digital digs

screencasting: new media rhetoric

Jon Udell's post on the new freshman comp has been making the academic rounds: Colin, Derek, and Will have all commented on it. I can only imagine the tremendous resistance to this idea in the field of composition, which, like all disciplines is quite conservative when it comes to preserving its regular practices. However, I do see other possibilities.

There were two particular points of interest to me in Udell's post:

1. The connection between writers and programmers: "We haven't always seen the role of the writer and the role of the developer as deeply connected but, as the context for understanding software shifts from computers and networks to people and groups, I think we'll find that they are."
2. And the step into the new medium of video for the web (or screencasting as he terms it):

We're just scratching the surface of this medium. Its educational power is immediately obvious, and over time its persuasive power will come into focus too. The New York Times recently asked: "Is cinema studies the new MBA?" I'll go further and suggest that these methods ought to be part of the new freshman comp. Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we'll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles--consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement--will be familiar to programmers and writers alike.

And a third point comes up in the comments in reference to Daniel Pink's contention that the MFA is the new MBA. Also as noted in that comment, Richard Gabriel's contention that software engineering programs should model themselves after MFA programs: what does he mean by that?

composition in part time...I hate this

Ok, here's a few things I'm sure we can agree with:

1. Part time labor is expletive...and exploitative.
2. Full-time, non-tenurable teaching positions are an improvement over part-time labor in ethical terms and certainly in material terms for the people doing the work.

However, here's a completely unrelated question/concern that gets mixed up in this: how do you run a "good" composition program? These questions are unrelated except to the extent that you can say that a good composition program cannot be run on unethical employment practices.

So what do you need to run a good composition program?  You need full-time, tenurable faculty who specialize in composition. How many? I'm not sure, but enough to conduct research, do curriculum development, run assessment, and peform other service related to the composition program. These are things you can't ask lecturers to do (even if they have PhD's in rhetoric and composition, which isn't the case in our department).

the next killer teaching app?

I've been working with my colleagues at NeoVox developing our new site, which I had hoped to get going this semester, but now obviously we begin in the fall. We're using Movable Type for the students to post entries, to encourage interactivity with commenting, and to ease the production process. However, we don't want the site to look like a blog (not that there's anything wrong with that, right?). And we don't necessarily want to look like a commercial magazine (e.g. Salon) or like a news site, even though those are obvious examples for us to draw upon in some respects.

We have three primary variables we need to consider in our design:

1. Our students: so far our students come primarily from the Art department's new media design major and the professional writing major. We need to expand to increase both the variety of majors and the general number of students involved. Predominantly, those students will be producing text content for the site and will be almost totally inexperienced with web production. The big question is what will they write?
2. Our content: the answer is our second variable. We will be expanding our range of media to include podcasting and video blogging (hopefully we'll interest some of the communications majors who have background in this stuff). However, the bigger question is not the media but the content (if you'll allow me the illusory distinction). The general purpose of the site is to provide a "college" perspective/voice on issues from current events to popular culture to campus life. We've published on a weekly basis, but perhaps there's no need to do that. Or perhaps we could have a varied publishing schedule, like a blog. With our hoped for influx of writers, there will be more material than our designers can design for. Fortunately, Moveable Type will allow for easy publication of these texts. Then, we can focus our design team on a monthly publication related to the blog.
3. Our audience? Good question. It's more a question of who we want our audience to be. We can begin with improving name recognition for the magazine right here on campus. Then we need to think strategically. One thought that's stayed with me is targeting SUNY campuses across the state; that's some 400,000 students. We might even do some section on SUNY-specific and New York state news/events.

On CHATS: remediating the humanities

The CHATS conference at Albany this weekend was an interesting interdisciplinary investigation into technoculture with some emphasis on the changing shape of the humanities in higher education. The best part of the conference was getting to catch up with Collin and Derek and meet their colleague Madeline. They've all managed to post about the conference, so I guess I'm the slow one here.

The roundtable discussion on Friday evening addressed the way the concept of the "public sphere" has evolved since Habermas in these terms. There was some debate over whether it is appropriate to think of the college classroom as a public sphere or even if we should want the classroom to become such a space.

The conversation initiated the expected concerns regarding Foucault and other postmodernists on the issues of power, knowledge, and discourse. From my view, one of the more interesting aspects of the conversation was the introduction of the topic of affect. The Habermasian public sphere occludes affect, identifying instead the sphere as a site of rational discourse. However, while Foucault's disciplinary society my focus on the rational management of discourse, it is also clear, as is highlighted in Deleuze's "Postscript on the Control Society," that the micropolitical management of affects constitutes one of the most pervasive and effective modes of contemporary social-ideological power. Unfortunately the panelists weren't prepared to take the conversation in that direction.

Virtual Haunts: "To learn to live finally" (with new media)

I presented my paper at the CHATS conference yesterday and now I'm blogging the text of it. It was a small audience, but the paper was well-received. In some respects this conveys some of the key points in my book manuscript that I'm currently revising, particularly the final section of it.

In “The University Without Conditions” Derrida recognizes that, “This new technical ‘stage’ of virtualization (computerization, digitalization, virtually immediate worldwide-ization of readability, telework, and so forth) destabilizes, as we have all experienced, the university habitat… Where is to be found the communitary place and the social bond of a ‘campus’ in the cyberspatial age of the computer, of tele-work, and of the World Wide Web?” (2002, 210). While this might be read as the typical humanistic bemoaning of technology, Derrida has a more radical insight, observing that, “what has been upset in this way is the topology of the event, the experience of the singular taking place” (210).

My presentation discusses this technoscientific mutation of time and space termed event topology as it speaks to the future of humanities, particularly English Studies. Far from seeing this mutational process as deterministic (and hence already settled), I argue, broadly speaking, that “the experience of the singular” offers substantial opportunities for the emergence, the becoming, of indeterminable subjectivities and communities, opportunities that offer the humanities a chance to engage new media in a significant intellectual and ethical manner.

Curriculum by Numbers

One of my colleagues pointed out an article in Profession 2004 written by an MLA committee on the issue of building programs in English and attracting more students. The article turned me on to this NSF site that makes available a range of statistical information. Over the past day I've been playing with it to see how we compare with our "sister schools" in the SUNY system: Brockport, Buffalo, Oneonta, Oswego, Potsdam, Plattsburgh, Purchase, New Paltz, Fredonia, and Geneseo.

So here's the thing. On average, nationally, English BA's make up just less than 5% of all degrees conferred. According to the statistics available on the NSF site, 8 of our sister schools are at or above the national average (the most recent year available is 2001, so things could have changed). We are well below and it looks like we have been well below for at least the last 15 years. This isn't really news in my department. The professional writing program in which I teach was created largely to attract new majors into the department, which it is beginning to do. However, we're restricted in size by the fact that there are only three faculty and obviously all of our courses are of the small, writing intensive variety.

Our largest program is in Secondary Education, which reflects Cortland's overall strength as an education school. However, examining our sister school programs, I've noticed that there are not many that are larger than we are. Departments that have 3-5 times the number of regular English majors have roughly the same number of secondary education majors. This led me to a hypothesis.

Composition Labor Issues

There's something about Spring that calls for agitation--Prague Spring, May 68, etc. As an undergrad at Rutgers, spring was the time for taking over Board of Trustees meetings, sit-ins in administrators' offices, and so on.

So here we are again. Most people, even administrators, are sympathetic to the unfairness of part-time, adjunct and full-time lecturer labor. Of course most people are sympathetic to the problems of world hunger....yeah, that sympathy goes a long way.

More than half the courses at Cortland are taught by such faculty, including virtually all of the composition courses and many of our general education literature courses. That's something like 70-80 sections per semester. Maybe more.

They want fair treatment, which amounts basically to fair pay and benefits. It's a longstanding problem in our field, so I won't bother to lay it out. Most of you are probably aware of it.

I am willing to agitate if that is the best means available to change the system. Recently I heard it would take $1 million more a year in the adjunct pay budget to create equitable pay.

I'm sure it's not easy. But it could be done if you had a strong enough motive for doing it. All we have is an ethical argument, which is not so motivating in these days of the "excellent," market-driven university.