Warning: What follows is somewhat off topic.

It’s been a scary semester as I feel I am barely a step ahead of the students most of the time. I didn’t even know about the stuff I’m teaching until a little over a year ago when I had a summer curriculum development grant to look into the possibilities for an “applied information technology” course suitable for English majors.

The biggest obstacle I find to incorporating writing experience is the cost of software. We have absolutely no budget to purchase software and I cannot in good conscience ask my students (most of whom are first-generation college students from working class homes) to purchase software. While I’ve found some helpful freeware, compatibility with both windows and Macs is not always workable. To top it off, my IT department has not been all that helpful as they are in the midst of huge transitions.

I find some of the ideas Mark has mentioned (with Google Maps, for instance) intriguing, but since I’ve never seen a work like he’s describing, I will again have to familiarize myself before introducing the possibility to students.

I would greatly appreciate it if those readers who have more experience in teaching this material and these kinds of projects would send me some ideas for how to address this problem. Please send them to me directly rather than adding more off-topic messages to this discussion.

Barbara Liu
blittleliu@cox.net

@Edward, your point about my narrow definition is well taken. The “born digital” concept comes via Katherine Hayles, but you’re right, once the text is digitally born, it is sometimes possible to experience it in a printed form. The key word to change is probably “only.” So the new concept might read “Expressive texts that are born digital and intended to be read, interacted with, or otherwise experienced in a digital environment.”

But then, I don’t really like that word “intended,” because it gets into authorial intent, and some of the most provocative uses of texts (digital and otherwise) are directly at odds with the intentions of the original author(s)/creator(s)/designer(s).

What I really want to get at is that reading e-lit would be an impoverished experience if it were read in a non-digital environment.

Even fairly simplistic writing assignments can be real eye-openers to students. These can range from dedicating workshops to learning the basics of dedicated apps like Dreamweaver, to simply asking students to use Word to create basic hypertextual documents. Anything which achieves a shift in writing practices through the relevant application of technology.

I sat in on a class at Brown’s Electronic Writing II module (which at the time was being taught by Aya Karpinska) and there were some fascinating writing projects on the go by students. Not all of these were strictly electronic though they were developed from engagement with various forms of electronic literature. Regardless, the ongoing practice was clearly affected by and helpful toward their research.
John

Obviously at some point…we would all want courses on Interactive Video Fiction from 1990-2000……but at this point most courses are introductory and thus should involve some practice based element.

If you want…I would be glad to send across some ideas for teaching E-Lit writing to beginners that aren’t tech heavy.

Jason Nelson