English W412/W510

This page contains information about the course goals; what we can expect of each other this semester; a list of texts; and various policies (such as policies on children in class, plagiarism and collaboration.

In Writing Space, rhetorician Jay David Bolter claims that our current era is the “late age of print,” characterized by electronic writing that represents a “textual medium of a new order” (6). This new medium, according to Bolter, “is the fourth great technique of writing that will take its place beside the ancient papyrus roll, the medieval codex, and the printed book.” Literacy and technology have multifaceted relationships with each other, and during the semester we’ll explore Bolter’s claim, exploring the ways technological developments shape the ways we see ourselves and our literacies. We’ll explore how people acquire notions of literacy and how technologies affect the types of literacy we prefer. We’ll consider the possibilities and limitations associated with different technologies and literacies, in and out of school. Students in English W510 will look at these issues through a teaching lens, considering what impact such questions and debates have on students, teachers, and schools.

Course Goals

By successfully completing the course, you will be able to

• Read and analyze different views about literacy and technology
• Identify resources to further your investigation of those questions
• Shape texts (whether in traditional, experimental, or online formats) to display your inquiry and your engagement with others’ ideas
• Use some new technologies, or use older technologies in new ways to further your writing development
• And if you’re in W510, articulate a philosophy of teaching relating to technology and construct teaching activities using and/or critiquing technology and literacy

What you can expect from me
• I will take you, and your work, seriously. I’ll talk and write with you about the important ideas you develop; I’ll treat you fairly.
• I’ll respond to your written work to help you revise.
• I will bring my calendar to class every day so that you can easily schedule a meeting with me.
• I will give you individual attention as you need it–and whenever you ask!
• I will try to help you with questions you have about IUPUI or the English department’s programs, and I will always help with questions about our course and its work.
• I will promptly respond to your work–within a week, generally.
• I will give you clear written assignments for all major work.

What I expect from you
• You will be in class, every night, on time. There is nothing better you can do to help your performance than coming to class.
• You will complete your work on time virtually all the time–and on the rare occasions when you don’t have something in on time, you’ll take quick action to catch up. You can call or e-mail me, call a friend, consult OnCourse, your assignment sheet, and the syllabus.
• You will take your own work seriously–your ideas matter, and you matter in our class.
• You will take our class time seriously–you’ll come on time and prepared, and you’ll keep on task. A corollary to this expectation: you will not ask me, “Are we doing anything important in class tomorrow”? We always are..
• You will take working with your classmates seriously.
• You will ask me if you have any questions, large or small, about your work.

Texts and Materials
Our readings will be available online (via Oncourse or e-reserve). You will also need:

• Folders or a binder to organize your work. Save everything you write!
• A system for backing up your work: an extra disk, a flash drive, regular use of Oncourse’s file storage facilities to save your work).

English W510 students will have two separate texts:
• Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian Huot. New York/Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003
• Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, by Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004.

Students, Accommodations, and Disabilities
I am happy to offer any student individualized assistance with course assignments. If you have a disability that requires accommodation, please let me know how I can help. The Office of Adaptive Student Services (basement of Cavanaugh Hall, 274-3241) can help you negotiate academic requirements.

Children in Class
Students with young children sometimes have problems with childcare and transportation situations. You are welcome to bring your children to class with you if that’s the only way you are able to attend class on a given day. Please make sure your child has books, games, or materials that they can work with independently so that the class can proceed as usual.

Ethics, Plagiarism, and Collaboration

When you think about ethics in writing, you might first think about plagiarism–which is actually a complicated term that covers many types of actions. One form of plagiarism is cheating or fraud –handing in work that someone else has written and passing it off as your own. Downloading papers from the Internet and handing them in, paying someone else to write a paper for you, taking a paper written by someone else and handing it in as your own are all forms of fraud and cheating, and if you do these things, you will fail the course. See the IU Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities for more information about the proceedings in such cases.

But plagiarism can also refer to other matters: the improper use of, say, quotation marks to indicate words quoted from a source. If you make mistakes in this area during the term, your classmates and I will help you respond to them. If you make serious mistakes in this area in your written work, your grade will not be as high as it might have been; serious errors in citation compromise your credibility and may result in a failing grade on an assignment.

Studying literacy and technology means studying the means by which technology has influenced writing conventions. You’ll quickly find that citation guidelines are usually written with an eye toward traditional uses of traditional, print texts. Depending on the direction your work takes you, traditional citation guidelines may not address all your questions and issues. If that is the case, talk with me and we’ll agree about how to handle the situation. A handy guide that covers a range of electronic citation issues is The Columbia Guide to Online Style.

It’s important that you understand that we learn by writing and talking with others; many of our ideas are formed by contact with others. In various ways, we’ll learn more about how people around us can influence our emerging views on a range of issues. We’ll also talk about how to acknowledge the influence of others. You can rely on me and your classmates to help you by responding to your writing during the term and by pointing you toward sources you might otherwise have overlooked. This sort of collaboration is standard academic practice. It is also standard academic practice to acknowledge, in writing, the ways that others have enabled a project to proceed, either by the provision of practical help or intellectual help. Your written work should include such acknowledgments.