Book Review

Each of you will review a book from the list of recent books having to do with computers and writing after these introductory comments. Each of you will give a 10 minute or so electronic/online “presentation” about your book (see below), and each of you will also write a brief (four or five page) review of the book.

Here’s how this will work:

• I’ve listed further down on this page the books that are available for review. I’ve tried to come up with a list of books that are mostly “current” (less than five years old) and that address a variety of issues important to scholars in “computers and writing.” Some of these books are highly theoretical, while others are rooted in more pragmatic issues. Most of these books offer information applicable to teachers of students at a variety of different levels, though some focus more on higher education settings, some focus on secondary school settings, and a few are just indirectly connected to teaching.
• If you don’t see anything on this list that you want to review, I will consider alternative suggestions. However, you should be aware that you will need a compelling reason to convince me to allow you to review and report on a book not on this list.
• By January 27, all of you will sign up for a book to review and a time for when your review will be due. Books will be chosen on a friendly “first-come, first-serve” basis where the people who sign up to do their reviews earlier in the term will have first choice on the books to review, and vice-versa.  This means you will probably need to be flexible to review a couple of different titles, and it also means that if there is a particular book on the list you are really interested in reviewing, you will want to sign up to deliver your book review sooner in the term. I reserve the right to slightly alter choices in terms of books and dates for giving reviews if necessary, and I will assign books to review and dates to report for anyone who has not signed up during this class meeting.
• Once you chose a book and a date to report to the class on your book, you cannot change your mind and the deadline for your presentation and review is firm. We have a tight schedule this term, and it could be difficult if not impossible to reschedule “late” reports.
• “How the heck are we supposed to give an electronic/online presentation?!” you may be asking. Well, this is indeed one of the “challenges” of the assignment, one I will negotiate with each of you individually based on the resources that you have available to you. Basically, I expect each of you to record a 8-10 minute YouTube video and share your link to that video with the class.  I will share with you a couple of examples of what I mean, one a video I made a couple years ago and another a student made last winter term.  Many of your probably already have computers/equipment that allows you to record and upload basic sound or video to the Internet. If you don’t have easy access to such equipment (especially video), I will be able to loan you a camera at some point this term. And of course I will be happy to meet face to face with any of you to sort out any technical problems.
• Don’t forget that you need to write a book review essay too, and it is due the week you give your presentation! For whatever reason, this was something that some students seem to forget. In any event, the “paper/text” part of the assignment is probably more important than the presentation part of the assignment. Also, this assignment is one that may offer publishing opportunities for you! When I was soliciting colleagues in the field about book review ideas (via an email list I’m on), some of the editors of the journal Kairos and of the web site for the composition studies web site/clearance site (whatever that’s called) expressed interest in publishing reviews of some of the books listed here. So if you’re interested in following through with that, let me know.

Okie-dokie: Here is the list of books you can review (the links are all from amazon.com):

Adam Banks. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. (I don’t know much about this book, but I know that it won an award at the 2007 Computers and Writing conference).

Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond:  From Production to Produsage Peter Lang 2008.  Theoretical for sure with some interesting observations and claims about the tools listed in his title, especially wikipedia.

Dennis Baron.  A Better Pencil:  Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Oxford UP, 2009.  (Recommended to this list by several people I know.  If you enjoyed Baron’s essay we read early in the term, I’m guessing you’ll like this book.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Freedom Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale UP, 2006. (Steve’s comments: Well-regarded book that theorizes the ways that social and open source networks are productive. Theory-heavy and not about pedagogy, but still relevant and useful for this class).

Lindan W. Braun, Teens, Technology, and Literacy; Or, Why Bad Grammar Isn’t Always Bad , Libraries Unlimited, Westport, CT (2007) I don’t know much about this book, but it was reviewed in Computers and Composition in December 2008. Seems to be more of a secondary ed sort of emphasis.

Jeffrey Grabill. Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action. Hampton Press, 2007. (Steve’s comments: I don’t know much about this boook, but I know Jeff and it was recommended by others).

Sibylle Gruber Literacies, Experiences and Technologies: Reflective Practices of an Alien Researcher Hampton Press, 2007. This is a book from a series from Hampton Press that was recommended to me. And it looks pretty interesting, too.

Alex Halavais, Search Engine Society Polity (2008) This came out in December 2008; one blurb reads “Too many of us approach search engines as if they are neutral, democratic, all-revealing guides to the internet. Alex Halavais shows that this belief can actually be dangerous, and he provocatively suggests ways to rethink our personal and collective policies toward search systems in the interest of a healthy civic culture.”

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide NYU Press; Revised edition (2008) Jenkins is an excellent writer, and this book is a good choice for anyone interested in new media and pop culture.

Andrew Keen. The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values Broadway Books; Reprint edition (2008) Keen is a somewhat infamous critic of the various things he notes in his title.

Liz Kolb Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education International Society for Technology in Education (2008) I included this book in the list since one of my main “pet peeves” in teaching are cell phones. The review on amazon.com suggest it might be more K-12, but I suspect it would apply for higher ed teaching as well.

Anna Munster Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics Dartmouth (2006) The one amazon.com review says “This book is a virtuoso performance in its feminist exploration of the concerns of new media and the concept of embodiment.” My guess is that it is a book that doesn’t address pedagogy, but rather addresses more conceptual/theoretical issues of new media.

Lisa Nakamura. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet Minnesota UP 2007  I know almost nothing about this book, but it sounds interesting.  The author is a professor in speech communication and Asian American studies.

Jason Ohler, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity , Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA (2008) I don’t know much about this book, but it was reviewed in Computers and Composition in December 2008. Seems to be more of a secondary ed sort of emphasis.

Alexander Reid.  The Two Virtuals:  New Media and Composition. Parlor Press, 2007.  Very interesting and theoretically savvy book.  We read a selection of it early in the class if you want a sense of Reid as a writer and thinker.

Jeff Rice, The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media , Southern Illinois UP, Carbondale (2007) Jeff used to teach at Wayne State, and while I haven’t read this book, my guess is that this is a pretty “theory-heavy” but well-written read. It was reviewed in Computers and Composition in 2008.

Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum, Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools International Society for Technology in Education (2007) My guess about this book, based on amazon.com, is that is kind of “nuts and bolts,” and very much geared to the K-12 educator.

Fred Turner From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism University Of Chicago Press (2008) Publishers Weekly said “Drawing a direct line from dog-eared copies of the Whole Earth Catalog to the slickly techno-libertarian Wired magazine, Stanford University communications professor Turner follows countercultural figures like Stewart Brand, who shaped the information revolution, according to their aspirations to break down the boundaries of individual experience and embrace a larger collective consciousness.” So it might fit in, but it probably has nothing to do with teaching.

Barbara Warnick Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web Peter Lang 2007.  (I don’t know this book, but it was recommended by several folks I know to put on this list.

David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder Holt Paperbacks (2008). Kind of a “pop intellectual” read on digital technologies; accessible and interesting.

Lynn Worsham Plugged in: Technology, Rhetoric, and Culture in a Posthuman Age Hampton Press (2008) I don’t know much about this book, but I do like the title….