English 642: Computers and Composition

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

A Digital-Holiday Story

A screen displays the Instagram logo during a presentation by co-founder Kevin Systrom
as he announces the launch of a new direct image messaging service named
Instagram Direct in New York December 12, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson

(Reuters) - The Christmas holiday brings peak attendance for most churches, and an increasing number of U.S. religious groups are using the boom time to wow parishioners with virtual choirs on YouTube and Instagram advent calendars. More than 500 churches will stream Christmas sermons online this year, up from just a handful in 2007, said DJ Chuang, host of the Social Media Church, a podcast with church leaders about social media. Hundreds more started Instagram and Pinterest accounts this year to post photos of baptisms and quotes from the gospel, he said.

"Instagram is like the modern day stained glass window," Chuang said. "They use it to tell the stories of the church."

The online churches appeal to those who have moved away from their own parish, people who may be reticent to walk into an actual church and people who wish to attend a service outside normal times. The New Jersey-based Liquid Church has had an online pastor since 2009, and took to YouTube last Christmas to share a virtual choir using videos from roughly 500 church members who attend services remotely. A technician overlayed the voices from each of the videos to create a cohesive song and video of individuals in front of their computers at home singing "Silent Night" in three-part harmony, said pastor Kenny Jahng. This year, the church will hold virtual communion, the religious sacrament where worshipers drink grape juice and eat bread. When members log on to the service, the pastor will tell them to get a glass of grape juice and any household bread. Evangelical pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, which is based in California, is exploring how to get a PlayStation channel to stream its church services similar to the way Netflix streams movies. The California megachurch, which was a pioneer in digital worship, already streams 168 services on its website every week, and will have services every hour on the hour the week of Christmas.

"Imagine church services on a Wii," said Jay Kranda, the lead pastor for Saddleback's online services. The practice is not popular with all churches, however. In November, the United Methodist Church declared a moratorium on all online sacraments, and said in a statement that communion must be administered with a "physically gathered community."

(Reporting by Elizabeth Dilts; editing by Edith Honan and Andrew Hay) amyreloomis.blogspot.com

Monday, December 16, 2013

A New Awareness of Computers and Composition

Link ... http://amyreloomis.blogspot.com/ - Amyre Loomis: Digital Composition, Photos, Videos: Progressing and New Awareness in Computers and Com...: I am one of those folks who started learning about computers in college when the Mac classic was built and I still have...

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The Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University is located on the

top right ...then look near the center of my airplane window digital

photo and a little above the park - about an inch from the edge.

Welcome to my digital composition blog, a series of texts, videos and images that derived from the English 642 course taught by Professor Thomas Peele called Computers and Composition. My main goals for knowing and teaching digital writing is to assist students in gaining crucial skills for their academic careers and to help them to express themselves efficiently through writing, as well as to communicate well as they navigate throughout all of their worlds.

The flow of ideas, precise language, specific examples, and grammatical clarity along with partnering with students to ensure they walk away better writers ...whatever it takes to reach the student is my ultimate objective. As the instructor, it is a duty to ensure and instill in students a willingness to learn. And, utilizing digital skills falls into this category. Having more knowledge is the bottom line – because more equals more, more diversity, independence and accuracy – and mo’ better knowledge from the wisdom of the crowds. The great experience of expressing oneself is the ultimate exercise of tapping into our creative nature. The discipline of writing produces subjectivity, and it shapes our world to discuss its shifting discourse. Writing has become digital, visual and audio centered, and teaching composition is now about breaking out of routine, and being a learner too.

The essay as a digital composition tool expresses idea, opinions, puts is all in writing, a shape and it becomes concrete. The purpose of composition also is to tell a story, share ideas, to hone conversation skills, vertical thinking, self-revision, and reading and writing, which are inextricable and cannot be separated. And, knowledge of grammar is always important - so what do we want students to learn about writing again? Maybe how to be a prosumer - a producer and a consumer. I appreciate Professor Tom Peele's guidance in achieving this aim to support the modern composure and student, teacher and professional ...with a digital technology influence. Although students (this writer included) sometimes find multimodal tasks challenging because of the technologies needed to learn and the methodologies ...the end result creates a broader scope and more open-minded producers of new knowledge. A point being made here also is that multimodal tasks are not easier for students, but more thoughts and actions are needed to complete them making digital technology more fulfilling. This would sum up a great lesson learned this semester in computers and composition.

My end goal is to help the student and myself feel empowered, to write more textually authentic and to construct original knowledge. Bottom line - when students are asked to explore identity throughout digital writing platforms and all of its complexities and tensions ...this encourages invaluable personal growth for the student and teacher.

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Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Blog Post #9 On my Website, I forgot to post

Blog Post #9

Remix Literacy and Fan Composition

It would almost be impossible to write about under water diving if you have never done it yourself or if you have never heard or read about anyone who have done under water diving. Similarly, for writers to be creative they must draw from their own experiences or the experiences of others. Starting at birth, everything we do and say there is a slew of remixes. We repeat what we hear and sometimes say it in a different way that seems new, but in the end, it’s just a newer version of something old. As Stedman points out in his essay Remix literacy and fan composition “artists don’t start with a blank page or an empty canvas, they start with preexisting works” (107). This brings us to the notion of copy-writing. Who have rights to this slew of remixes that in many respects are untraceable?

Remix is what we have been doing with our essays. For example, when we are asked to write a paper about a story or to critique a book that we have read, we are generally being asked to take the author’s original work and manipulate it into a new form of creative blend that now becomes an original design from the previous work. We conduct an analytic research to gain an understanding of what others have to say about the particular issue. Then we fuse those ideas together to build on our own views and create a different form of originality that other people in turn use to create their own innovative blend. This blog that you are currently reading is a remix of the A. M. Dubisar et al. excerpt that I just read. I am simply using what the authors said and adding my own thoughts about the issue, I now create an original piece about Remix Literacy. Therefore, this blog post is now an original composition remixed from another original piece.

Computer technology and digital text, facilitates this experience in a whole new realm that is often inconceivable. The wide array of multimodal rhetoric that one can accomplish with digital remixing and manipulations of video and audio is mind-boggling. A whole new self can be realized. Remixing, as A. M. Dubisar et al discussed, is a way of exposing students’ creativity through experimentation and invention, as well as “it prepares students for composing the kind of remixes that are common in the civic realm” (78), and pop-culture has that propensity to teach us. It is amazing the capabilities that these students were able to realize while completing these video remixes.

In my view, this Video Remix explains what Literacy remixes really are.

Reading these excerpts reveal the importance of knowing what is important to an audience and how popular cultural influences people. I came to realize that what people say is important but more importantly is how they say what they say. Similarly, how they are portrayed in saying what they did not say is also crucial. The political rhetoric remix videos were impressive and go to show how creativity will always find you while engaging in digital rhetoric. You don’t always know how its going to turn out until you have engage in the process and then your creativity even surprises your own self.

This brings the issue of fair use into question and we wonder how much of students creativity and invention is being curtailed by the idea of intellectual property and who own the rights to its use. Should there be a thing as intellectual property where the Web is concerned? Maybe, if it does not interfere with restraining the creative freedom of world wide “web”.