I’ve been spending my first day of the year kind of doing stuff around the house, running errands, doing laundry, watching Iowa pound the crap out of South Carolina in the Outback Bowl, and working on the materials for my grad class, English 516: Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice. It is a work in progress, though it is much more together than the rather blank schedule page on the site might suggest.
In any event, one of the assignments I have for the class is for students to do a book review of a recently published book that has something to do with the subject matter of the class. My current list of book options is up and running here; anybody out there in the comp/rhet world have any other ideas for possible readings?
The only two qualifications/requirements are it has to be some kind of book that has to do in some way with “computers and writing” (and that obviously could include a lot of different things), and it has to be a book that has come out recently (certainly nothing before 2004).
What about Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, Bauerlain’s The Dumbest Generation (even though it seems pretty reactionary), Jonathan Alexander’s Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web, or Stevens’ Everything Bad Is Good For You. Thanks for sharing the list you have. I wasn’t aware of some of these books. They look cool!
I don’t want to include Shirky’s book because I’m actually going to do a review of that book as an example and I’m going to assign some chunks of it. Someone did a review of Alexander’s book last year, so I decided to take it off the list. And the “Everything is bad” book– well, I might include that. It is just on the cusp of being a little old for my purposes since the hardback came out in 05, but it is a good book for sure.