Writing in Cyberspace

v2.0

Welcome

What is this place called cyberspace? And what does it mean to "write" in (for) cyberspace? This course explores how digital technologies are redefining what we mean by "writing."

What will we do?

We will read about the new genres, composing practices, and rhetorics associated with electronic (rather than print) environments, and we will create texts within and for a range of digitial spaces, such as blogs and wikis.

This page:

This page itself is an example of what we will do this semester using uncomplicated html and css. Note the following:

The content is fully separated from the presentation. No inline styling has been used.
Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS2.
Number of .classes: 0. Number of #id's: 3 (#sidebar, #menu and #content).
Number of styled tags: 11 (html, body, ul, li, a, img, h1, h2, h3, and p).
One large image has been used to improve the design, but it works just as well without it.
The sidebar has fixed positioning to keep it in place when the rest of page scrolls.
To make the fixed positioning of the sidebar work with Internet Explorer, a conditional comment and an extra CSS file has been used. Scripts would work better, but this class will not cover them.

Quotations

Writing is an adventure. --Winston Churchill
If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it research. --Albert Einstein
You have to be confused before you can reach a new level of understanding anything. --Dudley Herschbach
for better or worse, our future will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real. --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Good luck with your dreams and cyberwriting!

site info
Design by Andreas Viklund.
Photo by Kathy Mackey, Los Angeles, California, known as auntie k on her photo website http://flickr.com/photos/auntikhaki/