Digital Bibliography

Here’s a video in three sections. In the first, I explain why I like PDFs on the iPad so much and introduce my workflow. In the second part, I explain how Dropbox keeps files sync’d across multiple computers, including the iPad, and how the iPad fits into that work flow. In the third part, I walk through the interface for Dropbox and iAnnotate on the iPad to demonstrate how easy (sorta) it is to use PDFs on the iPad.

Key Words: ipad, pdf, pdfs, dropbox, iannotate, email, tutorial, highlighting, marginalia, notes.

(p.s. Apologies for the screen-capture audio. I had the wrong microphone enabled. It picked up all the wrong acoustics from from desk.)

My good friend, Matt Dowell, wrote a long, thoughtful comment on one of my posts from last week: “Reading, Writing, Marking, & Difficulty: Re-Reading Salvatori in Light of Digital Writing Practices.” I wanted to take some time and give his comment to attendant response it deserves. I posted it as a comment in the original post, but I thought it might warrant an entry all it’s own. I’ve changed the pronouns for readability, but the text is largely the same. Here is Dowell’s comment (followed by my response):

I find the last sentence of section 2a to be the most interesting portion of your post. Maybe because I’ve heard the rest of it from you before!

It seems to be that in one way, your argument that teachers should “consider the material/physical aspects of a students’ reading processes as an additional factor affecting the “difficulty” of a text” provides a possible answer to ideas you are presenting in section 1a and on the other hand it speaks back to the complications you raise in the same section.

I, to use one of your phrases, “totally totally agree with you” that we need to make the material/physical aspects of reading/writing more visible to our students and need to draw connections between physical/material reading. So, the most obvious answer is

Read the rest of this entry »

At tomorrow’s pedagogy workshop here on campus (2.17.10), we’ll be reading and discussing Mariolina Salvatori’s College English article “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition” (1996). While acknowledging that I’m oversimplifying, I want to mention four important points in the article, and think through them (now, 14 years later) in terms of pedagogy inflected by digital writing tools. Salvatori herself describes the project of her article as “an argument on behalf of the theoretical and practical appropriateness of using ‘reading’ as a means of teaching ‘writing’” (441). Within this frame, she works through several related ideas; I’d like to think though the following four:

1. One of the activities she often asks students to work through is to reflect on their own mark-making practices as active readers of a text, and then to consider what those marks – the nature of the marks, what gets marked, what doesn’t–might reveal about knowledge-making practices, reading, and writing.

2. Another activity she asks her students to engage in is to describe and analyze the difficulty that certain texts present in reading. What moves are difficult to engage, what types of knowledge or warrants are challenging, etc. Then students can reflect on their process by sharing it with other students/teacher and offer a more concrete, specific strategy for reflecting on reading and writing practices. Read the rest of this entry »