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ENG 480, Computers and Writing
Western Illinois University Fall 2003 |
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AssignmentsThroughout the semester, we’ll complete a variety of small individual and group assignments which build on class discussions. You will be asked to write short responses to the readings most weeks of the semester (refer to the course schedule for specific dates). These responses don’t have to be comprehensive summaries or masterful critiques, but should engage an interesting part of the assigned material, helping you come to class with something to discuss. Graduate students will supplement these readings with selections from another book, and a different set of assignments. We will begin the semester by working through Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, a tremendously influential text from which we will extract a theory of grammatology—the history of writing—to use throughout the semester. The first project will be an essay or Web project which describes Ong’s method, in the hopes that we’ll be able to borrow it for the remainder of the course. (Rewriting this assignment is possible.) With a common foundation of media theory, we will turn to one of Ong’s students, Marshall McLuhan, who you probably know for his provocative statement “the medium is the message.” We will compare McLuhan’s Understanding Media to what we currently know about electronic and digital media and communicative forms. The second major project of the semester will include group and individually authored web sites which reflects on McLuhan’s work. The course will conclude with a more recently written text, Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, which offers a comprehensive theory of new media. We will evaluate this theory, keeping Ong and McLuhan in mind, by producing web sites and other “computers and writing” forms. Through the semester, we will supplement these texts with material from Gregory Ulmer’s experimental textbook Internet Invention, which also confronts the question of the “and” framing the course. |
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