digital digs

more youniversity

A couple weeks ago I wrote about Henry Jenkins' "youniversity" talk. As you may have seen, he has an article in Chronicle by the same name, which also appears on his blog. The article goes in a slightly different direction and offers more insight into what a youniversity might look like, drawing some on Jenkins' work at MIT. In a nutshell, Jenkins is asking what would happen if the "bottom-up," wisdom of the crowds, folksonomic qualities of networked media (or Web 2.0 or smart mobs or whatever you want to call it) informed the university. Jenkins employs Cory Doctorow's term "adhocracies" and writes:

An adhocracy is a form of social and political organization with few fixed structures or established relationships between players and with minimum hierarchy and maximum diversity. In other words, an adhocracy is more or less the polar opposite of the contemporary university (which preserves often rigid borders between disciplines and departments and even constructs a series of legal obstacles that make it difficult to collaborate even within the same organization). Now try to imagine what would happen if academic departments operated more like YouTube or Wikipedia, allowing for the rapid deployment of scattered expertise and the dynamic reconfiguration of fields. Let's call this new form of academic unit a "YouNiversity."

As a commenter on Jenkins' blog laments "I'd say that what you have described is the future irrelevance of most higher education - it's hard to imagine the change you describe surviving the institutional antibodies of the modern university. Of course the institution will survive for a long time, but it may face the prospect of becoming a vestigial appendage." I agree, in that I imagine that what would happen is that many departments couldn't function this way, that they will choose to go down with the ship (In English, I think it's the author-ship, sorry couldn't resist).

However, I'm honestly not too worried about the parts of higher education that will sink. The history of the university indicates that academic practices, fields, disciplines, and so on rise and fall (all you natural philosophy majors out there raise your hands). Like everything else, changes that in the past happened over centuries or decades now take place in years or months. Just like it used to be that your life would be much like your parents' life, it used to be that the academic department & college you retired from would look much like the one you graduated from.

Not so much anymore.

I would be more concerned that other institutional structures will not be able to adapt to our more fluid context. Can the university really manage to give up its self-delusion of control? Hierarchy has never really been about control, even "quality control." You can get these things now in a more dynamic and participatory way through adhocracies. Instead, it's always been about slowing the rate of change.

What happens if you allow a dozen or so faculty to form an adhocracy across disciplines and build an educational program without filling out a hundred forms, getting approval from half a dozen faculty committees, and getting signatures from every administrator from chair to provost? Well, for one thing, change would happen probably five times faster. That is, you could accomplish in two years what now takes a decade. More importantly you could accomplish in less than a semester, what now takes two years to make happen. For example, let's say right now I realized that we needed to add a new course to our curriculum. I could put it together and offer it next semester. As it is structured now, that would take years.

Now someone might complain that the result would be chaos, a total lack of coordination. However that person would probably also be under the mistaken apprehension that there's any coordination going on right now. Such a person would also likely believe that order was a top-down phenomenon rather than an emergent one. Clearly, moving to a "youniversity" model would require changes in administrative procedures and oversight; it would require some top-down functionality. But it would hardly be chaotic.

Remember we're talking about academics here. Despite claims about our politics, intellectual conservatism is deeply ingrained in most faculty. They're plodders. It's what makes them good at undertaking the close study of their disciplinary object. The faculty are the control rods in the intellectual reactions of the university. You don't need anything else.

Trimbur's Carnival

I swear it's not often that I wake up with ELP in my head, but this morning it's welcome back my friends to the show the never ends. Several have already taken up the call to Trimbur (Donna, Derek, Collin, Jeff W, Jeff R, Jenny, Bill).

Here's my short review.

1. I agree with Jeff Rice's response to the specter of critical theory, for much of the same reasons (e.g. Latour). I would not seek to "legitimize" rhetoric by creating a cultural studies of writing major. I've already been down this road. At Georgia Tech, we taught (and I believe they still teach) FYC essentially as an "intro to cultural studies" course. It was institutionalized that way, and they hire ADB's and post-docs who can deliver it.
2. I also agree with Derek's assessment that there is no reason for Trimbur's questions to be exclusive when they can be additive: "Can writing be taught?" "How can writing be learned?" "Should writing be studied? Furthermore, these questions can be proliferative, mutating one another (though honestly none interests me too much).
3. Though, as director of a professional writing major, I'm clearly supportive of the writing studies major as a general idea, I'm not attracted to the trope of the "seminar." To me, it is even more retrograde than the appeal to critical theory. I understand it's cache institutionally in saying "we're serious intellectuals b/c we teach seminars," but I believe we don't need to go backwards like that.

Reform in the teaching of writing is a difficult circular task. A couple graduate programs can decide they are going to reform their curriculum, but they still need to prepare students in a way that will make them employable by more conservative colleges and universities. At Penn State Capital College and SUNY-Cortland, the two places I've been an assistant prof, the FYC programs were easily 20 years behind current scholarship. The vast majority of sections are taught by adjuncts or instructors who may have little or no background in rhet/comp theory (even though they have MAs, MFAs, and sometimes PhDs in English). In neither case was there any continuing education or professional development, largely b/c it was felt that we couldn't ask these underpaid individuals to do one extra thing. Even in the case of tenure-track English faculty teaching FYC, the lit professors don't really have the training, and they aren't keeping up with rhet/comp scholarship obviously.

I realize research institutions have grad students teaching FYC, but in the larger picture this is just a one part of who teachs this course nationally. And in the case of grad students, in many instances those TAs are seeking lit PhD's and likely haven't had more than one course of rhet/comp theory either.

If one was going to reform FYC, one would have to alter this system, at least locally. At Cortland, where FYC is not only a college service course but meets system-wide general education requirements, you could potentially face massive bureaucratic hurdles to any substantive change. On any campus, you'd have to win over colleagues across the campus who think we teach FYC for them and that they know what we need to do. Even more difficult, you'd have to win over traditional lit folk in your department, who also think they know how to teach writing.

It's a morass, so I can appreciate the argument that says we should turn our backs on FYC. I'm not here to save anyone. I'm not here to save students who can't write. I'm not here to save composition from capitalism's satanic influence. My interest in FYC is purely mercenary. It's two more courses where professional writing faculty can interact with their majors. We can use FYC for creating attractive first-year learning communities and for recruiting students as majors and minors.

That's all it really means to me. I don't hold much hope for FYC. I fear it has too much inertia to change with the times and eventually it will become so atavistic that we'll just cut it out.

In my experience, a professional writing program offers a significant means to explore writing.  We study writing (both verb and noun) as Trimbur suggests. We practice writing. We study by practicing and practice by studying. We have courses like "Rhetoric" and "Contemporary Poetics" and "Evolution of Writing" where we read about writing and write and talk about writing. They are seminars I suppose. I suppose you could say we offer our students a cultural studies perspective, if the alternatives are a process orientation or a functional-transactional orientation.

However, I see it differently. In curriculum design we've long imagined courses as building upon one another, as connecting to one another. Now that network is technologically possible.  Students can build and access information across courses and semesters. In terms of networking, it's nothing special. In terms of curriculum I think it points the way out of the seminar. Furthermore, it makes it easier to trace linkages rather than leap (as Latour says) from the local interaction to the specter of ideology.

It's not technology to the rescue. It's recognizing that the conditions of writing shift and we must shift with them. One thing we don't want to inherit from our disciplinary cousins is the belief that we get to determine what it is that we study. We don't get to say "what writing is," let alone "what good writing is" (for chrissakes!).

learning from teaching online

I've been teaching Writing in Cyberspace and Academic Writing online this semester and using iTunes U. Using iTunes U has obviously got me thinking about video and audio I can create for my courses, as well as media my students can produce and share. The obvious first impluse is as a teacher is that you're going to record lectures or maybe get more ambitious and put together video with some better production values. Those things are OK, I guess. And I can put in the extra time to make a video with decent productions values. But if I do that, I'm going to want to use it more than once. Then I'll suddenly find myself in a world of canned content that I've been avoiding as an FTF teacher my whole career. If I were going to pursue that, I guess the best thing I might do then is create a library of media that I can share with my students.

Well, perhaps you can guess where I'm going with this. I've created some specific screencasts for my students to help them with some technical how-to's and maybe I'll create some lecture-like videos yet. But I can draw just as easily on existing material. I know, no great revelation there.

However, it does have me thinking about how one thing leads to another. In part it makes me think about the potential value of public pedagogy, a professional-technical writing channel on YouTube. Sure there'd be a fair amount of worthless stuff as there always is on YouTube. Yet there's also great stuff, as you know.

But more importantly this experience has offered up a palpable feeling of how these things proliferate. I remember when I first learned many years ago that students who have computers at home use computer labs more than students who don't have labs. Now that just seems obvious.

Well, this is obvious too: iTunes U can be a gateway drug. Start thinking about how you can draw networked media into a course and you'll uncover many avenues for doing this.

mobility matters

Is it any surprise that education struggles to adapt to the implications of mobile networks? After all, we work in an environment where many of our colleagues complain if desks are moved out of their "proper" alignment in rows. Just as moving desks into a big circle or rearranging them in small groups creates different communicational dynamics, different netowrks. Ok, it's a very loose analogy, but it's at least a point of reference from the context of everyday teaching.

Mobility matters.

So what's my point? iTunes U and podcasting have a range of uses unto themselves. And as is often pointed out, you don't need an iPod to use them. The result though of this logic is that we don't require students to purchase iPods (though many have them) and that faculty don't need them either. I realize the logistical and budgetary issues here, especially in a developing situation like this one where the technologies are in such a state of flux. However, I want to make an argument for the importance of mobility in this context.

Mobility is about more than convenience. It's more than listening to lectures on the treadmill or bus. It's also about time- and space-shifting pedagogy for your convenience. Can you imagine any potential value in your own courses to being able to offer instruction at a particular time and place outside of the classroom? For example:

• a tour of a particular place
• instructions/reminders for a process (e.g. guidelines for a lab experiment)
• technical support
• gloss on a reading (e.g. read chapter two and then listen to this)

It's not about doing the same old, same old but on foot. It's about imaging whole new practices, like these examples of just-in-time teaching.

Of course that's still just thinking about one-to-many communications. It's analogous to keeping the chairs in rows. Like shifting chairs in the classroom, iTunes U is really about shifting communicational dynamics. Take this potential for just-in-time communication and multiply it by the group-forming networks of Reed's law. Now it's not only the teacher who offers these communications, it's the extensive potential network of students with their overlapping interests and demands.

Right now we're just on the cusp of this. The near future will undoubtedly offer us mobile media devices with wireless download ability and playing from the network when the connection speeds make this reasonable. Sure, right now you need to anticipate your needs and download media to your iPod before you head out. But even in this context, the ability to draw on a network of students and faculty offers many possibilities.

Stepping into podcasting and iTunes U without a mobile component will certainly allow you to do a lot of new and interesting things, but it's mobility that offers the greater challenge to our pedagogical imaginations.

close reading versus clairvoyance

I was reading Collin on the issue of reading at a distance. Then I was thinking about this in terms of teaching fiction and then teaching writing. As I read it, the disagreement Collin is tracing deals with the objection to the idea of slicing/mining texts using a database rather than approaching them "directly" through a traditional reading of the text.

Close reading has long been a hallmark of English Studies. I would think it predates the New Critical movement we generally associate with close reading. For the New Critics, close reading revealed the intrinsic meaning of the text, as opposed to the extrinsic meanings provided by psychoanalysis, Marxism, and so on. Generally we no longer buy into the idea of intrinsic meaning; meaning can not be encased in the text itself but demands a larger context to be understood. Pick up a book in a language you don't understand and you'll see what I mean.

But how quickly do we move from close reading to clairvoyance? A novel must be read to be interpreted? And yet, before reading can't you already tell me what you will find? what new critical mechanisms will be at work? to what extent does a cultural studies or postcolonial or feminist (or any other theory) interpretation exist prior to the text's reading?

For me, placing this issue in composition is more interesting. Yes, we begin with a sincere focus, a close reading one might say, on student writing, but how quickly do we move to the nebulous force of the "discourse community" or "academic discourse"? Do we know, before even reading the title of a student essay, what it might say? what it should say? or perhaps most importantly, how it should be said?

When you think about composition instruction in its purported role of improving student writing over the course of an undergraduate career, it would seem obvious, at least from an outsider's position, that you could look at an incoming student's writing and a graduating student's writing and see if the writing got better. A study of this kind, if it were feasible would be the clear kind of evidence one way or another about the efficacy of particular pedagogies or writing instruction in general. But we know this kind of longitudinal analysis doesn't work (for writing anyway)... too many variables.

So what allows us to fall back on an amorphous academic discourse community? What happened to those variables? Here we answer with pragmatics, perhaps, and say it is necessary to reduce the complexity and give the students some general direction about theses, intros, conclusions, citing research, etc. You know the drill.

If we stick to this narrow goal of making students better writers of academic papers (which I personally have no allegiance to, but for the sake of the argument here it's sufficient) then the question is "how do I write a paper that gets a good grade?" After all, how else can we define being a better writer of academic papers than in terms of better grades? Anyway, given this mercencary if not downright cynical enterprise, is the answer really to teach them to be clairvoyant? To know in advance how the paper should be written/read? And then to give them a crystal ball that provides only the fuzziest of pictures?

Undergraduate composition, perhaps moreso than any other genre of writing I can think of, is about audience analysis. The students already know this: the game is called "figure out what the professor wants and feed it to hir."  You don't have to agree with it or even necessarily understand what you've written.  The professor may want to believe that what s/he reads on the paper is what's in your mind, but we know better.

Though there are certainly idiosyncracies to professors, there is also a great deal of common practice. That's the business we refer to as "discourse community." But this term doesn't really explain how this "social behavior" (of evaluating student papers) is communicated through the professoriate.  We could trace this practice through professor's offices and dining room tables and red pens empty of ink on the floor, coffee reheated in the microwave, tales in the copy room, war stories shared over lunch, etc. etc. We could sniff out connections to the professors own writing: to comments from editors, deadlines for grants, campus memos, applications for tenure, and so on.

But all that seems like dull work for students, not worth the advantage it might give them. I suppose we could do the study ourselves and just pass the results along to the students, but is this really the course we want to offer to all our incoming students, a course that offers the most accurate accounting we can provide of the reading, writing, and grading habits of academics?

I'm sure there are other possibilities, other than teaching writing as a fuzzy clairvoyance or engaging in this kind of investigation. Perhaps we might all agree to strive to read and write differently and thus to shift the enterprise of composition in a different direction.

Thanks to Google I'm writing an update

We have often heard before about the fact that anything you publish online can be accessed through Google and stays there long after you've forgotten about it. A colleague of mine was recently cross-examined in a legal proceeding regarding poetry she published on a website.

But I'm not writing about that. I'll leave that to her. I'm writing about something a little closer to home. We're hiring this year. I'm not closely involved in this year's hiring process, but of course one is inclined to Google the visiting candidates. I'm assuming they might do the same with us. And if you Google "SUNY Cortland English Department," our department's website is, thankfully, the first hit.

The second hit is a post on this blog written in November 2004 titled "SUNY Cortland English Department, Where you at?". This post is lodged between a post that takes "the rear" as a subject and another that discusses meconium, so maybe that gives you some context.

Anyway, I figure I need to own up, somewhat to my past, and perhaps give an update, if that's what people are going to encounter. Although that post notes my particular department as a site, it really speaks more broadly to the discipline of English Studies, to longstanding conflicts between literary studies, rhetoric/composition, and cultural studies/critical theory, to which I would now add various concerns over technology (see the previous post).

This department has essentially decided to go its separate ways. English majors don't take writing courses (unless they take them as free electives or decide to minor or something in professional writing). With the latest revision to our professional writing major, our students will no longer take courses in literature either.

[Note: we made this change because our major as it is currently constructed requires 34 credits in Professional Writing (a typical amount for any liberal arts major at Cortland) plus nine credits in English literature and a philosophy course. We decided to drop those 12 credits for a number of reasons: they caused bureaucratic "double-dipping" problems for our majors who wanted to minor or double-major in English; they made it difficult for junior transfers to graduate in two years; they made us a little less desirable an option; and finally we just decided these courses, while valuable in themselves, were not especially integral to our degree program--that is, there was no more reason for us to ask our students to take these courses than there would be for the history or communications departments to ask their majors to take them.]

Aside from the occassional GE course, professional writing faculty don't teach undergrad courses with an ENG prefix, and no literary studies faculty has ever taught (or asked to teach as far as I know) a course with a PWR prefix. Up until last semester, I was teaching a grad course for English Education in technology, but I'm not doing that any more. Writing faculty still offer courses in writing at the 500 level, but they are mostly taken by our professional writing undergrads. Students who are in the Master's program in English are permitted one non-literature elective if they choose; we don't see many of them. We occassionally see students from our English Education grad programs. We have plans to create a grad degree in writing. When we have that I'm sure it will follow the undergrad model and be separate from any literary studies curriculum.

It's a strange (one might say ironic) though not unexpected outcome of this business. Ostensibly the professional writing program was created (before I was hired) to increase interest in English. But it never really worked out that way; we've always been perceived as a rival. For professional writing to increase interest in English, one would first have to acknowledge that an interest in professional writing was an interest in English. Despite what we may say, in practical terms, we've never accomplished the integration of professional writing, a fact that is clearly observable in our currriculum.

Maybe that's for the best. At this point,it will have to be, or at least we need to make the best of it, b/c I don't see the situation reversing.

ANT's marching

I've been thinking about Actor-Network Theory in relation to both my teaching and research surrounding iTunes University (iTunes U being a recognizable starting point for the larger subjects of networked media pedagogy and new media rhetoric). In my Writing in Cyberspace class, we've been focusing so far on mobile technologies (via Rheingold's Smart Mobs, which for being for being 5 years old remains amazingly current). While I don't have plans to discuss ANT directly in the course, there's clearly a lot to draw from it.

My overly generalized, outsider understanding of ANT goes something like this. Though there is a very strident protest that ANT is separate from postmodern/poststructural theory, particularly Derrida and Foucault, ANT also begins, as Latour says, as a negative theory, as a critique of sociology. In my view it begins with the deconstruction of several key binaries: nature/culture, scientific/social, and material/symbolic. Now I will admit to making "motivated" readings of Derrida and to not putting a whole lot of value on the literary studies deconstruction industry in the U.S. of the 80s onward. However, these strike me as central elements of Derrida's project. Similarly there have been some bizarre readings of Foucault's notion of power as this omnipresent, mystical force, as Latour notes. Finally, I can't help but read ANT in the context of Deleuze and Guattari, but I'm not going there today.

Anyway, I've encountered multiple responses to iTunes U that might be well-understood as coming out of recognizable constructions of the relationship between society, technoscience, and individuals.

1. socio-ideological determinism: iTunes U functions as what Latour terms an intermediary for the dominant ideological force (i.e. transnational capitalism or whatever you want to name it... the "social"). That is, iTunes U (again as a synecdoche for networked media) serves as a means to control in some fashion the critical/oppositional potential of the university. This would include for example that iTunes U serves as a mechanism that threatens faculty positions (eliminating the need for professors to repeat their lectures year after year), encourage certain consumer practices (buying iPods, using the iTMS), and perparing students to be networked workers. I won't refute these are potential effects. Nor would I disagree that some might see these as desirable effects and pursue them while others see them as nightmares. The more limited point of ANT would simply suggest that it is an error to imagine that these technologies are simply intermediaries transmitting agency/causes that come from elsewhere (a spectral social or ideology for example).
2. technoscientific determinism: I might also term this "pessimistic humanism." It is the belief that technology and/or scientific facts determine outcomes. I know that humanisits often believe that scientists view the world this way. And some likely do. What happens here is that people believe that technology is costing us our humanity, that technology and science threaten humanity. In terms of iTunes U, the common argument, often rehearsed by my students and others, is that when you are tuned into your iPod, you are tuned out of the world around you. The technology itself, and again this spectral "will to technology," determines outcomes. I would not refute that these technologies are redefining humanness and human relationships, just as the plow or the codex or the automobile did in the past. Nor would I refute that some technologies affect us more powerfully than others. However, it is another matter all together to imagine that technologies or scientific facts determine what will happen, as if they were not in themselves products of some larger context.
3. good old-fashioned humanism: the flipside of #2 and the idea that human free will determine what happens. "Guns don't kill people, etc." If you don't like iTunes U, then don't use it. Don't like the iPod? Don't buy one! ANT doesn't even need to go here b/c this position has already been displaced in sociology by the power of "the social." However, I have to go here because this is where many of my students, and others with whom I interact, live.  Typically what happens in academia is that we move students backward through these positions: from 3 to 2 to 1. I have free will. No my free will is threatened by technology. No, it's not technology but the spectral force of ideology and/or the social that shapes "reality."

So that would make ANT position zero? I guess, whatever. In any case, my students are producing podcasts as I write this. We've been using iTunes U somewhat (in fact I should be producing some material right now instead of writing this), but we'll begin in earnest with these productions. I really want to look into all the various "actors" that get involved in these productions. Clearly you can spin out across the culture to Apple and their engineers and so on and so forth, but I guess you have to choose to narrow your focus somehow if for no other reason that at some point you have to declare your research complete and say it's time to write that article. 

So what I'm saying is that I'm going to focus on the more proximate actors in these productions, obviously starting with the students and the technologies available to them, the support they receive, various institutional practices at the College, and then move on from there. The result is that I hope I can uncover some sense of how students actually use iTunes U and podcasting and from that move toward some positive assertions about what I might do next to build on it. That's my research agenda.

On the teaching side, I'm hoping to move students away from some of these positions above. In doing so I don't want to abandon the concerns or criticism they raise but rather do away with the built-in explanations that accompany those concerns. That's what this is about.