digital digs

Ulmer's Heuretics Today

As I am reading Ulmer's Heuretics for my graduate course, I am reminded of an old, painful, if somewhat cynical warning against teaching books that you love. Essentially, it is unlikely that your students will share the same feeling... so just be careful not to take the matter personally. And Heuretics is one of those books for me. I first read it in my first semester as a doctoral student, and I felt as if that book had been written for me. I was coming into "theory" from writing poetry with an avid interest specifically for what Ulmer describes at the outset of the text: a heuretic rather than hermeneutic approach to theory. Furthermore his specific goal of creating an electronic academic writing and transforming pedagogy and schooling in turn obviously inspired me to follow the path to where I am now.

While there is no doubt that in some technological ways Heuretics is dated. It might go out of its way to explain things that would have been alien 15 years ago but are obvious now. But I look at that text, along with a couple others that arrived in the early 90s (e.g., Bolter's Writing Space, Landow's Hypertext, Faigley's Fragments of Rationality) and I still see challenges that we have yet to face. Certainly we have yet to address the potential of electronic space as chora.

Thinking about the ipad in terms of Ulmer, one might begin by recognizing it in relation to chora. By now, it is perhaps cliche to conceive of the chora as the screen, but the expansion of the touchscreen with devices like the ipad gives us a new way of interacting with screen as choral interface. Yes the touchscreen has been around for some time, but the ipad at least promises to expand significantly its cultural operation. In particular I am interested in the ipad as a haptic, gestural space.

Ulmer writes,

it is difficult to "grasp" chora, even if it is to be thought in haptic terms. But this difficulty is to be expected of a method designed as an alterative to conceptual thinking. The aspect of this complication of the "gesture of knowing" important for chorography is that differences among nationalities, genders, ages, and so on are a matter of "writing." The writer using chorography as a rhetoric of invention will store and retrieve information from premises or places formulated not as abstract containers, as in the tradition of topos, but by means ofGeschlecht. Chora, in other words, as a figure of spacing, is another name for what has concerned Derrida in nearly every text he has ever written: differance. (73)

Of course I don't wish to go so far as to suggest that the ipad is some revolutionary device. Maybe it will turn out that way, but I not here to push the hype any higher (as if it could go higher). And on a hardware level it might not operate that differently from other devices. In other words this is a limited claim/thought experiment. With that caveat in place, how might the new gestural relationship opened (though maybe not fully realized) by the ipad create opportunities for rethinking our relations with the screen and the cloudy databases behind it?

As Derrida writes, cited in Ulmer, "If there is a thought of the hand, or a hand of thought, as Heidegger gives us to think, it is not of the order of conceptual grasping. Rather this thought of the hand belongs to the essence of the gift, of a giving that would give, if this is possible, without taking hold of anything." There might be something to theorize in the touching implied in the touchscreen. Touching always implies distance and exteriority. In touching the screen, in what way might we say that we touch the data? Is that the site of Geschlecht, of differentiation? Where the chora winnows out some data? What kind of App Store download would facilitate such interactions?

I'm not sure where this goes, but I suppose I have this sense that the rise of a haptic, gestural interface might offer us a way into chorography.

digital (post)humanism pays attention

As an erstwhile practitioner of zazen meditation, I can say one thing with a fair degree of certainty: humans suck at focusing on a single thing, or even worse, on no thing. PBS Frontline's recent, interesting and wide-ranging program Digital_Nation spent a fair amount of time on the theme of focusing: the price of multi-tasking, the threat of ADHD to education and "kids today," etc. etc. It's a common issue regarding digital technology, and I have little doubt about the inefficiency of multitasking when it comes to activities that require any significant cognitive load. But I want to question this ubi sunt mythology of a past generation of readers who buried their noses in great novels and had prodigious powers of attention. They aren't talking about my generation of slackers are they? They don't mean those dirty hippie baby boomers, do they? So maybe it's that "greatest generation" that won the war and read Faulkner... or not. One can't go back much further and find many literate folks, so I'm not sure what they would have been paying deep attention to or how that deep attention would have been formed since it is so closely associated with reading.

The Frontline story cites a Chronicle survey where professors say that students aren't as good as they were a decade ago. Fine. I believe professors would say that. My only question would be when professors didn't say that? It's a dog bites man story in my view. Even if there were a quantifiable way to determine that students are not as able to perform certain kinds of reading acts as they once were, we'd still only be guessing at the causes. But just as we have created some ridiculous hype around this fantasy that "digital natives" are these amazing multitaskers, I think we have an equal fantasy about the pre-web era. I was an undergrad right before the web emerged, and I can assure you that we weren't sitting around with our noses in books. We never went to the library either.

But I digress. Blame it on the Internet.

So we need to rethink, not just "attention," but cognition. One begins by realizing that the putative deep attention of print culture is just as artificial as whatever attentional mechanisms one wishes to attribute to the coming digital age. Certainly we should not mistake print literacy/attention as an evolutionary, progressive step. It is undeniable that we value the practices of deep attention, especially in the humanities; however, it should also be possible for us to recognize that print literacy participates in the industrial culture that has led us to the brink of global, environmental collapse and that there is no guarantee that it can save us. Maybe, just maybe, we need a different way of paying attention to the world.

That said, we should not be so foolish as to believe that our initial, transitional movements toward a digital hyper attention are on the right path. After all, centuries passed between the invention of writing and Plato's development of philosophy. The right answer might lie in the intersection of deep and hyper attention. In a 2007 PMLA article, "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes," Katherine Hayles explores these questions and writes

critical interpretation is not above or outside the generational shift of cognitive modes but necessarily located within it, increasingly drawn into the matrix by engaging with works that instantiate the cognitive shift in their aesthetic strategies. Whether inclined toward deep or hyper attention, toward one side or another of the generational divide separating print from digital culture, we cannot afford to ignore the frustrating, zesty, and intriguing ways in which the two cognitive modes interact. Our responsibilities as educators, not to mention our position as practitioners of the literary arts, require nothing less.

One thing I take from Hayles is the need for a critical mode that is not seated in deep attention (even though it might emerge from there). This is what, for example, Ulmer looks for. Zazen gives one a different kind of attention from the focus on print. It is an awareness of the emergence of thought (at least in my reading) from the intersection of the body with the world. Perhaps there is something in that, in thinking about the extension of the body and cognition through these digital networks. Though our cognition may be distributed, we still become conscious of it at a single point. And it is to that point that we must level our attention.

literacy objects: exposure, assemblage, network, plasma

Continuing from my previous post on the subject of literacy...

As I began to discuss previously, what would it mean to approach literacy in the same way as Latour approaches society? That is, to begin with the critique that we conceive of literacy as its own special material and that we tend to leap from local reading scenes to the panoramic backdrop of literacy as a general social phenomenon. To follow on Latour we might instead insist that "local" scenes of literacy are mediated by objects that provide duration to literacy practices and that the panoramic (or oligoptic in Latour's terms), globalizing frames of literacy are produced in their own (dis)locat networks. As such, when the NEA wishes to publish on the "crisis" in literacy in America, this panoramic view is produced in offices somewhere. The same would be true of the Horizon Report and its digital literacy mentioned in the previous post.

So here's a general question: how do you know if someone is "literate"? Literate is in scare quotes here b/c you get to define literacy in a variable way. But basically, if I send a message and the receiver responds/acts in a way from which I can infer s/he understood what I said/wrote, then I'm likely to think that person is literate for the purposes of our conversation. So literacy suggests some kind of cybernetic loop, right? To what extent then can we say that literacy is something that an individual has? Or alternatively, to what extent might we say that literacy emerges with an assemblage or network?

Let me turn these questions on myself. I have a PhD in English. Most people would assume that means I'm literate in some general sense. So where does that literacy reside? There are embodied elements in my ability to process sight and sound, to turn letters and phonemes into words and then into sentences. It is not very often that I am conscious of sounding out a word or making sense of a sentence, though of course these activities were learned once upon a time. I don't remember if I learned to read in school or at home (or both), but I do remember teaching my own kids to recognize words in books and read simple sentences. There is an extensive assemblage that is involved in this activity: special books, reading time, a comfortable chair, perhaps a promise of some reward.  Who knows? And it doesn't end there. 

We tend to imagine that some basic literacy is like riding a bike, easy to recall. But when, if ever, do we practice this "basic literacy"? Do we not, instead, always practice specific, complicated literacies? The most "literate" professor, divorced after a long marriage, may fail to make small talk on a date. Perhaps I haven't read a particular dense philosopher since grad school: can I just open up the book as if I never left? Most poignantly, what better definition of great literature could there be than a novel that you can reread every few years to discover something new? Did you become more/less literate? Certainly there is something translatable from one literacy event to another. Each new literacy act does not require learning a whole new language or learning to read again. In the same sense, each new social act does not introduce you to an entirely new society. This does not mean that there is some hidden social force or some spectral literacy at work but rather that there exists a continuous network of objects, mediators, and actors sustaining (and mutating) literacy from the early reader primers to the most erudite scholarly texts to the latest Hollywood blockbuster or hit video game.

Perhaps one would want to object that these are different kinds of literacies, that the literacy of reading a novel is different from the literacy related to a movie or a video game. No doubt that's true. But then the literacy of reading a novel is different from the literacy of reading Latour. And the literacy of reading J.K. Rowling is different from the literacy of reading James Joyce. And the literacy of reading James Joyce today is different than it was ten years ago or ten years from now. Or in my house or at the coffee shop or for a class. There are plenty of differences, but there are also many continuities. After all, who would deny that novels can be made into movies or that video games can tell stories? This is NOT the result of some generalizable literacy. One simply has to follow the meetings between authors, agents, publishers, movie producers, script writers, directors, actors, etc.

In more abstract terms, literacy emerges in the exposure of actors, objects, and mediators in each reading assemblage. So when the Horizon Report urges educators to address the challenges of "digital literacy," the task is at once simple and complicated. It is simple in the sense that all that might be required is for faculty to incorporate digital media into curriculum. It's complicated because that incorporation turns out not be that easy, especially when one realizes that literacy practices that once were at work in the curriculum are mutated through their exposure to emerging technologies.

But as Latour suggests in Paris: Invisible City this complication is also an opportunity.

When there's a lack of techniques, when by chance a strike or breakdown deprives us of a means of communication or transport, everyone learns, walking and talking, that the social world is indeed flat, that it has to be composed piece by piece, staircase by staircase, concierge by concierge. When riots are rumbling no one believes that there is a Society, constantly present, with little individuals living in it.

From every bridge insurrection can emerge, a new totality, a new regime, marching through Paris, offered to Parisians. Switching from the real to the virtual Paris means finding the road to these potential totalities, these scattered virtualities, yes, these former virtues (the word "virtual", don't forget, also derives from virtus, the favourite world of the ancient Romans), from this plasma —the word meaning a fine layer of clay that Prometheus was said to have used to model Pandora.

Because literacy is not a generalizable thing, it cannot be suddenly gained, lost, or transformed in a general way. The introduction of the digital creates a breakdown in the college classroom (so we sometimes ask students to turn off their devices to forestall such breakdowns). And now we see that literacy, like the social, is flat. Perhaps we bemoan the lost dream of literacy but only in the way that a child bemoans the loss of Santa Claus. Literacy must be composed piece by piece. Furthermore, when the "real" social world of literacy breaks down, we enter Latour's virtual, potential totalities. As Latour notes in Reassembling the Social, "When pointing out the ‘plasma’, don’t we discover a reserve army whose size is, as Garfinkel said, ‘astronomically bigger’ than what it has to fight?" That is, in entering this virtual, potential, plasmatic space, one discovers connections to virtual-actual objects far beyond the formalist structures of socialized literacy. And through our exposure to virtual literacy we open new opportunities for education (among many other things).

Of course we need to resist deciding in advance what digital literacy might be.

the horizon of "digital literacy"

As happens around the time of year, EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium have published their annual Horizon Report. By now, you are likely familiar with its methodology of identify six technologies "on the horizon" of adoption in higher education across three time periods: one year or less; two-three years; four-five years. This year's winners are the following:

• Mobile computing (1 or less)
• Open content (1 or less)
• Electronic books (2-3)
• Simple augmented reality (2-3)
• Gesture based computing (4-5)
• Visual data analysis (4-5)

I'm particularly interested here in the first three. Not only because they are more imminent, but also because they have more obvious connections to writing instruction. The report also identifies larger trends and challenges. While each has an impact on rhet/comp and English Studies in general, one in particular points toward us:

Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. The challenge is due to the fact that despite the widespread agreement on its importance, training in digital literacy skills and techniques is rare in any discipline, and especially rare in teacher education programs. As faculty and instructors begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm. This reality is exacerbated by the fact that as technology continues to evolve, digital literacy must necessarily be less about tools and more about ways of thinking and seeing, and of crafting narrative. That is why skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral and difficult to sustain.

If you are tied to this business at all, then you recognize this as familiar rhetoric. Though I'm going to poke some holes in this in a minute, that should not undermine the fundamental situation at stake here. It is increasingly difficult to imagine arguing that college students will not be using digital media as students, professionals, and citizens for many purposes that will partly supplant as well as extend the way prior generations used books, paper, pens, typewriters, libraries, televisions, newspapers, lecture halls, and even higher education itself. As an industry, as institutions, and as faculty we remain ill-prepared to meet these changing conditions.

That is fundamentally what is at stake in that passage.

However. I am concerned about the concepts that we are deploying to address these changing conditions. I was zipping around a lot on the web yesterday, so I apologize for not attributing this, but I was reminded of Deleuze's perspective that concepts are developed in order to address problems/questions. Either way, here's a quote from Negotiations via Wikipedia

"Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say."

In this frame, I would suggest that "literacy" is a concept that responds to the problems print technologies pose as mechanisms of communication. Here we remediate, I suppose, the concept of literacy as "digital media literacy" in response to the problem of understanding how assemblages of/including digital technologies mediate communication. Oh, I recognize the rhetorical nature of this choice. "Literacy" is a charged term in education. Few would doubt the importance of teaching "literacy," so to tie digital media to literacy is a way of brining a particular kind of legitimacy and attention to the task. The word "literate" enters English along with the printing press in the 15th century, where it refers to a general understanding of language and a liberal education. Literacy, tellingly, only appears in the late 19th century as a discernable quality or skill and as a quality of a social group. So one might contend that "literacy" only appears as a concept as a way of socializing and institutionalizing a particular perceived problem in the habits of a population who were being newly introduced to a system of public education.

I will take this one step further and suggest that literacy suffers from conceptual problems that are similar to those Latour identifies in the use of the term social by "sociologists of the social" (as he calls them). Namely, that we imagine that literacy is a particular kind of substance, much as we might typically imagine the "social" to describe a particular substance. That is, that "literacy" is a thing (or a category of things if we want to accede that there are different literacies) that one may or may not "have." Much like the problems Latour sees with social explanations, questions of literacy tend to either focus on local settings (i.e. Johnny (not) reading his book) or leap to general social explanations of (il)literacy.  This shouldn't be surprising since we think of literacy as a social phenomenon and problem. If we think of literacy practices as a subset of social practices, then it becomes maybe a little more clear where ANT comes into this conversation. We can recuperate literacy just as Latour does for the social, but it is likely a long process. Maybe this is why some folks (e.g. Ulmer) prefer to invent new terms. 

So let's take the example of mobile computing. As faculty, we cannot rush in with preformed definitions of mobile literacy. Our students are extensive users of mobile computing. I use my iPhone all the time, but maybe not as much as they often use their mobile phones, and not for the same activities. We can think of "digital media literacy actions" (i.e. producing and consuming digital media) as the development or extension of a certain kind of social ties but also as the development/extension of cognitive/affective/subjective networks. As Latour argues, these bonds gain durability through objects. 100 daily text messages from your significant other points to this durability and the need to refresh it. Literacy is not natural (of course) nor does it just sit in the background, invisible, waiting to be called upon. It is continually in action through these networks. And nowhere is that more clear than in mobile computing.

Will Richardson and the new high school, Clay Shirky and the new college

I wrote a few days ago about a conversation initiated by Clay Shirky on the idea of reimagining college from the ground up. Will Richardson started a similar conversation on his blog a few days later about eliminating or reimagining high schools. Obviously these are just the most recent instantiations of what is an ongoing conversation.

So here are a few points I think we should consider before we roll out the dynamite.

1. Education is a significant $100Bs industry, if not more. US higher education revenue itself is $400B. Add into that all the industries that provide services to educational institutions from cleaning supplies to textbooks.
2. Think of the impact on local economies of closing down colleges and significant parts of school districts: both of which represent major employers in many, many communities. One could turn a 1000 college towns into mini-Detroits (sorry Detroit). 
3. Add into that the economic contributions of universities, not only as spenders, but as developers of technology and attractors of talented professionals into economic regions. 

My point is that "people" like to complain about the expense of education because they read the big number in the state budget and they see the school tax bill and the money coming out of their paychecks. Generally though, people have little sense of the economic value resulting from that investment. Maybe we need better PR, but that's a matter for a different post.

One of the issues that arose on Will's blog has to do with maturity. Are we ready to leave our 14-17 year-old kids at home when we go off to work and say "make sure you get on the computer and do your lessons"? Because we can't afford to say home, right? And most of our neighbors can't afford to stay home. And I don't think we are just going to expect the retirees or the stay-at-home parent down the street to watch our kids? And if they did, do we think it would be any cheaper than our school tax bill? And would they learn anything as a result?

No, if we were going to eliminate the principle of gathering up the local teens and having them be supervised (i.e. job #1 of high school), it would have to be because we had a massive cultural shift wherein we determined these individuals were legally adults. That is, if your 15-year old burned down my house, I couldn't hold you any more accountable than I could if your 18-year old did it. In a way this is going back in time, because a century ago these teens were in the work force. 

And I think that's what would happen to the vast majority of teens today if we eliminated compulsory attendance at a HS. They would seek to enter the workforce, which would only further damage the economic viability of a community already reeling from the massive layoffs in the school district. Of course none of that is necessary. But we would have to significantly restructure the operation of market capitalism and the government to create conditions where these individuals were considered mature enough to not require supervision but were not considered as employable.

Meanwhile, though we can certainly contest the questions of the qualifications/characteristics of good teachers, best pedagogic practices, and the shape of curriculum, I think we would, again, have to seriously reshape society to imagine conditions where education would not be undertaken by individuals who are specialized in these activities.

Would you allow someone without specialized training to cut your hair? fix your car? clean your teeth? do your taxes? But you think it's a good idea to entrust your child's education to someone without specific education in doing that job? If we don't need professional educators then there are probably very few professions that we do need. And so there is a segment of our society that cuts their own hair, fixes their own cars, doesn't visit dentists, and doesn't pay taxes. Maybe they homeschool too. 

Is that the future America that we are in search of?

Now, I've been to high school, and it sucked. I was nominated "class bookworm" for chrissakes. It wasn't fun, and the education was mediocre. I've basically spent the rest of my life attending classes and working on college campuses. So I am aware of their limitations too. I've been known to spend a fair amount of time studying digital social media (which is often identified as a primary tool for whatever will supplant education). I have argued and will continue to argue that digital media should and will be further integrated into education. However, I will also continue to argue that for the foreseeable future and for the majority of learners, a primarily socially-mediated education will not work, not without supervision for minors and specialized educators to interact with.

So if you want to know my positive contributions to these questions of the future of schooling, very briefly, here you go:

• stop using age as the primary means to organize students: let them learn and move through the curriculum at their own speeds.
• use social media to create greater curricular customization (e.g. maybe you don't have enough kids in your school to study Italian but I bet there are enough in the county).
• focus more on doing, on creativity and experimentation
• stop stigmatizing failure through this debilitating test culture
• sometimes one makes philosophical realizations while jogging
• sometimes one realizes something about history while painting
• a mathematical concept might make sense while practicing violin 
• in other words, don't be so certain we understand how learning happens or what we need to learn

Anyway, that's probably enough griping for today.

actor-network theory and a composition program

I'm teaching Reassembling the Social next week (actually just Part I; Part II is next week) and so I'm going back through the text, looking closely at the various uncertainties.

• what are groups
• what is action
• what are objects
• what is natural/what is social
• how does one write an account of these things

I am interested to see the direction the class will go with Latour's argument, since in many respects it runs counter to the "critical sociological" approaches that typify many literary studies uses of cultural theory (e.g. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, etc.) to say nothing of more textually oriented, postmodern approaches. So, we'll see. 

Meanwhile I want to take up ANT in understanding something "simple" like a composition program.

After all, the faculty and students of a composition program make up a group that is continually performed through regular class meetings. The adjuncts and professors are hired, the TAs accepted into graduate programs, the students enrolled in the university. The group has a number of spokespersons, beginning with the WPA but moving right through to the instructors who operate as spokespersons for the group in each class meeting. There are any number of objects. There are the documents of the program: employee contracts and evaluations, syllabi, assignments, student work, etc. There are faculty offices, the classrooms, the chairs and desks, the computers and other A/V equipment. There's the program's website and each class' CMS. And all of these stand a step away from the department, the college, the campus, other faculty, staff, and administrators, general education curriculum, tuition payments, the library, campus computer networks, and so on. "Beyond" the campus is the entire disciplinary apparatus of rhetoric and composition. Of course we know all this stuff is there, but our tendency has been to leap from the classroom to the nebulous, invisible forces of "academic discourse."

While the students are in some senses "in" the composition program, they also constitute a significant anti-group, whose performance can be witnessed in scholarship, in email, official program documents, hallway conversation, program memos, etc. The anti-group student obviously is a formal, institutional designation, but it is more than that. Composition instructors are "not-students" (even though many of them in fact are graduate students). (Needless to say, students identify faculty as an anti-group as well.) There are then a whole series of anti-groups that cut through composition program group identification: adjuncts, grad students, tenure-line faculty, program admins, literary studies scholars, creative writers. In short, a composition program's group cohesion is continually threatened by the likelihood of its members viewing one another as parts of anti-groups relative to other group identities they have. Of course this is always the case with group performance.

Even though composition isn't "scientific" the question of "matters of fact" vs. "matters of concern" are integral to group functioning. Composition group behavior is replete with "factual" statements about the "nature" of student writers, as well as the nature of writing itself. In some sense, the operation of composition scholarship and professional development has been to shift matters of fact into matters of concern.

So now, I'll circle back to the question of action. How do we explain our actions as composition faculty? The scholarship is replete with heroic pedagogy narratives and best practices. Blogs and email listservs fill out these explanations in less formal ways, as do all the traditional forms of hallway "lore." Here is the core lesson that Latour would impart to those who might study composition. Rather than coming to the scene with readymade "social" explanations and terminologies, one must listen to the group and their own ways of explaining their actions.

• Where do they call upon "matters of fact"?
• Where do they refer to program requirements or other institutional documents?
• Where do they mention class size, meeting times, classrooms, offices?
• Where do they discuss "technology"?
• Where do they mention workload?
• When do they bring up anti-groups or criticize other potential agencies? (e.g. I don't do "it" like them or I don't do "it" b/c of that agency.)

Of course I come to these questions not simply as a disinterested researcher but as someone invested in making changes in a particular composition program. In this context I might ask, if I change one actor in this network (e.g. the outcomes statement for the curriculum), how might it alter group formation and performance?

And how would I describe the agency involved in my decision? I am striving to make these changes because

• research indicates these are the appropriate outcomes for a composition program
• I have a professional/ethical obligation to design a program that meets with my best understanding of how composition should be taught
• there are departmental/institutional expectations to do so
• this is what one does, professionally, as a WPA
• my professional identity and ethos is tied to the institutional shape/appearance of the program

Of course I could go into more particular depth about the agency behind each element in the outcomes statement. As we should understand from Latour, the paths for research are endless here: innumerable ant trails.

And perhaps, most importantly, at the end of the day, what we are really after here is changing student writing practices. So maybe we ought to be looking a the group performance of student writers, at their anti-groups, at their explanations of agency, at the objects in their networks, and their matters of fact. 

Here's a curious question... the putative raison d'etre for FYC is that students "need" to be "better writers." I don't know how we determine if this is "true" or what it means, but let me set that aside. It is not a fact; it is a matter of concern. Presumably, one could look at the WPA Outcomes Statement or a similar institutional document to get some understanding of what students lack and what the general path toward better writing might be: e.g., practicing the "writing process," reducing grammatical errors, learning MLA style, acquiring some basic rhetorical analytical skills.

How would instructors describe the agency involved in assigning a poor grade to student writing? What causes them to give this grade? What is their interpretation of the causes of the student's poor performance (e.g. didn't read the assignment, wrote it the night before, etc.)?

Furthermore, what are the students' explanations of their own agencies? How do they describe the forces that lead them to write as they do?

From the perspective of Latour, might one not view mainstream rhetoric and composition as operating out of assumptions similar to the "sociologists of the social" that Latour critiques?  That is, do we not head out with an already-established theory of the invisible forces of the "social" and "discourse" and the heavy baggage of intricate meta-language for describing groups and actions? Might one not go even further and see connections between some composition pedagogies and the assumptions of "critical sociologists" who Latour identifies for even more rigorous critique?

Fortunately we are not obligated to agree with Latour. I say "fortunately" as I'm not sure how the discipline would withstand such an encounter.

On the other hand, if we consider this a misfortune, we might continue by engaging what Latour says about writing and the demands of engaging the other four uncertainties through one's written encounter with the groups one studies.

oh digital humanities, where art thou?

Some recent, thoughtful, and often provocative posts on the relations among digital humanities, digital media studies, and the traditional humanities from Ian Bogost, Dave Parry, Cathy Davidson, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick. As is discussed in these posts and the comments following upon them, there are all kinds of potential and actual conflicts among various flavors of digital scholars, which I suppose I would characterize as ranging from those who study digital media of some kind to those who employ digital technologies in their study of objects/practices that are not in themselves digital (e.g. historical literary texts). Among those more deeply embedded in digital media, it is common to find the argument that an engagement with the technology or digital literacy or some similar formulation is the humanities' best chance for continued relevancy (if not just survival) over the next decade. I have made this argument here. In fact, I pinned my career on this supposition nearly 15 years ago, as did many of the scholars now involved in digital media.

Perhaps this is not a fair characterization, but in my encounter with "digital humanities," this nomenclature mostly refers to scholars who are largely carrying out traditional humanistic scholarship and/or studying traditional objects but using digital technologies either in the analysis of those objects or in the dissemination of their research. In my new position at UB, I've been sitting on the steering cmte for our digital humanities initiative and reviewing applications for the grants we offer. And this would be how I would characterize the work I see here. One might be tempted to read this as an argument that digital humanities doesn't represent much of shift in the work being done. And I suppose that in the weakest versions of digital humanities that might be true. But at the same time, there is a more subtle observation to be made, that in taking up these technologies there is an inescapable shift in scholarly work. Maybe it is slow moving, maybe it is not fast enough to "save us," but something is happening.

Meanwhile, there remains a more substantive resistance among the traditional humanities that ranges from those faculty who might oppose colleagues or their institution when they pursue the "digital" to others who simply will not choose to "go digital" themselves.

But that's an old story. In some ways, the will to digital media is a refrain of modernity, to "make it new." And as such, it is perhaps fundamentally at odds with the humanistic ethos of conservation. 

The "problem with the humanities" as I see it is only tangentially related to digital media. In this regard, I strongly agree with Ian, when he writes "It's not "the digital" that marks the future of the humanities, it's what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas." I think that in a failed attempt to mimic science through the 20th century we have wound up insular and hyper-specialized, marginal and increasingly irrelevant to others. As highly specialized as scientific research becomes, there remains a general connection to the world through technology. One might be critical of that relationship, but it is undeniably there. The humanities don't have that. That's not to say that we need an instrumental or market-driven relationship with the broader culture, but simply that we need some relationship.

As Richard Florida argues, the strength of the university as cultural-economic machine is not only related to its production of technology, of patents and so on. It is also a function of its ability to attract and nurture "talent" and its capacity to foster "tolerance." The humanities, even the digital humanities, will likely never be a patent-making machine, but we should excel at producing talent and tolerance. In order to do this though, we must connect with the "great outdoors." In this way, I think Dave Parry's contention that "we" should be out here, in social media, on the web, communicating makes sense. We need to reconnect with the rest of the campus (and beyond) to make the humanities relevant again, and the digital as both media and object of study is an obvious means to that end (though not an exclusive one).

More importantly, this shift to reconnect the humanities with the outside will eventually need to recognize that the necessary move into digital media will change the humanities in ways that we don't understand yet. But think of it this way. Humanism has been around since the 14th century. Philosophy and rhetoric go waaaay back. Do we think the printing press changed the humanities? Of course. Did the industrialization of print change the humanities? Of course. We wouldn't have journal articles otherwise. The humanities has always been shaped by media technologies. 

So maybe these changes won't take place as quickly as some (like me) would want. Maybe they won't happen quickly enough to prevent the collapse of traditional humanities departments. But in the end, the study of digital media will continue, and I imagine that the study of history, literature, art, and philosophy will continue in some form as well.

on lesson plans and pedagogic tactics

ProfHacker offers a useful post by Billie Hara on lesson planning. It's a useful discussion, and one to which I could certainly see pointing new teachers. Hara also notes the familiar stereotypes of professors who are underprepared (and thus unfocused) or over-rehearsed (as in presenting from ancient lecture notes). So perhaps we might all think more carefully about preparation.

But here's the thing...

How do we want to characterize the cybernetics of pedagogy? Would we say that a course has a specific direction toward which we a steering? Is each class meeting then a point along a largely pre-determined course? And if not, then what exactly is being "planned"?

I want to consider this in terms of my own teaching. This semester I am teaching the second part of your FYC curriculum. The course's curricular status is fairly typical. It's the place where we teach "research." The courses generally have a "thematic focus." The one unique quality is that the course also satisfies the humanities GE requirement. My particular section's thematic focus is the effects of media networks and emerging technology on research practices. I could say more about it, but I don't think it is necessary for my purposes here.

Tomorrow we will be discussing Nick Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Since the course revolves around a research project, the first task is for the students to begin identifying a research topic within the context of our theme. The Carr essay offers some potential avenues for that. So we will be reading that and a couple other pieces over the next few classes with this task in mind. Certainly I could enumerate several curricular goals (and match them to the WPA Outcomes Statement or whatever). But really, from my perspective, the goal is for something unplanned to occur. 

It is in that context that I think of tactics rather than plans. We are all familiar with the laywer's advice that one never asks a question without knowing what the witness' answer will be. Here, that tactic is inverted, where pedagogical questions are ones where one not only does not know what students will say, but ones where one does not know what they should say. The students' task will be to find some way to intersect the course material with their own experience and interests in a way that can result in a research project. Who knows what paths they will take? Or what rhetorical challenges they will face?

That's not to say that a curricular program cannot have goals or objectives, but it is to suggest that there isn't a simple brick-by-brick relationship between those goals and classroom activities. Looking at the WPA Outcomes, for example, I couldn't say of my own teaching that a particular class or activity matched up with a particular outcome. More importantly, regardless of the kinds of outcomes we might describe for FYC as a profession, we need to understand that they are not discrete objectives but attempts to describe different features of a more integrated experience of humanistic writing.

None of that, btw, should be interpreted as meaning that we shouldn't give thought to what we are doing in class as teachers! Of course we should. I just have trouble thinking about a course in terms of planned outcomes, in terms of being able to say to a class that today we will learn x, y, and z. Ultimately the task of the writer is to be able to take up the world around herself and compose. I don't think that's planned.

the business of critical thinking and design

The NY Times reports on the rise of "multicultural critical theory"... in business schools??? Citing changes at UToronto, Harvard, and Stanford there appears to be a shift toward bringing both critical theory and design theory into MBA's. “The liberal arts desire,” Roger Martin, dean of Toronto's b-school says, is to produce “holistic thinkers who think broadly and make these important moral decisions. I have the same goal.” Similarly, “If I’m going to really launch you on a career or path where you can make a big impact in the world,” explains [Stanford U's b-school] dean, Garth Saloner, “you have to be able to think critically and analytically about the big problems in the world.”

On a slightly different tack, the article also reports on "design thinking"

“Critical thinking is an ability to understand a system or a statement and respond to it,” explains Tim Brown, president of IDEO, the design firm whose founder, David Kelley, was the main force behind the [Stanford U's] d.school’s creation. “What’s different about design thinking is, it’s focused on taking that understanding you have about the world and using that as a set of insights from which to be creative.”

The article goes on to note that "The changes are also not limited to graduate programs. Because business is now such a popular undergraduate degree, the Carnegie Foundation is arguing for greater integration of the liberal arts with undergraduate business programs."

Hmmm.... So what does it mean when business school deans start talking like humanities professors? Do we think there must be some miscommunication? Do we say that if one really understood "critical theory" or making important moral decisions then you wouldn't be running a business school or getting an MBA? I mean, how does one react to such reporting?

The reality is that in the mid-twentieth century all those business people were getting actual liberal arts degrees rather than business degrees with some liberal arts content. For the last 20-30 years students have been abandoning English and the rest of the humanities in pursuit of finance and accounting. So now it would appear that at least some b-schools might be realizing that the liberal arts education that their MBA students were getting as undergrads once upon a time wasn't so worthless after all. At the same time these gestures should clarify that learning critical theory is not connected to any particular political project. For example, an understanding of postcolonial feminist theory might help a manager in dealing with female workers in southeast Asia, but it doesn't mean that manager will come to identify herself or her corporate colleagues as oppressors. On the other hand, maybe such an education does result in the pursuit of some improvement of those workers' lives. So I'm not sure how to take that.

From the perspective of some critical theory, the activities of business schools and their graduates cannot be redeemed. For others, b-schools might be a good place to work on creating a more ethical and fair business world.

That said, I am particularly interested in the relation between critical thinking and design thinking. This is a space where I have long believed English and other humanities are lacking. We're quite good at the critical part, but we tend to ignore the next step, where one takes one's critical insights and uses them as a foundation for doing something... for action. In my experience, when one tries to do this one immediately encounters the critical function. So while I don't think that the humanities needs to go anywhere near what anyone would recognize as a "business" curriculum, it wouldn't hurt exploring the positive, creative potential of critical thinking further. I think that if we were to find business majors in our courses that it would be helpful not only to teach critical theory but to encourage those students to figure out ways to make use of it in their professional lives.

avatar: exposure, immersion, becoming

So to dispense with the critique of dismissal, yes, you could say Avatar is Dances with Wolves in 3-D, or any other narrative of the imperialist-gone-native with the beautiful native informant love interest. In face, one can go back to the Crusades to find Knights Templar "going native." More interestingly though, one can situate that familiar narrative in a deeper mythic tradition regarding the outside or stranger. In these ways, Avatar is a story we've heard before. What is maybe more interesting is that the movie is a story we haven't seen before...

My thoughts on Avatar resonate with some of my writing about the Matrix trilogy in my book. The Matrix, too, was a familiar story told through a revolution in digital cinema. And there are some sci-fi similarities as well in terms of plugging in and shifting consciousness. The resonance for me is in the connections across the film's production, the content of the film, and its reception/consumption as a viewer. That's how I looked at The Matrix and it is how I am seeing Avatar.

Within the movie, there are two obvious forms of plugging in. The humans plug into their Na'vi avatars. The Na'vi in turn are plugged into symbiotic relations with other creatures on Pandora, as well as with the broad network of the planet itself. Plugging in, one might say, is a matter of exposure and immersion. It is perhaps an error to think of it, instead, as penetration. Penetration into what? Think instead of diving into water. We could say that is penetration, but hopefully the water doesn't get inside you and you are not really inside the water either. I mean, where would inside be? Between the molecular bonds of oxygen and hydrogen? No, you are exposed to the water and immersed with the water. Similarly, with the narrative's plugging-in there is exposure between human and avatar, between Na'vi and Pandoran creature. There is even immersion. And finally, here is the ongoing process of becoming, through the exposure and immersion of thresholds.

Meanwhile, one can see related activity in the fim's production. Using motion capture technology, the actors' movements and facial expressions are mapped onto the virtual Na'Vi characters. Cameron employs a virtual camera that allows him to fly through the virtual, 3-d landscape. The actors and director are also plugged in. The interact with the film through relations of exposure and immersion. The surface of the actors' bodies touch the surfaces of motion detectors and through these exposures, virtual characters come to life. Just as the film's avatars are genetically coded to match up with specific human users, the Na'Vi faces map onto specific actors' faces to pass along facial expressions. 

And what of us, the gentle viewers? Well, we are clearly exposed and immersed. Such is the case with all movies, after all. But Avatar does offer something different, What is interesting about it is that after the first few minutes, for most of the movie, one forgets that one is watching "3-D." That is, generally the 3-D doesn't call attention to itself too much. At least it didn't for me. However that doesn't mean that it simply reverted to being the same as the conventional film either. It is instead the depth of vision in the film that gives the sense of immersion.