Bingo!

Here is the problem for me:

Richard Lanham, in The Electronic Word, makes the distinction between looking 'at' a text, versus looking 'through' a text. I've come to realize that traditionally visual artists have leaned towards the former, while writers have been more prone towards the later.

Joseph in Mind the Gap

I am an auditory learner. That has confused people who have tested me, when I can relate large chunks of information from texts that I read. The answer is that I look through texts. I don't visualize words. I look through the text to the words. And often I talk about what I am reading so that I understand it (much to the chagrin of my children. My eldest daughter came home from school telling me that they had finally got to rhetoric in her 9th grade class, and that they were working on the classical appeals. She also has more than a passing acquaintance with the idea of the social construction of reality.)

These new media texts, like Samuel Beckett's work, force the reader to slow down and acknowledge the visualness of the words. These kinds of texts prevent the invisibility of text. I cannot look through these texts to hear what the author is saying... I have to look at the texts and construct my own meaning.

I just saw the doll box assignment-- if I had seen that in an undergraduate class, I would have dropped the class. Dropped it. If it appeared in one of my graduate classes, I would of course, grit my teeth and do it, hoping that completion earned me something. I am pretty sure that my product would not manage to get me very far.

Not that I am above pushing my students. This semester, I made my comp students contribute to Wikipedia. I did this for a couple of reasons. One is that they are writing for a real audience. And for real editors. If their edits were rejected, I offered feedback that I thought would help them be successful with their editors. Several were successful on the first try. Others made it on the second. Several, of course, are still trying. Midterm grades are tomorrow, and I have warned them that if their article is not up on Wikipedia, it will be reflected in their midterm (unless of course, their editor is just unreasonable, in which case, they must write a narrative explaining why it didn't work, and the steps they took to try to work with the system). But in essence, this is a research assignment. They know the form, having read it all their school career. Only the delivery system is new for them.