What Bombed

As in: Composition , Teaching

For the last few days I've been participating in the 2005 CASTL conference. It's been a pretty cool experience that helped me get insight into some of the ways people do the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (or SoTL, which most pronounce like SO-tul but one guy pronounced to rhyme with bottle). Of course, as a compositionist, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was nothing new—we built our profession on it.

Craig Nelson, one of the featured speakers, presented several key points, but the big one was "sharing" your teaching knowledge with others. Again, not a new idea in Composition, but new for many of the audience. He led us to several models of SoTL research, starting with the "What Works" article. It seems like those kinds of articles might be best shared in updatable, searchable online resources like the Practical Muse. I doodled in my notes, though, that we also needed a "What Bombed" genre, in which we explain our ideas for teaching projects, assignments with an eye toward the challenges these bring.

I also composed a limerick, reproduced here for your amusement. NOTE: I'm using the less common but more-easily-rhymable pronounciation of SoTL (SAW-tull):

There once was a souce who did SoTL
who looked for a good teaching model.
  He said, with a wink,
  I really do think
the answer must lie in a bottle.

Writing New Media

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

Our reading group meeting was fantastic last night. We met to chat about the first couple chapters of Writing New Media by Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc. As our conversation ranged over a wide territory of issues, we started talking about Selfe's piece, "Students Who Teach Us," in particular her description of David, a young man who developed outstanding technological literacy skills while simultaneously failing to succeed in college—so much so that he flunked out. Selfe writes:

To make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand a full range of literacies—emerging, competing, and fading—English composition teachers have got to be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic. And we have to do so quickly or risk having composition studies become increasingly irrelevant. (54)

Selfe buys into the idea that the need for electrate composition in our classes ties to the changing world outside; we need to learn to recognize these other ways of communicating and help teach them. She says, on page 51, that when David's teachers failed to recognize his new technological literacies, the "missed important opportunities to link their instruction goals to his developing strengths" (51).

Pegeen asked why David's instructors should have recognized his new media literacies, rather than his competency in his own dialect. Had his instructors been willing to go to bat against "standard English" and the power-centered grammar rules that go with it, he may have succeeded. In short, our discussion last night asked why new media should be the space through which we "stay relevant" and (implicitly) "change the world." Why not use our knowledge that different dialects operate under perfectly logical grammar systems and our understanding that standard English grammar reinforces power structures that put at a disadvantage the already disadvantaged to argue for the validity of poly-vocality, rather than the validity of new media?

Whoo doggies, it was a beaut of a conversation. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. After a long conversation, we generally agreed on the idea that perhaps it needn't be either/or but rather could be both/and. Teaching and being aware of both kinds of polyvocality allows us to leverage the student's talents best.
2. New Media pulls ahead in many minds because it's clearly recognized by systems of power as important. In part, systems of power also recognize that while digital technologies can allow for sophisticated articulations of thought, they can also be used to replicate existing structures of power (as with, say, TOPIC).
3. With both New Media and Alternative Grammars, we generally agreed that our teaching balances between the rhetorical, idealistic goals of our ethics (in which we recognize and teach the intellectual value of these ideas) and the practical needs of our students who come to the college for credentialing (whom we tell that instructors in other departments won't appreciate what we know here—that this work you're doing has value). The question we returned to is why we're willing to go to bat for new media and not for polyvocal grammars?
4. Perhaps the "both/and" idea becomes increasingly relevant as we think about the ways in which economically disadvantaged groups have made use of new medias to express their ideas; mixing, hip-hop, skratching become spaces where these elements collide/intersect. (To pay homage to that crossing, Doug put in "The Humpty Dance" while we chatted.)
5. Finally, we acknowledged that New Media's popularity also stems from its institutional currency. Because of point 2 above, new media scholarship helps get people published, get jobs, get money. Arguing for alternative grammars does not (Norm lamented that this discussion is much harder to have since the ebonics fiasco).

Our coversation led me to re-think much of how I approach grammar (philosophically), but ultimately won't change what I do with it in the classroom right now. Instead, it will certainly influence my thinking about the value of new media scholarship. I definitely concur with the notion that new media scholarship affords another avenue into the discussion of polyvocality—it might even be the element that opened the door for such a discussion.

Walking in the City

As in: Composition , Reading

From de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life:

Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer of progress), one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular, and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization. (96)

Booyah! That's why I like M-de-C. This paragraph describes precisely the activities of the baroque (as Ray would call us) chroniclers of electracy. Some phrases that hyperlink for me:

• "speaking of catastrophe..." sounds like the Rhet/Comp plagiarism conversation to me. "Students are downloading their papers! We need some TechnoGotchas!"
• "swarming activity" sounds like mixing, filesharing, blogging, podcasting: the web's ecstatic flurry of new stuff.
• I would love for my students to harness "surreptitious creativities."
• "frantic mechanisms" echoes the catastrophe quote above. RIAA lawsuits, the Broadcast flag (recently defeated!), anti-Wi-Fi.

If we follow de Certeau's lead here, perhaps the internet isn't the Global Village, but rather the Global City. It's the nameless city from The Matrix.

Techno-Gotchas

As in: ComicBlog , Composition , Media

Jeff says it again (on WPA-L):

Skepticism

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

The other day, I had a long chat with a colleague about electracy, new media, and many other things. I described my theory about Future Shock (at the bottom of the page), and she agreed; she also added that in her experience, it was with generation X that students started being consistently skeptical of not only texts, but symbols, explanations, and conversations about those texts. This is not to say that they were not skeptical before, but rather that a sea change had occurred in which many more were skeptical now than were in the years before the Gen Xers hit college.

Then I read this in Avatars of the Word:

The underlying insight of this strategy [of "teaching the arguments of the field"] is that ours is already a culture permeated by irony. Skepticism about received messages is rampant, leaving any system that depends on transmitting those messages vulnerable. To use the space of the classroom to teach both the message and the critical reception and evaluation of the message is to create an opportunity to reach students at multiple levels. (119).

I'm not sure what I want to do with that passage, but I found the synchronicity pleasing.

So apt!

As in: Composition

From Matthew Pearl's enchanting The Dante Club:

The mind of our country is moving with the speed of a telegraph, Osgood, and our great institutions are stagecoaching behind it. (16)

This passage seemed particularly relevent given the recent discussion on WPA. Plus, I think it's damn funny. It appeals to the part of me that fetishizes old technologies—cogs and levers look so much cooler than circuitboards.

More How to Lie with Maps

As in: Composition , Hypertext , Media , Reading

I just finished Mark Monmonier's book. It's great. There's one passage that strikes to the core of my being with a glowing, cartographic, nerdly joy. He writes:

...map publishers have been known to deliberately falsify their maps by adding "trap streets." As deterrents to the theft of copyright-protected information, trap streets are usually placed subtly, in out-of-way locations unlikely to confuse or antagonize map users.(51)

It seems to me that the "trap street" is a fantastic opportunity for hypertext writers. While people working for "transparency" and "clarity" certainly wouldn't want trap streets cluttering up their "site maps," I think hypertext authors interesting in the more playful aspects of the web could use "deliberately falsified" elements deliciously.

When trying to write using hypertext to be more socially active or aware, this passage seems particularly apt:

By omitting politically threatening or aesthetically unattractive aspects of geographic reality, and by focusing on the interests of civil engineers, geologists, public administrators, and land developers, our topographic "base maps" are hardly basic to the concerns of public health and safety officials, social workers, and citizens rightfully concerned about the well-being of themselves and others. In this sense, cartographic silences are indeed a form of geographic disinformation(122).

Perhaps an offshoot of adbusters could be mapbusters--people dedicated to the cartographic education and elucidation of social problems often ignored in maps.

"the engines of invention"

As in: Composition , Reading

My favorite bits of what Ulmer says are the bits about "invention." I have since attempted to work the process of invention into all my assignments, regardless of whether I feel they do the work of new media or not. Of course, invention is a fun term in its own right, what with Barthomome's students inventing the university, among others.

I take glee in Jeff's comments on WPA, as well as his blog posts, because they say, very eloquently and much more brazenly, things that resonate with me.

It seems that the New York Times is catching up with the Florida school. Erich Kunhardt's Op-Ed piece from 14 December, "Necessity as the Mother of Tenure?" suggests that universities need to embrace invention as one of their main goals. He writes:

However, "academic entrepreneurship" - the patenting and licensing by universities and their faculty - has not become part of the academic mainstream, and is generally viewed within the Ivory Tower as conflicting with the mission of the university. That mission is now often captured by the phrase: "to teach, and to research." I think a third element should be added: "to invent." There are two compelling reasons for broadening the academic mission. First, the university shapes the thinking and outlook of our future workers, and also offers one of the most stable environments for bright Americans to work on new things and sustain our creative leadership. Second, putting an emphasis on invention would enrich the academic community by adding a new dimension of creative expression. Independent of whether inventing can be taught or not, affirming the creative process as a long-term value in the university will serve to stimulate faculty and students alike. (par 3)

Of course, Kunhardt writes here about patents as the result of invention, which isn't what I'm suggesting we do. Rather, I'm walking in the same direction Ulmer walks when he suggests that "The best way to learn about the potential of websites and the internet for supporting learning in the Arts and Letters disciplines, is to invent a new practice of writing native to hypermedia"(Internet Invention, xiii). Rice makes a similar move in Writing About Cool, inventing a method for writing hypertext through concepts of "cool."

So, if we ignore the passage about "patents," Kunhardt's piece becomes a campaign for web-writing using the logic of invention (heuretics instead of hermeneutics).

Some relevant passages:

...inventing is viewed mainly as technology transfer, not as something with academic value of its own. It is no surprise, then, that few faculty members get involved in inventing, and students are not challenged to attempt it. And any arguments that inventing should be nurtured for its potential contribution to American economic development are quickly dismissed (par 7).

This reminds me of Jeff's recent post about the stubbornness of the composition community in refusing to engage with more inventive pedagogies and thinking. Plus, invention's harder grade.

The quickest way to change this mind-set will be to get administrations and faculties to accept successful inventing as a step toward tenure. After all, in a few decades research went from being a foreign concept in academia to being the most important factor in tenure decisions. However, unlike research, there is no established peer-review process for evaluating inventions, no way to evaluate the academic significance of a new idea beyond its potential economic value (par 8).

Kunhardt's argument moves toward the idea that invention should figure in one's tenure and promotion evaluation, but I'm interested in the idea of peer-reviewed invention. Perhaps the blogosphere could be seen as a peer-review system that works really fast. The rapid spread of ideas becomes the peer-review process. Hmmm.

More Kress

As in: Composition , Reading

Another quote I enjoy:

The specificity is the same at one level: the affordance of the logic of time governs writing, and the affordance of the logic of space governs the image. Within that, there is the possibility of generic variation. And the generic variation of the ensembles, in each case, produce an overall difference of a significant kind (115).

and

In that new communicational world there are now choices about how what is to be represented should be represented: in what mode, in what genre, in what ensembles of modes and genres and on what occasions. These were not decisions open to students ... some twenty years ago (117).

Perhaps part of the task writing teachers should be doing is helping students learn how to choose in this multimodal culture. Hmmm.

More Gunther Kress

As in: Composition , Reading

We finished discussing Literacy in the New Media Age on the 15th, but I've just now had a chance to post about it.

We wrestled, at the meeting, with the question of what Kress' ideas—particularly the teaching of design/digital rhetoric instead of more traditional kinds of writing assignments—would get us. I came from the "Of course we should be teaching this stuff" side of things, while another person at the meeting played the "I don't see what all this gets us" role.

The most interesting objection, for me, was that electrate communication has yet to develop the kind of analytical significance/power that literate argument has. My response was that argument is the literate thing—the electrate is something else, something that plays more on affect. I suggested that the power of news media to determine political candidates was one such use of affect.

To return to Kress, I found chapter 10 particularly enlightening. He says a couple neat things (excerpted here for your convenience):

The notion of competence in use will give way to that of interested design. Competence in use starts with that which exists, shaped in the social history of the group in which the user acts. Hence competence in use is oriented to the past. It is also oriented to allegiance to the conventions of the group. Design, by contrast, starts from the interest and the intent of the designer to act in a specific way in a specific environment, to act with a set of available resources and to act with an understanding of what the task at hand is, in relationship to a specific audience. Design is prospective, future-oriented: in this environment, with these (multiple) resources, and out of my interests now to act newly I will shape a message. (169)

Kress, here, seems quite relevant to the recent discussion on WPA. The argument (mostly between Rice and Gordon), seems to rumble down the same old lines. What Kress brings to this discussion is a reasoned assertion (one of many, of course) about what/why we should change what we do. His use of the term design intrigues me. I like the idea of having students consider design (and have done so) because it seems to be an integral part of electrate rhetoric.

Another point he makes in this chapter again reminds me of things I've heard Ulmer say. Kress writes

The new forms of reading by contrast require action on the world: to impose the order of a reading path on that which is to be read, arising out of my interests. Ordering a message entity in the world in this manner is a different form of action—not contemplative but actional, not inner-directed but directed outwardly"(172).

So how do we teach students to write for these readers? I think one of Rice's many points on WPA continues to be that students are already this kind of reader. We need to learn to teach writing for these readers.

One final point. As I write this, I'm reminded of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, in which Toffler suggests that as technology speeds up, we have less and less time to deal with it, something that affects us psychologically and bodily. He suggests that, like a tourist who is "culture shocked" when s/he enters a foreign country and can find no familiar cultural hooks on which to hang her/his mental hat, we will all become victims of "future shock," people living in a world changing so fast that it constantly seems like another world. One answer to Toffler's proposed problem might be that our students, people raised in an electrate world, might feel the sense of change as inevitable, their culture is one that must work at its pace. As such, their communicative strategies will have to be different.

Collages are more Blog-ish

As in: Blogistry , Composition

In my Composition I course ( Mapping the Self), students are in the late stages of their third paper, a textual collage documenting a memory of an Entertainment text. (The students use collage techniques from Elbow's Being a Writer to conduct an experiment loosely based on Chapter 5 of Ulmer's Internet Invention.) The other day, we had a discussion about the characteristics and techniques used to create collages as opposed to essays or other more traditional writing forms. One of my more technologically savvy students commented that "collages are more blog-ish."

I'm intrigued by a couple things there:
1. That my student is so familiar with blogs that they become a descriptive form--he conceives collages as a sort-of remediated blog. Of course, the characteristics of the network culture that blogs propegate don't work so well on ink-and-paper assignments, but the same rhetorical moves occur. Nonetheless, my electracytometer (measures how strongly electracy appears in a context) buzzed high. I like that he sees the digital as the primary mode for this kind of work.
2. That many others in the class had no idea what he was talking about. I had to explain what blogs are, and where they might have seen them. Does this constitute another kind of "digital divide"? One based less in access (most of these students have the same opportunities for access) and more in education and appetite?

Kress and Semiotics

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

From Literacy in the New Media Age:

It is no longer responsible to let children experience school without basing schooling on an understanding of the shift from competent performance to design as the foundational fact of contemporary social and economic life.(37)

Give the governor a 'harrumph!' When Kress writes passages like this, my inner choir he's preaching to stands up and cheers. He supports this statement with many of the same kinds of arguments I've heard elsewhere. His particular take is that the move from page to screen accompanies/affords a move from alphabetic writing (which is based on speech in its temporal glory) to design-as-writing (based on image). Of course, these are useful formulations of ideas I already like.

However:

...[S]ings are always meaningful conjunctions of signifiers and signifieds; it means that we can look at the signifiers and make hypotheses about what they might be signifying in any one instance, because we know that the form chosen was the most apt expression of that which was to be signified. . . . It entails that all aspects of form are meaningful, and that all aspects of form must be read with equal care: nothing can be disregarded.(44)

I can see why this distinction is useful/necessary for an image-based writing system, but I get stuck making the leap (back?) to speech. Pierce's notion that the sign is arbitrary reigns so strongly in the semiotics I'm familiar with that I can't get my head around the notion that spoken signs are significant in their form. A colleague suggested that Kress doesn't refer here to the sign in its inception, but its use at a given time--when I say tree, it's the most apt way to express 'tree' in a given situation. That helps, but I still don't see why "all aspects of form are meaningful" in that situation. How does the single syllable become meaningful in itself? Is there something in the combination of 'tr' and a long 'e' that embodies 'tree-ness?'