About the Readings

Reading are listed in alphabetical order, not the order in which they are assigned. Many of the essays are PDF files, which requires a PDF reader, like the free Adobe Reader. Notes from BW are in [ ].

Alexrod & Cooper. (2006). Strategies for Reading Critically

Atwood, M. (2010, March 19). Atwood in the Twittersphere. New York Review of Books.

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Introduction: Writing in the late age of print. Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahwah, NJ: LEA. 1-13. [pdf]

Johnson, S. (5 June 2009). How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. Time.

Rettberg, J.W. (2009). What is a blog? Blogging. Malden, MA: Polity Press. [pdf]

Silver, D. (2009, February 25). The difference between thin and think tweets. Silver in SF.

VanFossen, L. (2005, September 9). Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One? Lorell on WordPress.

Wesch, M. (Mar 2007). The Machine is Us/Using Us (Final Version). YouTube.

Web 2.0 Readings (Part 1: 1945 – 1996)

Bush, V. (July 1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly. [read: Intro, sections 1, 3, 6, 7, 8; this was the first publish account of anything that anticipated what we now know to be the Internet.]

Engelbart, D. (Dec 1968). The mother of all demos. YouTube. [watch the first 12 minutes or so; “This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking. . . .”]

Dibbell, J. (Dec 1993). A rape in cyberspace; Or, how an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizzards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society. Village Voice. [PDF]

Turkle, S. (Jan 1996). Who Am We? Wired.

Web 2.0 Readings (Part 2: 1999 – 2005)

Selfe, C. (1999). Literacy and technology linked: The national project to expand technological literacy. Technology and literacy in the twenty-first century: The importance of paying attention. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. [pdf; read only pages 10 – 15 under the heading, “What is Technological Literacy?”]

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing as technology. Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahwah, NJ: LEA. 14 – 26. [pdf]

Kelly, K. (Aug 2005). We Are the Web. Wired.

O’Reilly, T. (30 Sept 2005). What is Web 2.0? O’Reilly.

Web 2.0 Readings (Part 3: 2005 – 2011)

DeVoss, D.N., and Porter, J.E. (2006). Why Napster matters to writing: Filesharing as a new ethic of digital delivery. Computers & Composition, 23, 178 – 210. [PDF]

Wesch, M. (Jun 2008). An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Presented at the Library of Congress. YouTube. [Note: 55 minutes]

Anderson, C. and Wolff, M. (2010, September). The web is dead. Long live the Internet. Wired.

Web 2.0 Readings (Part 4: gaming, screen literacy, remix)

Highland, M. (2006). As real as your life. Presented in D. Perry Are games better than real life? TED [start watching at 10:00 for Highland’s movie, though I recommend the whole video]

Gee, J.P. (2007). Semiotic domains: Is playing video games a “waste of time”? What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: PalgraveMacmillan. [pdf]

Kelly, Kevin. (2008, November 21). Becoming screen literate. The New York Times. [Printable version.]

Faden, E. (2007). A Fair(y) Use Tale. YouTube.

Ferguson, K. (2011, 2012). Everything is a remix, parts 1 – 4.