As my technological literacy collage is intended to serve as an example of an assignment prompt, I also wrote a short explanation of how I composed the piece. If interested, you can find the assignment guidelines and accompanying documents at the course web site. Any comments on the assignment or the collage are more than welcome.

On Composing “On the Dangers of Reading Conan Stories and Playing Computer Games; or, the Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage”

I began writing my technological literacy collage by writing stories that illustrate my practices and values involved with reading, writing, and exchanging information. In all, I wrote about 13 pages, 11 distinct passages, all written by hand, in the period of a few hours one afternoon. The passages ranged from a paragraph to a few pages. Of the 11 passages I wrote, 6 made it into my final draft in one form or another. While a few of the passages made it into the final version almost unchanged, others made it in after a lot of pairing down. Seven additional passages were composed at the computer over the period of a week as I thought about other ideas and how I might make a collage out of the passages I had initially written.

With those 12 passages typed up, I printed them out, one passage to a page, figured out which one wanted to start with, and then started piecing together the rest of the order. One passage that I’m really fond of just didn’t seem to fit anywhere, so I took it out. As I decided on the order of my passages, I came up with an idea that would work well between passage one and two, so I wrote it out by hand on my print out of my old passage two that had now become passage three. I then read the collage straight through and realized I wanted another passage at the end. I was going to end with the line that Tolkien liked Howard’s Conan stories, which tied into the title I’d come up with. I decided, however, that it didn’t seem right as the final passage, so I wrote the bit about logos and mythos, which allowed me to return to teaching, reading, and writing; preseningt those activities as acts of storytelling; get in another dig at Plato; and return to my definition of technological literacy.