digital digs

The futurity of the archive: remix and catastrophe -- CCCC 2010

The Futurity of the Archive: Remix and Catastrophe on Prezi

#CCCC10, the twitter stream, and other calculations

This is my third post on CCCC 2010 (here are the first and second).

There's conversation on the #CCCC10 tag about the number of tweets (is it high or low? what does it mean?) and exchanges on the WPA list about the metrics of panel attendance and what drives it.

I didn't do an exact count, but there were over 600 panels across 16 sessions. That means that you could attend at most 2.6% of the sessions, including your own. Assuming you miss one session per day to eat or something, the number is closer to 2%. Of course most people are not on site for all 16 sessions. For example, I was on site for 11 sessions. Subtract a two for lunch, planning our panel presentation, and going through the books. That leaves nine. Of those nine, I attended five. I probably could have gotten to one or two more, but I got involved in some interesting conversations, plus I had other work to do with a grant project and classes that kept me from getting to some early sessions on Friday.

That's life. Plus, to be honest, there were a couple sessions where I just didn't see anything that was all that compelling to me. 

So call me bad if you want. As I mentioned in my last post, I was raised by one or several wolves. But I think it isn't unreasonable to believe that the typical attendee gets to 6 panels, or 1% of the conference, including his/her own panel. Based on that totally spurious calculation and the guesstimate of 3000 registered attendees, the average number of people attending any given session would be around 30, including the panelists. Of course average doesn't do one any good since some panels will have hundreds of people and quite obviously some panels have less than 10, including presenters.

Perhaps the reality is that the mode number of panel visits is lower than 6. I wonder how many of the 3000 come in one day and leave the next? Presenting their own papers and perhaps attending one or two other sessions?

It would be interesting, hypothetically, to have RFID tags on every lanyard and readers at each door as a way of measuring the number of people in each room in each session. Though generally it would tell us what we already know. There are large sessions and small sessions, and fewer people are around on the last day. Though maybe it would be interesting to see which category clusters draw the best.

Anyway, this brings me to the Twitter stream. Bill Wolff's analysis notes the following about the #CCCC10 hashtag: "total: 1191 from 176 Twitterers; Mean: 6.9; mode: 1; most tweets: @johnmjones with 87. 65 tweeted once." Personally I posted six times with the hashtag and 10 times without it during the conference. So I guess that makes me about average.

So here's how this all connects for me. Who is interested in #CCCC10? Not me. I mean I'm interested in about 3% of the conference. And I'll only get to 1/3 of that. There were more than 50 sessions in the 106 Information Technology category (the category I most closely associate with), about 8% of the conference. That's a good 2-day conference all on its own. I could maybe deal with a #106 hashtag. If there were 100 people following it, maybe it would be worth it to participate. There were only 111 people who posted more than once to the hashtag anyway, less than 4% of the attendees, most of whom, I'm guessing, also associate with the 106 category.

I'm not very interested in abstracting to the level of the field, to the level of #CCCC10. I want to connect in other ways through twitter that are more particular if not singular.

CCCC 2010 Recap: on being raised by (one or several) wolves

The Friday panels I saw addressed themes such as time, circulation, meshworks, loops, and channels, but I want to start here with a single image from Collin Brooke's presentation taken from an old cover of the magazine Field and Stream. It was a Rockwellian image of a father and his son sitting in a small boat, pulling a fish out of a stream. Collin used the image as a launchpoint for thinking about our disciplinary field and its relationship to the streams of information which pass through, over, and alongside it. 

However, I was also thinking about the patriarchal relationship depicted in the scene, the kind that leads to the reproduction of disciplinary progeny, the kind that takes you out into that field and says "one day, son, this will all be yours." And the stream? Well the stream has always been there as well. A natural boundary perhaps. You look at the field, and you see the possibilities: the logical, the thought-out. The stream, on the other hand, is perhaps potential (and here I am thinking of how Deleuze and Guattari parse the difference between these terms). The stream can be tapped, of course, for irrigation and so on. When it becomes larger, perhaps it powers a water wheel or facilitates travel. But I don't want to carry the analogy too far from this little scene of Americana, of field and stream.

I suppose I have always had a less than sanguine relation with "the field." No blood relation that mediates the field and stream in Collin's slide. Maybe this is the case for many/most of us? I don't know. In my case though, I believe it is, at least in part, because I was raised by one or several wolves. No one took me fishing in the disciplinary stream. No one ever showed me the field that would one day be mine. Please don't take that as a "pity me" or a romantic lone wolf scenario. The several wolves Deleuze and Guattari reference are multiplicities:

The proper name can be nothing more than an extreme case of the common noun, containing its already domesticated multiplicity within itself and linking it to a being or object posited as unique. This jeopardizes, on the side of words and things both, the relation of the proper name as an intensity to the multiplicity it instantaneously apprehends.

So the goal is not to domesticate the wolf here, to create the loyal dog who patrols the field, but instead to investigate, and perhaps intensify, the multiplicity that goes here by many names: meshwork, loop, stream. 

If one comes to CCCC and feels as if they are standing in their own field, then, I don't know, maybe it does feel like a Norman Rockwell painting, like one has come home. But if not... well then, there are many loops and circulations. Spencer Shaffner, Collin's panelmate, focused on the looper, a digital audio looping tool, and asked about the potential of looping for scholarly composition.  I hear the loops every year. I suppose this could be a negative criticism (e.g. same crap with a new theme keyword crammed in), but that's not what I mean. Instead I mean the iterative, ambulant emergence of intensities emerging in different concepts. On a macro scale, the stream loops through the water cycle, but in the more immediate scene one finds the eddies and micro currents of flows that establish temporary orders. I hear talk of chronos, aeon, time, timing, rhythm. I hear autopoiesis, meshworks, embodied rhetorics. Circulations, linking, findabilty, viral potential. All loops and layers, at least as I encounter them.

As always, the struggle seems to be with taking such concepts far enough, with returning them to their intensive potentiality or even slipping into the virtual. And it is here that I know I have been raised by wolves, that I can hear the guttural, nearly unspoken tones of disciplinary warrants that I can recognize but simply do not share. These warrants keep us in the realm of the "pragmatic" or more precisely the realm of the possible: what can be grown in this field? These warrants hold us, gravitationally, to a particular scale and point of view, where the individual counts as "one" and there are no fractions.

For example, Laurie Gries, Gage Scot, and Kristen Seas presented on time, meshworks, and circulation (Jim Ridolfo was the respondent and posted his response here). I thought it was a very good panel exploring some slippery concepts. At the same time, part of the struggle is their efforts to apply such theories, to show what is possible. And such a gesture is warranted at Cs, perhaps even demanded, and perhaps in many cases specifically demanded in terms of pedagogical possibilities (i.e. how do I use this in my class?). If we look at meshworks (or assemblages), we cannot stop at the level of the individual as rhet/comp might ask us to (or at least warrant us to). It's meshworks all the way down. We cannot re/construct a chronology with assemblages. Similarly if we are examining virtual time, the haecceity, we cannot talk simply of possibilities. I don't mean that as a knock on this panel, which I found thought-provoking (obviously since I'm writing about it), but perhaps as a prod to take up Massumi's articulation of invention in Parables of the Virtual:

a true invention is an object that precedes its utility... With invention, the perceptual direction of travel between the poles of necessity and utility, between intelligence and instrumentality it, possibility and reason, is reversed. An invention is a sensible concept that precedes and produces its own possibility (its system of connection-cases, its combinatoric. An invention is an in situ plumbing of potential rather than an extrapolation of disengaged possibility. It is a trial-and-error process of connecting with new forces, or in new ways with old forces, to unanticipated effect. Invention is a plug-in to the impossible. (96).

So this brings me back to the problem Collin raises: how to understand the relation between the field and the stream. The "field" is the abstract, thought-out possibility of object relations. It is one limit-pole extending out from each event. The stream, on the other hand, points toward another limit-pole, one of potential moving toward increasing latency and virtuality, until it is virtually unfelt. In Massumi's formulation, then, we cannot ask the field to invent ways to address databases or streams of information or the perennial problems people see with the conference (check the WPA list and similar venues today; I'm sure you'll find this going on). Instead, we must look toward the other pole, the potential, even the virtually unfelt.

CCCC: first day review-- thinking about things

I found my way to two panels, plus my own, on Thursday: "Octolog III: the politics of historiography in 2010" and "Autopoetic Processing: An Interactive Performance of Writing and Reading." 

As I tweeted at the time, Octolog 3 sounds like something that should involve a cage and Mel Gibson.... this time it's personal. There is something a little odd about an event that seeks to put historiography into question but is continually seeking to restage itself. It's like The Who's third farewell tour or something. As suggested in the title, the panel was politically charged. It was largely organized around protestations over who/what is counted as the history of rhetoric; that is, it was essentially canon-busting in what struck me as a fairly conventional way.

There are two kinds of panels that I have little interest in at Cs. Those that are essentially heroic pedagogy narratives about "what I did in my class last year," and those that argue that you should be doing what I am doing because it is so important. This panel smacked of the latter, which is not to say that I disagree with the panelists. I completely agree with the general argument that there are giant swaths of non-white/male rhetorical practice and theory that can and should be studied as part of our discipline. At the same time, I think it is an error to see the canon of classical rhetoric as a monolithic entity. In my view, anyone who would feel comfortable saying "this is what classical rhetoric tells us" needs to turn in his/her history of rhetoric decoder ring. In saying that, I'm not trying to point the finger at anyone on this panel, though I do think there was some of that kind of rhetorical move here. 

On the other hand, I was encouraged by another undercurrent trope among the panelists that focused on the importance of an embodied, material approach to rhetoric. It is in this context that I found Vitanza's response to panelists encouraging, particularly his cautions against chronology It is worthwhile to consider whether outside or other can be written into chronology. More importantly, from my view, there is a question of how the world of objects or things (pushing the panel's call for embodiment further) intersects the organ-izing plane of chronic-logical time. 

For me, this issue of things extended into the next panel. I have to say that I thought autopoiesis was the wrong cybernetic model for what they were exploring. Autopoiesis models the self-sustaining cybernetics of an organism or system. Instead, the panel was really focusing more on the mutative potential of exposure and relations of exteriority, which I find more interesting, so I was happy about that. Where the Octolog focused on identity politics, this panel focused on our exposure to technological innovations. Johndan Johnson-Eilola had some interesting things to say about spimes. From his, Anne Wysocki and Marilyn Cooper's presentations, there was certainly a thinking about things.

As I have said, I don't have much interest in calls for others to do what I am doing. However, I do think it is clear to many that rhet/comp has long been mired in subjectivity, discourse, and ideology with no real way out. Maybe embodiment is one way out, a step toward things. Which is not an argument to say that others should study the particular things I study or in the way I study them. But I do think we need some kind of shifting.

acting as the digital (post)humanist

I'm back on readings for my graduate course on Digital Research and Pedagogy: this week, Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual. Massumi's text stirs mixed responses, I think. It is a hard text to swallow for many reasons. For example, he writes

It is meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human to the nonhuman if the nonhuman is only a construct of human culture, or inertness. The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa. Let matter be matter, brains be brains, jellyfish be jellyfish, and culture be nature, in irreducible alterity and infinite connection. (39)

In a way, I think this resonates with assemblage theory via Delanda (of course both are departing from Deleuze and Guattari) as well as with Latour. And yet, there are significant deviations from these other thinkers that I believe would disturb other object-oriented thinkers out there. However I want to keep these connections (and tensions) in mind as I move forward here.

Specifically today I want to talk about the second chapter in Parables which deals with the concept of quasi-corporeality and does so through a parable of acting: a scene from a Ronald Reagan autobiography. It is acting though that interests me, in part because it connects the course back to our reading of Ulmer's Heuretics, which takes interest in method acting and Gary Cooper. In particular though, my question is this:

Why is acting important for the digital humanist?

In part, the answer is self-evident, at least it is if the digital humanist is engaged in video scholarship. Of course we can talk about performance more abstractly across media, but it is the particular demands of performance before/within the camera that interests me. The camera (plus editing technologies and, especially now, the media network that distributes video) participates in actualizing potentials and capacities in actors that are different from those demanded of writers by the pen/paper, typewriter, word processor. That's obvious, right? A whole new set of cultural practices, including the method, arise to deal with the challenge of acting before the camera. Even those of us who "act naturally" (as the Beatles song goes) learn that behavior in relation to the camera. As Massumi writes, "Susceptibility to possession and ventriloquism ... define the actor's talent: self-affectation. That term should be understood in the double sense of the artificial construction of the self and of the suffusing of that self with affect" (63).

In writing and even in teaching, one remains within the mirror-vision of the self. As Massumi notes, the mirror image is always one of stasis, the self at rest. In order to see yourself, your head has to remain still in relation to the mirror. The movement-vision (a vision of the body in movement, as captured by the camera) is one of included disjunction: "a continuous displacement of the subject, the object, and their general relation: the empirical perspective uniting them in an act of recognition. It is an opening onto a space of transformation in which a de-objectified movement fuses with a de-subjectified observer" (51). Reconnecting to assemblage theory here, there is the moving actor, the moving camera, and the eventual movements of the editor. Traditionally film demands the stationary viewer, but here I want to jump forward to the digital media user who moves as well. I also want to note that the camera capture of the body in motion is always partial and abstracts a new secondary, coded movement).  By now, we have all seen ourselves on video somewhere I imagine. This is more than/other than the uncanny. What is emerging here is a different notion of body through our exposure to these assemblages.

In short, I am thinking that digital media demands something very different from us rhetorically than traditional oral or written communication. In those we act from mirror-vision. We develop the "voice" that expresses, reflects and/or secures presence, intention, and/or thought. We compose and revise with the mirror-vision of thinking. Even if we ascribe to the power of ideology/culture to shape identity and agency, we hold on to the hope of critical theory to create space where this mirror-vision can work.

The movement-vision of digital media works differently. It is composed of that which mirror-vision cannot see. And we do not have to take it literally, as if to suggest that it is only video that presents this challenge. As Massumi notes, vision is a bifurcated sense, registering both movement and identity. Movement belongs most properly to proprioception and viscerality: muscle-memory, habit, and gut. In perhaps a surprising move, I might suggest that digital "life-streaming" connects with this movement-vision. It is surprising because we connect life-streaming with navel-gazing as the epitome of mirror-vision. And perhaps each individual status update, each tweet is mirror vision. But each tweet is like a still taken from a video, a reconstitution of mirror-vision. But maybe the whole stream in action is movement-vision, a kind of digital proprioception. I'm not sure, just thinking out loud here.

To bring this around to a close... In thinking through the implications of movement-vision, particularly as those implications were addressed by acting methods, we can gain access to the new rhetorical demands of digital media to move us beyond reterritorializing moves of mirror-vision typical of voice and style toward the potential becomings available in our inescapable exposure to digital assemblages.

post-procedural rhetoric and serious games

I was reading Ian Bogost's "Rhetoric of Video Games" and was interested in his use of the term "procedural rhetoric." The term is also central to his book, Persuasive Games. The term caught my eye in part because it is the same term that Richard Fulkerson employs in his 2005 CCC essay "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century." So I started wondering about the potential for interesting things to happen between these texts.

Not surprisingly, Bogost and Fulkerson are referring to different things, at least on the surface. For Fulkerson, procedural rhetoric, along with expressivism and critical/cultural studies, represent the three dominant forms of composition pedagogy. For Fulkerson the WPA Outcomes Statement is a good example of procedural rhetoric, and he describes procedural rhetoric in the following way:

an axiological commitment to judging writing by suitability to the context (“situation and audience”), including concern for classical issues of pathos, ethos, and logos. Its theory of the writing process says that writing is a complex extended set of (teachable) activities in which a wide variety of invention procedures may be valuable, and an equal variety of drafting and revision activities....Epistemologically, adherents of this view believe that values and decisions are reached through dialectic, but they do not take a radical antifoundational view.

In short, Fulkerson's procedural rhetoric includes some of the dominant pedagogic modes in FYC. Of course one can take issue with his taxonomy, but that's not what I am here to do today.

Instead, I want to juxtapose this with Bogost's use of the term: 

Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes. Following the classical model, procedural rhetoric entails persuasion—to change opinion or action. Following the contemporary model, procedural rhetoric entails expression—to convey ideas effectively. Procedural rhetoric is a subdomain of procedural authorship; its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming.

So here we have something interesting, I think: argument through the composition of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In a way, I think this is what is going on in Fulkerson's model as well. There, as a procedural rhetorician and pedagogue, one is teaching students a variety of writing processes. The students undertake the processes in the composition of essays, but one teaches procedures as a mode of persuasion and expresson. Now there is an argument that would suggest that all texts are procedural. Books carry with them rules of behavior. Reading a book is a procedure, and a procedure that must be learned. Different books demand different procedures. As such, one might argue that Bogost's distinction between the "construction of words or images" and the "authorship of rules" does not fully hold. And here, like Bogost, I'm not talking about the content of the media but rather the mechanisms by which media are composed and consumed/used/played. What we might say is that the procedural rhetoric of print-textual writing and reading have become regularized. Where we are quite conscious of our choices as game players, we are perhaps less conscious of the choices we make as readers, even though our choices with texts are likely more open.

In saying this I am not trying to dismiss the point that Bogost is making, because I think there's certainly value in thinking through the rhetorical issues here. To the contrary, in trying to establish the connections between these concepts of procedural rhetoric, I'm thinking it might be possible to open up this conversation to think about the role of other rhetorical theories. In particular I am interested in the notion of a "post-procedural rhetoric" that builds upon post-process theories. In this essay, Bogost is particularly interested in the potential for video games, through procedural rhetoric, to undertake the kinds of cultural critique Fulkerson would associate more with the Critical/Cultural Studies brand of composition pedagogy. However, I would push in a different direction where rhetoric processes are less deterministic and become articulated as components in a more complicated assemblage or network.

Undoubtedly, processes in a more technical/computer programming sense conform to a stricter logic than rhetorical processes. Despite that, if we think of a game like chess, with a reasonably limited number of procedures or rules, we can see rich variety of potential interaction and unfolding composition: particularly once the system is exposed to (and exposes itself to) two human players. Chess can be as much a game of human psychology as anything else. Post-process composition asks us to consider the broader cultural and material contexts in which writing practices are situated, that writing cannot be simply the undertaking of pre-established procedures or processes (not that anyone would ever say it could be, right?... right?). A post-procedural rhetoric for games (serious/persuasive/educational/etc.) would similarly investigate the social assemblages or actor-networks or whatnot in which games operate. This is not to suggest that a game or text cannot be persuasive, because obviously things are persuasive. Instead it is simply a way of stepping beyond the perceived process to investigate how rhetoric operates in these assemblages.

augmented reality, serious games, and pedagogic secrets

I was reminded earlier of Don DeLillo's White Noise and the scene early in the novel where Gladney visits the "most photographed barn in America" and his friend observes that, of course, no one can actually see the barn. It's an observation that summons Baudrillard's precession of the simulacra. 25+ years later, seeing the same barn through an augmented reality lens (e.g. layar on a smartphone), what might we be able to say that we see?

My response has been that all subjective experiences (all the things we see) are mediated and directly material, that all mediations are material. And by material, I mean that all mediations are comprised of objects and forces that are actual and virtual in a Deleuzian/post-Deleuzian sense. As such, in the sense that we think about the "withdrawal of objects" (as a term of art) and the limits of human cognition/epistemology, our consciousness can only ever sense our exposure to the exteriorized relations in the assemblage that include us and the barn. Augmented reality, then, changes the assemblage to which we are exposed. I don't know if we can say we are exposed to "more data" through AR, but we might say that we are exposed to more information if we define information as a subjective, value-laden evaluation of data (i.e., information is data we value). On the other hand, another person might find the AR data interferes with the experience/information s/he's looking for. Either way, though, we have the same chance (i.e. none) of seeing the "real" (as in unmediated) barn. But we can be exposed to the barn (and AR) through an assemblage of exteriorized relations that are material (virtual/actual), real but abstract, and that's what we need to deal with.

Anyway, that's just a brief philosophical prelim to thinking about AR and serious/educational games. I'm directly involved in a game development project right now, and it has me thinking about these issues on a general philosophical level that I feel comfortable sharing here.

The first thing that strikes me about serious gaming is the fundamental disconnect between the rhetorical stances of games and schooling. Here are a few key ones. Generally speaking, schooling is compulsory and transactional. The discourse is rational and formalist. For example, you go to school and the teacher says, "we are going to learn about the American Revolutionary War." You get no choice in the matter. The teacher gives you a series of assignments, and you do them. And through the teacher's lectures, the school textbooks, and the student assignments the primary goal is clarity: to make available any and all knowledge about the war that is requisite for the curriculum. Rhetoric is simply a matter of style-correctness.

Games obviously present a different set of conditions. I'll circle back to the questions of compulsion and transaction in a moment and deal with the question of gaming discourse first. Obviously there are many kinds of games. However, I would suggest that in all games (video or otherwise), there are secrets. All games come with rules of play, but the rules do not, cannot, tell you how to play the game. The discourse is both hermeneutic and heuristic. That is, one must recognize patterns to discover the secrets of gameplay, but then one needs to turn that knowledge into inventive action. Games hide things from players; winning a game means discerning hidden things (e.g. the cards your opponent is holding, the next pitch to be thrown, whether the defense will blitz, the weakness of the boss creature at the end of a level, etc.). Often such discernment is intuitive (it cannot be reduced to rational thought) and draws upon an assemblage of data that we cannot fully account for in our conscious minds. 

As such, while such gaming exchanges are transactions, they cannot be reduced to the zero-sum game of rational exchange (i.e I do a, b, and c, and you give me an "A, B, or C."). And here is where I think we uncover the "compulsory" experience of schooling. The negative compulsion of schooling is its demand that we reduce our experience to rational exchange. One could suggest that this insistence on rational exchange is intended to condition students for the exploitative, vampiric exchange of labor for capital (i.e. the hourly wage), but I'l just gesticulate in that direction.

In any case, the question I see serious games posing to schooling is "can schooling accept learning as a nonrational, irreducible experience?" Obviously, it's an open question.

So now let me reintroduce AR as part of a particular kind of serious gaming environment. Here is the player, mobile device in hand, interacting with a physically proximate object and receiving augmented data in relation to that object. In schooling discourse, the AR data is rational and transactional; there is a compulsion that it be reducible to some set of objectives about "what we are supposed to learn here." In short, the AR data rationally informs us about the otherwise secret/inaccessible knowledge about the object we are compelled to know by curriculum. However, we (ought to) know (by now) that AR does not "reveal" but rather alters the assemblage to which we are exposed in our relations to this object. Furthermore, in a game, we know the key knowledge is not plainly visible. In fact, the key knowledge is often intentionally obscured. As such, in an AR serious game, the data presented to the game player contains secrets that must be discerned and may even be potentially misleading in some regard. That is, something is missing that must be figured out and then acted upon in an inventive way.

When we win the game, it is fair because we all play within the rules, but it is unfair in the sense that the winner acted on knowledge she discerned that others did not (unless it's a game of pure chance, but that's not for today). In schooling discourse it would be akin to a test that asked questions that "weren't in the textbook or lectures." Supposedly that's not fair, even though all students take the same test. On the other hand, in reality, I know students who succeed in a composition class often do so because they are better writers coming in through the door. Is it fair that my kid is a math genius and yours maybe is not?

All this should really tell us something about schools, right? Though, ideologically, they operate according to a transactional, rational rhetoric, their claims to reveal knowledge must operate by simultaneously hiding other data and information. As most students eventually figure out, school is a game, but it is a cynical game because the rules are unevenly applied. As such, it is like all the mind games we play in life. Winning the school game means discerning the hidden curriculum and recognizing that the information presented to you ("learn/do a, b, and c and get an 'A, B, or C.'") is just legerdemain, that the winning tactics are not simply rational, and that what can be valuably learned is irreducible to the crap in the printed curriculum. 

One can see this taking place in the little game where students come to you and ask "how can I revise this paper to get an A?" Maybe this is a naive question of someone with faith in the transactional rationality of pedagogy. But maybe it is gameplay. However the professor's office isn't the place to find the cheat codes or the walkthrough. If I tell you how to win the game, then you aren't playing the game anymore, right? But the secret is that you can't do a, b, and c to get an A. How do you get an A on your paper? How do you serve an ace in tennis? Hit the ball hard enough, in the right place. How do you do that? It's a secret that you can't be told but must interpret and invent. In school that seems unfair because of this illusion of rational transactions, but in almost any other context we understand this implicitly. You don't walk up to a beautiful stranger and ask them how to convince them to have sex with you. We reject the implicit terms of the car salesperson who asks "what do I have to do to get you into a car today?"

This may seem far afield from AR and serious games (ok it is). But I think my underlying point here is that the study of AR and serious games ought to be able to tell us some things about the schooling pedagogies that emerged in the context of industrial capitalist culture. Serious games give us a real opportunity to rethink education in a way that might lead us back from the brink of absurd instrumentalism on which we totter. 

Selfe and Hesse converse on digital composition

Yesterday NCTE hosted this conversation with Selfe, Hesse, and about 65 other folks. We were in Elluminate, if you are familiar with that. If one is very optimistic, one could see the potential in such conversations, but we'd need much more practice and better technology. An hour obviously does not allow 65 people enough time to really converse. One has to appreciate Selfe and Hesse being willing to do this, but I do wish we might all have made better uses of our time.

That said, a recap and some thoughts.

Selfe presented an argument which is familiar if you have followed her work. Her main point was that multimodal composition allows students to communicate in different ways, thus not restricting education to those with facility at alphabetic literacy. Hesse didn't take up a position counter to that. In fact, the whole thing was mostly people agreeing with each other. Hesse's FYC program at Denver does quite a bit with digital composition, so at least in practice it would seem he has a fair degree of support for the concept. Furthermore, though not everyone participated, my sense is that the audience was one that was largely in agreement with the value of digital composition.

The only issues that were really raised had to do with resources and professional development. Those are certainly issues, but mostly if one hasn't decided that digital composition is a priority. And by "one," I mean as an institution and/or profession. IF, in a very hypothetical sense, at UB we decided, with the support of the administration, that digital composition was integral to composition, we could acquire the technological resources and provide the professional development needed. In fact, I think we are overly stuck on the notion of "computer labs," so when we get stuck on those costs, we may be going down the wrong road.

I appreciate Selfe's call for us to address students with non-alphabetic literacy strengths. However,  I fear that such an argument is one of dozens of things that universities should do. I think compositionists like to frame their arguments as ethical imperatives, and they respond well to such arguments. So while I agree that we should do this, I don't really see that as a positive path toward digital composition. For as much as Selfe states her dislike of the term "disability" (and I agree with her about the term's problematic status), her argument has a problem of situating digital composition as an "assistive technology" (at least for those less troubled by the term disability). And while these technologies certainly can be assistive in this sense, that's just one small portion of their functioning.

The other argument touched upon is the inevitability argument: all these students doing all these techie things and changes in communication in the workplace... inevitably we will need to address these technologies. I agree with that as well, but the argument does suffer from a few problems, which were discussed yesterday. First, what sense do we have of the prevalence of digital composition in the workplace or elsewhere in the academy? For the latter, the sense is not much is going on overall. Of course I always want to ask how many people are writing humanistic research essays in their workplace or in their other courses? So in part, I think this is a misleading concern, even though I do think composition ought to engage with such writing practices (but in a critical way, not in a way that is slavish to their trends). The second concern has to do with how much value we are willing to put on informal social communication, from texting to YouTube videos. Can we take these as indicators of where other rhetorical practices might go?

The other problem with inevitability is when. It suggests "some day" this will happen. But it doesn't necessarily create any exigency to do this now. Similarly the "should" argument is compelling, but there are lots of things composition "should" do.

I might add a different argument that essentially says that we have always taught composition in the context of available technologies. At some point in history, I'm not sure when, it became necessary to turn in typed essays (that was the case when I was an undergrad). Before that, handwritten essays were acceptable. Somewhere in the 90s, essentially all students started turning in word-processed essays. Each of these changes radically altered the materiality of composition, but we could ignore that because the materiality of the final product was the same (so much for our so-called "process orientation"!).  Now the materiality of our compositional spaces are changing rapidly. Not some day, not inevitably, but already and we are behind. 

We do not get to choose IF composition should change. Composition has changed. No matter what kind of assignments you create in your FYC course, the compositional contexts in which they are produced have radically altered. And we risk our intellectual and professional future by ignoring that fact.

As a side note...

The question I didn't get to ask was about networked, collaborative composition. Honestly I am more interested in the possibilities of students writing texts together using a range of networked technologies than I am in their bringing in non-textual media (though I think that is also significant). I think once you start composing online it is inevitable that you will bring in other media. I know I don't do it much here in the informal space of my blog, but if you look at my online publications, you'll see plenty of other media. If you were to look in the online spaces of my courses, you'd see a variety of media as well. But I digress. As I said, I think one of the important things to have happen in a composition class is for students to get practice in real collaboration. Not necessarily on a single document or paragraph, but on a site.

I didn't ask in part because we ran out of time, but also because I didn't see the point in asking. Just like conference panels, a conversation like that is highly performative and in my mind not really an opportunity to work through things. 

As a second side note...

One question I did ask when I registered got folded into the presentation and was answered (sort of), but there was certainly some miscommunication. I had asked if we thought that the fact that many rhet/comp folks have little/no expertise with digital comp was a problem for us in having this conversation. Selfe answered by saying that our state of not-knowing wasn't an excuse. That's an answer of sorts, but it doesn't really address the problem I was describing. The problem I was trying to describe is one where a majority of rhet/comp faculty do not agree with the argument that digital composition is integral to FYC and part of the reason they do not agree is that they have no facility with digital composition themselves. Yes they could be trained, but first they would have to want to be trained. They would have to see digital composition as integral to their work. 

So maybe this state of things isn't an "excuse," but I certainly think it is a problem we have to face.

In other words, right now I think it would be overly generous to say that 30% of rhet/comp PhDs have the facility with digital comp necessary to teach it in FYC. And I would think less than 5% of FYC instructors have that capacity (though they could be trained/supported if the programmatic/institutional priority was there). If the situation were reversed and 70% of r/c phds had this facility, I doubt we would be having this conversation. 

So to me, "excuse" or not, the whole problem we are really facing in this disciplinary question is the general lack of fitness among r/c faculty to address the concern. 

can education be abundant?

Seth Godin wrote this post a while back. I don't remember if I read it at the time, but I was picking up on it again from a Will Richardson tweet. Anyway, he proposes several "crossroads" in education and suggests that they results in eight possible futures, which are basically described as:

• abundant, free, learning
• abundant, free, schooling
• abundant, expensive, learning
• abundant, expensive, schooling
• scarce, free, learning
• scarce, free, schooling
• scarce, expensive, learning
• scarce, expensive, schooling

He suggesting that "the free, abundant learning combination is the one that's going to change the world." I think he's right. This combo will change the world.... in the nineteenth century. This is what we call public schooling. Obviously we think of this as "abundant." It is free to the student. And students do learn there. I don't think we can quibble with the abundant quality of public schools, but maybe one might complain about the "free" part. Well, I would suggest, to quote Robert Heinlein, TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Just look at all the "free" social media out there--the concerns about monetization and immaterial free labor. That's what I am talking about here. So "free" is relative to the user/student in this case.

Now perhaps we also want to quibble over the learning/schooling distinction. As I see it, the distinction that Godin is making here is between self-paced, learner-driven inquiry and group-based, teacher/institution-driven instruction. I don't think this is to suggest that people don't "learn" in school, but only that it isn't a great method. I know where he's coming from. Nevertheless, I have long-standing criticisms of the fantasy that Americans are going to teach themselves through self-paced online courses and a community of experts freely giving their time. However I would be willing to see this as a methodological shift in terms of pedagogy. At one point, Godin describes an MBA program he attended as scarce, free, learning, so clearly he sees this possibility.

However, while Godin seems to think the problem is schooling vs. learning (as do many others), I think the conceptual problem lies with the idea of "abundance." What exactly is abundant about education? In the case of public schooling in America, it means that every kid has access to a classroom in a public school. It also means that we will hold schools, teachers, parents, and kids accountable in different ways for "learning" (as determined by performance on standardized tests). So rooms, materials, curricula, and teachers are relatively abundant, as are tests. If we turn it over to more of a "learning" model, what is abundant then? Basically all the same things. It's just that the curricula and pedagogy are different, and maybe we get away from the standardized tests, but maybe not.

I would suggest that whatever is "abundant" about education is a commodity. It is not worth very much. And, in the end, while necessary, it is not sufficient to make a difference in student learning.

For example, in teaching writing, books and websites about grammar and style are abundant. Syllabi, lesson plans, and writing assignments are abundant. Video games and multimedia exercises to teach you grammar are abundant. Some of those things are useful and maybe even necessary. But what makes a difference in a student becoming a better writer is the attention she pays to the task and the sustained attention she receives from an experienced, knowledgeable teacher and a community of dedicated, fellow student writers. It is the attention, the cognitive demand, that is scarce. Not only b/c people may not want to do it, but simply b/c that kind of sustained attention is not abundant. It is something that needs to be learned, developed, and exercised. And that attention simply cannot be "free." It is a cost unto itself.

So, perhaps perversely, I will completely disagree with Godin and say that it is scare, expensive, schooling that will change the world, though I will slightly amend his definitions to suggest that the pedagogical methods he describes as "learning" can and should be what we find in schools. What is scarce and expensive is what is valuable. And I'm not talking about an Ivy League degree. I'm taking about the scarcity and cost of paying attention, of the difficult cognitive labor of learning anything that is worth learning or developing any skill worth having. I'm talking about attentional demands that must be paid by both student and teacher.

What is necessary is to shift the discourse so that people stop thinking of education as abundant, and as such as something that is easily acquired like fast food. We need to help students understand that an eduction requires effort and hence it is not "free." And as much as I embrace the pedagogy behind what Godin terms "learning," we need to realize that it is an error to suggest that just following your nose and interests and links at one's own pace will result in learning. I'm as likely as anyone to while away a few hours surfing blogs on the web. And I learn some interesting stuff, and sometimes I blog about it. But I also realize that such practice is only a prelim to a very different kind of learning where I must meet other people's demands and expectations, where I have to confront difficult things, and work them out.

In short, TANSTAAFL..