I must be honest and admit that I simply could not take in all the assigned readings, the forum discussions, the wiki building, and the community weblog; however, I was able to learn a lot from what I could absorb. Reading Ong and Bolter were some of my favorite activities in ETEC540 for a couple reasons. The first reason was that I really enjoyed seeing the contrasting views of these two authors and the second reason was that the reading was on paper. Even though I have a nice new monitor, my eyes could only handle so much digital reading and I found myself craving reading an actual book. That was an interesting realization as we were learning about different writing spaces and the benefits and drawbacks of each.
Before reading Bolter, I found myself seeing eye-to-eye with Ong. His great divide perspective about technological determinism is so black and white and makes sense. Then we read Bolter and his humanistic perspective not definitively labeling a cause and effect relationship on the remediation of writing was slightly disconcerting at first. Being more of a humanitarian myself, I have come to agree more with Bolters ideas than Ong’s. By understanding their contrasting views of text technologies, I was able to gain a solid understanding of the implications of the evolution of writing all the way from papyrus to Web 2.0. To be honest, I as slightly impatient learning about all this history while I was reading about it, but I am glad to have as good of perspective on writing as I do now.
The collection of material created by my classmates on the community weblog is incredible. There are so many creative and innovative ideas incorporating much of what we have read about and lots of other knowledge brought to the table from outside this course. Our blog is a good example of the wisdom of the crowds and thankfully most contributors have added appropriate tags and have categorized them accordingly making it easy to find connections in the contributions. I only wish I had access to our community weblog indefinitely for an instant source of inspiration!
Thanks to all of you for sharing all your knowledge and making this a very enjoyable course.
