Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom

by Jeff Rice

Working from the popular notion of "cool," this innovative text challenges students to think and write critically about how popular culture terms and phenomena are constructed. Ideal for instructors interested in integrating cultural studies and technology into their classrooms, this text examines the popular notion of "cool" as a means of understanding the cultural dimensions of electronic writing as well as the rhetorical strategies implicit in such writing. By providing content-specific assignments to be created in HTML, the textbook merges the subject of cool with technology-based writing instruction. Students are encouraged to think critically about the construction of popular culture and taught how to write critically about various popular culture phenomenon. Through the study of Web, advertising, literature, and technology usages of cool, students learn how to use HTML to write "cool" themselves.

176 pages, Paperback

Published January 10, 2004

About the author

Jeff Rice was born in Lawton, Oklahoma and grew up in Miami, Florida. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing Program at the University of Missouri. Previously, he was Director of Writing and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Detroit-Mercy and Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University, where headed the department’s Digital Literacy Initiative. He joined the Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at the University of Kentucky in Fall 2011.

Professor Rice is the author of The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media (Southern Illinois University Press 2007) and the textbook Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom (Longman 2004). He is also the co-editor of New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy (Parlor Press 2008) and Keywords in Markup: From to A (University of Minnesota Press 2011).

Professor Rice has published over 20 articles and chapters in new media, composition, pedagogy, and rhetoric. He recently finished his second monograph, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, a project that explores a networked rhetoric via the city of Detroit. In addition to his academic work, he blogs at Yellow Dog (http://www.ydog.net) and Make Mine Potato (http://makeminepotato.ydog.net), where he is sketching out a new book project on Web 2.0 and the rhetoric of obsession in the craft beer industry. That project is tentatively titled 'Craft Obsession.'