digital digs

Web 2.0 and Higher Ed: the long tail, mashups, and the trusted student-user

Tim O'Reilly's excellent article on the Web 2.0 lays out some some significant challenges/opportunities for higher education, particularly for people like myself in technology-intensive areas. I won't summarize the article. It really should be read in full. Instead I'll just throw out some ideas.

1. The "long tail:" I've discussed this idea here before, I think. Basically the idea is the curriculum with a relatively small audience can be effectively delivered over the web. That is, even staying in the SUNY system, there's something like 400,000 students. Let's say 1% of those are Junior or Senior English majors (4,000 students). I need .5% of that vertical market to fill a course. As such, in theory, SUNY English faculty, could offer dozens of highly specialized online courses every semester.

The common error in thinking is that colleges should offer their core curriculum online. I think this impulse comes out of the belief that such courses have a wide consituency that might take them. That makes sense in a way, and shifting in the direction I'm suggesting will require some "attitude adjustment." However, it makes much more sense to me that students will take an online course because that's the only way they can get access to it. The problem is creating a large enough user base for the long tail to go into effect.

2. Mashups: this leads me to my second point. The really interesting parts of the Web 2.0 are mashups: combinations of various online applications to provide new user experience. O'Reilly provides the example of combining Google Maps with Craigslist to create maps of available apartments and homes. Having just bought a home, I can tell you this would have been a great service to have. In a sense, mashups have long been a part of higher education in the form of interdisciplinary studies, cross-listed courses, and such. As much as such activities are often lauded, at most institutions interdisciplinary programs are not well-supported or well-understood.

The long-tail curriculum I'm describing requires the mash-up of disciplines and institutions. Believe me when I say I know quite well the territorial protectiveness of most academics. Ultimately it is this strong territoriality that will be the undoing of many disciplines, including my own, for which I hold out little hope. I firmly believe that the practice of the mashup points the way to a new mode of curricular production. In this case, one is mashing up disciplinary content, methods, curriculum, institutional resources, and student populations.

For example, let's say I'm going to offer a 400-level course on contemporary poetics focusing on experimental and multimedia methods of composition. It's not a common course, so maybe its the only one of its kind being offered this semester or this year in the SUNY system. Maybe there are two or three others. In any case, a course of this kind has been offered before somewhere. So let's say that it's been offered twice before online, and there are online materials from those courses: blogs, wikis, etc. Now I'm going to mashup that content with my own content and leave something new for the next person who teaches the course. I'm going to enroll students from around SUNY and those institutions and departments are going to incorporate my course into their curricular requirements.

In order to so, they're going to have to trust me. Hence point three.

3. Trusted users: a significant part of what makes Web 2.0 applications valuable is the trust they put in users. From blogs to wikipedia to del.icio.us to Amazon's user comments and ratings, the Web 2.0 is about the value-added of the user and the capacity of a large number of users to be self-correcting.

The trusted users concept in higher ed works on two levels. First is the importance of the professor trusting his or her students. As I've just suggested, an important part of the work of a Web 2.0 course is adding to the course content that will live on to the course's next incarnation. Much of this content will be produced by students. Though perhaps a class doesn't have the critical mass of Amazon or wikipedia, it does have (hopefully) a highly committed community. I don't need 10,000 readers to keep my blog honest and accurate, just a dozen or so, fairly regular, and trusted users. In part this is the case because my course, just like my blog, is part of a large system.

As O'Reilly notes:

If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

A little sci-fi, but you get the point. My course is just part of the Web 2.0. My students don't have to be perfect or incredibly knowledgeable. They just have to be part of the process, contributing their own part to the collective intelligence. Assuming my vision above, my course is part of 50 or more highly specialized online courses in English offered each semester to 1000 or more students. At this level we start to approach the necessary mass.

But I'm forgetting the second part of the trusted user concept. The faculty have to be trusted users: trusted by the university AND by one another. This is the part I have a hard time imagining ever occuring (which is really pretty sad, since it means that we are our own worst enemies... which of course we are). But what this means is that I would have to be trusted, not only by my own faculty in my own department, but also by all the SUNY English departments, to offer a course for their students. In turn, I would have to trust my content with the next professor teaching the course, as s/he would have to trust me.

I don't know that it will happen, but this open source, large scale model of information is growing all around us.

material concerns

Thinking about some of the things Jeff wrote recently about writing practice. His primary observation concerns how writing occurs within a network (my word) of media and perceptions. When we think about the challenges of writing, whether it is situated in a basic writing class or FYC or a professional writing course or elsewhere, we have been trained to think of "process," but that notion of process is strangely separated from the materials that would be the requisite site on which any process could be enacted.

However, when we consider our own, specific writing process (i.e. the actual activities in which we engage and not the abstractions of invention, organization, revision, etc.), we cannot ignore the material. I think about my own writing practice. (And I should note here that obviously there is writing and then there is writing. That is, there are the perfunctory writing tasks of e-mails, memos, and so on; then there is writing that involves pushing the limits of thought, straining to understand, to see what one is trying to say...hence, to theorize.)

Clearly, I am discussing the latter. I would articulate writing as the unraveling of an instinct, impulse, sensibility, hunch--something like that: an un-apprehended thought. The first task for me as a writer is to catch wind of this thought. (BTW, I wouldn't call it "inspiration," as it strikes me that inspiration suggests a thought that one discovers (or one is gifted) wholly formed; what I am trying to described is more animalistic, more embodied.) This task is interminable, and the appearance of this non-thought is always untimely. While that's an abstraction, the near-ritualistic hunt is not. Neither is it particularly romantic. Much like Jeff describes, my process is one of multiple media and sensory inputs. Stacks of books, articles, mostly illegible notes and marginalia, scrawled diagrams, websites, blogs, databases. Music on. Music off. Food, drink, walk around the block. Then comes that moment that Ulmer dispatches students in search of in Internet Invention: the moment when everything flows.

Then it passes. And the process begins again. But somewhere in the back of the mind is that instinct/hunch that what I'm searching for can be found/made...composed.

I assume that most college writing instruction is really about that other, perfunctory kind of writing. The kind of writing everyone does; the kind you do when you're not a "writer." To be a perfunctory writer, you need control. You need to be able to order pre-fabricated thoughts, almost always somebody else's thoughts...this is the new company policy...this is what happened at the meeting...it was a pleasure meeting you. I hope you become my client...etc.

The other kind of writing is much more difficult to teach. Thinking about the material terms of such a writing, you realize that to be a "writer" means a commitment to a way of life. Not that you have to write the way I do. Obviously. But it strikes me that writing requires time, space, and material investment. This should be a no-brainer. However, somehow we continue to imagine we can simply "teach" students how to be writers. Even if this were the goal of composition (and I think we at least talk about composition as if this were its goal), I find it difficult to imagine how a single course (or two) could enact this becoming in any systematic way...especially since many people simply have no interest in becoming writers. Why should they? It's not like it pays well.

On the other hand, a professional writing program is hinged on transforming its majors into writers. It is a transformation that is both mental and physical. One not only needs to learn to think rhetorically, to understand the requirements of various genres, to adopt a way of talking about writing, to learn the art of revising, etc. etc. One also must transform physically/materially. What one does with one's body. How one spends one's time, and even one's money.

Again, I don't mean to suggest there's one writer's life; this isn't a religion. Instead, I mean that one's commitment to writing practice will manifest itself materially. Hence, infused throughout a professional writing curriculum must be the opportunity for students to develop this material practice. Perhaps, at first, a professional writing major writes in response to the prompting of a class. Most of the writing a student does is writing for a class. Ultimately, though, a reversal must take place: the demands of the classroom become part of a larger writing practice. One subsumes those demands to one's writing practice.

Of course perfunctory writing always remains, but the principle is to use the context of the curriculum as a launch point. To discover writing as a mode of inhabitation, a haunting, a material-embodied practice.

VRRL 2006: Virtual Reality in Real Life

Thanks to the efforts of my associate, Derek Mueller, the website for the conference is now up. Here's the call.

VR@RL (Virtual Reality in Real Life)
February 24-26, 2006
State University of New York, College at Cortland

Call for participation
200 word proposals
Deadline: November 15, 2005

VR@RL seeks participants interested in investigating the intersection of rhetoric and new media. The conference seeks to provide a forum for scholars working in this emerging area of inquiry, to address common problems in research and teaching, and to uncover fruitful points of connection. Fundamentally, the conference will address new media as it exists now and as it is emerging as an embodied, material concern.

Topics might include:

* new media in technical and professional writing programs
* new media in first-year composition
* the rhetoric of blogging and podcasting
* the impact of technology on theories of writing
* rhetoric and composition’s disciplinary future in new media
* new cultural practices and communities related to new media
* copyright and intellectual property

The conference will include an online portion, during which participants will share their contributions. This will be followed by a face-to-face conference organized as a series of roundtable discussions and workshops drawing on the central issues raised by the participants presentations.

Please send abstracts and/or direct your inquires to Alex Reid, Associate Professor, English and Professional Writing, SUNY-Cortland (reida at Cortland dot edu) or visit our conference website at http://vrrl06.earthwidemoth.com.

Professional Writing grads going on to grad school

We've been graduating students for two years now, and each year there's a few folks who decide that they want to go on to graduate school. Some want to do the MFA thing. However others are looking for an MA. In most cases, their interests are not in traditional literature programs but in rhet/comp or possibly professional or technical writing.

Though we are in an English Department, our students don't get "English" degrees. Our courses have a different prefix (PWR not ENG).

I'm going to have to figure out how that's going to work. Obviously, we are not preparing our students to enter traditional literature graduate programs, and I wouldn't expect our students to get into programs like that. However, I'm wondering about these other kinds of programs. Will they recognize the coursework our students are doing as suitable preparation for their curriculum?

an open letter to professional writing students

I'm looking for your feedback in thinking about the direction of our program.

I sense a tension between what our students want (or think they want), what interests faculty, and the expectations of the emerging discipline of professional writing. I'm trying to figure out how these things should be addressed.

1. As I see it, a significant majority of our students cite their primary interest as creative writing. That's fine and good. However, taking three or four creative writing courses is not a good way to prepare for most professional writing careers (e.g. technical writing, corporate communications, copywriting, journalism, etc.). This is only a problem inasmuch as students and faculty have the expectation that a PWR degree will prepare you for a job. It can, but not if you focus on creative writing, and this is as much a matter of attitude as course selection. Our program requires courses in writing for the web, technical writing, and revising and editing. We also require an internship. However, students who are interested in creative writing often do not approach these courses with the level of intensity that one would expect from someone expecting to try to enter the field of editing or technical communication.

This is not a criticism, per se. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be a technical writer or an editor.

2. This leads me to my second point: faculty interests. The history of our program is a little strange. Many of the courses we have were created by faculty who are not teaching in the program. That is, David, Vickie and I were hired on in the middle of the process (I was hired after the major had already been approved by the university). We've made significant changes. However, we have many courses that reflect the more traditional liberal arts interests of faculty. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy teaching creative writing and courses like Contemporary Poetics. But such courses are not what you would call the "core" of professional writing programs.

3. So what would a more conventional PWR curriculum look like?

Well, here is what our major looks like:

Here are the eight required courses:
1. Intro to PWR (entry-level course)
2. A creative writing course (entry-level course)
3. Rhetoric (theory/philosophy course)
4. Writing in Cyberspace (new media-professionalizing course)
5. Technical Writing (professionalizing course)
6. Revising and Editing (professionalizing course)
7. Internship (capstone/professionalzing course)
8. Senior Seminar (capstone/professionalzing course)

That looks ok to me for a PWR major.

But now look at all the other courses on the catalog:

"creative writing" courses:
Writing Fiction
Writing Poetry
Writing Creative Non-Fiction
(one of the three above fulfills the creative writing requirement)
Writing Children's Literature
Writing Sports Literature
Experiments in Creative Writing (new media/creative writing)
Advanced Creative Writing (proposed)

professionalizing courses:
Business Writing
Writing in Cyberspace II (which we have never offered)
Grantwriting (which we have never offered)
Writing for Community Development (proposed)
Publishing (proposed)

theory courses:
Contemporary Poetics
Evolution of Writing

You can see what we are trying to build our number of professionalizing courses, but we've only offered one of the elective ones so far.

So here's my question, and it's purely hypothetical b/c I don't think we'd make this kind of change, but anyway... Let's say we had TWO writing majors: a creative writing major and a professional-technical writing major.

The CW major would require Intro, Rhetoric, Revising & Editing, Senior Sem., at least 12 credits from the CW courses listed above, and 9 credits of general PWR elective

The PTW major would require Intro, Rhetoric, Revising & Editing, Cyberspace, Technical Writing, Internship, Senior Sem, 6 Credits of "professionalizing courses," and 6 credits of general PWR electives.

The differences are subtle but significant. The CW major could avoid cyberspace, technical writing, and the internship. Of course, these are also the courses that provide the most direct job training. The PTW major could avoid taking any creative writing courses.

Anyway, HERE is my question--to our PWR students: which of these hypothetical majors would you choose? Or would you prefer to stick with the current one?

If we offered a 400-level Advanced Technical Writing Course, would you take it? Would you be interested in Cyberspace II?