digital digs

transferring from teaching "academic" writing

In her recent CCC article, Elizabeth Wardle extends upon the argument she made with Doug Downs earlier in challenging the field to move away from conventional FYC pedagogies and curricula. As she notes, and I agree, the fundamental problem with how FYC is conceived is that it rests upon a faith in transference, that "writing skills" learned in FYC will transfer to other writing situations. This faith in turn rests upon a mythology of generalizable literacy.

The problem is that transference and general literacy do exist to some extent. All acts of reading and writing do share some common attributes, mostly the kinds of things that most kids learn in elementary school. And I think there is a limited property of transference. I am an expert writer in my specialty of digital rhetoric (if I may be so immodest). My writing practice transfers quite well to other areas of rhetoric and composition. It even would transfer fairly well to other areas of English Studies. I can write into interdisciplinary spaces. And while I wouldn't consider myself an expert writer in other humanistic fields, I think I could be more successful writing there than the average scientist. Certainly I would perform better than the typical undergrad. Also, my writing transfers fairly well from scholarship to this blog, to pedagogical texts I create, and to various institutional discourses.

Fundamentally we realize that investing time in writing will lead to better writing.

But that doesn't mean I could write a legal brief or stock market analysis or documentation for a weapons system or any other number of things.... Obviously.

When FYC began 100+ years ago, the range of undergraduate discursive practices was smaller. We didn't have as many highly specialized discourses. So maybe the idea of transference might have made a little more sense. But really transference isn't the problem. In order for a student to have a writing practice that might transfer from one discourse to another, that student has to have a writing practice in the first place!

So that's a problem and, no, FYC is not the solution. 

In addition, writing well in a particular discourse requires knowledge of the field it supports. I always use the iceberg metaphor with my students. Of course one of the perception issues for FYC on campuses is the belief that one can just replicate the part of the iceberg above the water without the rest of it. Writing well takes time, knowledge, and dedication. Students might acquire these in four years, but FYC certainly cannot assure that they do.

I would think that all of that should be painfully obvious to anyone. And the basis of Wardle's argument is that we need to begin rethinking FYC by rejecting the premise that it can achieve the goal of preparing students to be successful composers of the multi-genre constellation known as "academic writing." She also suggests that FYC might be seen like BIO 101 or PHIL 101 as an introduction to a discipline. That works OK for me, though I'm not sure that from there you can make the argument for the small, writing intensive courses that we have. That is, if FYC is to be like other Gen Ed courses and other Gen Ed courses are taught in large lecture sections, then, well...

And here we get an interesting departure based on institutional context. If you're a small, liberal arts college where most of the courses are small then there's no problem. If you are a state comprehensive school where most of the FYC courses are taught be contingent faculty, then maybe moving to bigger sections means people lose their jobs (albeit exploitative jobs). If you're a research university then those small sections fund your graduate students and you don't want to lose them.

In any case, "we" are in the business of believing that students benefit from sitting in small introductory courses where they write a lot. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. I don't think those courses can do the magical things that have been expected of them, but I believe that an intensive writing course where students study, practice, and reflect upon writing practices is at least as valuable a part of general education as any. I do agree with Wardle that such a course can serve as an introduction to the field of rhetoric, where I think the fundamental argument is that rhetorical-compositional practices are an intellectual advantage for students in the same way that thinking historically or reasoning scientifically or contemplating philosophically (i.e. things one might acquire elsewhere in Gen Ed) is an advantage. That is, they are an advantage in a general way that is only indirectly transferable to other contexts.

What genre should FYC students write if the fictitious "academic writing" is finally ripped away? That's obvious. They write in the only genre available to them: the genre of the FYC classroom. Genres are not plug 'n play. Genres emerge from a set of relatively stable contexts: writers, audiences, and exigencies. Not the other way around. FYC does provide this. Every semester, you have first-year students writing to one another and their instructors for the purpose of understanding how rhetorical methods and knowledges help us understand writing. Maybe students aren't all fired up about the subject. But then they aren't interested in biology when they take BIO 101 or history when they take HIS 101 and so on and so forth. That's the nature of general education. Students often aren't interested in taking it. That's part of the challenge.

In any case, if you think of the purpose of FYC in this way it can actually open the course up to a wider degree of variety than one finds in other disciplinary intro courses or even in current FYC curricula which remain tied to lock-step. oversimplified textbook versions of process, tired mode-driven pseudo-genres, and fantasies of academic writing that make virtually every FYC class seem like a failure.

The expectations of such a course should be simple. We cannot measure the success of FYC by how well a student does in some discipline-specific writing course two years later when they are next asked to write a research paper. The expectations should be analogous to those in any gen ed course. Students should demonstrate that they have learned certain introductory concepts and demonstrate some facility with particular disciplinary practices.

I find myself writing about FYC quite a bit. And in a year, I will find myself directing a composition program at Buffalo. So such conversations are interesting and relevant to me. At the same time, as a discipline I think we need to start turning more of our energies away from such matters and toward other rhetorical concerns that might speak to broader humanistic and cultural concerns.

In the end, FYC is just a couple introductory courses.

preliminary thoughts on Technological Ecologies and Sustainability

I've started read Technological Ecologies and Sustainability eds. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi A. McKee, and Dickie Selfe: the first book out of the Computers and Composition Digital Press (available here). This new press is an exciting proposition and it's great to see it come to life. Though I'm just getting into the text,  Technological Ecologies and Sustainability raises important new questions for us to consider. As the editors write in their introduction,

Why shouldn’t scholars and teachers of English studies once again envision a new institutional space for prioritizing propositions of compelling sustainable technological ecologies and establishing a temporary state of affairs? Why can we not imagine an institutional process that will eventually call that state of affairs into question, so that the process can begin again? We and our colleagues have brought to life unique and innovative institutional spaces before as we created (and continue to recreate) writing and learning centers or technology-rich labs and classrooms, as we create new techno-pedagogies out of each online space that leaps into existence (blogs, wikis, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.), and as we create new digital spaces for publishing online scholarly work. We are perfectly capable of creating institutional space for establishing temporary states of affairs on which we can base decisions in the service of sustainable technological ecologies. We are flexible and nimble enough to imagine policies and procedures that will, then, call a temporary state of affairs into question and begin Latour’s process all over again (collective gathering civil discussion  ranking of propositions  establishing yet another temporary state of affairs).

There's no doubt that we are in a challenging moment. It is nearly as difficult to figure out the questions that we need to ask as it is to seek answers to those questions. That process is not made any easier by the larger contexts of the economy and the changing nature of higher education (of which technological concerns are only one part). How should rhetoric and composition, or more broadly, English Studies, or even broader, the humanities, respond to the emerging practices of networked digital media? How should we approach the subject as researchers? How should we incorporate it into our curriculum? Into first-year writing? Into writing across the curriculum? Into undergrad and graduate degree programs?

Ideally the bottom line answer to these questions would begin with your degree of certainty in your understanding of where we will be in 2020. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone can have much certainty. As such it is imperative to move forward with a highly fluid and responsive set of tactics, which is something I see echoed in this collection.  The couple chapters I've already read all suggest that these tactics are heavily shaped by local, institutional forces. This is something I've suggested myself (so naturally I think it is a very astute observation ;-) ). That said, at some point, our disciplinary identity might shift so that the integration of new media would seem as normal as the integration of print texts, and then differences between local contexts will likely diminish as they have in terms of the expectations for English faculty in terms of books have. But that is quite a ways off, if it ever arrives.

In the first essay in the collection, Rylish Moeller, Cheryl Ball, and Kellie Cargile Cook, take up the question of tactics from the perspective of new faculty entering an institution. Specifically, the article recounts Rylish and Cheryl's experiences joining the Utah State faculty. As they argue,

One solution to this issue is to look at new English faculty as agents who manipulate certain pressure points at various times within a complex, political economic ecology—a social system demonstrated through material, measurable effects and affectations. These pressure points become more visible with the introduction of new agents and new technologies, both of which push the boundaries of a department’s constraints. 

This is an interesting perspective for me as I move to join the Buffalo faculty next semester. I think this is a useful essay for anyone in computers and writing entering a new position, or indeed any department hiring such faculty. Looking at the particular experiences of these faculty will likely give many readers new insight into what happens when digital media faculty are brought into a department. My own experiences at Cortland were not much different. At first I was given an office computer that was of little use to me. And it took a couple years to build a computer lab where I could teach my courses. The successes I did enjoy at Cortland came from building relationships with faculty and staff across the campus. This also seems to have been the experience at Utah State. It's really not surprising. And in the end, we might take comfort in recognizing the importance of good old-fashioned rhetoric and communication to these efforts.

In the end, it's not really anything new to reshape a department through new hires, but the move toward digital media takes this in a new direction. That is, making a move toward hiring faculty in a new literary specialization will make a difference internally to a department, but hiring digital media faculty changes the department's relationship to the material operation of a campus. Digital media faculty will establish connections and draw on resources that traditional literary faculty might never consider. For good or for bad, we shake things up.

So that's certainly one way to call the current state of affairs into question.

I'm looking forward to reading further into this collection.

Chronicle Article on the Internet and Student Writing

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh Keller reports on the research and debate over the impact of the Internet on student writing. Not surprisingly, there are differences of opinion to be found. While there is a general sense that more time spent writing is a good thing, the article also reports on concerns that the informal writing of social media leads to poor academic writing and sloppy thinking. Really, the more I think about it, the more this seems a "dog bites man" kind of story. The report focuses on several longitudinal studies undertaken at Stanford, Michigan State, and elsewhere with the idea that such studies might resolve these debates.

Yeah, right.

Why ask whether writing on the Internet makes you a better academic writer? Why not ask whether academic writing makes you a better user of social media? I suppose it is understandable that academics might want to value a particular kind of academic writing, but in the end that valuation is a demonstration of thinking that is no less sloppy than the poor thinking habits of which they accuse students.

I wonder where one might find the longitudinal studies and extensive research that demonstrates that academic writing (if such a thing actually exists and can be quantitatively defined) is the best possible genre for developing "critical thinking" or producing and disseminating disciplinary knowledge. Of course such studies and research do no exist. The value of academic writing is purely tautological. Academic writing is the best academic writing because academic writing is what academic writing is. 

If we give even a few minutes thought to the issue, we can recognize that academic writing practices emerge from historical-cultural-material-technological-ideological conditions. Whatever skepticism one wishes to turn toward social media discourses should be turned doubly so upon academic discourses.

When we talk about academic discourse we are really talking about two unrelated things.

1. The constellation of largely unrelated discourses employed in faculty research. These discourses are mostly untranslatable from one discipline to the next and often from one sub-specialty to the next. Generally, only a few thousand people worldwide could read any one of these given discourses. And whatever value these discourses may have in these small communities, they have no direct relation to the writing practices of undergraduates, who do not write in these discourses and rarely read them.
2. Another constellation of largely unrelated discourse practices undertaken by undergraduates in their coursework, which include everything from literary interpretation to lab reports to pseudo-professional genres preparing students for workplace writing in any one of hundreds of careers and majors.

The real problem with this whole debate is the continuing mythology that there exists some generalizable academic discourse. In the Chronicle article, Keller notes that skeptics believe social media genres "have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands." Really? and what "kind" would that be? Can you describe the "kind of sustained, focused argument" that is displayed in literary criticism and a lab report and a poli-sci analysis of public policy and a review of a marketing campaign and an environmental impact report and so on?

The truth is there is no "kind of sustained, focused argument." Now, if the purpose of college writing instruction is to prepare students to write 5-10 page, research, literary interpretation essays, then clearly that would be what you would assign students in a first-year writing course. But I imagine that even for undergraduate English majors, the goal is to prepare students to write in a broader range of genres than this. The goal, as I think most of us envision it, at least in liberal arts majors, is to prepare students to write in a general and flexible way for a range of civic and professional discursive contexts. And if one takes a look at what those contexts currently are and where they might be headed... well, an examination of social media discursive practices would seem a reasonable part of such a curriculum.

So, no, I don't think tweeting or keeping a blog diary will provide much help to a student writing a literary critical paper. And I've seen little evidence that writing a literary critical paper will help a student write a job letter or a marketing brochure or a grant for a non-profit agency. And just as the habits of tweeting may even be detrimental to composing academic prose, academic writing habits can be detrimental to composing successful business prose.

The best I think we can say is what should be fairly obvious. The more we write and the greater variety of genres in which we write, the better prepared we will be to write in a variety of genres in the future.

In short, this article indicates that we continue to ask the wrong question. And maybe I should have just written that, but I'm an academic writer by trade and my habit is to elaborate (typically beyond almost an audience's level of interest). Hmm... maybe I should be relying more on my habits of tweeting discourse.

Why blog? on the rhetoric of social media

I am contributing an essay on blogging for the Writing Spaces collections being put together by Charlie Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. As part of my proposal I suggested the following

My intention is to present the essay as a series of blog posts. Since the collection will be available through a Creative Commons license, if it is acceptable to you, I thought I would post parts of the essay, in draft form, on my blog and elicit comments. This format will also allow me to demonstrate one of the key rhetorical differences between the blog and the essay: where the essay typically flows tightly from one part to another and is read as an organic whole, the blog takes a serial approach to subject matter where the relations between posts are iterative.

As blog readers and perhaps bloggers yourselves, you already know this, but I bring this up as I plan to be carrying out this blog-essay composition here over the summer. I'd appreciate any feedback you might hae along the way with the understanding that some of your comments might end up in the essay itself. (If you mention that you don't want your comments included then I won't include them.)

Writing an essay for a first-year writing course on blogging isn't as easy as it might appear. Obviously blogging represents a broad range of discursive practices so I intend to focus on the uses of blogging for novice writers and the advantages of maintaining a blog about one’s area of professional or academic interest.

For the novice writer, perhaps the most important quality of the blog is its invitation to a regular writing practice. Nothing is more important to the development of a writer than a daily writing practice. A close second though is the opportunity a blog provides to build an audience and purpose for one’s writing. In choosing to write about one’s area of professional or academic interest and connecting with an audience, one has the ability to engage current and important issues in one’s field. This provides an opportunity for students to articulate the relevance of their studies for themselves.

In my view, the fundamental challenges of blogging are not very different from those of any kind of writing. One requires sufficient exigency to write. Where does this come from?

• An urgency to the subject matter (e.g. a current event)
• An important and reasonable purpose (e.g. writing a job letter to get a job)
• A sense of authority, feeling qualified to write about a subject
• A strong personal interest (e.g. creative writing, political writing)
• An audience that will give you positive feedback

One doesn't need all of these. Over time, it is likely that different exigencies will emerge. More importantly, as one develops a writing habit, one begins to think less about needing a reason to write. Hopefully there is always some reason of course, but I think that as one becomes a writer that the act of responding to one's experiences with writing becomes more natural or expected. It simply becomes what one does. As a regular writer or blogger one begins to trust that exigency or purpose will become clear through the act of writing.

The best analogy I can come up with is being vegetarian. Most anyone could decide to not eat meat for a day or two. In fact, you might happen to not eat meat one day without even thinking about it. If you chose today to be a vegetarian, the first week would seem strange. The first month might seem very odd. You might think "so this is what it is like to be a vegetarian." But it isn't. At least not for me. I've been a vegetarian for several years and I give no more thought to eating a hamburger or a chicken leg than most people (in the US anyway) would give to eating a dog. In other words, it doesn't seem strange to me to be a vegetarian, like I'm not eating something I want to eat or should be eating.

As a novice writer, starting to write seems as odd as becoming vegetarian. We know there are writers and vegetarians out there, but we aren't those things. We may write sometimes, just as we eat vegetables, but that's not our identity. What would it mean to make writing a part of our identity? For it to be as much a part of our daily habits as the other things by which we identify ourselves? Blogging is a way to seek an answer to those questions.

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 crisis of scholarly publication: a regurgitating choragraphy of CCCC 2009

My CCCC 2009 experience was bookended by vomit, literally, though fortunately not my own. On the BART train in from SFO, the doors opened at a Mission district stop just in time to perfectly frame a young man vomiting. I recognized this immediately as hailing me into the orbit of urban life. A few days later, as I stepped out of the SF Hilton following the final session, a young woman stood on the side walk and barfed into the street.

Better out than in, I suppose.

Maybe regurgitation was the hidden theme of CCCC 2009: nausea caused from all those waves. Then again, perhaps put cynically, regurgitation might be the general operation of the conference, not just C's but the conference in general. I attended many computers and writing panels. How often is it the same old, same old? How many times do we hear the same questions, year after year? "But my college wouldn't never let us do that in comp." "But how does that teach 'writing'?" And, "what do you mean by 'web 2.0'?" It's regurgitation. I imagine it is often the same in other areas of interest in our field. "What should we do with the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi?" An important question? Maybe. Maybe they are all important questions. But did we need to travel thousands of miles and bloat our carbon footprints to regurgitate the answers?

One noted difference at the conference was the disappearance of publishers. We've been talking about this "crisis" for most of this decade at least, but the recent economy has changed the tenor. We see Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson talking about the future of the newspaper and essentially arguing that the old model is going, going, gone but that news itself will mutate into a variety of forms. As Shirky astutely observes,

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

I think it is fair to say that we are in a related situation in terms of scholarly journals and books. Arguably the old system must break before a new one will have a chance to emerge. In the interim, and already, we can see a variety of measures and experiments--from blogs to online journals like Kairos to WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press to open source textbooks. If we follow Shirly's logic, none of these may replace traditional scholarly publication. Some may take up parts of the old, but more importantly something new needs to come along.

I don't want to regurgitate, again, the discourses surrounding digital scholarship. I think this will quickly become a non-argument as traditional publication simply becomes an economic impossibility. Given the choice between re-evaluating the scholarly quality of digital publication and subventing humanities scholarship, what choice do you think academia will make?

The more difficult task will be extricating ourselves from the remediating horseless carriage of the PDF file and the digital monograph. Who knows how long we will need to continue to toss up the scholarly essay? No doubt we will get to experience a decade of dry heaves. In the end though, a networked, collective/participatory intellectual compositional practice will, I imagine, look very different from the atomized writing model, the overdetermined, citational management of the network, and limited interactivity of contemporary scholarship. But that is likely a long way off. You can try and swallow that if you want, but it will probably just come back up.

In the empty space of missing book displays at CCCC, there were posters of Wordle images made from panel titles from various decades. Make of this knowledge what you will. To me, it is always supplemental. But it is clear that the words Writing and Composition keep coming back up. Not surprising, right? When will we be done regurgitating these words?

Maybe the answer to scholarly publication lies in that question.

Better out than in.

Part III of CCCC09 on historiography, code, and the face

This is likely my last post from SF, unless I'm bored with time and access at SFO tonight, and I have one last panel to discuss from yesterday, "The Waves Not Taken" with Michelle Ballif, Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, and Cynthia Haynes. If you are familiar with their work, then I don't think you would have found anything particularly surprising here. If you're not then you would have likely struggled with what was going on. This was not exactly pitched to a general C's audience, which was fine b/c there wasn't a typical C's audience in the room.

Anyway, I won't attempt to account for the whole matter. Ballif took up the trope of zombies to account for the way that our profession has avoided or domesticated the implications of post-structural thinking for writing. In many ways this was a familiar argument for me, but I did appreciate the zombie metaphor, particularly the linking of zombies and consumerism (which we have seen in the classic Night of the Living Dead). The desire to consume and turn everyone into zombies is reflected in the rhet/comp drive to teach and produce consumable texts with fungible characteristics. It is the pharmakon potential for otherness in consumption, for unexpected mutation, that we seek to domesticate through discipline and pedagogy.

Vitanza declared a "re-beginning" in addressing the concerns of writing histories of rhetoric, picking up on, among other things, the Latourian concern with the idea of "being modern" that drives many historical impulses. Is the truth of history true or rather a rhetorical figure? As we know, r/c seems to have a particular fascination with writing its history. I have been particularly interested in Byron Hawk's counter-history in this regard. Derek Mueller and I were discussing this historicizing impulse in the context of the "long now" project. What histories do we write of ourselves when we eye a future 1000 years or even 10000 years from now (as the long now project seeks to do)? Or more importantly how do we investigate the inclination to think in such terms?

I think I was most enaged with Davis' talk, which addressed the idea of community through the concept of the face. She made several references to Levinas and if I was sitting here with A Thousand Plateaus I might turn there in thinking about faciality. But I'm in an SF hotel, so I'll just wing it. What I got from Davis was this idea of how the call of the other that grabs our attention obliges the construction of a face and a subjectivity. In this sense, the self exists for the other as a site, a condition, of interaction and community. I think this is familiar idea, within certain theoretical circles anyway. In fact, it got me thinking about some of my own conceptualization of the subject as an interface (drawing on Ulmer, among others), as something that bears a relation to interiority that might be analogous to the relation between the computer desktop and the inner workings of the machine.

Haynes' talk was likely the one most relevant to my own presentation (which I ought to rehearse one more time). She talked about code and the role of code/computers in the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. Again, I don't think there is any surprise in the connections between computation, efficiency, optimization, and fascism. In fact, one can go further and look at relations between new media aesthetics and fascism as well. This connects with my discussion of Hayles and the "regime of computation." Of course we must not only critique and "look out for" technofascism, we must directly engage with such potentials. Certainly Deleuze and Guattar have offered us a way of thinking about anti-fascist machines, but also always with an awareness of the possibility of reversal. As the regime of computation begins to enter our professional thinking, we must keep this in mind, but we also cannot simply reject computation as means or metaphor. Instead we need to take it up productively.

Another CCCC 2009 day, part II

So more on the BS angle from the last post.

The third session I attend was a poster session put together by Dickie Selfe. As I tweeted yesterday, I enjoyed this session quite a bit, and it seemed to draw a good crowd. I think people appreciate the lower personal investment of a poster session. Check out what interests you. Interact if you want. Leave when you're ready. Poster sessions are hardly a new phenomenon, though maybe new to CCCC. I've never been to one at least. I think the idea is worth further exploration.

Almost everyone complains about these mega-conferences. To get funding, you need to present, so people invent presentations in order to attend. The tail wags the dog here. That doesn't mean we're not interested in the work we are presenting. It just means to motives are a little skewed. Is CCCC a conference where you speak to experts in your field? Is that the audience you imagine? I don't. There may be some experts in the audience, but today when I present I expect to have to make at least some gesture toward explaining what Twitter is when I discuss it.

Anyway, my point is that we could do this a little differently, give people a chance to present their research, and not have so many concurrent panels for so many days of sessions without really detracting from the intellecutal-scholarly value of the conference. We might even improve it! How about slideshow poster sessions where every presenter sets up a laptop? Or pecha kucha sessions followed by online discussion? Picking up on next year's "remix" theme, Derek Mueller and I were discussing, half-seriously, the idea of remixing the space-time of the conference. How about flash mob presentations outside conventional presentation spaces? Sign up. Receive a text message and in 15 mintues show up in a public space to hear a quick presentation. I was thinking about 60s happenings and I know they used to do things with elevators. How about an "elevator talk" presentation? Everyone who can squeeze into the elevator goes and the talk lasts the journey up and down from the lobby.

Of course you would still need a conventionally approved presentation to get funding to attend, so it always comes back to that.

Another day at CCCC 2009: thoughts on academic bullshit, part I (it never ends)

Another cheap play for attention in a blog title? Maybe, but this was the subject of the first panel I attended on Friday, "Empty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Composition's Self-representation in National Arenas," featuring Mike Edwards, Mark Bauerlein, Margaret Price, and Lauren Rosenberg. You have to appreciate Bauerlein's willingness to come to a conference where he may not be warmly received. (I've discussed some of Bauerlein's arguments here in the past.) However, the panel was less contentious than one might have expected (or perhaps hoped).

Here's the crux of it, and I think something everyone can agree upon. We need to be rhetorical as we strive to reach our intellectual, scholarly, pedagogical, ethical, political goals. This is a pragmatic piece of advice that applies to mostly everyone, including rhet/comp scholars. This means being strategic in our discourse with some audiences and thinking about how we might communicate with non-experts: other academics, politicians, grantors, the general public, etc. At the same time, if there's one thing CCCC demonstrates, it's that there are a lot of us doing may different things. There needs to be a space for such concerns, but it need not occupy the entirety of what we do. And I don't believe anyone would suggest that.

That said, rhet/comp does get addressed the BS question in a particular way, even from within the field, in the continual expecation that research must make the "pedagogic turn." This even came up in the Q&A. Obviously I don't think this is necessary, and in some ways it can't be given the diversity of specialization in our field. If I were to write a text that offered pedagogic insight into the uses of technology in a composition classroom that could be read and employed by the general fyc-teaching population, I could not simultaneously advance knowledge in my field. That is, what I would tell to the typical fyc instructor are foundational things that specialists already know. This is very clearly in evidence when you attend CCCC panels on computers and writing.

Interestingly though, the BS question can cut in many different ways. This was evident in the three other sessions I attended. The next was on writing digital dissertations with Chris Ritter, James Haendiges, and Mike Garcia, all of whom have had some experience with trying to do this. My take away from this panel was that the primary rewards they saw for going digital were personal. They enjoyed the creative challenges of digital composition and viewed the digital medium as intellectually appropriate if not necessary for their work. On the other hand, the risks were professional: legal/copyright obstacles, institutional constraints, and potential job market pressures. Where does the BS lie here? A traditionalist might say a digital diss is BS in thinking that it somehow eschews the intellectual demands of a more conventional text. A techno-progressive might see BS on the other side.

I can appreciate these guys for taking on the challenges of writing a digital diss. On the other hand, I have some concerns. Really they are just questions for discussion. Clearly we don't have, in rhet/comp, a clear sense of digital scholarship. Is it fair or appropriate to ask graduate students to try to develop this genre for us in their dissertations? What kind of expertise should diss cmte members have to be qualified to evaluate a digital diss? In other words, who is reading through the grad student's xhtml code or whatever? Who is evaluating video production values? Who can speak to design or usability? If a student is going to do a digital dissertation, should his/her qualifying exams include some evaluation of technological production/design knowledge? Then there are questions about the job market. Even assuming that these students will be specialists looking for production-oriented new media, digital humanties, and/or computers and writing jobs, a search committee is going to want to know that an applicant will be able to produce the kind of scholarship needed to get tenure at their institution. Chances are that that will mean print scholarship. Sure, one can fight that battle too as an asst prof, just as one fought the battle to produce the digital diss. But the question is whether or not one will even get the chance to fight that battle or if one won't get the job or the campus visit in the first place.

Those are tough questions. And I don't want to dissuade people from doing work in digital media. I should hope that's fairly clear on this blog! But if we are going to encourage or allow students to do these kinds of dissertations, we need to address these concerns... And not just as rhet/comp probably but as English Studies, since hiring/tenure decisions won't take place solely within our field.

strategies, tactics, and the lore of eco-choragraphies

Made it to CCCC for two Thursday afternoon sessions: Clay Spinuzzi, Mark Zachry, and William Hart-Davidson discussing text ecologies and workplace writing and Jeff Rice, James Brown, Derek Mueller, Michael McGinnis and David Grant on the choragraphies of composition.

If there's an advantage to presenting in the penultimate sessions (and yes, I'm grasping here), it's that you can be inspired by the sessions you attend before that. So here I am the following morning putting together some of the ideas from yesterday... not in a way that does any justice to these panels, but in a more self-serving manner for my own presentation.

Clay offered a methodological overview of the work he and his co-panelists do in analyzing workplace writing on three different levels: the strategic, the tactical, and the operational. The operational level is an almost unconsicous event level--keystrokes, mouse clicks, etc. The strategic level, as I understand it, points more to institutional-organizational goals, and the tactical is about the activities that workers undertake in between the micro and macro levels. This had me thinking about De Certeau's use of these concepts, of the tactical as a kind of resistant repurposing of strategies by users, consumers, workers, etc. It's like the William Gibson thing: the street finds its own uses for things. And there was some talk in this direction, particularly at the end of the session in the discussion of how workers respond tactically to the kind of views of their own labor made possible by the kinds of research discussed at the panel, which certainly at least has the potential for a chiling panopticism.

I was particularly interested in their switching back and forth between two views of the tactical level. I don't quite remember their terminology this morning, but one view was a kind of causal event chain, largely reported by the writers (e.g. I did this then I did that). The second was a more "ecological" view, which attempted to capture a more ANT-like diagram of the forces at work.

In truth, the only thing these two panels have in common is what is inside my head. The Rice et al panel took up a choragraphical intervention into CCCC history, looking at putatively formative years in the 60-year history. But as one could see at this panel, choragraphy is about a kind of experimental, collaged storytelling where histories get remixed--the personal, the disciplinary, the social, etc. Derek selected 1987 and talked much about North's Making of Knowledge in Composition. That's where the topic of lore arose in the Q&A.

It got me thinking about lore in terms of the tactical and ANT-like ecology. I was also thinking of lore as potentially a choragraphical performance. Of course, lore was fundamentally local, the talk among compositionists in a department office or hallway. Today, locality obviously doesn't work the same way. Choragraphy offers a very different way of thinking about the local and network ecology, which might invent new tactics.

My own presentation, as I've been dancing around here, takes up the concept of computation to ask how computation might shape our ideas of composition in emerging technologies, particularly in relation to mobility and participation literacy. Listening to these presentations has me thinking that I ought to talk some about how social media technologies develop strategies that envelop, anticipate, or capitalize upon tactical responses. That is, the built-in opportunities for customization, mash-ups, etc. really invite users to make their own uses for things. In fact, that level of personal investment is really at the heart of social media success. (Manovich and others discusss this.) Our take on this is somewhat computational in its logic. When we think of different levels--strategic, tactical, operational--I am reminded of Hayles discussing the challenges of explaining emergence from one level of complexity to the next using these computational theories, like Wolfram's cellular automata. We see this with Twitter too, when we try to mine the data and look for patterns, when we assume that new structures of compositions will emerge, new levels of compositional complexity perhaps? I'm not sure.

But I guess for now I'm coming back to what I would see as Hayles' ethic of intermediation, which I think is (again, potentially) choragraphic. If the "regime of computation" is at least in part a "metaphor" and circulates through cultural discourses as makes its way back to the material and what we decide to make, then a kind of networked, choragraphic lore (which takes all those terms and uses them at a slant, I guess) might be a way of grasping at the tactical ecology behind social-mediated composition.

Anyway, that's what I came up with this morning.