International Student Discourse

Dear Tessa,

 

I think this paper went very well for me. I haven’t written very many papers in my lifetime and it was good to finally get one out on paper. There’s definitely a lot I need to work on but this was a good start for me.

One of the aspects that I need to work on is quoting. I am constantly afraid that I don’t have an adequate quote for what I’m trying to say. This may come from understanding the reading better and maybe taking quotes before the assignment comes out and writing about what it means. Maybe knowing the assignment while we do the readings, well in advance, might work.

Another thing that I need to work on is content. I feel that some of my points are very solid but for every point that I have I force myself to think of a million counter points that make me not want to write the paper. Maybe getting someone else’s opinion on the idea of my paper would help. The writing center is a resource that I should be using more for feedback.

One more thing that I think I should work on is my structure. I am very confident with the 3-paragraph essay layout but past that I am not confident in any writing setting. I’ve been writing some analyses as of late but I am still needing work on those. Writing center again!

All in all I think this paper was pretty good. Next time I would finish some of the parts early, and sparse out my time.

Sincerely,

Augie Cummings

 

Augie Cummings

Writing 105

Tessa Brown

10/30/13

 

Abstract

 

International students are a type of student on this campus. They come from all over the world to attend School. Maybe it’s the allure of a job in America after school, or maybe it’s the esteemed university of Syracuse that attracts them. Regardless they are all here, and a way to divide the students, if you must, is between students attending the university deriving from the United States of America, and students deriving from somewhere else on this earth. I originally thought, that by this division in the types of students that went here, you could define them both as discourse. Groups of people that formed individual discourse. As I conducted my interview process my definition of a discourse hardened and my thought of the international student discourse community was questioned. My goal with this project is to figure out whether or not they comprise a discourse community. I went about this by interviewing two potential members of this discourse community. I interviewed a sophomore named Jorge Eduardo Gomez. He is from Columbia in origin, but spent time at a school in Austria before coming to Syracuse. He speaks German, Spanish, and English. The other student that I interviewed is named En-Lei, but we call him Ray. He was born in Taipei, Taiwan, but moved to Long Island, New York, six years ago. He speaks both Mandarin Chinese and English. The interview with Jorge interview was briefer, and consisted of ten to twenty separate questions asking about where he is from and how he feels he fits in at Syracuse University. The other interview with En-Lei was longer, and was documented much better, also about how he fits in at Syracuse and about where he came from. It consisted of a recorded interview, a transcript of the interview, and 3 pieces of interaction with possible discourse members. In the interview with both of them, I found that international kids had a connection to one each other, but not enough to constitute a discourse community. The connection they shared was not deep enough to have a different set of speech, or a common set of goals. These two things are massive indices of whether or not a community comprises a discourse. The speech they had was now English, but it was the same as every other student attending the University.  IN this paper I reference John Swales, heavily, as he is considered one of the senior experts on discourse communities, and speech communities. Based on his six criteria for being a discourse community, I prove that the international student discourse community does not follow the rules. Based on my paper, the international student discourse community does not exist here at Syracuse nor anywhere else in the Academic world.

 

 

 

Augie Cummings

10/15/13

Writing

 

Discourse

International Students are a set of students who are falsely believed to comprise a Discourse community. They do however share a bond. This is a bond of a struggle, a distance to overcome. The Distance of immigration, and the hopes of substantial assimilation to grow, thrive, and enjoy with a new culture. Heading into this project, I was quite certain that these students, having come from a place that is not here, that does not speak the same language originally, and that has seen and experienced another culture, surely set them apart in a group of their own. While this was true, I led my self to believe that this also was able to classify them as a discourse. After the interviews I conducted, I was able to come upon the conclusion, that based on the six rules and regulations set out by John Swales, International Students is not a discourse. In fact, some of these requirements were so off in describing this community, that it separated them even more than I had previously anticipated. So in this paper I will be discussing why International students are not to be considered a discourse community, and why some aspects of this group may be confused as being traits attributing them to such a group.

The first rule set out by John Swales is that a Discourse community shares a “broadly agreed upon set of common public goals” (Swales pg#471). To understand this rule we must first break it down. The first part of the rule that needs defining is the words “Broadly agreed upon.” This to me is trying to signify a basic principle that groups of people share but not necessarily for the same end. One may be part of an anthropological society of Massachusetts because they like history, and another because of their affinity toward the Wampanoag Indians. In the case of Jorge and En-lei, both being international students, agree upon the goal of learning in the United States. While this binds the two with a common goal it is not enough to make them a discourse. This is not different enough from the goals of everyone else at this school. In Kanye West’s song, We Don’t Care, he says, “Drug Dealing just to get by, stack ya’ money til’ it get sky high (West).” If you were from out of town but still new how to make a lot of money slinging yay (drugs), you wouldn’t necessarily be singled out into a different discourse community. You might be singled out, but for other reasons. The aspect to notice from this is that the true discourse is that everyone is selling drugs to get by. Just as all the Syracuse students are here to learn. Outside of that, international students are used to very different public goals from where they came from.  They, and other international students, did not converge a new set of goals arriving here. With En-lei spending equal time in Taiwan and Long Island (En-Lei), and Jorge being mostly in Austria and Colombia (Gomez), splits them even further apart. This is not to say that they are the only two types of people that make up the population of international students. Many other students have come from Taiwan, Colombia, and similar places, but this again breaks down the idea of the international students discourse into smaller ones. “(I) Definitely have a connection with both other central European students (German speaking mainly) and have a stronger connection with Spanish-speaking students, specifically South Americans (Gomez).” Jorge is saying that he feels closer to students that are specific to certain international areas but feels more or less equally close to

The Second Rule set out by John Swales is that any given discourse has mechanism of communication between its members (Swales). This aspect was more easily disproved than the others. Many international students converse in their native tongue with other students that have the same original language. These again break down the international student discourse and put them into smaller ones. Samy Alim says that he subscribes to both the HHNSC and the BASC (Alim). These are two separate speech communities that are very much a part of their own discourse communities. They may over lap but you cannot clump them and make another discourse communities. With international speech communities you cannot do this either. Albeit, the lack of knowing English is a bonding factor. One of my interview subjects noticed a girl in his class that had trouble understanding and forming sentences. He immediately felt a sense of sympathy because he had gone through the same exact scenario. So, one could conclude that the lack of communication puts them in a group that constitutes a speech community. Both parties that are trying to converge on English will usually have the same coping strategies to communicate. This could be reverting to a translator or hand gestures, but nonetheless, its binds them. This is still not the requirement of the set of rules so it does not classify international students as a discourse.

The next rule is that a “discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback” (Swales pg#472). With in the international student community, there are no formal meetings that take place regularly. Besides a few gatherings when they arrived, such as testing and housing, there are no places or times in which they can meet to discuss. That is a task that is taken up by them if they should so please. There is no arena for them to provide feedback amongst each other. This is a bit of an awkward rule because of the fact that many discourse communities are not self affirming. This group is, but prefer not to be. Many of the international students, including one of the students I interviewed, do not like being clumped into this group. Many believe their country of origin is inconsequential. This is also still a group that does not share a goal so there would be nothing to provide feedback on or for.

The next rule is that a discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims (Swales). To reiterate, international students do not have a separate goal from other students at the university. An individual might have a different goal education differing from the other students, but it’s not a broad, widely recognized goal with in this possible discourse.

The next rule is that each discourse has developed a set of lexical communication (Swales). As mentioned before, there might be a communication different from the American students, but this is a different discourse community as International Students. They may be able to talk about a visa and traveling for long periods of time, but this is not broad enough to classify them as a discourse community, or a speech community.

The last rule of a discourse community is that they have to have members in the group (Swales). This is the only criterion that this group passes. They do have enough members to split them apart from American students. This is perhaps the reason I originally thought that they could have been a discourse. Those are the first two types of students that you hear about when you get to a college campus. It is occasionally a statistic universities put up or other websites put up to show how many people not from the United States attend the college. This is also the least important and perhaps the most deceiving rule of a discourse. Deceiving because it is easy to skew numbers as a community, or one that is tightknit.

In conclusion, International students do not comprise a discourse community or a speech community. Based on all six of Swales rules of a discourse, passing only one out of the six criteria does not make them a discourse. Considering international students a discourse is an ignorant and narrow-minded plight. Diving a group of strangers makes them stranger when in fact they are much more like us than some of our fellow American students. Coming to Syracuse and trying to grow with a community is made quite difficult if a person is split from the beginning.  Struggling to fit in with the students that are already here is not a trait that should push them away. “There is this girl in my math class; she doesn’t speak English well, she’s Asian, either from china and Taiwan and when she asks questions I can see her struggling and that’s exactly what I’ve been through 6 years ago and I’m really just able to relate to that and I have empathy (En-lei).” When En-lei saw that student in his class struggling to ask a question it immediately gave him sympathy because he had gone through the same thing. This is the kind of attitude people at Syracuse should have toward the international students, wanting to bring them in and make them feel comfortable in a country that is not their own. The interesting point that came out of these interview was another discourse community. The discourse community that has risen here is American students, and that is the discourse these new students are trying to assimilate into. America has its own discourse so its not very surprising that they have comprised a more specific community of students. This just goes to show that a discourse cannot come from a anti-discourse, of those “not,” something.

 

 

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

 

RAY

Yup?

 

Where you from?

Taiwan

 

Where in Taiwan?

Taipei, it’s the capital city

 

Since coming to Syracuse, what are some things you find different from home?

Um, Honestly, um, I moved to long Island 6 years ago so uh, to me, it’s not- I couldn’t really recall what exactly were the similarities and differences, but um here its obviously a lot more diverse in cultures and races and um, and that’s the biggest thing I noticed. the education resources you get here are just way more than you can get in Taiwan

 

How is Taiwan different and similar to here?

In Taiwan, I feel that a lot of the things we do is Modeling America, so it’s pretty similar, besides the language

 

Is there still a bit of the old culture in Taiwan?

Yea I mean a little bit um, its like a long time a go I cant really recall it

We, we in Taiwan we celebrate a lot of non-catholic stuff

So Taiwanese is a mix of traditional stuff and old Chinese holidays

 

Christmas?

Not really, but yea

 

Was that weird coming here (Having Christmas)?

No, I mean we had off on New Year, so its close enough

But we also celebrate Chinese New Year, so we have a whole new calendar

Last year I think it was February

It changes every year

 

A tendency or feeling we lack in America?

In Taiwan were more of a collective society so we admire more about the social harmony, where in America it’s more about individualism, right,

So I mean, its not that it’s just different

 

Feel more comfortable here or in Taiwanese culture

Honestly I feel more comfortable- it’s hard to say, I’ve spent the same amount of time in Taiwanese culture as America so I pretty much adapt the cultures the same amount, both have some good and bad things about it, but now I chose American, I see a better future

 

Of other International students, do you fell connection?

Yeah I mean I’ve been through the exact same thing their experience now. I can relate with the troubles their going through now with the transfer students.

 

How?

There is this girl in my math class; she doesn’t speak English well, she’s Asian, either from china and Taiwan and when she asks questions I can see her struggling and that’s exactly what I’ve been through 6 years ago and i’m really just able to relate to that and I have empathy.

 

You think they feel isolation?

In Syracuse we have a lot of, um, people from all over the world, so their case is a little different from mine because I moved to long island into which was an all white community. So I wasn’t able to find any Chinese friends or a group of Asians to hang out with. So here they will still face some difficulties but they have the opportunity to hang with people from their own country, with the same culture and same language. So we’ll help them adopt the American culture

 

What languages do you speak?

Mandarin Chinese, and English

 

 

Bibliography

 

Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Writing about writing: a college reader. Ed. Doug Downs, and Elizabeth Wardle. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 466-80. Print.

 

Alim, H. Samy. “How the Other Half Speaks.” You know my steez: an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society, 2004. 45-53. Print.

 

Kanye West. “We Don’t Care.” College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella Records

 

En-Lei. Personal Interview. 10 2013.

 

Gomez, Jorge. Personal Interview. 10 2013.

Unit 1 Workshop Letters

Dear Stephanie,

This is a beautifully written post.  Your language flow is very reminiscent of a blog and really helps move your piece along. I like how you use a lot of your own life from stories of dancing and letter writing in Puerto Rico. I would suggest using a few more hard facts to back up your claims. These would help play to other people reading your blog and really help solidify your statements. Besides that and a few grammatical errors, your prose is great and you have a very well written piece.

Sincerely, Augie

Dear Chioma,

Your piece is off to really good start. You have a couple of grammatical errors that I circled. Your piece comes off with a formal feel. This, I believe, still works for a blog post but could be the reason for the trippy language. I would like to see more of your own literacy, more of your own rap. I suggest putting more of your anecdotes in there. The structure of the piece is also really good for a blog post; it flows very nicely with its transitions. This is a very good piece of work.

Sincerely,  Augie

Unit 3 Letters

Dear Stephanie,

I like that for your final you want to combine the last two assignments. It will be a great way to cap off the whole charade.

You seem to be very comfortable with these types of set ups. It’s good to see you further developing your style. I don’t really know what you your definition of a composition is. You give many examples but I’d like to know what exactly you think. Why do you not want to do a blog? You have the blog style rolling around here; it could be nice to have it all online where you could add hyperlinks and other photos.

Besides that I look forward to seeing your final project.

Sincerely,  Augie

Dear Julia,

This is really a great idea for your next project. I think you really went outside the normal realm of projects and took it to a whole new level. I’m glad you really took advantage of this project’s opportunities and ran with it.

I am in total agreeance with your concepts and understanding of composition. It is really a vague term and is still slightly undefined for me. It is literally anything under the sun that was made by someone or something and a synonym for creation. So because of this I think the project is really geared toward what compositions you do, and why you think it’s important. It gives us each an opportunity to show others what we love to do and why we are at Syracuse.

Moving forward with your project, I have a few questions. How ‘composed’ will the pictures be? Maybe if all the photos had a hint of you in it, maybe a reoccurring theme more specific than composition would be great. I would also suggest more photos that 15. I was thinking upwards of 20 for the 4-page equivalent. I think you’ve got a great idea here and sincerely look forward to seeing the outcome.

Sincerely,  Augie

Dear Jessica,

The blog post is a great idea for a final project. I also agree that it was an interesting way of writing. I too had never done that for a school assignment either. I commend you for giving it another crack.

I would disagree with you when you say a composition is only a form of literature. Yes, composition does include literature, that you do put a lot of work into, but it is not confined to just pieces of literature. I think it can be a very vague tern that is can really be used for anything. I would say that literature and other literally written things are the most common types of composition. It is a little confusing that you say that this is your definition of composition but then go on to say that all these other things could be compositions.

What kind of layout are you going to have for your blog? This is a great opportunity to discuss another type of composition in your layout. You could use photos and other composed pieces of art on your page. What is your argument on writing vs. composition? I am very interested in this.

You have a great Idea for your project and look forward to seeing the final product.

Sincerely,  Augie 

Unit 2 Letters

Dear Stephanie,

Your paper is off to a very good start. You have all the right building blocks in place to create a great paper. Your arguments are very strong, and I think the          idea of interviewing all of the different sects in Christianity. There are, however, a few things I would change that I denoted in your paper.

First of all, there are a good amount of grammatical errors in the paper. I went through and added suggestions as to where I would change it. All you have to do is click the check and it will change to the accurate grammar. Other tiny errors that exist are the correct names for things. An example of this is on the first page, where I think, “Jewism,” was meant to be Judaism.

Another issue I would address is the lack of quotes. Also on the first page you have the statement, “Roman Catholic is the most liberal branch of all of the Christians.” You give some supporting reasons but nothing grounded in any outside sources, just observatory notes. Some of the facts that you use do not need to be grounded in a hard document because they are general or common knowledge but a few of them should be quoted. This will also help with the whole paper because you do not have too many of them in the paper.

Another issue I would suggest addressing would be explaining you vocabulary. You mention many things that are commonplace in Christianity but as an ignorant atheist I did not know what you were saying. I’m not saying that you rewrite the bible but explain words such as “tongues,” and, “CRU.”

All in all this paper has a great start.

Sincerely,       Augie

Dear Devi,

I really like your paper. You started to introduce me to the world of blogging and fashion. You also started to quote early, a tendency that I often avoid, so I felt like it was worthwhile noting. I’d say you are pretty close to having a fully finished piece. There are just a few issues I would consider looking at.

Firstly, but not most important, would be that there are a few grammatical errors. In the copy of your paper that I send to you I have corrected what I saw and what Word saw, so just click the check and they should correct the mistakes.

Another issue I would address is your use of blanket statements. You don’t use these all that much and there are only a few that I would hold in higher level of question. One of those would be in the first paragraph. You write,” They typically try to identify between ‘natives’ and ‘non-natives’, and discourses are fundamentally gates to exclude these ‘non-natives’,” when referring to discourse communities. This statement is very broad and I feel it only applies to the fashion blog community, based upon the facts you provided. Other than that, your statements are very effective.

The last issue I would consider is adding some more quotes. Based on all the feedback I’ve received, from Tessa and Students alike, you can never have enough quotes. I commended you on quoting early but I still think you could have more. I won’t be able to help suggesting sources because I don’t know diddlysquat about fashion blogging.

Good luck with the Rest of your piece,              Augie

Dear Andrew,

This paper is a very well written piece. I have no doubt you will met all the necessary requirements, and some, for the assignment. Besides a few minor transgressions, I implore you to take a deeper look into how you took your information. Let’s dive in.

First issue I would mention, as I always do, is grammar. There are not many at all but nonetheless need to be addressed. In the copy I send you, all you have to do is click the check to accept the changes I made.

Secondly, I would suggest looking into some of your vocabulary. You explicitly say in the beginning of your paper that anyone can understand this piece. “While the vocabulary pertains to the Writing 105 discourse community, it is legible for anyone with a basic vocabulary.” This is contradicted when you start using words like, ”Code-switching,” and, ”Goes out.” These are words within your discourse that you might use, unconscious of the fact that a lot of people do not know your vocabulary.

Finally I think you should consider how you report on your recording. This is still a somewhat minor issue but I think it needs to be looked at. How you use the words that only writing 105 knows is great for us, but still leaves room for explanation. If this is an area you want to explore in your paper, by all means do it, but I feel that in your piece there is a bit of explanation missing.

Great start Andrew,            Augie

Frontward, Again

“’Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next” (Seaborn). The shifting literacies of our time have come upon a brand new threshold, the next step toward our unfathomable future, towards our unseen frontier. The embracement of technology has been a massive blessing because of the increased stimuli that our people have been exposed too. While human processing may have changed since the advent of technology, with us being somewhat engrossed by it, it has also given us opportunity; it has given us hope. Of all technology, the Internet has educated the masses, and the most important technology that has shaped my literacy is film.

“What I have tried to suggest is that as we assist and study individuals in pursuit of literacy, we also recognize how literacy is in pursuit of them. When this process stirs ambivalence, on their part or on ours, we need to be understanding (Brandt).” In 2000 we had 6,055,049,000 people in the world and only 361,000,000 of them were online and logged in. In 2010 there were 6,916,183,482 and 1,967,000,000 of people were online. This means that in a 10-year span the amount of people connected to the web has increased by 22%. 22% more humans have been reading blogs, watching videos, commenting on articles, and playing video games. People were communicating digitally 22% more than they previously were. They are also immersing themselves into the biggest virtual classroom of gathered ideas. And if the old saying still rings true, practice still makes perfect. People are refining their reading and writing skills. From communicating to people through email, composing blogs or commenting on a news article, people are including themselves in discussions. People never find that they know less from contributing to a conversation. Throughout all of this online existence, people are defining themselves. People may argue that some may keep up a different profile on the web but nonetheless it still conjures ups habits, strengths and weaknesses in our own lives.

The website Aspen Task force recognizes that the Internet is an amazing tool for learning. They are specifically worried about using the Internet safely to teach our children. “The Internet is arguably the most potent force for learning and innovation since the printing press (Aspen Task Force).” This group brings up an interesting point: the last time we had an opportunity for sharing the wealth of knowledge was from the printing press. Martin Luther gave us something that educated the masses. For the printing press it took time to produce and distribute, but with the Internet today, access is almost instantaneous.

Interactions in any and all forms will create some sort of relationship. A relationships that develops its own, separate specific knowledge base. So, with all of these people on the Internet, in even greater numbers, people are learning. Brandt suggests that while we are living our lives, either searching for increased literacy or not, literacy coming after us. And with recent innovations in technology, it’s doing so even faster. Brandt’s idea of literacy sponsorship is that we all have our own stimuli that pushes toward or away from a certain area of information, and pushes us to define ourselves. Technology is my favorite, and I believe, one of the most important ones around.

My first interaction with the Internet was in my father’s office about 12 years ago. I sat down in a large black swivel chair, staring at a tan box. I was scared. Setting me up at the computer was a process. He would have to pick up the monitor, reposition it, and set it up again.  Initially I thought it was a camera, a big one, staring at me, reflecting my face right back. And with him everything was a process. I was still at the age that it agitated me. I felt like he was doing me a huge favor every time he grunted. I was going to play motocross though. He gave me the control, watched me for a bit then left. There was no concept to the game. It was loud and I got to go really fast. My father flipped a switch and another followed suit in my head. Even then I thought it was prehistoric. The sounds of dinosaurs bleeped and blipped across my radar until, 5 minutes later, I was on the web. Even though it was coming through as a flat screen on a clunky piss colored box, it felt amazing. I was connected in an ethereal, Meta sense. The dial tone radiated through out the room with its pink and brown noises, scratching the surface of my eardrums and my imagination. A lighthouse posted in the top left hand corner of the browser. They called it Netscape and I had no clue what it could do. Granted, at this age, I was not fully able to use or communicate with anyone online, albeit I understood its power, and more importantly its potential. I never really used the Internet for explicitly developing my own literacy until later on in life.

Before this I was mostly busy with the little schoolwork I had, macaroni art and finger painting, hot wheels racecars and their tracks, soccer baseball and all the things a kid being a kid could do. All I really wanted was to have fun and not really consider the life I had before me in too much depth, and that was the beauty of being a child. All you’re expected to do was follow the few rules that were laid out for you and explore. Although I am an advocate of technology, I am glad that I grew up in a comparative absence from it. It gave me perspective, and a point to look back on. I didn’t need the accessibility and ease of the Internet back then let alone would I have appreciated it. It was only in my young high school days that I came into frequent contact with technology. The technology that changed me was film.

I worked at a TV station learning how to produce short films. I was taught how to use cameras, lights, boom poles, microphone, studios, final cut pro and computers. It wasn’t until after I had seen my first documentary working with this program that I realized the importance of communication. We watched the movie “Bowling for Columbine.” People have really criticized this film for all that it portrays and represents. Regardless of what one may or may not concur with, you cannot deny that this film is a captivating one. While the subject matter was about a school shooting and national gun laws, there was another aspect of the film that stuck with me even more. The film to me was so persuasive and provocative that I was in envy of its effect. It was so effective at getting its message across to the audience that I could not deny its awesome power. I needed to use this. What do you mean us this?

Film was the most important tool of communication because it was the most relatable. You saw faces emote and people react. The people working on these films knew how to draw it out of them and show what was important. This was the moment I realized that I had found my narrative. I was shaping my literacy and these people were the first sponsors of mine outside of my family. As time passed I learned everything I could through this program and ended up teaching it. I was able to help pass down the valuable skills that I learned through it and I loved. Thinking about it now, there was a very easy chance that this part of my life would never have been written. If this part of my life never happened then I could still be in the darkness as far as what I wanted to do with my life. I could have gone through high school wondering what I wanted to do, what I could do. I know that some people are still at a point in their lives that they have no idea what they want to do with themselves, but considering how much film means to me now, I don’t think I could have gone through high school without it. Without even knowing it, my whole experience was facilitated by technology. It helped me learn about the video position at the TV station in the first place and sustained me throughout. Considering that the Internet was almost outlawed in classes seems ridiculous. It is a realm that has been proven to be totally useful within academia in the last few years, uncovering potential for development in countries and classrooms where literacy didn’t exist before. Face to face interaction is always better, but when you’re faced with a situation where the sort of in-flesh encounter is impossible, online is the best way to go. People have complained that the Internet has more distractions in a classroom rather than benefits. The truth about that is quite apparent and undeniable but it signifies something about the Internet. The endless hours of gaming and distractions are a testament to the possibilities on the web. If the Internet has enough room for nonessential online interactions, than it can totally hold all the knowledge in the world. It is also not impossible to filter through these, so these possible distractions should not be enough to negate the chances of its use in the classroom. Chances for literacy development online give you the opportunity to define your path more individually. You don’t have to wait for anyone on the Internet because it is always there. Answers from Wikipedia, online encyclopedias, and other websites are literally clicks away. So with that, I thank the Internet and the people who have advanced technology to where it is today. The human race’s thirst for exploration will never be quenched.

This is a screenshot from a film that I produced while at my program titled “Nautic Robotics”. The film documented the high schools Underwater Robotics team.

This is not the first monitor that I saw, but its pretty damn close. This represents the first time that I saw a monitor and how I looked when it stared at me.

Portfolio

Below you will find a reflection, the homework that I did this semester, a revision of a final project, and 3 highlighted HW assignments that influenced the final. This is my Portfolio.

1. REFLECTION

Before coming into this class, the beginning stages of writing had always been the hardest part for me. I could always write well when I knew exactly what I wanted to say. While the ability to write when knowing 100% what it is you want to say is not uncommon, I use it to point out the rare case in which I can write. The drafting process was another huge struggle to me because, still, if I didn’t know what I wanted to say I would not be able to write. With the lack of conviction for every thought that I wrote while trying to draft, I questioned myself to the point of deletion, and nothing would remain on a page after an hour. I could usually come up with a good number of ideas, quite varying and abstract, but ideas nonetheless. It was in the verbalization process that here too, I questioned these thoughts too much and ran them into the ground. In this class I forced myself into writing down my thoughts on the project with one of my many ideas and worked on drawing something out of that text. I would write through the internal questioning and perseveres through possible falsities. Out of 10 ideas, 9 of them could be wrong, but 1 could be solid and that’s the least that I needed. The free-writes gave me an opportunity to solidify ideas that I could then try and apply back to the readings or standing claims I had made in relation to the assignment.

A few times I got so far into the brainstorming of ideas portion of the process that the completion date was too close for comfort. In the same sense of just doing, I started to work with some of the concepts I had envisioned and started to work. For the final project, I really wanted to stray away from the writing process to complete the assignment for both personal stimulus and hopes for an interesting outcome. I decided to make an experimental video mash-up. The project assigned was to some how relate it to composition. I became so overwhelmed with possible projects that I never got around to defining one specific project idea to operate on. I soon began to just work with the material in sort of an autopilot type mode to see what I could come up with. I soon began to form an idea in the building process. I decided to illustrate what has influenced my generation’s growth with the programming that we grew up with for my project. This type of process should not be confused with the last minute pulling together of scraps and calling it art, but more of a brainstorming activity timing that is only coincidental.  I was very proud of the final project because I was working with a type of genre that I hadn’t really done before and I think it came out quite well.

The people in this class have also been very influential in the shaping of my work in this class, and hopefully I have been so for them. Through the in-class discussion in small groups I was able to flesh out ideas from different peoples perspective in the readings. In the last project’s proposal workshop, I first came to the realization that I didn’t really know what I was going to do. To be more precise, how I would do it. I knew I wanted to work with found footage, but it was through the questioning of my classmates I realized I had an Issue. With my classmate’s works, I feel as if I have gotten much better at responding to their work. I have started to both write them response letters and send them back an annotated version of their work on word. This type of revision makes it very easy for them because they have virtually all their corrections highlighted and can change all the very nit-picky grammar issues with their assignments very quickly. It also makes it easier for me to communicate about ideas and phrases that I question directly. I know that in Andrew’s paper on discourse communities he made many claims about discourses in relation to other discourses. I highlighted these portions of the text and asked him to clarify. I have also used a lot of your feedback on projects as well. Sometimes it has been hard to apply feedback about one project to another but a good portion of the time your feedback is broad enough to do so.

What I can tell you about the rigor with which I have approached the three assignments is that I have tried very hard on all of them. Because formal writing, citations, and research assignments are not skills of mine, this may not be as easy to notice. I believe that my explanation of ideas can be very good when done in my words. Using other’s words to back up claims or to only explain certain claims in others’ words is much harder for me. So instead of looking at my possible slight disregard for directions or misreading of them, know that I decided while working on projects to try using my strengths to increase the value of the work, rather than employing very new concepts that, in my case, are weaker and not as easily executable.  The deep revision that I performed really focuses on the feedback that you gave me. I really tried to go in and expand on those parts and work through the rest of the piece so that it flows a bit more. I added a few more hyperlinks and talked a bout Brandt a bit more, a person that I really should’ve used more of in my original iteration.

1. HOMEWORKS

UNIT 1

• Blog Comments on “Future of Literacy”
  • “Devoss’ ‘Future of Literacy’ harps upon the evolution of literacy into a domain largely influenced by technology.” This was the first line of this homework. This homework talked about how some of the later generations were highly influenced by technology. As a student, kid, and human being that grew up in one of these generation, being a digital native, I really related to this reading. It laid claim to a type of learner that I had never really heard of in a formal class setting before, let alone a group of learning that I was a part of. In the final project for this Unit I wrote that, “My first interaction with the Internet was in my father’s office about 12 years ago.” Like Devoss I relayed my first experience with technology too because it meant so much to me back then when it come to my learning and continues to mean so much.

• Literacy Artifacts

• Reflection on Brandt
  • This homework really helped out my vocabulary. I had really thought about how we are influenced in our everyday lives. Using the word, “Sponsors of Literacy,” finally gave me a word for that. “To this day of class, no single author that we have encountered has put it better that Brandt. “The Sponsors of Literacy” have driven us to this point in life and continue to do so in the most minute and finite ways.” This was the first line in my post about Brandt. In my final piece for this unit I wrote, “This means that… (from 2000 to 2010)… the amount of people connected to the web has increased by 22%.” It helped me point out the fact that more people were not intentionally trying to increase their literacy and expand their ideals but were doing so on a default level by just existing on a literary-excessive environment that is the internet.

• Workshop Letters

• Frontward

• Frontward, Again

UNIT 2

• Long interview notes & reflection and short interview
  • This homework assignments really helped me realize that International students are not a discourse. They may have come from a place that is not a the United States but that does not make them closer to others that came from out of this country. Some of the people from out of the country associate closer to American culture than other foreign cultures. Jorge said in our interview, “I feel like international students cannot be grouped under one single category as various countries have different traditions and values.” In my final paper I said, “In conclusion, International students do not comprise a discourse community or a speech community.”

• Open blog post on Gee, Swales, Anderson, Alim

• Citation Style

• Workshop Letters

• International Students Discourse Community

UNIT 3

• Howard Discussion questions

• Connections between Orwell, Rose, Howard

• Reflection in Action

• Workshop Letters

• How We Got Here

PORTFOLIO

• Curation blog post

Curation

Curating in this world has seen many different faces in the past 10 years. Curating was only used in a physical sense in museums and exhibitions until the advent of the internet. Things could only be viewed in the physical sense until the internet so the use of the word came into question. Curating to me means any sort of conscious perusing for the sake of display. Here is an example of a blog that is for a magazine called VICE. VICE chose to use a collection of photos, that the artist who took the photos went through tons of photos to select these few. This is an example of double curation. As mentioned in the blog about curation, this may or may not be the correct use of the word, “curate,” but in the article it suggested that any press is god press.  This is an idea that I fully concur with. Some of these previously closeted words are seeing the light of day and interesting more and more people.

I use curation in my life, occasionally, to pick out things that I find interesting. Like the use of the word above, I may not be using it in the correct set of terms but I use it in the way set above. Some times I will pick through a few photos that I have taken and put them up on my flickr account. These are usually photos that I think show the most amount of artistry, beauty, and that some times contains a message. Here is a photo that I chose to upload because it really captured the feeling of my favorite ballpark. I do the same when choosing wether to upload photos to other websites as well.

How We Got Here

“The Capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation.” These are the words from an American Psychologist Eric Fromm. He knew, like any other, and also unlike many others, that composition can be born out of confusion, a confusion that let’s us move toward our imagination for the answer. When we ask ourselves what to do, we can create, and try to answer our question. When dealing with such vague terms as Composition, one has to be satisfied with a broad answer. Merriam Webster defines Compose as, “To come together to form or make.” This is probably the most important word we must understand as a class. The importance that this word and its process give us may be in the inception of the concept, the making of it, or only fully realized after the materialization has been complete. Our compositions teach us something about our selves. In the end, hopefully our compositions will be one of the many things we are remembered for. I compose to show what comprises me. Some of the things we’ve looked at in this class have even done that. Rose says that rap is influenced from the afro-diasporic music. The beating of the drums drove music into many different places, but eventually, into rap. With Kanye West, the sounds of his music talked about his many discourse communities, family, school, his neighborhood growing up, and it all came through in his compositions. We can only do things based on our previous knowledge, be it inherent or not. Everything new is derived from something old. So this piece above tries to answer a question in an uncommon way that uses what I know to illustrate the answer. So for this project I will demonstrate composition with what I believe composition is comprised of. The question I will answer is how my generation grew up. I have watched a lot of TV so I will try to tell our story through that.

This piece is broken into beginning, middle, and now. This is not because our stories are so simple, but that’s how a lot of them are told in TV. The more sophisticated a story becomes, the longer and more detailed it is, but it usually stays within a beginning, middle, end setting. I chose to end with now because our stories are not over. The Betty Boop is there to signify the early cartoons we grew up with. These cartoons taught us how to be creative, and not to be so caught up in the story. Its physics were totally off, but it showed us what could be imagined. From there, we started to see a few more coherent cartoons but they were still very much coming at us in a barrage. There are really just more images coming at us, showing us the diversity of programming with Arthur, Rocket Power, The Wild Thornberry’s, and Hey Arnold were some of the many examples of this type of diversity. This section then segways into the Twin Peaks and Full House section. Our lives started to become slightly more coherent, and our hormones were thriving so there was still a lot of confusion with what we were feeling. We were finally growing up, and our interests were changing. Twin Peaks is one of the few TV shows that still captured the fleeting magic we all wanted in life as a kid while still slightly balancing reality. Full House had so many characters that were in all sorts of age related troubles that it connected with every viewer. There was also a part in our teenage years that we felt alone. This was a section that I felt I should capture, the Adolescent Void.  The next section, of Now, is the most coherent and least creative section. It is a quick snippet of LOST, a program that embodies mystery. We have no idea what we are to do next. The road before us is long and may or may not be paved. Alas, we are all headed somewhere, just as Jack is (the character in the clip). We will all sit back, reflect, drink and think at some point. This is a moment that can become a fleeting thought that no one but you will know, or, perhaps the inception of a creation, a composition.

Project So Far

So this project is not really going well so far. It’s not really going. I have realized that my original idea was way too much to take on. I kept looking for cartoon that would work for my project but the idea that I am trying to carry out would take weeks and weeks of searching to find the right cartoons to fit in. I am still very confused about how I would cite and what I would cite for the project that I am doing.

I am still very much under the assumption that the composition is very much implied. How else we are supposed to cite people on this would be to just say that other people are composing too. I would still like to do something with the video mash up idea but I’m afraid it won’t tie into the project enough. My piece doesn’t really use any words so I will need a lot of help working through it and figuring out if its still salvageable, meaning: can I express thoughts of composition without words and only images.

I’ve started to write a few words about what composition means and is and have some quotes posted in there as well. I’ve thought about maybe making it a voice over and a small video piece to go behind it and maybe further illustrate my claims. My last option, which I really do not want to have to do, is to make it into a written piece. I do not want to have to do this because I really like the idea of not turing in any writing for a writing class. Video and other elements surrounding that are my strong suits, so I wanted to finally make something in this class that I felt comfortable with. Alas, I feel far from that.

Plagiarism

1) Where is the line drawn for plagiarism? If I cite do I have to specify? 

2) To what extent can someone call a phrase their own?

3) In the situation of the non-native speaker in the video, should she be held accountable as much as a native speaker? Why?

4) Artists have to deal with less obvious situations with plagiarism in scenarios having to do with appropriation. Should everything be public domain?