More than Just Remixing: Uptake and New Media Composition

This article turns to genre theory's recent explorations of uptake, broadly defined as the ways genres interact, as a resource for sketching a pedagogy of shuttling between genres. Using uptake, I intend to reconceptualize multimodal compositions as a means of participating in rhetorical ecologies that consist of transactions between genres instead of thinking of remixes as an end in themselves. In this article, I first define the concept of uptake in detail and discuss its use in rhetorical genre studies. After further illustrating uptake through an analysis of transactions between YouTube parodies and the 2005 German language film Downfall, I discuss existing scholarship in multimodal composition that draws on genre but not the idea of uptake in order to lay a foundation for a pedagogy that highlights the links, feedbacks, and rules that coordinate genres. My aim in the last section is to sketch possibilities for how teachers and students can deploy the concept of uptake as a rhetorical tool to strengthen their awareness of genre and multimodality. In doing this, I hope to reposition multimodal projects as beginnings or midpoints that lead to students’ emersion into public discourse rather than culminations or end goals in themselves. Integrating studies of uptake into writing curricula in this way will help students to make sophisticated rhetorical decisions in the age of media convergence.     

Iconographic Tracking: A Digital Research Method for Visual Rhetoric and Circulation Studies

Drawing on recent scholarship in the disciplines of rhetoric and composition/writing studies and communication, the author advocates for generating new methodologies and methods for studying rhetorical circulation. The author introduces iconographic tracking—a research method that employs traditional qualitative and inventive digital research strategies to investigate the circulation, transformation, and consequentiality of images across genres, mediums, and contexts. As evidence of what this method can afford, the author presents findings from a five-year long case study that employs iconographic tracking to trace Shepard Fairey's now iconic Obama Hope image. To help readers understand some of the theories and philosophies that undergird the method of iconographic tracking, the author also briefly introduces a new materialist approach to rhetorical study. As such, the author points in new directions for visual rhetorical study and circulation studies at large.     

Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy

Computers and writing scholarship is increasingly turning towards the network as a potential pedagogical model, one in which writing is intimately connected to its social contexts. The use of wikis in first-year composition classes can support this networked pedagogy. More specifically, due to unique features such as editability and detailed page histories, wikis can challenge a number of traditional pedagogical assumptions about the teaching of writing. This article shows how wikis can challenge assumptions in four categories of interest to composition studies: new media composition, collaborative writing, critical interaction, and online authority. The analysis demonstrates that wikis, while not automatically revolutionary to composition pedagogy, hold significant potential to help facilitate pedagogical changes.     

Temptations of fluency and dilemmas of self definition: Stutterers' usage and avoidance of new media technologies

Media technologies, such as telephones, often challenge stammers. Other media, especially applications such as SMS and social networks, enable stammers to express themselves fluently. This study looks into the multifaceted meanings of the encounter between stammers and new media, focusing on applications which enable speech through writing, and a Stammers forum website, as a site for reflexive debate on the meaning of new media opportunities. The study focuses on questions such as anonymity, the “noise” of various media and the ways in which new media helps to improve the users quality of life, but at the same time might lead them to reduce their social life to an alternative “verbal ghetto”, confined to the borders of the new media platform.     

Mobile communication and political participation in South Korea: Examining the intersections between informational and relational uses

This study aims to extend the literature on mobile communication by demonstrating that multifaceted mobile practices work in coordination with one another to predict enhanced engagement in public life. Using a national survey of adults in South Korea, we show that informational mobile phone use to gather and discuss content about news and public affairs is positively associated with political participation while the corresponding link for relational mobile phone use to enhance strong personal tie relationships being also significant. More importantly, the findings indicate that the two mobile usage patterns interact with each other to explain increased involvement in political activities. However, analysis of the three-way interaction points to a noteworthy caveat, namely that those who are already engaged, by virtue of their perceived capacity to produce desired outcomes in politics (i.e., self-efficacy), are even more likely to obtain motivational benefits from the manifold uses of mobile telephony.     

Networked narratives on Humans of New York: A content analysis of social media engagement on Facebook

Humans of New York (HONY) is a popular Facebook page which has more than 13 million fans. The posts on HONY are termed as networked narratives, which are stories told on social media with technology affordances enabling story co-construction between the story tellers and the readers. A content analysis (N = 390) was conducted to examine the popular topics on networked narratives and its impact on social media engagement as represented by the number of likes, the number of shares, and likability of characters featured in the post. Results revealed a set of topics of the networked narratives were associated with social media engagement. Also, the tone and the length of posts were associated with social media engagement.     

From smartphones to iPad: Power users’ disposition toward mobile media devices

The spread of mobile media devices (MMDs), such as smartphones and tablet computers, has been markedly rapid around the world in recent years. The diffusion of mobile media technology has turned some early adopters into “power users,” using MMD more innovatively, efficiently and thoroughly than others. Going beyond the research of innovative users and heavy users, this study proposes the concept of power users by investigating the interactions between the power use of MMD and personality attributes, online activities as well as traditional media use. The findings showed that personality attributes were strong predictors for power use, which was also partially predicated by media multitasking and traditional media use. Research in this stream should assist in understanding the diffusion of mobile media technology and its impact on human interaction.     

基于移动Agent和主动网络的服务组合与定制

在面向服务的架构中，为了实现根据用户需求，利用已有的服务构件组装新的服务，提出了基于主动网络和移动代理技术的服务定制模型，该模型将定制服务所需的基本服务封装成主动服务包（称为Service Agent，SA），通过SA的不同组合生成用户所需要的服务，并对服务定制过程中涉及的服务描述、服务发布、服务发现与选择、服务组合与定制等关键技术进行了研究，解决了传统网络不能实现服务定制的问题。     

Visual Composition and Multimedia

Multimedia applications can be seen as sets of autonomous parts, independent yet capable of working together. This assumption allows for the construction of multimedia applications in a “connectionist” fashion. In this paper we describe mechanisms for the visual composition of multimedia applications. These mechanisms allow for quick and flexible application construction by direct manipulation with reference to multiple composition models. An object-oriented framework for multimedia systems will be introduced throughout the paper.     

Reclaiming Experience: The Aesthetic and Multimodal Composition

Recent scholarship points to the rhetorical role of the aesthetic in multimodal composition and new media contexts. In this article, I examine the aesthetic as a rhetorical concept in writing studies and imagine the ways in which this concept can be useful to teachers of multimodal composition. My treatment of the concept begins with a return to the ancient Greek aisthetikos (relating to perception by the senses) in order to discuss the aesthetic as a meaningful mode of experience. I then review European conceptions of the aesthetic and finally draw from John Dewey and Bruno Latour to help shape this concept into a pragmatic and useful approach that can complement multimodal teaching and learning. The empirical approach I construct adds to an understanding of aesthetic experience with media in order to render more transparent the ways in which an audience creates knowledge—or takes and makes meaning—via the senses. Significantly, this approach to meaning making supports learning in digital environments where students are increasingly asked to both produce and consume media convergent texts that combine multiple modalities including sound, image, and user interaction.     

基于P2P的Web服务聚类及组合

针对集中式的语义服务发现机制成为服务发现和匹配时的瓶颈问题,结合P2P和聚类的思想,探讨一种基于P2P的Web Services聚类与组合模型。理论分析与仿真实验表明,该模型在Web Services的匹配速度和查准率上均有提高,可以为用户提供由Web Services组合而成的增值服务,在一定程度上解决了集中式的语义服务发现机制在面向服务计算过程中的瓶颈问题。     

Development and validation of New Media Literacy Scale (NMLS) for university students

Along with the emergence of new media technologies, individuals are now expected not only to consume but also produce, share and criticize digital contents. Being new media literate, they also need to know socio-cultural and emotional aspects of new media beyond its technical characteristics. New media literacy (NML) involves a series of crucial skills needed for living and working in the mediated and participatory society of 21st century. Although there has been a growing interest in the conceptualization of NML, the literature lacks a measuring instrument to operationalize NML. This study attempts to fill this gap by developing and validating a NML scale (NMLS) for university students. The sample included 1226 students at a state university in Turkey. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses as well as item analyses including internal consistency coefficients, item-total correlations, and item discrimination powers were conducted to determine construct validity and reliability. Consistent with the adopted theoretical framework, the 35-item NMLS comprised four factors: Functional Consumption, Critical Consumption, Functional Prosumption, and Critical Prosumption. Potential applications of NMLS for measuring students’ new media competencies were discussed within the pedagogical and research contexts.     

Some like it lots: The influence of interactivity and reliance on credibility

This study has four primary purposes: to investigate the level of interactivity with 15 sources of political information, determine the degree of reliance on each of the sources, assess perceptions of credibility, and compare the strength of interactivity to the strength of reliance on judgments of credibility. This study includes sources that have received little attention in the credibility literature such as social network sites, Twitter, and mobile device applications. Respondents interact with and rely on the sources moderately. Credibility ratings range from moderate to highly credible. Reliance predicts credibility of 14 of 15 sources as compared to interactivity that predicts credibility of just 9 of 15 sources. Interactivity with sources that are inherently collaborative (e.g. Twitter, social media, talk radio) more strongly predicts credibility than interactivity with sources that are more source-to-user based (e.g. CNN, political websites).     

新建高校大学生价值追求与思想政治教育工作策略

随着改革开放步伐成长起来的新建高校青年大学生,在享受着改革开放创造的巨大物质财富的同时,也经历着思想观念的冲突与嬗变,在价值取向、价值选择、价值表达以及价值实现等方面均表现出明显的时代特点和群体特征。针对新建高校青年大学生这些价值追求的新特点、新变化,新建高校思想政治教育工作应采取讲求多样多实的价值取向,体现开放包容的价值选择,强调客观理性的价值表达,注重自我体验的价值实现的工作策略,以理想信念教育为核心,增强新建高校思想政治教育工作的有效性和时效性,引导新建高校青年大学生正确、健康的价值追求。     

Towards an ecological account of media choice: a case study on pluralistic reasoning while choosing email

The discourse around media choice has generated a diverse array of media choice factors originating from both the media‐based and social interaction‐based approaches. The multitude of these factors hints at the adaptive nature of media choice. Alas, how a user engages with such factors and adaptively carries out media choice has remained understudied. We undertake a field study to explore the role of a plurality of choice factors and their interactions in shaping media choice processes and outcomes. In particular, we focus on how a user identifies relationships among plural choice factors while he or she works on his or her particular choice resulting in a similar outcome – email – given a large number of alternatives. Drawing upon a theory of affordances, we propose a systemic way of narrating the dynamics of media choice as a multi‐dimensional process where a user explores her or his surroundings – a niche – as to establish media affordances that will then help her or him achieve a communication goal. We identify five relational patterns of interactions among specific choice factors: reciprocity, emergence, complementarity, re‐exploration and actualisation. These patterns are shown to be emergent and highly interdependent. We conclude by reviewing future research avenues to formulate richer ‘ecological’ accounts of media choice.     

新考纲下计算机组成原理教学探索与实践研究

在计算机专业课中,计算机组成原理是一门核心课程,是硬件基础。2009年计算机专业硕士研究生考试同以往有所改变,计算机组成原理作为一门重要的专业课在考试中占有较高的地位。在新考纲下,计算机组成原理的教学与实践问题值得探讨。文章就新考纲下计算机组成原理的教学与实践进行探讨,重点从教学内容,教学方法,教学手段和实践教学等方面提出教学的措施。     

新考纲下计算机组成原理教学探索与实践研究

在计算机专业课中,计算机组成原理是一门核心课程,是硬件基础。2009年计算机专业硕士研究生考试同以往有所改变,计算机组成原理作为一门重要的专业课在考试中占有较高的地位。在新考纲下,计算机组成原理的教学与实践问题值得探讨。文章就新考纲下计算机组成原理的教学与实践进行探讨,重点从教学内容,教学方法,教学手段和实践教学等方面提出教学的措施。     

Making games in the classroom: Benefits and gender concerns

This paper argues that making computer games as part of a classroom project can develop a range of new media storytelling, visual design and audience awareness skills. This claim is supported by data from the evaluation of a six week game making project in a state funded primary school in which 11–12 year old learners made their own computer games using software called Adventure Author. The paper reports on analysis of the games produced by the children and documents the range of new media storytelling skills used as well as examining how the pupils responded to peer reviews of their games. In light of concerns raised in the literature that girls may be disadvantaged by classroom games projects, it investigates whether there are gender differences in the game making skills displayed by the learners. The results of the study indicate that girls' games score more highly than boys', particularly on skills relating to storytelling.     

Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks

We examine the relationship between scholarly practice and participatory technologies and explore how such technologies invite and reflect the emergence of a new form of scholarship that we call Networked Participatory Scholarship: scholars’ participation in online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and otherwise develop their scholarship. We discuss emergent techno-cultural pressures that may influence higher education scholars to reconsider some of the foundational principles upon which scholarship has been established due to the limitations of a pre-digital world, and delineate how scholarship itself is changing with the emergence of certain tools, social behaviors, and cultural expectations associated with participatory technologies.