digital digs

faciality and the interface

Gardner Campbell writes on Michael Wesch's recent post on "context collapse." Wesch describes this collapse as

an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.

Essentially Wesch is speaking to the paralyzing effect of the webcam. It's an issue that has come up in several conversations on Seesmic: the many ways in which the material constraints of the media network shape compositions. Gardner also speaks about this in rhetorical terms--the development of voice in the writer and the challenges of audience. That is, the challenge of speaking to an absent, indeterminate audience is not new.

One could follow this down the Derridean path toward presence/absence cum pattern/randomness a la Katherine Hayles. But Friday is Deleuze and Guattari day here at Digital Digs, at least this Friday is. Besides, Wesch's passage made me think immediately of D/G's discussion of the face as white wall/black hole in ATP, and this interesting little passage:

if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face--freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities. (171)

One of the things you have to love about D/G prose is the capacity to take the things we presume make us human and turn them monstrous. One of the things you have to understand about facialization here is that it is a process of decoding the surface of the head and overcoding it in terms of signification (the white wall site of inscription) and subjectification (the black hole of consciousness). And it is not just the head, the body can also be facialized in this process. Indeed even objects can be reterritorialized this way, as D/G remark "you might say that a house, utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc.  is watching me, not because it resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the while wall/black hole process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization" (175). And where could this be more true than with the monitor and its web cam? As Wesch notes, the camera is a "gateway to a blackhole." The screen is the desublimation of facialization.

Rhetoric includes the author's strategic manipulation of the face. This is bi-directional though as discourse captures the face/voice as well. But this is about more than that. The camera reveals the inhuman and uncanny face, introducing us to "unconscious optics" as Benjamin noted. Of course we normalize the experience fairly quickly. I'm no longer bothered to sit before my webcam and then send off a post to Seesmic or YouTube or where ever.

Perhaps it is possible though to elude the organization of the face by recognizing that the image on the screen is a product of a networked process that cannot be reduced to "you."

pedagogy and the cms

Reading "Social Constructivists and eLearning" at eLiterate and I'm interested in this question, "How does the choice of an instructional method impact the design, development, or choice and use of a learning system?" Yes, good question. Guest blogger Jim Farmer observes

As the eLearning systems—Blackboard, ANGEL, Desire2Learn, Sakai, Moodle, ATutor and Olat to name a few—increase functionality there are fewer functional differences among the systems. Georgetown University’s Peter Farkas recently commented: “Now the choice of an enterprise learning system depends upon reliability, scalability, and ease of use.” And responsive technical support when it is needed—a requirement for any enterprise system.

It may certainly be the case that there are fewer functional differences. However I believe it is certainly still the case that these systems narrowly define the possibilities of online education and they do so for reasons that reflect commercial, marketplace, and institutional considerations. Whether its a corporation or a conglomerate of universities developing systems or a college making use of a CMS, everyone involved in this business is a large institution. Their operational costs as institutions necessarily limit their ability to innovate and their willingness to experiment. They have to consider the cost of failure in a way other groups do not (as Clay Shirky argues). To take up Farkas' comment, reliability, scalablity, and ease of use of a system are all important factors in terms of institutional costs, as is technical support, but none of these things have any direct relationship to effective pedagogy. All they do is demonstrate the inability of these institutions to act effectively in emerging media networks.

Farmer also discusses how much discussion of effective use of instructional technology happens at the disciplinary level. This is certainly true at CCCC and even moreso at Computers and Writing. No doubt there are disciplinary-specific issues to address. But at the same time, there are significant campus-wide issues here. We have much in common. In FTF classes we all share the same classrooms for the most part and the same campus. Many of our activities are functionally the same. We lecture; we discuss; we write things on the board; we read; we give homework; we give tests or essay assignments. The same is true online. The web is vast, but we all deal with the same web, with the same emerging social media, and so on.

In my view, what it comes to is how you answer this question: what do you get when you strip pedagogy to the bone? Clearly pedagogy has something to do with learning, but you don't need a teacher or teaching in order to learn. There are a thousand ways to learn. Pedagogy facilitates learning or you might say that pedagogy organizes/manages learning. I think that if you tend toward the latter then you'll find the CMS model works pretty well. And you don't have to be in the "banking" model of education to ascribe to learning management. There are plenty of faculty seating students in circles, offering "student-centered" pedagogy, and managing student learning: though I have to ask how a course can be student-centered when the goals are pre-determined? Maybe classes shouldn't be student-centered. But I digress.

My courses just aren't like that at all. Sometimes I worry they should be. But my courses are more like a meadow than a garden. It is more the social constructivist model, right? It's the creation of an environment designed to facilitate learning experiences. The students have to take an active role in building knowledge, making connections, and defining projects. I'm not pretending I'm the only one who teaches like that, but I'd be interested to know if anyone feels they can do that successfully using Blackboard... Maybe if you're using the CMS as an auxillary space to an FTF class, but I can't see how you could doing it in an online course.

And yes, it's my view that these teaching methods are what we need for the future and that as such what is being offered to us institutionally as a CMS is wholly unacceptable. But that's for another time.

2012 composition

So I'm tapping away on my iPhone to see if I can have the will to publish something substantive this way. I suppose it's like any interface. It requires practice. And yet there would seem to be physical constraints as well: fat thumbs.

But I digress. Perhaps this is the compositional mode of the future (or at least one mode). Arguably it is the dominant mode of textual communication already with trillions of text messages sent each year, to say nothing of IM, tweets, etc. Perhaps we might say there's little of substance here, but if that's the case then it's a whole lotta nuthin'! Intimate relationships are born, maintained, and ended this way. Business deals are made everyday. And political movements operate through these little keyboards and handheld devices. The bottom line is that there are billions of these machines lying around, and as William Gibson said, the street finds its uses for these things.

iPhone musings

I've been carrying around the new iPhone for about 2.5 weeks now. So here's what I have and haven't done with it.

1. I have used it to stay in connection with my online summer course. Since the course is only five weeks (ending today), it's been fairly intense. Being able to keep up with what's going on has made it easier for me to do other things, even if it means that I don't have to get on the computer every couple hours to check on business. That's been useful.
2. Being connected to a serviceable internet is surprisingly useful. Whether its a matter of checking weather or getting directions or finding some local business. I'm sure all those also works better in more urban locales. I still find myself often in Edge service areas and there's just not a lot of social/ user-participation data out here in the sticks. As such I could see how this could be more useful.
3. Here are the applications I have used:
   
   • Weather Bug: having radar has been great with the many summer thunderstorms of central NY.
   • Pandoara/Last.fm: these music services work pretty well, especially with wi-fi. Since I'm always shuffling my iPod playlists anyway, I've gotten into listening to these customizable radio stations.
   • Google: obviously, but you can also search your contact list
   • AOL Radio: haven't used it too much yet, but you can tune into a couple hundred radio station feeds.
   • EccoNote: just downloaded this one. It allows you to record voice memos. They are promising that in a later version, you'll be able to e-mail it to yourself.
   • Nearby/Where/YPmobile: these are various ways of finding location-based information. I imagine these work better in more information-rich areas than Syracuse. Still YPmobile works fairly well for me
   • NYTimes/Mobile News: these are both good news feeds.
   • Typepad: it works well. My main issue is whether or not I want to be tapping out blog posts on the iPhone. Maybe short ones. As I said in an earlier post, it would be cool if you could quickly record and post an audio podcast.
   • Twitterific: works just as you would expect it to and I use it regularly to tweet.
   • Pownce, Facebook: I use these less but they seem to do the job as well.
   • Jott and Evernote: Still seeing if these are things I'll actually use. The Jott application seems limited to 15 seconds. If you call into Jott you can get more time, plus you can also send your Jotts to Typepad, which is kinda cool, I guess.
4. As for the built-in apps, I use the iPod all the time. I've also been using the Camera, which is better than the one I had on my old camera, except.... you can't do video (unless you jailbreak the phone). I might do that down the road. I'd like to be able to do a simple little video, upload it to YouTube and quick put it on my blog or ning site.
5. And finally I have been doing a trial version of Mobile Me. The push e-mail feature seems to work fairly well, although not as well as I would expect (it doesn't always seem to push). I like the syncing feature, the file sharing, and the back to my mac thing. But I'm not sure it's worth $99/yr. We'll see.

the local nature of fyc reform

As I think I mentioned a while back, we are in the midst of reforming the FYC program at Cortland, a program that has been tweaked many times but is essentially 20 years old. While many things have obviously changed in 20 years of rhet/comp theory, in practice much remains the same. Our impetus was more from a recognition of the way the program had calcified and bureaucratized and institutionalized over the years.

In any case, working on this project with FYC instructors and our comp program director, Mary Kennedy, has been a worthwhile experience so far. In particular, it has really helped me to see how local conditions tend to overdetermine the shape of writing curriculum. I don't see this as a necessarily good or bad thing. It's just the way it works. For instance, Cortland's teacher-preparation focus and the desires of the Education school certainly shape the courses we offer, as does the history of integration of service learning into FYC here. Obviously part of best practices for FYC is adapting national best practices to meet local conditions.

The largest concern has to do with hiring and staffing practices related to contingent faculty. Our proposal includes moving to a sophomore writing course as opposed to two first-year courses. This will create a one-year reduction in the need for FYC instruction. So there is some concern over this issue. We have developed a proposal that addresses this issue, but we'll have to see what the administration says. Of course no one in our department wants to put forward a proposal that costs jobs, even exploitative adjunct jobs.

In some ways this is a microcosm of our disciplinary challenge. I remember Vitanza writing, years back, about how we could never have a CCCC where the theme was "Should writing be taught?". It's just not a question we can seem to consider. I think we have similar issues with the foundational practices of our pedagogy. I don't know if we can give up things like small classes, commenting on drafts, student conferences, etc. I'm not saying that we should. I'm just saying that I don't know that we can even really ask the question.

Anyway, I'm sure all composition programs have similar or related challenges. However, it seems to me that the local, institutional, embedded nature of curriculum should indicate that composition as a discipline is better off seeing itself as researching the teaching of writing rather than seeking to manage it nationally.