Ti's Seminar Project

Hi everyone!
Here is the link to my seminar project: http://macktial.wix.com/multimodalassessment

What is Access? A Critique of Adam Bank’s Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground

Assumptions Make an Ass of U and Me

Institutions of higher education make a number of assumptions about students. One such assumption of great gravity, but that is often over looked, is the assumption that all of our students have access to the basic technologies that they will need to be successful at the university. Yes, many institutions have nearly round the clock access to state-of-the-art computer labs and nearly all of the students on such campuses have access to these electronic devices and software. These technological offerings are certainly impressive but, although students may have physical access to technology, they may not actually know what to do with it. Without fairly sophisticated technological literacies, most students are unable to use these technologies in meaningful ways (we’ll define this later in the discussion). This flies in the face of common claims that our students are all impressively technologically literate since they are videogame and texting wizards. Luckily, scholars like Adam Banks encourage us, as educators, to remember that not all students have equal access and literacy to academic technologies and that we are desperately in need of “serious, thoughtful discussion about race and the problem of access to computers, the Internet, and information technologies” (Banks, 2006, p.13).

A Review of Banks

            For Banks, access “requires an individual or group of people having the material of any particular technology, along with the knowledge and experience and genuine inclusion in the networks in which decisions are made about their design and implementation that enables them to use –or reuse—them in ways that make sense in their lives” (p.135). When he discusses the missed opportunities of the Digital Divide from the late 1990’s in his chapter “Oakland, The Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment,” Banks draws a clear parallel between the NCTE’s “Resolution on Students’ Rights to their Own Language” to students’ rights to meaningful engagement with technology. For him, discussions on language, such as the Oakland School District’s appeal to include Ebonics as a legitimate language also in the 1990’s all serve as a springboard for discussion surrounding the lack of technological literacy that African Americans and rural poor tend to experience in the United States in that language is a form of expressing power just as meaningful literacy in various technological media also serves as a means to power and change. Unfortunately, according to Banks, such conversations do not frequently occur and, in the case of the late 1990’s, an essential opportunity for such discussions was missed by nearly every writing educator of the time.

Focusing on Technological Access in the Classroom

            Banks goes on to explain that “the rhetorical problems that dominate understanding of race in our discipline are technological problems” (p.12) and his treatment of this discussion is both fascinating and thorough in his book-length analysis of this issue. For this class, however, perhaps a more immediately applicable discussion of Banks’s scholarship lies in his concerns with using technology in the classroom and the potential means with which we might assist our students in developing literacy beyond material or experiential access. Banks’ primary concern is that technology is either entirely not available to students or that it is “dumbed down by skills only curricula [see his example on p.19]” (p.19) and not used in meaningful ways to empower students to achieve transformational access. In this way, teachers and administrators must be critically aware of technological implementation in the classroom and we must be cautious of simply importing technology into our pedagogies as a quick solution to a complex problem.

Unfortunately, this careful consideration is all too often the exception rather than the rule and technology is often treated as a magical solution where throwing money at the problem of technological illiteracy is thought to make the problem go away. This poorly considered solution often leaves educational institutions with quickly outdated technologies that are useless to both students and teachers in addition to perpetuating despair and disillusionment with the constant pursuit of accessing relevant technologies.

Scholars like Cyndie Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Marilyn Cooper, Kathy Yancey, and Charles Moran argue that implementation of technology into a classroom without careful purpose and critical consideration often merely advance hegemonic classroom roles. They, like Banks, argue that teachers must “make sure clearly articulated pedagogical goals drive all technology decisions so that purchases, training, and planning related to technologies related to technology implementation remains relevant to the learning, social, political, and economic needs of those we hope to serve” (Banks, p.20).

Despite the careful implementation of technology by some educators, many teachers and students still resist the implementation of technology as a new and intimidating or unnecessary literacy and, as a result, students are not assisted in the development of meaningful technological access. Banks argues that “committing fully to integrating technologies in the classroom can put us in touch with the natural awkwardness and adjustments that come with picking up new skills and acquiring new discourses, and help us move beyond some of the debilitating assumptions we made about all student writing, and especially that of students from different linguistic traditions” (Banks, p.139). In this way, Banks argues that our discomfort and struggles with technology are actually natural and useful means of working through technology just as working through linguistic differences enable us to embrace all types of student writing. Such pedagogy requires that teachers accept and embrace their limitations and that they even accept a level of discomfort as they “put themselves out there” amongst the students in learning various technologies. Something that, I would argue, is a valuable pedagogical and personal experience.

Meaningful, Schmeaningful – What Does Meaningful Access Look Like?

            At this point, it is important to recognize that Banks defines “meaningful” access as access that enacts social change. Of course, this is not necessarily the same level of access that we all accept since we are not all activists and it is unfair to ask our students to be (unless they want to). What IS important in Banks’ discussion is that everyone should have the ability to experience such access if they choose to. For me, it is essential that we attempt to introduce students to levels of technology beyond their comfort level to develop in them the critical thinking skills that make advanced technological literacy possible. It is, of course, impossible to elevate students from material access to transformative access over the course of one semester but it is possible to build students’ technological confidence and knowledge to set them on the right path.

The Long and Short of It

            If, as Banks claims, technological literacy and access are key to social transformation (something that I imagine David Parry would agree with), it seems that the “burden of access is not only the responsibility of those seeking it, but is a systemic burden as well” (Banks, p.21). If we want to truly value various literacies and if we want our students to have the opportunity to enact social change, then a well-considered technological pedagogy seems like a logical place to start. It is not enough to simply encourage students to use technology. We must, instead, provide them with meaningful and challenging opportunities to embrace technology and, thus, improve their technological comfort level. After all, as Banks points out, “just as the right to vote alone does not ensure that people have access to the local, state, or federal governments that are supposed to serve them, just as school desegregation alone did not magically provide equal access to education, a few computers and Internet connection alone will not mean that people in rural communities, poor people and other people of color will wake up some fine day and marvel that they now have equal access to technology and information” (Banks, p.137). 

Works Cited

Banks, A. (2006). Race, rhetoric, and technology: Searching for higher ground. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Cooper, Marilyn M. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." College English, 52.8 (Dec., 1990), 847-869. Print.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication, 42.1 (Feb., 1991), 55-65. Print.

Moran, Charles and Cynthia L. Selfe. “Teaching English across the Technology/Wealth Gap.” The English Journal 88.6 (Jul., 1999), 48-55. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 411-436. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

Week 11 - October 30th Post

This week’s readings:

Wysocki, Anne Frances. "Introduction: Into Between--On Composition in Mediation." Composing(Media)=Composing(Embodiment). Eds. Kristin L. Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki. Utah State UP. 2012. 1-22.

Banks, Adam. "Oakland, The Word, and The Divide: How We All Missed the Moment." from Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. NCTE Press. 2006. 11-46.

Both Wysocki and Banks are concerned with various levels of access in using technology. These authors recognize that to have more than a basic understanding of technology is to have power. For Wysocki, “writing as a technology […] enables us to experience our bodies as our bodies while at the same time writing mediates those bodies in line with existing institutions” (p.22) and for Banks, digital technologies are essential to enact meaningful changes in our society. Banks argues that “just as the right to vote alone does not ensure that people have access to the local, state, or federal governments that are supposed to serve them, just as school desegregation alone did not magically provide equal access to education, a few computers and Internet connection alone will not mean that people in rural communities, poor people and other people of color will wake up some fine day and marvel that they now have equal access to technology and information” (Banks, p.137 – sorry, I pulled this from the last chapter in his book. It was just a really, really good quote).

Wysocki pushes against the traditional Western of vision and, therefore, sensory experience

“is more complex and changeable than conceived and, as conceived and applied, has consequences we should not wish blindly to accept” (p.6). In place of these singular visions, Wysocki encourages us to consider technologies and means of communicating that encourage multiplicities of sight and of our other senses. And she encourages us, as teachers and as readers, to consider “what other sorts of arguments are possible when we broaden our senses of the texts we can make for each other through the possibilities of the digital. What might be possible if we encouraged a democracy of the senses in our teaching instead of a hegemony of sight?” (p.7). It is this democracy of the senses that will ultimately allow us to have influence on our collective knowledge and to attend to our own various embodiments through media (p.8) while “better understanding how we have and can use written words in shaping our lives with individuals” (p.9).

Like Wysocki, Banks is concerned with encouraging all citizens to better communicate using digital technology. His primary concern, though, is the lack of meaningful technological access for African Americans in the United States. He argues that material access, “to own or be near places that will allow him or her to use computers, software, Internet connections, and other communication technologies when needed” (p.41) and even functional access, to “have knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools [those of material access] effectively” (p.41) defines most African Americans’ experiences with technology. For Banks, these levels of access only allow users to simply USE, rather than fully understand and meaningfully use, technologies that are essential to enacting change within a culture and within our country. Banks encourages educators to push users towards experiential access, where “people must embrace the technologies involved […where] there must be a level of community awareness and acceptance in order for those technologies to mean anything. Beyond the tools themselves and the knowledge and skills necessary for their effective use, people must actually use them; they must have experiential access, or an access that makes the tools a relevant part of their lives” (p.42) and critical access, where “members of a community must … develop understandings of the benefits and problems of any technology well enough to be able to critique, resist, and avoid them when necessary as well as using them when necessary” (p.42), with the ultimate goal of achieving transformative access. Such access involves as genuine inclusion in technologies and the networks of power that help determine what they [a community] become, but never merely for the sake of inclusion” (p.45).

Both Banks and Wysocki encourage individuals to be careful consumers and producers of technology and new media in order to “enable individuals to stand up to the pacifying structures of the mass media” (Wysocki, p.15). Wysocki, specifically, is concerned with the materiality of writing and digital media as she paraphrases Marx’s view that “human freedom is the freedom to do productive work in one’s community. We cannot be fully human if we cannot work and see how the results of our work connect us with others” (Wysocki, p.17). That is, we all must be connected as embodied members of society in order to be truly free. This is much like Bank’s plea that we realize that “all technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society…and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, received, and used” (Banks, p.23).

For me, these arguments are well taken. We, as a discipline, spend a good deal of time talking about naming the our discipline, expanding views of literacy, etc. but we don’t often talk about what access to the core technologies of our discipline looks like. Perhaps the readings of Foucault and Ohmann, Cooper, Selfe and Hawisher, Yancey and Selfe, and Selfe’s “Not Paying Attention” provide a good framework for the potential hegemonic uses of technologies in which all citizens do not have equal access. It is worth considering (and I’m going to talk quite a bit about this in my crit for tomorrow) how we might encourage deeper literacy in the technological use of our students. It is simply not enough to put these technologies in front of our students and expect them to know what to do with them and, more importantly, to expect them to make something meaningful from these digital technologies without a bit of training. I’m wondering how you all think of access as it relates to incorporating digital technologies into the classroom. Is this fair? What sort of accommodations do you make? Why?

Week 9 - Oct 17th Post

This Week’s Readings:

O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto, Ontario: Toronto UP, 2007. Print.

O’Gorman is against the dehumanization of texts through traditional processes of imitation and this is at the core of his Chapter 3 argument. As we learned in Chapters 1 and 2, O’Gorman is frustrated with the printcentrity of the Republic of Scholars (an apt name for those stuck in our current forms of scholarship and who resist change) and he continues to argue against systemic pressures that limit invention in composition in the next chapter. 

For O’Gorman, Peter Ramus represents the foundation of our current printcentric academic foci. O’Gorman resists and even rails against Ramus’ “phallogocentric history of the print apparatus” (p.47) and he asks, “might it not be possible to invent scholarly methods to [re]shape the digital apparatus?” (p.50). It is important to note here that O’Gorman does not define digitization in a traditional fashion. Instead, he quotes Morris Eaves who explains that “digitization is not a notion confined to electronic devices but a technological norm that operates across a spectrum of materials and processes. As a rule of thumb, the more deeply digitization penetrates, the more efficient the process becomes” (p.58). O’Gorman is concerned with the commerce-driven, capitalistic need to sort, organize, and encourage imitation that constrains our current scholarship – something that Ramus has represented for centuries.

On the other hand, William Blake represents a focus on invention and “chaosthetics” (p.58), something that O’Gorman argues will assist us in the necessary decompartmentalization of our current academic and composing practices. Because Blake’s political works against imitation and rigid academic expectations are carefully and artfully couched in children’s literature, O’Gorman applauds his inventive strategies that tend to “fl[y] in the face of mechanization” (p.59).

In order to encourage us to think more like Blake and to invent “new scholarly methods suitable to an age of computing” (p.69), O’Gorman cautions that “specialization is a liability” and that “multitasking, dabbling, and audodidaction are the order of the day” (p.69). He also claims that Blake “teaches us not to trust our visual sense alone – an invaluable lesson for students bombarded daily by the words and images of a postmodern mediascape in which the imagetext is the dominant mode of communication” (p.66). In terms of the classroom, I love O’Gorman’s notions of students writing WITH rather than ABOUT sources and I agree with his argument that multitasking is valuable and that students should learn not to trust any one sense but, rather, make use of all senses as much as possible.

While I do agree with much of O’Gorman’s argument in this section, I find myself a bit torn in terms of what he says and what he does. O’Gorman makes use of nonsense words like “mystory” (p.68), puns (the repeated use of ‘puncept’ for example), and he repeatedly uses visuals to make his argument for him, which works well only because he is clearly a master of traditional prose. That is, he understands the rules before he artfully breaks them (something that I often explain to my FYC students). I wonder, though, if “chaosthetics” is really the answer to inventing new methods for composition and communication. If students, unlike Blake and O’Gorman, do not understand language and are without specialization as O’Gorman advocates, will they be able to make effective arguments? Like Jen, I appreciate what O’Gorman is doing here and I even agree with him on some level but I still find myself a bit dubious towards the applicability of his arguments. 

Multimodal Timeline Assignment

Here's a link to my multimodal timeline assignment pics and here are the pics themselves... just in case you don't get your own copy at the presentation tomorrow (my printer is completely out of ink):

Link to this file on Twitter

Week 8 - October 10th Blog Post

This Week’s Readings:

George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication 54.1 (Sept. 2002): 11-39

Hesse, Doug. "Response to Cynthia L. Selfe's 'The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.'" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 602-605. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing." College Composition and Communication. 60.4 (2009): 616-663. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Response to Doug Hesse" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 606-611. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

This week’s readings are very in line with my own ways of thinking and, happily, quite in line with the move of our WSU’s FYC program’s move towards multimodality. The Selfe and Hesse pieces demonstrate both the benefits of such a move as well as the potential drawbacks and concerns for those who are yet to be “sold” on the notion of multimodal work. Cyndie Selfe argues for the inclusion of aurality in the FYC classroom in addition to traditional alphabetic literacy. For Selfe, aurality, as part of a long rhetorical tradition, has a central role in the classroom as a means of recognizing multiliteracies (clearly influenced by the NLG) and to give voices (literally) to a number of marginalized groups. Once again, Selfe is at the center of multimodal discussion and, in addition to clearly influencing Doug Hesse (who directly responds to her essay), Selfe has paved the way for more multimodal publication by students and scholars such as Shipka and Lauer.

Ok, so I’m going to geek out a bit. I love, love, LOVED Cyndie Selfe’s piece on aurality. In fact, I would say that I have been “looking for it” all semester in one way or another. I’m very interested in the roles of aurality and orality in the classroom and I’ve actually recently decided to focus my dissertation on the roles of aurality and orality on commenting on student essays. Patty Ericsson recommended this text to me on Friday and, lo and behold, it was on the schedule for reading this week.

Selfe encourages compositionists to consider the importance of both alphabetic literacy and print literacy in our FYC classrooms. She is very careful to avoid exclusively arguing for any specific type of literacy but explains that there is room (and indeed, we should make room) for a variety of literacies in our class. For me, the discussion on pedagogical uses of aurality was especially useful. Selfe describes how teachers have, in the past, used technologies to provide students with an auditory “walking tour” of their essay (Selfe, p.633) from the readers’ point of view – something that I plan to expand on in terms of the impact on at-risk students.  Selfe’s larger point is that sound is undervalued as a compositional mode (p. 617 and that very little work in aurality has been done for the sake of adding to or better understanding our oral tradition. Instead, most of our focus is on using this mode to compose written text (p.634). Selfe also bemoans the lack of aural tools for teaching practitioners (p.641) but ultimately continues to argue for the employment of a variety of literacies in the classroom since, “when we insist on print as the primary, and most formally acceptable, modality for composing knowledge, we usurp these rights and responsibilities [of the student] on several important intellectual and social dimensions, and, unwittingly, limit students’ sense of rhetorical agency to the bandwidth of our own interests and imaginations” (p.618).

Doug Hesse’s response to Selfe is quite well-founded and his concerns are clearly well considered. Hesse points out that composition as a discipline has long been described as a series of literacy crises which have led to our own identity crises. If our role truly is composition on all levels (not just writing), then the political implications of professional overlap with departments like communications deserves consideration. Hesse also specifically asks whose interests composition studies should serve and he voices his concerns over the social implications on higher education if Selfe’s views are realized. In the end, he argues that “perhaps the best we can do is tour students through the taxonomy of roles, audiences, situations, affordances, constraints, and rhetoricity: a tall order for a course or two” (p.604), and that we must, as a discipline, discuss these issues of multimodality and various literacies to garner answers to the questions that he poses.

Cyndie Selfe's response to Hesse's commentary simply asks Hesse and other naysayers to

consider WHY alphabetic literacy is valued above all other literacies. She points out that much of the work that we (and our students) do today is with literacies other than traditional alphabetic literacies. Selfe goes so far as to suggest that "faculty in rhetoric and composition should serve as role models in this regard, [show] students that they, too, are willing to learn new ways of composing, to expand their own skills and abilities beyond the alphabetic by practicing with different modalities of expression that may be unfamiliar and difficult but increasingly expected and valuable in different twenty-first century rhetorical contexts both in and out of the academy” (p.608).

Diana George and Kathy Blake Yancey’s works also provide support for multimodal work in addition to a few words of caution. George advocates for the use of meaningful visual analysis in FYC classrooms. For George, alphabetic literacy stifles both student and teacher creativity in the classroom and, as a result, assignments lack interest and fresh ideas. As an element of rhetoric, George suggests that we use assignments to break down notions of high and low culture in our visually oriented society. She is clearly influenced by the New London Group's call for multiliteracies and she also influenced Wysocki et al's recommendation that teachers look at student projects with "generosity".

Kathy Blake Yancey's work "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key" was one of the first calls for multimodal assignments in the composition classroom. In this work, she encourages teachers to dive into multimodal work and to consider multimodal work as a "new key" in writing (this was also the keynote address in the 2004 CCCC keynote address). This work is very much in line with Cyndie Selfe's works, Selfe and Moran, Selfe & Hawisher, etc. as Yancey encourages the use of technology in the classroom but also cautions us against using it without being pedagogically and theoretically minded. Yancey's text clearly influenced the works of Shipka and Lauer in the ways they incorporate multimodality into their classrooms and studies. Additionally, Yancey was clearly influenced by Cyndie Selfe's earlier works in addition to Richard Lanham (whom she mentions specifically in her text).

Week 7 Blog Post - Oct 1

This week’s readings:

New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review. 66.1(1996): 1-32.

Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, 2011. (read through pg 82)

Shipka and NLG have a good number of similarities in that they both argue for an expanded view of literacy. For both sets of authors, literacy must be expanded to LITERACIES but, for NLG this focus tends to focus almost solely on digital literacies and their impacts on various elements of society while Shipka urges us to be wary of focusing only on digital literacies.

Shipka argues that composing is never really monomodal but is, instead, always some sort of a multimodal creation. While she is clearly in favor of multimodal work, though, Shipka is “concerned that emphasis placed on “new (meaning digital) technologies has led to a tendency to equate terms like multimodal, intertextual, multimedia, or still more broadly speaking, composition with the production and consumption of computer-based, digitized, screen-mediated texts. [She is]…concerned as well that this conflation could limit…the kinds of texts students produce in our courses” (pp.7-8). For Shipka, focusing only on the written text or on the digital text is limiting to student growth and it should only be one of several foci of the FYC class. “in addition to examining writing as ‘the thing,’ meaning final products that may be entirely or even partially comprised of alphabetic text, we need to investigate the various kinds of writing that occur around – and surround – writing-as-the-thing” (p.82)

I find Shipka’s argument to be very persuasive. In many instances in our own lives, writing is often a tool as a means to an end rather than always as THE end product. After reading Shipka’s argument, I find myself rethinking the overall structure of my classroom. Presently, the class is structured by a series of traditional and multimodal assignments that ultimately result in a researched argument essay. Perhaps I should structure the class in a sort of reverse organization to assist students in achieving their own goals like Shipka’s Muffy (I never could really get over that name in the reading).

Like Shipka, the NLG focuses their arguments around the notion of multiliteracies but, unlike Shipka, they tend to discuss digital literacies. The NLG argues that our views of literacy must evolve with the multiplicity of discourses that currently exist and that constantly seem to appear in our culture and in worldwide cultures. For me, the NLG primarily argues that “such a view of language will characteristically translate into a more or less authoritarian kind of pedagogy. A pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects” (p.4).

This is my second time reading this NLG piece and, for whatever reason, it made much more sense to me this time. I think that pairing it with Shipka made it much more accessible and the concepts made way more sense. I do, though, find the NLG a bit frustrating since their “manifesto” is deemed a “tentative starting point for that process” (p. 28); whereas Shipka’s argument is a bit more decisive.

Overall, I would agree with some of the other blog posts that put NLG at the center of the multimodal timeline discussion. Their 1996 discussion was relatively early in the game and it is, most certainly, a seminal text in the discussion of multiliteracies. Shipka’s text seems like a 2011 text to me. It is clearly influenced by the Lauer and Wysocki’s pieces that discuss naming issues since she specifically discusses the dangers of labeling specific literacies. Her text was also influenced by Selfe and Selfe and Hawisher who suggest that we must be cognizant of simply using technology for the sake of technology’s existence. 

Teaching With Technology Timeline

Here's the link to my timeline project!

http://studentweb.engl.wsu.edu/591/tmacklin/

Week 4 - Sept. 13th Post

Today’s Reading:

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Bolter and Grusin do a fine job of explaining remediation in the technical sense. To be honest, before I came to WSU, I only considered the term “remediation” as a “euphemism for the task of bringing lagging students up to an expected level of performance” (p.59), which is much different than Bolter and Grusin’s explanation of remediation as the evolution of media as they reshape and refashion themselves through technological advancements and as a result of societal and cultural forces. I find the connection between these two definitions quite fascinating. Both definitions indicate a sense of improvement with the change in the medium (print, technological, HUMAN) but the “traditional” definition tends to focus on more of a deficit model of understanding while the Bolter and Grusin definition does not imply that there was anything “wrong” with the previous medium. In fact, the authors point out that there are a number of instances in which remediation changes a medium only to bring it back nearly full circle to its roots.

In fact, the authors point out that no media is in isolation to other media. They explain that  “no medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces” (p.15). Lanham responds to this idea of connectivity when he explains that the common fear of print media becoming obsolete is unfounded. For Lanham, and for Bolter and Grusin, print media will not disappear but it will become remediated. Our current obsession with the physicality of traditional books is now giving way to remediated books that sort of “feel” like traditional books (iPad, Kindle, Nook) but that are entirely digital.

Bolter and Grusin explain that remediation takes place through hypermediacy, when media (and the authors of texts within these media) purposely make the viewer/reader very aware of the medium and through transparent immediacy. For many of us, hypermediacy isn’t necessarily a positive thing. I am, for instance, very aware of the fact that I am reading Pride and Prejudice on a machine rather than on my beloved paper book but, as Bolter and Grusin point out, hypermediacy can and SHOULD occasionally be purposeful when rhetorically appropriate. I think Lanham would disagree here (based only on his article that we read earlier anyway) since he prefers that any digital medium should be fluid and unobtrusive and that “it is good only when you don’t notice it” (Lanham, p.277); this is much like Bolter and Grusin’s transparent immediacy.

Both Bolter and Grusin and Richard Lanham do, though, focus most of their discussion on the impact of this remediation on the reader. Lanham’s “responsive reader” (Lanham, p.268) is very similar to Bolter and Grusin’s focus on viewer centered media. In both cases, the ubiquitous nature of technology and various media results in a “hyperconsciousness” (Bolter and Grusin, p.38) of users and this awareness allows us to better understand the interconnectedness of various media since “mediation without remediation seems to be impossible” (Bolter and Grusin, p.271).

Week 4 - Sept. 11th Post

Today’s Readings:

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. (read through pg 87)

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "The Humanities, Done Digitally." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 5/8/12.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?" ADE Bulletin. 150(2010): 55-61.

The readings for today were, for me, quite focused on the ideas of intellectual freedom for all scholars but, most especially, for scholars in the humanities (of course I’m most concerned with composition, rhetoric, and the digital humanities specifically). After reading Foucault, I’ve been sort of obsessed with the idea of hegemony and, to this point, I’ve been almost entirely focused on the implications of power struggles on my students. These readings, however, brought to light concerns with the power struggles that faculty face daily as we do our work as academics.

Kirschenbaum points out that digital humanities work has illuminated the lack of agency for most scholars in our field and that “the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed […] a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online” (p.60). He goes on to explain that “this [tension] is manifested in the intensity of debates around open-access publishing, where faculty increasingly demand the right to retain ownership over their own scholarship – meaning, their own labor – and disseminate it freely to an audience apart from or parallel with more traditional structures of academic publishing” (p.60). Such tension is felt as the digital humanities opens seemingly endless possibilities for collaborative and independent publishing while the traditional academy frowns on such creative and unusual means of communicating ideas. Fitzpatrick agrees, suggesting that “scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally” (Fitzpatrick p.4). Additionally, while such work is done digitally, only a handful of journals (like Kairos) are accepted as legitimate, scholarly endeavors.

This resistance to digital publication is somewhat surprising since, as Slatin and Lanham point out, such understanding of in addition to the development of the “responsive reader” (Lanham p. 268) allows the reader to more fully experience the text, which is something that Bolter and Grusin also bring up throughout their text. If the goal of academe is to share, reflect, and build upon on each others’ work, then it only makes sense to embrace digital publication. More specifically, in viewing academic work in this way (sharing, reflecting, and building), academic publication becomes the epitome of Bolter and Grusin’s remediation.

Such discussion reminds me very much of Faucault’s text about the Panopticon as a technology of power and as a means in which these “techniques of power are invented to meet the demands of production” (Eye, p.161). In Panopticonism, Foucault discusses the enforcement of power on the “abnormal” individual in order to better “deal” with them in an attempt to employ them in some sort of useful occupation. To me, the panoptic gaze of the publication industry tends to keep scholars who have unique and maybe even a little unusual ideas separated from the mainstream of academe through requirements that they publish in traditional journals in order to be potentially eligible for tenure. Of course, I realize that scholarly journals should be peer reviewed to maintain a level of professional legitimacy, but does the medium really make that much difference?

Just as Cooper and Selfe and Hawisher and Selfe caution us against using technology for technology’s sake without careful pedagogical consideration, so must we also take a step back with professional consideration to consider the state of publication affairs in modern academe. If, as Kirchenbaum points out, English departments are ideally suited for digital humanities because we (English departments) embrace text of all kinds, because we tend to maintain a rich lineage between computers and composition, because we idealize belle letters, and because we have a history of being open to cultural studies (p.60), then it only makes sense that we begin to embrace more current means (media) for academic publication. 

Week 3 - September 6th Post

Today’s Readings (September 6^th):

Faigley, Lester. "Literacy after the Revolution." College Composition and Communication 48.1 (1997): 30-43.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 411-436.

CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2004).

These early technologically-related C’s addresses were both fascinating and a little depressing. Both made strong calls to action but both also strongly lamented our field’s lack of engagement in technological literacy and, therefore, the social issues that accompany this type of literacy. Faigley seems to blame the educational and economic system for these literacy inequities and, while Selfe also puts some blame on our capitalistic American society, she ultimately rebukes the composition and rhetoric field for its lack of action on this matter.

Faigley’s hopes that our discipline would be able to do great things and that we would be able to make systemic differences in exploring anti-authoritarian ways of teaching and in the working conditions of our peers was met with seemingly insurmountable institutional barriers. He goes on to explain the revolution of the rich in a time when the US was highly polarized financially, culturally, and racially and where the government favors the wealthy was “identified with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and waste” (p.34). For Faigley, colleges are now run more like business and we’re constantly fighting an uphill battle to maintain class sizes and workloads.

In his address, Faigley explains how the revolution of the rich ultimately begat the digital revolution since only those who were wealthy were able to lay claim to the benefits of the digital age. He is disillusioned by the technological abilities of students who choose to do little for the greater good with these impressive skills and he is further disillusioned by the digital inequality in terms of income, gender, race, culture, and location.

Despite this somewhat hopeless critique of power hierarchies, Faigley does suggest that comp/rhet scholars must work together to stop the decline in publically supported education. He encourages us to be smarter and more aware of what is going on and to organize to protect our discipline and our students.

Similarly, Cyndie Selfe encourages comp/rhet scholars to simply pay attention to technology since, in order to remain active and relevant scholars, we must realize the essential role that technology plays in our lives (whether we like it or not). She specifically recommends that we “pay attention to, how technology is inextricably linked to literacy and literacy education in this country” (p.414). In this way, Selfe is much more specific than Faigley as she responds to the lackluster and even apathetic view that many comp/rhet scholars take towards technology.

Like Faigley, though, Selfe is very concerned with issues of access. She brings up the literacy myth that dispels the notion that the literate (the reading public) will be successful. If we believe that those who are literate (including technologically literate) will be successful, then we must realize that “computers continue to be distributed differentially along the related axes of races and socioeconomic status and this distribution continues to ongoing patterns of racism and to the continuation of poverty” (Selfe, p.420). This is much like the earlier Selfe and Cooper and Selfe and Hawisher articles that argued that technology without advanced literacy or without careful purpose merely advance hegemonic classroom roles.

Selfe admonishes the discipline for allowing technological literacy become a part of general literacy throughout education as we (as a discipline) have very little real impact on these definitions. For her, we allow legislation like the 1996 Clinton-Gore legislation to go forward without providing “adequate guidance about how to get teachers and students thinking critically about such use” (p.419). In this way, students may be materially or maybe even functionally literate in technology but they may not develop the necessary ability to critique such technology.

The fact that capitalism has always shaped our definitions of literacy is problematic for Selfe since those who are technologically literate continue to improves and become successful in life, much like Faigley’s revolution of the rich, while the technically illiterate individuals “provide the unskilled, low-paid labor necessary to sustain the system” (p.427).

Selfe is, again, a bit more specific than Faigley in her final call to action. She recommends (or maybe even demands) that we stitch our understandings of technology together locally, then branch out to make connections with other writing professionals in order to engage in essential activist towards access.

Luckily for me (I was getting seriously bummed out by these readings), the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments provided some hope that our field is moving in the right direction. Most specifically, the Assumptions section was especially helpful.

The first goal is to introduce students critically to technology and information technology. For me, this is a recommendation that class discussions and assignments encourage students to consider issues like access and hegemony (something that I am already attempting to include in my classroom). The second goal asks us to provide students with multiple opportunities to solve myriad problems in their lives (including education, personal lives, etc.) using technology. Such a recommendation is easily accomplished based on the type of assignment that the teacher chooses. In my case, I assign multiple assignments throughout the semester that allow students to choose the technology that they find most rhetorically suitable. The third goal is to give students hands on time with technologies. This is something that I strive to accomplish but, based on the busy schedules of the campus labs and the fact that my class meets during peak lab hours, such instruction proves to be quite difficult. To counteract this issue, I’m considering occasionally holding office hours in the AML to help students with technical issues. The fourth goal is to “engage students in the critical evaluation of information” based on information literacy. In addition to significant library time, students are encouraged to use a variety of sources and, in their cover letters, defend their choice of sources and media. Finally, the last goal is to “prepare students to be reflective practitioners” of technology? For me, this is the vaguest of all the goals. I suppose that, by encourage students in all of the other goals, they will hopefully become “reflective practitioners.”

Overall, I am relieved to see that there is a CCCC’s Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. I would imagine that this is a result of the addresses of Faigley and Selfe, at least to some degree, and that this statement will be fluid and dynamic in its continued response to technological literacy. 

Week 3 - September 4th Post

Today’s (Sept. 4^th) Readings:

Lanham, Richard. "The Electric Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution." New Literary History. Vol. 20, No. 2, Technology, Models, and Literary Study (Winter, 1989), pp. 265-290.

Slatin, John. "Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium." College English. Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 870-883.

Cooper, Marilyn M. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." College English, Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 847-869.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 55-65.

I very much enjoyed the connections between Lanham and Slatin in this week’s readings. Although both of these texts are relatively old in terms of technology, many of the issues that these authors bring up are still legitimate concerns for today’s digital scholars. Both Lanham and Slatin discuss the “responsive reader” (Lanham 268) and the concerns for the reader rather than the author in digital texts. The authors go on to explain how hypertext allows readers to explore the text in a variety of ways to best experience the text on their terms. Slatin goes into great depth in his discussion about hypertext publication, while Lanham explores the more playful side of multimedia publishing and asks, “wouldn’t you begin to play games with it [malleable hypertext or digital media)?” (p.269). For me, the answer is yes. I find myself taking notes on the very PDF files that we’re reading now with a series of personalized stamps, colors, and images to make the readings more enjoyable, applicable, and memorable for my reading pleasure.

Cooper and Selfe and Hawisher and Selfe also have a number of interesting connections. Both readings call into question the use of technology for technology’s sake in addition to offering general pedagogical caution to the status quo of teaching. Both sets of authors dislike the more traditional, lecture-type modes of teaching in addition to the skill-and-drill methods. For them, using technology in such ways simply reinforces the traditional hegemonic issues within the classroom that students and teachers have always faced. In fact, Hawisher and Selfe make a really nice connection between their words of caution and Foucault’s panopticon as they analyze the dangers of technical assignments like discussion forums and online conferences since they often “inhibit open exchanges, reduce active learning, and limit the opportunities for honest intellectual engagement” (p. 62) with the teacher watching and grading their actions.

As a whole, these readings made me consider my own views and actions as a scholar and as a teacher. Lanham asks the question: “What business are we really in?” (p.285) and, for me, this is a central question to all of us who teach FYC. Are we in the business of creating texts, are these texts books and only books? Are we in the business of preparing students for writing in the university? Elsewhere? What does writing look like anyway? He further calls into question our practices in publication which, I thought, was sort of eerily accurate. He mentions that conversations may become the norm in scholarly publications and that they may be in media other than books and traditional print media. Kairos (the journal) anyone? As a relatively new scholar to these conversations, I find myself asking these questions almost daily as I try to find my place.

Additionally, the Hawisher and Selfe and the Cooper and Selfe texts bring teacher power to the forefront of the discussion. Obviously, teachers always have power in the classroom since “our culture has imbued us with considerable power within the confines of the classroom; we are the architects of the spaces in which our students learn” (p. 64). But, even through my efforts to provide a student-centered classroom, I find myself acutely aware of the instances where I impose my power on students (sometimes inadvertently). I tend to beat myself up about the issues of hegemony since, the more I read and study about it, the more I realize that I do it and that I don’t really know how to stop “oppressing” my students. I suppose what is really valuable from these sorts of discussions, though, is that we are THINKING about these issues and becoming more aware of them. For me, I often have to be content with just working towards creating a more open, diverse, and inviting classroom for new ideas.

Finally, I was struck by Cooper and Selfe’s discussion of the forced assimilation into academic discourse that FYC students endure. They rail against this assimilation (and bring up Bartholomae in the process) and, to a point, I agree. To bring this full circle, though, “What business are we really in?” (Lanham, p.285). I find myself torn between the definition of FYC as a service course and FYC as a place to help students to communicate in more non-traditional means. If I don’t treat the course as a service course, though, will my students be prepared for the requirements of the university and for the rhetorical expectations of their future professors? One of my major frustrations with comp is that none of us can, with any certainty, really define what business we are all in.

Week 2 - Foucault and Ohmann

This Week’s Readings:

Foucault, Michel. "Panopticism." Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan, 1977. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 195-228.

Foucault, Michel. "The Eye of Power." Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. 146-165.

Ohmann, Richard. "Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital." College English. 47.7 (1985): 675-89.

To be honest, I feel sort of silly that I didn’t know that Jeremy Bentham was the creator of the Panopticon. All this time, I have been attributing the concept to Foucault. That sheepishness aside, I actually enjoyed reading Foucault. His arguments tie in really well with the sort of issues that I’m dealing with in my classroom right now.

Foucault talks at length in about the Panopticon as a technology of power and as a means in which these “techniques of power are invented to meet the demands of production” (Eye, p.161). It is this discussion of power, production, and utility that most interest me. In Panopticonism, Foucault discusses the enforcement of power on the “abnormal” individual in order to better “deal” with them in an attempt to employ them in some sort of useful occupation. In this way, those who are different are “sorted” from the rest whether they have leprosy/plague, as in Foucault’s examples, or whether they are different in terms of class or race; this separation prevents collective action through separation. This discussion reminds me a bit of Adam Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, and Technology as he discusses the fact that African Americans have been “sorted” in terms of technological advances. Banks discusses the various levels of technological literacy (material, functional, experiential, and critical) and explains that most African Americans and other “abnormal” groups (to use Foucault’s term) are consistently held at material or functional levels, thus preventing them from taking advantage of and becoming a part of the technologies of power. This is very much in line with Ohmann’s argument that “the computer revolution, like other revolutions from the top down, will indeed expand the minds and the freedom of the elite, meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce that have been hallmarks of monopoly capitalism from its onset” (p.683).

These discussions suddenly make me very aware of the assumptions and decisions that I make in the classroom. I found myself irritated that my students were unable to find a specific file (I did give them directions), open that file, listen to the contents of that file, and then complete a discussion forum post relating to that file within the first week of class. If any of my students are indeed at functional or material levels of technological understanding, then I am making unfair assumptions and I am further alienating them and forcing them into the “abnormal” group, thus further removing them from the power of technology. Such assumptions are, although often unintentional, quite dangerous in our classrooms and now, more than ever, I find myself more aware of them and I am attempting to do more explanatory and exploratory work in class before I require such assignments.

Foucault also explains that “the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, alter behavior, to train or correct individuals…to try out PEDAGOGICAL [my emphasis] experiments” (Panopticonism, pp. 203-204). This statement was especially jarring to me since my dissertation research uses my students as my research subjects. After reading Panopticonism, I began to think of my own classroom as a bit of a Panopticon since most of the class work is online and open to everyone with me at the center viewing everyone’s work critically and separating students according to their research interests. I also thought of Foucault’s three criteria for maintaining power “to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost…to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend to them as far as possible without either failure or interval…[and] to link this ‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses” (Panopticonism, p.218). And THEN I thought about time as my currency. What am I doing to enforce my own power over my students in the sake of time? Additionally, the entire panoptic idea seems to spring from the idea of maintaining a greater good through order; Foucault explains that disciple exists partially to clear up confusion and restore order to the masses (Panopticonism, p.219). I’m not sure that I can really remedy the TIME as my currency issue but I am now more aware and more critical of my power in the classroom. Although I do try to share power and wield what power I do have benevolently, I still have THE power in the classroom and that’s not something to take lightly.  

Week 1 - Lauer and Wysocki

This week’s readings:
Lauer, Claire (2012). What's in a Name? The Anatomy of Defining New/Multi/Modal/Digital/Media Texts. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 17(1). http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/17.1/inventio/lauer/index.html

Wysocki, Anne Frances. "Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications." from Writing New Media. 1-41.

The readings this week were an intersting combination. I read Lauer’s text first since (ironically) it was digital and because I could start reading it while I was waiting for the bus on my tablet. What struck me most about this text is the lack of a clear, unified definition for terms that we use daily in composition. I realize that I throw around the term “multimodality” as if everyone understands it and as if everyone shares my definition (using various modes of composition as a means of persuasion/communication). I realize also that, although I do define this term in my FYC class, that I don’t do a very good job of SHOWING my students what I mean. Wysocki discusses the impact of vague terminology on the student experience and even on the potential agency of the user/student. She also points out the dangers of decontextualizing writing, resulting in the “real world” vs. “school” divide. This decontextualization is, most certainly, a part of the alienation of students through ineffectual/ill-defined/unclear terminology. If students don’t understand what we’re saying because we’ve jargonized our classroom activities to the point of failed utility for the student, then we are failing as teachers. I’m certainly guilty of this in terms other than multimodal discussions. I’ve tried to stop using terms like rhetorical and genre analysis for assignments and I’ve replaced them with more student-friendly and specific terms like argument analysis and assignment type analysis. Students don’t need to get bogged down in OUR professional terminology as FYC students.

Students aside, in terms of my OWN, professional preference for terminology in this field of study,  I prefer “multimodality” precisely for the same reason that Cyndie Selfe mentions in the secion on terminology being “precise”. She states that multimodality is esentially using all available means of persuasion (in whatever mode/form) to effectively complete the task at hand. THIS is how I present multimodality to my students. I explain that there are various modes of communication and that some of them are more situationally appropriate than others and that their task is to determine the most rhetorically effective mode for each given task. Students seem to understand this and when I explain that this comes from Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, well, that just adds to my own ethos. In this case, multimodality has a very precise definition for me and for my FYC class.

Finally, I very much appreciated Wysocki’s call for generous reading and encouraging more teachers to study new media since “writing teachers focus specifically on texts and how situated people (learn how to) use them to make things happen” (Wysocki, p.5). I’m expecially intrigued when she points out the lack of scholarship on “help[ing] composers of texts think usefully about effects of their particular decisions as they compose a new media text, to help composers see how agency and materiality are entwined as they compose” (Wysocki, p.6). For me, this entails more discussion (a la Selfe and Banks) in the FYC classroom to encourage students to see behind the interface and terms to better understand their situation as a student and as an individual.

Wysocki also does a very nice job of encouraging us to teach alertness within our students towards differnet types of composition/production and their appropriateness. This alertness is also key for us as teachers since we should encourage a “generosity toward the positions that others produce, no matter how awkward-looking or –sounding” (Wysocki, p.23) which is something that I want to better encourage in my classroom. Of course, this selection of readings doesn’t address issues of assessment which complicates this “generosity” in reading such texts. But, that is another entry all together.

New Blog

Hello there! So this blog is solely intended as a reading journal for my ENGL 591 Course at WSU. Here's hoping for a semester of awesomeness!