digital digs

Digital Scholarship and Tenure

This subject has come up again on Inside Higher Ed with some good comments from rhet/comp digital media scholars--Cheryl Ball, Will Hochman, and Heidi McKee. I think there are several ways to look at this issue.

If you are a graduate student or assistant professor specializing in digital rhetoric, you clearly have a great deal at stake personally in arguing for the validity of the work you are doing. Actually this is a challenge every grad student or asst. prof faces, regardless of specialization, but with digital media the rhetorical situation is notably different because one is doing work that is substantively different, in both form and content, from the work of the faculty hiring, tenuring, and/or promoting you. The IHE article reports on efforts by MLA and HASTAC to educate such faculty so that they are better able to make these evaluations.

This is how I look at digital scholarship. In the short term and for individuals, the arguments that we make today about the validity of digital scholarship are important. And for those reasons, they are worth making. But in the broader view, the success, failure, and general form digital humanities scholarship will take will have little to do with these arguments.

Digital scholarship will succeed for the same reason that we no longer share our research by writing letters to other members of our disciplinary societies (as would have been common in the 17th century). We will teach digital literacy (or electracy or whatever you want to call it) because it will be culturally necessary, and the shape of that digital literacy will no more be determined by academics than print literacy was. Certainly there will be specific disciplinary discursive practices within digital media, just as there are such practices within print literacy. But the book, the page, the paragraph, the linear argument--the fundamental features of print literacy--emerge from broader material, technological conditions. And while I think there's great digital scholarship out there and I admire the work done by my digital rhetoric colleagues, I believe we are still very much in the horseless carriage era.

What do I mean by this? Right now I think we are in a kind of make-work situation in English Studies scholarship and perhaps beyond that as well (though I am less familiar beyond our discipline). I write a 6000 word article. A relatively small number of editors and reviewers read it. Eventually it gets published somewhere, where it probably gets read by a few people, probably has little impact on them (since there are dozens of other articles out there to read), and probably doesn't get cited. It's not that much different from digging a hole, having someone certify I dug it to approved specifications, and the filling it in.

Now that article represents more thorough scholarly work than what appears on this blog, and it has been vetted by experts, but what difference does that make if few people read it? We don't write things to be read; we tend to write them to be published. Publishing is the end result, which if you think about it makes almost no sense. On the flip side, publishing here is worthless in itself. If no one reads this, then I'm largely wasting my time. Many blog detractors would say that's exactly what I'm doing.

But I say we have to answer this question:

Is the point of humanities scholarship to participate in the production and communication of humanistic knowledge, or is it to demonstrate a certain level of mastery or academic reputation?

Certainly one could say the answer is "both," and to an extent the two goals could be complementary, but I think our current situation demonstrates the limits of their complementarity. Digital scholarship doesn't solve this problem. Technology isn't a solution here. In fact, the spread of digital journals might even exacerbate the condition of make-work scholarship. As such, I believe we will find the answer to how digital scholarship ought to work in our discipline when we can re-balance this equation.

There is no going backward. Print publication makes less sense everyday. Online PDF or web journals with articles that look like print essays are, at best, short term solutions, and at worst, failures of intellect, imagination, and guts. We will move forward when we can recapture the lost exigency of humanities research through digital media by using networks to increase access, encourage collaboration, and foster conversations. When we discover the genre of digital humanistic scholarship it will likely no longer be necessary to have these conversations with tenure committees.

Composition ground zero

There are several untenable and under-theorized places from which a first-year writing program might operate. I think most of these are familiar to us.

• The traditional pedagogic function of writing in the university is to demonstrate student knowledge, where writing and language are neutral, objective carriers of thought that exists elsewhere and only writing "errors" interfere with this process. This arhetorical, anti-genre imagines writing as a purely formal process, as almost literally filling out a form.
• A more updated version of this same notion looks to prepare students for writing in the workplace. Of course this is impossible to do in a general first-year program, even if one develops a few tracks. Still there remains this idea that the foundation of writing is the elimination of error. There is also the half-life of a kind of twisted writing process concept that has been sucked back into a product-orientation and been reborn as the process by which a product is perfected.

If faculty across academia want to pursue such ends, I suppose they can. Writing certainly can be used as a tool for evaluating knowledge and preparing students for workplace writing isn't a bad thing in itself. However there isn't much FYC can do for either of these practices, at least not directly. Indirectly, FYC can perhaps help students become writers, which in turn might make them more successful at these limited writing tasks.

Of course, in rhet/comp we've been trying to exorcise these demons for several decades. Instead, when starting at ground zero, I think one can begin with one of three possible questions/approaches (at least three is the number I have today).

1. You can begin with a product-orientation, which doesn't have to been "bad," and ask, "What kind of writing do you want students to compose?" What should be the genre(s) of FYC? We know what they have been, the various modes and such. Most FYC readers are filled with intellectual but not scholarly-academic writing (i.e. not research articles from academic journals). Are these models of the kinds of writing we expect students to write? If they are, they surely represent a depth of knowledge and writing experience that cannot be simulated 18 year-olds in a semester, so how would such models realistically translate? What is it, exactly, that we expect students to produce? Even avant-garde, heuristic compositional practices are undertaken for a reason where the composer can make judgments about the end result of the practice.
2. Or maybe we eschew the product orientation in a preference for teaching process. I've written about this many times here... the idea of offering students the opportunity to become writers, to pursue a life or habit of writing. As writers we know that the representation of process in a typical FYC textbook is absurd. Yes we invent and arrange and revise and so on, but not like that! Writing is as much a process as living is, living a writerly life. Of course a writerly life isn't for everyone, nor would I wish it to be. But an FYC course might be a place where students experiment with such a life. And a writerly life could clearly be many different things. So then the question would be something like this: we know the writing process in FYC textbooks misrepresents the practice of writing, so what habit/life/practice do we wish our students to engage?
3. Finally I would consider a writing studies approach, which would include the Wardle/Downs version of introducing students to the scholarly practices of rhet/comp. Here we think of FYC in the way we think of nearly every other course at the university, as addressing a particular body of knowledge and/or methods. This approach might also include the post-process, cultural studies-inflected pedagogies which we sometimes see. The goal here is offering students means to study the production and operation of writing/media from Aristotle to Foucault and beyond. However this approach still begs the questions of what will we ask our students to write (the product question) and what writing practices or habits will we seek to inculcate (the process question). The danger in ignoring these questions is falling back into the academic default where writing becomes a way of demonstrating a student's understanding of the course content.

Perhaps it is (predictably) unavoidable that all these questions must be considered: that FYC represents a body of knowledge and methods; that FYC asks students to investigate and experiment with compositional practices; and that any compositional project presumes some (aesthetic, rhetorical, discursive) concept of product (even if it is that a product will be "experimental"). As I have often said, the great thing about emerging technologies is that they have destablized all our preconceptions of thinking and composing that were implicitly (and often unconsciously) founded upon print technologies. That means virtually every thing is up for grabs in answering these questions.

Of course there are all kinds of institutional variables and other stakeholders that shape what FYC programs actually become. But I think that too often those objections are raised too early in the process, simply to avoid exploring these difficult and maybe uncomfortable questions.

So here, briefly now, is how I would answer these questions.

1. If FYC is going to teach a genre that doesn't exist, it shouldn't be "academic discourse." The error in how genre is generally taught is imagining that a genre of writing can be excised from its material contexts and neatly pasted into an FYC classroom. In short, the genre of FYC writing will be FYC writing. Rather than simulating some real or imagined genre, we should open the question of product. I would say defer to process and see what starts to emerge. I do think one needs to consider the questions of exigency--audience and purpose. Why are we doing this? Who will read it and why?
2. The approach to process that interests me is the rip/mix/burn practices of networked composition, which I've discussed elsewhere. However I also think students need a regular composition practice.
3. In terms of content, for me an FYC course should include fundamental rhetorical concepts, cultural analysis, and some new media theory so that students can investigate how cultural, material, and technological contexts shape compositional practices.

As such, I imagine FYC writing projects should make use of these analytical methods, asking students to investigate compositional practices in their own lives, in professions that interest them, in schooling, in media or politics or other cultural arenas that interest them.

the future of work + the future of higher education = ???

On the cover of Time this week, a series of articles on the future of work. If you've read folks like Dan Pink or Richard Florida or even Thomas Friedman, then there isn't much new here: changing nature of the workplace, desires for flexible working conditions and career paths, changing values of Gen Y/Millennials, baby boomers not retiring, green jobs. Still there are a few good lines in there.

Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, thinks the best training for anyone who wants to succeed in 10 years is the online game World of Warcraft. Carter says WoW, as its 10 million devotees worldwide call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most gets to lead the team — until someone else contributes more. The game, which many Gen Yers learned as teens, is intensely collaborative, constantly demanding and often surprising. "It takes exactly the same skill set people will need more of in the future to collaborate on work projects," says Carter. "The kids are already doing it."

And this from a piece contributed by Seth Godin:

Internet technology makes working as a team, synchronized to a shared goal, easier and more productive than ever. But as in a three-legged-race, you'll instantly know when a teammate is struggling, because that will slow you down as well. Some people will embrace this new high-stress, high-speed, high-flexibility way of work. We'll go from a few days alone at home, maintaining the status quo, to urgent team sessions, sometimes in person, often online. It will make some people yearn for jobs like those in the old days, when we fought traffic, sat in a cube, typed memos, took a long lunch and then sat in traffic again.

The only reason to go to work, I think, is to do work. It's too expensive a trip if all you want to do is hang out. Work will mean managing a tribe, creating a movement and operating in teams to change the world. Anything less is going to be outsourced to someone a lot cheaper and a lot less privileged than you or me.

Part of the argument seems to be that there will be increasing jobs in green and high-tech manufacturing in the US. These careers will require training beyond a high school degree, but it is likely not the kind of education that traditional higher education is equipped to provide. I'm not exactly sure who counts among the privileged class that Godin addresses here, but the rest of this quote resonates with Carter's position above. However, the general trend of these predictions is that a college education would point graduates toward these kinds of "high-stress, high speed, high-flexibility" careers.

Of course this begs the question of what is (or ought to be) the relationship between a college education and preparation for a career. In the minds of most students I meet, the answer seems fairly obvious that these two things should be the same. However those of us who are in this business know that it's not that simple. First, most students don't know what they want to do. Second, even if they do know, they are likely to change careers in short order. Third, even if they don't change careers, their careers are likely to transform beneath their feet.

That said, we are familiar with how traditional schooling prepared students to become factory workers. And we might even see how an educational culture of high-stakes testing prepared students as atomized knowledge workers in the hierarchical corporate bureaucracies of the last century. So while specific career preparation, for most careers, may make even less sense now than ever before (at least at the baccalaureate level), it is likely that educational spaces and practices will mutate to reflect emerging workplaces. Online and hybrid courses certainly reflect this, as does increasing amounts of collaborative work.

Still that's not all that higher education is or wishes to be. There's an interesting article on trying to introduce professional ethics into business management programs. It's actually somewhat sad how difficult a challenge that turns out to be (at least as it is reported here). Inasmuch as higher education is about teaching ethics and citizenship, we face challenges in figuring out how those things work in this new, networked social order. In any case, this is where I think some of the more interesting work in the humanities will take place over the next decade. Starting with what is most closely under our own purview--the ways we teach and the ways we do our research and service--the humanities ought to participate in shaping the foundation of higher education's role in this future.

That's rather general, I know, so here are a few specific points from what I am thinking for myself:

1. Undergrad courses where students collaborate FTF and online, hopefully with students at a distance and internationally, on digital compositions that they can share with a larger audience.
2. A first-year writing program that gives students experience with networks and digital composition, that asks them to think about rhetorical issues and compositional practices as they are shaped by techno-material contexts, and that explores ethical and socio-political concerns raised by those contexts and networked communities.
3. Graduate courses that give students the opportunity to explore the role of networks, computing, and digitial media in their teaching and scholarship, regardless of the particular area of specialization they pursue, an exploration that would necessarily include both practical and theoretical-critical dimensions.
4. Developing scholarly networks with colleagues interested in pursuing emerging research and publication practices.
5. Participating in university discussions shaping the future role of digital networks not only in the classroom (i.e. trying to move away from the Bb solution in a box) but also in rethinking the way faculty organize and collaborate on campus.

the black angel rises

If you follow such news, it is likely that you've already heard that Blackboard has acquired Angel. If not, you can read about it in Inside Higher Ed or at Blackboard. There are also some early blogs at eLiterate and EdTechPodcast. There is also a running discussion on Twitter #bbplusangel.

My current institution, Cortland, moved from WebCT to Blackboard after that merger. My new institution, UBuffalo, uses Blackboard. For purposes as an individual faculty member, an institutional CMS is just an overinflated grade book. I don't use it for anything else. I find it difficult to imagine that I would. Instead, I use a constellation of free or cheap social media applications--twitter, ning, pbworks (aka pbwiki) and so on. My basic thought on the matter is this: no one company is going to out innovate the web.

However at UB I will not just be an individual faculty member. Eventually I'll be taking on the role of directing the composition program, and one of the things we will certainly be doing is addressing the use of technology across the program. As I see it, there are two primary reasons for a CMS.

1. Faculty lack the knowledge, skills, time, and/or interest to kludge together their own online learning environment (not that it takes much of the first three as long as you have the interest, imho).
2. Institutions like uniformity for any number of reasons (e.g. support, assessment, accreditation, marketing).

Because of reason #2 we will not soon see a time when a university does not have a CMS of some kind. For reason #1, it may be some time before a critical mass of faculty become concerned about the choices the institution makes. But faculty in general are not well-enough educated about technology to understand what is at stake. Imagine a university trying one of the following analogous policies.

• From now on, faculty can only order textbooks from Pearson.
• The campus will be redesigned so every classroom looks the same, and all the desks will be bolted to the floor.

Now, one might complain that Blackboard offers more flexibility than either of these scenarios, but relative to the potential flexibiity out there, I would contend this is a fair analogy. In fact, I would suggest that one of the features of a CMS that attracts institutions is that they do reduce faculty choice and flexibilty by creating standardization.

But it's only academic freedom, right? Why would anyone care about that?

While that may seem like a key issue, there's really a more important lesson to be learned from this merger. The uniform story about this merger is that Angel was great with customer support and Blackboard is horrible with it. Clearly though the market dictates the limits of Anglel's commitment to its customers. Any Ed Tech corporation is ultimately going to do what it imagines/hopes will be most profitable. Now maybe you want to also imagine/hope that Blackboard's interests in profit, our students' interests, faculty interests, and university interests run the same course... yeah, right. Clearly that was not the case with today's news. I don't think anyone outside these corporations' PR departments really believes that having fewer CMS options will make online learning better.

So the lesson for universities (and faculty) ought to be a cautionary tale about relying on a dwindling number of corporations to provide an increasingly indispensable feature of higher education.

My dream resolution to all this is a proliferation of standards-driven, interoperable  new media applications produced by a mixture of corporate, academic, and open source communities... and a savvy university and faculty committed to maintaing a flexible virtual space that extends from the classroom through university service to scholarship. I don't know how we get there but I'm pretty sure it begins with significant faculty development, starting with graduate education, and that we don't get there by putting all our resources into a single corporation whether that's Blackboard or anyone else.

the joys of failure

My 8-year old's "baseball" season began yesterday. Baseball is under scare quotes because this is what happens. It's coach pitch, which is fine since not many kids that age could get the ball over the plate. The batter gets as many pitches as he (yes, boys only) needs to make contact, sometimes as many as two dozen. It's unlikely that the fielders would register an out, but even if the batter is thrown out, he's allowed to stay on base. The inning ends when every player on the side has had an at-bat. When the final batter gets a hit, all the players left on base run home. The kids in the field barely even bother to field the ball. What would be the point?

Now I understand all the things people say about our culture being over-competitive and the ridiculous fights parents get into at their kids' sporting events. On the flipside, one can also read about the questionable value of over-praising our kids. When one kid takes 20 cuts at the ball to hit a dribbler down the third base line and another kid picks it up and either throws it five feet into the ground or in some random direction, why are we applauding their success?

Maybe this seems cruel, but I think that reaction is more telling of us than of our kids. Doesn't this whole thing seem a little out of whack? Presumably the goal here is to insulate our kids from the potential discouragement of failure by creating a situation where failure is impossible. Needless to say, where failure is impossible, success can only be an illusion. Besides, don't we only further stigmatize failure by placing so much emphasis on protecting our children from its clutches? After all the familiar adage about American sports is that the hardest thing to do is hit a baseball. Can't we just let it be difficult?

Of course we do the same thing in the classroom. Pedagogies, particularly for younger kids but even in college, speak of encouragement and opportunities for success. In turn we stigmatize getting things wrong, especially when we prepare students for high-stakes tests. Learning, it would seem, is all about getting the right answers.

I'm not saying we need to swing all the way in the other direction, whatever that would imply. But really we should be encouraging kids (and students) to take risks, to see genuine failure as an acceptable risk in nearly every situation in their daily lives. In my classroom experience, the unwillingness to take risks stands as a significant impediment to learning. And yes, I can create contexts where the consequences of failure are muted, and I often do that b/c I have found that it does convince students to be more experimental. But, again, you can't take a risk if there are no consequences.

And we should be clear that college students are forever taking risks... with sexual relations, drinking, drugs, and any number of other social choices. And they sometimes learn from those risks. The classroom ought to be a mechanism whereby the opportunities for learning from risks and failures (and successes) are enhanced. We ought to be able to say to those kids that striking out is an acceptable risk. It doesn't feel good. It isn't a desirable outcome. But if you can't accept the risk of striking out, you can never get a hit. Maybe 8 year-olds can't understand these risks, but watching my kids I think they are already making more sophisticated calculations about risk in their social interactions with friends. If games were once a form of ritualized warfare, today they are maybe ritualized social exchanges. The applied game theory and (dare I say) rhetorical choices of sports ought to prepare us for future risks.

But only if we are allowed to take them.