digital digs

Report on uneven tuition in the NY Times

Related to my previous post about cost-cutting and as mentioned on WPA-L, the NY Times reports on an emerging trend at public universities where students are asked to pay higher tuition to enroll in particular expensive and popular programs, like business and engineering. Why is this happening? Well, state legislatures are reluctant to raise tuition costs (or apparently provide more budget funding) and the cost of these certain programs in terms of faculty salaries, lab equipment, and such continues to rise. Mark J. Kushner, dean of the engineering college at Iowa St, makes the following observation in the article:

“There was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public universities was borne by the state, and that was why tuition was so low,” he said. “That was based on the premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That’s no longer the perception.”

I can appreciate where some of that sentiment comes from.

The National Center for Academic Transformation and SUNY look to redesign courses

SUNY has entered an agreement with the National Center for Academic Transformation to redesign courses, particularly large enrollment courses, to improve retention and results and cut costs. The goal is laudable and necessary for a public institution like SUNY: to provide excellent, affordable education. Technology serves a primary role in the NCAT vision of how this might be accomplished by substituting technology "capital" for teaching faculty "labor."

hmmm....

In English Studies the course this would target is obviously FYC, and in the original NCAT project, two of the 30 programs involved were composition courses, one at BYU and one at Tallahassee Community College. (I've provided links to the two programs' reports on the NCAT site.) The results were mixed at best.

we have never written by process

Recent talk of process has made me curious about the role that Latour has or hasn't played in rhetoric and composition. Thanks to the great work Collin and others have done with CCC Online, you can actually search the works cited of CCC articles going back to 1987. So that's a start.

Looking there you can see Latour cited in a Mike Rose article in 1988 that deals with issues of cognition and teaching. There's a second article in 1990 by Dorothy Winsor on engineering, one by Cynthia Selfe in 1999 that deals with technology and literacy, and two in 2005 by DeVoss et al on new media and Moskovitz and Kellog on science writing. That's not to say these articles deal substantively with Latour, only that Latour appears in the works cited page.

Check MLA and you'll get 19 hits for Latour, Bruno dating back to 1994, seven in 2005-06, mostly in "theory" journals or science fiction or science studies. Nothing in rhet/comp. Search for latour in comp pile and you'll get four hits. Two articles from the journal Science, Technology, and Values, a dissertation from 1995, and an article in an essay collection on the machine grading of student writing. Of course this doesn't tell the whole story. Latour has been put to work in technical writing. In TCQ there have been more than a dozen references in the last few years. It is also not uncommon to find reference to Latour in computers and composition.

However, there is a general story here. We read Latour as speaking to the issues of science and technology. Those of us in English Studies interested in those matters, whether we study science fiction or technical writing or computers and writing or science and literature, have a tendency to reference Latour. Otherwise, not so much.

But there are some very interesting implications, particularly about process, in thinking through Latour.

What Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Rene Descartes, Socrates, Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen, and I all have in common

Yes, apparently we are all "engineer" personality types. Finally I had a semi-legitimate reason to put the Olsen twins on my blog. Now I'll really see some web traffic! BTW, it seems that fictional characters can also be personality types and that I am joined by an android (Data from Star Trek) and a cyborg (Seven of Nine, from Star Trek: Voyager). [side note: Brent Spiner, the actor who played data, is also an engineer. Talk about typecasting, huh?]

And about that introverted thing (said the blogger): it's not that I'm shy. It's just that I can't think of a good reason to talk to you ;)

(post-) post-process composition

Elizabeth Wardle and I have been having a pleasant exchange on one of my earlier posts, and we hit upon a discussion of post-process composition. I don't know if there are any real histories of post-process. There's Richard Fulkerson's Composition Studies article, which indicates the term was first coined in 1994 by John Trimbur and Anthony Pare. However, I would think that you could go back earlier, even to the late 80s, and see the post-process movement there. In fact, you could even say something like Ira Shor's Critical Thinking in Everyday Life was post-process in some respect, and that was 1980.

As it happens, Shor's book was one of the first, if not the first, book I read in comp theory when I entered grad school in 1992.

I think there are many varieties of post-process composition. It's a kind of an attempt to capture the various ways that rhet/comp scholars have moved beyond, built upon, and/or rejected the dominant writing process school of thought. In general though, and from my perspective, post-process is a recognition of the social and cultural dimensions of writing. On the one hand, it's Berlin's social-epistemic rhetoric, which is strongly Marxist from my view. On the other hand, it represents the impact of Foucault and cultural studies on our understanding of the role of ideology/power in discourse and representation. That's not to say there was no recognition of social/political issues in rhet/comp before then. Obviously that isn't true. However, I think it's equally obvious that postmodern theory and cultural studies offered radically different and powerful ways to examine these questions, with the result being that some rhet/comp folks shifted their thinking about writing and teaching to such an extent that they no longer could think of themselves as holding the process positions they once held. They were post-process.

William Gibson's Spook Country

Here is William Gibson discussing his soon to be released novel, Spook Country, which is a somewhat tangential continuation of Pattern Recognition as one of that novel's characters, Hubertus Bigend, makes an appearance in the new novel as well. The interview is interesting in its discussion of character and writing process, particularly the participatory role readers play through Gibson's blog.

The promise of Spook Country as a kind of continutation of Pattern Recognition makes me happy as I thought his last novel was one of his best. It was a decided departure from the more speculative/futuristic content of his earlier work in that it is set in the present and, as Gibson says in the interview, explores the cultural changes in the U.S. since 9/11.

That said, it shares a common theme in exploring the intersection of technology and politics. As Gibson notes, technology is very rarely legislated into existence. That obviously shouldn't be taken to mean technology emerges in apolitical spaces. However it does mean that technological development can disrupt political order, a very Marxian observation, I would think.

Anyway, I thought Pattern Recognition did a great job of capturing the global media network, of giving us an affective experience with that network, and exploring the development of a kind of distributed cognition, so I'm hoping Spook Country will continue in this direction.

What should college students write?

Continuing interesting conversation on the WPA listserv about Wardle and Downs' CCC article. I also read some interesting comments from Mike and Kevin. All of this has me thinking some more, so I'm going to try to distill this down to a few observations.

1. I think we agree that being a good writer is not the same as being a good teacher of writing. They are different skills, different talents, different practices, different bodies of knowledge, etc. The discipline of composition studies the formal teaching and learning of writing in colleges (it does other things, but this is a primary one and particularly germane to the Wardle/Downs article). You study composition theory to become a good teacher of writing, not to become a good writer. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but I don't see studying composition theory as a logical way to becoming a "good writer."
2. I agree with Wardle/Downs that one of the pitfalls of FYC is the concept of a universal literacy and/or general academic discourse that students are supposed to learn (and master!) in FYC. This thing doesn't exist. No one can simultaneously teach students to write philosophy essays, economics research papers, and biology lab reports. Certainly learning to write literary criticism won't help you do these things. Learning to write about pop culture or do cultural critique won't help you with these tasks, and neither will learning to write about composition theory. Or perhaps I should say they'll all help you about the same.
3. What FYC can do (and I think many folks already do this) is teach students to become conscious of their own writing practices and teach them methods of studying and acquiring the discursive practices of the various communities they enter.

Still that doesn't answer the question of what students should write.

One more on suburbia: Walk Score 18.

Found this amusing Google mash-up following CogDog's tweets, Walk Score. It searches for business, schools, libraries, etc within walking distance of any address and then hands a score on a scale from 1-100.

My score? 18, which equals Driving Only. Well, you can actually walk to the Wal-Mart superstore from here, which has a McD's and a hair salon, so where else exactly do you need to go anyway? Of course it makes little sense to walk there ... cause how are you going to lug back a six-month supply of toilet paper, an industrial-size bottle of dishwasher detergent, 10 cubic feet of decorative mulch, and the latest DVD release?

Helpfully there is a Border's "nearby" (six miles) and you only have to cross two interstates and a giant mall parking lot to get there.

WPA Council and the struggle with technology

It seems it was about a year or so ago when a draft of the Writing Program Admin Council's technology plank was drifting around and being discussed on listservs and blogs. Now a revised version has appeared. A couple of things to note about it. As the rationale behind the proposed plank explains, the composers of the draft considered "whether to include goals and strategies that would appeal to some of the more technologically sophisticated programs and teachers."  They also kept in mind

the many colleges and universities where neither students nor teachers have ready access to digital technologies or the Internet. Indeed, we know of some schools in which teachers do not feel they can require typed copy, let alone electronic submissions. Keeping these schools in mind, we have drafted a statement that we hope will give them reasonable objectives without outdistancing their possibilities altogether, leaving them alienated from our shared purposes in teaching required writing courses.

I suppose that's fair enough... maybe. Well, what is meant by "ready access"? Do "many colleges and universities" not have general labs open to students in libraries, student centers, and such? Do they not have dorms where students have high-speed internet access? Do they not have wireless access on campus?

Here's a recent survey, commisioned by Circuit City, that indicates more than 98% of college students use a computer everyday. Even this 2004 Harris Poll indicates that 90% of full-time college students own computers, and one would think this has gone up in three years. I don't mean to suggest that a digital divide doesn't exist, particularly in terms of high-speed access, but I am high skeptical of developing national policy based upon presumptions about access.

In fact, I am quite certain that decisions about the integration of technology into composition have very little to do with access and far more to do with faculty attitudes and experience with technology.

Suburban living

Another classic jeremiad invieghed against suburbia. This one is a TED talk by James Howard Kunstler.

It's not that I disagree with what he says, but I live in suburbs and grew up in suburbs--and so I have some thoughts about them.