Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

The “Why Digital Writing Matters” reading was 18 pages that consisted of research and expert opinions to support the importance of teaching students digital writing and what skills within it they should be taught. The audience was definitely focused on teachers, even when the introduction gave the outline of the book, each chapter seemed to deal with digital writing and its use and conventions in the education system. It sort of reminded me of a drawn out version of the course description and course outcomes that were in the syllabus. Despite the reading being repetitive in that way, it did still have some valuable information. I learned that basically everybody thinks that digital writing matters from teachers to teens to parents. The only concern with digital writing voiced in the reading was with instant messaging and shortcuts that the youth uses with it. In the age we live in now, being exposed to digital writing is inevitable. It is seen in both academic and social environments.It may have took longer for the academic world to catch up but now I see most of my lectures with multiple digital writing outlets including powerpoints, videos, and interactive things like discussion posts and Kahoot. The reading basically covered how much the world is changing into the technological side and that it is important that teachers keep up.

 Another way the technological world is crossing over is in the entertainment industry. The Forbes article, “Top Six Digital Transformation Trends in Media and Entertainment” speaks on exactly that. This reading was a lot easier, both consisted of information I sort of already knew but the article was more straightforward kept my interests more. The digital trends were all in some sort of way so that the entertainment industry can make more profit but a lot of money is also being spent to make these changes in the industry. I was surprised to find out that in the span of 10 years(2015-2025), spending for Artificial Intelligence went from 350 million to 30 million dollars. But AI is capable of so much that we might not have even scratched the surface with yet. AI is being used to make movies and analyze viewer trends, how long until people are no longer needed in the creative process? 

Both readings taught me that it is important for students to know the many mediums that digital writing consists of because the world is shifting in a way that print-based writing may become obsolete.

Blog Post 2

Cynthia L. Selfe is a huge advocate for Aurality in composition learning settings in her article. Selfe’s main argument in the argument is that both aurality and writing along with other composing modalities should all be equally paid attention to in education settings. I learned in her article that writing was considered the main composition modality after the industrial revolution and that before that students main focus was public speaking. After the rise of the typewriter and specialized jobs, writing became more important but aurality was rarely seen in classes. Selfe argues that not teaching aurality in universities made students lose necessary tools in communication. Aurality, speaking and hearing as a means to spread and learn knowledge, was not lost in the average home life though. Even in the start of the industrial revolution minorities continued to value Aurality because they were excluded in most schools. Without having access to learn how to read and write, information was spread word of mouth. Even minorities who could receive education, whether it was through church, HBCUs etc.., still valued the modality of speech and aurality. In modern times we do see aurality more in the classroom. Selfe acknowledges that and tributes that to our digital advancements. With there being multimedia methods of spreading information like audio, video, images etc.. There is much more that students and teachers have to learn. Aurality is needed more in today’s world of technology but it’s still falling behind in the education system in comparison to writing. Aurality at first was just being used as a method to help students become better writers. Ie. making them read their paper’s out loud while editing. Selfe continues to emphasize her argument that aurality and writing need to be more balanced in the school setting. 

Hocks’ and Comstock’s article was a lot more interesting to me. The fact that everyday sounds that we ignore still affect us and are being used by professionals means that movie’s we watch could make us feel a certain way just from a sound we didn’t even know we heard. Learning about resonance is important to me because I make music so it actually can help me outside of class. The students’ interactions with sound and how it made them feel was quite captivating to read about. While Selfe’s article was about the importance of aurality in the classroom Hocks’ and Comstock’s article showed how aurality in the classroom would look.

Blog Post 3

Barry Hampe, author of the textbook, “Making Documentary Films and Videos”, emphasized the importance of visual evidence in Part 3 often. He explained that in documentaries what we see is what is understood, regardless of what we hear. Interviews, narration and dialogue mean nothing without visual evidence. Hampe also showed how to gather visual evidence which helped me figure out ideas for my documentary. I learned from reading Part 3 that you should plan a documentary around the visual evidence you can show rather than the information that can be said or heard. I was kind of worried about what figuring out  visual evidence will communicate the message of my documentary while reading the chapter until Hampe started talking about reading people. The truth isn’t hard to capture when people are being genuine and themselves because the audience understands that but the shot still has to capture that correctly. Hampe also emphasizes the importance of good footage and editing with the shots you have rather than what you saw out on the field because they often won’t be the same. 

I realized while reading Part 3 that Hampe has a very strong opinion on B-roll. I kind of wish he was a little less biased when explaining it just because I didn’t know much about B-roll before reading this and I learned more of his opinion than what B-roll is used for. His main argument was that B-roll is not visual evidence, it’s just illustration to supplement auditory evidence. He did explain the origin of B-roll and its use in the news but outside of that he basically recommended avoiding using B-roll in documentaries, with a few exceptions. He did say B-roll can be used metaphorically as long as it’s not mistaken as visual evidence. 

I liked how Hampe compared interviewing for documentaries with Court interviews. He explains that in court, even though the testifier is bound to the truth under oath that even some true things are not allowed to be used as evidence. In a documentary the interviewees are not bound by any laws and are often just giving opinions so there is a lot more to consider when figuring out what can be considered the truth from an interviewee. He said that the audience can judge an interviewee just like a jury judges whether or not they believe testifiers. Hampe’s overall message about interviews is that they are not visual evidence they just compliment it. 

Although a documentary should focus on visual evidence there is still a need for a script. Hampe explains how to approach and structure a documentary script. He also explains that often a script may be written towards the end of the documentary process. But to me the most helpful information he provides in terms of writing is the outline he gave for scripting before shooting. It’s a simple outline that consists of three parts: Scene, Video, and Audio. I know that I can use it to make sure that I have visual evidence to support all my claims that may be in narration or other audio mediums.

Blog Post 4

In the article, “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship”  Thomas Inge breaks the myth of authors and writers being “solitary geniuses”. He explains how most authors were very open to collaborative processes and pretty social. The collaborative process he speaks on is editing and publishing. The majority of the time, at least in modern day society, authors do not publish their own work, they send it to get published. Inge mentions how that process dated back to even before the printer was invented in some cases. For example Shakespearean plays would be adapted and rewritten all the time. Beyond editing and publication writers collaborated in other ways, Inge explained. Many famous pieces of literature thought to have one single author actually might have had “direct collaboration, peer advice, editorial assistance, or creative borrowing from other sources”. I learned from reading this article that collaborative writing was not only applicable in group projects in class but also in the creative writing world. 

Nathaniel Tkacz’ article, “Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness” was definitely more educational for the purposes of the current group project, a wikipedia article. I learned that Encyclopedias were more than just books filled with random information. They were like snapshots of the time they were written in that captured the culture and the knowledge that was important in that time. It only makes sense that the Encyclopedia of our age, the digital age, is online. Wikipedia has outlasted and outranked all other Encyclopedias in  the world because it can always be amended and information could always be added. Wikipedia is the most collaborative piece of writing in the world because people are always adding material. Tkacz talks a lot about the ideological mindset of openness that Barack Obama brought into the political world and how it relates to technology and the web specifically. Wikipedia is the best example of that openness because they are open to everyone. Tkacz is really optimistic and enthusiastic about what Wikipedia offers the future of the world. I always knew how useful Wikipedia is but Tkacz opened my eyes to its importance in more than just an educational setting. 

Both of these articles taught me different things about collaborative writing and collaboration in general. Collaborative writing is not something new and it is not going to go away. In fact, with Wikipedia being as popular as it is, it is only going to get stronger. 

Blog Post 5

When I started reading the article, “Co-Constructing Knowledge through Collaborative Writing”, by Richard Beach I already realized that I knew a lot of this information but it was still applicable. I already use google docs and all the other google drive apps. I also have the extension “Read and Write” already on my Mac. Now having to work with my group long distance and in quarantine I’m glad that I know ways to do so. The project doesn’t require my group to meet in person because we can edit everything at the same time in Wikipedia. I’m also not worried about the challenges Beach mentioned in the article because my group already worked on the Documentary Movie together and already have a collaborative process and rapport. Richard Beach’s audience was definitely teachers and professors. When writing about Wikipedia article’s Beach mostly talked about ways to get students familiar with using Wikipedia and how it could help students learn rather than giving readers tips on approaching a wiki article which was what I was hoping for.

“Wikipedia Chapter 1, Open Politics” was kind of a hard read because it was about political and philosophical ideals and how it relates to the openness of open source coding, both of which are complicated topics. What I did get out of it can be summarized in the excerpt, “One approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude, then, is as an open source society,that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we can work collaboratively to solve its bugs and create new, better social programs.” This is also how Wikipedia works, different people working together to get a complete and accurate article that is helpful to everyone. 

One thing that Chapter 2, “Sorting out Collaboration” does is debunk the myth that anything can go into Wikipedia even if it isn’t true. Yes it is true that anyone can edit and submit a Wikipedia article but those submissions and edits can be reversed or deleted if it is not accurate or is biased. Wikipedia has “standards of quality and verifiability” and as soon as someone sees an edit doesn’t meet that standard it can be reversed. That means that like any other research paper or academic project, my group and I will have to make sure our sources are reliable and that what we write is both politically and grammatically correct.