Looking Good

This week I'm prepping a presentation on how to use e-portfolios in composition classrooms. I've been spending a lot of time with an open source platform powered by Mahara.

So my head is in an odd kind of space. Presentation prep has me thinking about teaching students to compose academic work for online spaces, teaching a novel interface, evaluating students based on their ability to work in a digital environment, and all while trying to learn the new technology myself.

This has me thinking about what digital texts look like, and that is why, of all the week's reading for my Literacy and Technology course, Matthew K. Gold's chapter in From A to : Keywords of Markup has engaged me the most.

Gold writes a surprisingly engaging chapter on the horizontal rule HTML tag, otherwise known as "hr".

Let's see if I can compose an 'hr'. I'm going to switch my blog's composition box to "Edit HTML" mode and add a horizontal rule.

---

See. It worked.
And I have a fuzzy screencast video of the process.
(Btw, if you plan to use screencasting software, it looks like you have to pay for quality. Actually, I just needed to learn the software better. I think the Camstudio open source screencasting software will work out just fine.)

But even if my screencast video doesn't look that hot, its inclusion is a vast improvement over the kinds of web-texts I remember from the 90s.

Popular Website from the 90s

The huge number of readers and composers of web-text has resulted in a rapid reconceptualization of the reading space. Both Gold and Wolf call on the Sumerians to help develop an understanding of how even the oldest conventions of text influence web text. Gold explains how the linear divisions on Sumerian pictographic texts depicted a hierarchy of gods, kings, and the vanquished.

While most modern text horizontal conventions do not have quite so stately divisions as the Sumerians, it remains interesting to see how people have struggled with layout. The the gap between the Sumerian writing system and today's web texts is filled with conventions dictated by technology. From the printing press to slow processing speeds, texts have long been restrained by the mode of production.

I found it amusing when Gold got around to describing the worst kinds of ornamental perversions of the HR: flowering vines, fire trucks, and dancing figures dividing the text. It had me thinking of MySpace's downfall - allowing users to add whatever bells and whistles they wanted to their personal page. That was a social experiment that taught us never to distribute an animated dancing baby.

That disaster of popular culture, in turn, got me thinking about Wolf's echoing of Socrates' concerns about the impact digital texts could have - Could we lose our sense of a text's true meaning in the flurry and flood of information now available? Gold reiterates this concern when he quotes Helfand, who describes "a new kind of illiteracy" motivated by the urge to self publish.

Gold does not join Helfand in fretting about the decay of literacy, arguing instead that as the rules change, so too will our conceptions of literacy. I think I sit somewhat uneasily in between the two views. I see the changes taking place, and I believe people will adjust. I also believe, however, that at the moment, most people do not know how to read or compose effectively for digital spaces. That is a kind of illiteracy.

I suppose the question that raises is this: How do we teach society to read and compose for a rapidly changing medium?

Result of an image search for "HR Tag"

 Interestingly, when I did a Google Image Search for "hr tag," the image to the right was the number one result. I find it funny that someone choose to illustrate the HR by dividing pop song lyrics from 2000. It's as though they knew the shelf life of both the tune and the textual convention.

If our writing conventions have the same staying power as our bubblegum, what's a composition teacher to do?