Ahoy Mates!

That's Twitter, BTW. I don't see a flurry of activity on the Blog, so I'll start sotto voce. Jayne brings up a good point about documenting our sources, whether they be words or images. All of us (especially students) need to understand that we are taking part in a long-standing conversation where identifying the participants is important to our collective memory of being and time as marked by events that illumine our lives (ah-oh, sounds a bit Walter Cronkiteish).

We all borrow thought-forms all the time and sometimes the expectation is that we will be allusive and imitate others at will, to participate in the social play of language. But in more formal situations, we are called to document our sources because the stakes are higher (read intellectual property) and we need to acknowledge the nodes of meaning and change in the currents of thought--their origin, their disposition, their possibilities for disputation and contestation--and hence, we need a SOURCE. Students don't always see the difference; an IDEA is and idea, and it should go right here in my paper. How else in some cases are we to have authority?

That brings me to the multimodal instantiation of ideas. It has become the new AUTHORITY, the new prestige language that we all need to appropriate to be on the cutting edge of digital rhetoric, to reach the vast and not-so-vast host of other interlocutors who wish to be partners in creating, recirculating, and integrating ideas--in phatic and formal ways.