@Process / @Cognition -- Plans for an Annotated bibliography

Erik and I chose to create an annotated bibliography for our Build-A-Tool. When I read about this assignment, I had visions of magical infographics and a dancing Prezi presentation, but these ideas weren’t confronting the ideas straight-on—they were the equivalent of walking into the art supply store, and feeling as though you are going to start painting right there in the store aisles—being overwhelmed with possibility.

We chose to create an annotated bibliography and wanted to include some of the keywords from the grid that we had been doing. Erik brought up the concepts of hashtags and I remembered a similar model that I had seen involving the RTE annotated bibliographies that I had seen in a previous graduate level course. The RTE annotated bibliographies make use of hash tags so that a user can search for articles via topic. We decided that these hashtags could also be used to demarcate theoretical turns. That work would require some serious intellectual heavy lifting, but if an individual were to undergo such a project, a lot of insight could occur for future scholars.

Erik suggested the addition of the “@” symbol to demarcate direct conversations between articles, and that addition is another aspect that distinguishes our tool from the RTE bibliographies. Additionally, since the @ symbol is well known, users would understand the relationship implied without a lot of explanation. I like how it incorporates elements of contemporary discourse into conversations that occurred in the past, giving us a (post)modern understanding of those texts.

In doing “the work” for this type of project, the builder of the tool would really have to think intertextually, especially when bringing in articles that are part of the conversation but may not seem so at first like that of Kinneavy. I also considered bringing in non-academic articles such as “Why Can’t Johnny Write” by Merrill Sheils published in Newsweek in 1975 and articles about the advent of open admissions in the 1970’s, which Mina Shaughnessy does discuss, as these were real world forces that may have been driving the turn away from process pedagogy and towards theories of cognition.

Works Referenced

Kinneavy, James L. “The Basic Aims of Discourse.” College Composition and Communication 20 (1969): 297- 304.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. "Open admissions and the disadvantaged teacher."College Composition and Communication (1973): 401-404.

Sheils, Merrill. "Why Johnny can't write." Newsweek 92.8 (1975): 58-65.