digital digs

reframing technology in education

I left a rather cryptic comment on my colleague Karen Stearn's blog. It was cryptic mostly because I didn't want to leave some massive comment. So the result is that I'm going to try to clear up what I was trying to say. Karen's post was about a technology workshop she had arranged on campus. My comments though are more generally applicable to the familiar conversation one hears among faculty and teachers on the subject of technology (one which I won't rehearse here).

In a nutshell, here's my point. These incessant conversations are founded on a particular understanding of the relationship between technology and subjectivity. I say subjectivity because, in the humanities at least, that's what we tend to think about when we think about students and learning rather than cognition or consciousness. Not surprisingly, we conceive subjectivity and thought as discrete, internal, and ultimately free-willed (despite whatever it is we imagine we learned from postmodernism).

So then we look at technology as an external force or tool that might impact the internal subject in any number of positive or negative ways:

• we become smarter;
• we have opportunities for more democratic participation;
• we can create new communities;
• we lose our ability to think independently;
• we lose critical thinking skills;
• we become subject to media and commercial manipulation;
• we lose contact with our local communities.

And so the "debate" goes. It never goes away. It just seems to shift from one emerging technology to another. First it's just the internet. Then it's IM. Then it's texting. Then it's Facebook. Now it's Second Life.

However, the point I was trying to make in far fewer words on Karen's blog is that this debate cannot move forward or become productive as long as it frames the relationship between subjectivity and technology in this fashion.

the conundrum of rhetoric & composition research

I've been thinking in the following terms since engaging in the process to revise our FYC program. I find myself facing one of two possible unsavory situations.

1. Knowledge of rhetoric and composition scholarship is necessary for effective teaching of FYC. In which case, the vast majority of FYC instructors are unqualified to the do their jobs.
2. Knowledge of rhetoric and composition scholarship is not necessary for effective teaching of FYC. In which case one has to wonder what the purpose is of the discipline.

Now certainly not all scholars in the broad field of rhetoric and composition conduct research related to FYC. So I do not mean to suggest that rhet/comp scholarship must pass some FYC relevancy test. That said, it would seem that a significant portion of our field focuses on college-wide writing programs of one form or another, as opposed to writing majors like ours.

Similarly, one might suggest that the first premise is a matter of degree. How much knowledge is necessary? What particular knowledge is necessary? Might one create a disciplinary canon?

Second Life World University Exchange

I haven't had much time to write here. All the normal excuses. One of the things I've been busy with is our Second Life Pilot project. Last week we finally got ourselves set up so that students could get access to SL on campus (through use of flash drives we provided). So now the students are getting into SL, customizing their avatars, going through orientation, and exploring the wide world of SL.

So the question becomes "What are we going to do in here?"

As it happens, I'm teaming up with faculty from Japan, Korea, Canada, France, and elsewhere in the US on this project called the World University Exchange. The basic premise is that students will be divided into multinational teams and will then be given a series of challenges on which they will compete. Many of the challenges will surround plots of land they have been assigned where they will essentially be asked to build their community. So there are a number of cross-cultural, technical, and rhetorical challenges that the students will need to face as a team.

But how does this fit in with a Professional Writing course?

illiteracy's perfect storm

We are embarking on the revision of our FYC program. Last year, as I wrote about, we did a survey of faculty and, surprise, surprise, faculty believe that students don't write well! That's not the cause of the revision, but I suppose it provides us with some campuswide momentum to act.

I suppose the conventional story is that the average senior arrives in her major's capstone course and is faced with some significant writing project and the result is less than hoped for.

So how do we get to that point?

a mysterious use of US News & World Report

As we all know, this news magazine ranks American colleges and universities. Like many in higher education I am dubious of these rankings and concerned about the way these rankings can drive decision-making at our institutions. But this post isn't about that. It's about the strange use my college has put its ranking to.

The college home page proclaims that we have been "ranked highly." Really? As we discover, we are tied for 70th among 100 Masters-granting institutions in the North. If you go to the magazine's website, you'll discover that means that we are a "third tier" institution, which is where we've always been, at least since I've been here. That means, nationally, we're somewhere in the bottom half of institutions. However, perhaps we've moved up within that tier. Now, as I've already said, I don't value these things much, but it seems like a strange thing to proclaim on your website, doesn't it?

Wait, there's more.

A poetic of invention

As we do each semester, this weekend my colleagues and I went to the college's Adirondack camp at Raquette Lake. The culminating event of the weekend is an evening performance in which everyone participates. So here I am reading the little piece I wrote on Saturday.

cooperation from composition to scholarship

I'm starting of my classes with reading Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs, and cooperation is one of the themes that comes early and often. Cooperation, particularly in media networks, is typified by

• open source software development
• the commons of media/information vs. copyright/IP
• regulation of network access (Net Neutrality and so on)
• collaborative/participatory networks like the blogs, wikis and so on.

Cooperation in writing, however, remains problematic. All acts of composition may be understood as individualized (in the sense that they might be said to occur at a local site) and networked (in the sense that they occur in a context of non-local sites, e.g., other texts). Saying composition is networked does not exclude it from also being local, unless one insists that composition is exclusively local, which is impossible assuming that one is composing in some language or employing some technology not created on the spot in a fit of MacGyver-esque genius.

Yet we insist on the fiction of the author, especially in academic settings, and I won't go down that well-trammeled path again, except to say... there it is... again.

But what would it mean to view writing as a cooperative act, as participation in a commons? What would it mean to articulate the classic challenges of composition in terms of the "tragedy of the (unmanaged or mis-managed) commons"?

fall semester planning

As the semester starts, I've really got to start planning what I'm going to do with me time this semester. I'm on sabbatical in the spring (and there was much rejoicing). I plan on hitting some conferences, writing an article, and putting together a book proposal. I just finished writing one article over the summer and had the book come up, so I'm at the start up point of another research cycle I guess.

On campus, right now we're in the midst of several things.

• Just revised our curriculum and that's going through final approval. We reduced the number of required courses, making the program more flexible.
• Added several new courses and shifted some prerequisites. The curriculum process is ongoing, but I'm going to let someone else spearhead that this year, since I won't be around much in the spring.
• Revising our FYC program. That's going to be a major project, and I'm on that committee.
• Piloting Second Life.
• Proposing a new graduate program in Digital Media Studies with Art and Communications. Though that's just in the early stages right now, I'm hoping to jump start it and see if the proposal has legs or not.
• Writing grants for our NeoVox project.

That should be enough for this semester. I hoping to just germinate some ideas for research and then formulate some real plans in November so that I can hit the ground running once the semester ends.

cms kibble and the vertigo of an open network pedagogy

One of the challenges of teaching these online courses, at leas the way I am doing it, is the extreme vertigo (and resulting anxiety) experienced by the students. As I explain to them, they've spent more than a decade learning how to behave in a classroom, from sitting on colored mats in kindergarten to learning the discipline-specific practices of sitting in a circle in English class, participating in science labs, and so on. The  "traditional" CMS-driven online course, as I often say, is all about the "M for management." It is designed to carefully regulate student behavior. However, it is exactly the kind of thing that Ted Nelson warned us about decades ago in Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

If everything we ate were kibbled into uniform dogfood, and the amount consumed at each feeding time tediously watched and tested, we would have little fondness for eating. But this is what the schools do to our food for thought, and this is what happens to people's minds in primary school, secondary school and most colleges....

Computer-assisted instruction, in this classical sense, is the presentation by computer of bite-sized segments of instructional material, branching among them according to involuntary choices by the students ("answers") and embedding material presented to the student in some sort of pseudo-conversation ("Very good. Now Johnny, point at the...")

As always, some sophoric is always the pharmakon for a lack of equilibrium, and there are few better sleep agents than a CMS. If you object to online education, what you are probably objecting to (or at least what I think you should be objecting to) is the poverty of the kibbled intellectual experience Nelson describes (which is not to say that most face-to-face instruction is any better).

Not surprisingly, I'm trying to avoid going in that direction, but the result is vertigo.