enact the culture from which they come and to which they are marketed, including features of individualism, militarization, and perseverance. Following Brian Street’s (2003) ideological model of literacy, this analysis of a particular gamer’s literacy practices found them heavily influenced by contemporary culture: Video game environments require gamers to read dynamic semiotic systems (Gee, 2003) that position them to be cultural critics on the one hand and learners acquiring new literacy practices on the other. “Brent,†a creative writer, creates fictional worlds in his writing that reinscribe co...
This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relatio... more This article is a case study of a young adult video gamer and his literacy acquisition in relation to video game play. The author conducted an interview with the gamer and read texts the gamer produced-both creative and personal. The interview and textual analysis revealed evidence that the gamer's literacy practices are influenced by his immersion in the virtual worlds of gaming environments. Additionally, following scholars in New Literacy Studies and video game research, the author demonstrates how his interviewee enacts culture and absorbs literacy practices through socially mediated ways. This ethnographic study suggests ways in which other young adults may carry out literacy practices in our increasingly multimodal contexts inside and outside school.
ABSTRACT This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian ... more ABSTRACT This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The wireless excited early twentieth-century audiences before it even became a viable black box technology. The wireless adhered to modernist values—speed, efficiency, militarization, and progress. Language surrounding the wireless is a form of technical communication, overlooked by today’s practitioners. This book establishes a broader definition for technical communication by examining a selection of the discourse surrounding Marconi's wireless. The book’s main themes are the following: 1) technical communication is all discourse surrounding technology, 2) the field of technical communication (or technical writing) should incorporate analyses of discourse surrounding technologies into its epistemology, 3) the wireless is a product of the society from which it comes (early twentieth-century Western civilization), and 4) the discourse surrounding the wireless is infused with tropes of progress—speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity.
ABSTRACT Charlotte Sleigh offers readers an analysis of the century-long (1874–1975) struggle to ... more ABSTRACT Charlotte Sleigh offers readers an analysis of the century-long (1874–1975) struggle to establish the discipline of myrmecology—the branch of entomology devoted to “unraveling the social arrangements of ants” (p. 2)—in Six Legs Better. Sleigh argues for the social construction of myrmecology by exposing three major periods of the discipline’s development, both in Europe and across the Atlantic. By showing who the key figures are and how they developed their understanding of ants and ant behavior through social lenses that influenced their methodologies and, ultimately, their theories of the “social” insects, Sleigh provides the reader with a vast corpus of evidence pulled from the scientific, popular, biographical, and political interactions of the century. This excellent book, especially in the last third, pieces together the multiple players and theories, from Darwinism to cybernetics, that had an impact on social entomology and negotiated—often stirring up heated intradepartmental animosity—myrmecology’s place as a serious scientific discipline. Sleigh devotes much of the book’s analysis to three key figures in myrmecology—Auguste Henri Forel, William Morton Wheeler, and Edward O. Wilson—but provides perspectives on the many others who interacted, supported, discouraged, and collaborated with the main characters. Sleigh’s immense reference list encompasses field notes, biographies, letters, diaries, reprinted proceedings, and textbooks, to name some of the primary research. Drawing on the methodologies of Gillian Beer and N. Katherine Hayles, Sleigh suggests that Forel’s metaphors have “cultural resonances that reach beyond [their] immediate application to the natural world and suggest all kinds of unintended connections, images, and analogies to readers” (p. 14); once established or simply offered, “the metaphor goes on to shape new exploration, experimentation, and representation” (p. 15). The three scientists’ similarities and differences are compared with regard to their social and academic positions as well as their sociohistorical contexts, which overlap somewhat. First, readers see Forel’s impressive taxonomic feat of cataloging “3,500 ant species of the world,” which were “half of those known at the time” (p. 42), combined with his training in “neurological and psychiatric methods” as the Swiss scientist’s context for furthering “the key nineteenth-century concepts of instinct and intelligence” (p. 22). Forel’s “science”—his methodology and filter for studying formic behavior—was heavily influenced by the social concerns he explored, especially his anti-alcoholism stance. Forel’s position within the late-Victorian degeneration anxiety and general evolutionary debates adhere to entomology’s (and zoology’s) penchant for transforming human psychology onto animal evolution. Second, Wheeler—Forel’s overlapping American contemporary—extended the sociological view of ants “for an interwar American context” (p. 64); again, social issues filtered into ant behavior. Wheeler viewed trophallaxis—food, secretion, or odor exchanges among insects in a colony—as “any kind of functional exchange among a community that holistically construed, went beyond the nest” (p. 81). Interestingly, the cultural awareness of communism as well as Herbert Hoover’s understanding that “without the worker caste there was no society, and the raison d’être of the worker class was food and its exchange” (p. 83) abounds in Wheeler’s descriptions of colonies. The Great Depression only strengthened the view that food distribution was a social imperative: “feeding was the key to society’s evolution and maintenance” (p. 84). Finally, Wilson transforms ants into communicative creatures while in the context of World War II and postwar communication trends. At this point, “big science” had endowed research institutions (often via grants from the military) and pushed myrmecology into cybernetics; now, the ant colonies become machine-like super-organisms, communicating through signs and signifiers representative of semiotic theories, from Pierce and Lévi-Strauss. Sleigh’s argument really gets going when she examines Wilson’s contributions—situating him within a postwar cultural perspective—that show myrmecology implicated within a military-industrial-academic context. Surprisingly, entomology, which moved from a curiosity of land-grant colleges in the latenineteenth century to a major discipline at Ivy League colleges over the century, became a major sub-discipline for biology departments and academic institutions. The study of ants, termites, and wasps after World War II stressed the communication question, which returned to the earlier myrmecology/entomology debates of...
ABSTRACT This article calls for technical writing courses to be more engaged in discussions on cr... more ABSTRACT This article calls for technical writing courses to be more engaged in discussions on critical technological awareness. Being critically aware of technology means looking beyond a socially constructed artifact's assumed practical benefit and critiquing its effects and development. All discourse surrounding technology should be the purview of the field of technical writing. Because much technical writing pedagogy ignores cultural issues related to technology, this article promotes student engagement in discussions about social constructions of technology to foster critical thinking. This article concludes with a discussion of student responses to an essay assignment based on Isaac Asimov's novel I, Robot. Asimov envisions a high-tech world where technologies of the 1940s are amplified and new ones imagined to create stories where humans must interact with not-so-perfect robots. The novel offers a chance for students to reflect on how contemporary technologies, such as computers, are enmeshed into the social fabric of twenty-first-century life. Additionally, I, Robot generates classroom discussions that bolster student engagement and highlight the impact of contemporary (and future) technologies on workplace practices and the culture at large. Some topics that I, Robot addresses are issues of gender in technological fields, military beginnings for consumer technologies, and labor issues.
… : Studies In Media & Information Literacy Education, 2009
Active learning and student-centered courses have been important goals for education research bec... more Active learning and student-centered courses have been important goals for education research because they appear to provide better, more effective learning environments for students. This article provides ways to bring a student-centered perspective to online and hybrid courses. By using rhetoric and composition theories that inform critical pedagogical stances, the author calls for incorporating online writing spaces for students across the disciplines. Because writing and thinking are connected, the author advocates that online and hybrid courses ask students to (re)present their understanding of course content online in order to have students move away from passive learning. These online spaces, similar to e-portfolios, are semester-long projects that allow students more chances for reflecting on the course material through media with which contemporary students are already familiar. Additionally, the online spaces in which students compose form an online learning community for individuals to showcase their work and, more importantly, their understanding of the course material. The article concludes by showing readers that students showcasing their work online makes the medium (the Internet) their message.
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