Writing for Cyberspace- Year End Reflection

I’ll start with the criticism. We did several readings throughout the course of the semester, and the PDFs that were supplied were not really in “great” shape. This is going to sound silly, but I was scared of some of the readings- not because of the content, but because of the crooked and off-the-page text. I managed to read most of them, but there’s no substituted for a well-done PDF that leaves you room to print out and annotate. To help understand the readings better, I think later classes will require nicer looking PDFs.

The PDFs are my biggest criticism, second to the general consensus that our “smart labs” are not very “smart” or equipped to do anything we need them to do. My only real “gripe” about the course. I do, however, have some other suggestions. This semester, we did presentations, posted at Wikipedia, kept our blogs, and wrote two major essays- on which we adapted to webpage form. I think there should be an additional requirement, however: require that students participate in an online community of their choice. I’ve learned quite a bit about the internet and the types of “literacy” just by posting around at forums on my own time.
Now, the positives.

What I liked best about the class is actually that we didn’t spend time getting bogged down in code. Leave that to programmers. Just because we write online doesn’t mean we need to know code- it kind of eliminates the point. What we should be concerned with as writers in “online literacy,” and how writing and writers need to adapt to that.

I also liked that we covered a wide range of material- this course really worked as a survey of online literacy in that way. We looked at e-lit, cell phone novels, second life, Wikipedia, and so on. I felt that, while this course didn’t tell me exactly what I need to do in terms of writing, it at least exposed me to several doors I can choose to enter later and gave me some foundation for further study. That’s more than I had hoped for.