About blogs

In viewing my classmates blogs I have noticed that each of us has a unique and distinct writing style, and while some of us use pictures and vivid colors, some of us just don't.

This class project requires some thinking and time. All projects for this class do, and I think it will be interesting to see the end results.

313 represent. I live in the 734 though. Much love for the 248.

Reading Screens

It's very interesting how this very screen I am typing on is laid out. I would have never thought before reading this article that it was longer legenth wise so more text could go across the screen.

The tidbit about clippy being removed from Word after XP was incorrect. I just bought Word 2003, and Clippy is still annoyingly there.

Ong Article

1) Two Quotes

"If a book states an untruth, ten thousand printed refutations will do nothing to the printed text: the untruth is there forever."

This struck me because this is something we discussed in class last week. A written text is permanent in its existence. In my community of educators, I see less and less dependence upon text books because information changes so frequently that they’re unnecessary. And in this context of oral verses literate cultures, an oral culture is richly spirited and has a deeper meaning to me than a literate culture. It’s nice to be a member of a literate culture, where we depend daily upon our newspapers, signs on the road, and e-mails, but it’s very appealing me to live in an oral culture. Just think for a minute how it would be to be blind, and to watch the news with not being able to read each line of text they put up. And even in our literate culture, we compensate our blind people who can’t read text with their eyes and we have Braille so they can be literate just like the rest of us. I wonder what blind people do in oral cultures. I bet they aren’t as "handicapped" as we make our blind in this culture.

"As writing is interiorized, verbalization migrates from a predominately action frame to a predominately ‘being’ frame: the verb to be becomes more urgent than it had ever been in an oral culture."

I’m not real sure what Ong means to interiorize, but I would imagine he means when writing becomes more main stream, and centralized. Anyway, verbs in our speech today carry a completely different meaning than they did even 100 years ago. This is evident when you examine historical texts, when they were used more to describe actions that occurred, where as now they are used more to describe how we feel, and how others feel.


2) Two attributes of each culture

Literate:
-Don’t understand how the oral cultures are able to survive on only speech.
-Writing distances the word from sound.

Oral:
-Again, don’t understand how literate cultures can articulate their sayings into letters and words.
-It’s ancient, writing is brand new.