open | situating Cool | pedagogical apparatus | coda

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

Jeff Rice
Longman 2004
ISBN: 0-321-10896-5    $29.00    pp. 176

Review by Carl Whithaus
Old Dominion University

Notes Toward a Review of Cool: A Fragment in Memory of Sam T. Coleridge
As I read Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom, I was reminded of Paul S. Collins’s Community Writing (2001) and the work of Tony Ruggiero, a fiction writer and graduate student at Old Dominion University, who has worked on a project about using Stephen King’s On Writing and Struck and White’s Elements of Style as textbooks for first-year composition. Jeff Rice, like Collins and Ruggiero, has the insight to make first-year composition engaging for students. For these teachers, not only should the course engage the students, but the materials need to engage the students as well. This approach is refreshing compared to the all-too-frequent approach where engaging instructors work against the dead-as-a-door-nail textbook. For Rice, this engagement starts with cutting up the traditional textbook, sneaking or sampling in music, and then putting the whole mix, the whole collage, back together in tEXtbook format. Cool is a cut-up, a collage, a knife in the heart of current-traditionalism. Okay, enough hyperbole already! Cool is a “whatever” said as a student walks into class late–“You’re late”–and slides into the back row.

But is it teachable? Is it learnable? Is it writing?