Help! I need a catchy title for the
digital writing
course I’m teaching next fall.  I’ve been racking my brain for a half hour now,
running through titular possibilities and trying to land a phrase with enough
pizzazz to spark interest and compel enrollments.  Here are a few that I’ve
ruled out (fine…so what if a few of these are still in the running, the
running is thin).

• WRT302: Status 405 Method Not Allowed
• WRT302: Effectively Banning Virtual Shenanigans
• WRT302: Writing Teachnologies: Chalk, Dry Erase Markers and Smartboards
• WRT302: Two-Button Mice and Macs
• WRT302: Dude, Where’s My Jump Drive?
• WRT302: The Pop-up Experience: Digidipity and Exasperation
• WRT302: Three-hole Punchers as Overlooked Writing Technology
• WRT302: Minimize, Restore Down, Close: The Abundant Adaptabilities of Windows
• WRT302: BRB: Dearest Cyber…I’ve Missed You
• WRT302: Investigating the Rising Cost of Grounded Plug Adapters
• WRT302: Discordant Coloration: From Painting the Screen to Painting the Walls
• WRT302: Climbing Beneath the Desk to Untangle Wires: A Gordian Approach
• WRT302: Wired Panaceas: Now Don’t You Feel Better?
• WRT302: Wifi, Bird-flu and Other Untreatable Stuff in the Air
• WRT302: Familiar Voltage: My Uncle’s An Electrician
• WRT302: ASCII, We Hardly Knew Ye

Maybe it will come to me when I slide into the MRI tube later today for a
good going-over of my knee.

Four days until I have to turn in a course description for the WRT302 course
I’m teaching in the fall. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, keeping as much
as possible with the official
course description.

WRT302: Advanced Writing Studio: Digital Writing
With the shift from writing the page to writing the screen we encounter both
expanded possibilities and new responsibilities for assembling images, text, audio and
video.  In WRT302, we will compose new media texts while engaging issues at
the crossroads of writing activity and specific digital technologies.  The
course will balance experimentation and application with conceptual
approaches; in addition to reading about and exploring online tools, students
will propose and develop a series of projects that extend from our
investigations of specific sites and applications, including simple web pages, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, video, and tag-based systems such as Flickr and
del.icio.us.  Opening lines of inquiry involve the following questions:  What
is gained and lost in the transition from the page to the screen? What are the
practices and techniques we might associate with digital writing? How do
digital texts circulate? How are they read and by whom? How are acts of
digital writing implicated with choices about navigation, links, and code?
This course will also foreground invention, design, usability and
accessibility.  All students are encouraged to enroll. No previous
experience with computers is required; however, some familiarity with basic
uses of technology will be helpful. Email dmueller -at- syr.edu for more information.

I welcome all critique and insight. I’m hesitant to include the phrase "new
responsibilities" in the first sentence.  The final point about previous
experience is messy, too.  Is it common to be explicit about experience with
technologies going into a course like this one? I haven’t committed to any readings
yet, but I have a few highly-probables, and I’ve ordered a desk copy of

this techxbook, fresh off the press.  The projects, too, will have to be only
provisionally defined/outlined because I won’t know the ease-with-tech felt by
the students until I meet them.