joanvinallcox’s posterous

joanvinallcox’s posterous

Joan Vinall-Cox  //  I'm fascinated by the possibilities offered by web 2.0! I lecture part-time, consult on writing and web 2.0, and read detective novels.

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Aug 13 / 1:24pm

A Movable Text: faux reading, reading foe or the integration of text and image!

In early 2008 I decided to reexamine what I know of reading by writing in my Eduspaces blog. Eduspaces was the first social community I was a part of, and its influence continues with me today as many of the people I encountered there, I still follow and/or friend.

I had been noticing the use of text in tv commercials and I included that new use when I set out my three categories of how we read text:

Lyric reading, like singing, entangles the whole person in its meaning. Useful reading is informational  and a requirement for specific tasks and accomplishments. Faux reading is the recognition of words used in an isolated and semantically meaningless way as indicators or symbols, seen in ads, commercials, some art, and traffic signs. All require word-recognition, useful and lyric reading require knowing how to decode the text,
I wouldn't call it "faux reading" currently, nor would I see it as an enemy of other kinds of reading. Now I see it as the "integration of rhetoric, image and vision" (Fleckenstein, p. 7) and I see it frequently on tv. Here's an example from last fall's American election:

It's a powerful use of text as image, where you have to be able to recognize the words, but the meaning comes only partially from the text and is highly augmented by the movement and size of the words and numbers. I think of it as text/image.

I think it's being used increasingly; do you? And what effect do you think it has on the readers/watchers?


Citations

Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Sue Hum, and Linda T. Calendrillo, eds. Ways of Seeing, Ways of Speaking. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor, 2007. Print. Visual Rhetoric.
EditDelete
Vinall-Cox, Joan. Weblog post. EduSpaces: Joan Vinall-Cox. EduSpaces.net, 10 Jan. 2008. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://eduspaces.net/vinall/weblog/245431.html>.
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Aug 4 / 7:05pm

Living in Important Learning Times or The Gatekeepers' Removal

The Gatekeepers' Removal
We live in important learning times. Whether that's a curse or a blessing depends on your point-of-view. I think it's a blessing for two reasons.

The first time I helped a student correct his error-riddled (green) text on a (dark) computer screen, I knew I would be learning how to use a computer. As a poor and slow typist, I could only get anything I wrote looking like an important document by paying a good typist. Even before the internet, a gatekeeper (the professional typist) stood between me and a polished document. Another and much more restrictive set of gatekeepers stood between me and being published. An agent, an editor, a publisher, and typesetters blocked my writings from being published almost all the time. Gatekeepers had specialized and expensive skills and equipment and I had only ideas that I could rough out (and I do mean rough) by hand.

Early Word Processor


The same kind of situation was true for photographs, audio recordings and film and video. The expense of hiring specialized experts and buying specialized equipment meant that there were very strong gatekeepers limiting people's ability to practice their creativity fully. Suddenly, with personal computers and software, the expenses were less (a computer and a printer is less expensive than a printing press!) and the different skill sets were reduced and transformed into learning how to use software.

When I saw how easy it was to correct and print what I wrote, I was inspired to learn how to use the computer so I could do graduate studies. I read and wrote and printed up my work, and I'm not sure which was the most important learning, the theory I wrote about, or my learning how to use a word processor. At the same time, the phrase "user-friendly" became central to software development and it became easier and even more fun to create. The gatekeepers were being removed quite quickly.

Word for Windows Manual

So the gatekeepers were being removed ( and there were and are real problems connected with that, but that's for a different post). But that wasn't the major change, in my opinion.

Living in Important Learning Times
Suddenly (well, in a 20 year time frame) we were all communicating differently. The father of a friend recently told me that when he was in Antarctica 50 years ago, it took eight months to send and receive a return message, by mail, of course. Now he is sending and receiving  messages from all over the world in literally minutes (if the person responding answers right away). And I'm writing and finding illustrations to publish a blog post that anyone in the world who is online can seen almost immediately after I tap on "Send". Not even time is a gatekeeper anymore.

But the learning I've done! the learning we've all done!!

I've learned how to use various software tools and various web apps. How to make them work technically and how to use them for my own purposes, how to create with them. And all over the world, people are doing the same kind of learning of technical how-to's and, even more significantly, learning how to connect with the (sometimes very small part of) this huge and hugely diverse audience, how to find their niche, and play in it. We are in a time of great change, and thus great learning. We are all either accepting the learning that faces us, or closing our eyes and denying ourselves. For some of us, this learning, this computer and web stuff comes easily. For some it's a struggle. I suspect it's a mixture of ease and struggle for most of us. But it offers us all such opportunities to learn and play and create!

<br>Gatekeepers & Learning on 12seconds.tv


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Aug 3 / 8:37am

The Web is About Connections

Holiday Monday and I'm playing on the web. I'm scanning through my MakeUseOf.com subscription and decide to look at this - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/technology-explained-how-the-internet-works/

I read this:

Look at a map of the Internet sometime and you’ll see that it is like a million superhighways with no lines painted on the road. It’s a snake pit of computers attaching to modems attaching to phone lines, or cable, or satellites, or cell networks, attaching to more computers, servers, routers and modems and so on, and so on. There is no beginning. There is no end.

It's the big picture, and it has a picture

In the image above, you are looking at one very small part of the Internet. See that star-burst like image it is extracted from? Go take a look at the full image.

I take the invitation and find this image

It's stunningly beautiful, in my opinion, and my mind makes another connection; it's the macro to a micro image metaphor:

Dandelion fluff, courtesy of Yahoo's image search,

(I used Yahoo's controlled image search to find a copyright clean image -filtering for Creative Commons images.)

A quick puff and the dandelion seeds spread out into the world, finding places to link to.

The web is made up of connections, and that's how our minds work to: the visualization of the web looks like a dandelion, and knowing the global nature of the dandelion, I can grok the global outreaching of web connections.

The web is made up of almost infinite connections, and when I land on one, my mind makes the connections that seed my use of the web's connections. I link on/with the web.


 

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