Canned Goods

As usual there’s all that teaching to be done, but luckily I’ve made it a bit easier this week with students presenting their favorite projects from the semester–and they are, so far, wonderful. Yes, many of the Photoshop and Flash projects may not be the Flashiest, but, as one of my students smartly put it, there are a lot of intangibles that go into the production of a final product. With the work they’ve done, I know they have fulfilled the basic goals of the course:

—to reconsider how we typically define writing,
—better understand the workings of the web, and
—to have some of the technical and social skills that will allow them to produce in a variety of media.

One of the most exciting projects of the semester, in my book, has been their Wikipeida entries. We all learned more about how this community works to collectively construct knowledge.

Also, I’ve been really busy with a few presentations and putting a couple proposals together (when will I get to my prelims?)

Last week I co-taught/led a Writing Center OGE (ongoing ed) workshop on multimodal writing: “It’s Not All Linear Text Anymore: The Least We Should All Know to Help Writing Center Students Compose Multimodal Texts in New Media Landscapes”. I had a great time talking about how/why we work with new kinds of writing in the Writing Center. AND, the process of drafting my ten minute prez helped to prepare me for another talk, this Monday, for the department’s Board of Visitors about how I and my students are using technology for new ways of producing and circulating writing. I have to thank Matt, one of my students, for allowing me to show his research paper-turned blog article. They were very impressed and clearly understood that his remediation of is original text to the blog was essential to achieve his purpose because of its ability to easily embed video. Without him, and the work of my other students, this prez would have left me using new media objects produced by others else where and would have been nowhere near as impressive.

Conference props — the biggie being for Cs, I’m lucky enough to be on a great (proposed) panel with Samantha Blackmon & Alice: “Changing Writing, Alternate Realities: Games and Game Theory in the Writing Classroom.” And I recently submitted to the Writing Across Borders con at UCSB.

In addition to (proposed) self-promotion, the reason I mention these activities is because my experience, I hope, is an example for my students that I can talk about in the classroom: I wrote so much more than ended up in the final products. I easily had 20-30 mins. of material for the BoV prez’s 5 minute slot (ended up going 10, of course, with discussion). This process gave me the opportunity to see what I was thinking and choose from what I felt would be the strongest example for this particular audience.

Now, on to my Computers & Writing paper/prez. I guess I’ll get back to my prelims in June.

I can’t believe it’s been more than a week since I blogged, but I’ve been buried in prelims reading and taking notes via Word. Annette has set up a wiki prelims that I’ll participate in by uploading my notes. But I wonder what changes will have to be made to my notes in the migration.

Anyway, since I just gathered another stack of texts from the library, I thought the moment right to ask these questions: “Must I read everything? And what does everything mean? I’ve seen a pattern in responses from those I’ve spoken to face to face. Basically, with the prelim exams changes here, we now have to read a core list of 40 items, with a list of 40 our own making–the old system required, I believe, 150 items from the standing lists. Of course, with all the writing required in the portfolio system we’ll leave, presumably, with a fuller understanding of the core list items (and our own). But is that really the case?

The old binge and purge exams apparently led to a lot of “read the intro, read the conclusion, and read a chapter from the middle that interests you.” And, you could always slide by without readings many titles. The new system, I think, is prone to similar problems. And, I’ll only speak for myself, here.

Under the new, write-a-couple-essays/portfolio system, it would be easy to simply not read many of the texts on the core list. In a 20 page essay, it’s difficult to include everything, and the faculty understands that you won’t necessarily include every core text in either of your essays. In many cases, I could easily get away with reading some review essays and using the B/ST.M Bib. I’ve used both to prep for reading.

I’ll admit to not reading every core list text all the way through; I’m getting the gist. I ask if this enough simply because during my reading I have been resistant to read a significant portion of a core list text (or two), but once I get going and thinking about the faculty question, I see why this item is on the list and understand what I’d miss if I simply read a review (or two).

These concerns go beyond my prelims in the direction of my future research and the need for interdisciplinary study. Can we ever read everything? If not, how much is enough? Who gets to judge? But, I agree, the has to be some kind of system set up to prepare us–for us to prepare. But what happens when those that don’t read everything get through?

We’ve all read the essays, where after, the author is taken to task by others. Then the others are taken to task by still others. Usually, all because someone missed some piece of information.

I’ve gone on too long already, but I’ll end with this thought, one I got by blogging about my prelims today—perhaps we and our students tend too often to see the work we’ve done (the results we obtained) and the work we draw upon as more than contingent (if that’s the right word for what I’m thinking). I can only do my best to do my best and keep working toward something more ___________ .

Not exactly the slickest work I’ve done, but while reading On the Ideal Orator I was struck by the bust of Cicero on the cover.

So I’ve been working on my prelims, the faculty question (#2, 2006-7) more so than my own. However, I’ve got to get final approval for my question (3 down; 1 left to go). But I think I’m stuck at the statement of the problem stage. What problem? you might ask. Exactly. Perhaps because this is a new system (maybe 4 people have gone through the process) we may get our signals crossed as to exactly what these essays are meant to do. They are to demonstrate a broad knowledge of the field, which was also the aim of the old exams. However, these essays also need a strong argument (apparently), and I think that’s what I’m missing.

How do new literacy & new media studies and participatory culture address these aims? What gaps in the field of composition and rhetoric might they address?

These questions will get me through the first hurdle, but what’s my claim? I really see the questions as investigative/exploratory. I don’t want to argue that NMS should take over the curriculum, but I do want to validate it as a legitimate way of addressing foci of the field as well as suggest that new media might just do some things better. Is that enough?

Maybe I need a bad guy, even if I don’t want one. Who really, really hates New Media? And how can I sneak up on them so as to shoot them in the back with my evidence? Or maybe from a window position. I’ve got ‘em in my cites.

This semester Thursdays are no longer simply Thursdays; they’re Prelims Thursdays. Actually, that’s a pretty sucky title. But I don’t have time to think of a better one. Got to work on the faculty question: “In what ways is writing organized by circumstance? And how do our answers to that question impact our theories, practices, and pedagogies?”

There are a lot of ways to answer this question, and one way is with a literacy autoethnography–the kind of assignment we sometimes give our students (write about a literacy experience . . . mine usually starts with getting Ds in handwriting). It’s an idea, but I’ve written about some of these experience as reflections in my coursework. I don’t think I’ll end up going that direction. After making the lit review move (with a bunch of Literacy Studies research), I’m hoping to move into new media literacies by pulling out some Gee and the New London Group (situated learning and multiliteracies) so as to focus on the acquisition of Discourse.

One of the other moves I need and want to make is to problematize my own use of new media technology in the classroom. People are learning to work with new media technologies within social networks–Harry Potter fan fiction on Muggle.net, Photoshop image manipulation on Worth1000.com, machinima on Machinima.com. That’s what’s missing from my classroom, situated learning.

As a MA student/TA I made service-learning a part of my FYC curriculum because I wanted students to have real-world (or post-college) rhetorical situations in which to write with non-profit agencies in the community. One of the problems: Even though they had a dozen sites to choose from, they had a dozen sites to choose from. Were they interested in what any of these agencies were doing? On the rare occasion a good match was made (a mother worked with the YMCA because she was concerned that the Y and the community didn’t offer any recreational opportunities or events for teens; the age group of her daughter), there was intrinsic motivation to work on the project, and my deadlines and those of the Y were the extrinsic motivation. But most students were rarely invested in the work/writing they were doing. It was just another assignment.

So what makes these assignments, the Photoshop visual argument or the Flash juxtaposition of word, image, and sound any different? Why am I teaching Photoshop and Flash?

Gee’s differentiation between language and literacy acquisition and learning: “acquisition is good for performance, learning is good for meta-knowledge.” Ah. So my students are gaining meta-knowledge? On the surface my course may seem like software tutorials (a criticism that has been made), but in conjunction with all the readings and discussions we have about language and literacy & new media and networks, the aim of the course isn’t apprenticeship into a Discourse but rather meta-knowledge, which Gee sees as liberatory. Talking about grammar, form and superficialities is good for developing meta-knowledge but not for “getting people to actually acquire Discourses . . . .” Is meta-knowledge the best we can ever hope for in comp? Is that enough?

Maybe we need to talk about the goals we have for our Intermediate Composition courses at the next meeting of the 201 instructors. Are we shooting for acquisition or meta-knowledge? How would our approaches affect our pedagogy?

I’m working on my question for the preliminary exam portfolio. I’ve received some really good constructive feedback from one particular faculty member (in two parts) on this that has helped/forced me to think about why the heck I’m writing this essay in the first place. It needs to be more than a lit review (what the first comments focused on), although the nature of prelim exams in general and our old system of prelims seemed to be coming to an understanding of the field in a lit-review-ish way. Since the new prelims format is still new, I guess I was thinking more in terms of showing what I know and beginning to move a dissertation topic.

So, here’s the question that prompted the initial feedback:

Working from the four competing aims/concerns of Composition as outlined by Smit in The End of Composition Studies and Berlin’s taxonomy of rhetorics used in writing instruction–
(1) writing as a body of knowledge and a fairly narrow set of skills people use to communicate with one another (objective rhetorics, CTR);
(2) writing as a form of personal liberation (subjective rhetorics);
(3) writing as part of a larger set of social or cultural practices (transactional rhetorics);
(4) writing as a way of participating in a civic culture, local, national, or even world culture (transactional rhetorics),
–how do new literacy & new media studies and participatory culture address these aims and rhetorics? What gaps in the field of composition and rhetoric might they address? And, what gaps lie between NLS, NMS, and participatory culture?

In response I added:

I guess, right now, I’m at the point where I would say that the teaching of new media literacies in the writing classroom requires, or in the least should include, aspects of multi-modal literacies and media literacy and, more importantly, share New Literacies’ sociocultural approach in that it should be seen as teaching what Henry Jenkins’ identifies as “core social skills” for a participatory culture. This thinking initially arose from thinking about what I wanted my students in 201 to get from learning to use blogs and other multimedia software and the discomfort I felt as I began to draft my syllabus. Many of the assignments tended to focus on individual creative expression and less on these literacies as social practices.

And the question I received was “who are you in debate with on this? That is, who do you see disagreeing or being unsatisfied with the claim . . . ?”

Now I can see that if I step back from my claim to a position that asks who would not see the value of teaching new media literacies, I might then move into what can/should be taught in this type of writing course.

But if my question becomes geared towards a debate of regarding the use new media, at this second (having just received the feedback and not having giving sat down to think about quite yet–beyond this blog) I don’t have a clear answer.

[Add: After meeting with one of the faculty, this question seemed focused enough and more than simply a lit review. It still is in rough form, but I don’t need a final draft until mid-January, and I’m sure it will change as I work over the break: In what ways do new media literacies and participatory culture fulfill/add to the aims of the field of Composition? Or not?]

As part of our preliminary examinations portfolio we have to write a teaching philosophy (it’s also a part this semester’s professional seminar for the teaching of English 201). Any attempt to define yourself is pretty intimidating.

It reminds my of the times I prepare to answer questions like “what’s composition and rhetoric?” or “what’s pedagogy?” to K’s family during the holidays; I usually find myself stumbling to get something coherent out and leaving unsure as to whether I should simply say “I’m studying writing” or “the teaching effective written communication.” I can sit down with my students and ask them to tell me what their paper is about in one sentence, but I’m hard pressed to do the same regarding my work.

Maybe you can comment with your one-liners?

Well, back to the TP (teaching philosophy, in this case). I remember writing one for a couple of grad school apps, and I’ll hunt it down, knowing it will most likely be embarrassing after 3 years of sitting on my hard drive. So as I pass on a link with some guidance regarding this genre of writing, I’ll thank Tim for sending it out on our seminar listserv.

I was scanning Wired this morning and read the story, A Sneak Peak at a Fractured Web, concerning several governments around the world filtering the internet. This is not new news, but I’m a few pages into Virilio’s Speed and Politics and thinking about dromology as it relates to the internet and participatory culture, and in this case internet filtering. Admittedly, I’m wholly unfamiliar with Virilio’s work, so forgive if I misunderstand what he’s saying and mis-apply it.

From the first page, he talks of “the masses” as being a “multitude of passersby” and that the “revolutionary contingent attains it ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed” (3). He asks whether the power of the bourgeois State is (is in) the street and describes rivers, roads, coastlines, and railways as “channels of rapid communication.” It seems that he is arguing that the streets (or paths through a city) and not the city itself is where power lies. And, perhaps, we can make the analogy that the “Information Superhighway” are the “channels of rapid communication” of today. I’m sure someone out there already has, perhaps even Virilio. And as he states that the “doors to the city are its tollbooths and its customs posts are dams, filtering [my emphasis] the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the hordes” (7), I began thinking about these nations’ attempts to control the flow of information coming in and what their citizens can and cannot access, think, and do. The internet moves information so quickly it threatens a government’s ability to control and thus possess its territory.

As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else! Globalisation cannot take shape without the speed of light.

Again, perhaps, I stretch Virilio for my own purposes, but a fear of globalization is not only economic but also cultural, as in Farmers Branch, Texas and its new anti-immigration measures, “including one that makes English the official language.” So if your tollbooths (borderwalls) aren’t working, and you can’t filter the internet, you pass laws that limit participation.

Do any of you folks out there who are familiar with Virilio find my reading, admittedly limited to a few pages, problematic? And, as I’m mired in prelims reading at the moment, I’m debating whether to continue reading Virilio. So, as part of my Cost/Benefit analysis, do you feel Virilio would be useful as I study online participatory culture for one of my prelims essays?

Remediation: (Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter) “the cycling of different [media] through one another” (5)
Medial Ecology: THe complex relationships involved in remediation.
Textimage: WJT Mitchell in Iconology—”Tis printcentric view fails to account for all the other signifying components of electronic texts . . .” (20).
Simulcrum: originally meaning a material object representing something
Technotexts (Hayles): “Literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate open a window on the larger connections that unite literature as a verbal art to its material forms” (25).
Cybertext (Espen Aarseth): “a wide variety of texts that [use] combinational strategies, including print works . . . electronic fictions . . . [and] computer games . . .” (27).
“Ergodic” texts (aarseth): “those literary systems that require ‘nontrivial effort’ to allow the user to traverse them” (e.g. computer games) (28).
Media-specific analysis (Hayles): “a way . . . to think more broadly about the connections between strands of criticism that have not yet made common cause with one another” (29) by “holding one term constant across media . . . and varying the media to explore how medium-specific possibilities and constraints shape texts. MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those [embodiments] interacts dynamically with linguistic, rheotical, and literary practices to create effects we call literature” (31).
Materiality(Hayles): “The physical attributes constituting any artifact are potentially infinite . . . . From this infinite array a technotext will select a few to foreground and work into its thematic concerns. Materiality thus emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies [and] depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifcat as well as the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops—strategies that include physical manipulations and as well as conceptual frameworks” (33).
Proprioception (75): the reception of stimuli produced within the organism.
Cyborganization(49): “transforming human subjects into hybrid identities that cannot be thought without the digital inscription apparatus that produces them.”

–”In their general form, computers are simulation machines producing environments, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. To construct an environment is, of course, to anticipate and structure the user’s interaction with it and in this sense to construct the user as well as the interface” (48).

–”simulation does not necessarily mean that the processes running in a computer are artificial. The processes can be ‘natural’ as anything in the real world; they are artificial only in the sensethat they run in an artificial medium” (48). “To the extent the user enters the imaginative world of this environment and is structured by her interaction in it, she also becomes a simulation, an informational pattern circulating through the global network that counts as the computational version of human community” (49).

–”If books are seen only as immaterial verbal constructs, the rich potential of this interplay [Mindbody interactions with text] is lost. Literary critics have lon accepted that form is content and content is form. Now Kaye [Hayles] wanted to shout, ‘Materiality is content, and content is materiality!’” (75).

So I’m thinking about my first prelims essay using the core list for the most part, with some of my own in there too. My reasoning is seeing both essay as moving toward my dissertation, so the second essay will continue from the first essay but become more focused on my interests.

As requested by a few people, here it is—my reading list (just twice as long as it needs to be):

1. Virilio: The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e) / Double Agents)
2. Lost Dimension
3. Speed and Politics
4. The Vision Machine

5. Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of
Cultural Materialism)

6. Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media

7. Brandt: Literacy in American Lives
8. Literacy As Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts
9. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth
Century,” College English, 57(6), p. 649-668.

10. Smit: the End of Composition Studies

11. Bourdieu: The Logic of Practice

12. Plantinga: Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film

13. Wysocki, et al.: Writing New Media

14. Hayles: Writing Machines

15. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatic

16. Graeme Turner: Film as Social Practice

17. Chatman: Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film

18. Eisentein: Film Form

19. McLuhan: Understanding Media
20. the Medium is the Massage
21. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

22. Selber: Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

23. Turkle: Life on the Screen

24. Castronova: Synthetic Worlds

25. Hawisher/Selfe: Passion, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies

26. Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

27. Mattelart & Mattelart: Rethinking media Theory

28. Sirc: English Composition as a Happening

29. Blair: “The possibility and actuality of visual arguments.” Argumentation and
Advocacy. Summer 1996 33(1) 23: 1996.

30. Kinross, Robin. “The Rhetoric of Neutrality.” Design Issues, Vol. 2, No. 2.
(Autumn, 1985), pp. 18-30.

31. Cynthia L. Selfe’s (Ed.) Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers.
Hampton Press.

32. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Composition in a New Key.”

33. Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” Book History Reader.
Eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, London: Routledge, 2002.
34. The Implied Reader

35. Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar Visual
Design. London: Routledge, 1996.
36. Kress, G. Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge.
37. Literacy in the New Media Age (Literacies)

38. Lanham, Richard A. “What’s Next for Text?

39. Daly, Elizabeth (2003) “Expanding the Concept of Literacy,” EDUCAUSE
Review, p. 33-40.

40. Trayner, Beverly. Multiliteracies: A Theoretical Overview

41. The New London Group. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social
Futures

42. Westbrook, Steve. “Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear: Impediments to
Multimedia Production.” College English. May 2006 68(5) 457, 2006.

43. Jenkins, Henry: Convergence Culture
44. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age

45. Deemer, English Composition as a Happening

46. Lutz, Making Freshman English a Happening

47. Macrorie, Blow that Horn, Man
48. Words in the way
49. The Movies Don’t Move

50. Perl, Writing True

51. Alexander García Düttmann, The ABC of visual culture, or a new decadence of
illiteracy

52. Rifkin: Waiting and Seeing
53. From Structure to Enigma and back perhaps

54. Mitchell: Showing Seeing a critique of visual culture
55. WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory

56. Fish, Doing what comes Naturally

57. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (in Poetry, Language, Thought)

58. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

59. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

60. Worsham, “The Question Concerning Invention: Hermeneutics and the Genesis of
Writing” (in Pre/Text 8 [1987]: 197-244)
61. Dyson, Anne Haas. Writing Superheroes. New York: Teachers College Press,
1997.

62. Gonzalez, Norma and Luis Moll. “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching in Latino
Households.” Urban Education, 29 (19950: 443-470.

63. Applebee, Curriculum as conversation

64. Dewey: Democracy and education
65. The child and the curriculum

66. Burke, K. (1945). A Grammar of Motives. U of California P.

67. Chandler, D. (2001). Semiotics: The basics. Routledge.

68. Jakobson, R. (1985). Verbal art, verbal sign, verbal time. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.

69. Jameson, F. (1972). The prison-house of language: A critical account of structuralism. Princeton: University Press.

70. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

71. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art. New York: Columbia University Press.

72. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1991.

73. Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1997). How writing came about. Austin: University of Texas Press.

74. Witte, S. P. (1992). Context, text, intertext: Toward a constructivist semiotic of writing. Written Communication, 9, 237-308.

75. Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Second Edition

76. Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

77. Lankshear: New Literacies

78. Gee: Situated Language and Learning
79. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

80. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1994)

81. Barthes, From Work to Text

82. Jeff Rice, “1963 Comp Revolution” &
83. “Networks and New Media”

84. Shaviro, Connected

85. Carolyn Miller, “Writing in a Culture of Simulation.” Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life.