i feel like a speed bump on the information superhighway

So who's job is it to teach web design, multi-media literacy, and the odd blend of visual rhetoric and critical "reading" skills required by Al Gore's invention? Perhaps more pointedly, exactly how analogous are writing a website and writing an essay, or story, or other "composition?" The counterpointed viewpoints shown by Faigley and Neuwirth highlight the tension between "excluding" non-lingual components from composition courses and the overload/redundancy issues of attempting to be instructionally comprehensive.

Here's the overlooked problem in both views: when we talk about teaching writing, even Basic Writing, we aren't usually referring to the elementary skill set made up of penmanship, letter/word formation and recognition, and how to hold a pen or sharpen a pencil. But these are the equivalents of web-surfing, googling, and embedding web objects. 'How you use the tools' is different from 'making things with the tools.' Faigley explains-"What concerns me most in the gradual but evident movement of basic composition courses toward multimedia production is that the tools are becoming so easy to use that we'll simply teach students to do what the tools allow. The rhetorical dimension...is being lost in the interface." Now, obviously, I don't feel like multimedia production is as simple as physically writing a sentence, but that's because I didn't grow up "reading" the IntarWeb. What we need to give students is the ability to find their voice; what medium they choose to use is their decision.

Where does it stop? There are elements of visual rhetoric in my tattoos. Do we need to start handing out ink, autoclaves, and sterilized ultrasonic needle machines in writing class too?