I'm on a Blog

Rather obtusely, I’ve decided to address this week’s worth of blog questions individually. Otherwise, I fear plunging into eldritch terrors of the mind that can only be described as “Lovecraftian” in their twisted malignancy. So! Here I go:

What is the pedagogical value of asking students to write in public spaces?

Foremost, accountability and investment, say I. Why the monetary terminology? It’s difficult to get away from banking models of anything, especially when speaking in Modern English in 21st-century America. However, when students see that their works are being viewed and potentially commented on in a public forum outside of a potentially solipsistic classroom environment, the stakes are higher for them. Fewer people, especially those who fashion themselves as university students, are willing to post just any tripe when they’ve put some measure of intellectual investment into it. Sure, plenty of people could argue that the internet—regardless of how public it is—fails miserably in quality control. However, students are putting their educations and erudition on the firing line when posting publicly; just as many people on the net are willing to scathingly comment as they are to ignore the errors. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen debunking an argument purely based on quality. While this severe copy-edit fear isn’t necessarily the most viable motivation, ensuring one’s logic is sound and supported is better.

What successes or failures characterize your blog/wiki use?

Last year, I attempted to use Facebook’s “note” system in English 201. The idea was to create publicly (to the class anyway) accessible insight into student research processes. Essentially, the assignment consisted of weekly entries into a research journal. Topics could range from anything from trips to the library and choosing topics to venting frustrations over having difficulty in tracking down sources, or even prompting fellow students for feedback on ideas. In short, the ongoing assignment was overall a disaster. Students were resistant to post personal thoughts on the work process itself—for some reason, this method violated their sense (I think) of what blogs/notes/Facebook is used for. Essentially, I tried to create a community from nothing using the wrong tool. I’m not finished with blogging, however, or at least a modicum of it. Communities must be fostered and share mutual interests in order to survive. Twitter hastags—though far more succinct—may foster a better space for conveying questions, thoughts, and insights into the research process. Technology (I say again), is only as useful as it is useful in context. Hammers are a wonderful technology, but they make terrible pencils.

How would you overcome technological barriers using blogs or wikis?

Technological problems are manifold, especially with tools as complex and expensive as computers. Not all students will readily have access, and visiting a campus computer lab every time an assignment is due can grow both tedious and logistically problematic. Therefore, many online assignments and activities should be collected and reviewed on a weekly to tri-monthly basis, giving students who don’t own computers more time to get their affairs in order. Also, an optional paper component should be arranged in special cases. Otherwise, practice makes better: students should be educated on how to access campus resources along with materials on blog/wiki use. Time should be spent in class on navigating blogs and wikis, discussing the format and its strengths—students should understand *why* these particular tools are useful.

How would *I* go about using public writing in the classroom?

Rebecca Wilson Ludin poses that wiki-use in the classroom can help to re-structure power relationships, to shift traditional models of teacher-students authority (443). This notion is of particular interest to me—transparency concerning the core classroom mechanics will hopefully help students to better understand the game. In the case of wikis, users can edit content at any point, destabilizing on one had the all-pervasiveness of the author while calling attention to the core issues of collaboration and accountability. Were I to use a wiki, we’d spend a significant amount of time discussing the implications of collaborative authorship, especially in cases where the authors didn’t necessarily agree with one another, much less having established an agreement to *work* with each other. Instructors could develop a game—compose an article for Wikipedia, simultaneously. Students must then reconcile all of their articles into the larger framework of a core article. Surely, this is a daunting and confusing task at first, and nobody has complete license over the truth, not even the instructor in this manner. Using Wikipedia’s discussion pages, students could engage with one another’s arguments: congruent and opposing viewpoints would clash publicly and critically. While the instructor would be outsourcing the classroom space as such, this broadened classroom context could destabilize (in a potentially good way) the authority of instructors over student work. To actually shift authority and power, the instructor *must* meaningfully relinquish some aspects of control. For blogs, as Charles Lowe and Terry Williams suggest, students can to tap into the “valuable public,” and not necessarily the classroom public. As I mentioned before, public ideas require at least some form of intellectual investment as to avoid, minimally, ridicule. There’s probably a good reason why some people are more afraid of public speaking than death. As grim as this sounds, I had far more stellar research projects the semester I required my 201 students to present at a research colloquium of our making. That, and the audience was required to respond with well-crafted, critical questions. How’s that for shifting authority?

Talking About Talking About Social Networking While Social Networking. And Identity.

Sometime back in 2004, I signed up for a Facebook account. I hadn’t really heard about social networking sites before an old residence hall acquaintance of mine told me that I “had” to sign up. Really, this notion was completely alien to me, and I really didn’t understand the point. I think “keep in touch and meet new people” was the catchphrase. I saw this system as a friend collection service: Facebook seemed to be keeping score. And, for a long while, I had very few “friends.” But for whatever reason, I felt compelled to check up on the page from time to time. The early days of Facebook were pretty low-maintenance. I don’t even remember status updates being a feature.

My first real social act on the network was posting the above profile picture (which is currently on my page, though I’ve changed it over the years). Before media explosions over identity theft via social networking sites or other fear-mongering, I felt uncomfortable about putting a picture of myself online. How could I represent myself with a single picture? It seemed pretentious. However, like anyone else who ends up with friends on Facebook can relate, pressure mounted for me to post a picture of myself. So there it was, about as obscure a popular culture reference as one could imagine: a picture of Balin from the Rankin/Bass produced animated film The Hobbit. Balin has only a few lines of dialogue, but for some reason I related to him better than any of the other Dwarves. Maybe it was the glasses. That and his apparently bad eyesight made him an ironically poor choice for “lookout,” unless he’s as farsighted as I am.



Balin was (and has since been) received with relatively wide acclaim. In recent years, he’s gotten more than one “like”—maybe no small feat considering my somewhat low friend count. At the time, I wondered if people thought he resembled me closely, or if they just liked The Hobbit. Asking other people what other people think about oneself felt infinitely more pretentious than posting the picture in the first place. Posting Balin must surely be illegal, unless it falls under fair use statutes. Vie notes that such questions would be compelling to ask students in the classroom—who owns a Facebook page? (15). More importantly, who’s being represented?
I ask the question because now it seems that on both MySpace (which I also eventually created a profile for—it contains quiz results identifying me with Captain Picard, Hannibal Lecter, Severus Snape, and William Wallace) and Facebook ads are ubiquitous, and the format of both sites trumps the user content. We’re given pretty limited tools with which to express ourselves. Even the names of the sites suggest identity loss. In “Facebook” we’re faceless amongst throngs, or just a face. “MySpace” is patronizing and ironic: it’s not “mine” at all. dana boyd has much to say about identity and social networking, arguing that race and class divisions play a major role in determining who uses Facebook and MySpace. She notes a trend where high school-age online social network users talk about online spaces in terms of vectors, and more specifically, how MySpace has often been characterized as being the online equivalent of ‘the other side of the tracks’ (35). I would be calling down torrents of theoretical criticism were I to simply state that space/place play a role in how humans conceptualize their identities, but I will anyway. Therefore (making a huge leap in logic), online social network users “*place*” their identities. That is, they place their identities on the internet, *and* make them into places where others can visit. Naturally, a web-site can’t contain the whole of a person (and I’d invite even more philosophical abuse were I to attempt defining “identity” here). So, we have to be picky, limited to the confines of what these sites, and our knowledge, allow us to do. And, again, those spaces are highly restrictive and self-promotional. Aren’t all MySpace pages, for example, mirrors of the creator’s page and persona? Maybe that’s not an entirely fair question—all expression is limited by medium—but putting one’s identity into someone else’s hands seems treacherous. Maybe unavoidable, even outside online social networking, but treacherous all the same, and even exacerbated by the somewhat static representations online at any given point.

Take the profile picture I included, for example. Though my profile looks very different from the way it did when I first started using Facebook, and it will again in the future, this picture won’t ever change. Unless somebody decides to use it for a mash-up or alter it using image-editing software, this image will endure. More importantly, the image will endure in the mind’s eye. We can’t keep track of every change on Facebook or MySpace, and most of the changes that take place on people’s profiles aren’t very exciting. Facebook’s newsfeed confirms. The biggest change I’ve made to my account in the past few months has been to remove an old AIM screen name. There’s no internet zeitgeist guiding the world to see our profiles at their masterful (or hapless) peaks. So, again, who is being represented?



Formats aside, maybe this is the wrong question. “Who is this for” might be more interesting. For my part, I can only speak for the page that I’ve constructed, and guess that many others do the same. Right now, Jacob Hughes’s Facebook page is pretty bare, and what’s absent is probably more significant than what’s present. I have my educational info listed under “Bio,” but no quotes or other information. Various relations are listed above, including my brother, sister, and significant other. The list is of course incomplete—I have some other relatives (including my mother) as friends on Facebook, and they don’t appear in this list. Rather, I obliged those people who asked me to list those things. I have displayed my actual hometown, *not* Kennewick or the Tri-Cities proper, but the small area outside the larger cities, declaring not pride but rather the absence of shame. I have a bum email address listed under contact information (it exists, but I *never* check it), indicating nothing. Only seven photos of me, which I will probably shortly un-tag, are currently available under my name. I’ve posted very few pictures of myself online, most obscuring my features, and those have since been deleted. Vincent Price stands in for two profile pics, and Brian Blessed another in addition to Balin. I regard these pictures about as honest and accurate as any that were taken of me and posted online. My only activity/interest listing is Saturn Missile, possibly the most face-melting and famous band in the world. Otherwise, that’s it: a page that’s quasi carefully constructed to avoid garnering attention while grasping for it anyway, hoping that nothing there will damage my reputation or employer credibility. Cheeky, but not as cheeky as it used to be; It’s devoid of political opinions, religious beliefs, and anything else which might indicate I have a perspective. On the other hand, often my wall belies the lack of posted information—I’ll curse and swear, launch politically-motivated tirades, complain about heartburn, and whatever else I feel like publishing via the web, more often than not hoping for some other perspectives on my perspective. How egotistical.

I hate to keep saying this, but I’m not so sure “ego” is represented. Maybe “Jacob’s ego filtered through a particular social networking lens, forwarded with an oddly paranoid sense of who cares about/sees what, and questionable priorities” is more accurate. For instance, if anyone clicks on the “Saturn Missile” link, and should that person linger on the page for more than a moment, they’ll see another side of my possibly inconsistent online representation. Yet, those pages are somehow separate, different spaces of identity within an online place. Therefore, I suppose my page is for all those people who I don’t want looking at it. Lame.

The Pen is as Mighty as a +3 Broadsword

As I mentioned on my Twitter feed at some point, after reading Gee I feel compelled to offer students experience points instead of grades. At the time, this was my somewhat flip response to Gee’s “Committed Learning Principle,” where learners spend great amounts of effort and time, extending their real-world identities with their virtual ones, characterized by a sense of developmental commitment. The best analogy that I could think of comes from RPGs or “role playing games” (though the extension of this acronym makes me wonder, “aren’t all games “role” playing games?). Ever since the earliest, nerdiest inceptions of *Dungeons & Dragons*, the RPG has emphasized the role of roles, maybe even to the point of stereotypical absurdity. By “role of roles,” I mean using the idea of roles as a game mechanic. In D&D, players form groups of individual characters, all who (usually) fulfill a specific party role. For example, the aptly named “fighters” are generally responsible for…fighting. Clerics, on the other hand, heal the front-line bloodthirsty fighters. Not all of these roles are combative. Rogues specialize in espionage (and stabbing people from behind) while Wizards focus on learning copious numbers of multi-purpose magic spells (from the most innocuous Harry Potter-style mischief to hellish necromancy). In effect, parties must seek “balance,” a term frequently used in game mechanics, especially when “real life” rage is involved. For instance, a party comprised of nothing but fighters might be really good at beating people up, but not so much at breaking into castles or unlocking treasure chests for sweet, sweet profit. Or healing themselves. In short, they’ll lose the game. There are a number of “jobs” to fulfill in these kinds of games, and if one area is drastically underrepresented, the adventuring party faces dire peril: they’ll quickly become troll-food. Thus, should one or more members of the party fail to fulfill their roles—or fail to take up a much needed role—rage ensues.

Significantly, RPGs offer players a tangible system of character improvement. For example, in many such games, achievement is demarcated by “experience points,” and when a player obtains a set number of points, additional features of the game are opened for use by their characters. For example, a higher level fighter might gain the ability to attack more than once per turn. Wizards learn new spells. Clerics develop better healing abilities. All of these improvements result in greater responsibility: “game masters” (persons responsible for refereeing and developing game scenarios) level greater challenges on a group of players. As the cliché goes, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Really, this principle isn’t new in games, or even “real life.” We all have expected roles to fulfill in the workplace—for instance—and sometimes people rage at us when we don’t fulfill them. People who perform their roles especially well are often promoted and/or take on greater responsibilities. But those roles, however, don’t adhere to Gee’s “Psychosocial Moratorium Principle”: there are no infinite “re-spawns” or continues in “real-life.” Therefore, the learning curve is steep and the consequences can be permanent. Rage and other emotions ensue, but there’s no resetting to continue from where the gamer last left off. Even in Dungeons & Dragons, party members can create new characters or “retcon” (re-do) a failed quest. They can re-evaluate the learning environment, take into consideration the construction of the game and its rules, and move on to try out another solution. Players, as Alice J. Robison via Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman suggests, are able to engage with their environment, exploring its developmental implications (360). In other words, they can “meta-game.” While “meta-gaming” is generally seen as a bad thing by players of RPGs (“since my character has a high in-game intelligence score he therefore could figure out the theory of relativity even though I the player cannot” or “most of these quests contain a set number of monsters—I bet there’s one behind that door that we can’t yet see”), the principle is sound in a pedagogical context. Gee asserts that thinking about the relationships in the semiotic domain is in itself an exercise in critical thinking. Furthermore, Robison emphasizes, “writing assignments are interactive systems with win states and expected outcomes” (362), but students are very often at a loss concerning exactly what is expected of them. Therefore, she suggests that interacting with the primary design elements *of* the curriculum—the game mechanics—clues students/players in on how one can play the game in more than one way.

Okay, so I’ve pointed out what RPGs do and what a few scholars have to say about the kinds of critical thinking games can generate. Now how can I build a curriculum from these blocks, and present that curriculum in a coherent form to students so that they can meta-think? The following list serves as a potentially feeble attempt at incorporating some of both Gee’s and Robison’s principles.

Frame the curriculum as a game: I think, to start, students have to know the curriculum is being modeled *as* a game. That way, they’ll (hopefully) clue in to its rules, observe the potential for measured achievement, and seek to understand the relationships within this particular kind of semiotic domain. Hey! They can think of the semester as “getting out of the dungeon”! Players tend to see their characters/avatars as measurements of in-game achievement. The course’s final product should do the same—it should be an assignment that *requires* multiple, easily identifiable phases and steps to complete (sort of like gaining levels or progressing onto a different stage in a video game).

Encourage Risk: Develop a writing curriculum that encourages risk-taking. Students should on some level be allowed to fail, and that failure needs to be understood before continuing on the project’s next phases. While this notion presents a potential scheduling nightmare, some leeway should be exercised in allowing students to complete the benchmarks leading up to larger tasks at their own paces.

Measured objectives: Assignments should logically increase in difficulty, and ultimately lead to more complex, better composed products. Provide students with a ladder to success—measurable objectives that lead to tangible gains. They can think of it as “gaining levels.” Okay, too nerdy, but the sentiment is the same. These objectives should lead to…

Tangible yields: Besides completing measured objectives, student projects should have a shelf-life beyond turning them in for credit, something more than vague promises of junior writing portfolio greatness. In the past, Dr. Delahoyde had his students work on encyclopedia articles, many of which were published. Perhaps Wikipedia itself would be a good public avenue for the display of student work.

Most games have an “ending”: Cue final credits montage—the ending of the course should have an overall goal, a final project that’s being worked toward. Students who complete the project and all steps in between “win.”

Party-time: Should students work as a group on projects, framing the venture as a “quest” in Dungeons & Dragons might lead to many a rolled-eye. However, the mechanic can be present without the nerdery (or with…just saying). If students take on their roles as a part of their identities, they become at least on some level invested in their individual representation and work. For instance, instructors can create “classes” (or roles) from which students can choose from, outlining what tasks are the responsibilities of each class. Should groups wish to modify these (officially), they’ll be required to engage with the discourse and requirements (the game mechanics) of the project in question.

Identity: The most compelling connection between RPGs and writing is authorial identity. Players focus on narratology, the process of writing her/his character, and the social telling of those tales. Truly, the journey is what counts in this case—otherwise, there’s nothing to tell. “We started and then we got to the dungeon” makes for a pretty pitiful story. In a way, developing student writing needs to be the same. They must be just as invested in the process leading up to the final product as the final product itself.

Naturally, this method isn’t without its dangers. Primarily, it relies to some extent on variable scheduling. Benchmarks must be evaluated by the instructor for students to continue; therefore, the instructor has potentially more reading to do. On the other hand, if those benchmarks are attended to, end-commentary on the larger paper assignments might be sufficient, effectively spreading out the grading workload. Really, only a test run would tell. But, sadly, such a test run cannot be conducted within the confines of a no-risk learning environment (aka, a game). That’s a rather nasty catch 22.

A Chat about Chat, on a Blog

Now it’s October, and I’ve gone mad. "I never thought I'd be on a blog, it's a big electronicky road." Therefore, I divide this blog post in twain.

The Shorts:
I liked our chat session when we were able to pursue individual threads of discussion while simultaneously watching other conversations. Interface issues aside, I disliked it when we tried to impose sterner order (though I understand the impetus). Such order seems to run counter to the conversational advantages that chat allows for.

The Longs:
I’d like to think of chat like how I think of funk music. There’s “the one”—the singular groove that holds all of the variation together. You can’t make the “the one” too tight, else there’s not much room for improvisation. But if you make “the one” too loose and ill-defined, the rhythm falls apart. Easier said than done—I’ve been in plenty of totally bombed jam sessions (and in bombed chat sessions). Though sometimes when one jams (uh oh—this metaphor is on a runaway train), an instrument change is in order. Those changes—which in online synchronus chat we could maybe assign to threads—can help facilitate group strengths. Too many guitar players? I’ll switch to drums. Though this way we’re not necessarily all talking about the same thing, we can still be in conversation with one another. The threads will start to weave in more logical (if at first subconscious) ways. But doesn’t that mean we’re just participating in isolated corners? No, not really. We can still see the chat feed. Having to only reply to a few people at a time makes it easier to look and see what’s going on in other conversations, not harder. The advantages to online synchronus chat are speed and volume—while not necessarily effective in their own right, a quite a lot can be said in very little space. When one angle of a conversation logically concludes (I use “logically” loosely), move on to another, and engage there in focused ways. Really, these are organized patterns of chaos.

For the past few years, I’ve been teaching a creative writing class for Cougar Quest—A summer program where students enroll in college-like courses and stay in the residence halls—and we employ the use of chat technology called a MUSH (which stands for multi-user simulated hallucination…yeah, it was developed during the ‘70s). When teaching this course and using the MUSH (an online chat environment set in a text-world replete with objects and non-player characters), I admit to feeling similarly frustrated. Though our technology was more reliable (amazing that 30-year old chat tech is better than ANGEL with more functions, but I digress), middle and high school students are more difficult to herd than cats. It’s impossible even with two instructors actually, especially when they’re armed with chat technology. Eventually, my co-instructor (Jim Roach, a former art and religious studies major here at WSU) and I figured that we couldn’t *make* our students stay on task. At the time, we were working on adding dialogue to one of many events in J.R.R. Tolkien’s *The Simarillion*. The only way for us to get students to stay on task was to add our own compelling text, hoping that students would respond. Normally these came in the form of environmental variables, though we did write for our own characters. In general, many students would respond to our writing, but others (who were very often working on decent storylines of their own) would ignore us until they were finished. Some ignored us altogether. When we posted these “world events”, it wasn’t to halt action and entirely shift gears, but rather to provide more creative fodder. In later years, Jim and I would start off by separating students into smaller chat communities, eventually introducing them to the larger group for the grand finale. Even still, students who tried to read absolutely everything became overwhelmed. I told them frequently not to sweat it, to just continue on as best as they could. After all, the conversation was being logged, and they could all go back and revise plot elements and other story details as they wished. Several students have sent me their revisions over the years, which invariably look quite different from the original texts.

I won’t go so far as to say that our method “worked.” We’d really have to ask ourselves, “to what end?” first. Though I do hold a short lecture on the context of Tolkien’s work and spout some VERY basic tenants of creative writing, for the rest we ride by the seat of our pants. And it’s pretty normal for some days to bomb terribly; at least it seems that way. Effectively participating in an online chat environment (as with any other) takes regular practice. I’d say that I’m a pretty experienced with such communication technologies, and I felt pretty out of countenance this morning at first, even after I resolved my tech-troubles. I was only really able to engage after I latched onto a point and then tried to ride out the conversation. I’m not sure if we can or should see these types of rapid fire discussions as completely linear. As I said before online, we have to use the right tools for the right jobs. Neither synchronus chat nor asynchronus discussion should be seen as a replacement for face-to-face interaction, but they can be advantageous and useful in their own rights.

Keeping Students at Distance

Though her article is by now dated, Patricia Webb Peterson is (was) right to point out the necessity of carefully considering distance learning’s impact on education. Not only must institutions consider the needs of students who can’t (for a multiplicity of reasons) live on or near campus, but how to bend under mounting budgetary pressures which seem to call for increased digitizing of classroom environments.

With the following goofy images, I’ll attempt to answer some of her key questions. If not answer, then at least consider.

Part 1: Teacher’s Roles in the Online Classroom



Without the traditional space of a classroom, online teachers won’t necessarily serve as lecturers. While they may indeed record presentations and distribute them widely between sections, students are unable to react with them in real-time, asking questions as they arise or requesting the speaker to expand/clarify particular points. In a way, this aspect of the online class environment is read-only. Peterson points out that critics fear what she terms as “unbundling”: “This process of unbundling means that the faculty member who writes the course is not the one who will teach the course; hence, the student and the content expert are further separated, not brought closer together by the technology” (374).

But aren’t we locked into certain content somewhere along the way, online or off? Shakespeare will still be taught in Shakespeare courses, and instructors’ perspective will still manifest, just in different ways. The same applies for other courses across the curriculum. Though students won’t always have real-time access to instructors, they *can* interact in discussion and real-time chat environments. In this manner, the instructor becomes more of a facilitator, helping to connect students with their resources, learning materials, and engagements with assignments. Ultimately, students are responsible for engaging themselves in the learning process, inside of the classroom or out. Instructors have always been facilitators (in most contexts), but distance learning changes the aspect of that facilitation.

Part 2: Educational Goals



Peterson points out that proponents of distance learning often consider ‘lifelong learning’ as being positively facilitated by the apparently increased access to educational venues (377). Furthermore, this apparently increased access will explode diversity levels in the classroom. Their opponents, however, worry about who gets to decide what education means (378). Primarily, they fear for-profit entities having control over the educational medium—manufacturers will come to dictate the structure of education based on how well they sell their products to learning institutions. Furthermore, as Peterson articulates, “Critics claim that this large-scale delivery of courses strips the learning experience of any social and cultural effects that traditional face-to-face learning offers. Worse, we are still contending with the digital divide, which potentially seriously blunts this hoped-for diversity.

However, again, aren’t all institutions corporately bound in some respect or another? If we assign books in the classroom, somebody buys them. Campus facilities are built by contractors, and other resources are purchased from a multitude of sources, some of which enjoy some rather exclusive privileges (AHEM—the Bookie—COUGH). And, depending on the computer-savvy of the instructor in question, can’t we get around going through ALL of the normal channels? There are ways around ANGEL, we just have to utilize them. In terms of access, surely not everyone can afford a computer, but owning a computer and knowing how to use it might be a shorter economic leap than having to uproot and move to campus (where one will probably need a computer at some point anyway).

Part 3: Student Learning



So, how do we evaluate if distance learning works, if students are able to digest the material? Well, how do we go about evaluating if in-class learning works? Granted, the venues are different, but aren’t the goals equivalent? No cookie-cutter solution will work for any educational environment much less one online, but institutional student retention reports focusing solely on distance learning might give us a better idea of where the numbers are going. Exit discussions (surveys, counseling, etc.) could provide insight into student’s motivations for staying or leaving. Peterson mentions stronger inclusion of student feedback (382). I hear, though won’t/can’t confirm here, that more distance students drop out of class than on-campus students. Undoubtedly, students who seek out distance learning opportunities have salient reasons for doing so, and sometimes those reasons may peel them away from class obligations.

We shouldn’t always assume that students who drop out aren’t “getting” the material. There could be a number of other factors. While some of those factors aren’t within an institution’s range of control, others are. For instance, how do we factor in technology problems to overall learning problems associated solely with course-content? Does the interface interfere?

It could.

Still in Intellectual Debt --or-- Everything is REMIX

After reading Lessig’s final chapters, I find myself still grappling with the issue of indebtedness, maybe now more than ever. Today in class we circled around several issues concerning remixes. Some of us were disinclined to call them essays as such, but I’m going to plunge out on a limb and claim that they are just that: “attempts” in Montaigne’s sense of the term. What they are attempting and what they actually accomplish aren’t necessarily congruent, but they attempt nonetheless. As I mentioned before on Tim’s blog this week, I found Lessig’s example (92) especially relevant.

If these “attempts” are being fielded, and they’re essays, they most probably have at least some shadow of a *perspective*. So who gets to take credit? In terms of copyright assignments, Lessig is critical of artists who allow remixers to use their original work, but fail to give those authors any sort of rights over their remixed creations. He’s especially critical of LucasFilm, who set up a fan-fiction web site, encouraging users to expand the Star Wars universe, but without retaining any creative rights (247). And why shouldn’t these remixers have rights? Weird Al (whose name keeps popping up tentatively during class discussions) seeks the appropriate permissions and is able to get royalties for his parodies.

But does Weird Al “do” Remix? Think I’ll ask him….

Sliding down this slippery slope, I wonder to what extent agency matters in constructing Remix AS Remix. Jessica and Rachel brought these questions up severally, so I’ll try to distill them into my own anxiety: Must we take agency and intention into account when discussing what we call “Remix?” We were talking about *10 Things I Hate About You.* Clearly, the film appreciates Shakespeare, but based on the vast majority of student papers I read, they were familiar with the Ledger-driven teen film prior to experiencing Shakespeare’s play. Can *10 Things* operate in a vacuum? Yes and no. If *10 Things* seeks to be in conversation with Shakespeare (or in conversation about him), then the “original” *Taming* context is necessary for a broader understanding of what the makers of *10 Things* are getting at. As much as I’ve been abused by *10 Things* references in a variety of ways, I would like to give the film makers the benefit of the doubt regarding intentionality. In other words, Shakespeare wasn’t incidental to their plot.

But is *10 things* a remix? What is a remix? Since Lessig came up with so many good things to say about particular remixes, I wonder what will happen should we extend that definition. Let’s try.

Language—as would be the case for all symbolic systems of communication—relies almost exclusively on its own solipsistic context. Languages eventually learn to talk to one another, but those normally form new languages, still based on symbols and still what most Anthropological linguists would call arbitrary (only in the sense that there’s nothing about the word “pen” that screams “call me pen!”). Languages recombine, sentences recombine, words recombine to form sentences, chords combine to form harmonies, notes combine to form chords and melodies—what we see as holistic (and rightly so) still must be composed of parts.

But those parts aren’t necessarily independent from the whole. Anyone who cooks knows that once you introduce a certain combination of ingredients into a mixture, you’ll end up with something that doesn’t necessarily reflect the discrete units of creation you put into it. The same phenomenon applies to Chemistry: take an “H” out of H2O, you don’t have anything remotely *close* to water. Not at all.
Bringing this insane garble back to the notion of Remix, can we call a REMIX something that forms a new whole—a piece of work that isn’t just the sum of its parts? Maybe that definition is problematic too, but if we find ourselves questioning whether a work is ‘original,’ maybe as an audience we exert our agency and decide, “NO, that certainly isn’t remix.” Somebody else may decide otherwise, however.

But who gets to take credit in R/W culture? I remember the Vanilla Ice *Under Pressure* controversy. We can safely say that those songs in question aren’t the same. And who was ultimately responsible for the playing of that background track, anyhow? Hard to say, even with ‘80s studio magic. Most probably, the parts in this case can’t be removed from the whole to show us just *who* is responsible.
Maybe if we can’t sort out the particulars, we can identify some kind of perspective. Maybe that perspective manifests from multiple authors, but it serves as an outlook, a kind of combined worldview. Remix texts, it seems, should be aware of each other. That’s the only way language works, so why shouldn’t it be the case for Remix, even if we decide *everything is Remix*?

Everything is Copyrighted (for 9-23)

Okay, so I jumped the gun for next week’s post (which I should’ve held off until before the 23rd). Chances are I’ll be mercilessly crushed by waves of grading, so better to do this now before my mind turns to mush.

The strands connecting notions of plagiarism, copyright law, and organizational systems are manifold. However, before I jump in please let me take a moment to express what I *really* feel about all of this, in one word:

“Fuck.”

I say this not because the author is dead, nor because there isn’t any sensible way of acknowledging indebtedness, but rather because the borders of what counts as intellectual property are changing in some pretty abstract and difficult to pragmatically approach ways. Weinberger’s mix tape—and his very notion of how we are beginning to organize information in “the third order” faces not only intellectual scrutiny, but mounds of legal issues as well. John Logie, in his rather depressing essay on copyright law, computers, and the composition classroom, exhumes a long legal history documenting the seeds that would lead to a market and intellectual climate dominated by “permissions.” He sees the expansion of copyright laws as a “response to the development of novel communicative technologies,” (137) culminating with analog tape decks and the internet. In short, Logie argues that the vague outlining of the “fair use” statutes in the 1976 Copyright Act fail to fully protect scholarly and non-profit uses of copyrighted material and other intellectual property (139-140). In effect, writing teachers can suffer stiff penalties for violating a poorly defined law. Teachers could even be sued by students for using their work in class exercises (anonymously or not).

‘Better break out the blanket waivers,’ suggests Logie.

To complicate matters, the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) attempted to strengthen the rights of individual intellectual property holders in an effort to protect third world investors and inventors (143-44), a move supported by President Bill Clinton at the time. As Logie puts it, WIPO cast “the public as passive recipient rather than the grantor of authorial rights” (145). This outcome and the series of court decisions to follow were decidedly “top down” by Weinberger’s standards.

Though it should come as no surprise to note that legal prattle can complicate matters rather than resolve them, composition teachers have inherited a heavy burden to pass onto their students. Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati, in their essay on plagiarism and the web, outline the web climate that fosters accidental plagiarism. They argue, vast arrays of information are readily available to students looking for ‘more correct’ perspectives than their own, and that the temptation to copy and paste is high due to the text being right at their fingertips (156). So not only are students in this case plagiarizing, violating academic laws, but they are also violating the terms of “fair use,” effectively putting them in double jeopardy. And, even if the plagiarism proves unintentional, students aren’t safe from violating authorial permissions. If avoiding plagiarism means acknowledging indebtedness, how do we then respond to publishers and authors who demand monetary compensation?

The definition of plagiarism—as both Logie and DeVoss and Rosati point out—has expanded via the internet and copyright law. DeVoss and Rosati in particular advocate viewing plagiarism via an intellectual property lens (159). The rationale here is to speak to the web and its content on the web’s, and capitalism’s, own terms using a ‘real world’ approach: property, and by implication, money. While this approach seems sensible enough, the reality is far more complex. In Chapter 7 of *Everything is Miscellaneous* Weinberger points to sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr who rely primarily on user content, instead laying copyright claim over the systems of organization themselves. Though DeVoss and Rosati argue that anyone can become a published ‘expert’ online (157), Weinberger might argue that the “democratized” spaces online (those characterizing tagging, wikis etc.) defy the very notion of individual authors. Sites such as Wikipedia foster a multi-author landscape—anyone (who is registered) can modify others’ work. Thus, the landscape of intellectual property has expanded not just to ideas themselves, but to the frameworks those ideas occupy (should we see ideas as discrete intellectual units).

So again, I ask, how do we teach students to acknowledge indebtedness when we’re all in so much debt, both legally and intellectually? How do we describe ideas versus frameworks for ideas? While some might argue that academic uses of broadly applied theoretical lenses (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) are similar to how students might engage a framework like Wikipedia, those lenses very often don’t include the baggage of as many copyrighted facets: images, sounds, words, paragraphs, phrases in and out of different contexts, and even the page layout containing them. Therefore, it might be tempting all over again to tell students not to use the web. However, such rationale ultimately only perpetuates the problem—students will continue to use the web, and will continue to steal from it both purposefully and accidentally. Though understanding intellectual property law provides a useful if Machiavellian approach to acknowledging indebtedness, this lens doesn’t necessarily help to resolve or foster an understanding of broader intellectual property issues and laws.

Once more, for the last time, what do we do with this mess? Resurrect the author?

Cyborgs and Foucault vs. the Digital Divide

Interface is a lens, and that lens is crafted by a developer. This may sound like a quasi-creationist reading—especially if I were to say that our very eyes are interfaces through which we process data—but we aren’t born cyborgs. We have to become them.

In several respects, computer users have become cyborgs. When using computers, we adopt another set of eyes (via monitors), hands (keyboard and mouse), and even voice(s) (representative of both our words on a web page or voice through a mic). We can remove ourselves from our cybernetic state, yet it’s still a remediated (if limited) form of perception.

Interfaces and the tools through which we navigate them carry their own sets of cultural assumptions and privileges for people who are used to navigating those kinds of cognitive structures. Selfe and Selfe point out that computer interfaces have been constructed for a privileged class of American English speakers (74). In this course, we’ve made much ado about how modes and media affect composition. So, what does computer literacy mean for oppression?

I think that expecting certain computer literacy can be just as oppressive as demanding an absolutely particular grammar structure. Do any of you remember having the word “aint” bashed from your skulls in elementary school, despite it being a perfectly functional version of “isn’t”? Did anyone really tell you why? Even Word is enraged at me for using it—red lines abound! Maybe this is a silly example, but we can come up with grim historical analogues. America, like other conquering nations, understands the tactical value of culture-kill and language death. How do you think the “West” was won?

I’m not saying (and neither are Selfe nor Banks for that matter) that we should abolish all standards of interface, mode, grammar—what have you—in favor of a free-for all blab-spree of jubilant, self-indulgent, supposedly free-speechy democratized flying robot freedom. However, we can and should teach, as Selfe and Selfe and Banks promote, how to be critical of the existing systems. And no, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in computer programming to do it.

Selfe and Selfe contend, “computer interfaces…enact small but continuous gestures of domination and colonialism” (69): the digital age, a term that sounds almost utopian, hasn’t benefitted everyone, and certainly doesn’t represent everyone. Adam Banks points out that the Digital Divide, a term that has fallen under much critical scrutiny post-Clinton administration, hasn’t been breached. He poses, “access to technologies and the discursive practices that determine power relations in our society, the Digital Divide, and the larger history of African American is, essentially a rhetorical problem…the rhetorical problems that dominate understandings of race in our discipline are technological problems” (12). This relationship between rhetoric and technology doesn’t merely concern access, but also the forms and uses this access takes. For victims of the Digital Divide, current interface models are insufficient.

Richard Ohmann is right to point out that not everyone necessarily benefits from computer technology, and such technology, doesn’t necessarily promote the kinds of literacy that writing teachers strive to convey. Adam Banks uses a particularly striking example that illustrates these fears. In Camden school district (New Jersey), administrators paid over ten million in site licenses for educational software that teaches little more than remedial grammar exercises, which are too narrowly focused to promote compositional skills or critical thinking except for how to navigate the interface itself (19). Effectively, these exercises could democratize student opportunities about as well as the burger button on registers at McDonald’s.

Simply having material access to computers doesn’t alleviate the Digital Divide. According to Banks, users “must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools effectively” (41). Like Selfe and Selfe, he promotes understanding both the benefits and problems/dangers of using any technology (42).
But how do we identify the loci of those dangers? Maybe I have a partial answer, or at least a partial thought.

I don’t really want to abuse Foucault, *but* we should consider the implications that the Digital Divide has on a panoptic society. I’ll go out on a limb (and not much of one), and point out that computers—as are any other FCC regulated modes—can (and do) function as an ideal panoptic cell in many respects. IP addresses can be tracked, purchases online are constantly recorded, computers can be hacked into and their contents stolen, illegal downloading and other thievery is punished and internet users can in general assume the presence of some kind of observer (be it an administrator, moderator, or government tracking system). Worse for the Digital Divide, there’s no obvious central tower to take, no clear map of what cell leads where.

Learning to navigate a panoptically observable interface—in many respects a material factor in the Digital Divide— can be treacherous to identity construction online. While I don’t believe that the internet is a place where ideas of represented gender, race, and class don’t necessarily come to bear, the interfaces through which users access the internet certainly try to make us believe that this is the case. Selfe and Selfe explain some of the particulars (68), but their most salient points concern representing agency through interface. For example, demanding American Standard English and ASCII character sets in word processing programs can seriously damage agency. Sure, character packs are available, but not everyone will know how to go about accessing them, much less installing them. Furthermore, as Banks contests, students need to have regular access to computers in order to exert any sort of agency (41). I’m writing this blog post from my home “office,” ensconced amidst my writerly accoutrements—it’s a comfortable (well…not really) place where I can sit and think and type on my own terms in my own time. I have agency in constructing this space.

I feel as if I’m drifting, so I’ll do my best to tie this all together. Interface mapping involves a kind of cybernetic relationship with computers. That relationship is dictated by the designers of technology in some pretty specific ways, at least until we as users learn to navigate it and define the terms of that relationship. The Digital Divide can’t be solved purely by providing access—that solution simply introduces students to an interface that can’t readily be interfaced with. The Digital Divide will be better bridged when users can become agents who understand their potential roles in the panoptic construction, and use these gazes to their relative advantage. The tower in the middle loses just that much more power the more those lateral cell walls are broken down. But victims of the Digital Divide have to break down those walls in their own ways—like everyone ultimately—then those lateral connections will become clearer, and their uses available. A critical understanding of this mode will help agents become agents—to become themselves in essence—when putting computer technology to specific use.

Going Modal

I’m convinced of aurality’s pedagogical merit in any compositional academic context. Even just today, when talking to Tim and Rachel today about new media, I explained that I often have to use music as a compositional metaphor when lacking some other baseline shared experience with my students. The rationale here is to appeal to a different compositional environment, one that must be coherent in certain respects, constructed to have form and meaning understandable by other people. However, such approaches are rifle with peril. Not all students will understand every such approach, and therefore numerous should be considered. While I feel savvy enough using my music example, others may not roll off my tongue as well.

Cynthia Selfe defines her approach as “civic pluralism” (Response, 607), a reaching-out process that avoids privileging writing as a form of expression, extending its pedagogical value to a variety of peoples who may have been educated with different systems of privileged modalities. She’s right in noting not everybody writes to compose meaning, and cognition is inextricably linked in many respects to expression through a given medium. Modality molds expression.

Doug Hesse, in his response to Selfe’s essay, expresses concern over the teaching of multiple modalities in a writing context. He argues in favor of exploring these various modalities in a rhetoric class, noting that each has its own “best fit” (603) depending on the context. Hesse distinguishes writing as a subset of rhetoric, therefore treatable/teachable chiefly in the context of written language. He’s rightly worried about “stakeholders”: students need to learn how to compose through writing in a writing class; Hesse employs the analogy “If I am to teach German, noting the world’s economic drift…I decide instead to teach Chinese, I shouldn’t be surprised if some stakeholder’s object” (603). He sees Selfe’s aim as “nothing short of calling for an expansive redefinition…of composition as rhetoric” (603). On this point, though, I’m not sure exactly what Hesse is concerned about. He himself points out that writing is a subset of rhetoric, and writing composition necessarily entails the study of rhetoric. So how is composition being “redefined”, as such?

To me, there’s nothing wrong with advocating attention to multiple modalities. True, incorporating a systematic classroom treatment of these modalities is daunting, but certainly not impossible to undertake. No single instructor could cover every modality, regardless. It’s therefore our job to at least acknowledge these different means of composition. Even simply juxtaposing writing with some other modality can serve to highlight the strengths and uses of both. Perhaps, as Hesse suggests, Selfe advocates for a system-wide redefinition of composition teaching. However, such a change would necessarily have to cross departments, cross campuses, and intellectual boundaries. She herself admits, “I try to design my composition classes as places where students begin the complex process of learning how to make use of all sorts of design resources” (Response 606). This way, she effectively raises the stakes for students, not as much teaching them the specifics of modal rhetorical sovereignty (whew!), but instead how to recognize and possibly learn how to take advantage of that freedom (cf. “The Movement of Air 618).

But even when teaching someone how to fish, somebody has to cast a line, and it’s no good to send students out unprepared. The specifics of particular modalities must be taught in some respect, and it seems highly unlikely that an interdepartmental alliance would form to bridge the gap between compositional strategies. Selfe insists, “The time that students spend in composition classrooms is altogether too short” (“The Movement of Air” 643). Of course we don’t have enough time, and therefore Hesse’s critique stands on this point especially. Not only do we not have the time, but we also don’t have a specialized knowledge of all modalities in question. We have to ask ourselves, how do we prioritize modalities? Setting such priorities, especially when considering a pluralistic student audience, is not a simple matter to say the least.

But why do we have to limit composition to the composition classroom? If we are indeed Gatekeepers, why can’t we approach Selfe’s ideas in a forward-looking, introductory manner? College composition can take many forms, and writing should of course maintain institutional priority if nothing else for the sake of our student’s survival the academy. Hesse worries that stakeholders (namely students) need to have maximum investment in a “high conceptual level rather than an accretive one” in order to effectively approach multi-modal learning (603). Again, this notion calls into question the matter of modal specialization: we’re writing teachers, and maybe we’re familiar with some of these other modes, but not necessarily enough to bridge the conceptual gap between these modes for students.

But where we lack the specialized knowledge to help us teach other modalities, other teachers can help fill these gaps in many respects. Since nearly all college courses demand some sort of work production—written or otherwise—aren’t we all composition instructors in a sense? If English 101 and other intro writing courses maintained a sense of forward-looking self-awareness, we’d still get to teach writing while paying appropriate critical attention to other expressive modes. Students need to learn how to be effective rhetorical agents before they can master any given modality.

Despite clear hazards to her approach, Selfe’s appeal to understanding the pertinence of other compositional modalities trumps many of Hesse’s concerns, being the most important point of her argument. While his apprehensions are valid and applicable, little is lost through writing instructors teaching students how to approach/understand/recognize other modalities, even if those teachers can’t function within those modalities themselves.

Relationships with Computers Part Deux

Okay, so stupid Google won't let me respond in full (too much text) so here's the continuation of my responses for the second post.

Scott et al:

Indeed! In the case of new media, I wish I could use the cliché “Times they are a’ changing,” but I’d be a decade too late for my part. An older friend of mine told me at a conference, “the internet is the future,” meaning specifically that we academics (he being an old IBM mainstay in his seventies) should get with the program and hit the internet wave while it’s still rising. It’s funny to think about it like that (the internet as a novelty still), but for some reason what he said didn’t seem incredibly dated to me at first. I suppose my knee-jerk reaction dates me in some respects.

I started thinking about attention in regards to technology (and not just writing technology) when I was trying to (yet again) wrap my head around the full implications of new media as new media. When I think about new media, I free associate “computers.” Since computers are a kind of multi tool—maybe even an über tool—it occurred to me that our thought processes (and ludic engagement such as point and click superseding scrawl and erase) are increasingly dominated by computer time. Time certainly isn’t the only dimension at play, but it seems apt to wonder at how our work process is affected by loading programs, saving, printing, and all of the other interactive minutiae involved. The short (though incomplete) answer is that computers are flippin’ fast. That speed on one hand helps me, personally, to commit more thoughts to paper than I could even begin to eke out in pencil. On the other hand, I’m not as immediately considerate of what I type (maybe my blog posts so far are a good indication of that, hrhrhrhr). Naturally, there are tons of other components involved even in this one crappy example. What we gain and lose will partially depend on individual practice, but mediums predispose—rather than predetermine—particular sorts of products. The best way I can explain my thoughts on this are through guitar noises (*sigh*). Much easier to play blazing leads on an electric with lower gauge strings, but sometimes the rich boom of the acoustic carries a desirable resonance. Maybe it’s the same with writing mediums. Maybe I’m out of my mind. Or both?

I sort of wonder if Walter Benjamin—in regards to his ideas on authenticity and mechanical reproduction—is haunting me. I’m not even sure that I agree with him. I’m stressed at the potential “fast food” implications of mass-produced language, but I don’t think that we should clip a bird’s wings just because we perceive it flies more wildly the higher it gets. Good grief I’m full of bullcrap metaphors today.
Understanding the potential disjoint between new media writing and old media techniques is important for me (I think) as a teacher, but also as a student. However, I’m long gone from the days of handwritten essays, scrawled in my own blood and drool, and I can’t say that I’d really ever want to go back. Though, I do think it’s important to consider just how transitioning from one medium to another affects writing, since so many students come from diverse technology backgrounds. Maybe that I way I can explain the benefits of writing essays in long prose versus “IDK.” Though I guess it would be pretty lol to see something like that.

I suppose my projected ambivalence towards the idea of new media can be best explained as me being crotchety. Not so much being cranky, but rather like someone who has lost something, knows he has lost it, but can’t quite put his finger on what went missing. Gah, I’m venturing too far out into the waters of aesthetics. In any case, I don’t really believe that life without computers would be simpler: just complicated in different ways. I must admit that the idea of “going back” is simultaneously terrifying and revolting (and yes a bit whimsical too—how Janus-faced I am). There’s no going back, even if Snake Pliskin turns off all electricity in the world ala Escape from L.A.—we’d just have to learn to cope with a writing world post computers, which we would probably find as a unique challenge altogether. I seriously don’t want to go back to using those dorky pencil grippers, though some of them did have cool colors.

Relationships with Computers: Going the Distance!

I still remember, from all those years ago, my very first computer experience. Booting up the system—waiting for the system to boot—waiting more—hearing screeching noises—waiting more—growing angry—getting hungry—hearing the lunch bell—going to lunch—coming back—waiting for the system to boot—smelling ozone—rebooting the system: hours later, we had the classroom Apple up and running! Maybe the term “classroom” isn’t grandiose enough. “School” computer is probably more descriptive. Maybe even “town” would work. Despite growing up in a very small town and attending a small school, competition for use of the newfangled machine was intense. The novelty took awhile to wear off, though it did. Somewhere along the line dying on the Oregon Trail lost its glitz.

Growing up in a relatively low tech part of America, computers seemed like unattainable objects of supreme power and status. Nobody owned one—it could cost more than a thousand (!) dollars. Not only that, but they seemed utterly impractical. Sure, one could type, but that’s what typewriters were for. Being a creature of either too little imagination or too much at the worst possible moment, I could think of fewer than five tasks that one could possibly use a computer for: games, typing, number crunching—okay, fewer than four tasks. To make matters worse, it seemed to take hours to start the damn things. In short, they were toys for schools and scientists.

It wasn’t until I was in the 7th grade before I’d even heard of a PC, but already by this time the uses of computers were being made manifest to me. If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s also the mother of having to learn to type when the teacher assigns you four pages of text to copy. Matters only got worse as I grew older.

More out of fear than a sense of responsibility, I decided to take a typing class my freshman year of high school. Our instructor was most of the time disarmingly kind, but a fierce battle-hardened matron of oppression when in class. Ms. Fine was what many would term “old school,” and her singular task was to make typists out of the sorry lot of us. Armed with smelly old HPs, black on green text, and WordPerfect, we ventured forth on our first typing lessons: [Program a metronome at 70-80 BMP] “Jay jay jay space, atch atch atch…Jay jay jay, atch atch atch…Jay Jay JAY, atch atch atch, jaaaay jay jay, atch atch atch RETURRRN!” she would trill. On and on we went like this for months and months, and being on a computer lost its novelty again. Though, probably out of any “skill” I learned in high school—since I never took wood shop—Ms. Fine’s typing course was by far the most useful.

My parents eventually bought a computer so that all of us could theoretically function in the increasingly e-oriented nineties (which were waning fast by now). I began doing more and more work on the computer, typing instead of handwriting. This process enacted a slow but major change. My impeccable spelling atrophied, I grew more loquacious on paper with my thoughts, and I started seeing writing products as wholes, not just as paragraphs strung together. It seemed as if a bigger picture had been revealed to me.

Eventually, computers became a ubiquitous technology in my work and play time. They blurred the boundaries of workspace, living space, and play space. Not only that, but they seemed absolutely crucial to success—so much so, that having one break meant having to buy another to fill the gap (despite the heavy financial burden). Not even televisions shared such priority, or even vehicles. The internet—at first a novelty in its own right—became the juggernaut that dominated communication and commerce giving us the ability to be both everywhere at once and imprisoned in only one place, tied to a box.

Despite its rather sedentary requirements (one must sit or stand still in front of a computer to use it), moving faster became the medium’s obsession. Typing allowed me to write much more quickly, more voluminously in much less time with much less pain. Tasks that were once relegated to other mediums were now almost exclusively conducted through the computer, mail being the most exceptional example. Computers for me became the “do everything” technology, and it was almost all in an effort, a gasping one at that, in keeping up.

I heard somebody say (maybe in 597 actually…or was it at the 302 meeting?) that email conveys a (false) sense of urgency. As a managing editor of a relatively small regional academic journal, I can attest to having a vast reserve of this feeling. With dozens of messages arriving each day from members with a variety of demands, I feel weighed heavily by the need to get to them all at once. Of course, this lack of system breaks down, and so does “productivity,” at least in the electronic age sense. And even where I think I’m trendy, I find rapidly that I’m actually quite dated by my e-malapropisms. A Cougar Quest student of mine recommended that I use IDK for the Tolkien creative writing class I teach via MUSH (Multi-User Simulated Hallucination—think old school text-based RPG on the computer with green on black text and vague cardinal directions, such as “obvious exits are NORTH and WEST). I had never even heard the term IDK until yesterday in 597. I should feel lucky that I didn’t open my evals until right after class. I might’ve ignored its significance.
It’s sort of scary to think of it this way, but every class I teach is affected and effected by computer technology. It’s a strange system with a great proportion of feedback—effecting trends that affect itself, computer technology seems to reinvent, in some manner or another, at a very rapid pace. I try to use different technologies every semester, which on one hand keeps me on my toes and makes teaching no two classes the same, but on the other makes it difficult to find the right pedagogical tools for the right jobs.

The increased ceiling for speed and multi-tasking proportionally increases its capacity to endure change by making itself invaluable. Wow—that last passage reads like gibberish. Let me try again: Computer technology has helped free our attention by reallocating it elsewhere, so that should we find ourselves bereft of it for any reason, readjusting our attention could become a serious problem, both in terms of habits and available resources. Who has a typewriter lying around, or the time to write a 20 page seminar paper in pencil? Maybe everyone has these things, or things like these things. But standards of living are hard to change, especially when our perception indicates that change in the “wrong” or “backwards” direction. Unlike many other technologies, computers adapt to shifting needs, expanding their repertoire. Pens, for example, still do what pens have done (for the most part) for the past thousands of years. When I first saw a computer, I never imagined anything like the internet was possible, much less than Skype (it’s like a Star Trek viewing screen!).

It’s difficult to precisely quantify just what exactly I use computer technology for in a pedagogical context (or any other for that matter). Aside from my own grading, presentation, and research materials, I’ve made using computers a requirement for my courses. This requirement seems natural, especially given how widespread it is. On other hand, computer literacy isn’t necessarily as widespread. It’s obvious to state that not everyone has the same access and experience to particular technologies, but the implications of this fact are heavy. As an instructor, I often don’t feel very technology literate in some contexts, and I’m sure many of the students in my courses feel the same. I feel as if I’m asking students to use a tool that I don’t quite know how to properly wield. So when using computer technology, I often wonder if we are in effect using wrenches to nail in wall tacks.

“Right tool for the right job” adages notwithstanding, computer technology literacies are ubiquitous, and it’s my responsibility as a teacher to make them applicable. However, that applicability need not derail the work of a semester. If an integrated approach just doesn’t work, sometimes abandoning it in favor of something else is better than slogging through an entire semester. Of course, that kind of shift produces problems in its own right, such as spending more time on figuring out technology rather than teaching or writing. However, as technological changes continue to rapidly mount (in some respects more so than others) and the demands for a varied computer literacy increase, adaptability may be as valuable a composition tool as any.

What is my job as a writing instructor?

What is my job as a writing instructor?

This is one of those questions I *really* want to answer well.
In the most basic sense, I hope that as a writing instructor I can effectively convey how to use a variety of compositional tools in a variety of situations. Of course, this hope relies entirely on context. I’ve illogically split this post into three silly sections, all of which in some degree respond to the concern of applicability beyond academe while addressing a variety of such contexts. I’ve been stressed out by questions concerning the “worth” of writing in the liberal arts for quite some time, and Kathleen Yancey catches some of my concern and recasts it into an apparently different perspective from previous composition pedagogical approaches. Research writing to me seems like a good general place to start, as it covers a variety of fields (including “real world” genres).

Research:

After first hearing that I would be teaching English 201 a while back, I thought to myself, “uh oh.” Really, I’ve worked in several research capacities over the years, and all of them academic, so theoretically the material wasn’t the problem, but rather how I was going to approach it. English 101 isn’t the same beast in many respects, despite the two courses’ similarities in structure and content. Teaching MLA formatting and research guidelines is peachy for people who will be using those guidelines—and even for beginning researchers who need something to use— but the 201 crew were a diverse lot with diverse needs. Instead of trying to cover absolutely every research base—and one can spend many hours in the government documents section going through reel after reel with no benefit to anything but perpetuating read-rage (similar to road rage—maybe even roid rage—except with text). Basically, my aim was to foster using the right research method for the right “job.” But teaching writing has to at some point transcend the natural teleology assumed by the term “job.” I try to look for things that all writers—nay humans—share in common, and apply this directly to the value of research methodology. In my experience, getting screwed over is what everyone likes the least.

The phrase “getting screwed” can mean many things, but college students mostly associate it with—yep, you guessed it—money. Sometimes I feel as if I have to, in some way, bring liberal arts education back into a banking model temporarily to illustrate a point (using terms like “value” and “worth”), no matter how Machiavellian and distasteful that feels. If money isn’t something everybody covets, it’s necessarily a concern. In the simplest sense, knowing how to conduct research in a particular context can yield immediate positive results. Okay fine—knowing that your Sound Wave action figure is worth thousands on ebay is “valuable” information, but generally doesn’t demand a research argument (unless, of course, such an argument is involved in the sale/bribe process). A simplistic research argument spawning from the Sound Wave example could be heard in court. “Mr. X broke my thousand dollar Sound Wave figure” implies at least two researchable arguments: 1) Proof that Mr. X did indeed break Sound Wave, and 2) a research argument on the worth of Sound Wave. However, such an argument is ultimately banal, and doesn’t require much critical thinking. But knowing the reason Sound Wave is worth a thousand dollars does demand a greater degree of critical thinking, and this knowledge arms the greedy researcher with not only more information on the item of value itself, but on how to speculate more items like it. Such a question will force research into cultural trends, contexts, manufacturing details, and ultimately the interrelationship of all of these factors to bring us the thousand-dollar Sound Wave. If said researcher works for an auction company, a research essay—verbal or otherwise—is called for.

Naturally, “not getting screwed” can branch off into more complex research oriented advantages, such as: “how to tell when X is lying”; “how to avoid being fired for writing angry things on Facebook”; “how to tell when a presenter has missed a crucial piece of information, especially when that information pertains to the functionality of your vehicle’s brakes”; and others in this vein.

As a literature Ph.D. student, I’m particularly sensitive to students thinking of my topics in terms of “use” and “value.” However, it’s not so hard to convey such value. Even the harshest of naysayers cannot deny the use of knowing literature and how it has been used and abused for political purposes. I try to encourage students to know why particular political leaders/institutions endorse certain books and denounce others. I imagine most literature teachers try to explain the importance of knowing when such abuse/interpretation occurs. In several serious ways—though likely not interconnected with any oppressions the students are facing immediately—knowing how and why a piece of literature (or visual culture or music or any other art form) is being exploited can greatly foster “not getting screwed” in a rather “big picture” sense.

Kathleen Yancey’s idea of interconnectivity between texts composed in an academic setting and ‘real world’ genres basically coincides with what I attempt (“Made Not Only in Words” 311). She poses that students aren’t being asked—at least not habitually—to draw “real world” connections with academic writing. However, I’ll be the first to admit that my priorities up to this point have been in fostering academic survivability for writing students. Without a certain repertoire of skills at their fingertips, progressing to even finish a bachelor’s degree can become an insurmountable challenge. While it’s not difficult to mount threats (“you will fail out of school and therefore fail to get a degree which will lead to you never being employed if you don’t pass this class”) to make our material applicable, it doesn’t really ensure its survival beyond a single classroom moment (as Yancey puts it) or moments. Which, looking to our own professional self perpetuation, doesn’t coincide with “not getting screwed”, culturally or economically.

Of course, “not getting screwed” is only the beginning of research-oriented motivation. Maybe it’s not even the beginning for some. Plenty of people can geek out and live in our world just fine. We teach others to survive in academe because it’s not somehow an unreal world—it’s a very real world to “us” (i.e. people who get paid to teach). But self-perpetuation without some kind of intellectual progeny beyond academics doesn’t really help anyone. Eww…progeny.

Subversion:

Nothing seems so universally applicable as learning subversive writing techniques. Maybe I’m extraordinarily biased in this supposition. Growing up, I at first had a very difficult time succeeding in school. Not that I was merely a loudmouthed, argumentative type—though I certainly could (can) be—but rather my interests and methods yielded the wrong results for assignments. Even when I was on the right track, I would often tweak my language in the wrong ways, leading many teachers to wonder about my mental health. Really, these are all the classical problems many writing students face. The act of writing requires a large degree of self-consciousness, and it’s difficult to commit oneself to seemingly alien methods, which can also seem counter to one’s worldview. In short, I was stubborn. I generally had a good grip on why we were learning something, but didn’t always feel as if we were going about it the right way.

Ultimately, I grew sick of fighting. It was so much easier to follow the assignment directions and to do as I was told in general. However, something inside me kept screaming bloody revolt, and that Alan Rickman type voice couldn’t be silenced. “You can still follow directions and say what you want to say, you just have to be clever”, it snapped. “Whoa,” I inwardly replied. My linguistic revenge manifested severally, though mostly in a form that was tailor-made to fit the assignment in question. That nagging parcel of my mind always ensured that I had something to contribute from my own perspective, my own critical digestion of the material. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that I wasn’t really being subversive, just an okay critical thinker at the time.

However, I’m certainly not saying that out and out subversion isn’t worth teaching and learning. A particularly salient example comes from my brother’s days as an anthropology student. He like other anthro majors had to take “Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature,” a class largely predisposed to approaches in Evolutionary Psychology and (sometimes disguised) Sociobiology. While generally able to voice his concerns with those approaches throughout the course’s run, my brother was eventually forced to write his final essay on defending them. Being a person of strong academic conviction (and mule-stubborn), he opted to instead compose a satire. While he indeed addressed the major arguments and posed an effective defense of them, he made good use of naysayers to deconstruct what he had just forwarded as viable. But simply deconstructing those arguments was not enough—he needed to make it read convincingly—so ultimately Evolutionary Psychology would seem to win over in the end. While he didn’t succeed in overtly attacking Evolutionary Psychology, he did succeed in complicating the issue by giving his counter-arguments ample face time. Even though Hannibal Lecter shares only a minority of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, he certainly steals the show, and his impact reverberates. What a creepy analogy….

And, on a more practical level, subversive writers often operate in grand literary fashion without getting killed. Chaucer survived much political upheaval and still managed to get in his barbs—so too with Shakespeare. The Roman Emperor Claudius acted like a fool in his early adult life, never becoming a target for assassination. Other examples abound—not tweaking the wrong noses often means not getting killed. Also, writers can win more arguments with honey than acid splashed in their enemies’ faces. If only more students considered this adage prior to posting “OMFG I FüKIN H8T3 MY J0B!11! and my BOSS!1!!” on Facebook.
So there: honesty via dishonesty.

Context: A part of Yancey’s argument that particularly resonated with me concerns her emphasis on context transferring. Yeah, I made that term up. Basically, she argues (in two separate points on 311) that students need to understand how to transfer what they learn “from one site to another”, and how that transfer affects their compositions. At first her argument didn’t really resonate with me, but ultimately she’s recognizing a medium’s impact on the projection of compositions. For example, if I were to purchase The Beatle’s mega stereo box-set, I’d have a significantly different listening experience than if I were to have purchased the mono set, especially if my stereo—an (hopefully) effective analogue to writing mediums—has only one speaker. The differences wouldn’t be immediately tangible in every respect, however. With text, changing methods and mediums predisposes that text to manifest in different ways. I spoke with my students a bit about this phenomenon today in class, telling the tale of how my writing style changed rather drastically from when I regularly used pen to when I first began using a computer late in High School. With a pen, my hand often cramped, and I found myself searching for more concise phrases to use. Moreover, my somewhat large script fostered the illusion that I’d written a great pile. My spelling was also superior. However, I generally didn’t have as good a handle on how a longer essay should appear (it not being in front of my face, easy to scroll to), and long compositions were a much more tedious undertaking. The computer, of course, helped me become a lazy speller, a rather fast typist, and possibly a better organizer. Ultimately, the medium changes Yancey refers to are much more complex—my writing training took place in a particular time-frame, places, and social mores which all enculturated that process.

Clearly, new mediums are called for by different pressures. I feel responsible for conveying a sense of self-awareness to my students, to help them understand what compositional tool is right for which job. I’m not saying that they’re always distinct, or that we’d even want them to be, but some writer’s tools work better in different situations. Piling on the statistics when attempting to reach a general audience, for example isn’t a very good idea. Analogously, attempting to slam down a 200-page dissertation on a single web screen may result in readers having apoplectic fits. Obviously, all of these factors apply topically as well. All writing has to be put into context, but not at one to one ratios. Meaning, knowing a particular context is fine, but a single text won’t fit every context the same, nor converse with that context in the same ways. *I’m gasping for e-air*

Bottom line: I’ve whined about academic fields not really talking to one another in meaningful ways for many years (maybe brought on by a sense of paranoia rather than any real understanding of pan academic communication), but Yancey seems to go further than academics. However, I’m apprehensive about her “real world” distinctions she draws between academic writing contexts and other contexts. I hope that her approach fosters connecting contexts, rather than denoting one as real and another as…not…real. I’d like to think that she (we) is on the right track.