Week 3.1 Symposium

You may think of writing as an individual task that we do on our own. If this is the case, think again!

Monday’s symposium made me think again. We discussed how through the rise of hypertext, we now need to write with the awareness that we are writing as part of a larger discourse. It’s not just the content that I’m creating, because my content is just one chunk of many other texts on the internet that can all be related, linked, and read together.

The little network we have amongst our class is a great example of this. We are all writing our own posts and creating our own work, yet we are constantly linking to each other’s posts. We read one post then follow the link to another post and read what they have to say. In this way, we are encountering a larger discourse, not just each individual article that we read.

And through hypertext and hypermedia, we as readers can become active readers not just passive. We can direct our own reading, choose which link we will click on, and have an endless reading experience if we so desire.

Another topic that came up in the symposium was that creative discourse is a collaborative task. Our input joins up with other online contributions to form the discourse.

And I feel that a great example of this in our course would be our wiki pages. We are working in groups of three or four people to create a creative, informative wiki page about the topic we have been given. We each contribute our own work onto the wiki, and as we do this the finished product is achieved.

It is an interesting process to work with others to achieve the desired outcome, but it is an activity that we are involved in every time we post onto our blogs. We are part of a much larger discourse than we may imagine, and our input adds to the rich, diverse, range of opinions and perspectives that floats around the World Wide Web.