When thinking of academic writing, I think it is safe to say that it is referring to writing done in school or in general academia. The audience for academic writing is typically teachers, professors, researchers, and other students. The most common type of academic writing would probably be the 5-paragraph writing that was first introduced to me in the 9th grade. However, academic writing is more about thesis statements, topic sentences, solid conclusions, and good grammar throughout. And while it can take form as the 5-paragraph essay or a 20-page scientific research paper, it typically does not allow for a ton of creativity or excitement.
In contrast, new media is abundant in creativity and excitement. New media includes the internet, text messaging, making movies, cell phones, and blogging. All of these types of media are very different from academic writing. They typically can be used without any strict formatting, and can convey almost anything imaginable in any way you could possibly want to convey something. That is the way that new media challenges the concepts of academic writing. Why should someone write an essay with pen and paper following academic rules to convey a message that would be conveyed even better using iMovie? I think the way that new media challenges the academic writing outline the most is that new media changes so fast. Only 5 years ago or so, PowerPoint was possibly the main new media that needed to find it’s way into curriculum, but today it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Some benefits of including new media into an English curriculum would be to better prepare students for the types of media they will encounter in the “real world”. It’s very rare for people to write a single 5-paragraph essay once they have jobs, but it is very common to have people use PowerPoint to convey ideas. People are encountering blogs in almost every area, and use of the internet is nearly a prerequisite in today’s age. By including forms of new media into English curriculum, students would have a leg up on these important forms of media. From my experience in the sciences, I have noticed that poster sessions are frequently used to convey research you are doing, instead of having everyone read your paper. This is just another example of how using computers to construct posters to convey ideas would be beneficial to know how to do.
However, there are definitely a few drawbacks to incorporation of new media into the curriculum. For one, there is no doubt some importance to the academic writing of old, and many would be concerned that it would fall to the wayside. Also, new media changes so often that it would be difficult to stay on top of the changes, if not impossible. Possibly the worst consequence was discussed in class last Thursday, which would be that some people would gain a further advantage over others. This would happen because not everyone actually does have access to a computer, so some schools would not be able to provide students a curriculum of new media whereas other schools would be able to do a great job. A large divide could occur which would certainly unfairly advantage some groups of people over others.
Academic writing is not unimportant, but it is not necessarily always as useful as certain new media. I think we need to include more and more types of new media into classrooms to prepare students for what they will encounter in the “real world”.
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6 comments:
Do you think there should be "new media" classes and then "regular writing" classes and then students can choose which they want to take? or do you think all classes should incorporate both? or should students be required to take one of each?
Sorry to jump in on this but I think that incorporating both is inevitable. I really think it would be a waste of time to take one of each when you could use that time to take two classes where they incorporate both. I don't know just thought I would put my two cents in.
I agree that incorporating "new media" and "regular writing" into the same class is the best approach. If you separated them out, one doesn't get the real feeling of the "real world" because nothing is quite so cut and dry.
Maybe I'm interpreting this wrong, but it seems that we've all begun to differentiate "regular writing" and "new media writing" as "the hard one" and "the easy one."
Perhaps this is not what other people are thinking, but at least I am.
It makes me wonder if all of these questions of choice or incorporation could be avoided if we could find a way to make "regular writing" another "easy one."
Composing papers should be challenging, but not painful, right?
i like your view on new media being very volatile and changing often. its going to be hard to keep up with everything, and if the old way of writing diminishes, we might lose things all together.
I agree that incorporating both are inevitable. Although the world is changing to incorporate more of this new media (emails, slide shows at a business meeting, cell phones, and text messaging), I think it is that very reason that makes it important to keep teaching (and maybe redefining the importance) of the old media or academic writing. Without teaching both, I think there will be a real disconnect as far as communication goes (especially between classes) and problems dealing with plagiarism, intellectual property, etc. will be far too common.
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