digital digs

why blogging is hard

A  couple weeks back, Will Richardson mused on the continuing challenges of blogging, even after 3000+ posts and an estimated million words. I'm not there yet (600+ posts and an est. 400,000+ words), but I understand where he's coming from. As you probably know, Will spends a lot of time working with teachers. He visited Cortland a few years back, so I know first hand that he does some great work inspiring folks and showing them the possibilities. But as he notes in this post,

a good number of people still find the thought of publishing to an audience, even a relatively small, private audience of like-minded souls, to be too daunting. It’s just way outside their comfort zone, and they just believe that their contributions would either not be relevant, interesting or useful. It’s hard to nurture these folks, to convince them to take small steps, to help them see the potential upside.

To me this is the fundamental rhetorical challenge and risk of any writing. Of course, before blogs, very few people had to worry about being relevant, interesting, or useful as writers. The opportunities for publication were very small. Now that that technical obstacle has been lifted, one must face those rhetorical challenges directly.

Anyone can have a blog. It's simply a matter of rising to the challenge. I see my students facing these challenges every semester. Right now, students in my online course are engaged in a microblogging project. They've all just joined Twitter. The reactions to Twitter and blogging in general are not surprising, I think. Students tend to wonder what they should write about, who would read it, and why anyone would care. They imagine, as many people do, that blogging is a kind of narcissism, which it certainly can be, if one is narcissistic to begin with. However, I tend to think such critiques are more a reflection on the critic and on a failure of rhetorical imagination.

Think of it this way. Why should anyone care what you think and do with your life? Are you not thinking or doing things that might be relevant, interesting, or useful to others? If an accounting of one's thoughts and actions result in a stream of narcissism, then I would suggest that one has bigger problems than a narcissistic blog: one has a narcissistic life.

Yes, you could read my tweets or facebook status updates and find declarations about going to the gym or heading to campus to teach this or that or taking my kids to soccer practice and so on. Yes these are mundane matters. And they probably mean very little to anyone. But a friend I haven't seen or heard from in 15 years sees that I'm regularly at the gym and takes that as an opportunity to write to me. A former student sees I'm teaching the Phaedrus and uses that as an opportunity to talk about maybe going to grad school. A colleague, who I don't know very well, sees I coach soccer, strikes up a conversation with me at a conference about it, and we become friends. These things may not matter to you, but they do matter to me.

Of course twitter also becomes a way of sharing interesting things discovered online and having quick conversations, so it is not all daily minutiae. But my point is that even that minutiae can become a way of creating a networked identity that becomes a basis for stronger and more productive connections.

But it is hard. I'm not one who writes about personal matters easily. I have never really blogged about my personal life beyond innocuous tweets. Perhaps it is because of the same concerns that Will notes. Perhaps it is because (for good or bad) my life is often here. I interact with the world as a writer/blogger. Part of that is a continual interrogation that asks "so what?" It asks us to look at the world and meet the rhetorical challenges of writing. Doing so will take one's life and thoughts in particular directions.

And maybe this is the thing, in the end, that is so hard. If one can answer the rhetorical questions of genre, audience, and purpose, to be a blogger (or maybe any kind of writer), one must still take up, at least in part, a particular relation to the world, a relation that looks at the world as a spur to composition. I fear I've been in that position for so long now that I've forgotten what it would be like to live otherwise, but I would have to imagine that the transition would be difficult.

print journalism and the future of the humanities

I've been reading a good interview with Clay Shirky in the Columbia Journalism Review (Part I & Part II). When the interview gets down to the nitty-gritty of failing newspapers, Shirky makes the following observation about journalists:

If there’s any lesson in all of this, it’s that you can breed an entire generation of really smart people to not think about existential threats to the business if you want to. We happen to be in an environment where, I think, it’s really damaged the print journalism world’s ability to think through the problems, because half the house hasn’t been invited into the conversation until just recently. Right? You know, I’m going to assemble all my print journalists and I’m suddenly going to tell them that the Chinese wall is down, here’s the problem we face, and 10 percent of you are laid off. It’s just not the deal they signed up for. The deal they signed up for was, “We will never have to care how the money is made.” And that whatever the advantages there in the flush years—I think that’s what made this crisis seem even more existential. And, as I said, from my point of view, it’s fifteen years too late, because the talent was encouraged never to think about the revenue.

I think there is some clear resonance with the current state of the humanities and the kinds of arguments that Fish has made (see my earlier post on this). Journalism and the humanities both benefited from the post-war era of American economic dominance, even while serving, generally, as loyal intellectual opposition. If we accept Shirky's characterization, then journalists and humanities professors alike, for a generation or more, never had to care about how their paychecks were covered.

For both of us, this has been a slowly then all-at-once phenomenon. For 20 years we've seen ebbing in both professions. Now, I don't want to make too much of the similarities between journalism and the humanities. We clearly have different business models; what we have in common is that journalists and humanities professors don't like to think about the business side.

The tough part about this is that there is more news now than ever. There is plenty for journalism to do. Similarly, there is plenty for the humanities to do. It's simply a matter of funding these activities (yeah, I said "simply"). While networks have exacerbated the challenges our professions face, they also likely offer new opportunities as well. As Shirky observes,

there’s an interesting phenomenon in the university world, where the number of papers jointly published by two or more researchers working in different institutions is on the rise. And it’s on the rise because it’s very… sitting at your desk, it’s almost easier to figure out, “Who else [in the world] is working on what I’m working on?” than to figure out, “What are my colleagues down the hall working on that isn’t like what I’m working on?

We already see this in journalism as well, I think. The collaborative potential of the network includes the possibility of humanists working in new ways and producing new forms of humanistic knowledge. As we do this though, I think we need to figure out a way to make it OK for us to address the business side of what we are doing. Even though our business models are quite different, I think we can look at journalism as a cautionary tale for the humanities.

2009 Horizon Report: what you already knew and perhaps what you didn't

EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium have released the 2009 edition of the Horizon Report.

Here is something you probably already knew:

There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy. The skills involved in writing and research have changed from those required even a few years ago. Students need to be technologically adept, to be able to collaborate with peers all over the world, to understand basic content and media design, and to understand the relationship between apparent function and underlying code in the applications they use daily.

Ya think? The Advisory Board lists this as the primary "critical challenge" facing higher education. So where does this begin for rhetoric and composition? We might have some sense of where the discipline stands overall by looking at the primary journals or attending CCCC or reading the recently-added technology plank to the WPA Outcomes Statement for FYC. What you'll find in the latter is fairly vague, which is understandable since it needs to be flexible enough to meet many institutional contexts. Hopefully, that flexibility will extend to meeting the kinds of emerging technologies discussed in the Horizon Report.

As you probably know, the Report identifies six technologies divided into three temporal categories: one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. In the most immediate category are "mobiles" and "cloud computing." These are technologies that are already at work at many universities and in many rhetoric/composition/writing classrooms, though they are far, far, far from being recognized as integral components to rhet/comp instruction, as the report's "critical challenge" quoted above would suggest.

Part of the challenge with the mobile business lies in what technology students have. Most students, at least at Cortland, have mobile phones and mp3 players. That means mobile access to a variety of media consumption (e.g. iTunesU), communication (texting, microblogging, email, Facebook), and media production (audio, photo, and video). Given the differences in student access, right now, it seems mostly a matter of making material and interaction available over mobile networks.

To me, cloud computing is even more prevalent. The Report uses this term to cover everything from Flickr and YouTube to blogs and wikis. Basically it is the move to put applications, services, and data on the network. So in a class you may have FTF time and books, but beyond those ever other interaction is taking place in the "clouds." Even the traditional CMS might be understood in these terms. Certainly this networked workspace corresponds with increasingly mobile access.

So those are things you probably do know...

Stanley Fish on the use of the humanities

Perhaps you've already read some of Fish's work in the NY Times. Here I think Fish makes an interesting comment on the (lack of) usefulness of the humanities. As you follow the article to the end, Fish makes some comment that reading literature or philosophy or historical texts might lead to "critical thinking" (though he largely dismisses this, noting that there are plenty of places to learn that). He then settles on the value of the humanities in providing people with subject matter for interesting dinner conversations.

I have to say that I think most people view the humanities that way, although they might use a different adjective than "interesting."

Actually Fish's defense of the humanities is that they have no use at all..... Hmmm. I wonder if that's some kind of insanity defense? Just kidding. I understand where Fish is coming from. I think most of us in the humanities can at least recognize this position. One studies the humanities in order to study the humanities, not in order to produce some secondary effect or use value.

And that's actually fine. I imagine most employees in most jobs have reasons for doing their work that are very different from the reasons their employers pay them to do the work. But it can be dangerous to mistake one set of motives for the other.

I think historically, one would discover that the study of the humanities (at least from the perspective of our employers) has never been simply for its own sake. As we know in the mid-19th century, students studied literature to develop their own rhetorical skills. And certainly the common argument is that the central role of English in the 20th century had to do with the perceived utility of literature in developing a national cultural identity and educating a literate workforce. I would not doubt for a moment that few English professors viewed their jobs in that way. Many might have felt like Fish.

And yet I think it would be naive on Fish's part to imagine that over the time of his career that (from his employers' perspective) his work in the humanities was not useful. In such formulations, usefulness is relative and a function of the market.

Although much has changed, I think the structure of this argument still holds. The humanities can provide an education in literacy and a now global rather than national identity.  There are many crucial ethical questions that we must consider in this generation, for which science or social science has no answer. And yes, Fish is right to suggest that there are possibly other places where these issues can and should be discussed. But as long as higher education believes there is use in having such discussions within the curriculum, there is a place for the humanities.

However, as Fish points out, the real difficulty begins when we start to discuss our esoteric research:

What benefit do literary studies hold out to those asked to support them? Not much of anything except the (parochial) excitement experienced by those caught up in arcane discussions of the mirror stage, the trace, the subaltern and the performative. (Don’t ask.)

As he recognizes is the case with other disciplines, there is nothing inherently wrong with having a specialized discourse; the problem is that nothing "useful" ever comes out of our specialized discourse. Actually for Fish, this isn't a problem: the humanities are not supposed to have a use. And here I disagree. The humanities ought to be about trying to understand the human experience in ways that escape our colleagues across the quad, and we ought to be sharing that with those beyond our discipline. And I do think there is use in "theory," and I would suggest that Foucault, Deleuze, and others saw their work as having uses as well.

I realize that might seem pollyanna. But then you also have to ask: if Stanley Fish thinks the humanities has no use, then why does he write for the NYT? Is it for the money? Is he not famous enough yet? Or maybe he thinks he does have something useful to say to people.

In any case, I think this is a version of a deeper set of concerns about the humanities. With philosophy at its core, the humanities are fundamentally a contemplative tradition. And I think the question has long been where our responsibility lies to society. One sees this with religious orders as well. Personally I would tend toward the interventionist side. Not b/c I think we know best but b/c it is unethical (and probably uninteresting), in my view, to sit on the sidelines of life. I don't know if this makes humanistic contemplation directly useful. I know humanities' lessons are not determining. You can appreciate the arts and be a Nazi. However contemplation may offer tools or tactics of one kind or the other.

In the modern day formulation though, the university is now in the marketplace. This does give the notion of "use" a particular charge. Maybe as a rhetorician I'm more comfortable in the market. For me, the rules of the market seem no less arbitrary or insidious than the rules of the academy. Rhetoric, having not faired too well in the 20th century version of higher ed, maybe has less to lose as well. I don't know.

I do think humanities has had its uses and can find new uses. Maybe we will not be able to be so blithely ignorant of the uses to which our labor is being put (though to be honest, I'm quite skeptical of Fish's accounting of himself). But this will not happen automatically. And it will mean changing what we do and how we do it. But isn't this the definition of a living intellectual enterprise?

computers and the machine readable/machine read text

A new discussion has just popped up on the TechRhet list regarding a recent article in Science, "Computers as Writing Instructors" (subscription required). In any case, this is old news in our field to some extent. The GREs and similar tests have been machine grading essays for years. This article also touches on the potential value of computers in providing feedback to student writers in helping them write their essays.

The fundamental argument for the validity of machine grading is simulation. It's essentially a version of the Turing Test. Imagine three rooms. In one room is a machine grader. In another room is a human grader. A series of essays is given to both the machine and human graders who turn back grades. If a second human sitting in the third room cannot distinguish the human from the machine, then the machine is an effective grader.

In a way this isn't suprising. What is a norming session if not an attempt to turn humans into predictable grading machines? To get humans to simulate some "ideal" reader? The faulty premise is the idea that readers should respond in the same general way to a given text, that a text should elicit common responses from readers. To create such responses requires turning reading into a kind of mechanical, cybernetic process. Certainly there are elements of reading that might be understood as mechanistic and/or cybernetic. I would think that nearly any human activity might be partly understood in such terms.

So there is a curious outcome here. Students are trained by computers to write essays that will be read by computers. They are taught to simulate writing. And perhaps simulation is good enough? It is a curious exigency though, isn't it? To compose for the purpose of satisfying a machine. No doubt there is a degree to which such activity is important: search engine optimization for example. But what about beyond that?

The primary criticism of machine reading is that computers can't tell if an essay really means anything. Ah, but that's a criticism that cuts in several directions.

Richard Miller's MLA Dream

Richard Miller has posted his MLA address on YouTube in two parts. The first is below; the second is after the fold. I fundamentally agree with Miller's argument and vision. We are in a moment of transition in terms of media networks. Miller terms this transition incremental. I suppose it's relative. The increments are coming pretty fast but we haven't had a total break from our print past. Nor does anyone expect it will happen that way.

Miller sees the necessity for developing new media composing pedagogies that foster creativity and collaboration, for preparing faculty to teach in this way (and compose themselves in this way), and for building spaces where such activities might be possible. The interesting questions for me now concern the timeline and the institutional methods by which such goals can be accomplished.

In my view if English and the humanities choose to do nothing, or leave the matter to individual faculty to explore at their own discretion as we have to this point, then the fate of digital humanities while be largely determined by external interests: corporations (e.g Blackboard), accrediting agencies, and so on. It makes sense, does it? Either we do this or someone else does. Now certainly there are increasingly grants out there for digital humanities, organizations like HASTAC, digital humanities centers on campuses, and other interesting things going on. So yes, we have a starting point. But how do we reach the tipping point?

I think there are several things that need to happen.

Graff's "courseocentrism" and post-disciplinary curriculum

Derek writes on Graff's recent IHE article on the issue of "courseocentrism." There are a number of interesting points in Graff's article.

At a time when amazing new forms of connectivity are made possible by new digital technologies and when much of the best recent work in the humanities has made us more aware of the social and collective nature of intellectual work, we still think of teaching in ways that are narrowly private and individualistic, as something we do in isolated classrooms with little or no knowledge of what our colleagues are doing in the next classroom or the next building and little chance for each other’s courses to become reference points in our own.

I think this is fairly self-evident to most academics. It is perhaps why faculty are so concerned about the threat of network access in the classroom.

In a succinct formulation of the point that Michael Bérubé offered me after hearing a talk in which I struggled to articulate it, any two eggheads, no matter how far apart ideologically, will always be far closer to each other than to non-eggheads. Again, the reason is that eggheads — intellectuals — whether they are on the Left or the Right, are defined and differentiated from outsiders by their membership in a common culture of ideas and arguments, a common culture that our curricular mixed messages hide from our students and our non-communicating courses hide from us.

In the end, it is this common culture that Graff would have us make the common point of our curriculum. You could take this even further and point out that very few intellectuals outside of English Studies care about the kinds of issues that often brutally divide departments. In a sense you could suggest that what defines English Studies in an affective (and intellectual) investment in a particular terrain.

I would hestitate to term that as  a "common culture" as Graff does, and I wouldn't hazard to name that terrain, since the name is part of the contest, right? The only reason I call it a terrain is that there is an apparent agreement that we are arguing over something finite. If it weren't finite then why would we bother fighting over it? So what is "it"? It could be something as mundane as resources: students, money, prestige. These are all certainly finite. Or perhaps it is fanaticism or devotion or ideological commitment. This terrain is our "holy land." We cannot share it with nonbelievers. To recall Monty Python's Life of Brian, to those invested there is something at stake in whether one chooses to follow the shoe or follow the gourd. But to the outsider it is quite absurd.

In such contexts, courseocentrism is detente. Don't ask; don't tell. Unfortunately, as Graff points out, this pushes the burden of resolving these intellectual differences onto our students who have to shuttle from one course to the next. For good or for bad, most of them come to view the incongruencies between their classes as idiosyncratic differences between individual teachers. They respond pragmatically. In any case, the differences probably don't matter to them anyway.

This is unfortunate because the differences are probably the most interesting things about our discipline. After all, they are the things we get most excited about, right? This might lead toward Graff's "teaching the conflicts," but the problem with that approach is that it imagines a rational meta-discourse in which conflicts can be situated. All we really get is another layer of conflicts over how to teach the conflicts. Ahhh... the supplement.

So in the tradition of supplements, here's another. The "problem" with disciplinary curriculum, particularly at the undergrad level, is that it seeks to found itself on a disciplinary identity. This is the case whether that identity is a traditiona lit studies curriculum of period-based courses or a professional writing curriculum built on specific genres. A post-disciplinary curriculum might organize itself around the question of discipline itself. Now you might rightly ask what student would be interested in such a navel-gazing curriculum. And I agree. So you have to ask how this post-disciplinary conversation might be brought to bear upon issues that are of import to our students and more broadly to our culture.

One way of thinking about this might be to ask the question of how to learn to live with new media/electracy and then discussing how our many different perspectives, concerns, methods might be brought to bear on that question.

But I think it has to be more than about sharing our courses. For the most part we hide our perspectives by publishing them in journals few people read (and probably not our colleagues down the hall) and in sparsely-attended conference presentations. It's not our fault, I guess; it's what we're accustomed to doing. And no, I'm not going to say that "blogging" is the answer. But some more public forum of departmental conversation might be worthwhile. And who knows, maybe the sunlight of public discourse would do us some good.

Blog personality test

Just for fun you can check out Typealyzer. Put in the URL for your blog and discover your blog's Myers-Briggs personality type. Mine was INTP- "The Thinkers," described as

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Hmmm.... I wonder how they got that from reading my blog? Actually I've done one of the free online Myers-Briggs tests in the past. I've actually got some slight variation in results but INTP has certainly come up.

teaching new media subjectivities

Michael Wesch offers a new article on Academic Commons "From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments." Wesch writes not only of the now familiar social media applications that are changing the contexts in which we teach but also of the institutional limitations that hamper our efforts to respond as educators to the cognisphere in which we now live. He also discusses the challenges of assessment that I want to return to in a later post. Here though I want to investigate two other points Wesch makes.

First, he remarks on the "crisis of significance" facing education. That is, "the fact that many students are now struggling to find meaning and significance in their education." There are so many problems here that go far beyond the issues of social media, though as Wesch notes, technology seems to intensify this problem. When students see no value in their education, they turn to their devices for distraction. So here are some thoughts about this:

• Is this a new crisis? Did students 20-30 years ago really think there was value in the lectures they attended? How about 50 years ago or a 100? I don't think we have any way of knowing the answer to this.
• How much of this is part of a larger cultural disconnect between academia and the broader range of cultures from which students now arrive?
• How do we address the serious cross-purposes of education vs. "job preparation" or whatever it is students think they want from college?

So I really see three issues there. First, there are some legitimate issues with educational practices in higher ed. Second, we need to address larger cultural attitudes toward education and intellectual life. Third, we need to do a better job of communicating to students what a college education is, how it works, and why it is valuable to them.

This leads to second point of Wesch's I want to speak to here. Wesch writes

I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.” You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.

This is something that has long been on the minds of rhet/comp pedagogues, particularly those who come from a cultural studies, post-process approach, and Wesch's own objectives in relation to student subjectivities echoes those of cultural studies.

If one thinks of subjectivity as a kind of interface, as I have written elsewhere, then the articulation of new subjectivities relates to the potential to connect in new ways with cognitive-media networks. And yes, it is about changing people, changing students, but that's what education has always been about. Wesch describes this as an "intellectual throw-down." I think of the experimental, mutative potential of media networks acting in compositional processes.

anathem and the consolation of rhet/comp

With the semester over, I finally got the opportunity to read Neal Stephenson's Anathem. If you like Stephenson's work, particularly his more recent work, I think you will enjoy this novel. It is science fiction, but it often reads more like a Platonic dialogue with extensive philosphical conversations about time, space, and consciousness, generally articulated in mathematical terms. The novel is also interesting for its alternate world take on academia. In this world, the work of intellectuals is carried out by monks, male and female, who live a seriously cloistered life. There are different orders. Some get to come out once a year (these are mostly students). Then there are those who are in for a decade, a century, and a millenium (yes, the last one is a bit of a mystery revealed through the narrative). The novel describes how the average folks, the extramuros, are not interested in the abstractions or even the complex technologies developed inside. As is articulated a couple times in the novel, some people burn with the curiousity to understand, to seek out the secrets of the world. Most people, however, have no such interests and are satisfied with pursuing more immediate desires.

Anyway, the novel resonated well with the In Our Time podcast I heard the other day. It was nominally on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy but was really a broader conversation about philsophy ranging from Plato to Camus (just about as far as one can go actually).Generally speaking, Boethius is a neo-Platonist who articualtes the Platonic ideal in Christian terms. The book is written while Boethius is imprisoned and awaiting execution and essentially explores the solace or consolation philosophy might offer one in such a position. Anathem pulls out a similar discussion with different orders of monks. Some believe in an essentially Platonic notion of a higher plane of ideal forms. Some might even attribute a divine quality to this world, in neo-Platonist fashion. Still others, who are termed Rhetors, view knowledge and truth as discursive and culturally constructed. Classically, we know that philosophy and rhetoric can be opposed, so all this got me wondering what the "consolation of rhetoric" might be.

Of course, when I hear the world consolation my mind leaps to consolation prize. FYC is often viewed as a kind of consolation prize... not as one's first choice. Philosophy is perhaps also a consolation prize, given to those who cannot find happiness in ignorance.

But as the In Our Time discussion addressed, philosophy need not (or in some view should not) be simply an abstract way to relieve sorrow. Philosophy becomes a means for engaging in the world. If, from a Camus-like, existentialist position, the world has no intrinsic meaning, then it falls upon the philosopher to produce value through action in response to one's cultural-historical conditions. In such conditions one can see the subordinate role the rhetoric has played since Plato in leading one's audience to the Truth or at least to a truth.

However I wonder if a different compositional consolation might not be available. Stephenson's novel speculates on the possibility of multiple universes, narrowly separated by quantum differences that lead us to spin off in slightly different directions. The characters speak of these as different narratives. I was thinking of choose-your-own-adventure or hyperfiction. The act of composition offers an affective encounter with this quantum-virtual-undecided experience. In the compositional event, many virtual possibilities exist. The potential for different worlds stand before us. Different verisions of ourselves stand before us. Yes, perhaps the differences are modest, but we encounter the potential for mutation.

Given the choice between the speculative contemplation of an ideal other world, the consolation of philosophy, and the meditative reflection on the virtual possibilities of the moment, the consolation of composition, I will take the latter. Of course no choice is necessary, so one might as well have both.