Spring 2002:: ENG 1131: Writing Through Media
Introduction
This course is the media studies equivalent of ENC 1102 (Writing About Literature). This class explores the practices of literacy in the context of popular culture including cinema, television, advertising, popular fiction, journalism, comics, hypertext, and video games.
Using the resources of UF's NWE (Networked Writing Environment), we will write through the use of media: in addition to other work, each student will spend the length of the semester creating a single (though not linear, finished, or whole) website. This website will use extensive links, images, and will engage the many texts we encounter throughout the semester and the site will explore what we have and are attempting to learn.
This course will explore noncanonical literature like video games, hypertext narratives, television, music videos and the like by writing THROUGH media. We will be building websites using what we learn in the class about the relationship between form and content and the relationship between graphics and texts. For these purposes, this class will specifically be studying video games, comic books, hypertext narratives, many experimental websites which rely heavily on flash animation for interaction, and many differing theoretical approaches.
According to the English Department: The goal of the course is to introduce students to the transition underway between literacy and post-literacy (electracy) in contemporary culture. This shift is approached through its rhetorical implications, with the students as makers (and not just consumers) of new media effects. Hence this course is best taught in the Networked Writing Environment, in the context of which its more "writerly" assignments seem less experimental than they do in a conventional setting. At the same time, the course is adaptable to the conventional classroom.
Goal
This class is process and not product oriented.
In practical terms, each person in this class will produce websites, which will encompass not only webpages and links, but graphical and textual interplay, and which culminate into one final (but never complete) intellectual self portrait.
Required Skills
We will be learning basic HTML (hypertext markup language), basic image editing, and a great deal about different texts and writing in this class. You DO NOT need any previous knowledge of HTML or image editing, but you must be receptive to studying and learning them.