Portable Composition: iTunes University and Networked Pedagogies

The development of mobile, convergent media networks is altering the context of professional, educational, and everyday communication. This essay examines the incorporation of iTunes University into writing and new media composition instruction, including institutional and technological contexts and faculty and student responses. This examination suggests the value of studying networked composition by following the expanding web of local interactions that link the conventional scene of composition—the student at the computer—with other events, such as college policy decisions, technology design choices, and the multitude of other compositional events behind the media available to students across the Internet. As these mobile networks become more powerful and pervasive, they will have a greater impact on compositional practices and will require a shift in habitual, disciplinary approaches to authorship and to the relationship between the more formal discourses of academics and the informal communications on mobile networks.