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Welcome! You are in the right place if you are
enrolled in Medaille College's
WRT 350 in Spring 2000
interested
in business communications
interested
in Medaille's curriculum
The April 3, 2000, Industry Standard declares "Publishing: The Book Finally Goes Digital." The article, "Publish Online or Perish?" notes Stephen King's latest being downloaded over 400,000 times in its first day of availability on the Internet. Kenneth Li, the article's author, quotes Stephen Riggio, head of Barnesandnoble.com:
We're about to look at a revenue stream [in e-books] in the publishing business that will make the MP3 phenomenon look tame by comparison.
Within a week of reading that, I received the Winter 2000 Bulletin of the Authors Guild in the mail, on paper, not available online. The cover has pictures of three of the electronic books, or e-books, and the article inside has the same picture of Stephen Riggio (in black and white, of course, because color is expensive; on the Web, all colors cost the same). The quote from Riggio says, "We're going to hit them over the head with it." The article by John McCloskey, titled "Electronic Chaos", begins by telling about an award-winning novelist who was introduced from the stage of a meeting:
The woman making the introduction came across as every author's ideal fan, calm, eloquent, witty and knowledgeable. Once she finished her remarks, the guest novelist took the podium and thanked her for the kind introduction. Then, a propos of nothing, a Hyde-like change overcame the mistress of ceremonies. She grabbed the mike back and blurted out, "And I hope your books are around for a long, long time as real books! Not e-books! We don't like e-books!" The audience cheered and she pumped her fist in the air, in the time-honored gesture of resistance.
What's going on here? A revolution? A backlash? The transformation of an industry? Is it progress? Is it inevitable?
Will information stored in carbon atoms continue to be moved slowly in trucks? Or will information stored in electronic bits start being moved instantly through copper wires?
Let's take a textbook. It can cost $100 and be two years out of date by the time it gets to you. If you lose it, you buy another copy for $100. Or the same information can cost $10 and be current, updatable, searchable, and yes, even printable. If you lose it, you copy your classmate's for free.
Which are you going to buy?
I would be very neat if that change could happen in isolation. From my example, you can see that the paper industry and the trucking industry will be affected (though not hurt). Here's another quote from Stephen Riggio in The Industry Standard article:
You will see very, very soon authors become publishers. You will see publishers become booksellers. You will see booksellers become publishers, and you'll see authors become booksellers.
The title of this course has implicit in it an important concept -- what are you researching and what are you writing? The general term is information. This course is about searching for information and then packaging it for readers.
It's also about getting you to think differently about information. An article by John Perry Barlow in Wired magazine over six years ago started me thinking differently. The article, titled "The Economy of Ideas", explores three statements:
Information
is an activity.
Information is a life
form.
Information is a
relationship.
In one memorable line, Barlow writes:
Information is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer.
To that I would add, information can also be stored in a picture. This course will also explore how we can report on information visually. An good example is Richard Saul Wurman's Understanding USA. To view it, you'll need the Flash plug-in for your browser.
What's old: WRT 350 is a writing course, so you will write a lot. What's new: 1) WRT 350 will be as paperless as possible. 2) The definition of writing includes visual information and web page coding.
Find out all the official stuff. How is this course described in the college catalog? What are you going to know more about and know how to do better? What's the self-assessment all about?
This is the page to bookmark. It will change often and be the place to learn what we're going to do in class and what you should do before class.
In this course, you'll learn by doing. We're going to pretend that you work for the CyberSea Inn, and that I'm your boss. If the course were Mission Impossible, this page would be the tape-recorded message at the beginning, except that it wouldn't self-destruct until the middle of June, when the course is over. "If you choose to accept this mission, ... ."
The ideas at the top of this page are meant to be provocative. The Ground Zero Bistro is the place to talk about it. Ask questions and get answers.
The oral presentations and the accompanying visual aids. What are the other students doing? When is yours scheduled? How will they be evaluated?
Printer-friendly version of the Course Disclosure Statement
I am always doing what I cannot do, in order that I may
learn how to do it.
-- Pablo Picasso
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