digital digs

Mark Bauerlein and digital imperialism

So I have discussed Mark Bauerlein's contributions to the Chronicle of Higher Education here before. Here's a new article entitled "Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind." The argument is one that is likely familiar. Bauerlein suggests that reading online does not improve print literacy and likely even detracts from it. He cites multiple studies and projects where the use of computers in the classroom has not resulted in improved test scores in reading, math, and so on.

Here is his most interesting point:

Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures toward the screen. If digitized classrooms did pose strong, novel intellectual challenges to students, we should see some pushback on their part, but few of them complain about having to learn in new ways.

In other words, students have a great deal of experience interacting with screens outside learning environments. For Bauerlein this is a problem because they bring their bad social habits to the classroom. I especially like this part about how if students found digital classrooms to present intellectual challenges that they would likely complain about having to be there. It's so cynical that I almost feel like I wrote it myself!

professional writing and disciplinary identity

One of the things my colleagues and I have been discussing is how we can communicate to our students what it means to be a professional writing major. If you're in traditional English or History and so on, that identity is quite familiar. On the flipside if you're in a more distinctly professionalizing major in new media or design or business or education, then you can identify with that professional direction.

Professional writing is a little different though. There are such a wide range of professions to enter. Besides, at least with our particular curriculum, which includes creative writing, we have many students who do not have firm professional goals but rather a more general interest in creative writing. So this mixture makes it hard for our students to see what it means to be part of our curriculum, and this problem is exacerbated by the typical, sophomoric notion of creative writing as simply being yourself or speaking with your voice. Still I suppose this could work if we were a community of creative writers, but that's not what we are.

To complicate matters, in the six years since we started doing this, a number of other writing majors have cropped out, not only near us, but around the nation. That means there's an emerging sense of professional writing as a major.

fun searching the mla job list.

What should the MLA job list tell us about our discipline? Not really sure, but it's a little fun to speculate. So if you do a search for Shakespeare, you'll get 16 hits. That's 16 jobs out of more than 450 current positions. Two of those positions are for non-Shakespeare Renaissance Lit, but let's assume that Shakespeare is still pretty relevant there. In that context, there appear to be about two dozen Renaissance positions. If you do a search for "new media," on the other hand, you get 31 hits. But that's a little misleading as the MlA database apparently can't search for phrases, so it picks up "new" and "media." However there appear to be more "new media" jobs in the MLA list right now than there are Shakespeare jobs. Plus, you have to account that there is not yet a set way to define "new media." If you searh for "digital" a different set of jobs appear, another 30 hits, with some overlaps. Most are rhet/comp but not all.

So what's my point?

Obviously the convention is that Shakespeare is at the center of English Studies. Historically this has been the case. What does it mean that there are more jobs out there for people with a strength in new media than for people in Shakespeare? I don't know. You'd have to look at the jobs more closely than I want to right now. I think it means that institutions are looking to build new strengths in the area of new media or digital humanities either as a primary or secondary area in their new hires. And maybe it means that Shakesperean positions are being collapsed at some places with other historically-separate literary specialities, like non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama.

I wonder if it might not also signal that a major in English ought to include some understanding of new media and/or digital humanities.

ya think?

the green interview

In English, fall is the season of the job search, culminating in the frenzy that is the MLA conference at the end of December. This year it's in San Francisco. Many attend to present at the conference, but thousands more attend for the conference's real purpose: job interviews. Though I couldn't tell you the names of the conferences, I'm guessing that most other disciplines have similar practices.

There is undoubtedly a significant expense of interviewing institutions and interviewees in undertaking all this travel. The conference call phone interview has long been an alternative. In the past I did a few of these. I can understand why they are less than ideal. It's hard to get a sense of a person over the phone. Of course you can't get much of a sense of someone from 30 minutes in a hotel room either, but there is something to the embodied sense you get from physical proximity.

Nowadays, it's fairly easy to conduct a video conference online between two or three sites. Maybe it's not as good as face to face, but it's probably better than a phone interview. However, given our concerns over the campus carbon footprint, I think this might be something to consider.

If the presidents of major universities could get together and say that they were going to conduct all their initial interviews, in every department, in this way, I think others would do so as well. After all, it would save them money! I just think about it from SUNY's perspective of being able to say to Albany that they saved x dollars and reduced carbon emissions by y tons by instituting this policy.

Maybe there could even be some incentive to departments. For example, at Cortland we can only bring two candidates to campus. If we did online interviews instead of sending people to MLA, maybe we could bring in three. That would still save money and reduce emissions.

Compositonal computation

So I will be doing my thing at CCCC. I believe I have the honor of being in the final session. I signed off to make my presentation more accessible, but the only way my presentation is going to be accessible to anyone at that time is if I do it in the airport terminal. What are you going to do, right?

Anyway, here's what I'm going to be looking at how mobile, computational-informational networks operate to establish the conditions of composition. I'm planning on doing a series of mobile phone composition experiments in my classes with the idea of articulating compositional computation, a heuristic for using networks to encourage invention.

Here is part of my proposal. It mentions some material familiar to this blog.

In a 2006 cTheory interview, N. Katherine Hayles remarks that postmodernism ends in April of 1995 with the development of the Netscape browser, contending that "the sense of shock that accompanied postmodernism... has now just become mundane reality." In "Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere," Hayles writes that what follows postmodernism is a post-human regime of computation: "the penetration of computational processes not only into every aspect of biological, social, economic and political realms but also into the construction of reality itself" (161). Hayles fundamentally suggests here that computation has become a metaphysic where we are no longer individual cyborgs (as in Haraway's manifesto) but rather nodes in an extensive network.

creative professions in higher education

Forgive the forthcoming circuitous route. Walking the dog perambulates my mind as well, I guess. Anyway, I keep thinking about this idea of education as a "creative profession." I suppose it could be a semantic issue, that it all depends on how you define "creative." Saying we are all creative is nice; there's a rhetoricity to that claim. It's a little like students who claim their individuality by wearing the same kinds of clothes, drinking the same beer, listening to the same music, etc. Maybe we are "individual" in the more abstract sense of always being other than ourselves, but that's not so comforting. Likewise, perhaps we are "creative" in that we are always remaking the world in our fictive conscious out of the electrically animated lumps of meat that are our bodies. And most of us manage to do a fairly good job of getting through the day.

But obviously the creative in creative profession means something more conventional. I doesn't have to mean creative in the sense of being an artist, but it is about developing new ideas, practices, things, etc. that have value (and of course value is another relative, situated term).

So here's the thing about tenure. I think traditionally tenure is supposed to protect faculty from institutional reprisals when those faculty teach or research in ways that may not be ideologically popular or in the direct interest of the institution. We hear often in the popular media about "radical" professors with their lefty notions. Tenure is intended to protect such folks or so way say. And maybe it does, at least to some degree. But in my experience, though profs may vote more democratic than some othe professions, most aren't that politically radical in their classrooms or research. In fact, most research isn't radical at all. If it were, then you could look through journals and see all kinds of different radical ideas. But you won't see that. I'm not suggesting that you should. Disciplines can't really function as disciplines if everyone is perpetually overtuning the apple cart, so to speak. Nor does that mean that research isn't creative. It's just that the range of creativity is fairly narrow compared to what it could be, given the protections of tenure (or at least so one might think).

publishing digital textbooks students want

This article on the Chronicle's Wired Campus discusses a recent survey that finds continued student dissatisfaction with digital textbooks. I don't use digital textbooks... or print textbooks. So I can't really speak to the relative merits of such technologies. However, I do know that students are conditioned to learn from print. Asking them to learn in other ways can be important, but we shouldn't be surprised if they are resistant.

The resistance to digital textbooks is similar to what one encounters teaching with social media. Sure, most students use some social media for some purpose. In teaching my course, I regularly find students who say they felt (peer-) pressured to use facebook but that they wouldn't do so otherwise. They don't necessarily feel enthused to be using social media in their courses. Without trying to be too cynical here, most students just look at college as an obstacle rather than as an opportunity. They just want to get through, over, under, around with as little effort as possible and get the certificate that will get them a shot at a career.

College curriculum has no sense of this audience. Half the credits are general education. Students complain that these courses are a waste of time and that they don't help prepare them for a job. Of course most textbooks target these large general education course from FYC to every 101 course across the campus. No one will ever want to read these books.

Anyway, the point is that the reason students like print texts is that a) they are familiar so they require less effort and b) they can sell them to other students. Since digital texts could obviously be freely copied and distributed, there's going to be a built-in resentment that they cost money. We're talking about a generation of students who rarely pay for music. They certainly don't want to pay for e-books that they don't want in the first place.

Of course that doesn't solve the problem for digital textbook publishers. But my point, in a way, is that this isn't a problem you need to solve. So what if students don't like digital textbooks? They don't like anything about most of the course they are taking. This isn't the entertainment industry for crissakes! Of course they want the text for free. It would be even better if the book would read itself. Can you manage that?

The person you need to sell is the professor. S/he's the one who orders the book. Then it's up to the professor to explain to the students why they need to use the text. If professors say they're not using a digital textbook b/c students say they don't like them, ask them why they use any text at all. I defy anyone to find a single textbook that a student body would say they would choose to read.

If the e-publishing strategy is to try to sell digitial textbooks by arguing that they will appeal to students, then they are going in the wrong direction. Digital texts need to make use of the medium to offer media and interactivity beyond what is possible in print and offer students and faculty new avenues for teaching and learning. That's the direction I'd go.