Digital Literacy

This course will investigate how the digital challenges our perceptions of what we have come to call literacy (and thus, composition). Is literacy a relevant term for digital production, or do we need a new term to describe the process of acquiring and producing knowledge?

Rice, Jeff. Wayne State University (2005). Academic>Courses>Literacy>Online

Networked Exchanges, Identity, Writing    

This article argues for a rhetoric of networked exchanges that focuses on the response. Working from Spinuzzi's call for a rhetoric of horizontal learning, it examines two kinds of online writing spaces in order to propose such a rhetoric. After surveying conflicting, academic attitudes regarding networked exchanges, the article proposes the response as a type of professional communication. A specific message board thread and a series of blog carnivals serve as examples of the rhetoric of response, a way that horizontal learning produces a specific type of networked writing identity. The article concludes with a call for response-based communication practices.

Rice, Jeff. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2009). Articles>Writing>Collaboration>Social Networking

Woodward Paths: Motorizing Space    

This essay takes up the call for a rhetoric of distributed space by proposing a folksonomic rhetoric. Folksonomies, systems in which users may name any object, space, idea, or image any name they want, offer technical communicators new possibilities for how they work in network environments. As a way to explore the possibility of a folksonomic rhetoric, this essay examines one specific space, Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, as if it were a folksonomic space.

Rice, Jeff. Technical Communication Quarterly (2009). Articles>Information Design>Taxonomy>Geography