On Old and New Forms of Writing

Bud Hunt at Bud the Teacher recently posted a link to the text version of the now-viral “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video and suggests classroom (and teacher) reflection on the differences between the pure-text medium and the web 2.0 version.

I’ve had the same idea for a while–ever since presenting Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?” video to my school admin in early January. I kept pausing Karl’s video to invite the administrators to reflect on how much more effective the video was as a communication medium over the traditional way–printing out Karl’s text and handing copies to everyone to read and discuss.

My superintendent–a wonderful literacy enthusiast–chimed in with some great comments. She noted the critical thinking involved in Karl’s isolation of only the most powerful information for inclusion in the video, and articulated how much skill it takes to separate the wheat from the chaff in this way. “That’s critical thinking,” she said.

She also noted the power of the timing of Karl’s text, and how radical this ability to control the readers’/audience’s pace of reading was–thanks to web2.0. It was a great thing, having these conversations about web2.0 as new literacies, and not as technology.

Yes, we all know that, but ritual repetition creates new realities. So it bears repeating.

SO…Bud posted the link to the text for “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” I’m just going to copy and paste it below, followed by the video itself–so now the “lesson” is all in one place. (And Karl, I can’t find an embeddable version of “Did You Know?”, nor a text version, to add to this exercise. Can you help out by showing me where they might be? It’s so worth doing!)

Here’s the text (with some formatting glitches I tried but failed to fix, sorry):

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Text is linear

Text is unlinear

Text is said to be unlinear

Text is often said to be unlinear

Text is unlinear when written on paper

Digital text is different.

Digital text is more flexible.

Digital text is moveable.

Digital text is above all…hyper.

Digital hypertext is above all…

hypertext is above all…

hypertext can link

here

here

or here…

virtually anywhere

anywhere virtually

anywhere virtual

The WayBack Machine

http://yahoo.com

Take Me Back

Oct 17, 1996

Yahoo

View Source

Most early websites were written in HTML

HTML was designed to define the structure of a web document.

is a structural element referring to “paragraph”

is also a structural element referring to “List Item”

As HTML expanded, more elements were added.

Including stylistic elements like (sic) for bold and for italics

Suck elements defined how content would be formatted.

In other words, form and content became inseparable in HTML

Digital Text can do better.

Form and content can be separated.

http://www.cnn.com

RSS XML

View Source

XML was designed to do just that.

CNN.com

< title > does not define the form. It defines the content.

http://www.cnn.com/?eref=rss_topstories

same with

CNN.com

and

and virtually all other elements in this document.

They describe the content, not the form.

So the data can be exported,

free of formatting constraints.

2 Comments

wow, this is a cool video
it really does show that text on screen can do so much more than lead on paper.

— February 4, 2007
awesome!
it clearly shows that networking is far more efficient then writing!
The these stuff confuses me
hope i can learn them and be an expert in computer networking

— February 4, 2007

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Written by Clay Burell

February 19th, 2007 at 8:41 am

Posted in language arts, writing

Tagged with audio, literacy, multimedia, reading, video, web 2.0/ read-write web

One Response to 'On Old and New Forms of Writing'

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Sure. There are about 4 or 5 incarnations on YouTube, try using this one to embed. I’ll email you the text of Did You Know - I’ll get it online tomorrow.

[Reply]

Karl Fisch

19 Feb 07 at 11:36 am