digital digs

Composition 2010, cont.

Jane is our typical 18-year first-year student in a composition course in the year 2010. How will she work? What will she learn? Peering into the near future like this, I think we can try to envision something that will not be radically different in institutional and epistemological terms. That is, we are still talking about colleges where students take courses during semesters from professors housed in departments. I think in time the notions of the course, semester, and department will all disappear or at least mutate beyond recognition, but not in the near future.

Instead, we can imagine Jane taking the traditional general education-type courses in math, history, science, and, of course, composition. So I am picturing an evolution of a composition course I might teach now. The students read essays from a thematically-organized reader, post responses to some online discussion, come to class to discuss both the topic and the rhetoric of the readings, and then write essays based on all this business. In short, a fairly typical comp. class.

Here though something else is going to happen.

Workload Curiosities

Our Dean, along with the higher-ups, has recently made a move to put the entire Arts and Sciences school on a 3-3 load. Our department has a 4-3 load. The trick is that this needs to be accomplished without additional teaching resources. This means either dropping courses or increasing class sizes. Somehow we need to drop 16 sections a year.

We have two main challenges. First, English does a great deal of service work from comp. to gen ed literature to advanced writing courses. Writing intensive courses CANNOT get larger, but dropping them will create problems for students.

We generally don't offer double sections of our major-specific courses. Our program is not that large. As such, increasing the size of those courses does nothing and dropping the sections will make it impossible for students to graduate on a timely basis.

This leaves us with general education literature courses, but here is the second problem. The majority of these courses are taught by instructors, whose loads aren't going to be reduced. Increasing the size of these courses just means piling more work on them.

So I have two realistic options. Both work froma numbers standpoint; neither is particularly desirable pedagogically speaking; but then again neither is a 4-3 load.

SUNY-Cortland and the 13th Grade

Paul Graham's essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular", recently published in his book Hackers and Painters, begins as a serio-comic explanation of the eponymous question but ends as a more straightforward critique of public education and our treatment of teenagers. With my daughter starting kindergarten in the fall, I guess I've been thinking back on my own unpleasant memories of school.

I'm not sure I agree with Graham's somewhat facile explanation of why nerds can't use their smarts to become popular, but he is certainly right on about the functioning of the cruel caste system in high school and the way in which adults turn a blind-eye toward it.

Unfortunately, SUNY-Cortland suffers from a similar problem. Why? To a put a none too fine point on it, as a school known for elementary education and recreation/physical education, we enroll a significant number of high school jocks, cheerleaders, and related social types. Needless to say, Cortland is also not a school that generally attracts elite students. And that's OK. These folks need college educations as well Our society needs elementary school teachers, football coaches, and physical trainers with college degrees.

the literacy net

Derek's post on Network Captives, which in turn references an exchange between Jeff and Will, dives into that big question of where new media is leading, and specifically if it is indeed leading us away from what we consider "literacy."

As is raised in these places, the concepts of the "open" text (a la Umberto Eco) or a Barthes-esque writerly text are both good places to start this issue. However ludologists and others who study interactive fiction (IF) might want to suggest that games move beyond these theories in that even the most writerly text remains static: that is, the readers interpretation of page one will not alter the text that on page two. The inclusion of the idea of collaboration is useful in making this move.

However, I also find that collaboration once again catches us in the literacy net.

Should Academic Writing be Copyrightable? | Kairosnews

A recent post on Kairosnews asks, Should Academic Writing be Copyrightable? | Kairosnews Specifically it suggests that faculty at public-funded universities should not own the rights to the work they produce, but instead that work should be owned by the university/state/public.

If indeed SUNY or the state of New York wanted to own the copyright to my writing, I suppose they would have to pay for the privelege. Currently, they do not, except in the case where the university specifically asks me to write something. This is part of the union contract. As such, any royalties I might get are not "extra" money, they are part of the negotiated compensation I receive as an employee. I think it is misleading to charge me with trying to steal from the public simply because I do my job and get paid for it by the terms of my contract. A change in the contract would be required, at least in my state, and I would obviously expect some other form of compensation.

In any case, there would be multiple problems with this suggestion.

Composition 2010: A Space Odyessy

Reading Rhythm Science and thinking about the meaning of "composition" in a very different light. Obviously we can think about musical compositions, material compositions; composition is the bringing together of parts that exist in some prior state. I suppose that in rhet/comp the parts are supposed to be pre-existing thoughts in the writer (though that runs counter to the notion of composition as invention) and, of course, the integration of research materials.

But in reading Paul D Miller/DJ Spooky, I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's reflection on the refrain in ATP and just the flow of repetition/iteration as it runs through Derrida. So the DJ as composer. We dispense with the notion of the "original" and see instead each composition as an iteration.

Miller writes, "Writing may be a little retro, but that's cool, too. That's why people still wear bell-bottom jeans. You can squeeze something out of the past and make it become new...At the end of the day, I write because I want to communicate with fellow human beings and forestall subjective implosion."

So look five or so years ahead, where we can imagine accessible technology in the computer classroom for any student to compose a multimedia piece as simply as they put together a written essay now--sampling video, music, text: creating a space with which we interact as readers/users/teachers.

Clearly we shall need to truly abandon our tired out notions of authorship and originality that underwrite our evaluation of student writing. We shall need to rethink our ideas about what learning might be and how it might be demonstrated.

Friendship

David Weinberger's post explores the notion of friendship, a concept I've taken particular interest in lately, especially since I'm teaching a rhetoric course on this theme in the fall.

But here is my motivated definition of friendship: a friend is someone in whom you confide. Now there are levels to this confiding. For example, you might have a colleage in whom you would confide your critical opinion of your boss, but you wouldn't tell that same person you were cheating on your spouse. Similarly, you might have a good friend with whom you would share your infidelity, but you might not tell that person your opinion of some professional issue, simply b/c s/he wouldn't be interested.

I think this goes along with David's notion that friends relax rules of behavior: judgment is suspended. However, we also expect confidentiality. That is, to continue David's example, we generally expect that our friends will not go around telling others how badly our feet smell (good-natured making fun aside).

As I said, this is a motivated definition. So what's my motivation?

trackback spam

I've temporarily removed the listing of trackbacks from my site as my trackback function was spammed by multiple rape porn links. I know that I can do IP comment banning. I wonder if I can do the same with trackbacks? I'm hoping the Typepad folks will have an answer for me. Have others experienced this?

the cost of new media

On the subject of ongoing discussions in relation to new media and professional writing: undoubtedly there are institutions with vibrant and popular new media and writing curriculum. At Cortland this is not precisely the case. In our defense, PWR is still quite new (2 years) and the new media programs on campus are even younger. Further more, the campus culture, which focuses on education and sports-related professional programs, does not lend itself well to our curriculum. That said, the number of majors in PWR is far above projections. Nevertheless, our class sizes remain small.

The upshot of this is the PWR is a relatively expensive major. With the amount of writing students do, and the workshop model, courses are necessarily small. In addition, the new media component is expensive in terms of hardware and software, and of course, also requires small classes (limited by the size of the computer lab).

None of this makes administrators particularly happy, especially when faced with the increased administrative/support responsibilities these programs (such as our NeoVox magazine) require and the resulting prospect of releasing faculty from teaching courses (and generating revenue).