- On Husserl: I see the chapter “Designing for Social Futures” as a kind of rationale for this course and for university education in general. I’m really into Husserl’s concepts of a “lifeworld” bounded by horizons and of treating the lifeworld as something to be reflected on through the transcendental. Courses like Multimedia Theory, Document Design, and even undergraduate composition and technical communication courses are there so we can begin to reflect back on the lifeworld, essentially bracketing off and making explicit our basic assumptions toward language and media. In a sense, I think each article argues for this perspective.
- On English literacy:I haven’t decided what I think of this statement in “Designing for Social Futures”: “Today’s culture of English literacy, which has designed us and with which we design our futures, is very much reduced to the world of the concrete, the predictable, and the repetitive” (221). The authors argue that “our contemporary crisis of meaning and futures…is a question of the possibilities inherent in hybrid experimentation and re-creation…[and] is also a question of who’s in control of the change in communities” (222). Does multimedia create a pathway for more possibilities for experimentation than English literacy?
- On issues of access: The problem with multimedia granting more opportunities for agency in cultural change is that not everyone has equal access, which the authors of these pieces point out. It’s hard for me to say that multimedia gives students more opportunities for experimentation with language when, as an instructor, I have several students who are only marginally familiar with computer technology. Other students (and friends and colleagues) of mine live more of a “cyborg” lifestyle; they seem to always have one hand on the keyboard and their minds on the machine. The issue of access (which is addressed in “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”) is really an issue of agency—then again, I guess it always has been. Even so, the gap between the haves and the have-nots seems to be wider when it comes to computer technology; because it is so powerful as an instrument of cultural change, those who have access to it immediately gain vast privilege over those who do not. Levels of access are also of crucial importance. The student with a computer at home is far ahead of the student who has to use a computer on campus to do work, and the student with Internet access at home is far ahead of the student who doesn’t. Even varying levels of computer knowledge affect an individual’s agency. For example, I don’t have Internet access at home, but I’m doing all my formatting (bold text, bulleted lists, etc.) in my blog post already by just entering the HTML tags in Word. In order to do that, I had to know the tags already.
- On design as meaning-making: One of the key ideas in these readings is that “Designing transforms knowledge by producing new constructions and representations of reality” (22). I think I can get along with that argument, but I doubt that most people who create multimedia are thinking of themselves as producing new representations of reality. Not exactly an easy thing to grasp. What are your thoughts?
That’s about it for now. I’m looking forward to hearing what you all have to say!
