Diss
Proposed chapter breakdowns; draft only!
AFK while I’m Rezzing:
Social Media, Community Literacy, and Second Life
Chapter 1 introduces Second Life as an example of a community of language users; argues that social media always makes us re-think community language practices; suggests that Community Literacy Studies can still apply.
A- Brief intro to what Second Life is: a virtual environment, a user-created world; a community of language users that is constituted by many smaller communities.
B- Survey of how Community Literacy Studies talks about community and how virtual communities may seem to challenge some of those assumptions (but I think most of the better research findings will still hold).
Chapter 2 presents a more detailed description of Second Life as a social media application; situates Second Life relative to other social media and game theory in particular.
A- Survey of how Social Media Theory is talking about these kinds of applications generally and is casting them as writing communities specifically: it’s about more than just networking, it’s about shared cultural literacies.
B- As sites of cultural literacy, social media applications bring new demands to community language and writing studies research. (Feminist methodologies can help build ethical studies in these environments; many if not most accepted research methods are problematic for this environment.)
Chapter 3 examines writing genres that have emerged within Second Life and how those genres are used to build community within the environment; surveys emerging pedagogies of writing and language instruction in and about immersive virtual environments and Second Life in particular.
A- Books do exist in Second Life: as plain text documents, as paginated pdf illustrated documents with covers, as items to leave out on tables, but also as environments where the story is lived experientially through one’s avatar. Writing builds communities through interest-based groups, instructions, blogs, marketing and advertising, reviews, identity descriptions; basically every genre or mode that exists outside of Second Life also exists in it. More than that, however, users create the environment of Second Life itself through coding and scripting language. They can sell items they make and market by means of their literacy skills for real-world dollars. Second Life is a “maker’s” environment; critical literacy can pay off there in very real financial ways.
B- Writing and language instruction are currently most present in distance education and ESL. Literature classes and argument classes particularly are increasingly moving into SL and academic articles and books are appearing in growing numbers. (I may rely more on distance ed here than anything else, but I’m currently surveying contacts I’ve met at Second Life conferences for teachers of writing classes particularly.)
Chapter 4 presents a case study of one teacher who is using Second Life for her writing classes. (I want to focus on a writing teacher, and there are 3 that I know about; in lieu of a writing teacher, there is a teacher of networked communication, in a communications program, who has agreed to work with me. In the 2 days since I queried the Association of Internet Researchers Listserv (AIR-L) for the topic, I have received 16 emails, 5 Twitter follows, 2 Second Life in-world contacts, and 1 new Facebook friend. I don’t anticipate problems finding people.)
Chapter 5 presents real and serious caveats for teaching in Second Life; suggests areas nonetheless of future inquiry for studying writing in immersive virtual environments, particularly emerging performance-based pedagogies and attentions to somatic/visceral theories of writing.
A- More than just access issues and campus buy-in, student perceptions of Second Life are real and stopping curriculum concerns. Studies show that without cautious engagement and appropriate bridging, students resent being required to engage in virtual worlds as educational environments.
B- The new CCC OnLine CFP emphasizes a turn toward “performance”: writing effectively for Second Life kinds of environments will require this turn. Additionally, studies of writing as they address “felt sense” and bodily engagement would benefit writing study in Second Life.
If we don’t pay attention to these new communities that students are learning to engage only as readers, then we are ignoring literacies that are potentially more lucrative to their future needs than the traditionally academic ones we provide. (don’t quite know how to say this, but it’s true: what happens when the literacies that students bring into the academy, when critically engaged, have equal earning potential, not just power, than those of the university?)
Sources for my committee members about Second Life
The following is a link to selected recorded sessions from the Best Practices in Education conference. These were recorded during the actual conference, so this is an example of what you would have seen if you were in Second Life for the conference except that you don’t see the text chat that the local participants are scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
http://business.treet.tv/shows/bpeducation
This is a link to the conference program itself: links on the left will show you what presentations were offered on which days.
https://sites.google.com/a/vwbpe.org/schedule/main-schedule-page
The following is the Second Life Destination guide. If you had a Second Life account and you clicked the link, you would be transported to that destination inside Second Life. The picture is an actual picture of what the environment they are linking to looks like, so imagine yourself inside that environment, and you’ll get the general idea. Also notice on the left side menu bar that there is a subject category for Education and Non-profits.
http://secondlife.com/destinations?lang=en-US
Video that is made of the screen while in an in-world environment is called, “machinima” (rhymes with “cinema”). There is a great deal of Second Life machinima, from people who just want to record what the world looks like as they walk through it to staged story presentations that use other avatars as actors. This link takes you to an archive of machinima, and this is the Second Life channel link. Remember that everything you’re seeing is something that a person made or an animation that a person scripted or an avatar that a person is playing, and then that event has been filmed.
http://www.machinima.com/channel/view&id=10
This is a for-profit company that is using Second Life to teach ESL students. I have attended one of the owner’s presentations at a conference.
http://languagelab.com/en/
A few of my favorite teaching blogs about Second Life:
Nergiz Kern, “Teaching in Second Life: Reflections of a Language Teacher” http://slexperiments.edublogs.org/
Kevin Brooks, “Virtual Peace Garden” http://virtualpeacegarden.com/
Shiv Rajendran, “Shiv on Learning” http://www.shv.me/
Community Literacy sources
Brandt, Literacy in American Lives.
Flower, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement.
Grabill, Jeffrey. Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action.
Gray-Rosendale. Rethinking Basic Writing (2000).
McComiskey. City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices.
McComiskey. Teaching Composition as a Social Process (2000).
Parks, Class Politics.
Parks, Gravyland.
Street, Brian. Literacy in Theory and Practice (1985).
Social Media sources
Aldrich, Clark. Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction.
Alexander, Jon. Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web.
Alexander, Jonathan and Marcia Dickson. Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing.
Bainbridge, William Sims. Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual.
Baron, Dennis. A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution.
Blair, Kristine, Radhika Gajjala, and Christine Tulley. Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action.
Blair, Kristine and Pam Takayoshi, eds. Feminist Landscapes: Essays on Gender in Electronic Spaces (1999).
Blakesley, David. Writing: A Manual for the Digital Age. (textbook).
Bloom, Lynn. Composition Studies in the New Millennium.
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
Bolter. Remediation.
Bolter Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing (1991).
Bonime, Andrew, and Ken Pohlmann. Writing for New Media. (1997).
boyd, danah. Faceted Id/entity: Managing Representation in a Digital World.
Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta.
Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers.
Castronova, Edward. Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality.
Christakis, Nicholas. Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
Clark, Irene. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing (2002).
Clark, Ruth, and Ann Kwinn. The New Virtual Classroom.
Collins, Allan. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America.
Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and the Tools (1998).
Daniels, Jessie. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights.
Davis, Robert. Teaching Multiwriting: Researching and Composing with Multiple Genres, Media, Disciplines, and Cultures.
Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Issue on Virtual Ethnography. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/issue/view/8/showToc
Garrand, Timothy. Writing for Multimedia and the Web.
Gee. Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century: Literate Connections.
Gee. Good Video Games and Good Learning.
Gee. New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and “Worked Examples” as One Way Forward.
Gee. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy.
Gruber, Sibylle. Literacies, Experiences, and Technologies: Reflective Practices of an Alien Researcher.
Gruber, Sibylle, ed. Weaving a Virtual Web: Practical Approaches to Teaching with Technology (1999).
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture.
Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Spaces (1963).
Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974).
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
Goffman, Erving. Relations in Public (1971).
Goffman. Strategic Interaction.
Gurak. Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness (2001).
Gurak. Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace (1997).
Harrigan, Pat. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media.
Hawisher, Gail, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe. Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994 (1995).
Hawisher, Gail, and Cynthia Selfe. Passions, Pedagogies, and Twenty-first Century Technologies (1999).
Hawisher, Gail, Cynthia Selfe, and James Paul
Hawisher, Gail, and Cindy Selfe. Literacy, Technology and Society: Confronting the Issues (1996).
Hawk, Byron. A Counter-History of Composition.
Hawk, Byron, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, eds. Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools.
Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999).
Hayles, Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts.
Hea, Amy C. Kimme. Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.
Herrington, Anne and Marcia Curtis. Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Personal Development in College.
Huot, Brian and Pam Takayoshi. Teaching Writing with Computers (2002).
Iuppa, Nick, and Terry Borst. Story and Simulations for Serious Games.
Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture.
Jenkins, Henry. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (1998).
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work.
Jung, Julie. Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts.
Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.
Kirsch, Gesa, ed. Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process.
Kress, Gunther. Multimodal Discourse (2001).
Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.
Maciuba-Koppel, Darlene. The Web Writer’s Guide.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media.
McKee, Heidi and Danielle DeVoss. Digital Writing Reseach: Technologies, Methodologies and Ethical Issues.
Miller, Richard. Writing at the End of the World.
Miller, Susan. The Norton Book of Composition Studies.
Miller, Susan. Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric.
Miller-Cochran, Susan K. and Rochelle Rodrigo. Rhetorically Rethinking Usability: Theories, Practices, and Methodologies.
Montola, Markus. Persuasive Games: Theory and Design.
Murphy, James J. A Short History of Writing Instruction (2001).
Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck (1998).
Oviedo, Ollie, Joyce Walker, and Byron Hawk. Digital Tools in Composition Studies: Critical Dimensions and Implications.
Palloff, Rena, and Keith Pratt. Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom.
Pearce, Celia. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds.
Pearce, Celia. The Interactive Book (1997).
Prensky, Marc. Digital Game-Based Learning.
Reid, Alexander. The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition.
Rice, Jeff. Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media.
Ritter, Kelly. Who Owns School? Authority, Students, and Online Discourse.
Rouzie, Albert. At Play in the Fields of Writing: A Serio-Ludic Rhetoric.
Selber, Stuart. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age.
Selfe, Cynthia. Multimodal Composition.
Selfe, Cindy. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century (1999).
Selfe, Cynthia, and Gail Hawisher. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the Unites States.
Selfe, Cynthia, and Susan Hilligoss. Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology (1994).
Selfe, Richard. Sustainable Computer Environments: Cultures of Support in English Studies and Language Arts (2004).
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.
Smit, David. The End of Composition Studies.
Snyder, Ilana and Catherine Beavis. Doing Literacy Online: Teaching, Learning and Playing in an Electronic World.
Striphas, Ted. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control.
Sullivan, Patricia and Pam Takayoshi, eds. Labor, Writing Technologies, and the Shaping of Composition in the Academy.
Szulborski, Dave. This Is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming.
Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies (2000).
Thaiss, Chris, and Terry Myers Zawacki. Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life.
Ullman, Ellen. Close the the Machine.
Ulmer, Greg. Avatar Emergency (in press: heard him speak about it at Clemson).
Ulmer, Greg. Electronic Monuments.
Ulmer, Greg. Heuretics (1994).
Ulmer, Greg. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (2003).
Ulmer, Greg. Teletheory (1989).
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing.
Wardrip-Fruin. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game.
Wardrip-Fruin. The New Media Reader.
Wimberly, Darryl, and Jon Samsel. Writing for Interactive Media (1998).
Worsham, Lynn. Plugged In: Technology, Rhetoric, and Culture in a Posthuman Age.
Wysocki, Anne, Cynthia Selfe, Geoffrey Sirc, and Johndan Johnson-Eilola. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition.
Second Life sources
Andrews, Scott. The Guild Leader’s Handbook.
Au, Wagner James. The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World.
Bainbridge, William. The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World.
Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human.
Corneliussen, Hilde and Jill Walker Rettberg. Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader.
Cuddy, Luke and John Nordlinger. World of Warcraft and Philosophy.
Heiphetz, Alex and Gary Woodill. Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds.
Malaby, Thomas. Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life.
Meadows, Mark Stephen. I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life.
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