Blog Project: Pedagogical Application

During my research, I discovered that the brain process of today’s youth has drastically changed from that of previous generations. Where once we scanned in a Z-pattern (think about how you read a book), many now scan in an F-pattern (think about how you view a web page). Another factor that plays into the pedagogical process of teaching composition is Lankshear and Knobel’s notion of the recent development of an “attention economy.” due to the influx of vast amounts of information readily and rapidly available to today’s discourse community participant. People today seem to be moving from a goods-drive economy to a media-attention driven economy where the more attention you gain, the more successful you are. Both of these fairly recent developments point to the need to rethink how we teach composition and how we instruct our students to present themselves and their positions in the various discourse communities they are involved with. By using blogging as a form of presentation, I will be taking my students out of the more archaic “norm” of written presentation and introducing them to just one of the numerous forms of attention gaining, F-pattern styled formats for presentation that are available in today’s information-glutted, hyper-linked world where less (in words) is often more (in outcome).