It's already the 4th week of the blogging workshop and we reached the 1502nd message in our yahoo group... and counting. I knew the world was shrinking and knocking at my door, but I'm still old-fashioned (i.e. slow and a little overwhelmed by all this), so I stop for a second and, in a few phrases, summarize what I've learned:
1. blogs make it easy to use a lot of modes - especially image - but also music and sound effects. In this way, they change the representational potential of action of their users. Yes, you knew it already, I'm talking about "multimodality" and "interactivity", which can be interpersonal (you can write back to the text producer) and which means also that you can play hypertextuality with your friends (you can link texts with links and other texts and produce new texts and meanings a.s.o.);
2. this multimodality is made usual, easy, natural by the new technologies (I can still argue with that, I'm trying to add a photo to my profile for three days now). And this affordability and naturalised uses of multiple modes leads to a greater specialisation - blogs can be used successfully in many domains, education is my point here, given the context;
3. blogs are the perfect example of fictionality to the notion of author as source of the text; you all remember your primary school teacher asking you to put something "in your own words". But we know already that no one in this (in any) community has "their own words" other than the citing fragments of previously encountered texts, in the making of new ones. Now it's even simpler to bring texts into association and elements of texts or links reorganized as new texts, which in the end change the whole idea about authorship as originator.
2 comments:
Dear Dan,
You make a profound reflection about hypertextual writing, the building of a collaborative discourse and the new meaning of authorship. No doubt the web is the place where ideas are born, grow and flourish. It's a blessing we all have access to such rich content.
My congrats on your blogging performance!
Claudia
Dear Dan,
I'm glad you spoke up by the end of our session! What a great example of blogging as a personal sharing of your views on such different topics as blogging, education, smoking and ads! As Claudia mentioned, you certainly grasped the vast possibilities blogs provide us in terms of authorship and discourse, some of the aspects we keep struggling in the traditional classroom. Here, we can show students a new dimension of the language and let them REALLY develop their content and meaning. Thanks for sharing such a rich blog with photos that I just loved!
Fantastic job! Hope to hear a lot from you and if you ever need any help from us, we're always around.
Carla
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