Composing in the 21st Century: Digital/Visual Literacies

1. Composing in the 21st Century: Digital/Visual Literacies Dan O’Leary & Cassie Bottieri

2. Diana George • Visual literacy is key because it attends to the needs of students that grew up in an aggressively visual culture • Visual literacy used incorrectly when only used as a writing prompt, to teach the normal agenda in a more “creative way,” or to dumb down instruction for non-verbal, visual students

3. Visual Language = to written discourse • Images come before written language • Images are a reflection of the world around us and are used to make meaning

4. What is should look like in the composition classroom… • Visual Arguments • Visual literacy, like the blog, is way for students to have a transactional experience with learned material

5. Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd • The blog as a new genre • “The blog might be understood as a particular reaction to the constant flux of subjectivity, as a generic effort of reflexivity within the subject that creates an eddy of relative stability” (1469).

6. Study the blog as a new genre through Kairos: • “Kairos describes both the sense in which discourse is understood as fitting and timely-- the way it observes propriety or decorum-- and the way in which it can seize on the unique opportunity of a fleeting moment to create new rhetorical possibility” (1452).

7. Why it’s so prevalent today… • Serves the purpose of self-clarification, social validation, relationship development, and social control • The self on the blog becomes a rhetorical subject and through this genre, the construction of the self is an ongoing process