"Box Logic" Response

I am not sure how to respond to Sirc’s piece. My biggest issue with it is the simple fact that I plan to teach public high school, and I cannot see how to really use Sirc’s activities or ideas in such an environment. Sirc works in a relatively ideal professorial situation, one in which I know I will not find myself. I will not have students readily capable of using Dreamweaver. I will not have 30 computers to use every day toward our electronic box creations. I will not have students lining up to take my course; in fact, students won’t even have the choice to take my course. I do see where Sirc is going with his work, implementing the 21st century in his student’s work and bringing their real lives to the classroom. Unfortunately, I also see that such possibilities are beyond the reach of a public educator in today’s educational system. I do appreciate the idea of multi-modality, but pressing digitality on my poor students who will not have such technology at their fingertips is not what I intend to do.

In response to his idiosyncratic formatting…Sirc spoke of having the students recognize the ways by which their online boxes were formatted, laid out, and what pictures were used. He wanted them to see the ways that these aspects changed how one read the text. I believe that is his purpose with this article. He formatted specific areas of the text into the odd ways, and this different formatting encouraged different readings--often more attentive. Perhaps in reading these more closely we gained deeper understanding of what he was trying to say; thus, his article itself becomes a multi-layered box.