Social Student Bodies in the IM World: Digital Vernaculars and Self-Reflexive Rhetoric

Recent rhetoric, composition, and literacy scholarship has refocused attention on the body’s role in reading and writing, arguing against abstracting literacy practices and texts from material situations, contexts, and the physical bodies who create them. This scholarship challenges descriptions and accounts of emerging media and digital writing situations as “disembodying.” This thesis argues that in the “IM world” in which incoming college students learn to write by participating in online communities, their digital writing can be considered “embodied” as real-world, socially-situated practice. By actively participating in online communities, many incoming college students learn distinct online language practices outside of school; they acquire digital vernacular literacy practices that can be useful when they encounter school literacies. To illustrate the importance of digital vernaculars for students growing up in the IM world, this project analyzes digital classroom writing from thirty-one students at the University of Tennessee. Writing online in blog and chat forums, these students drew from past digital rhetorical knowledge to produce identity-building writing with wide- ranging motives while negotiating present academic writing situations. The project concludes by suggesting that incorporating digital writing in classroom situations can help first-year writing teachers teach students to become self-reflective rhetorical practitioners, rhetors who use all available means across different writing situations and domains

Emplacing Mobile Composing Habits: A Study Of Academic Writing In Networked Social Spaces

This article details the material, locational, time-use dimensions of student writing processes in two networked social spaces. Drawing on case examples, the findings show how composing habits grounded in the materiality of places can build persistence for learning in a mobile culture. Public social spaces support these habits, enabling some students to control social availability and manage proximity to resources

Coordinating Constant Invention: Social Media\u27S Role In Distributed Work

Cultural shifts in technology and organizational structure are affecting the embodied practice of symbolic-analytic work, creating the need for more fine-grained tracings of everyday activity. Drawing on interviews and observations, this article explores how one freelance professional communicator\u27s social media use is intertwined with inventive social coordination. Networked writing environments help symbolic analysts gain access to communities of practice, maintain a presence within them, and leverage social norms to circulate texts through them. © 2014 Copyright Association of Teachers of Technical Writing

Mapping Complex Terrains: Bridging Social Media and Community Literacies

While social media is a pervasive form of digital cultural interaction, it remains a relatively new area of study for literacy scholars. Scholars have expanded the scope of social media research beyond traditional academic communities; however, much research still focuses narrowly on youth. This essay begins by tracing how digital communities have developed and argues that online spaces constitute legitimate sites where meaningful community literacies develop. We then highlight how social media is evolving as a new mode of community and civic engagement. Finally, we identify areas for more research at the intersections of social media and community literacy

Knowing Bass: Accounting for Information Environments in Designing Online Public Outreach

Social media and online news sites have become common outlets through which publics encounter information that shape their knowledge, values, and opinions about food. This article extends scholarship at the intersections of user experience design and online public outreach by focusing on the role of social media and online news sites in information environments that impact public site users’ knowledge about and practices of seafood production and consumption. First, we introduce an ongoing design project about North Carolina seafood production and consumption to provide an example of how and why site designers should account for how online information affects public understanding. Next, we contextualize the challenges of this project by introducing a conceptual framework that helps to explain why the values and practices of understanding seafood production are so complex. Finally, through this case and framework, we argue that designers of online public outreach projects should become more aware of designing in contexts shaped by social media. The potential for public learning is affected by how people search for, encounter, and discuss information about the issues that matter to their lives. We offer a classroom heuristic for identifying and addressing the role of information environments in rhetoric and/or technical communication courses

Messy Rhetoric: Identity Performance As Rhetorical Agency In Online Public Forums

A novel Nd:YVO 4-based regenerative amplifier system operating in the picosecond regime featuring a volume Bragg grating (VBG) as an intracavity spectral narrowing element is described. This compact amplifier provides pulses with duration of ∼85 ps operating at repetition rates ranging from single shot to 10 kHz. The VBG is used to passively tailor the pulse duration and achieve transform-limited pulses with 50 pm FWHM of spectral linewidth. A Gaussian output beam profile is obtained from the amplifier at all repetition rates. The intracavity VBG also guarantees a high spectral purity by efficiently preventing the build-up of out-of-band ASE. The spectral, spatial and temporal properties of this amplifier make it highly suitable for OPCPA pumping applications. © Springer-Verlag 2011

Why People Care About Chickens And Other Lessons About Rhetoric, Public Science, And Informal Learning Environments

When, where, and how do people learn science? In response to this question, the National Academy of Sciences report “Learning Science in Informal Environments” (National Research Council [NRC], 2009) stressed the importance of everyday experiences, designed spaces like museums and science centers, nonschool science education programs, and science media. The report built on an array of scholarship attuned to science learning as a lifelong, often self-motivated endeavor. The fi ndings are not surprising. In all cases, we spend more of our lives learning outside of classrooms and other formal learning institutions than we do inside them (Gerber, Cavallo, & Marek, 2001). The situation is analogous when we think about when, where, and why people engage public science. Often the scholarly literature focuses on deliberation in related normative forums, yet most of us engage science issues in ways (and in places) less structured and more connected to circumstances of daily life (Barron, 2006; Falk, Storksdieck, & Dierking, 2007). Indeed, in these less structured forums, what we do would not often be considered “deliberation” at all by scholars. This is particularly true for learning and engagement online, which can be easily understood as too messy to be useful (Grabill & Pigg, 2012)