writingtechnologies

Using Computers to Assess Writing

2008-11-24T08:22:00.001-08:00

As Huot discusses in his “Computers and Assessment: Understanding Two Technologies,” he argues against notions of using technology to relieve the drudgery of grading student papers and as a more efficient way of grading papers. He follows Sirc’s assertion that we should use computers as a medium for responding to student writing (239) and argues that they can be especially useful for collecting and responding to portfolios.

I find using computers to respond to student writing useful for additional reasons. One is a personal reason: my handwriting is akin to hieroglyphics to anyone who has never studied them. Oftentimes I would wonder why students kept making the same mistakes over and over again. Unfortunately, I made the mistake many novice teachers do by assuming that they were just not interested in improving their writing. After feedback from classes and on student evaluations, I realized that deciphering my handwriting was a large part of the problem. Now, I have students submit their essays on Vista or in email so that I can type comments throughout the paper and give a summary statement at the end. This happens to be more time efficient for me because I type faster than I can write. However, the more important issue is that my students are able to understand my comments.

Another benefit of responding to student writing with computers is to demonstrate academic conventions. I write my comments in blue in their text with brackets around my words to show where I have inserted comments. I used to use the Comments tool until I received too much feedback that students were unable to read them since they had older versions of Microsoft Word. By using brackets to insert my voice into theirs, I reinforce the fact that different voices need to be signaled in the text in some way (a lesson on using sources/voices) and the notion that a writer cannot change the words of another author without telling the audience that they are doing so (using brackets to facilitate the audience’s understanding of the quote). A (“feel good”) side note: I like to use blue, as opposed to red, because it is less threatening and “cooler.” Color, of course, is only one part of the way that students’ respond to a teacher’s comments, in addition to the quantity, tone of voice, explanation (or lack of), praise, and illumination of options. Nonetheless, it is part of my overall strategy to encourage improvement.

A last benefit that I see for using the computer as a medium for response to student writing is that the malleability of the Word document (i.e., REVISION) is fore-grounded. Writing may be more clearly seen as a recursive process through the use of computer-mediated responses. By printing out a document it looks final and finished. On the other hand, submitting it to an instructor and having that instructor change the inside of the document highlights that writing is in flux. The resulting revision of the document also may also highlight this process as recursive. Although, this does depend on how the instructor responds to the student’s writing—if the response is not based in a rhetorical and recursive understanding of writing, the affordances of the document alone will not facilitate this type of understanding just as portfolios can be used without the theory behind it being employed. All in all, I find that computer-mediated responding is the best way for me to respond on both a personal and theoretical level.

PaStIcHe: examining remixing

2008-11-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

"How can we teach, engage in research, write about, and talk across boundaries with others, instead of for, about and around them?" (620).
Jacqueline Jones Royster "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own."

Indeed.

Enter: “Datacloud: The Remix”

In our own scholarship:

[Remix: we might also think of coding data as a form of remixing? We read, stuff ‘emerges’ – emergence though is based on our interpretative lens, our framework-- and where does our interpretative lens come from? the voices in our heads—old mentors, fellow scholars to whom we speak, and of whom we read, those whose approval we seek. We code, stuff emerges. Whose stuff is it? Letting the data speak for itself…sure, but then we act as interpreters of that voice, we always necessarily select what we will attune to. And in that selection, our interpretative lens is evidenced.]

In our teaching:
"at least one set of social forces suggests to students that using citations and quotations from source materials will be valued less than their own original text, a situation that may encourage them to conceal their sources." (p. 378)
[Really? I spend a lot of time *encouraging* students to use sources! Our students often aren't granted the authority to speak for themselves-- they're expected to use sources because their voices aren't always trusted to speak *correctly* on their own! Elbow, ok, maybe he’s a little passé, but he has a place here in any discussion of voice, which is what’s going on in one level in this text. Johnson-Eilola & Selber are reframing students’ voices like Bakhtin’s heteroglossia.]

"students are encouraged to make explicit their borrowings and appropriations. What counts, in this new context, is the ability of students to remix texts in ways that address specific issues, readers, and situations." (p. 380)
[They're arguing for a shift from Invention to Arrangement and Delivery. They're not calling it that explicitly but that's what it is. It’s more than a shift though, it’s perhaps more accurately a reappropriation. Arrangement and Delivery are taking ownership of Invention? Or vice versa?]

" What if the “final” product a student produces—a text—is not concerned with original words or images on a page or screen but concerned primarily with assemblages of parts?" (p. 380)
[this sounds a lot like factory production language though, this is where I’m getting into trouble. Is this again a lack of trust? Are our own students’ personal narratives still valued? Are we telling them we don’t want to hear your stories? Or is my problem here in how I’m defining stories? We don’t want to hear your old stories, you’ve got to make new stories and you need to recognize that they come from outside of you?]

"patch-writing"
[like topoi a little. also like progymnastata, modeling- Graff & Birkenstein They Say I Say - They're arguing for writing as problem-solving.]

" A traditional approach in composition would create at least two hierarchical levels of value among these materials: The quotations, links, and default elements of the template would be valued less than the original text (original images, personal narrative, and summaries). After all, one might say, the other materials were all pre-existing: Johndan merely found them." (p. 390)

[Invention as discovery, so they're situating invention as problem-solving within invention as creative act. Is there room here for recognition of individual subjectivities? Yes, I think so, as long as the students are encouraged to explain their choices, their juxtapositions. But again, I'm running in circles, because that would also reinforce Johnson-Eilola & Selber's claims that we value the original text more than the texts students bring in. -- this would be a means of forcing them to generate original texts. Is there a way out of the loop?]

On plagiarism, originality, and assemblage

2008-11-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

I borrow; forgive me:

From T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism

We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare collocated by Mr. Cruickshank to make manifest Massinger's indebtedness. One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal. Let us profit by some of the quotations with which he has provided us—

Massinger:

Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
My mind to that tranquillity and peace
It then enjoyed?

Shakespeare:

Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

Massinger's is a general rhetorical question, the language just and pure, but colourless. Shakespeare's has particular significance; and the adjective "drowsy" and the verb "medecine" infuse a precise vigour. This is, on Massinger's part, an echo, rather than an imitation or a plagiarism—the basest, because least conscious form of borrowing. "Drowsy syrop" is a condensation of meaning frequent in Shakespeare, but rare in Massinger.

Massinger: Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect,
Crooked, and abject means.

Shakespeare: God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown.

T. S. Eliot seems to be inferring that imitation is a lesser art; yet still an art, indeed. Imitation is the classical method of learning. And if we ascribe to dialogism per Bakhtin, it seems perfectly legitimate to cut and paste. Haas was making the point with writing interns that it is perfectly ok if they look at one another's work--re: their letters to perspective employers, their resumes and borrow---put into use--one another's ideas. She was saying that in the university, we have these rules, but that's not how they work in the real world where people collaborate, share, help one another.

good god grading

2008-11-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

The predictions of the future of computer-based assessment made me imagine a future where a John Henry-esque battle between a TA and a grading machine takes place. That's something I'd gladly lose.

I think Brian referred to the act of student grading as "onerous" in one of his articles, and that made me chuckle a little because the act of grading 50 student papers got in the way of me doing any "real" work this week (and will quite possibly result in my embarrassment whenever we show off our projects next week). At about 15-20 minutes per paper, I have to allot myself about 12 hours for any major assignments that need extensive grading. Since I'm teaching two classes this semester, I've cut back on the amount of assignments that require an in-depth, personal response from me, and transformed these things into group/blog work. So, in some ways, I welcome the electronic grading robots--unless of course we can live in an idealized society where I can focus all of my efforts on teaching one class. But I don't think that's gonna happen.

That being said, all of the work in the classes I teach is submitted and graded electronically. While I'm the one doing the grading, using a computer for this act shaves a lot of time off of the productivity I would have if I brought a giant stack of papers into Starbucks every couple of weeks. Here are the benefits I've seen so far:

Organization. I'm huge on this. It helps with grading because I can keep track of all versions of a student's paper.

Surface-level stuff. Because the new word can spell and grammar check most stuff in context, this is something that I don't necessarily have to worry about when I'm grading. Though I still need to tell students FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE RUN THESE CHECKS about a thousand times before they realize how much of a difference hitting F7 can make.

Instant word count. It's always at the bottom of the screen, and it's infinitely useful.

Grading via computer allows me to write more, and it allows the student to read everything I've written. Since my first semester of teaching, I've learned that students don't necessarily read all of the comments you put on their paper, so I don't write as much as I used to--but I still have the ability to do so. Of course, it seems like most students don't want to see more than their grade, which is why it's fun to piss them off with an evaluative non-grade. Takes a while to break 'em.

Strangely enough, grading does seem like the thankless "busywork" of academia--along with teaching comp classes. In my 90 years at college, I've seen enough TAs and GAs grading papers for real, live professors that I have to fall into John's camp and wonder just how useful and reflective grades can be when the process itself can be shuffled off like this.

I came to the conclusion Friday night--after I finished all of my grading--that I need to be in a field where my students hand in ScanTron sheets and I have way more free time. This is why I'm joining Kent's applied physics program. I'll see you guys there in the Spring.

Rambling about computers and assessment

2008-11-23T12:13:00.001-08:00

Brian Huot’s piece, “Computers and Assessment: Understanding Two Technologies” was very interesting to me. As a teacher of composition, I always find the area of technology and assessment to be a tricky arena. As for the piece itself, Huot examines past practices used with computers and assessment. It was scary to read that some teachers actually thought that a computer could replace the human agency in the grading process. People wanted to use the computers to grade papers based on “surface level” details. Word count, syllables, and grammatical uses were caught by the computer and allowed teachers to place to students in the “appropriate” category based on the findings of the computer and the student’s use of those things. I found that appalling. I realize that it is very tempting to try to find a technology or program that would decrease the amount of time it takes to evaluate student writing, but it seems to me that these predecessors of this decade led us straight into standardization. I hate standardization. Using a computer program to “grade” writing is ridiculous to me even with the temptation of less itme spent on reading countless student essays.

Huot reviews some of the main reasons for the need/want of computer grading systems and along with a dispensation of “drudgery” was the concept that computer grading would be more efficient (that seems a lot like a means of relieving drudgery but whatever)…so these teachers wanted to decrease the amount of time it takes to grade to , I am guessing, spend more time on creating a better classroom or some such. I totally understand these reasons and the early programs do seem remarkably like SpellCheck and GrammarCheck, so I guess we have moved into an area that allows some computer objectivity in the writing classroom. I am an advocate for these programs because it allows students to write without worrying as much about their surface level flaws becaes the computer will usually find the mistakes for them.

Huot then goes on to explain how assessment and computer technology works in our world today and the efficiency of using the World Wide Web to share portfolios and ideas within the computer classroom as well as allowing teachers to compress the very large portfolio system. As I am typing, I have a box full of portfolios waiting for a student to retrieve them taking up a large amount of space in my kitchen, so I can totally justify the idea of having portfolios electronically submitted. Also, the computer allows teachers to respond to students in a more time efficient way because they can type their remarks and then immediately send it to the student via email or a system like Vista. Although I have not yet integrated this system in my classroom I plan to because it seems like a very good idea. Overall, I just liked this piece because I think it looks at some of the ideas that led to how the computer is used in assessment today and it discusses some of the very positive traits the computer can give to the writing classroom.

However, as I was reading about the beginning uses of computers as grading systems I was hoping to discover some sort of type that allowed for less time spent on grading the papers due to the use of the computer—but I realize that I don’t really believe in objective grading like that. I would not be here if graduate school application relied only on standardized test scores and writing because I am not a strong surface level writer. The computer programs that are discussed would probably have thrown me out in the first round, but since the application process includes reading a person’s essay by human subjects I believe I was able to join the graduate program. I think I am confusing myself a bit here, but basically I just want to say that I realize it is tempting for a composition teacher to want to find more time in the day (especially if they are teaching 4 or 5 sections of Composition) but the idea of human subjectivity in writing is too important. Value should be placed on what ideas the students are trying to convey and not how well they use their commas, and the revision process is an extremely important tool to teach and learn. Computers and the technology that comes with them are valuable because they can take some grunt work off of the teacher and allow for swifer responses and more creative lessons—so, go computer technology!!!

assessment, testing, grading--wtf?

2008-11-23T08:30:00.000-08:00

When I was studying to be a high school English teacher--back when I believed that this was my true calling--I was taught to make a distinction between assessment and grading. Assessment, I was told, was an ongoing process of monitoring student progress. The goals of assessment were to verify that learning had occured, and to ensure the appropriateness of the curriculum. So-called formative assessment included frequent systematic observation (including anecdotal records) and necessitated the ongoing provision of feedback for students. Assessment was to be intimately linked with instructional planning. It was not to be thought of as a thing added on at the conclusion of instruction. It was a way of evaluating whether or not your teaching had been successful, not a way of determining if your students had been successful. It was a way of identifying when concepts needed to be taught for the first time or retaught if learning had not occured.

Grading was different. Grading certified completion. Grading suggested finality. Grading offered conclusive judgment: A B C D F.

Because of my training, I have tended to continue to make the distinction between assessment and grading to this day. I have also noted a kind of tension between the two. Assessment, by this definition, seems to be never ending. It's something you do over and over again--to inform teaching and reteaching, learning and relearning--and to make both teaching and learning ongoing, recursive practices. Yet, in the end, we are still asked to grade. The ongoing process of assessment is forced to a halt by the singular moment of the grade. This leads to a kind of conundrum. E.G: Help your students to work on, I don't know, MLA format. Sit with them, work with them, write to them, comment on their papers: Assess. Then, at some point, put a letter on their work--how about a C (they just don't get it!). Grade. Now try to assess--since that's ongoing--try to go back and help after you've put that C on their work--except now they don't want to talk to you, or worse, you can't go back because they are gone. The semester has come to an end. The grading session is over and students have been "marked."

Aside from this tension between ongoing assessment, on the one hand, and conclusive grading, on the other, I also find that while grading is something that I observe frequenlty, assessment is exquisitely rare. In my admittedly few years of teaching, I've very rarely seen a teacher say, "hey, my students aren't getting this concept. I guess it's back to the old drawing board for me. How can I reteach this content?" By contrast, I've seen an alternative scenario rather frequently: "Hey, my students didn't get this concept. Guess they'll have to accept Cs so we can move on to the next concept (or reading assignment, or paper, or whatever)."

Of course, the dominance of the grading-mentality as opposed to an ongoing assessment-mentality can be see in the standardized testing movement. Kids are tested like mother-fuckers. They're stamped with grades so that they may be "placed appropriately." Of course, in practice, the kids who aren't succeeding simply get flagged and plopped into remedial courses or lower tracks. These kids are, needless to say, disproportionately poor people of color. The remediation they receive--even in cases where it is helpful--also has the effect of labeling these kids as "Other" for the rest of their educational lives. Once they are classed and tracked, they remain in their class and in their track and never rejoin the masses of "normal" children. The grading system, then, helps to reproduce existing social inequities. After all, we NEED kids to fail. We NEED, some of them anyway, to fill the low-end jobs. We need optimum rates of unemployment, and thus optimum rates of failure and drop-outs. Might as well be poor black kids to fill that social role.

So, what's the solution? Well, as Madaus has pointed out, the solution has been to test our way out of it. Keep testing. Keep providing grades. Keep tracking. Don't bother to look at any of the social dynamics that may adversely affect educational outcomes. Don't bother to look at the adverse effects of testing/grading. Don't bother to reduce class sizes, increase teacher-support and training, make room in the curriculum for reteaching. And, above all, don't question why grading--stamping letters on people--is necessary. Don't question how grading is inextricably linked with an economic system that requires failure, poverty, and unemployment.

This begs the question: WHY the eff do we need to grade? Or, at least, why the eff do we need to grade student writing? I'm not sure I've ever been satisfied by an answer to this question. I can see grading people if they're brain surgeons, say. I can see grading people if what we're grading has life-and-death implications. But writing? If a kid can't write a college essay, no one is going to die. If a kid can't write in this context, it doesn't mean s/he won't be able to write in some other context. So, the grade doesn't even tell if the kid is a good writer. And it sure as hell doesn't assess. If I give a kid a B in my College Writing I class, his College Writing II teacher doesn't even see the goddamn B. Nor does that teacher have any goddamn clue from that B, what this kid does well or poorly, what s/he needs help with, whether the B was 'cause I sort of liked the kid's growth over the semester; or because s/he really did "A-work" but missed a few assignments; or because I found him/her slightly more pleasant than the others, even though the writing kind of sucked; or because, when compared to classmates, the kid's papers were just a little worse than some better papers; or because B is the highest grade I give out; or because I have some arbitrary, yet dynamic, idea of what the fuck a "B-paper" is and this kid's paper reminded me of it. The grade is meaningless as an assessment tool.

So, is there any reason to put it on some kid's paper? Is there any reason that a kid NEEDS a writing grade, other than to tell him if s/he's good or bad, right or wrong. And, if this is why, do you really need a goddamn grade to tell you if you're writing is good or bad, right or wrong? Isn't it already obvious where your writing stands when someone says, "I don't know WTF you're saying in this paper"? Or do we give grades simply so the kid can show them to his or her employer? If so, is there any reason that an employer needs to see a letter grade that "reflects" a kid's ability to write rather than some kind of writing sample from the kid, or, better yet, some non-letter-grade assessment about the kid's qualifications for that particular job?

Why do we grade writing? Is it only to be gatekeepers? Is it only to ensure that the right kids "make it" and the wrong kids don't? I still see no reason for it--other than to reproduce and sustain an unfair social system.

Composition as assemblage

2008-11-22T21:27:00.000-08:00

Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s essay was really intriguing; writing as assemblage? This is a great rethinking of what writing is, and what it is we teach in composition classrooms. If we see writing as a technology, then Bijker’s (and Johnson-Eilola/Selber’s) comments about technology as a social construct (not the product of a solitary genius) really complicates our view of composition. Composition, in this sense, is more or less a construction of patterns (i.e. language, visual elements, etc) into a cohesive whole.

The view of writing as assemblage takes into account all aspects of what it means to write, to compose. Example:

Poet H.L. Hix’s text, God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse, uses quotes from George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in each poem to discuss culture, politics, etc in a strange dialogic fashion. The quotes, obviously not from his “solitary, creative genius,” were nevertheless composed in a way that is “original.” He did not use intext citations, nor did he use quotation marks. He makes it clear that the poems are constructed with the words of Bush and bin Laden, but it is often unclear whose voice is saying what in the poems (which make them all the more interesting). Thus, Hix has gone beyond being a traditional writer, he has become a composer: a designer.

From this point of view, the writer/composer must carefully understand the design and construction of each quote. This new context for the assembled elements is part of the composing process:

“We want to change the goal of writing from performance to action or effect in context. That is, we want to lend some weight to a movement that shifts the terrain of the assignment by shifting our approach to writing instruction and assessment: What if the “final” product a student produces—a text—is not concerned with original words or images on a page or screen but concerned primarily with assemblages of parts?” (J-E & S, p. 380).

This view of writing is one that allows the student to focus on composition as a whole (i.e. the design, the construction of the parts, placement of parts, etc) rather than proper citation and other things that do not necessarily affect the meaning of the text. I do think we should teach proper citation and attribution; the thing to be conscious of is to teach these rules in context. When should citation be included in a text? What form does the citation take in this context?Why do we use citations? All of these choices should have a rhetorical purpose, as should assemblage.

Another great example of the creativity, “originality”, and composition is the scrapbook: While that scrapbook craze a few years back was a bit scary, a scrapbook is a great example of a personal story using multiple modes of expression. Jessica Helfand’s new book, Scrapbooks: An American History, is not only fun to read, but a great example of the ways people express themselves through assemblage.

As Helfand articulates on the Daily Scrapbook blog:

"Highly subjective, rich in emotional meaning, the scrapbook is a unique and often quirky form of expression in which a person gathers and arranges meaningful materials to create a personal narrative."

Isn't this what we want from our student writers?

I would <3 a stylistics computer program

2008-11-22T16:31:00.000-08:00

I want to own a computer program that does Corbette and Conner’s stylistic analysis on writing. That would have saved me hours and hours of time when I was working on my thesis. And if such a program exists, I think it should not cost an arm and leg. I vote open source. Though, if a stylistic analysis program was created open source would it be valued as much in the academic community as say a program created and sold? When using it for research purposes would it matter? If only I could find a linguist and a computer programmer to create such a program… I have seen some programs in the linguistics depts that seem to do what I would want them to do, but would also have cost me my house to purchase and use. And even then, I would still have to "tell/train" the computer exactly what to look for.

Though I would support I program to analyze writing for purposes other than grading and placement, I would still need a little convincing. Such programs, such as the stylistic analysis, would save me hours/days (I analyzed 92 college writing 1 diagnostic essays…. It literally took FOREVER), it still, as the articles mentioned, leaves out the subject aspect and not everything with regard to writing in objective. Even labeling nouns as concrete or not could change based on a human vs. computer. But then again, the computer could easily count nouns, pronouns, finite verbs, compound sentences, complex sentences, simple sentences, ect. It really does come down to the purpose of the program and the why and for what? Computer grading though, that scares me a bit. Mostly because it is so objective. What about seeing student improvement from paper to paper, how would a computer judge that? Would it come down to syntactic maturity? I <3 stylistics, but not in the sense to use it as a means to judge writing improvement.

I have a number of questions that deal with assessment in general. But, my first question to you is how many of you use end of the semester portfolios? I ask because, it was in the readings, and because I used them my first semester teaching, hated them, but am thinking that maybe I didn’t do it right and am considering trying it again. It sounds so warm and fuzzy, but , for me, in practice it was miserable. My students didn’t revise until the night before they were do (as they all said in their reflection papers), and that seemed to be so counter to what I heard portfolios could do. And, then, it could have just been my execution of portfolios. Thoughts on portfolios?

Writing Technology, Activism, Coalitions

2008-11-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

After reading the Kvansy & Igwe and Banks articles for class and attending the Join the Impact rally for gay marriage on Saturday with John Oddo and Lindsay Bennett AND having a conversation with my boyfriend, I realized a number of things: (1) to have any impact as social agents we need to build coalitions among minorities (minority-to-minority) and majorities (minority-majority); (2) computer technology is an effective way to create agency and activism. Kvansy & Igwe discuss how the Black community responded to the AIDS crisis which disproportionately affects them, especially women of color. Acknowledging the role of the church in the community (and Civil Rights activism), Kvansy & Igwe show how silence operates because of sex in prisons and gay black men (especially those on the DL). They also show the community on the blog critiquing this silence. Silence, as Eve Sedgewick points out in her Epistemology of the Closet, renders LGBT individuals invisible through the construction of the “closet,” a discursive epistemological structure.

Interlude: I was so disheartened when I heard that members of the LGBT community where attacking black voters and Mormons for the passing of Proposition 8 in California, which took the right of gays and lesbians to marry away after the Supreme Court granted them that right earlier this year. This type of blaming and overt racism only serves to divide us even more—obviously because there are LGBT persons of color!! The Join the Impact rallies explicitly denounced this racism and called for conversations and peaceful organizing (I do have some reservations about the goal of the rallies and the methods, but I will save those for anyone who is interested off the blog).

The issues of AIDS and silence are sites where coalitions can be forged. AND this can be done using writing technologies online like BlackPlanet and JoinTheImpact.com. JoinTheImpact was started by two women (Willow Witte and Amy Balliet) as a grassroots website calling for rallies to protest the passing of Prop 8. They built the Website on Nov. 7 and the rallies happened nationwide on Nov. 15!! They used facebook and twitter as well as the main website, which had a blog. The use of these writing technologies and the historical conditions (the passing of Prop 8, which angered many) mobilized people across the nation and in ten other countries to hold rallies at the same time.

The discursive and rhetorical strategies that Banks celebrates in the BlackPlanet website, such as tonal semantics and sermonic tone, are great for disrupting our notions of Standard English and how we teach composition courses (as well as how African Americans use technology with/for identity practices). There is more that can be done. The Barbara Jordan / Bayard Rustin Coalition is an example of African American and LGBT coalitions. Two prominent lesbian and gay (respectively) political leaders. What would happen if we used writing technologies to mobilize against the AIDS crisis, which crosses multiple boundaries (not just Black and queer) in the same way that JoinTheImpact did?

Thomas

2008-11-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

--boring title, i know

Douglas Thomas’s article, “Virus Writers: Subculture and the Electronic Meaning of Style” discusses the subculture of virus writers. He briefly states that subcultures themselves are tricky and not easily defined. The subculture of internet virus writers focuses on style and that allowing them to be defined as a subculture—how they write their programs helps them to find and fit into their relevant subculture. Sharing is also very important in this subculture because they believe that if one can make something better then they should. Thus, they share the codes with other programmers and work together to form an ever-changing atmosphere and are, pretty much, working together to make programs better.

Virus writers present themselves as noise, and they cause “semiotic disorder.” Virus writers are reacting to the new age of technology where technology is becoming more and more “user friendly.” This “dumbing down” of technology opens an area for the rebellious programmer/virus writer to do what they will in order to have people be aware of their technology. These virus writers also see too much dependence on technology and the viruses present a sort of protection from this dependence on the computer. There is also the sense of causing huge disruptions in large corporations, Thomas uses a few interview quotes to follow-up the idea that the virus writer just wants to cause a ruckus for the “drones” of the large corporations—like a technological anarchy of sorts (I think).

The actual connotations that arrived with the word “virus” are interesting. One immediately thinks of illnesses and deaths when faced with the word. Thomas even describes the AIDS virus as having an effect on the word of computer viruses because suddenly the word in our lexicon had such dire consequences. Thus, the viruses became the enemy to the computer user/consumer. However, Thomas explains that most of the viruses do not harm the computer in the ways that immediately comes to mind. He also examines the use of Science Fiction in the subculture of virus writers because many of them have read the same books and are aware of some of the same themes running through them; such as government control and then the independence due to a “crash” in a particular system. Thomas also explains how the subculture of virus writers sort of blurs the lines in the are of “subculture” because their culture is always changing and they are always wanting to change it. Internet virus writers “Function as a means of subcultural signification and as a strategy for the preservation of a subcultural style in an age of increasing corporation and commodification of underground computer culture” (Thomas 265).

Overall, I liked this article. I, for one, am also fearful of the sudden explosion of viruses on my computer and then my panicked phone call to my technologically savvy cousin. But, Thomas sort of describes a virus writer that I have never really thought of before. To be honest, I sort of thought these sorts of things just materialize and never really focused on the people who write them or why they do it. I totally understand the ideology within the subculture that wants to write viruses “against the system” a sort of rage against the machine idea. I like that. However, I do worry that their skills and beliefs against technology dependence will screw up my computer, but now, at least, I realize they are doing it for a just cause….

wikigroaning

2008-11-17T08:59:00.000-08:00

The site I write for has a funny series of articles called "Wikigroaning" that compare the huge disparity of text between similar nerdy/non-nerdy subjects. Kinda gives you a clue as to the type of people editing Wikipedia articles, and what groups may be disproportionately represented. Here's the author's explanation of the premise:

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. (We're calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.) The next step is to find your own article pair and share it with your friends, who will usually look for their own pairs and you end up spending a good hour or two in a groaning arms race. The game ends after that, usually without any clear winners... but hey, it beats doing work.

The Art of Wikigroaning
Wikigroaning II: The New Batch
Wikigroaning 3: Wikipedia Sucks and Here's the Citation

fight the powers that be

2008-11-17T08:30:00.000-08:00

Good readings this week--mainly because they tie into my increasing dislike of Academic English (remarkably whiter than Standard English). I recently had a friend of mine make a comment to me about an impenetrable essay he was reading for a Shakespeare class (he has a degree in journalism and is currently getting a BA in lit): "This is completely classist. It's like they expect you to have 100 thousand dollars' worth of education before you can even understand what's being said." He's not exactly being oppressed in the same way that Black readers and writers are, but his situation is still a good example of how a certain self-perpetuating style can shut people out--especially if they have to write in this style. Banks' satirical comment about Standard English as the "promised land" made me laugh, because really, where does Standard English come from.

In my class I recently did an exercise about the fallacy of blackboard grammar (which is what they seem to be most comfortable with after high school); for me, the most important part was showing the students where most of the writing rules we're familiar with come from. For the most part, two elitist jerks (AKA prescriptive grammarians) from the 18th Century wrote most of our rules, primarily out of Latin envy. They viewed Latin as an immaculate language, and adapted many strange rules over from the dead language. For example, the infinitive in Latin is a single word, so of course it's a grave sin to split the infinitive in English. These rules were perpetuated by the very tiny amount of people who actually received a college education before the GI Bill, primarily to distinguish themselves from uneducated or lower-class speakers. So the very foundation of Academic English is rooted in classism and racism. We academic writers usually use the excuse of "Just following orders" when it comes to using this style, but I think it's important to also recognize its history.

The Wikipedia article was interesting to me because it actually reflected the way my students edit their papers; as Jones said, inexperienced writers overproduce microstructure edits. When I got back revised papers from students, I noticed that they almost always add material to a paper without necessarily integrating this material into the whole. So I had to tell them, "Make sure you're thinking about how your revisions affect your entire paper; just don't tack on the information that's missing." It's true that they are very hung up on the superficial aspects of their writing, and, as Jones points out, this is affecting their editing processes. I try to get them to focus on content above the tip of the iceberg stuff, but it's a tough battle.

Right now, I'm a little worried about the final project. I've only had the time to start doing my research this week; I have a general question but I'm not really sure what to do with it. I definitely want to create this project as a blog while incorporating many videos, but I need a little more grounding first. Hopefully I'll be able to get something done this weekend and over break.

Another rant

2008-11-17T06:46:00.000-08:00

Ok, as I could not find anything to respond to, I want to talk about the Black Planet article and the blog on AIDS in the AA community. What is the most interesting to me about both sites is their use—that is, that they are being used without the use of coercion. I don’t mean that in regard to African Americans—that someone must coerce them to write or they won’t. I mean that ANYONE write without coercion is interesting. So again how people actually use the technologies without being assigned is fascinating. Apparently we all have a need to signify—to create community—to share our humanity and ideas. Again, how do we tap into this to make our writing assignments less artificial?
And when considering speaking patterns or writing patterns as “black,” what does that mean to us in writing classrooms? Is standard written English “white” or is it English? How can we capitalize on the richness of vernacular uses of language in the writing classroom?

If what we want is to help students develop strong writing—and believe this is linked to voice---how do we justify silencing their primary voices? How do we get to the places of hearing what students are saying in writing if we have to censure their language? In my experience, black students have some of the strongest voices—because they have been engaged in the kinds of social conflict that evokes strong responses. Their identity seems to be more sure, their personal history more alive, their convictions less superficial than many—dare I say most—white students’. But then I run into the conundrum: what do I do with the vernacular without destroying them as writers? And often when they strain to use Standard English, I want to encourage them to shake off that stilted voice. WE want student to show up in their writing—that is what I want most of all: writing sans the generic voice. But how can we get to it? This is not exclusive to African American writing, but how can I say this? I have a sense that my African American students have simply lived more, simply have more to say that is not licensed by “the man.” It is this rich underground voice that I covet from them. It is that place—recognized, I believe as a “standpoint” of oppression that allows them access to knowledge whites do not have—indeed cannot have because they are excluded from Black reality. Marx argued that those who are subjugated are in an advantaged position of interpretation—and consequently of answers to how to eliminate that subjugation—if critical conscious and pedagogy is what we are about, then we should encourage voices and not repress them.

Just a few tidbits about Technology and the resistence of Tyranny...

2008-11-17T06:29:00.000-08:00

Datuk Johan Jaafar said: "This is a new influence that we need to carefully think of."

http://mt.m2day.org/2008/content/view/5378/84/

The writer of this blog, Raja Petra, was arrested and detained for 56 days (September 12, 2008 until November 7th, 2008) for blogging about police mistreatment of Muslim women in Malaysia. He wrote the blog in question in January. Another blogger, Teresa Kok, was arrested for a shorter period of time because Government officials accused her of requesting that her local Mosque not hold their services loudly. When she was brought to trial, the officials from the Mosque in question stated that no complaint was ever made.

Obviously, words are dangerous. The result:

"This is Democracy...Malaysian style..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q6558tY58E

Just some tidbits to think about.

Elliot

UNDERGROUND & STUFF

2008-11-17T06:03:00.000-08:00

Underground Writing

Very interesting reading this week—especially as it pertained to underground writing. I have not thought much about virus writing as writing—but indeed, it is. And a type of terrorism for which I had never considered an exigency beyond a need to pull one over on everybody—a kind of geeky vandalism I assumed to be merely for getting away with it.
Now I am looking at it rhetorically, and can see it as a response to use—a complaint that more technically savvy users are becoming obsolete as common-user-friendly interfaces have developed. But I also see it as a way to create demand---for anti-bug programs, which could—and have—made a lot of money for some programmers and maybe some venture capitalists. I can also see the writing of viruses as terrorism against corporate powers—a kind of piracy in terms of time waste. While I don’t necessarily laud that type of piracy, bug writer can be considered, in some cases, modern day Robin Hoods. However, I don’t think that testing one’s programming abilities is a commendable motive to justify writing the bugs and infecting peoples’ systems. I was really surprised that the writers are an actual community of practice with their own common language and support systems—replete with journals, magazines, etc.

I found the article on Wikipedia interesting, as well, but found myself wondering if the type of macrostructure edits—which are mainly aggregative—would be limited to the type of writing produced on Wikipedia—that is expository writing—sorry to allude to the modes here, but I wonder if we would find the same dynamic in other “modes” of writing—or in writing that has purposes other than to explain. It seems that the structure of the Wikipedia technology—as well as the purpose of the writing encourages aggregative editing—which is not necessarily the same as revision. I wonder about changes in logic or structure of the pieces within the Wikipedia technology.

I also wonder if the answer to why we see fewer macrostructure edits in the U.S. schools is simply that writers are less invested; surface revision is simply easier than structural—aggregative or other---types of revision.

I do think the idea of collective intelligence is intriguing, though—and for this reason alone—to understand collaborative writing in a more nuanced and living way, wikis seem as good move in the writing classroom. I’d really like to try them next semester.

But back to underground, I am really intrigued by the article from Race, Rhetoric, and Technology—although I thought the title was odd: “Taking Black Technology Use Seriously […]”. Why wouldn’t we take it seriously? But as to the issue of underground writing—I am very interested in what is done when overt surveillance is absent—but I note that as we academics view the website, it is once again under the gaze—even now being analyzed systematically—soon to be coded and filed as what we “know” about African Americans and their use.

Writing Teacher's Tribute to Gloria Gaynor: "I Will Revise!"

2008-11-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

One of the most salient points in Jones's (2008) article was that researchers interested in revision need to account for writers' interaction with the "structural features of their environment" (p. 283). My first foray into comp studies research involved working with revision. In fact, although it's no longer a primary interest area, I have a "revise and resubmit" article on the back burner here about revision, waiting for some time to actually deal with it. Although it's been through a ton of iterations at this point, the editorial direction I received for this current revision suggests focusing on my use of response sheets for student revision. While Jones focused on the particular environment of Wikipedia, it seems the particular classroom structure I employed may also produce expectations for certain types of responses.

Jones's article was eye-opening for me on another level as well. I've used Wikipedia in my classroom before to talk about social construction of meaning as well as reliability of sources. When I had students update entries on Wikipedia, some were upset to see their information deleted or changed-- typically because they violated Wikipedia standards of non-bias. While I'll continue to include the discussion of socially constructed meaning and source reliability in future classes when I do a Wikipedia activity, I think I'll take a cue from Jones and also talk about this as a revision process. Based on his work, it does seem crucial to address the norms conveyed by instructions to our students to "revise." There's a great article by Armstrong and Paulson (May 2008) in TETYC, which attempts to survey the varied terminology associated with revision and the potential implications of that terminology, i.e. instructors sometimes have different intentions, and typically receive different responses when they decide to refer to "peer editing" vs. "peer critique" vs. "peer response" vs. "peer evaluation." It matters what we call things…

This (obliquely perhaps) seems to bring us back around to the socio-cultural assumptions involved in naming-- a theme which I see beneath the surface in the Kvasny & Igwe and Banks articles. Kvasny & Igwe refer to what they're studying as "the African American system of communication" (p. 571). Banks writes about "African American discourse" but he notes the proliferation of terminology: African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Black English, ebonics, creole, or "a complete language that is a member of the Niger-Congo language family" (p. 69).

While Banks mentions these different names, he doesn't get into the underlying assumptions behind the names, in fact Banks seems to skate on by it... I suspect that which name you chose does indeed matter. It may matter on a personal/practical level-- i.e. you chose one which has gone out of vogue and you look insensitive or uneducated. It may matter on a social level-- which one you choose may depend on who you're talking to, and your choice may influence how that audience responds to you. It may matter on a definitional level-- thinking of Ed Schiappa's work here-- when you choose a specific name, isn't it implying what you expect it "ought to be?" This in turn invokes layers of connotations. Something to think about during acts of revision.

hodge podge of ideas

2008-11-16T14:57:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to decide what article to post on, but all of them seemed to speak to me in one way or another. Thomas’ article had me thinking more about the division between mac’s and pc’s vis-à-vis viruses. As more and more people start to purchase mac’s, will the desire to out-code each other start a movement to create viruses? I understand wanting to challenge each other and create programs, but why can’t virus-makers make happy programs? Programs that help people and not destroy them.

Kvasny and Igwe’s article really struck me because it was very similar to what I am attempting to do with my seminar project. I found the layout of their article and the headings very helpful and encouraging since they were very similar to the headings I was thinking of using. It made me feel not so out in left field. Though I would have liked more about the methods, as Jon comments below, did they attempt to more or less create their own methods? I don’t have a direct person that I am following, instead based on what I have been reading, I have created a list of words that I am looking for and if the post has that word (or words) then I classify that into one category (and I have 4 categories). So, I see Kvasny and Igwe’s methodology very similar to mine. As in, what to look for on the blogs and comments? As I said in a comment to Jon, I found two of their articles that they cited in the methods section and will let ya’ll know if there is anything in them that makes the methods more clear. Fingers crossed!

Wikipedia has always been an interest of mine, mostly because I find myself using it more and more when I don’t know something. Our Wikipedia entry has been revised since our last class and it seems as though it was revised to fit more within the “standard Wikipedia format” (which when writing it I didn’t even know a standard format existed!). I wonder how students would benefit from seeing the revision process in work. If I asked my students to search an article and look at the revision history, would they understand the difference between macro and micro revisions better than my higher order and lower order distinction? Would being able to see the difference make the point clearer? I may try this out next semester. I like the idea of students revision Wikipedia articles, but I never thought of using it as a point of contact to teach what revision is. Pure brilliance John Jones.

The end of Banks’ article brought up some good points: the idea of not just wanting to get people dependent on the internet, but to get more farmers, blue collar workers and families online. If we got everyone online (which with Obama’s broadband wireless for everyone, may happen… though there will still be an issue of who has a computer to get onto the broadband) what would that mean for view of community? How would having all of America online change what we view as writing? Our views of writing has already changed with the internet, so by having EVERYONE on, I can see our views changing even more.

Kvansy and Igwe

2008-11-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

I thought the article on the African-American blog community response to the ABC News report on AIDS in Black America was really interesting. Overall, I thought the article was excellent, but right now I want to talk about a few things that confused and troubled me.

One thing that I wanted to learn more about in this article was the methodology. While the authors explain that they coded the blog, they provide a confused indication of what served as their unit of analysis. They explain that they coded a number of comments, but also explained that they analyzed direct quotatoins, and threads of conversation. I'm wondering how they segmented the data into chunks, how they determined what the parameters of those chunks were. Also, the authors explain rather vaguely that "quotations were coded and analyzed according to themes that they represented" (577). How were these themes chosen/deciphered? How did the authors negotiate differences/similarities amongst the "candidate codes" that they came up with when they coded separately? What was their interrater reliability?

More importantly, it seems like the authors were expressly looking for signs of "resistance" in these blogs. They say that one of their research questions was to find if and how the "community provided an oppositional interpretation" of the ABC report (576). It seems, that if you're looking for these oppositional interpretations of the news report, you'll be likely to find and code for them. Thus, it's not a surprise that the discussion portion of the article emphasizes these signs of resistance, while perhaps understating many of the other categories that emerged from this analysis.

I'm not saying that the authors were merely finding what they were looking for. But I am saying that their description of the methodology makes this an important question to ask. One problem I see is that the authors don't indicate the percentage of comments or quotations or threads (or whatever unit of analysis they were coding) that fell under each coding category. In their discussion, they make it appear that bloggers' comments resisting ABC news were overwhlemingly present in the data: "They [the bloggers] questioned the statistics, provided explanations for why the figures overstate the proportion of HIV infections among African Americans compared to other racial/ethnic groups, and critically analyzed how science is often misued to legitimize negative portrayals of Black people....The agency to resist these ascribed identities is situated in and often in opposition to the institutional power structure of existing AIDS discourse" (588). However, the authors provide no way of knowing if these oppositional interpretations of the ABC report were the most salient feature of the blog that was analyzed. They don't compare the number of such comments to the number of comments that support and uphold the news report. For instance, how many comments gave "props" to ABC for giving the report and shining light on this issue? How many comments neither questioned nor challenged the findings of the report? There's also no way of knowing if the "resistance" category was more or less salient than the "ineffective leadership" or "Black cultural practices" or "individual behavior" categories.

Finally, let me take small issue with one potential category that the authors did not code for, but which they mention in passing. The authors notice "clear linguistic markers such as "they" and "us", ABC and BET to demarcate the outgroup and the ingroup, which serves as additional evidence of a shared group identity" (582). I realize that this was not one of the researchers primary questions, but it would have been interesting if they had coded for demarcations of an "us/them" binary. It would have been interesting to try to understand where and when these demarcations occur. And I think it's important to ask if, by making such demarcations, this blog community sustains a kind of unnecessary separation b/w black and white, us and them, BET and ABC. To me the creation of this demarcation is double-edged. On the one hand, it serves to promote a kind of shared group identity, as the authors note. On the other hand, it serves to promote a kind of Otherizing of White people, White news sources, and White culture. This is certainly understandable given the history and persistence of racism in our country; moreover, it is understandable given the real bias in the White-controlled news reports (see Teun van Dijk's Elite Discourse and Racism). Still, part of me cringes when I see us/them lingusitic markers, and I think researchers have a responsibility to expose these binaries and comment on thier potentially divisive implications.

quick diatribe

2008-11-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Thomas suggests that one motivation for the rise of virus production is the desire of virus writers to make PC users aware of their dependence on technology: "viruses force the end user to become aware (or, at least, more aware) of his or her blind reliance or dependence on technology. In doing so, the threat of viral infection forces him or her to take note of technology itself. The threat of viral infection forces the end user to understand how his or her computer -works, to take precautions, to be aware of how viruses spread and to protect oneself" (p. 267-8). Allow me to speak for the ignorant masses of PC users. Hey, virus writers, we are all already painfully aware of how dependent we are on our computers. We don't need goddamn viruses to make us more aware of technology. And these goddamn viruses don't force us to understand how our computers work; they force us to buy products like Norton Antivirus and McAfee--only furthering our reliance on technologies which we don't fully understand. And, by the way, we don't give a shit how our computers work; we only care THAT they work. It is not always important to understand every microfunction of a machine; it's enough to know how to make a machine useful for you in a given context. Sorry that PCs became easy to use and made your special hacker langauge passe. Sorry that you see the average PC user as an unsuspecting fool. I hope you'll forgive me for seeing the average virus writer as a selfish asshole.

Best regards,
Ignorant PC user

Open source vs. the constraints of licensed technology

2008-11-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

Thomas’ and Jones’ articles really stood out to me since, lately, I’ve been interested in open source software as a public technology. Thomas asserts that “virus programmers have a long history of sharing code and ideas, a process which is similar to the early computer programmers of the 1960s and 1970s. What these hackers used to refer to as ‘bumming code’ is a standard for development in the virus community” (p. 266). In addition, Jones begins his article with a brief explanation of Wikipedia: “Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone with an Internet connection, regardless of that person’s background or expertise, and the wiki software that powers the site instantly publishes those edits to the Web” (p. 262).

These articles reminded me of something I read in Wired magazine a while back. The article looked at Google’s new Internet browser, Chrome. In the article, Ben Goodger, part of the Chrome development team, “ talks about the benefits of making Chrome an open source product — the code will be publicly released and a community will emerge to determine the browser's evolution..."It'll enable people to do things we haven't thought of. And it'll generate trust that we're not doing something evil” (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-10/mf_chrome?currentPage=4). While I'm sure we could make a long list of the pros and cons of Google, this is an interesting development in their software.

Likewise, Mozilla has been producing open source software for awhile. Their purpose for doing so is expressed on their web site: “The common thread that runs throughout Mozilla is our belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. With this in mind, our efforts are ultimately driven by our mission of encouraging choice, innovation and opportunity online” (http://www.mozilla.org/about/).

As a combination of Jones’ and Thomas’ research, it would be interesting to look at the writing practices of open source software “writers” (although this has probably been done...). As the virus-writers created code to subvert the commercialization of computer technology, it seems that open source code writers work in similar ways. Rather than creating a piece of technology to copyright and sell, groups like Mozilla create software with the inherent purpose of encouraging its evolution through a community of like-minded people.

It’s interesting to think about what rights are allowed to the end user of various software. It’s almost assumed that a user of Mozilla software or other open source technology might consider changing the code to their liking. When you use a licensed software, say from Apple, Microsoft, or Adobe, you can pay loads of money but only have the ability to use the software within the constraints designated by the programmers. While I agree that, for example, Adobe Photoshop is built on a ridiculously complicated code structure, and it might be worth some (all?) of the cost to buy it, I wonder how it might be changed if it were open source? The end users, probably web and print designers and photographers, know what they are comfortable with and what they’d like to change.

I’ve been using licensed software for so long that it’s difficult for me to comprehend changing the way I use my computer. First of all, I can’t write code. I understand the bare basics of how HTML works, but beyond that, I’d need some training. That’s not the obstacle for me; once I learned how to write code or change programs, I’d like to tweak the ones I already have to do things I want them to do. Unfortunately, licensed products don’t allow the end user any creativity with their product beyond the use for which it was designed (I’m sure you could crack the code for any of these softwares, but I’m talking in a general sense here).

The creators of virii seem to have found a way to subvert the constraints of commercialized technology. I’m not a fan of nefarious virii that crash personal computers just because the user doesn’t know anything about their technology (aka Dark Angel, Thomas p. 268). I agree that the user of any technology would be better off understanding the inner workings of these devices and programs, but shouldn’t be viciously punished for ignorance. But the premises Dark Angel uses are significant: ignorance leaves users open to computer virii. Beyond that, ignorance keeps users from expanding on their literacies and abilities; if we don’t understand the technology, we cannot possibly begin to work outside that which constrains us.

unfair use

2008-11-13T15:45:00.000-08:00

A good editorial on a recent copyright debacle. LittleBigPlanet, a new game for the Playstation 3, is built around the concept of user-created content shared online. But what happens when that content references copyrighted works?

I like to view "writing" in this case as level creation. Because it is.

http://www.ps3informer.com/playstation-3/games/editorial-copyright-madness-hurts-gaming-009502.php

Pennell

2008-11-12T10:44:00.001-08:00

I apologize for missing class on Monday and for the lateness of my response to a reading, but I do believe I was stricken by some unseen food poisoning from hell. I chose the Itext piece because I was interested in the Pennell’s use of a fraternity to understand the uses of websites today and what it means to composition and people in general. He states, “We fail to investigate ITexts as they operate and develop on the peripheries of our classrooms, campuses, and workplaces. While we see students as composers in our classrooms, we have a tendency to avoid claiming extracurricular writing as composing.
Student organizations, especially those such as the Interfraternity Council (IFC), mediate
a complicated existence between various constituencies, such as students, fraternities, academic
administration, the public, and alumni”(75). Here Pennell explains that although we as teachers may see our students are composers in the classroom and understand the importance of technology in the classroom we have issues recognizing the amount of composing and literacy that continues and grows outside of the classroom. I find it amusing that perhaps one of the students that I constantly have to nag to email responses, write an essay, or create a PowerPoint will have no difficulty spending hours messaging and posting on Facebook or even creating their own website to promote whatever it is they feel like. Well, even though that student is not composing in my classroom they are obviously a busy bee outside of it—and that is important. This “student’s” extracurricular technology activity is helping to create a new type of worker/person in the workforce because of the new direction in work affairs after industrialism.
Pennell addresses the fact that it is difficult to explain post-industrialism and its effects on literacy and technology in a composition classroom. Thus, Pennell went to the IFC, a fraternity web site in the Midwest, to research some of the roles it play, conduct interviews, and observe. As Pennell stated, “I wanted to capture a variety of snapshots of the web site’s role within the IFC communication ecology.” He remarks that the website is a great example of Itext and although it is not necessarily cutting edge, “The composing of an organizational web site provides students with an engagement not only in composing with technology but also an engagement with larger social, political, and economic ecologies”(78). Again, creating a website adds skills and an awareness of society that perhaps the composition classroom could not address. I do not think it is our fault that we cant really address it (we cant do everything) but the realization that this kind of literacy is happening out there all the time was something that really struck me. Although I consider myself quadsi-technology literate, most of the younger people I meet can run circles around me in the technology field and I have a good idea that they did not learn these skills in classrooms. I think it would be better to realize that students are becoming literate in technology on their own and try to utilize that in the classroom. Of course, that means we have to count on the students to not lie about their skills and develop some sort of area for them to use their powers of technology…sorry, I digress…

Pennell says that he wants to investigate contextualized design, but outside of the classroom. Hence, his entire piece that revolved around a very popular extracurricular activity (Fraternities) and their website. He ends with, “ITexts such as this challenge our notions of revision as composers mediate both space and time, looking to future composers and diverse, as well as dispersed, audiences. With the post-industrial turn and its subsequent call, and need, for free-agents and flexible workers, the in-between and extracurricular places of student composing in our universities require our attention”(89). Basically, I think he is saying that we need to realize the world outside our composition classroom and realize that it is changing. Types of works are changing. Students are changing. So it is important that we change. I realize that he explains that he wanted to work and did work outside of the pedagogical perspective, but since I understand pedagogy to a point and I am hopelessly lost within the field of theory I thought it better for me to try to apply what he found and what he was saying to the classroom. I do not think I am wrong in believing that he wants us to address the fact that our students continue their literacy and growing outside of our classroom (or any other classroom for that matter) and at the very least we need to be aware.

2008-11-10T08:43:00.001-08:00

I was very much intrigued by Honeycutt’s essay on orality and literacy; I have considered, in depth, the relationship between oral and silent reading—especially in relation to pedagogy as it has developed from antiquity. I was well aware that the primary mode of reading was indeed oral until at least the time of St. Augustine. Until the at least the fifth century A.D., reading was, in fact a communal activity. It did not belong in the realm of the private—largely because there was not much of a sense of privacy in any culture—those who had time/space for leisure and/or privacy were indeed, the aristocracy. Oral reading was a way of transmitting and reinforcing cultural norms, hence its prevalence in religious training.

But, vis a vis technology: it was in, fact, a technology that accounts for what Scribner calls “literacy as a state of grace.” During the reign of King James, catechisms and alphabetic primers converged into one book for the sake of a technological convenience—and for the sake, I believe of wedding politics and religion via the indoctrination afforded by oral recitation of transcribed doctrine—under the name of a sovereign state and monarch. This technological practice continued in the New England Primers, Webster’s Blue Back Speller, and The McGuffey and other early readers in the
U.S.

While I have read and written considerably on orality of reading, I had not considered the inverse operation of writing—likely because in educational settings, the writing always came after the reading—if it came at all. The reasons for this, if we consider literacy as ideological are of course very clear. When we are producing subjects, input is desired over output. Output, in fact, is discouraged except as imitation—hence the copybooks of early common school practices.

The emphasis on literacy (vis a vis reading) has unfortunately denigrated the affordances of orality. It is easy enough for us to understand in retrospect that if reading was once a communal public act, with its own affordances, that orality also has affordance that rely upon the collective, the communal, the public. So to overlook the use of the oral in terms of collaborative composition seems indeed counterintuitive. But again orality has been devalued because of its traditional use of vernacular—the very thing that impeded the public inscribing of documents as literacy spread beyond the Latinate erudite of Rome.

I’m not exactly sure what the author meant by “secondary orality,” but I think that as a result of this article, my thinking about Ong’s claim that “writing restructures consciousness” has changed. If what Ong meant was that during the act of writing itself, our consciousness in relation to the subject and process at hand is restructured, I do believe he is correct. Whether his claim is broader and therefore an example of technological determinism, I am not sure. But, I have often wondered about the recursiveness of the ancients writings—take Aristotle, for instance. It is often burdensome in its repetition. I always thought he was simply trying to drive home a point; I thought the restating was pedagogical. Now I wonder if it was simply the technology of having it written for him as he dictated—I’m not sure of his method of transcription.

Genre and Identity

2008-11-10T07:38:00.001-08:00

Both of the genre studies articles (Graham and Pennell) gave me a lot to think about. I definitely want to read some of the articles they cite, such as Miller, Bazerman, and Giddens. Genres certainly do have rhetorical power. Take for instance any form you have to fill out that identifies your gender. It produces social knowledge about how many genders there are and what categories they are. Also, the question are you married, single, divorced, widowed, etc. does much to produce and reify a heteronormative social knowledge of intimacy because it elides relationships that homosexuals form, such as life partners, because they have no legal consequences. The Houle et al. piece gives some insight into the implications that genres-as-knowledge production can influence identity. Bazerman locates a sense of agency in genres in that individuals can use them for their own purposes.

This seems to be Alex’s purpose in his project—to re-imagine his identity through multiple genres. Although as an audience I did feel a little put off with the “You decide,” it did locate me just where I am—in a position of power relative to trans-folk who despite being tagged onto the alphabet soup of the LGBT movement (the full version is LGBT2-SIQQ—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, two-spirited, intersex, queer, and questioning) have historically been erased from it. Also, at times I felt like I was listening to a rebellious, petulant teenager who just needed to grow up (See Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place for a full discussion of maturity and queers, esp. trans). LOL I laugh at myself because I can recognize the privilege that under-rides those reactions. At the same time, different rhetorical appeals may be more persuasive to a privileged audience than the ones he uses.

The genre of myth and the genre of sound really drove Alex’s purpose home to me. By reworking the Robin Hood myth, or showing it as multiple (“That’s why it’s such a complex and beautiful legend because it changes with every single person who reads it.”), Alex produces himself as multiple, able to be re-read. The “You decide” takes on a different meaning here—one that I certainly can identify with. Whenever I “come out” to someone, there is a re-viewing process that happens. Sometimes the person verbalizes it—“Oh yeah, now it makes sense. You get real quiet when we talk about sports.” (because, you know, talking about sports is a sign of heterosexual males despite the fact that there are many straight guys who don’t watch sports and many gay men who do—gay men even have sports bars! Gasp! I was actually shocked the first time I heard that.). Or they non-verbally re-view me by paying attention to certain behaviors or looking me up and down. I certainly don’t think of myself as an outlaw (I am an upstanding citizen, thank you very much), as Alex has described himself, but in many ways according to the “laws” of society I am just by being myself. So, the re-reading that Alex describes about himself through the Robin Hood myth helps us to understand about how he views his gender as continuously and simultaneously both male and female: “Was I Alex then--Alex when I was a girl called Bethany? Does that mean that Bethany is gone/dead now? No. I am Bethany now, just as I was Alex then, too.” Some transgendered individuals assert that they have no gender, or are a gender not defined by male and female categories. For Alex, gender, instead of being on a continuum (the more masculine you are the less feminine you are), seems to exist as two separate poles (allowing for the possibility to be high in male and high in female characteristics). Does this, then, resolve into androgyny?

In addition to myth, the genre of audio technology seemed useful to Alex’s project of producing knowledge about his identity through multiple genres. As a person prepares for and undergoes sex-reassignment surgery, she or he takes hormones, which affect, among other things, the depth of the voice. Since Alex selected different clips from different points in this process, the listener is able to hear the change in his voice. This embodied rhetorical move could not happen in simply print text with the same degree of efficacy.

Although I am skeptical about how liberatory this project may be (Who will access this??), the myth and the audio genres do the work of producing social knowledge particularly about the multiplicity of identity for Alex.

Politics loves the Internet

2008-11-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

What do you think about Obama's use of the Internet as a part of his campaign? His post-campaign strategy?

Besides the fact that the web design of both sites is, dare I say it, beautiful, the networking and public quality of both sites helped create a movement.

“When Congress refuses to go with his [Obama's] agenda, it’s not going to be just the president” they oppose, Mr. Trippi [ran the Howard Dean campaign] said. It will be the president and his huge virtual network of citizens.

“Just like Kennedy brought in the television presidency, I think we’re about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency,” Mr. Trippi said.

***Check out Print magazine's analysis of various designs used in presidential campaigns over the years. You can download a PDF.

Materiality and genre

2008-11-09T20:19:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: Genre theory confuses me. I find it interesting and important, but nevertheless, I am confused. The following is a somewhat coherent rambling of ideas related to Monday's readings...

“There is a material component to ITexts that tends to be overlooked with more traditional genres. Rather than functioning solely as the tool for achieving a goal, the technology is always part of both the composing and understanding of the text. The use of ITexts highlights this materiality of composing and sheds light on the (infra)structures within which actors work” (Pennell, p. 83).

The Christian Science Monitor will be moving from a daily print edition to a daily online edition in 2009. CSM editor John Yemma says,

“This is a period of extreme financial difficulty for all news organizations. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., for instance, was asked at a conference in California on Oct. 22 whether the Times would be a print product in 10 years. "The heart of the answer must be (that) we can't care," Sulzberger said. He added that he expects print to be around for a long time but "we must be where people want us for our information."
(see full article here)

I’m particularly interested in the connection between materiality and genre. The Christian Science Monitor is a newspaper that is held to a (generally) high standard, and I wonder how the reader/industry perception might change because of the print to online switch being made. Pennell is “drawn to and influenced by Anthony Pares and Graham Smart’s (1994) definition of genre as ‘a broad rhetorical strategy enacted within a community in order to regularize writer/reader transactions in ways that allow for the creation of particular knowledge’” (p. 78). At this moment, I’m not comfortable enough in my knowledge of genre (and the barrage of readings on genre from various classes this past week has confused me more...), so I’ll stick with Pares and Smart’s definition for now.

Because it’s that time in the semester when I really want to simplify things...

Anyway...how does the news genre (or any subgenre? of news) fit with the CSM’s switch from print to online publication? Does a change in materiality constitute a change in genre, or, as I’m guessing, is it more complicated than that?

Since Pennell also cites Carolyn Miller’s work on genre, I’ll take a look at that text for a moment. In the onset of her text, Miller explains that “one concern in rhetorical theory, then, is to make of rhetorical genre a stable classifying concept; another is to ensure that the concept is rhetorically sound” (p. 151). Rather than looking at “substance or form” (materiality?), Miller focuses on genre as a representation of “rhetorical action” (p. 151). Pennell argues that “ITexts, especially Internet genres, rely on [an] unfinished state of always being under construction” (p. 81). So, does this “dynamic nature” (as Pennell puts it) place the materiality of an online web site beyond the surface definitions of materiality (p. 81)? For example, an online newspaper (i.e. CSM) could be seen as a digital extension of the print edition. On the other hand, since the print edition is no longer the dominant publication of this news organization, could we consider the online CSM to be an extension of the organization? How does this complicate one’s idea of the genres involved?

Miller gives the following as one of four implications for understanding genre: “As meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre rules occur at a relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction” (p. 163). I’m having difficulty envisioning genre rules that apply to an IText. Other than an application of rhetorical rules, I think this is another area that begs for a new/revised theory. Graham and Whalen discuss a problem noted by Kress: “Much of genre theory has been developed for alphabetic practice” (p. 68). Hence Kress’ adoption of theory from the Australian genre school (Graham and Whalen, p. 68). Point being: the application of theory based in alphabetic texts creates problems for mixed-media texts.

To revert back to the first quote by Pennell: perhaps we should look at materiality and its position (?) as the “(infra)structures within which actors work” (Pennell, p. 83). With this in mind, I can see the online version (online materiality) of the CSM as the “(infra)structure” in which all actors involved interact. In this view, I think Miller’s understanding of genre as a social and/or rhetorical action fits well.

The photo at the top of this post is amusing: It pictures a rolled-up newspaper yet the CSM (in 2009) will be primarily an online publication.

Graham and Whalen: A smattering of stuff I want to know

2008-11-09T19:57:00.000-08:00

1. Reciprocity
I'm always interested to see how issues of reciprocity play out in research. Ellen Cushman has suggested, “The terms governing the give-and-take (reciprocity) of involvement in the community need to be openly and consciously negotiated by everyone participating in activist research.” Pam’s “Ethics of Reciprocity” article also came to mind. While Graham does not label his work as ‘activist’ research, he does make explicit that he considers co-authoring/reciprocal research with his participant, Whalen, the “ideal” and most ethical approach to qualitative investigation, following from Williams (1996).

While I agree that ethical reciprocity does seem a distinct improvement over the disciplining gaze approach long used in research, “ideal” still seems too committal to me. What does Whalen get out of this study? I’m curious. While they do give us a couple of hints as to what each author contributed, i.e. Whalen doesn’t use rhetorical terms in the part he’s written, I’d be curious to know if Whalen found talking about his design process enlightening at all. How did theorize his work previously (if he did theorize it)? Did he gain more knowledge about his own process, or new ways of speaking about it? I think all I am really asking for here is a footnote obviously from him – something that gives him a moment to overtly assume ownership of the article. I know he’s the second author and Graham is the academic, but if it’s going to be truly reciprocal, this might be a way of helping make that move even clearer.

2. Methods
I liked the description of the data collection; it was coherent and seemed well-justified overall. The terms 'post-mortem' and 'situational' also provided some food for thought. It was a smooth rhetorical move on Graham & Whalen's part, I think, to identify this dichotomy and then promptly note that their identification created a gap between the two poles, which they then proceeded to fill.

I did find one aspect of their methods troubling. They clearly detailed data collection, but then what happened? There was a direct jump to the writing process. I wanted to see more information about what they did with that data they collected. Did they code it? If so, how? I acknowledge this problem might be due to my unfamiliarity with the genre theory literature; perhaps there is a sort of tacit understanding of how that approach goes from data to write-up.

3. Rhetorical Canon Shift
This is not new news, but in terms of actual practice, this reading and the piece by Houle, Kimball, and McKee further emphasized the ways that the rhetorical emphases are changing. Arrangement and delivery matter again. I'm not sure yet if memory has made a comeback, but it's interesting to see how arrangement and delivery have ascended to new levels of importance within digital modes and digital processes. A lot of the design issues Whalen dealt with stemmed from issues of arrangement. Graham and Whalen emphasized the shifting nature of the audience (which I would locate within Invention) but arrangement has become a priority for the audience, so it needs to be considered within invention.

anecdotes and sunken boats

2008-11-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

No offense to Michael Pennell, but his article about fraternity web sites seemed to contain a lot of obvious observations (at least to a seasoned web nerd), albeit couched in the terminology of rhetoric and composition. Maybe I would have gotten a little more out of his article had I read the work of Anthony Giddens, but for the moment the little extra research time I have is reserved for upcoming papers. But if I missed anything groundbreaking in Pennell’s article—or if I’m writing it off a little too quickly—someone, please intervene.

Then again, I could also be blinded by the fact that I worked on a rickety university website for an entire semester and had all of my work accidentally overwritten by the person who took my place when I graduated; but I don’t think I could possibly be that petty.

As for the Graham and Whalen article, I think I was given a better perspective on things by having a friend who’s spent the last three years dealing with these issues. He went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon’s ETC (Electronic Technology Center), where he had a project each semester that was for a corporate sponsor. I don’t imagine that he’s even heard of new media theory (though it’s a possibility), but each one of these projects had to involve some form of what Graham and Whalen refer to as the Mode, Medium, Genre Interaction Heuristic (Fig. 6 on page 88). I followed most of his projects pretty closely, because I would go visit him and his brother every couple of weeks in Pittsburgh; and he had similar problems as the designer in this article.

One of his biggest projects came in his second semester when his team was contracted to create an exhibit for the USS Requin submarine currently docked at the Carnegie Science Center (it’s a WWII sub). They interviewed some surviving veterans on video, but had to decide how to present this information as visitors walked through the submarine. They finally decided on a series of kiosks placed throughout the sub which would give information about the specific area around the kiosk and give you the option to watch the replies of veterans who were interviewed for the project. They did run into a few problems with the content, though; the museum wouldn’t let them use interview footage where the men told gory/raunchy stories about their time in the service. But all in all, he was happy with how the project turned out—and I believe it’s still set up in the Requin today.

Actually, I did a little digging, and discovered that the tour is available via the web. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t scale to the size of your browser. I’ll have to yell at him for that.

Fun fact: he now works for a video game developer that works almost exclusively with licensed products. You wouldn’t believe how often Nickelodeon thinks that clouds/rock formations/random background objects look like penises.

amusing VR software video

2008-11-09T12:37:00.000-08:00

Voice recognition software gone awry...

writing by dictation--inarticualte ramblings

2008-11-09T07:43:00.001-08:00

About ten years ago, my father, who never learned how to type, bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. I think it was version 2.0, but I'm not sure. My dad was hoping that the software would allow him to write faster and eliminate the frustration of having to hunt and peck at keys on the keyboard. As a high school student with many papers to write, I was also really excited about the opportunity to write by dictation. It sounded very easy and I was hoping that I could compose papers with my voice alone.

So, I plunged in--downloaded the software, "trained" the software to recognize my voice, and began writing/speaking. It was a nightmare. Each sentence I uttered was riddled with errors. I had to go back by hand--like a caveman!--and correct just about every word in the sentence before dictating the next one. I realized quickly that the software wasn't delivering accurate results. But I also realized that writing, for me, is not something that you just spit out in a fit of passion. For some reason, the advertising for the software had led me to believe that writing on screen was just like speaking aloud, but slower. I thought that writing was just something that poured out of you, and that doing it by dictation would make the pouring that much more efficient. But, this experience forced me to see that writing--for me anyway--is always slow and recursive. Now, writing recursively by voice--going back and forth--was nearly impossible. Plus, all of the extra errors made it that much more harder. If writing was slow before, now it was glacially slow.

The Dragon folks suggested that if errors were a major problem it was because the machine had not yet learned your voice and recommended that users take the training courses again. So I did. Basically this amounted to reading aloud several scripts on the screen. Then, I returned to writing by dictation and still found that I could not compose a comprehensible sentence. I gave up. My father, too, ran into similar difficulties and became very frustrated. He had paid quite a bit of money for the software and now it was going to sit on a shelf--never to be used again.

Now, it appears that Dragon is releasing version 10.0 of its NaturallySpeaking series. It claims to have 99% accuracy. I'm tempted to give it another shot, but I can't help being fearful. Based on my earlier experience, I've adopted a kind of "I'll believe it when I see it" approach. Besides, I learned the hard way what the advertisers will not tell you: to use this kind of software, you almost have to unlearn how to write by hand and relearn how to speak. It the (re/un)learning didn't pay off ten years ago, but maybe the technology is improved enough that it will pay off now.

In any case, if the 99% accuracy claim is true, then perhaps this is the beginning of a revolution in how we write. Honeycutt claims that "if word recognition accuracy increases to the point at which users can consistently produce clean drafts faster than thy can with keyborading, then voice recognition has a chance of becoming a widely adopted literacy tool in the corporate workplace" (315). I wonder if the technology might also become widely adopted by students, or are the differences between school-writing and workplace-writing too great? I also wonder if people will choose to buy the technology--even if it is better. Honeycutt seems to suggest that improvements in the technology will make it more popular. But many scholars have reminded us that whether a technology is seen as working or not working depends on the user, not the technology itself. It's possible that improvements in word recognition accuracy might not matter to people who like writing the old-fashioned way or who don't trust machines. There are a lot of such people. Still I wonder what the future holds: Will advertising reach and convince people that this is the next wave of writing? Will schools and/or businesses purchase the software and make writing by dictation part of the curriculum? Will writing by dictation supplant writing by hand?

It will be interesting to see what happens. Personally, think I might give the technology another shot--but not just yet.

2008-11-09T07:33:00.000-08:00

The following is from the website for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (I've also included a link to a review below):

"Turn Talk into Type

Most people speak over 120 words per minute but type less than 40 words per minute. What if you could create email, documents and spreadsheets simply by speaking? What if you could control your PC just by talking to it, starting programs, using menus, surfing the web?
This isn’t Star Trek or HAL from the Space Odyssey saga; it’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the world’s best-selling speech recognition software. This revolutionary and easy-to-use product gives you everything you need to be more efficient with your PC. Turn your voice into text three times faster than most people type with up to 99% accuracy. It’s so easy, you can use it right out of the box. It learns to recognize your voice instantly and continually improves the more you use it.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking works with the most commonly used desktop applications, including Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, AOL and more! Just about anything you do now by typing can be done faster using your voice. Create and edit documents or emails. Open and close applications. Control your mouse and entire desktop.

The biggest reason more people worldwide rely on Dragon NaturallySpeaking: it works. With more than 175 awards for accuracy and ease of use, it’s the undisputed leader in speech recognition software. If you want to get more done, more quickly, just say the word and Dragon NaturallySpeaking will transform your productivity. "

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Reviews/Talking-to-yourself-productively-with-Dragon-Naturally-Speaking/

Honeycutt

2008-11-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

*no awesome picture to go along with my ramblings :-(

This must be the week of my academic career where I learn about genre. Seriously, like 80% of the readings I did for my 3 classes focused in one way or another on genre. I am glad that I read Miller earlier in the week, otherwise I would have struggled with some of the readings for this class. I want to mention a few things about Honeycutt first.

For the first 20 pages of so I have all of these side notes about the transfer from individual writing to collaborative writing to individual ect. And then, poof, there is a whole section on the differences in history and individual and collaborative writing. The article was reading my mind! I was actually just having this conversation earlier in the week. I have taken 2 classes where we had the option to do our final seminar project as a collaborative project. In the first course, of the 9 of us, only two decided to work together to write a paper. Looking back I wish I would’ve done a collaborative project, but instead I did an individual paper. In the second course of 9, there were two groups of 3 and then the rest were individual projects. In this course, I did decided to work in a group for the final project and together we ended up composing a 20min movie; the other group did a web text and majority of the individuals did formal papers with powerpoints. It is interesting just to see who decided to use what mode, medium, genre. I have been thinking a lot about what is valued in the field (especially after last weeks readings). There seems to be encouragement for collaborative work within journals or conferences, but then when applying for jobs or tenure there is still value placed with the ability to do individual work. There is the possibility that I could have argued my way into collaborative projects throughout my MA career, but my MA thesis would have had to be individual. When is the first collaborative dissertation going to be done? If there is value placed with collaborative work, why does it feel like there is a rift between collaborative and individual? And, Honeycutt offered us some examples with regard to technology. New technologies encouraged a shift from collaborative to individual. Where do we think this is going to go? “But even if our composing memories become less individual and more collective, either through technical or social means, certain features of voice-recognition technology might prevent its use from being the collaborative effort that dictation was in past eras.” (318).

The other theme/issue that I was thinking about while reading this article was the thought that these voice recognition programs could become status programs in the sense that you would have to speak a particular standard dialect for the program to accurately record you. “You can, however, achieve fairly high recognition accuracy rates— but only if you make a concerted effort to improve your pronunciation and diction and speak in continuous phrases so that the com- puter can parse your speech correctly.” (315-316). Would/will these programs reinforce the idea that there is a standard dialect and that those who are able to afford access to the program are those that are within the standard? Therefore, leaving others behind and causing another divide within literacy learning?

More to come later on genre and itexts.

I Am a Changed Man

2008-11-06T08:44:00.000-08:00

Note: Starting off with a picture of The Best Dog because this page is entirely too text-heavy, and this actually ties into what I'm saying...maybe?

I've spent the last 10 weeks whining, bitching and complaining (all different forms of expression) about my students' lack of technological knowledge. This, combined with my tendency to be irritated by everything, is not exactly making me a happy camper. So I've decided to do something drastic: I'm making my students really use technology. For their final project, I'm going to make them do something that isn't composed in Microsoft Word. I think I was entirely inspired by Yancey's article--or maybe it was Selfe's. I'm getting the two mixed up right now. But what I do know is that in the past I've only been paying lip service to technology as a teacher, when I should be integrating it more into my actual classes.

Even before I started teaching, I sort of felt the resistance to technology the my students might have--though I still underestimated their skills. Aside from blogs and Vista, technology has this sort of superfluous feeling in my class; we use it, but in most instances an analog alternative exists--and I'd probably go for that if I wasn't so keen on not wasting paper. For the various papers we have in my class--all in Microsoft Word format--I make multi-modality an option; and, to be fair, Word is not exactly the best place for multi-modality. Due to its lack of picture compression, students have to literally wait hours (yes, hours) if they want to upload a picture-laden document to Vista. But, aside from upload bottlenecks that desperately need fixed, I think I'm forcing technology into a place it doesn't belong. If I want students to start getting all multi-modal, I'm going to need to have them compose in a place that supports multi-modality. That's why I'm changing the next paper into a paper-long blog post with mandatory media. That'll learn 'em.

Back when I was first monitoring classes, I sat in on a session with a instructor who didn't use the laptops, projector, etc. in his teaching. When the class was over, he came up to us and proudly said, "You'll notice that I didn't use any of the technology. I feel that stuff just gets in the way." Of course I thought he deserved a good face-punching, but I decided to take the more civilized route by arguing for the type of reading and writing students our doing without our inspiration or intervention. I even used myself as an example of someone who makes a half-living from doing the kind of self-taught writing completely facilitated by the Internet. But, as Selfe says, "We have convinced ourselves that we and the students with whom we work are made of much finer stuff than the machines in our midst, and we are determined to maintain this state of affairs" (414 HOLY CRAP, I'M CITING). And to make things worse, the dude was using content no college freshman would be interested in learning, even if he brought a keg to class. He was completely devoted to making himself as irrelevant as possible.

So I may have to alter the approach to my class' content drastically over break. Right now, I'm a little forgiving of shortcomings in computer literacy; I think the best thing to do in this case is to jump right in and help the stragglers as much as I can. Wish me luck.

Copyright links

2008-11-03T13:40:00.000-08:00

fairuse.stanford.edu

http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/submissions.html#copy

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

http://creativecommons.org/

The Fallen World

2008-11-03T09:57:00.001-08:00

I just finished watching the Youtube video by Richard Miller and I thought it was awesome. On a purely aesthetic note, I liked the pictures and the music together and his voice was paced wonderfully to go along with the images. I thought I would find the whole thing incredibly boring but I found myself sitting here and fully absorbed into what he was saying and what I was seeing. I think this is a nod to the effects a multimodal presentation could have on a person/student and I hope that one of these days I can make my presentations as effective as Miller did.

Now, I had some responses to the overall theme of the presentation and I must say I didn’t know what was going on at first with all the pictures of apocalyptic images…I wasn’t sure where he was going to go with those and then into humanity. Then, I realized, that he was going to address something that I have pondered often myself and that is the existence and (I hate to use this word) usefulness of the humanities. Here the viewer is presented with devastating images of a world at its end…leaving me, the viewer, with the now familiar feeling of hopelessness and cynicism. I was waiting for the usual argument that we have to change the future or realize what is happening and all that jazz. Instead, Miller continues with an argument that with humanities people can learn to hope again. People and students can begin to realize that the world is not a place where only black and white resides but instead the world is in a constant state of grey. I have thought many times that I wished more people would realize the consistency of grey in our world, and here I found out that is a goal of humanities (according to Miller anyway). When realizing the ambiguousness of our world, a person should be able to see more clearly thus allowing them to possibly make change and not just change in only a critical sense but change with movement. How great! Suddenly I was feeling a new sense of duty as an English major and English graduate student. My point in this university, where my department does not even have proper bathroom doors, is to direct the students about the world and give them hope. Help students to realize the world out there not in terms of right and wrong but in terms of understanding and becoming a global citizen. A daunting task, but I was at least given a task. Of course, this then made me panic because I thought of my composition classroom and realized there is a lot of room for change in order to help students learn and really understand some things but I figure the first step to my own personal change is realizing I have to do it—sorry, I guess that was just an aside. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this presentation and as usual as I am trying to Blog I want to get everything out but find myself either repeating or leaving out main concepts that are running around in my head, so for that I apologize. ☺

Can These Bones Live?

2008-11-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

Can These Bones Live?

This week’s readings have really been resonating with me—especially Yancey’s—I suppose because she offers us something tangible to sink out pedagogy into. Besides her talking about a new comp/rhetoric major in practice, her suggestion of a new model of composition is refreshing. I have a lot of angst about the discipline—and its slipperiness, especially as it is influenced by digital comp and new media. The dissonance I feel is in part philosophical, in part aesthetic, and in part practical. The practical weighs heavily on me as I consider—each semester—how to teach comp. Each semester, I reinvent myself, promising I’ll never do “that” (what I did each last semester) again.

Next semester, I am using feminist thought as a vehicle to explore writing. I understand the why of this, but the how is a different story. I think that Yancey’s three-pronged approach to teaching comp will help me out a good deal—as will my experience of making last week’s movie. But Yancey’s triad of circulation, canons of rhetoric, and deixis will give me some pedagogical hooks on which to hang my hat.

I especially appreciate Yancey’s explication of how the practice of circulation might look in a classroom—staring with a student-composed definition of a term, say “feminism” for instance, then the student proceeding to remediate her own definition—not her own writing, so much as the knowledge she/we are producing as we interact with each student’s definition (I’m also glad to reading Schiappa’s Defining Reality at this time). Moving then to Power Point would help the students to see and feel how the medium shapes the writing, how text, medium and genre form/inform one another.

I think Yancey’s insight that “to study text production, reception, and meaning apart from animated activity is to miss the core” of a text’s meaning is exactly right. I have been wanting to start focusing in class theories of writing vis-à-vis practice, but have had some anxiety about how ready first and second-year students are for that kind of treatment. I think that, in fact, they ought to be “insiders” in terms of writing scholarship, questions in the discipline, conflicts and all.

Yancey’s treatment of the five canons, especially of invention, arrangement and delivery struck a chord with me because as I was composing in Movie Maker, I encountered the phenomenon she described. I had invented, but arrangement sent be back to invention again—as did delivery. In multimodal composition, recursivity plays very largely into the whole process.

As far as deixis, I’m still thinking.

I wholeheartedly agree with Yancey on another point: students ARE writing out of class—and no one is making them produce. We need to tap into that. So I’m still thinking. I think the idea is that their writing must live. We all know that writing for a class, fro a teacher, for a grade, for a requirement is dry-bones writing. We hate writing it. We hate reading it.

Yancy, The Bricks I was given, And Woooooooman!

2008-11-03T07:33:00.000-08:00

"The images, in other
words, did not simply
punctuate a written text;
together words and
images were (and are) the
materials of composition.3"

I like to keep reading this little sidebar, like it was a prose poem. Words! Woooooooords. Wo-o-o-o-o-ords! But wait, the bricks we build our mansions out of do not just include words anymore: as Yancy goes on to further explain in the footnote, we are not even limited to words and images. With the addition of audio to the sense mix, how long is it before technology develops were we can smell or even taste textures. I am not limiting this to the screen, as Yancy does. Let's go a step further. Why not serve drinks at a presentation? About to give an acerbic lecture? Slices of lime. Now, some of you are rolling your eyes and pursing your lips. I'm looking at YOU Barb. I am completely serious. Why not use the materials offered to us to communicate? Why not you any means necessary? If we take what Kress is selling us, and once I get past the image/word dichotomy he sets up, textual, intertextual, and recontextual possibilities are endless. Should we just limit ourselves to words and images and sounds? Or should we be pushing the boundaries of text? Should we encourage it in our students? Who gets to say what bricks we use? What our mansions should look like? I am not willing to put a stop to the breadth of materials available to myself, or any other writer.

And now, for something completely the same: Elliot making a jackass out of himself, for his class, while being observed by Gerry Winters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndv6Mc6jtgY

Professional? Academic? Never.

E-Rizzle. Fo' Shizzle.

Hope, Creativity, Beauty... and technology?

2008-11-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

When I started watching/listening to Miller’s presentation, I was really just listening to it while multitasking online. It wasn’t going to be any different than when I have tv on in the background while doing work… only, I was drawn into his presentation. I needed to see the images. (or maybe it was the music that drew me in). I wasn’t surprised at the decline of English majors (or French or German), but what surprised me a little was the one student’s struggle to articulate why he was an English major. It could be that I am just so used to having to articulate what I am doing and why, that it seems second nature. Why are our students majoring in English? Literature? French? German? When the end of the world is coming?

He posed these three words at one point (maybe part 3).

Hope: the idea that the humanities can offer a secular basis for hope.

Creative: how to teach students to be creative? How to teach them to use their imagination?

Beauty: I don’t think I can think of an instance where I have talked about something being beautiful in the classroom. Have you?

He went on the discuss beauty as having to do with pointlessness. The power of beauty wanting you to do something (going to see beautiful buildings). And, how do you make things beautiful?
Can we connect Miller’s 3 terms, hope, creativity, and beauty with emerging technology? Can we instill hope for a better future with technology? Can we teach students to be creative with technology? Can things be beautiful with technology? And, can technology be a way to share that beauty. I think so. I think technology is a perfect instance where we can bring Miller’s three terms/concepts together and make humanities not seem so gloomy.

He ends with the goal of humanities is to find a way on how to build on the ruins. Can we use technology to do so? Can technology be the rebirth of the humanities? Should it be?

Al Gore's Athenian age of democracy

2008-11-02T22:34:00.000-08:00

First, it was great that the IText authors chose to outline the various ways in which various frameworks can be utilized in IText research. For my project specifically, it is nice to see design employed as a key rhetorical element in composition: “Rhetoric is design art (Kaufer and Butler, Rhetoric), a goal-directed activity similar to engineering and architecture in its regard for practical effects in the future and in its need to be socially responsible and ethical” (p. 271). Later in the piece, the authors argue that in order to “design rhetorically effective documents and systems for their production, access, support, and distribution, we need to understand how people make sense of these new forms and practices” (p. 281). They then ask, “What aspects of design can promote both efficient meaning-making for the purposes at hand and the deep understanding required for reflection and thought?” (p. 281). This question is really important, in that it asks us, as writers and compositionists, how we can best make use of the rhetorical means available. This is what we do, and this is what we teach.

In addition, the authors point out the importance of both the visual and verbal in texts. The fact that visual communication is, as they say, “a basic form of human communication, dating back before written language,” should be enough to convince us as teachers to go beyond the five-paragraph essay. IText asks us to revisit the ways in which we have communicated and composed communicative texts in the past, and then decide which modes and media are most appropriate for the rhetorical situations we encounter in the present.

Yancy’s discussion of intertextuality and remediation is also quite interesting, especially considering the IText piece (and vice versa). She proposes that we teach a model of composition that is rooted in “circulation of composition, canons of rhetoric, and deicity of technology” (pp. 311-312). To complicate this model of composition, Yancy discusses remediation (in context with circulation): “We create the new in the context of the old and based on the model of the old” (p. 313). To consider intellectual property rights and copyright alongside Yancy’s statement throws me a bit. What I create is essentially a remediation of what’s already been created, but just a bit different? It makes sense, but I guess what’s really confusing is the “just a bit different” part. Have I simply rearranged the ideas of others as part of my rhetorical moves and thus created something “new” but still old? Rather than the ideas themselves, is it the design of the composition that is new and created by me?

And...

Yancy then discusses how delivery of a text changes according to the technology involved: “what a shift in the means of delivery does is bring invention and arrangement into a new relationship with each other” (p. 317). The interface of the text offers certain affordances and constraints that the writer/composer must work with and around. It seems that Yancy (and the IText group) want us to (re)consider the importance of delivery/distribution of texts. In an academic world where so often the final artifact is the keeper of meaning, things like delivery, production, and distribution are conveniently forgotten. The way a text is produced, delivered, and distributed can greatly affect the meanings interpreted and received. As John put it, “Shit doesn’t just emerge”, and rightly so. Meaning doesn’t just flow from the textual artifact, but is created in an ongoing negotiation between author, reader, and the means of production, distribution, and delivery. Not to mention an other factors that could influence interpretation of meaning. Technology? Social class?

As Selfe put it, we so often assume that “when we don’t have to pay attention to machines, we remain free to focus on the theory and practice of language, the stuff of real intellectual and social concern” (p. 413). Those who fall into that trap and assume we can ignore machines (technology) and become enlightened are greatly misguided. Language itself is a technology, and yet that has become so transparent that we’ve forgotten to notice. But we can thank the government for getting us back on track and focusing on technology to save us from a life of illiteracy. (Please note my sarcasm.) As Al Gore said, “ I see a new Athenian age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create....” (Selfe 426). Maybe a democracy for those lucky enough to have access to it, but not for the rest of us.

Rhetoric: A Technological Entry Point?

2008-11-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

Miller argues that the humanities must reform, or risk becoming irrelevant. He cites varied catastrophic events, in both image and text, in a sort of apocalyptic vision of the larger world, and then he moves in to the university level. Providing graphs and verbal commentary, he decries a loss in enrollment in humanities, and more particularly, English, coursework at the BA level, and a loss in the number of majors.

In his book, Miller suggests we ought to reconsider how higher education reshapes daily life experiences; and he argues for humanities education as a humanizing force in troubled times. He states, “I believe the function of a secular public education should be: to provide training in the arts of solving the problems of this world, training that recognizes that people, who never leave behind their embodied histories and their cherished beliefs, can’t be revised the way papers can” (p. 197). He argues for humanities as communication—making connections.

In his argument for communication, following from a Perelminian understanding, I see a direct call for rhetoric. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest rhetoric assumes an intellectual contact; and further, that rhetoric is about “gaining adherence of the minds.” If Miller is right in that we need to make these connections with the ‘real’ non-ivory tower world, then we must employ rhetoric in its greatest powers to demonstrate our willingness to work with(in) the real world.

This segues into the next set of materials (Yancey, Selfe, I-text). Across these materials, I see a continuing call for recognizing and examining the value of digital scholarship and pedagogy. The I-text article contains a digital research agenda. This article also delineates the necessity of incorporating a rhetorical perspective into digital research (p. 272) (along with discussing the influence of I-texts across a variety of research areas).

Digital scholarship seems to be one way of answering Miller’s concerns about the humanities needing to communicate with the world outside itself. If digital composition does provide a way of expanding the audience for the humanities, it might be conceived as an audience appeal. We need to use the means and the methods that others are using. If no one’s reading parchment anymore, then you don’t write on parchment. If people are reading in the age of the screen, then you need to write accordingly. It might also be seen as an act of metis.

I’m thinking back to a fairly recent CCC article about metis. The teacher described in the article argued for using metis when talking to her students about controversial issues, because without the bit of cunning the teacher enacted, the students would be unwilling or possibly even unable to open their ears to new voices.

I suggest, based on this week’s reading materials, that those seeking to advance digital writing studies might also need to evince a sort of cunning, at least in their pedagogy. A metis-based technology approach does not necessarily make technology the centerpiece of a course’s design, but instead integrates technology seamlessly throughout the coursework. Although Yancey’s approach seems to argue for a potentially more overt approach, her suggestions also may be used to more subtly integrate technology across the curriculum as well. Selfe states,

we have not felt a responsibility to involve ourselves directly in some of the more public discussions about technology and educational policy because many of us unconsciously subscribe to a belief-both culturally and historically determined-that technology is a productive outgrowth of Science and Innovation (cf. Winner; Virilio; Feenberg; Johnson-Eilola). As a result, we take comfort when the linkage between literacy and computer technology is portrayed as a socially progressive movement, one that will benefit American citizens generally and without regard for their circumstances or backgrounds. Such a belief releases us from the responsibility to pay attention. (p. 416)

For Selfe, this lack of involvement is problematic because it means we let other people decide how the technology is used and implemented, which leads to continued (and sometimes increased) social inequities, especially within the realm of literacy. I suggest that in addition to this problem, we are missing an opportunity. Selfe uses Harraway’s idea of “coyote knowing” (p. 429), but I think the concept of metis would work just as well and perhaps better.

If we enter into these discussions of technology at varied levels—as researchers, teachers, and potentially as activists, we can also do more to answer Richard Miller’s call to reinforce the significance of our work as both teachers and researchers.

A couple of Questions worth asking

2008-11-02T07:35:00.000-08:00

There are two more things that I would really like to know--and if any of you have info on these subjects, please respond.

1) What is the current status of the digital divide? What are the latests statistics (on class, race, gender, socieconomic status) regarding access to technology and acquisition of technological literacy?

2) Does KSU have computers available--to take home--for students who don't currently own them, who can't afford them, and who don't have the means to access the computers on campus?

Selfe and Paying Attention

2008-11-02T06:51:00.000-08:00

This is probably the fourth or fifth time I have read this particular CCCC's address by Selfe. It's one of my favorites because each time I read it, I'm reminded of our larger responsibilities as scholars, as human beings.

Among other things, Selfe points out the contradiction between the egalitarian rhetoric that often defines discussions of new media literacy and the hierarchical reality of our economic system. In other words, Selfe examines egalitarian rhetoric which says that we will "provide all Americans with an education enriched by technology, and, thus, equal opportunity to high-paying, technology-rich jobs and economic prosperity after graduation" (419). At the same time, she notes the hierarchical reality of our economic system and our education system--which help to sustain an underclass that is disproportionately comprised of people of color. As Selfe explains, "computers continue to be distributed differentially along related axes of race and socioeconomic status and this distribution contributes to ongoing patterns of racism and to the continuation of poverty" (420). Importantly, she understands unequal access to technology and technological illiteracy to be necessary functions, symptoms of our economic system. She explains:

"The economic engine of technology must be fueled by--and produce--not only a continuing supply of individuals who are highly literate in terms of technological knowledge, but also an ongoing supply of individuals who fail to acquire technological literacy, those who are termed "illiterate" according to the official definition. These latter individuals provide the unskilled, low-paid labor necessary to sustain the system I have described--their work generates the surplus labor that must continually be re-invested in capital projects to produce more sohpisticated technologies" (427).

To put this another way, the unfairness is built right into the sytems of which we are a part. Our economic system requires that, in our education system, certain people fail; it requires that certain people remain illiterate; it requires a digital divide.

This is such an important argument to keep in mind. As we all clamor about the perils of failing to teach digital media in the classroom, we mustn't forget what the likely effect of our teaching will be: to reinforce already existing social inequalities. This is not to say that we are bad people; it's just to say that we are functioning in a system that demands that we act as gatekeepers. Jon, in his post, said something that really hit me when he was discussing his teaching at Brown Mackie. He wrote:

"Even though access to computers and internet is (rapidly?) changing, there are still many that would be considered on the lower end of the digital divide. Joe, the plumber, himself may be such an individual. Certainly, many of the women (and men) I taught at Brown Mackie college (demographically 80% female) many of whom were in Section 8 housing and survived off of state-issued food cards did not have computers in their home. These women may be a statistical anomaly or the self-report data I received was unreliable. Nonetheless, it gives me pause (a cognitive dissonance, a felt difficulty) when I read this article. It may be no surprise that many of the women who did not have computers in their homes were African Americans. "

Here Jon reports that many of his students at Brown Mackie were without computers--and adds some demographic information about these people, who were mostly women of color living in relative poverty. As Jon points out, it is no surprise that those "on the lower end of the digital divide" were African-Americans. I might add that it is no surprise that you would find them in greater numbers at a college like Brown Mackie than you would at Kent State. And you'd be more likely to find them at Kent State than you would at Harvard.

Again this is a pattern of inequality that is structural, that is inherent in the systems that we have created. Dr. King used to talk about an "evil triplet" of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. For King, one couldn't try to dissolve racism, without also trying to dissolve the other two members of the triplet. We can add to the list a fourth component: educational inequality. And, like King, we must keep in mind that we cannot hope to transcend this inequality without attending also to racism, economic exploitation, and, yes, militarism.

This leads me to discuss many of the solutions proposed by Selfe. Selfe offers that we start changing the way we do business locally in the academy and she asks that we challenge official versions of literacy in our curriculm meetings and standarads documents. Likewise, she calls on us to revise our professional organizations and facilities. All of Selfe's proposed solutions are important; and I agree with her that we must beigin locally.

But one thing that is missing from Selfe's list of things that we could do is protest, demonstration, and the like. I would argue that the "savage inequality" that we see requires more than curricular reform; it requires that we organize and protest--that we make a stink in front of the public, so that these issues are talked about beyond the walls of the academy. I would also argue that we have to raise our collective voices not only about the reforms needed in English classrooms and English curricula. If we truly want to "address the complex linkages among technology, literacy, poverty, and race" (429)--and I'll throw in militarism, too--then we need to be protesting loudly for change in our economic system, protesting for an end to structural racism and interpersonal racism, and protesting wars which only suck up the resources that could be used for such social progress. In other words, we need to start addressing all components of the linkage simultaneously. We need to start merging our academic selves with our civic selves. We need to bring the lessons we learn in the academy to the public, and make public our political vision.

Such a project would require organization; it would require--dare I say it--consciousness-raising. It would also mean challenging systems in ways that would likely put our reputations and careers in jeopardy.

I wonder if I--I wonder if we--we have the courage to make a stink about what is staring all of us in the face.

Joe, the plumber, and Sara, the Sky-Way cook

2008-11-01T08:52:00.001-07:00

Yancey and Joe, the plumber

Yancey’s article made me really reflect on composition. Her comparison of what is happening now with writing (that it is increasingly becoming a public, or mass, activity) to the 19th century development of a reading public really hit home for me. However, this nicely aligns writing technologies with the average “Joe, the plumber,” the underdog hero of an American (Dream, or wishful thinking) metanarrative, which appeals to us socially-construct-ed/-ing academics who believe in the power of the Word (not John’s, of course—that of the de-voiced, or muted, marginalized) to redeem the world dispatching the Beast (i.e., the Hegemony) to its eternal grave which will usher in the Kingdom of Heaven (i.e., socialism or some other new world order that is more just).

Yancy makes the point that technology is where the people are by quoting Elizabeth Daley saying, “the screen is the language of the vernacular” (305). Even though access to computers and internet is (rapidly?) changing, there are still many that would be considered on the lower end of the digital divide. Joe, the plumber, himself may be such an individual. Certainly, many of the women (and men) I taught at Brown Mackie college (demographically 80% female) many of whom were in Section 8 housing and survived off of state-issued food cards did not have computers in their home. These women may be a statistical anomaly or the self-report data I received was unreliable. Nonetheless, it gives me pause (a cognitive dissonance, a felt difficulty) when I read this article. It may be no surprise that many of the women who did not have computers in their homes were African Americans.

As Gee repeatedly points out in his book Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourse, the distribution of “social goods” is an ethical (he says “moral”) issue. Technology is a social good that is unevenly distributed. Still, change is coming (if not for everyone at the same rate). University Heights up in Cleveland near Case University is one of a growing number of cities to offer free community wi-fi. I’m certainly not raising the digital divide as a red herring to avoid discussion of the changing face of composition. However, an untempered optimism concerning this shift continues to gnaw (maybe that’s too strong of a word; nibble, perhaps) at me. Or, maybe I’m just being the self-righteous white knight of liberatory pedagogy and its correlative ideology that we discussed in literacy class.

Moving from Joe, the plumber, to Sarah (pseudonym), the Sky-Way cook

This is the point in the semester of my 21011 course where I assign the visual argument, which I use as a way for students to build toward their final research paper. I ask them to develop one reason that their target audience would find appealing (through ethos, logos, pathos) and would lead them to more likely accept the position of their paper in this assignment using images and words together. I also ask them to write a short (1-2 page) composing choices reflection to explain the functions of their design. They submitted these on Vista Wednesday and we talked about them on Thursday.

The collective response was a writing teacher’s dream! The following are not their exact words but what they amount to through a writing teacher’s lens: “It helped me focus on my topic.” “The pictures made it easier to be more specific.” “The pictures gave me new ideas about my topic.” “The pictures helped me to think about my audience and why it is important to have a particular audience.” “It was different and fun (i.e., engaging).”

Sarah is a quiet and brilliant student. Her first paper (a work literacy narrative) focused on how being at work (a forced social environment) helped her to open up and talk to people, to come out of her shell, just a little bit. Part of my comments on that paper encouraged her to continue to participate in class, which she does on rare occasions. I see the strain in her face and hear it in her voice when she does participate. Nonetheless, she made the comment above about audience—something she had been struggling with when we did an audience activity in class.

The response of this class (the most vocal response I’ve ever received from this assignment) illustrates Yancey’s discussion of remediation. She argues that students should practice using different media for the same message because it helps develop students’ ideas and brings an awareness of the affordances of each medium: “As they [students] move from medium to medium, they consider what they move forward, what they leave out, what they add, and for each of these write a reflection in which they consider how the medium itself shapes what they create” (314). Now, I’m thinking of using visuals at different points in the semester to generate new ideas and consider audience in different ways. I’d also like to incorporate her suggestion about using power point as a drafting and organizing tool (319). Since I use these blog posts as a way for me to organize my thoughts and to remember key ideas that may be useful later in my understand of writing (an act of envisioning ☺), I want to note her quotation of Prior and Shipka on revision and laundry.

4C's thoughts

2008-10-31T08:57:00.000-07:00

I will preface this by saying that I have only read the two 4C's position statements, but (as what normally happens when I reflect on teaching and research) I had this list of questions in my mind. I am curious as to how all of you use technology in the classroom or are thinking of using technology in upcoming semesters? I am in the process of completely revamping my syllabus, so all of this is at the forefront of my mind. I also fall into the category of hating vista (or blackboard, though I hear the new blackboard platform is suppose to be really good), so much that I haven't used it in the past year and a half and instead have a course website and course blog, and the all my students have their own blogs. One thing that I am really interested in hearing from you is about online office hours. On Wednesday I do office hours via an aim widget on my website, and I haven't had any students this semester.... which is a huge change from last semester at Ball State where I would have so many chat windows open that I thought I was going to lose my mind. I know a few posts below was there a discussion on teaching students to do movies and such, and I do do that. The final project is a movie (and there are mini other technology projects or components working up to that). But I am curious to see how you are integrating it.

I heart technology. I hate it at times, but all in all I love trying new things, playing around with programs. So, after reading these two 4C's positions I was thinking of how am I going to capture that within a "please hire me" document. I don't want to print off pages of my course website for teaching, nor do I want to print off of my profession website/webfolio. If and when I ever get something published on Karios or Computers and Composition, how is that document going to look printed and in a folder? Do we send youtube links with our movie compositions as examples of work? And even outside of the WPA or Writing Center listserve, there are all the 4C's/NCTE/IWCA facebook groups, twitters, Ning sites... where would those fall in, if at all? At what point will that just become a part of professional development?

And final 4C's thought of the lunch break. Does anyone know more about the computer scoring in Writing Centers? I am just curious.
"We understand that machine-scoring programs are under consideration not just for the scoring of placement tests, but for responding to student writing in writing centers and as exit tests. We oppose the use of machine-scored writing in the assessment of writing." (CCCC Postion Teaching, Learning and Assessing...)

relevance?

2008-10-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

I’m going to respond to one of the comments I received on my presentation. In doing so, I hope to think through my project a bit further and deal with problems I don’t want to deal with later in the semester.

Barbara asked a great question: “What will this tell us and why is it valuable?”
I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer this fully right now, but the question encouraged me to develop a more concise reason (and tweak my project to clear up its relevance). Usually when I decide on a topic, because it seems valuable to my personal academic work, I forget that I need to articulate its value to the field in general. Well, I guess I don’t really forget this, but sometimes it’s put on the backburner because of other concerns... Hence my need to work it out here.

Since I’m primarily using Kress (Kress and van Leeuwen, sometimes), it is important to note the publication dates of the three texts that I have references in my presentation. Reading Images, 1996; Multimodal Discourse, 2001; Literacy in the New Media Age, 2003. The comment that sparked my interest in this particular project was from Kress. He argues, “the affordances and the organisations of the screen are coming to (re)shape the organisation of the page. Contemporary pages are beginning to resemble, more and more, both the look and the deeper sense of contemporary screens” (2003 p. 6). When I read this, I thought to myself, “well that’s obvious; I can see that happening all over the place.” The question is, how can I really prove that it happens (at least in a certain situation) beyond mere assumption?

After finishing Literacy in the New Media Age, I felt that while Kress’ theoretical suggestions were fascinating, his examples left me wanting more. The earlier texts (with van Leeuwen) do set up a framework for performing the sort of analysis I plan on doing, but that earlier framework/visual grammar seems a bit brushed aside in Literacy in the New Media Age. I don’t know if he had textual length constraints or that simply Kress assumed the reader would be familiar with the earlier texts. Anyway, LitNMA sets up some really heavy theory without the kind of examples I had hoped would accompany those theories.

In the final chapter (“Some items for an agenda of further thinking”), Kress posits that “the major task is to imagine the characteristics of a theory which can account for the processes of making meaning in the environments of multimodal representation in multimediated communication, of cultural plurality and of social and economic instability” (2003 p. 168). He then briefly discusses design. I really hoped he would theorize about design’s importance much more than he actually did in LitNMA. I’m glad we read the C&C issue on Kress, because he talks more deeply about design there than in the 2003 text. Anyway, while he and van Leeuwen cover design as a part of a multimodal analysis, it is in a text that is seven+ years old with a framework that needs updated examples/research. Because, as Kress notes, we live in an unstable world that is constantly in flux, I think my project might be able to address his theories as they relate to present ways of making meaning.

What I want to do is look at design in relation to Kress’ argument about the screen influencing the page. While I think it’s an obvious relationship, I want to move beyond mere assumption and actually find out if this is the case. Any thoughts?

Pictures worth a Thousand Words

2008-10-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

REALLY cool projects by students at Georgia State. Images made out of words with regard to the presidential race. Reminded me of Kress.

The words become the image...

Web 2.0 Dance Party

2008-10-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here's my proposal, in case you were dying to see it again.

I have to admit, this was fun to put together. As you can see, I had to find ways to entertain myself during all of the work a video proposal requires, but I am interested in doing more stuff like this in the future--hopefully with a more robust program than Windows Movie Maker. I've been told that iMovie is much, much better, but I lack the money and elite status to become a Mac owner.

The construction of a video proposal--again, something I had never done before--also got me thinking about multi-modality in my own classroom. I would love to make my students do something like this, but they groan at even the most rudimentary forms of multi modality: "Do we HAVE TO use pictures in our papers?" Not to mention the whole computer literacy problem I've been seeing in my students since I started teaching; they already have contempt for me for making them use Vista, so if I told them they had to learn an entire program and produce something with said program, they would circle me, beat me to death with their laptops, and carry my head around like a trophy.

One of my office mates is having similar problems, which he summed it up with a simple quote: "I don't want to waste half my time doing tech support." I've found similar problems with wasting time on troubleshooting with both Vista and even simple things like saving and sending files. Sometimes, I feel like the approach to my next class should be, "Fuck it, everything's gonna be on paper." I don't know anyone who uses Vista to the extent I do, and they don't seem to have any problems getting by. Hell, my professors barely use it; in one of my classes, our prof. wanted all of us to be able to read each other's papers, so she engineered a complicated e-mail scheme involving file attachments and the "reply to all" option. People don't even want to use Vista for the one thing it's good for.

It may seem like I have a bone to pick with Vista--and I do--but this all falls back on the resistance to technology I'm seeing in the classroom. I'm thinking that, for my classes' next big assignment, I'm going to force multi-modality on them, instead of just making it optional. I've been a little wary about doing something like that, but maybe it's time to completely disregard the future and try something new. All of my students have been writing about and responding to multi-modal things throughout the entire semester (video games, tv shows, blogs), so I think it's a bit hypocritical of me to demand only text from them.

I guess, for now, I'm still trying to figure out all of this stuff, but I think the creation of this proposal really gave me a taste for multi-modal projects. As far as the methodology goes, I'm still a little unsure, as my single rhet/comp class didn't give me a foundation I remember particularly well. But, I plan on doing some research and returning to this blog with some ideas. Wish me luck.

Ponderings on Multimodal presentations…

2008-10-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

I finished my project today and I was thinking about how difficult it was for me. It was difficult in a few different areas 1. because I have no real skills or knowledge when it comes to technology and utilizing it and 2. because presenting my “research question” visually was a very complex challenge. When it came to creating my actual project, I found myself panicking because I couldn’t figure out how to use my software or any other types of software…after my panic attack ended I began to think logically and called my cousin who is a tech guy at West Liberty University. Using our Apple computers, he was able to log onto my computer, take it over, and then speak to me via our MACs to help tutor me in the iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand applications…I found this amazing! How cool was it that since I didn’t understand a thing about any of those applications, but suddenly my cousin (who is in West Virginia) was able to come save me through the very technology that I was frightened of. Of course, this was a brief tutorial and I was still left my own for a large amount of the applying the applications, but I did it and it was a wonderful feeling. Now, I’m not really sure what my point is, other than the fact that technology and multimodal tools can work no matter who a person is, and I will remember this lesson when I am teaching multimodal presentations to my own composition class…

My second realization during this project centered around the entire assignment. I had no idea what to do! It was daunting to think that I had to visually represent a topic and also learn how to use the software to make it available for presentation. I never realized how much I relied on the “old way” of teaching and presenting, and how much I have fallen into a comfort zone…I type and discuss teaching with technology and I am almost always an advocate for it, but then when it came time for me to actually apply my skills and do it myself I discovered I was scared and lost. This was surprising to me and I just wanted to make note of it on here because I wondered if anyone else suddenly found themselves in a position like me? I guess I haven’t had a lot of chances to use technology in graduate school, but I definitely find it challenging but also thought inspiring...it made me think about what changes I could make in my own classroom and pedagogy…also, heads up, this is my first movie on a MAC and some of my images are grainy—I just couldn’t figure out how to fix up my pictures in enough time…

I slept through class...

2008-10-27T10:30:00.001-07:00

I thought some of you may be interested in this site. Apparently it is starting to hit Ball State since I have gotten a number of emails the past few days looking for students to sign up. Basically students become members of the site, upload their notes, and get paid for uploading notes. Other students search for notes from a class (that they may have skipped or slept through) and I think they have to pay for the notes. I just briefly searched around.

I am interested to see how the professors respond to the site and how other students respond. I'll keep you posted if you are interested.
I slept through class

"Information Wants to be Free"....The Disclaimer!

2008-10-27T01:50:00.000-07:00

Subtitle: Adventures in Technology pt. 2

So, after filming the mockery that is my video at Nikki's house last night, I came home and attempted to edit the various "clips" we had collected. After three hours of making a bigger mess than I had to begin with, something occurred to me: Some of my favorite film makers make some of the shittiest films--Jon Waters...Ed Wood...

So, rather than polish a turd...I think it fits what I want to do with this project to keep these videos choppy, disjointed, and jumpy. The other week in class, Jon and I had a very brief side conversation about one of the problems with new media forms of textual distribution revolving around market distribution, etc. Leading out of this, my very next concern is exactly what gets distributed over technologies such as the internet. For example: reallllllly bad home movies. Poorly conceived notions of social-construction. Unarticulated political rants...just for some examples. As a motif, I began to like this more and more for this mini-project.

The heart of my seminar paper is going to revolve around how the internet (and perhaps other technologies...digital cameras and camcorders...) have in some ways kicked open the doors and broken down some of the gates that keep fringe/outlaw/"subversive" ideas at bay. However, if I don't take a closer look at the concerns/dangers of these new technologies...I am only doing half of my job as a researcher.

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Works Cited/Secondary Texts

1990-1992: books banned in schools and libraries in the US:

1. Impressions Edited by Jack Booth et al.
2. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
5. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
6. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
7. Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
8. More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
9. The Witches by Roald Dahl
10. Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
11. Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
12. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
13. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
14. Blubber by Judy Blume
15. Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
16. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
18. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
19. Christine by Stephen King
20. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
21. Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
22. The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
23. Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
24. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
25. Night Chills by Dean Koontz
26. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
27. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
28. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
30. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
31. The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
32. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
33. My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. Cujo by Stephen King
36. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
37. The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
38. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
39. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
40. Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
41. I Have to Go by Robert Munsch
42. Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
43. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. My House by Nikki Giovanni
46. Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
47. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
48. Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth
49. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
50. Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/most-banned.html

http://classiclit.about.com/od/bannedliteratur1/Banned_Books_Censorship.htm
(reference site asking for commentary on banned books)

http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2008/09/23/list-of-25-banned-books

http://degreedirectory.org/articles/25_Banned_Books_That_You_Should_Read_Today.html
(top 25 banned books you should read)

---

“Howl”

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=19132

Books seized, Ferlinghetti and Gisberg tried for obscenity

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6393328
(NPR looks back)

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100083370
(Book review of Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression: CityLight’s involvement and what was gained from the obscenity trial)

----

Dubliners introduction by Brenda Maddox: the curious publication history of the novel

Images:

Bookburning: taken from http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://isurvived.org/Pictures_Isurvived/Book-burning.gif
on 10/25/2008

Galileo on Trail: taken from http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://faithjustice.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/galileo_facing_the_roman_inquisition.jpg
on 10/25/08

Traffic Anarchy: taken from http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.graphicreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/traffic_anarchy.jpg
on 10/25/08

Lorem Ipsum: taken from http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.fontstock.net:83/images/Anarchy-Mono_big.jpg
on 10/25/08

------

Song

"Room Without a Window" by Operation Ivy. From the cd _Energy_. 1989 Lookout! Records.

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Antagonizing Nikki and Courtney aside (I can do that whenever I want!)...this was a lot more fun than I expected, and I might add...I walked away with an extra piece of technology...woot!

Elliot

Hey, speaking. of. hypertext. fun!

2008-10-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

So, I have been thinking about Lindsay talking about Kress's book/essay/lecture/presentation having some sort of multimodal companion. And this site immediately jumped into my head: oldschool text-only hyperlinks to other cool stuff!

Maybe you find something good (marxist/communist criticism of _The Smurfs_? The Transformer Kama Sutra?? 87 different uses of the word...fuck!?!?...how could I not like this site!).

Enjoy:

www.memepool.com (Nikki...I don't have tabs like you do on your blogspot window to make hypertext links...are there any ctrl- functions that I can use to do this? Anyone? Bueller?)

E-rizzle.

Changing media require a change in theory

2008-10-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

Check out this blog post from Publishing 2.0 blogger Scott Karp:
"The evolution from linear thought to networked thought"
http://publishing2.com/2008/02/09/the-evolution-from-linear-thought-to-networked-thought/

Karp asks:
What if the networked nature of content on the web has changed not just how I consume information but how I process it?

What if I no longer have the patience to read a book because it’s too…. linear.

Wysocki pushes us to asssess "how our materials have acquired the constraints they have and hence why, often, certain materials and designs are not considered available for certain uses" (p. 56). She continues by noting the ambiguity of her text's title, "Did you read my title as 'a way with words' or 'away with words'? The potential ambiguity, I think, shows how a particular visual space has become natural to how we now read" (p. 56). She argues that we need to notice how "we use space on pages affects how we read and understand" (p. 57). In addition, Wysocki notes the pedagogical importance of asking such questions: "If we are to help people in our classes learn how to compose texts that function as they hope, they need [sic] consider how they use the spaces and not just one time that can be shaped on pages. The also need to question how they have come to understand the spaces of pages so that they can, if need be, use different spaces, potentially powerful spaces that...have been rendered unavailable by naturalized, unquestioned practices" (p. 57).

Wysocki's arguemnt brings to mind Kress' discussion of the power of design. Kress argues, "one effect of the social and the representational changes, practices of writing and reading have changed and are changing...Reading has to be rethought given that the commonsense of what reading is was developed in the era of the unquestioned dominance of writing, in constellation with the unquestioned dominance of the medium of the book" (p. 17). In order to remedy this rather disjointed relationship (new media texts and traditional theories of reading, and others...), Kress argues that we "cannot continue with existing theories of meaning given the facts of the changes in the social, economic and cultural domain. At the moment, our theories come from the era dominated by notions of conventions and competence, whereas we need theories apt for an era of radical instability" (p. 20). Kress then argues that we need to include design as a conceptual element to a new theory of reading, writing, etc.

To connect Wysocki and Kress with Karp's comment at the beginning of this post, let's consider a few things:

1) Karp's questions and concerns (detailed in his entire blog post) provide a good example of the problems that arise from the application of "old" theory to "new" [media] texts. He's assuming all reading is linear, and this causes problems when "reading" new media texts (specifically online).

a) When considering this in context with Kress' argument, interesting things arise: again, we can't continue to apply traditional theory to new and rapidly changing technologies and ways of making meaning. This seems similar to an attempt at applying 15th-century physics to explain dark matter: gaps and problems arise. Not to mention that a Stargate episode would be radically different if they relied on 15th-century physics to explain an "outgoing wormhole" (nerds will understand me here).

This isn't to say that we need to throw out past theories of reading and learning, but I do think we need to make an effort to constantly assess the relevance of such theories in a new media context. And, I do not think that such theories are always applicable to traditional print texts either. Any multimodal text (as opposed to the King James Version of the Bible or text- only versions of the Wall Street Journal) probably requires different types of reading skills, but it seems easy for many people to assume (i.e. Karp) that reading is completely linear and has "evolved" only in relation to linear print texts.

2) Both Kress and Wysocki seem to argue for this reconsideration of theory in context with new media texts. Wysocki specifically addresses the pedagogical applications of this (p. 57), while Kress emphasizes the importance of design.

a) A consideration of design as a theoretical concept addresses the problems noted here. Wysocki's use of "spaces" should be a rhetorical concept applied in these new theories, as it points to much of what makes meaning in multimodal texts. Spaces between words, letters, images, pages, sounds, etc. should be used with rhetorical purpose in mind. Silence, emptiness, proximity, etc. are all powerful tools with which to make meaning, and thus fit into Kress' idea of design.

My point is that we need to seriously rethink our application/creation of theory with respect to the textual context at hand.

Fortune and Moran Responses

2008-10-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

Ron Fortune’s response to Kress focuses on how instructors can teach how the visual and verbal relate to one another. He argues that the tradition view of this relationship is either illustration (the visual illustrates the verbal) or explanation (the verbal explains what is seen). He argues that there are more relationships than just these two. He notes Kress’s notion of the “semiotics of synesthesia.” This seems to refer to the simultaneity of the visual and the verbal. However, Fortune never explicitly lays out other relationships. I began to think transitions in writing, which represent relationships between ideas. What would a cause-effect visual / image relationship look like? Maybe it would look like this: a verbal message “Global warming is real” with a picture of some of the effects. Other relationships could consist of similarity, difference (even irony), exception, etc.

While I believe Moran has a point when he highlights the important of the oral, I believe that technology has enhanced discussion in some ways. Moran argues that Kress’s move from print to image has helped us to ignore the importance of the spoken word. He argues that voice and class discussions will be thrown out of English classrooms. I wish he would have said more on listening because I think this is such an important feature of communication that is often ignored. I know for me it has been a relationship skill that I’ve had to develop. I find it difficult sometimes to not jump in with my thoughts before the other person has finished. Also, finishing other people’s sentences is not necessarily the best way to show that you’re listening. In any case, Moran emphasizes the importance of the oral, especially in discussions, and how it may be being displaced by a focus on technology and the image. However, if we embrace technologies such as threaded discussions and chats in the classroom we might note some unexpected outcomes. One that I’ve heard and experienced is that threaded discussions really help to give more introverted students the chance to express themselves with less anxiety. I’ve seen quiet students make really long posts online and never say a word in class. This is not to say that oral performance is not important. I know for myself, being a more introverted student, that it is a challenge for me to speak out in class. It really does go against my typical way of being. However, threaded discussions may offer students the opportunity to see that their contributions are meaningful, which may encourage them to speak in class.

more actor-network theory

2008-10-20T06:54:00.001-07:00

It was nice to see actor-network theory applied to something that’s a seemingly less-complicated (in its history, at least) artifact than Aramis—and if it wasn’t, Ittersum certainly made his approach a little more coherent. I’m going to credit the smaller space of the article, along with the fact that a translation isn’t getting in the way of meaning (at least I think it isn’t). So this article ended up being a much better introduction to actor-network theory than Aramis—sorry, Latour.

Anyway, this quote on page 160 stuck with me:

“The case of the NLS, then, suggests that judging writing technologies solely, or even predominantly, on the criteria of ease of learning tends to support existing infrastructures and practices.”

A lot of the failure behind NLS stemmed from its method of input; even though it was more intuitive than the keyboard; and the fact that it required the user to learn it like an instrument (seriously, it seemed like guitar lessons would have come in handy) made it less appealing. As Ittersum indicates, people would rather produce things than learn a system—and I’ve had very similar experiences in my own life. My friend was talking about learning the Dvorak keyboard a while back, and I saw it as a waste of time because of the training required. I’d have to break some part of my brain to let go of the muscle memory that allows me to use the Qwerty keyboard blindfolded; Gitelman calls this "cultivated motor automatism," and it seems like I’ve completely ingrained the use of a less-than-optimal input method into my brain.

Note: As my loudness has indicated in class, I’m also proficient with Vista (not the Windows variety), and that definitely feels like the cumbersome, giant-wheeled bike of teaching tools. And for all of my efforts, girls are never impressed with my Vista wizardry.

So is the keyboard the “macho” bicycle of writing technologies, when compared to Engelbart’s creation? It could be; and there’s certainly something to be said about how we have to contort our wrists to an unnatural angle when sitting at most keyboards. I actually have an “ergonomic keyboard,” which is considered non-standard, but really shouldn’t be (and it was much more expensive than a traditional keyboard, but also a necessity due to how much I write). On my keyboard at home, the keys are split down the middle and slanted at 45 degree angles, which is a huge improvement, even though the underlying technology is still built on a foundation that was created based on the mechanical work of metal hitting paper. But I still have to take one of my hands off of the keyboard in order to use the mouse; and after reading Ittersum’s article, this action does seem counter-intuitive.

In the end, I’m left wondering how much of this will apply to me project, or if I’ll even use actor-network theory. It would be nice to use something new, but I’m still unsure if I can do ANT justice. Hopefully we can hash this out as we do more reading.

EDIT: It looks like I might have done the wrong readings, but I was going off of the most recent syllabus (sent on Oct. 6). Were all the assigned readings on Vista? That's what I printed out.

"One order of Kress w/ a side of social-cognitive-economic mayo please"

2008-10-19T19:32:00.000-07:00

So we got back from the Watson conference last night. More about that in the second post probably. Here I’ll address several comments from Kress’s article. Please forgive the piecemeal nature of this; I’m running low on energy and brain power (not to mention time) at this point.

[A related aside here—interesting that Kress has downplayed the role of time and sequence. These are still tremendously important in my day to day life… and I do expect that newness plays a significant role in how people who are “regulars” to particular sites examine the pages. i.e. registering to be alerted of favorite blogs being updated…]

Anyway, first observation. Kress suggests that traditional written pages have one entry point onto the page, which we don’t even notice. Online pages have multiple entry points. This suggests the possibility of readers coming from various perspectives and social groups. Consequently, he posits that the site author(s) assume a fragmented audience. Kress states that the order of the site is open (p. 10-11). He does suggest that the site’s authors “imagine the possibilities of reading” (p. 10), but he insists that these possibilities are only suggested, as opposed to managed with little opportunity for reader/ “visitor” resistance.

However, I think Kress is being a little too generous (idealistic?) here in a claim which seems to hint at the possibility of the web as a democratic place. I would argue instead that one needs to take into account the economic machinery in place. There are definite assumptions being made about users’ paths. This is evidenced by the placement of advertisements on online pages. Marketing research is used both to steer and to predict where users’ eyes will go.

Kress also suggests that the logic of space is a different approach from the traditional logic of reading, which relies on a sequential/chronological approach. This differentiation seems crucial as it hints at the possibility of significantly different cognitive processes involved in reading/analysis between image and text. While on many levels I embrace the social turn in our field, I do hope that we can find places for cognitive analysis too, because when cognitive approaches are set within the social, this seems to me to offer a powerful tool set for insight.

The final observation I want to discuss is Kress’s claim that the “elites will continue to use writing as their dominant mode” (p. 18). I found this claim particularly interesting in light of Cindy Selfe’s warnings that we need to pay attention to the questions of access—who has and does not have technology. At the Watson conference, one of the plenary speakers, Omar Wasow, suggested that the gap is still really a literacy gap, not a technology gap. However, another speaker, David Kirkland, described the ways and places he has observed underprivileged youth (declared illiterate by elites such as their school teachers) becoming authors on the web. This dovetails with Kress’s comment that “everyone can be an author” on the screen (p. 19). Kress also suggests that this decreases authorial authority.

But, taking these differing views together, I wonder if we’re seeing technology and literacy both set up as parts of Graff’s literacy myth. Perhaps we’re imbuing too much power in the social goods (Gee) of literacy and technology themselves. Instead, I think a whole lot more attention needs to be focused on the economics of literacy. Brandt’s sponsorship work provides one way into that.

kress & co

2008-10-19T16:44:00.001-07:00

I know that Pam encouraged us to be “generous” as we read the theorists, but I think because the other scholars are in dialogue with Kress, that taking issue with him is appropriate in this week’s post.

I find myself agreeing with Wysocki as she questions Kress in positing that the temporal/sequential are within the domains of words, while the spatial and simultaneous are within the domain of image (p. 57). I would argue that the image is made of individual elements, such as strokes, shapes, angles, perspectives that are broken down and even processed in much the same way as the alphabetic. Anyone familiar with whole language approaches to reading—as opposed to phonetic approaches—understands that the words are read as units and not as separate letters or sound once the system is internalized. I think the same is true of our reading of other images as well—and I do think that words are images, as wells as syntactically structured phonemes. I think we learn that a picture of a cat (which looks little like a real cat) represents a cat. I think though that the language-like qualities of picture reading has become invisible to us. I also agree with Prior that images are not as Kress charges—infinite, specific, natural, and transparent. Images, too, are designed to be read in a particular way, but are not necessarily resistant to interpretation. That is the function of perspective, foregrounding, composition in a triangle to encourage or privilege certain relationships among parts of the whole. It is not only words that construct relationships. Classic representations of the Madonna and Christ-child have connotative meaning based on relations of power. I don’t think that any representations are disinterested—even the most abstract. Prior notes that “even single images may have preferred vectors for sequential processing” (p. 27). Not only do they have preferred vectors, but Kress and Van Leeuwen focus on systemic functional grammatical readings of multimodal texts in both Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, and in Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Norman Fairclough does the same in his texts on critical discourse analysis. I also found myself thinking—as I read Kress’s argument—that magazines, newspapers, and catalogues also have multiple entry points. The difference is their material instantiation. Prior also mentions this fact (p. 25) and includes hymnals, menus, quilts, atlases, books of poetry, field guides—and many other genres. These print texts are not necessarily coded by order. Their order of presentation in terms of traditionally privileged reading practices might be fixed—but that is merely a matter of convention. They do indeed have multiple entry points—and readers use the texts to read in a manner they choose—to suit their needs. And readers are not bound—even in traditional texts—to read in a strict order as Kress claims (p. 9). Readers often skip paragraphs, pages, sections, chapters.

And while this “traditional” manner of reading might dictate how the writer writes for the reader, it is the manner of reading and not the text that determines this manner. Kress is quite correct when he notes that rhetoric accounts for audience needs—but that is their need within the realm of the conventional manner of reading the genre, not of the genre itself. Kress argues that the the IoE assumes its traditional structure and the knowledge” and that needed by the reader are one and the same (p. 9), that this old way presumes to know—even dictates—how readers from their own “life-worlds” will read. But that also seems to be the case when the IoE shows up on the Web. The constraints for the reader are still the organizing principles as imagined through the website’s author. The page construction—whether in word, image or combination-- always imagining and consequently constructing its audience and what it assumes will be agreement between her/himself and the visitors. In this way, a web page is not “open,” as Kress avers, but rather IS “relatively open” (p. 10).

I also took issue with Kress’s comment that with images, we can “draw whatever [we] like when [we] want to draw it” (qtd. in Prior p. 28). In fact, we cannot draw whatever we want. We can attempt to put down on a surface what we “mean,” but that meaning is never any more “specific” than a word, nor is an illustration more specific than a descriptive paragraph. Kress argues that “[s]peech and writing tell the world; depiction shows the world” (16). I have to take issue with this. Fiction can indeed show; bad fiction tells. In either case, it is the writing on the mind that the reader does. Fiction AND EVEN depictions can only suggest via print or visual text.

I have more, but I’ll save it for class. There are other articles.

Kress et. al. Post version 1.1

2008-10-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

First impressions of Kress and friends (2005 opinions):

On dichotomies:
I have a love/hate relationship with dichotomies (as I’ve made my relationship with them a dichotomy between love and hate…Derrida has ruined my mind). My opinion here extends to categorization and labels in general. Often, to make a point, it’s necessary. I think, though, that we need to be absolutely as clear as possible with our categorization, and not fall into the trap of creating stark dichotomies that cause more problems than they cure.

I have an issue with this: writing vs. image.
For example:

http://www.rafalfedro.com/gfx/gallery/typography/typography03.jpg

This is a visual reproduction of a piece of digital art. But it includes alphabetic text, so is it an image or writing?

What do we call pre-alphabetic texts: writing or images?

http://www.alifetimeofcolor.com/study/images/cave_painting_l.jpg

Are hieroglyphs and logographs considered writing or image?

http://k43.pbase.com/g3/93/399693/2/57416695.CRW_3935_01.jpg

http://www.crystalinks.com/hieroglyphs3.jpg

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/chinese_character_scripts.gif

What I’m trying to explain is that we need to have a clear theory of writing before attaching labels to semiotic devices. This theory doesn’t have to be accepted as the end-all-be-all in our field, but rather, when using these terms, the person doing so must be able to articulate what they “mean” with regards to the argument at hand. A person’s theory of writing should also be flexible and adapted to the social, historical, technological, etc. events of the time. I am still working on my theory of writing, which is probably why I’m so concerned with this.

Some questions I’ve been asking myself in regards to a theory of writing:
1) What does it mean to write today?
2) What does writing as of us?
3) How is writing influenced by new technologies, and vice versa?
4) Etc…etc…etc…

I have come to terms with one thing in regards to my theory of writing: It is a semiotic mode of representation used to communicate. While that is pretty vague, it does help me to guide my theory.

On the book and the screen:
Another dichotomy, but this one seems more explicitly defined than writing and image. A book is just that: a physical collection of paper bound into a book. A screen is the physical surface that expresses complex computer functions, code, etc. onto a flat screen.

Kress argues that the semiotic changes presently occurring takes place in part because of the “centrality of the medium of the book to the medium of the screen” (6). What I find especially interesting about this ‘phenomenon’ is how the screen influences the physical print text.

Take a look at recent newspaper redesigns:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=151319

I’ve mentioned this before in a previous post, but it is certainly relevant here. These redesigns are much more dependent on non-alphabetic representation: photographs, color, graphic elements, etc. They also refer directly/indirectly to their respective online editions. The Hartford Courant uses the period at the end of its masthead as the ‘dot’ in ‘hartfordcourant.com’.

Zach Dodson’s book, boring boring boring, is especially interesting when considered alongside Kress’ discussion of design. Kress argues, “Design focuses forward; it assumes that resources are never entirely apt but will need to be transformed in relation to all the contingencies of this environment now and the demands made” (p. 20). Dodson’s book is a deconstruction of the traditional book as well as a multimodal text. According to the web site below, the super bundle includes:

You'll get the perfect bound version. With an unerring, unflinching eye for satire, Zach Plague’s brilliant hybrid of image and text skewers the art world and those boring enough to fall into its traps. This one is built for reading.

For hanging on the walls, or lining the rabbit cage, you'll also have the awesome set of nine double-sided large format posters (25 x 38 inches). They were created on the giant ‘signatures’ that all books are printed on, and true works of art in their own right.

Finally, enjoy the soothing sounds of the boring boring Audio Book Mash-up. A shortened, punched up, music/spoken word version of the book, read by a cast of characters with the craziest voices we could find.

http://www.featherproof.com/Mambo/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=1&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=30&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=45

The text can be read a number of ways: from left to right in the traditional format; linearly or nonlinearly in the signature/poster format; or hear as an audio book. There is also an online edition, which, strangely enough, mimics the traditional book, complete with turning pages:

http://www.zachplague.com/

I will continue on with my discussion in the version 2.0 post after class on Monday…

Kress, Wysocki, McDonagh and Gender

2008-10-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

Kress’s notion of transformation made me think of lesbian feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich, among other feminists, who consider the ways in which the notion of agency can resist a particular kind of “victimhood” and work to transform the power structure that patriarchy has constructed. As I read the responses to Kress, I noticed Wysocki and McDonagh, Goggin, and Squire also bring up feminist issues. Both take issue with the binary distinction Kress makes between print and image. Wysocki demonstrates the visuality of text by considering the spacing and the page layout as well as the order, based on emphasis, foreground, and background, of images. McDonagh et al. argue that images are primarily symbolic, rather than specific contra Kress’s notion that the verbal is a bunch of empty signifiers waiting for readers to fill it with meaning and images are specific. Wysocki makes a really interesting move when she maps the assumptions Kress, and our society, makes about the verbal and the visual—when she maps these onto notions of binary gender identities: “If human practices do entwine, as I have been arguing, to the extent that the spacing of lettershapes on a piece of paper reflects and helps continue unquestioned restrictions on behavior or that a habit of understanding words and images as opposites reflects and helps continue beliefs about relations between men and women, then it is possible that trying new spaces on pages or exploring the visuality of alphabetic text can be seeds for changes in such practices and beliefs” (59). Wow! She offers this new understanding of the visual and verbal as a way to rethink gender relations. This may be seen as a better understanding of the transformation that Kress begins to articulate in his theory. It does seem that the visual has been associated with all the things that women have been associated under a polarized understanding of gender (what feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler calls the heteosexual matrix of gender relations that require there to be opposites). “Common sense” views seem to suggest that the visual is immanent (connected to earth and body), whereas the verbal is abstract (connected to the mind). This is representative of the Cartesian mind/body split. However, as McDonagh explains, it is the emotional and symbolic that has drawn professionals in the visual design field to that line of work (82). Philosopher Ken Wilbur argues that to overcome the mind/body split that we inherit through the Western tradition, we must re-integrate the body, earth, and emotion into our lives. He calls this becoming the centaur—being a hybrid fully connected to mind and body in conscious awareness. Wysocki seems to be suggesting a way to use writing technology to become a centaur. Any thoughts on gender in these pieces??

Design and Rhetoric

2008-10-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

Kress argues that authorship must give way to designership. Design, he argues, helps us to deal with the shifting world of technology that has come upon us because of the shift from print to the image. Whereas authorship and print assume a static world, according to Kress, design and the use of multiple modes is more useful in our current sociohistorical moment. With this shift to design he sees a wider capacity for agency, an agency that responds to the world and the modes through transformation rather than acquisition, which he relates to language / literacy acquisition (20). Since the decline of the authority of authorship, Kress argues that the audience has become increasingly important in designing so that modes are chosen for their “aptness of fit” (19). He concludes from this that rhetoric has subsequently “re-emerged” (19).

The shift from print to image / design can be seen in a project put out by Equality Ohio, a statewide organization dedicated to LGBT rights, called Our Stories. They have been doing this project for three years, each year telling the stories of LGBT individuals and straight allies, those who combat heteronormativity. The first year was a book of more than 80 stories from individuals in Ohio who are LGBT or allies. This may be seen as further evidence for Prior’s critique of Kress, as it is a book that allows for multiple entry points (see Prior 25). Nonetheless, there is a shift from print with images to the second-year video interviews and finally to the third year (just released August 20th, 2008) of digital narratives. This is one instance that supports Kress’s notion of agency through design. These eight digital stories use film, voice-overs, still images, and music to convey their messages. This digital ensemble shows a recognition of the affordances the modes allow to the designers. The Center of Digital Storytelling worked with Equality Ohio and these eight participants to help create the videos.

Here is a link to one of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU5-RFmYnOw. If you search “digital stories equality ohio” on youtube.com you will find all of them. The purpose of these videos is political in that they are meant to convince the (straight) public that LGBT people deserve equality. Equality Ohio was formed and has been shaped by the political context of 2004, where gay marriage exploded onto the national scene. Therefore, many of the videos focus on family. Also, there is a rhetoric of “normality” and “sameness” that underpins the entire project (for critiques of this politics see queer theorists Michael Warner and Judith Butler and LGBT historian John D’Emelio among others). Nonetheless, I selected this video to talk about because of Kress’s argument that rhetoric has re-emerged for designers. This video’s rhetoric is sophitocated, at lest in its use of kairos, timing (and potentially kairos used as metis, cunning), compared to the others.

The video focuses on a lesbian woman’s relationship with her older brother. The logic goes like this: (1) Family is important to LGBT people because we have good relationships with our siblings (a response to “family values” rhetoric that ignores the fact that LGBT peeps are born into the heterosexual matrix of their family of origin and create families of their own—families of choice, involving any of the following: partners, children, and / or friends). (2) There are straight people who are supportive of LGBT issues and you, too, can become one (The message of gay liberation in the 70s—“We are everywhere”—has turned into almost a strange Uncle Sam message--“We want you!”). This message is derived from the portrait of her brother as an ally. (3) LGBT people just want to be “normal” and have a family like straight people do. See, we are just like you (a response to pathological notions of “deviant” sexual identification and gender-variant individuals). By ending the video with her plan that she and her partner will have kids and that they’ll play with her brother’s kids, she is also trying to identify with a straight audience that has similar hopes for their prospective children; although the assumption is that all straight folks want and will have children. The other glaring assumption is that LGBT peeps want to be like straight people. This is simply not the case for many of us.

The video is all about timing! The designer is crafty enough, and understands her audience enough, to start with “family values”—her relationship with her brother. It is something that, presumably the audience will connect with emotionally. Also, the choice of using video clips that have that old-time flickering quality to it (not sure if it is just old film or if that was a manipulation on the part of the designer) also may connect emotionally with the audience through nostalgia for “the good old days.” It is not until half-way through the video that she reveals she is a lesbian. At that point, she believes that she has established a “family values” ethos; evidence of her relationship with her brother stands as her credibility. Furthermore, she locates herself in a place, a topoi??, of “normality” by identifying her commitment ceremony to her partner in the same breath as she outs herself. These choices may be explained through Kress’s notion of “aptness of fit.” She certainly had the audience in mind when creating this video. I wonder how effective it will be. For me, I found the pathos appealing and even got a bit teary-eyed, despite my different political agenda that instead of seeking to normalize LGBT individuals, examines the ways that heterosexuality has been normalized and uproot those built assumptions from our world, especially the very hetero-sexy and “family friendly” public sphere.

Just to give a decidedly different approach to LGBT issues, consider the British organization Stonewall. This organization gets its name from the bar in New York where gay liberation began in 1969. The bar was raided by the police, which was common at the time. However, what was uncommon and what sparked the gay liberation movement (you won’t get this history lesson in high school by the way) were the transgendered individuals of color who protested the raid for days. With that in mind this organization started an education campaign in response to bullying in schools with this billboard: http://wallflowermag.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/get-over-it.jpg. The billboard reads, “Some people are gay. Get over it!”

Critiquing Kress

2008-10-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

At the onset of the Iraq war, I found myself feeling very small and helpless. I remember seeing televised images of aerial bombings--vivid depictions of the "shock and awe" phase of the war. At the time, most of the people that I know were interpreting these images in a positive way. They were seeing in these explosions the destruction of an enemy aimed at killing Americans. Meanwhile, I was seeing in these explosions the destruction of communities and the needless killing of Iraqi civilians. They were both impressed and satisfied with the images. I was was depressed and horrified.

Of course, their interpretations were guided by a powerful discourse that had been circulating in the country long before the bombs were actually dropped. Political leadership had been constructing an Iraqi in words (speeches and texts) for over a year. News media had been disseminating these words of political leaders on a mass scale, making it impossible for the public to miss or ignore them. Furthermore, when the News reported what the polticians said, it added words and images of its own, which further suggested that there was a dangerous man in Iraq with connections to terrorists and ambitions to supply them with nuclear weapons. Given this discourse that created an enemy--the discourse of political leaders combined with the metadiscourse of news media outlets--it was really difficult to "read" the image of bombs dropping on Iraq as a bad thing. It seemed like our very lives depended on these bombs being dropped. It seemed like these explosions required our approval.

I share these recollections not just to make a political point, but because they tend to suggest some limits to the arguments posited by Gunther Kress in his C&C article. First, Kress argues that images, unlike words, are full of meaning, and very specific. They show the world, while words merely tell the world (15-16). But the above story illustrates that images, just like words, are open to interpretation. Certainly, the image of bombs were being dropped on Baghdad was concrete and specific. Nevertheless, the meaning attached to the bombs varied from person to person. The meaning of the image was hardly precise.

It is also worth pointing out that the binary the Kress suggests between words and images is, as many other authors have pointed out, a bit misleading. What the above example suggests is that a given image always exists within a universe of words. The image of exploding bombs simply could not be understood without the words that surrounded it. First, there the words on the screen in the news broadcast: the words that said, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Begins: Bombing Baghdad" or some variation on this. These metadiscursive words shape the understanding of the image. Without them we might not know who is dropping the bombs or where. But with them, we know who and where and are able to connect these facts to the already-constructed discourse that talked about an "Iraq War" before these bombs were ever dropped. Thus, the image of the bombs exploding plus the words in the caption connect us to those other words that came before--the speeches, the reports that constructed the enemy in Iraq, that made possible this bombing campaign. Kress notes that communication is always multimodal, but in his piece he seems to separate the word from the depiction--as if they are exclusive categories. In practice, words and images are constantly interacting with each other; moreover words and images in the here and now are easily connected to words and images from the recent past. Meaning is made over time, over weeks, months and years, and across many images and texts. It is not made in single moment through a single image or text. The images of the dropping bombs "meant" only insofar as they were connected to the news reports and speeches leading up to this event.

Finally, I would like to question Kress's notion that we are somehow beyond a project of critique because we have entered into a period when social systems and structures are already in crisis. First, I agree with Kress on the crucial point that the current situation is requires more than critique. It does indeed require action, agency, reform. Still, I stongly dispute Kress's claim that social systems and structures are in crisis. Certainly, in the sphere of communication new media opens up new possibilities and challenges old realities. On the other hand, some old realities are very much stable. The above example shows how power concentrated into the hands of political leaders and news media can influence public understanding. If you ask me, this power, which rests in the assumed authority of the politicians and their access to the means of mass communication, shows no signs of crumbling. Indeed, there is a very secure system in place when it comes to manufacturing enemies, a system that is challenged only a little by the new media revolution. To oversimplify the process--when a President wants a war, s/he constructs an enemy, knowing very well that the news media will report this construction to the public. Thus a powerful political system is intimately tied with a powerful press. The words and images of these conjoined twins reach the ears and eyes of every single American. This is a reality. It is a reality that is not in crisis. It is a reality that does not shake at its foundation because people are using youtube and blogging.

Kress argues that the affordances provided by the screen allow reader to become author--to become designer--and to challenge existing notions of authority. He argues that the individual acquires a kind of agency that allows him or her to act transformationally in the world. Critique, he says, unsettles, but design transforms. I simply do not see how designers are doing anything to transform the extraordinary power of the political-military-industrial-press complex. And as far as I know, the systems that support racism and sexism, the systems that keep two thirds of the world in poverty, that allow half of the world's population (3 billion people) to live on less than 2 dollars a day--these systems are not in crisis and they are not being brought to their knees by designers and their depictions. Is it our western bias--our myopic view of a wealthy, technological society--that allows us to claim that we are redesigning the world? Why do we continue to ignore the global system of social injustice that stands stable as ever, unscathed by our design? Why do we ignore that communication--however it may be changing--can be controlled by powerful actors when they so desire? And what is the actual effect of individual designers and their transformations of the world when compared to the actual effect of these powerful actors and their transformations of the world?

The answer to these questions should trouble us. They should cause us to think critically about what new media really afford individual designers. They should cause us reign in the rhetoric of "transformation" and "revolution". There is still a place for critique. Certainly there needs to be a place for reform. But let's not lose our heads: the system is not in crisis. Transformation of the system has not occured and is not likely to occur just because images are displacing words.

Part 1 Kress et all

2008-10-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

One thing that Fortune’s and Moran’s articles made me think about was the role dialects play in images. Throughout most of the articles, there was a discussion about the grammar of images, and a discussion about how we understand word and image (as separate or a dichotomy) and what that means for our classrooms. I was thinking of African American Vernacular English, and the absence of the third person singular, or the habitual be in writings where AAVE speakers are aiming for Standard Written English. How will the grammar of images affect them? Will the use of visuals and images place those who speak non-standard dialects on a more equal playing ground as compared to those who speak Mainstream American English, or will speakers of non-standard English dialects still be at a disadvantage with the addition of images? Kress states “Representation and communication are motivated by the social; its effects are outcomes of the economic and the political. To those or act otherwise is to follow phantoms” (6). So… my thought is that the addition of images is going to make it even harder for non-standard speakers to reach a socially acceptable level of standard written (and visual) English.

When Kress was discussing the IoE, he comments that “the author(s) of this page clearly have in mind that visitors will come to this page from quite different cultural and social spaces, in differeing ways, and with differening interests, not necessarily known to or knowable by the maker(s) of the page” (9). Does this make the multimodal web pages more ideological? More culturally sensitive? I feel as though Kress was discussion more about the gains and losses of the different modes and mediums, but I can’t help but think about who gains accesses to these different modes, mediums, and socially accepted practices, and who loses access. What will become the new dominant mode for the elite? Will it stay as the book? Will it be the web text? Or will the elite discover something different, as others gain more access to the current dominate mode for the elite?

One final thought for the first half of the readings, instead of thinking about word and image as separate, or as a dichotomy, why don’t we think about word and image as a venn diagram?

The joys of Latour, and then some...

2008-10-15T20:17:00.000-07:00

This post is a potpourri of info related to what we've been discussing recently:

Bruno Latour's web site:
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/
This includes presentations, articles, etc...both in French and English for all of you bilingualists out there...

Resources page of the Society for Social Studies of Science
http://www.4sonline.org/resources.htm
Journals, movies, and course syllabi on topics in technology, society, science, etc...

TED!!!
http://www.ted.com/
Technology, Entertainment, Design conference web site with loads of videos on various topics ranging from, you guessed it, technology to entertainment to design.

21 Biggest Technology Flops
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9012345
Lists such as this are always entertaining, and do allow us to think about why a technology is considered "failed" or "dead".

Top 30 Failed Technology Predictions
http://listverse.com/history/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/
Predictions from the past...

Wired Gadget Blog
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/
Blog that discusses new gadgets. Enough said.

More PRT excitement!
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/10/personal-pod--1.html
Aramis' death wasn't in vain...

The Aramis Lectures

2008-10-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

The Aramis Lectures

I thought it might be helpful to go through Aramis and write out all the first lines of the professor’s lectures—to see if we might glean something from them in terms of shape of the methodology, or at least, to help with the Wikipedia entry:

“How to frame a technological investigation? By sticking to the framework and the limits indicated by the interviewees themselves” (p. 18)

“By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset, it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase” (p. 23)

“The difference between dreams and reality is variable” (p.28)

“No technological project is technological first and foremost” (32).

“Justice and young engineers are hard on projects that fail” (35).

“The market forces of the private sector are actors like the others” (41)

“The actors come in varying sizes; this is the whole problem with innovation” (44).

“To translate is to betray: ambiguity is part of translation” (48).

“Innovations have to interest people and things at the same time; that’s really the challenge” (56).

“Men and things exchange properties and replace one another; this is what gives technological properties their full savor” (61)

“The reality, feasibility, and representativeness of a project are progressive concepts, but they are also controversial; that’s why it’s so hard to get a clear idea about the technologies involved.” (66).

“We are never so numerous as we think; this is precisely what makes technological projects so difficult” (71).

“About technological projects, one can only be subjective. Only those projects that turn into objects, institutions, allow for objectivity” (75)

“No on can study a technological project without maintaining the symmetry of explanations” (78).

“To study a technological project, one must move constantly from signs to things, and vice versa” (80).

“A technological project is neither realistic or unrealistic; it takes on reality, or losesit, by degrees” (85).
He time frame for innovations depends on the geometry of the actors, not on the calendar” (88).

“Projects drift; that’s why they’re called research projects” (91)

“The only way to increase a project’s reality is to compromise, to accept sociotechnical compromises” (99).

A project isn’t one project. It’s taken as a whole or as a set of disconnected parts, depending on whether circumstances are favorable or unfavorable” (106).

“The topology of technological projects is as peculiar as their arithmetic” (108).

“What counts in a technological project, is deciding what has to be negotiated, and deciding on an official doctrine that will make it possible to proceed with any negotiation at all” (112).

“There are two models for studying innovations: the linear model and the whirlwind model. Or, if you prefer, the diffusion model and the translation model” (118)

“the more a technological project progresses, the more the role of technology decreases, in relative terms: such is the paradox of development” (126)

“A technological project is not in a context; it gives itself a context, or sometimes does not give itself one” (133).

“The work of contextualizing makes the connection between a context and a project completely unforeseeable” (137).

“Technological projects become reversible or irreversible in relation to the work of contextualization” (142).

“The shortest path between a technological project and its completion might be the crookedest one” (149).

“During a given period, the form, scope, and power of the context change for every techno project” (154).

“The actors don’t have a strategy; they get their battle plans, contradictory ones, form other actors” (162).

“The actors create both their society and their sociology, their language and their meta language” (167).

“TO study technological projects you have to move from as classical sociology—which has fixed frames of reference—to a relativistic sociology—which has fluctuating referents” (169)

“Technological projects are deployed in a variable-ontology world; that’s the result of the interdefinition of actors” (173).

“To survive in a variable-ontology world, the promoters of a technological project have to imagine little bridges that let them temporarily ensure their stability” (175).

“The actors themselves are working to solve the problem raised by the relativist sociology in which they’ve situated one another” ( 179).

“Economics is not the reality principle of technology; technology has to be realized gradually, like the rest of the mechanism for which it paves the way ‘(183).

“Consumer demand and consumer interest are negotiable like everything else, and shaping them constitutes an integral part of the project” (187).

“The interpretation offered by the relativist actors are performatives” (194).

“There are two major sociologies; one is classical, the other relativist (or rather relational)”(199).

“Mechanisms cope wit the contradictions of humans” (206).

“A technological project always gets more complicated because the engineers want to reinscribe in it what threatens to interrupt its course” (209).

“Every technology may be a project, an object, or an exchanger” (212).

“It is in the detours that we recognize a technological act; this has been true since the dawn of time” (215).

“The work of folding in technological mechanisms can go from complication to complexity” (219).

Thanks to computers, we now know that there are only differences of degree between matter and texts” (222).

“Technological mechanisms are not anthromorphs any more than humans are technologists” (225).

Hmmmmm.

writing: is it a black box?

2008-10-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

As the Aramis designers did with their project, we too often want writing to stay the same (fit our original ideal), and yet we still don’t see how we change it.

By taking advantage of new writing technologies but wanting to limit our theory of writing to print linguistic text, we follow in the footsteps of the Aramis designers. Take a look at this quote from Van Ittersum’s essay:

As scholars such as Bertram C. Bruce and Andee Rubin (1993) and Christina Haas (1996) have noted, there is no singular “computer,” only situated instantiations of various hardware and software put to different ends by a variety of people. Yet, for the most part, these assorted configurations are taken as one, obscuring the differences that shape the diverse range off literate activity (Prior, 1998) they support. (pp. 143-144)

The connection I’m about to make might be a stretch, but it does seem plausible. As argued above, although we combine various parts for different purposes, we still reduce this collective technology to a black box computer. It seems as though we reduce writing in much the same way. If we look back to Stephen Kline’s essay, a technology can be many things, including a “knowledge, technique, know-how, or methodology,” and “a sociotechnical system of use” (p. 211). By those definitions, writing is very much a technology (as we’ve discussed in class). That much is obvious.

This realization (writing is a technology) helps connect Van Ittersum’s point with our view of writing as a fixed system/black box. Yet, we compose with so many different “parts” for so many different purposes.

There is no singular “writing,” only situated instantiations of various modes of meaning-making put to different ends by a variety of people.

*When I say “we” I mean our friend, society.

Ode to the sentence... Ode to the long sentence...

2008-10-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

I am trying to develop some general ideas about “Aramis was an exciting discourse” and “Aramis is one long sentence.” Most, “Aramis is one long sentence” because it seems that no matter what we are working on, new technological development, research paper, lesson plans, etc, we are asked to summarize it in a sentence (article abstracts, program book descriptions, objective for the lesson plan, research question). I have never thought of the idea of one (long) sentence seeming so key to the field of rhet/comp, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the ability to be concise (in one sentence) or a little more elaborate (one long sentence) is an important component.

[I am writing this in word, and am unable to get online at the moment so I apologize for the lack of page numbers, as my physical book has not come in yet.]

I am thinking about the part of the book where Aramis is a sentence, and each new sentence adds something, until Aramis is one long sentence. It seemed to me that each new addition to the sentence, each new added length, came from some actor – an interview that gave them more information about the history of Aramis, new reports that were filed away, new meeting minutes, each new sentence had an addition from a new actor. The inventor did not sit down and write a long sentence and poof Aramis was a long sentence, but it seemed that as the engineers worked on the project, as those in politics had input, Aramis continue to grown in its sentence length. I feel like this idea should be able to go a step further, outside of the Aramis context and work with other technologies, but I am missing that connection step. I see how language and discourse works to create technologies (concepts of technology, patents seem all language and discourse based, grant paper work, protocol, ect) there is no argument that language/discourse is important, and not only for those working directly on the project, but for those within society, the public authorities, those working on other projects. At one point in the book there was a discussion about it not being a pertain question about technology, not about society, but about sociotechnological compromise – and compromise can’t exist without discourse. Each actor would have their own “Aramis is…” sentence, and how would they, as a group, reconcile those sentences into one long “Aramis is sentence?” I think I may do some prelim- research on the sentence as our sound bites for research, for description, for technology. I am interested to see if there is more out there. There has to be more to the sentence; there just has to be!

Don't step on the ANT! (Part 2-- dichotomies & context)

2008-10-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

Post 2 for 10.12-10.17: [To follow up my last post, here I'm continuing to try to work out tenets of ANT. I'm focusing on 2 main points though: the breakdown of geographic and metaphoric dichotomies and the role of context in ANT.]

Breaking geographic and metaphoric dichotomies: Allowing for fluctuation and flexibility seems exceptionally important in ANT. Latour notes that actors’ size, goals and even “isotopy” are all negotiable. Actors are not stable (p. 176). Actors can no longer be viewed as large vs. small, for instance. Instead, they’re constantly in flux due to the ever changing relationships with each other. The scope or frame is inscribed by the actors themselves, not the researchers.The ANT approach observes the acts of inscription, and avoids imposition of a pre-existing context. The imposition of context is a sort of geographical frame which delineates what is and what is not available as an object of study. Latour though, resists this pre-imposition of context and insists instead on an emergent sense of context initiated by the actors.This article was particularly helpful to me in thinking about how ANT works to break down spatial dichotomies: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9801/msg00019.html In this article, Latour details how ANT disrupts near/far, local/global,small/large, and inside/outside dichotomies.Contexts: Returning to Aramis, I’ve pulled out a couple of quotes to further explain his approach to context.1) “A technological project is not in a context; it gives itself a context, or sometimes does not give itself one” (p. 133) and “Contextualization is fabricated and negotiated like everything else” (p. 143). These two quotes demonstrate resistance to a priori assumptions of context and they help demonstrate Latour’s insistence that we focus on the network itself, not our own scientific/philosophical agendas. Every methodology is imbricated with assumptions. Latour wants us to resist those assumptions. Of course, the challenge here, is even a resistance to those assumptions is filled with its own methodological assumptions and values.2) “Every context is composed of individuals who do or do not decide to connect the fate of a project with the fate of the small or large ambitions they represent” (p. 137). This last quote demonstrates the actors’ role in constituting the context, and it further shows ANT’s intense focus on observing actor-driven research.

Absolutely Tangential...but hey, it's Techne and Technology!

2008-10-12T16:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=26634&post=328235&uid=10337532241#topic_top

This was a discussion on a new feature on the discussion board for a silly FaceBook game that I play, MouseHunt, that turned into a brief discussion of literacy, technology, etc. Makes me happy.

You can ignore all the gibber jabber about alcohol, e-food, and partying in a mousoleam. We are freaks, I openly admit it.

*chuffs on*

Elliot

discourse and language and latour

2008-10-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

Following Beth's lead, I'd like to approach another of Pam's points for consideration and attempt to summarize some of what Latour has to say about the role of discourse and language in the development of technologies.

I think pages 80 and 81, as well as 222-223, are helpful. Here Latour makes a telling remark: "To study a technological project, one must constantly move from signs to things, and vice versa." For Latour any technological project starts out as a discourse--usually an "exciting" discourse. People talk about, conceptualize, draw schematics, calculate logistics, produce statistics, create texts, write reports and offer explanations of a project before its ever made. Latour says that a project is first and foremost "a story," "a fiction." Eventually, if a project is well-received, the textual form of it shifts to an objective reality. The calculations and commands are "delegated" to a part of the technological apparatus. A chip, for instance, is compelled to do the work of a person. However, the object is always, and variously, interpreted and understood through discourse. Thus, the thing shifts back to realm of signs. And the signs, in turn, continue to work at creating things. Technologies themselves are texts which carry human inscriptions. An object always begins with signs, is always covered over with signs, and is always inscribed with signs. As Latour says, programs are written and chips are engraved. The interesting thing is that once technologies are written, they do what they say--they act.

Don't step on the ANT! (Part 1-- the actors)

2008-10-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

(Post 1 for next week, 10.12-10.17):

For my new post on Latour, I decided to continue focusing on delineating the tenets of Actor-Network Theory. In my first post last week I began grappling with an understanding of ANT, but things have become a little clearer for me since then. I’m writing, then, in response to Pam’s third question: “identify & discuss the ANT principles that Latour outlines in his book. That is, focus on the explicit statements about methodology…& on the methodological model the book itself provides.”

Actors: For Latour, the actors are where it’s at. ANT is all about following them and seeing where they lead us. This reminded me of an ethnographic approach. However, I think one important distinction that ANT makes is technological things/projects/artifacts are just as important as human actors. ANT opens up a role for the non-human. Here’s where I ran into a roadblock. I began to wonder about the role of intentionality— this is something we surely can’t attribute to non-humans objects. It seemed initially that Latour was arguing for some sort of intentionality when he wrote the rather odd passage with the pieces of technology speaking and talking about their roles (p. 59). However, I think I missed the point on that first reading though.

Instead, I needed to look at two segments.

1) “Men and things exchange properties and replace one another; this is what gives technological projects their full savor” (p. 61) and

2) p. 162, where Latour suggests that actors do not have strategies themselves—rather these come from other actors.

In light of these two sections, (if I’m now understanding correctly) Latour appears to resist ascribing intentionality to any actors. The emphasis is placed on reactivity and relationism, and consequently (?), the breakdown of geographic and metaphoric dichotomies. (which I'll write about next)

Gmail Goggles?

2008-10-09T05:12:00.000-07:00

Gmail has added a new downloadable function "email goggles." This new function is to help people not send drunk emails. So, between the hours of, I believe, 11pm Friday to 4am Sunday, if you have this function enabled, you will be given a short math quiz before your email will be sent. If you fail the quiz, the email will be saved in your drafts folder, and gmail tells you ""Water and bed for you."

And, you only have a short amount of time, 60 seconds, to complete the 5 question math quiz. What a sly way to bring math into the email (writing) world. What do we value more? 12 secs to answer a math question, or the lessons learned from sending a drunk email? How does this program influence our email literacy? The second link below has some interesting quotes that seem to connect to some of our class discussion - a technology development that solves all drunk communication problems: "But even if Google deems you too inebriated to correspond with your boss or your ex, what about all the other ways to communicate something stupid?" Or "But there's still no technological catch-all solution for drunk dialing and texting. And no one's tackled some of the other foolhardy activities associated with a night out, like consuming a gross burrito at 3 a.m." It may not be the rape wagon, but........

Huffington Post Article

Chicago Tribune

So interesting!

Doug Engelbart Link

2008-10-06T13:34:00.001-07:00

1968 Demo

[no. 322]: We want information! <---->[no.xx]: You won't get it!: What relevant social group....

2008-10-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

subtitle: How would you react if you were on the "rape wagon"[1] with Frankenstein and his big dick? What if he just wanted to go to the same place as you, and is really a swell guy that wouldn't even hurt anyone? Would you get off the wagon?
----------

In our discussions of relevant social groups, there has been some questioning of the inclusion of consumers (both in the sense of those that purchase and those that use) into breakdowns of these groups. Latour's book pulls out the paranoid in me, in regards to consumers in this light. We are not relevant to those with the power to offer or withhold technology (information, distribution of power...I could go on and on, but I will try my best to remain focused...). Sitting in "inscrutable seats of power" [2], politicians and businessmen decide for how what we will be allowed to use (and in vain attempts at further means of control, how we use the products they offer us; however, I am not jaded enough to believe that they have finally taken this away from us, no matter how hard they try). For example, we have the businessmen buttering their own bread: "While the automobile still seems to be the fastest (though costliest) solution for urban transportation in the short run, its very proliferation will increasingly cut down on its speed, which will soon become unacceptably slow; at the same time, automobiles will increase to dangerous levels the atmospheric pollution that they inevitably produce." (p. 31) [3] That's certainly one spin on cars, which I agree with on some levels, as I have been caught in both Baltimore and D.C. traffic. However, for all the economic spin (in regards to a businessman or group of businessmen selling their product), the weight of the automotive industry didn't budge one bit in the 70's and 80's with the idea of PRT's bouncing off their gargantuan necks like so many unnoticed gnats.

This leads me to my next paranoia: Political might. How much was the decision to scrap emergent technologies like the Aramis project the result of heavy-weight commercial entities--such as the automotive industry [4]--putting economic and political (again, can these two things realllllllly be separated?) pressure on leading politicians? "'I tell myself that if somebody came up with the idea of the automobile today and had to go before a safety commission and explain, I don't know, let's say, how to get started on a hill...! I just think how complicated it is: shifting gears, using the hand brake, and so on. He wouldn't stand a chance! He'd be told: 'It can't be done.' Well, everybody knows how to start on a hill! It's the same with Aramis. We hadn't gotten all the kinks out, but yes, I think it was doable. [no. 23]" (p.48) [5] Rather than ask whether or not a technology would be beneficial (in theory) or economic (in theory) this is the sort of bureaucratic insistence on the "impossibilities" of technology we are offered. It is a slight of hand. That the Aramis project lasted through four different administrations of French Government is a mystery to me. At the very first change in power, Giscard d'Estaing replacing de Gaulle in 1974 (p. 13), one would have thought that the project would have been capped right there and then. New power, new economic pressures...oops, budget cuts! Do I really need to research and list examples of this? We see it every 4-8 years here.

(I just ran out of time...will rant and rave more later...for now, watch out for Frankie! We know his intentions! And they are always the worst possible case...)

Elliot

[1] "Senator Wallace: 'Well, I'll tell you what happens, she gets raped! And the rapist has all the time in the world, in this automated shell of yours with no doors and no windows. You know what you've invented? You've invented the rape wagon!'" (p. 21) Why is it that when I read this passage, I was not remotely shocked that after a brief discussion of logistics, the very first place our politicians and supposed leaders go, is fear? At the very least, as I will quote above, the French politicians and business men offered up some tangible analysis of the Aramis project--although still not directly addressing the political and economic (if they can be separated) reasons why the project was ultimately scrapped--between finger wagging and blame shifting. On some levels I am proud of my ability to laugh at this caricature of US Political Discourse (really...how much of a caricature is it?), but I am also sickened. This is, on some base level, how our society functions: through waves of fear and cowering. And we just let ourselves be sucked into it.

[2] "Dogma." Kevin Smith. Viewaskew productions. (1999)

[3] I am unsure of any of you have seen the French new-wave film "Week End" by Jean-Luc Goddard (1967), but in the film there is a lengthy "pan and scan" shot that goes on for 15-20 minutes of automobile backup and carnage in the French countryside. It makes one wonder if this is being specifically referenced in this passage. If you have an hour and a half of free time, and are interested in seeing "A Clockwork Orange" without a plot, I highly recommend this experimental film.

[4] At some point this semester, I want to bring up the marriage of oil and automotive industries and the obvious lag in "greener" technologies. Am I again paranoid here? Am I seeing ghosts in the meadow?

[5] [no. 23] is M. Henne, "head of the bureau of technological studies of Aeroport de Paris".

the little engine that couldn't

2008-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

Like a few others, Aramis gave me a few problems; it was a pretty dense book, and while the investigation was in chronological order (or at least it seemed to be), the information/interviews/data being used wasn’t—or was it? It didn’t seem to flow in any logical way, but maybe it wasn’t supposed to? Still, I managed to take some good ideas away from the book—and from the failure of Aramis.

On a related note, it surprised me that such an advanced mass transit system was being developed at a time when the technology necessary to create it was relatively simple. Twelve years after the release of this book, Aramis seems to be more technologically possible; though obviously, not in America. Of course, the autopsy of Aramis shows that it was more than technological hurdles that stopped the project.

What interested me in this failed technology was the chance for it to be misused; I’m thinking mainly of the “rape wagon” story from the chapter—who is going to be around to protect the little old ladies? Invariably, someone will always use technology for a purpose far removed than what the technology was intended for. With Aramis, we saw the possibility of sexual assault (not to mention regular assault) and vandalism that the designers of the project had to work around. As Elliot said in class, technologies can be expropriated for uses that range from “deviant” to “illegal;” but can these unintended uses redefine the technology?

The Internet, once used for military and university correspondence, is now facilitating the transfer of illegal downloads, pornography, drugs (check Craig’s List), and sex (check Craig’s List). And for as much as everyone celebrates second life, I have to wonder how many people have actually spent time within this virtual world. One of the sites I write for had a series of articles of all the sexual deviance going on in second life: simulated pedophilia, incest, bestiality, prostitution, torture etc. And whenever a “famous person” has an event in Second Life, it will inevitably be invaded by virtual anarchists; this is possible because Second life tries to sell itself (even though it’s free) on this kind of freedom.

And this “griefing” (that’s the terminology) leaks into the real world, too. Second Life inspired the interruption of a real-life event with a flying penis-copter—and keep in mind that raining phalluses are a common event during virtual Second Life press conferences. Of course, this is all very entertaining—to me, anyway—but it makes me think about the safeguards of technology (to prevent this sort of behavior), and how people get around these safeguards—or even exploit the technology in ways that the designers never though of (as with the “rape wagon” story).

In the end, Aramis taught me that there’s no way that technology can possibly be autonomous; in this case, the creation of Aramis is a 15-year mess that can barely be contained within 300 pages.

Latour, Latour

2008-10-06T08:08:00.001-07:00

Ok—to be very honest, I (like John), was overwhelmed by this week’s readings. Unlike
Lindsay or Nikki, I never got to a place of completely enjoying or wrapping my head
around Aramis. I hated—even resented Latour’s format—more so than when reading multi-genre novels that use various fonts, etc.

Overall, I struggle with Latour. I have wanted to understand his work from the time I first stumbled upon his Politics of Nature, a book in which Latour purportedly establishes the conceptual context for political ecology. Except now, I’m not sure what he means by “context.” In any case, in PON, Latour seeks to disabuse readers of their notion that political ecology has anything to do with “nature,” Which he dismisses as a jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism, and American parks” (from the book’s back cover [I never even got past the book’s intro and a cursory inspection of subsequent chapters of PON]). However, I did glean that Latour reads nature as a way of assembling political order rather than as a domain of the real. In fact, he claims that political ecology must relinquish “nature.” Explicitly, he says that “if ‘nature’ is what makes it possible to recapitulate the hierarchy of beings in a single ordered series, political ecology is always manifested in practice by the destruction of the idea of nature” ( p. 25).

Sorry for the digression into another of his texts, but I am relating this by way of an analogy as I try to understand his application to “technology” in Aramis, because in PO, Latour argues for the inclusion of nonhuman actors in an analysis of environmental and ecological issues. Because I am interested in environmental discourse(s), I have been frustrated when that when conducting Critical Discourse Analysis, nonhuman actors are never accounted for—even when they are manipulated within the discourse; while they are actors, they are never counted as actors because they are not human!

Back to what I am gleaning from Latour in Aramis: although Latour is a kind of social constructionist, he departs from SCs at just my last point: it does not account for inanimate or nonhuman objects or subjects (like plants or animals). But in reality, all these actors—which he calls actants—are recruited, almost hailed or interpellated (though not discursively) in the Althusserian sense, into a network. We should, however, not confuse this network with a web-like structure such as the Internet. IT is more like a jumble of marionettes, whose strings are entangled and pull on both one another and the puppeteers—animating all involved. So all intertwined actants work one another; none are privileged—not even the political—so no delimitation or delineation exists within the construct of the network among actants, network, artifacts, technology. I am guessing that is his same take on “nature.” (Interestingly, Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma and Botany of Desire makes a similar, if more poetic argument).

I am still working all this out in my head; it has not clicked completely fro me in terms of why this is so important vis a vis technology…but I am sometimes dull of mind. Van Ittersum brings it home for me much more solidly—if less “creatively” than Latour. I so struggle when someone like Latour or Eco weds theory with fiction.

ANT, and interweaving threads

2008-10-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

Van Ittersum (2008) provides a clear explanation of Actor Network Theory (ANT) which helps draw together several of Latour’s works. Van Ittersum says that ANT is a process of "mapping," including both humans and non-humans, and focusing on "acts of translation" (p. 145). He also explains, following from Latour, that ANT investigates mediators and intermediaries as types of actions possible for actors. Mediators invoke some sort of translation or transforming, whereas intermediaries act as a conduit.

The style of Latour’s Aramis (2006) was engaging, and the content certainly thought-provoking, but simultaneously, the theoretical implications were wide-ranging and at times a bit overwhelming. Consequently, I found Van Ittersum’s article helpful as a means of pulling together several of the important terms and strands from Latour’s work, many of which also appear in other works we've read so far.

Several of the key points, many which seem to carry across the other readings we’ve done this semester so far, include:

* A rejection of retrospective, Whiggish accounts (e.g. Van Ittersum, p. 146). STS, at least in my exposure so far, seems to consistently resist the Progress motif.

* Symmetry- Latour identifies the importance of symmetry by noting the meaningless of calling something a success or failure (p. 78). He suggests in place of such useless categories, we employ a “relationism” (p. 79). Relationism recognizes the interconnections between actors, including both humans and non-humans, and the ever-multiplying (?) interpretations possible. This is further suggested late in the text when Latour suggests the RATP itself had identified Aramis as both success and failure (p. 263) and as the engineering/sociology student struggles to compose a report about Aramis.

* Follow the actors. Latour explains, “Since every study has to limit its scope, why not encompass it within the boundaries proposed by the interviewees themselves?” (p. 19) and “We just follow the players” (p. 10). This also resonates with Bijker’s justification of his snowball sampling technique.

* Allowance for flexibility/indeterminancy. Latour explains the necessity of “respect for indeterminancy” (p. 30) and Van Ittersum observes, “ANT argues against accounts that attempt to produce a singular, definitive analysis of a project” (p. 148).

I’ve also found several entirely new (to me) ways of thinking/speaking/writing about technology within this coupling of texts. Probably the most striking one is the treatment of the technologies themselves as “characters.” I didn’t find this happening overtly in the earlier texts this semester. When Latour discussed the lack of depth in his characters (p. 55), it felt like some of the critiques we give and receive in creative writing classes. Initially, likely due to this association, I read it as a self-imposed critique of his human characters, e.g. the engineer turned sociology student. However, as I continued reading, it became clearer to me that the technology of Aramis and all its literal and potential component parts were also being depicted as potential characters. This takes personification to a whole new extreme. Upon a re-reading of the introduction, I identified this 'machines as characters' approach as stemming from Latour’s concern with acknowledging the density and context of the machines in order to encourage greater respect for machines as “cultural objects” (p. viii).

Aramis and writing technologies

2008-10-05T18:06:00.000-07:00

After the first page in chapter one, I was pretty confused (but it got easier): Latour wasn’t kidding when he described the book’s format in the prologue. I thought this was going to be like Bijker and Gitelman, but the format of the book actually fit the content really well. Latour adjusted his writing to his argument: a technology is multifaceted and involved in a network of contexts: social, political, financial, scientific, etc.) Therefore, his book wasn’t a novel, an academic treatise, a collection of historical documents, or an opinion, but took advantage of all aspects involved in the creation of such a study.
“Either you change the world to adapt it to the nominal Aramis, or else, yes, you need – you needed – to change Aramis” (Latour p. 292). Aramis died because those involved in its creation “believed in the autonomy of technology” (Latour p. 292). To connect with Van Ittersum, “objects are neither passively dominated by people’s will, nor all-powerful in their ability to control humans. Instead, objects and people shape each other through their interactions” (p. 145). Aramis wasn’t an all-powerful idea incarnate, but instead it needed to interact with the society in which it would be placed.
To connect this text with writing and writing technologies:
-Latour supports the careful consideration of the interrelations between technology and the social, thereby acknowledging the effects of writing technologies on society (the writer) and vice versa.
-To reappropriate Latour: “[Writing/writing technologies is/are] not in a context; [they give themselves] a context, or sometimes [do] not give [themselves] one. What is required is not to ‘replace [writing/writing technologies] in [its/their] context’…but to study the way [writing/writing technologies is/are] contextualized or decontextualized” (p. 133). I think this relates to the relevant social groups (Bijker) that engage with a technology. According to Latour, “The context is not the spirit of the times which would penetrate all things equally. Every context is composed of individuals who do or do not decide to connect the fate of a project with the fate of the small or large ambitions they represent” (p. 137). The context for Aramis was not the zeitgeist of the 24 or so years of its ‘life,’ but instead was composed if the spaces, people, ideas, politics, etc. that drove its creation. So, how is writing contextualized through different social groups using different writing technologies today? How do these technologies contextualize the writing done by those different social groups?
Therefore, to return to Latour, “Aramis had not incorporated any of the transformations of its environment. It had remained purely an object, a pure object. Remote from the social arena, remote from history; intact” (p. 280). Thus, as Latour’s sociology intern argues, “they really succeeded in separating technology from the social arena! They really believe in the total difference between the two” (p. 287).
(Warning: rant below…)
Aramis was an object on a pedestal with, what seemed to be, rather stubborn engineers that made sure it stayed away from revision, adaptation, and, God forbid, an actual consumer. This is the same problem with traditional writing instruction (i.e. my high school and undergrad English courses): here’s your mode, here’s your medium, this is writing, and it’s alphabetic, linear, print, and that’s all you need to know. Writing technologies have been perfected, we are comfortable with them, and nothing is allowed to change.

What’s so wrong about changing things? Or at least allowing for the fact that literate practices aren’t static?

Aramis and Me

2008-10-05T16:26:00.000-07:00

Maybe I am crazy (which could be), maybe the sore throat medicine I was taking this weekend messed with my mind, or maybe I watched too many episodes of Saved by the Bell, but I loved Latour’s book. Now, I hope I just got the message right!

First, I have read articles and web pages online, but this is the first time I have read an entire book online. And it really changed how I read versus reading the physical book. Since I couldn’t highlight and comment in the book or even download and save the book, I decided to take notes, which proved to be really helpful. I didn’t really think much about reading online until after I finished the book, but I am more than willing to read more books online – maybe an Amazon Kindle will find its way on my Christmas list after all.

Onto the book, what I gathered from the creative work was the influence of research and environment on technological ideas and innovations. Research seemed to be a reoccurring theme toward the end of the book. Those working on Aramis didn’t research throughout the project (as the environment, context and time changed) – Aramis stayed constant, which was related to its death (I just loved the murder mystery aspect of the book - so creative!). It didn’t seem as if the actors involved with the project really communicated as much as they should have to keep the project alive.

Some other key things that stuck out to me were, ‘technology follows ideas,’ ‘innovations have to interest people and things at the same time,’ ‘no technological project is technological first and foremost,’ ‘technological project is not in a context, it gives itself a context’ and calling projects innovated projects or research projects. I was also interested in the idea of anthropomorphism – I don’t know why, it just seemed like a really neat concept.

Overall though, I feel as though this book brought together readings from earlier in the semester. I could see some use of relevant social groups, and actors, and who is in control (ie politics). And, I must say this is one of the few technology books that have made me laugh.

ARAMIS

2008-10-05T08:20:00.001-07:00

I'm having a really hard time writing a post this week. After finishing Aramis, I'm not sure where to begin or what to comment on. I feel like I've read 300 pages of really dense and complicated prose, and all that I've taken away is the idea that technologies will fail unless people compromise, negotiate, and change their minds. Aramis failed because people were unwilling to change it in relation to shifting circumstances and varying social demands. Latour writes that by insisting on the purity of the nominal Aramis, and avoiding the work of renegotiation, the engineers ended up with nothing. He claims that because the engineers hated research, its uncertainty and contingency, they were unable to succeed. Latour explains that, if something is physically impossible, then you must change it into something that is physically possible. You can't expect the thing to autonomously become possible. If you can't get funding for a project, you need to work to persuade people to fund the project. You can't expect to the project itself to persuade people. He avoids calling the idea untenable or infeasible because he insists that an idea can--and must--change. (At least, that's what I'm taking away--perhaps I'm misreading).

I think I buy into what Latour is saying, but, then again, there is a part of me that wants to reject him, or at least, reject the conclusion that the if you fail to compromise, then your project is a failure. In other words, I don't see a problem with giving up on an idea when you've determined that, in order to make it work, you would need to change it--or yourself--into something that you don't really want. The engineers who wanted nominal Aramis, but could not convince others to accept, or could not transform the material world to implement, nominal Aramis, had the right to terminate the project. They don't have to renegotiate and accept an Araval, if they don't want to.

Now, Latour would probably argue that it's better to make something--even if it's not exactly what you set out for--rather than come up completely empty-handed. He would say that it's human nature to compromise and negotiate, and it's the only way to get things done. I agree. But I also, think that there are times when people won't or can't accept a compromise. And, if they can't accept a compromise and can't convince people to see things their way, then the only thing they can do is shut things down. Maybe, their refusal to compromise, will force people to see things their way in the future.

I guess part of my insistence on this point is my tendency to draw parallels between those who wanted the nominal Aramis and those who wanted, say, civil rights in the 1960's (and still want them today). This is a stretch, so don't go with me if you don't want. But I think I see a parallel between the social negotiations that go on when trying to construct a more perfect technology and the social negotiations that go on when trying to construct a more perfect world. MLK, in a social justice project, was willing to negotiate on some things, but he was also unwilling to negotiate on basic principles (EG. non-violence) which he saw as vital to his project (if you've ever read Why We Can't Wait you know what I'm talking about). Meanwhile, the Aramis engineers were willing to negotiate on some things, but unwilling to negotiate on basic principles (EG. non-material couplings) which they saw as vital to their project. Neither King nor Aramis engineers would have their projects if they had to give up their basic principles. And, to me, that's okay. Maybe, both projects came to a halt because of this refusal to compromise. But maybe it's better to shut things down, then it is to change the project into something that you don't really want.

PRTs STILL IN DEVELOPMENT

2008-10-05T08:02:00.001-07:00

Out of curiosity, I google searched "personal rapid transit system." I recommend doing it yourself to see the wealth of opinions about the "feasibility" of such a system in the United States. The following links provides some interesting accounts of what a system would look like, cost, do, etc. The first link contains the most information--arguments and counterarguments regarding the PRT. The second link has some really cool videos, worth watching if you have a minute. The third link is an abstract about the PRT in Chicago mentioned at the end of Latour's book. Apparently, the "system found no market"there, but it is now "free" to seek investment capital and become commercial.

http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_prt001.htm
http://prt.blip.tv/rss
http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?0105298

44 inches wide and a vertical masthead...Hearst and Pulitzer roll in their graves

2008-09-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

I’m really interested in newspaper design changes: why they happen, what’s the end goal, what informs the design/rhetorical choices, etc. I knew this was going to be something I could look at from a variety of angles, and since I’m not sure exactly what my focus will be, I’m going to use this blog post to generate some ideas and (hopefully) organize my thoughts into something coherent and useful.

I like to check out www.poynter.org regularly, and something caught my eye this morning: three newspapers have just undergone redesigns (Chicago Tribune, The Oklahoman, and the Hartford Courant). The Hartford Courant’s new design is especially intriguing, considering their use of the masthead: it’s vertical! (Check out http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2008/09/hartford-courant-redesign-launched-today/ for screenshots and a brief analysis.) Traditionally the masthead included a period at the end, and while it went away for awhile, it came back recently and the new design incorporates this in an unusual way: ‘Hartford Courant’ is vertical, and then the period draws the eye to the horizontally placed ‘com.’ The masthead now references the newspaper’s web site www.hartfordcourant.com which seems like an almost implicit (explicit?) nod towards the importance of the web site over the print edition. Or maybe it’s just PR.

I’m not sure what my research question will be, but I do think I’m going to choose a specific newspaper and do some form of diachronic analysis of its design changes using an old design, the present design, and the present web design. I’m interested in how the newspaper conveys meaning through these different designs and media, and how/if the designs and media influence the meaning. I don’t want this to simply be an explanation of what changes (because that’s obviously not productive), but I would like to see how the print/electronic media work (in)dependently in this situation.

It’s also quite informative to read what journalists and editors say in response to the redesigns. (These quotes can be found at: www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=151319) Jonathon Berlin, Chicago Tribune design director, says, “A newspaper in 2008 needs to be able to change frequently.” In addition, Yvette Walker, director of presentation at the Oklahoman, discusses three major changes she is really excited about: “the size of the paper, the use of color and a new way to present information through tighter writing. You really can't ignore the size of the paper; it's getting narrower -- to a 44-inch web. I believe we're the first U.S. paper to go 44 inches. That's a really big part of it. So I can't leave that out.”

44 inches wide?! I remember when newspapers were printed on huge tabloid paper, and in the last ten years or so inches have been shaved off to cut costs. How does this inform/influence their design choices? It certainly seems like a big influence. Stories will obviously be shorter, but how will photos and other visual aspects work on the page? There must be serious thought about the rhetorical choices made when redesigning a paper, especially with a paper that will also get smaller.

Anyway, these are just some ideas and points of interest that I’ll start with. Any suggestions are welcome!

Internet Intoxication and Other Ways to Spend the Weekend

2008-09-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

As far as our projects go, I remember hearing that they were supposed to be group projects—but the syllabus doesn’t seem to be on Vista in order for me to verify this. So, unsure if I will have to align my ideas to those of others, I’m going to solider on and do some more brainstorming.

On a side note, can you (Pam) put up that brainstorming document on Vista (we did this in our last class)? That would help out a lot with future planning.

Obviously, my idea is going to involve the Internet in some way. I think I have a little bit of an edge in this subject due to A.) the fact that most of my waking life is been spent online, and B.) I’m involved in some pretty large communities from which I can gather a lot of data. When it comes to the latter point, I have a lot of experience as a producer and consumer of online text, so I have a lot of information to draw upon. But what exactly am I looking for?

After looking at the ideas I generated last Monday, I think I may want to focus on the role Web 2.0 is playing in changing the way online texts are produced. Today, it’s very strange when an article/blog post does not allow comments; in fact, one of the blogs I read doesn’t have comments enabled, and it’s a constant source of annoyance—especially when I have something to say. I’m thinking about looking at how online reading has become more of a dialogic process as opposed to how monologic it used to be. Before, discussion and reactions to an Internet article were once relegated to message boards tucked away in the corners of a web site (if they existed at all). Now, your comments on an article from The Onion's AV Clubcan have just as much space and visibility the writer’s own text on that very page--despite your lack of expertise on the matter.

See? I used the words “monologic” and “dialogic.” If that’s not a setup for a good grad school paper, I don’t know what is.

As said in class, with the advent of Web 2.0, many articles/blog posts are now left open-ended, or are written with the intention to produce more text than the writer has produced in said article/blog post. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve done this many times at the different blogs I work/worked for; and there’s often a sense that the article is not “complete” until those comments are added. As with my most recent post here, I’m also seeking a reaction to the news I posted about—and it’s not just because I’m a lazy blogger. I could have asked people their reaction to this issue, and then added these quotes to my post, but that’s really not how things are done on the Internet now. If I had closed the subject, there would be no room for discussion or response; and my duties as a blogger include both generating and moderating conversation.

Generally, I’m wondering if I can write about the shift from monologic to dialogic writing online—if I’m using those terms correctly. I guess my research question would be “How is Web 2.0 changing the role of online writers?”

Project? I project? What?

2008-09-29T06:32:00.000-07:00

See also: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/dloads.htm (takes about 17 minutes to download at 500kbps and is roughly 80 minutes long)

So, what I would like to do with the project is look at items like the film linked above, and discuss how the internet has been socially transformed from an archival/research tool into a medium of socio-political information distribution. Sub-topics I am interested in regarding this are subversive publication and discourse communities, open access to information, non-mainstream discourse methods developed through internet technologies, etc. etc..

The problem I am having is that I am horrible at framing projects like this in terms of "scholarly/academic" questions/arguments. In Dr. Huot's Literacy:... class, a colleague of ours often asks if it is possible to "use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house" and items like _Zeitgeist_ seem to be doing just that: using the internet (a creation of the military-industrial complex) to distribute information directly opposed to "the master's house."

I don't want to limit myself to this movie alone, and am beginning to scour the interweb (har har) for more subversive material (surely, there is more than enough material in this area). What I am concerned about is whether or not there is any theory/scholarly analysis of this sort of subversive use of the internet that I should specifically be looking for. Anyone know?

Totally inappropriate in terms of our project? I intend to frame my paper on new means of discourse, distribution, writing using the internet as a gateway/medium/etc. Too broad?

E.

Logistical Challenges

2008-09-28T18:37:00.000-07:00

Here’s my broad research question: What is writing within the context of composing a profile for an online dating site? More specifically, I will investigate the following question: What rhetorical considerations do writers employ as aids to invention while composing online profiles on a dating website?

My current plans for this project include two aspects. For this class, I’m intending to run 1-2 online focus groups of dating site users who have previously composed profiles. In one of Dr. Newman’s rhetoric classes, I’m attempting a rhetorical analysis of a corpus of profiles, with a focus on invention/topoi.

Both parts of the project have some challenges at this point. I think I’ve got a decent site to hold online focus groups—it’s called DimDim. I checked out Adobe Connect (thanks for the lead!), but without a paying membership, they only allow 3 people in a chat, including the moderator. Dimdim allows up to 20, although my groups will be 4-5 participants, I hope. Here’s where the initial logical challenge comes in—I have to recruit participants. My initial intention is to subscribe to a dating site, and then send emails to a random set of other users requesting their participation. I’m a bit dubious about whether I’ll find enough willing participants. It appears that I need them to give me an email address to enroll them in a Dimdim discussion, unless I operate the conference as an open room, which makes me nervous about crashers. Alternately, if I cannot find enough participants, I could probably put together a less elegant snowball sample. But, my preference is the randomly selected groups to provide more control for selection biases. I intend to run two groups—an all male group and an all female group. I have the questions mapped out for the groups already, although I’m not going to post them here in the public domain.

Regarding recruitment, I’d be quite grateful for ideas and comments on my current plans. Also, if I wind up doing a snowball sample, I will probably be asking all of you for potential leads. :)

The second part of the study, the rhetorical analysis of profiles, is also tricky. Here I’m concerned most about building a reliable study without imposing intentionality bias. I can’t look at profiles and know what cognitive processes informed their composition. And, I ought not to conclude that all aspects which appear related to invention processes were created in deliberate fulfillment of invention heuristics. So, I guess here I’ll start coding and see what happens.

So now that I’ve rambled on too much about my own stuff, this article is tremendously helpful when thinking about the methods involved in formulating and writing up a study:

Smagorinsky, P. (2008). The method section as conceptual epicenter in constructing social science research reports. Written Communication 25, pp. 389-411. He writes from a reviewer’s perspective and sets a high bar in terms of accurately depicting methods, but also provides some useful tips for the methods design process itself.

Project - sigh

2008-09-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

I am not sure if I am any further than I was in class last week. In fact, since I have been reading articles about my topic, I think I am more excited about the project, but frustrated since I have pinned down exactly what I want to do. Mostly my problem is that I come up with a great topic for my literacy class (since I want to do something similar) but it has nothing to do with technology - or I come up with a great topic for technology that has nothing to do with anything writing related. Needless to say I am floating above my landing -- hoping to land soon -- with about 20 research questions for my other class. Heavy sigh.

Here is what I am working with/thinking about. I am interested in the assumptions producers of reproductive health information have about the women who access that information. From the research I have done, on Kent's campus, women have 3 face-to-face points of contact for information: Women's Resource Center, Women's Health Clinic and Planned Parenthood. And then, whatever they find online (with all 3 F2F points of contact having websites and links to other pages). Each location has a slightly different mission, and I am interested in the assumptions these centers make. I want to look at the print material in the centers and the information online (where those from outside of the university could find and use). I was thinking of limiting the information I look at to birth control and pregnancy, since reproductive health is broad. So, I guess my question would be something like: What assumptions do women's health centers make, when producing written information, about their users online and in print?

Thoughts? Workable? Back to the drawing board?

project

2008-09-28T07:39:00.000-07:00

If I remember correctly, this week we are supposed to blog about our seminar paper ideas. The research questions that I'd like to explore are: How does a the same Presidential address get mediated and remediated by different technologies (i.e. what gets accentuated, added, taken away as the text is transformed/transmitted?) In other words, how much does a "message" get altered by different media? What contraints do various iterations of the same text place on readers/viewers--and what are the implications of this in terms of civic literacy?

In some of my other course work I've been studying the rhetorical aspects of "call to arms" speeches by U.S. Presidents, and trying to figure out these speeches persuade. Obviously, to answer my research question, I could study any Presidential address. However, I'd like to stick with one of the ones I've been working on: Bush's 2002 address to the public in which he laid out the "threat from Iraq." I'd like to study 1) various mass mediation of the entire speech (a television broadcast, an audio broadcast, a transcript) and 2) some mass remediations of the speech which excerpt and recontextualize parts of the entire text (evening news stories--30 second soundbites; and perhaps a newspaper article on the Internet).

It occurs to me that all of these are important (re)mediations of the text and all of them change how the text is read and understood. I mentioned in class how the live CNN broadcast of the speech included the words "Showdown in Iraq"on the bottom of the screen--adding something to the text that a radio listener, say, would not have consumed. I'm assuming that most TV news broadcasts which "reported" the speech selected clips that accentuated the threat from Iraq (and deemphasized any doubt about the need to go to war)--but I'm not sure of this and it's one of the things I really want to find out. Interestingly enough, the speech was NOT broadcast live on the major networks because, of course, Fear Factor is much more important than a President making a case for war. Because of this, I think that the news broadcasts which discuss the speech may have been how most--or at least a lot--of the people learned about it. This makes it important for me to discuss these news broadcasts, but this presents some challenges (see below)

I'm already running into a number of problems/challenges that maybe you all could give me some advice on. First, the scope. I'm really interested in getting a number of examples of mass mediation in different media, but I'm not sure how many is enough and where to stop. The speech itself was broadcast on TV, on radio, and probably over the Internet. The speech transcript was also disseminated in newspapers and online. The speech was also remediated on tv evening news broadcasts, on radio news broadcasts, in newspaper articles, online news websites, etc. Part of me wants to look at a large number of these (re)mediations because I think it's interesting just how much the "message" gets replayed for the public and the consequences of this on public understanding. However, I can't possibly study every or even most of the mediations of this speech, so how should I limit myself? I was thinking perhaps of looking at the t.v. broadcast of the speech, a radio broadcast, and an online transcript of the speech on a website, a television t.v. news broadcast. Already this seems like too much and not enough for me to do. Any thoughts?

The second major problem I'm having is getting access to the things I want to study. At the whitehouse.gov website you can download a video, audio, and transcript of the speech. However, the video at the .gov website is not the video that live viewers watched. Those who viewed the speech live saw a news channnel video (including "Showdown in Iraq" or other such nonsense. So, I'd rather study a cable news broadcast. There are clips of a broadcast on youtube, but not the full speech. Does anyone know how, if, one can find the complete broadcast? I've searched and come up empty-handed. In addition, I've come up empty-handed when looking for T.V. news broadcasts that discussed the speech? Again, does anyone know how to get access to such broadcasts?

I think I have an interesting research question, but I'm sort of getting stonewalled as I try to look at versions of the speech to study.

Thanks in advance for any tips/advice you can throw my way,

John

changing writers and readers

2008-09-22T11:01:00.001-07:00

To begin, Gitelman references an issue that we discussed during the last class (i.e. cell phone as phone or as a writing tool); Gitelman “locat[es] machines and other textual devices in the instances of invention, in narratives that show each machine, device, or process to have been authored and appropriated out of many different possibilities relevant to the making of meaning” (p. 4). She argues that the invention of new ways of writing or kinds of writing “presupposes a model of what writing and reading are and can be” (p. 4). She maintains that inscription practices and technologies are “not ‘our’ theory of language. Instead, they are modest, local, and often competitive embodiments of the way people wrote, read, and interacted over the perceived characteristics of writing and reading” (p. 4). In addition, Gitelman argues that “changes to writing and reading matter in large measure because they equal changes to writers and readers. New inscriptions signal new subjectivities” (p. 11).

Enough quotations…I just wanted to set down the context before I extrapolate/ramble/technologize my words.

A good illustration of the phenomena occurring throughout the above quotes is that of Edison’s phonograph, the purpose he saw it fulfilling, and the purpose it eventually fulfilled. Business recording device vs. music/audio playback machine. This example, to me at least, really points to Gitelman’s argument (above quote) that these inventions help create new kinds of writing and meaning-making, but also presuppose our theories of writing and reading.

The phonograph was originally intended as a business recording device. Edison thought it would, essentially, be an artificial (cyborg?) phonographer. Yet, it opened up an entire new understanding of what we see as writing (and reading). I think we could look at this phenomenon with many other technologies in mind as well: the cell phone, the computer, clay tablets to paper, etc. In any case, these technologies opened up new locations for writing to take place, and while these new practices are not ‘our theory’ of language (see above quote), they do allow us to see how we work within/outside language (and within/outside our theory of language).

Before the personal computer was en vogue, I never imagined a liquid crystal screen would perform as a writing surface. Gradually, my theories of language and writing changed with my practices and the technologies I used. I am certain that my social interactions and beliefs have also been affected by these practices and technologies, and thus, as Gitelman argues, I am exposed to new subjectivities (see quote above). It is quite telling about a social group/society when a technology is used for a purpose of which it was not originally intended. This really gets at the idea that the meaning does not reside in the technology itself, but is created by the social groups and their interactions with the technology. Not everyone needs a phonograph to record business notes, but many people might want to hear a recording over and over again. The technology becomes meaningful, and its meaning changes when people interact with it and around it.

With Gitelman’s above quotes and Bijker’s work in mind, how we can address writing today? What are the affordances and constraints of the technologies and practices with/in which we engage? How are we, today, changing our theory of writing and language, and how does this affect our use of technologies available? (I’m trying to get some questions down so that I/we can think about these things some more.)

Gitelmania II: "The past didn't go anywhere..."

2008-09-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

In my reading of _Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines_ by Gitelman, I also felt a certain
worm-holding" between the way technology was consumed in the late 1800's and now, like Bob--hence the appropriation of the title (property being theft, ghost writers, aLl YoUr BaSe BeLoNg[ING] tO uS and all...). However, I was somewhat more interested in social intention in terms of how technology is used. For example, on page 68 Gitelman writes: "Amusement seemed to contaminate the pragmatic purpose of the phonograph. Participants to the convention wanted the two functions [business and entertainment] to be entirely separate, because they considered amusement wholly secondary to their product and business." When I read this passage, I immediately remember back in 1999 (again, right around the time of this book's publication) when they first started putting computers into use where I worked at the Metro Food Market corporation. Their intention was to use the computers specifically, and singularly, for payroll and store projections. When this happened, I was an office clerk at my store who was known to spend a good deal of time sitting behind a computer when I wasn't at work. So, when the computer arrived at our store, I was asked to learn to do payroll and write store projections because I was one of the few people in the store that had experience with the new technology. When I kept informing them that my "technological frame"---surely I didn't use this term them...but it seems appropriate now--was that of a gamer, more than once I was asked why someone would "waste such a powerful tool playing games." At first, the internet, solitaire, etc. were all blocked on the computer as each store was connected through an internal, closed network. Like the phonographs purchased in the late 1800's, the upper management at MFM inc. "mistook their own interests for the interests of consumers. Accordingly, they assumed that low-paid office staff and good-time Charlies lacked the necessary skill, attention, and incentive to operate the phonograph [or computer] correctly or maintain its still-quirky mechanism." (p. 68)

Yes, this is a singular example of bogus limitations being placed on a technology by a specific group, but it high-lights for me how sometimes "technological frames" erroneously pigeon-hole technologies as they, the technologies, push their way towards mainstream acceptance. Yes, computer is a powerful business tool. Yes, the computer is a powerful research tool. Correct me if I am wrong (someone...give me a verbal slap), but wasn't the concept of the internet developed by the military as a research/archival system? Did they have the foresight to see the way the internet would explode in terms of social networking, media consumption, etc. at or around the time of Gitelman's book being published? I can't imagine that they could, but there are many things in this world--income tax, for example--that I would not dream up on the worst drugs. Gitelman continues, "The inventor of the phonograph, contemporary pundits, novelists, and capitalists had all misconceived the phonograph. They had all been wrong in pronouncing the function and the future of the new technology." (p. 69)

Carrying this train of thought further, could the amalgam of scientists and programmers that initiated the internet (or whatever they called it) forecast the current way millions currently use the internet as social networking and media consumption technology? What would Al Gore have thought of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or YouTube back in the earlier conceptions of the internet(Har har har har--I'm a silly boy, sorry)? Case in point, and somehow in my mind mimicking the late 19th century reaction to hearing a human voice carried out of a machine, is the urban myth of Chuck Palahnuik's readings of his story "Guts".

At the end of his composite novel _Haunted_ (a collection of 24 stories forming a gestalt of horror and depravity), Palahnuik speaks, outside of his text, of the problems he has had giving readings of one particular short story from the collection. At each reading, members of the audience would begin fainting and/or vomiting. In one reported case, a man had a seizure in the middle of the reading. For over a year I searched for some local reading of this story by the author (http://www.seizureandy.com/stuff/guts.htm if you would like to see a text copy of this story). At a point where I was about to give up...I checked somewhere else...YouTube, and found a submission of Palahnuik himself giving a reading. I didn't faint or vomit (of course, I have read the gruesome story probably 10-15 times...), but it was fascinating to hear the story in the author's own mouth.

If you want to check it out, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7oC2ZIQ4JI . But be warned, it is one of the most horrifying, graphic stories I have ever read. But it changed the way I heard/read the story. And I think that is something that Gitelman was trying to point out. Media...technology. Strange bedfellows.

E.

Noises, silences, and blank spaces

2008-09-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

One of the most fascinating recurring touch-points of the text was Gitelman’s (1999) descriptions of the breakdown of the divisions between “orality, aurality, and textuality” (p. 185), through her discussion of the noise stretching across these categories. Gitelman gives a brief overview of some of the definitions and workings of noise:

The ‘noises of speech,’ as scientists noted right away about the phonograph, get lost in mechanical reproductions. ‘Noise’ is Jacques Atali’s term for the political economy of music. It is similarly William Paulson’s term for encoded culture, for ‘anything that gets mixed up with messages as they are sent’ (ix).Its very mixed-up quality of inarticulation makes noise difficult to identify
and explain. (p.183)

She nicely sets up this metaphor of noise in several places in the text, which encouraged me to start thinking about the possibility of noise ala Bijker’s model. I see shades of Bijker in Gitelman’s discussion on p. 4 where she brings in the concepts of symmetry and workability. Noise though adds a more nuanced notion of the various possibilities between working and non-working categories. Noise, potentially a nuisance for some, is alternately what is sought by others, i.e. as in the “noises of speech” mentioned above. In her discussion of patents, Gitelman suggests the linguistic difficulties in transferring the noises of the phonograph and the records it played into legal discussions about copyrights. Who owns the noise? The one who makes it, the one who hears it, the one who writes it, the one who produces it, the one who performs it? These issues were new due to the previously assumed ephemeral quality of noise.

She brings the issue of noise to the fore in her discussion of “noiseless” typewriters (p. 216-218). At the end of this section, she notes the creation of “the sound of blank space” (p. 218), which is particularly intriguing. On my initial reading of this, I wanted to disagree with her due to music’s centuries’ old use of silence. One can certainly play silences in music, and also use them in conversations in a highly rhetorical manner. To cite a musical example, Nicholas Cook (1990) examines musical and non-musical listening and describes the effects achieved through John Cage’s entirely silent composition, “4’33.” Cook states, “The effect of this piece in live performance (it hardly makes sense to envisage a recording of it) is to create an expectation of musical sound, which in the event, remains unfulfilled; this results in a distinctly heightened sensitivity on the listener’s part to the environment of the performance” (p. 11).

However, as I re-read Gitelman’s passage, it seemed that she was making a distinction between blank space and silence. I remain uncertain of the possibility of blank space in an aural sense, but I do see her point in terms of the visual, so this provides further means of complicating the movements between these categories which occurs with the introduction of the technologies she describes.

Talking Gravestones

2008-09-21T17:16:00.001-07:00

This isn't the article that I was looking for, but it is for the same invention. What are your thoughts on a talking tombstone? I can't remember exactly where it was mentioned in the book, but I know it came up somewhere.

This has to be my favorite comment of the ones on BBC News' site.

"Imagine if all the graves were just looping video. At night, you would just here this continuous distant murmuring sound coming from the church, as all the dead seemingly chat away to each other! Creepy."

Gitelmania

2008-09-21T13:32:00.001-07:00

I found something very haunting about a particular excerpt from Gitelman. Why "haunting?" It made me doubt my own humanity. Here's a quote from page 210:

Skilled typists do not look at the keys or at the body of the machine; rather, they experience what William James undeniably would have called a "cultivated motor automatism" or a mild case of posession..."

I replicated that entire quote completely without taking my eyes off of Gitelman's book. I am a cyborg.

But I digress. Gitelman's book interested me primarily because of the similarities of then versus now; I don't think anyone would argue (though you are more than welcome to) that the Internet is our own world-changing turn of the century technology, much as the phonograph, typewriter, motion pictures et. al completely transformed the world during the transition from the 19th century to the 20th. Gitelman does address this in the epilogue of her book, but since the time of this book’s publication, the Internet has grown exponentially—and this doesn’t include the amount of people who can now access this technology. Since 1999, we have seen the integration of movies, television, and music on the Internet in ways that have only been made possible in the last few years. But before I go into this more, I’d like to discuss a few of the interesting similarities about the anxieties caused by technology between then and now.

Of course, we have the initial redefining of “reading” and “writing,” which (I’m pretty sure) is a major theme throughout Gitelman’s work. Reading and writing changed from an activity a human being could fully take part in—i.e., writing/reading letters—to an activity where the human element was a bystander. We saw with the record that, even though the sound itself left physical traces on a disc, no reading of the letter “a” produced the same evidence; so, here we have a version of “reading” and “writing” that can only be inscribed and interpreted by a machine. This is actually something that I talk about in my writing classes, that reading and writing exists in more than just the literal ways we assume exist. For example, I use the work of James Paul Gee to show my students how both “reading” and “writing” exist in the semiotic domain of video games, and I’d like to think that it blows their minds. Either that, or they’re just sleepy.

Back to the Internet: it’s a shame that Gitelman didn’t write this book a few years later, because some of the things she mentions in the epilogue really exploded right around the time of its publication (Is there an updated version anywhere?). Between 1999-2000, the Napster phenomenon exploded, requiring many modifications to copyright law, and redefining the ideas of both “intellectual property” and “theft,” just as we saw with records, piano rolls, etc. And the growth of broadband since the printing of Gitelman’s book—I’m not sure if dial-up even exists anymore—has only complicated matters as it facilitates the copying and transfer of intellectual property. It’s an issue that fascinates me endlessly—probably because I’ll be thrown into prison one day for showing a copyrighted YouTube clip to a room full of students.

Oh, and here’s an interesting article about the battle over Winnie the Pooh. Interesting stuff.

http://iblsjournal.typepad.com/illinois_business_law_soc/2006/03/winnie_the_pooh.html

Democratizing Technologies

2008-09-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

I think one of Gitleman’s major points in writing this book is to challenge, once again, the idea of technological determinism—particularly the optimistic idea that new technologies will deterministically pave the way for more democratic societies. In the “Coda,” she criticizes scholars who suggest that digital hypertexts will democratize reading, education, and the social order, and, by the same token, she criticizes scholars who produce “shockingly reductive” histories which suggest technological revolutions which made modern democratizing technologies possible (p. 220).

Gitelman discusses how the phonograph was lauded as a democratizing technology that would bring classical music and excellent ideas to the masses. She then goes on to discuss how, in practice, the technology was used to reinforce racial stereotypes as “coon songs” became all the rage. Similarly, Gitelman discusses how the typewriter seemed to make possible a kind of “automatic writing”; however, in practice, the this “automatic writing” was to be carried out by women—for men—in a economic system that was hierarchically structured along gender lines. As a bit of an aside, I’m reading a very interesting book called A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, in which the author discusses the advent of the airplane. Again the claims about the airplane were optimistic. Airplanes would “democratize” the war—making everyone vulnerable and exposed, thereby decreasing the likelihood of an attack. Moreover, people thought that airplanes would do away with the very causes of national conflict by bringing people closer to one another. The opinion that this technology would be used for bombing, making war more brutal and lethal than it had ever been, was simply preferred less than the vision of a more democratic, more peaceful future.

Now, I’m not saying that it should be assumed that any new technology will bring about the Armageddon. But I do wonder why there seems to be an impulse to crown each new technology as a force for human liberation. Perhaps, Gitelman’s most important point is that technologies must be understood within the social-historical-material-cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed. It stands to reason that as long as people continue to live in racist, sexist, and militaristic cultures, then racism, sexism and militarism will be written all over new technologies. Or to put it another way, we can expect that technologies will be used in ways that will reinforce existing patterns of injustice. Technologies will not by themselves correct injustice, just like laws will not by themselves correct injustice. What matters is how people make meanings for, and make use of, technologies.

Writing Machines, Authorship, Human Subjectivity

2008-09-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

One interesting idea to emerge from Gitleman’s book is the idea that human subjectivity is complicated by machines. I had never really given phonographs much thought before reading this book, and I had certainly not given a lot of thought to the notion that phonographs did something--“reading aloud”--that only human beings had done before. What does the “colonization of the body by the machine” (p. 146) mean for human beings? By the same token, we could also begin to question, as Gitelman does, the idea of authorship—whether it can be located at all, or whether it is located in the machine or the person. (These issues are still with us. A couple of semesters ago, we read an interesting piece by Deborah Brandt about the phenomenon of ghostwriting—and how ghostwriting complicates issues of authorship and plagiarism.)

Anyway, this got me thinking about a conversation I had with a friend (of a friend) of mine who works on the staff of a congressman in Washington. I had always wondered what became of letters, emails, and other correspondence that people send to politicians—recognizing that most politicians never saw the correpsondence that their constituents were sending them. Not surprisingly, these letters/emails are read by staff and immediately classified by the issue that they are addressing. Then, almost always, staff members retrieve from a computer database a stock response letter which is sent back in reply. In fact, the response letters are usually composed by ghostwriters at the beginning of a politician’s term in office. So, the response that a concerned citizen gets from a politician 1) almost certainly was not written by that politician, 2) most likely will not directly address any specific concerns that the citizen wrote about in the original letter, and, in fact, 3) may have been written years before the citizen even thought to correspond.

Of course, sometimes a letter actually makes its way to a politician’s desk. If the letter is a very touching human interest piece, it may make it to the politician. More interesting to me, if you include a line like--“I realize that you are never going to read this, but I thought I’d send it anyway”—you have a better chance of your letter actually making it to a politician’s desk. You may even receive a hand-written letter back from your favorite congressman/congresswoman!

But beware: and this gets me back to Gitelman, any “handwritten” response you receive was more than likely written by a machine which imitates the politician’s handwriting patterns. And once again, the machine is merely spitting out a form letter from a database of stock responses. Politicians realize that we value the time it takes them to write back a handwritten response, so they have a machine write—and sign—such letters for them (and us).

What do these handwriting machines say about human subjectivity? What do they say about authorship? What do they say about democracy and civic participation?

The start of reading aloud practices?

2008-09-20T19:34:00.001-07:00

Reading Gitelman’s book caused me to do a few random things – such as watch ‘My Fair Lady.’ I felt the inking to watch sound machines in use, and then spent time analyzing the place of the technology in Eliza’s life. Eliza is able to move up the cultural ladder from a flower girl to high society by having her voice recorded, listening to her voice, and then matching pitches so to change her dialect. I am assuming we all know the plot of the movie, so I am not going to go into much detail about what happens. I was surprised to read about the phonograph and other “talking technologies” in court rooms and business settings, and no by linguistics, such as Mr. Higgins. Wouldn’t this be around the same time the International Phonetic Alphabet is being developed? To me, it would just make sense for the linguists to want this piece of technology. I know it isn’t exactly what Gitelman was getting at in her text, but I thought it was an interesting connection between the book and the use of the technology in a popular film.

What I have really been thinking about was mentioned on page 145, “For the first time reading aloud was explicitly severed from the human subject.” I was thinking about how writers’ read their papers aloud to catch their own errors. We can ‘hear’ if something is wrong with our writing. Our voice becomes severed from us in a way that we don’t hear our voice per se, but we hear our words and are able to catch ourselves. It is almost as though our voice becomes some sort of an object, we are listening to a recording of our voice, when really it is in real time. I was wondering if maybe this practice, or the idea for this practice, came from these new technologies. That practitioners realized the benefits of these voice recording machines, and extended the concepts to just reading their own work aloud? I know that in the Writing Center the reading aloud practice is used in pretty much every session, yet little if any research has been done on reading aloud. It just seems to be a practice that we accept. We know it works, so we do it. But why does it work? How does hearing our work help us catch mistakes that we wouldn’t catch if we silently read to ourselves? Could the shift to the phonographs/gramophones as “talking machines” be the framework (or maybe just the start of the practice) of the reading aloud practice? If someone was to trace the practice of reading papers aloud, is this where that person would find the beginning? Does it make sense that this could be the beginning? It is necessarily the main shift from literate to oral, but it a shift as though literate and oral are becoming more like one. With these new technologies, you are now able to speak and have that spoken language recorded down, and played back – which from reading the text changed the way things worked. Just some ideas I was playing with.

Fair(y) Use

2008-09-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

I hope I embedded the video right. Fingers crossed. The reading for this week mentions copyright, and I couldn't help but think of this video everytime copyright came up. If you haven't seen it before, it is a 10 min movie on Fair Use and Copyright using clips from Disney movies -- so Fair Use in practice as well. I show this movie when I teach fair use, copy right and intellectual property and the students seem to enjoy it. And, becuase I love Harry Potter, the courts just ruled on the Harry Potter Fair Use case last week. It was a pretty interesting case (I followed it in April -- CNN article). Something worth looking at if you have a few extra moments.

2008-09-15T20:44:00.001-07:00

http://www.useit.com/papers/internetworld2008.html

The above article is a quick read, and beyond its humorous quality, is also generative of questions regarding the assumptions we make about technology (and what a certain technology might accomplish or require in the future).

Jakob Nielsen is an Internet usability expert, and while much of what he has written is not directly linked to rhetoric and composition, his work is relevant, especially to the things we are discussing with regards to writing technologies. In this specific article, Nielsen creates two possible seminar topics in which he thinks he could possibly discuss at the Internet World 2008 conference. This piece was written in 1998.

While it is amusing that Nielsen assumes the death of print media will occur by 2008 (see his first presentation topic), I do think that these assumptions point to some critical ideas concerning the social construction of technology, and the technical construction of society. Bijker discusses “implicit assumption[s] of linear development. Such assumptions were often found in earlier technology studies, sometimes at the level of the singular invention and sometimes in the genealogy of related innovations…Too easily, linear models result in reading an implicit teleology into the material, suggesting that ‘the whole history of technological development had followed an orderly or rational path, as though today’s world was the precise goal toward all decisions, made since the beginning of history, were consciously directed’ (Ferguson, 1974: 19)” (pp. 6-7). In addition, Bijker discusses the asymmetrical analysis of technology: “The focus on successful innovations suggests an underlying assumption that it is precisely the success of an artifact that offers some explanatory ground for the dynamics of its development” (p. 7).

In 1998, Nielsen, and I’m sure many others, assumed that the death of print news (and other texts) was imminent; it was simply a question of when. I’m sure I’ve thought about this possibility, and I still wonder if and when it might happen. In addition, it is interesting to think about why we might assume these technologies will “die”: is it because we think other technologies are superior, or is it because of the historical “death” of now obsolete technologies? For example, papyrus and clay tokens are no longer used as the dominant writing technologies/surfaces/graphic spaces in our society. We have replaced them with other, often quite similar, technologies. Paper, for instance. It is versatile, cheap, portable, and, sadly, often too easily wasted. The only thing that I can imagine might replace paper is some form of electronic medium such as a paper-like electronic tablet.

But it seems that our writing practices have to change before we make the technology change. Why would we make electronic “paper” unless we have no use for traditional paper? Or that traditional paper no longer fulfills our expanding needs? These questions point to the working and non-working technology Bijker discusses. When paper is no longer a working technology, it might be due to a technology that has become dominant, and essentially, has become the working technology. But does it become the working technology because we’ve created a technology that usurps the former (paper)? Or is it because we have changed our writing/communication practices, and out of necessity, we begin to use a different technology to fulfill our needs?

I’m not trying to explain the possible death of paper; I just want to ask questions about the relationship between our assumptions and the actualities that occur with the social construction of technology/technical construction of society. Any thoughts?

2008-09-15T10:23:00.001-07:00

I cant believe my student's inability to achieve even basic computer assignments. One thing that really threw me for a loop was the fact that they didnt even know what "rich text format" was. I explained that since i had a Mac and if they needed to send me projects or papers they would have to put the file in RTF...the amount of blank stares looking at me was laughable. Thus, i had to show the class what this format was and how to use it. I mean, i am totally not computer/technology savvy but i figured that the students would at least know the basic things that i know about computers, downloading, etc. apparently i was incorrect. It followed that i wanted them to email me an assignment on Vista and i ended up spending about 20mins with each group showing them how to use it. It does make me wonder though if perhaps the students are just being obstinate in their own way. i mean, i think they knew that i would help them and decided not to try and figure out the process themselves. i really do t hink that sometimes they are just not going to help us out any with the computer literacy because they expect to write with pencils and have papers collected in such a manner so this is their way of responding to the changing times (changing and also times that make it necessary to complete work because of the professors ability to view their work and when it was done). So, i agree with the overall problem of computer literacy in classes, and although i am not yet comfortable with adding blogs or facebook accounts in my class i know that i would run into many, many problems with my students as well if i did attempt such a thing.

Adventures in Technology

2008-09-15T00:08:00.000-07:00

To make it very, very clear, this is my "personal narrative" post for the week. I will post my analysis of text post later today before class.

So, this last week I had the brilliant idea of doing a very small "multi-modal" project with students involving FaceBook and the "Pieces of Flair" application. Assuming that they all had Facebook accounts, and had synced and activated their Kent State email accounts (I had been emailing them assignments, updates, etc. since the second day of class three weeks ago), I walked into 213 Sattefield Hall Friday thinking I was in for one of the easiest classes of the semester. Uff. So, not only did 6 of my students not have Facebook accounts, 2 students had somehow not even heard of Facebook, and one was stressing out about starting an account because she was worried that someone would assume her identity (I eventually convinced her that it was ok to put false information into the profile, so long as I knew it was her account). To complicate matters, at least 7 students had not synced and activated their Flashline account, so they couldn't log into the classroom computers at all. With one of my students trying her best to help multiple people sync up their accounts, but having little luck, in the end I logged in these 7 students as me into the laptop at their table, and then rushed a 10 minute demo on how to use the Microsoft "Paint" function to make image files so that they could make flair (for anyone here that doesn't know what flair is...basically you take an image--be it an image of text or a picture--and you make electronic buttons to post on your "flair board" on your Facebook profile. You can also trade these buttons and collect others that people have made...). I asked several times...did anyone have any questions? Any problems? Nope, they are good. Easy as pie.

Well, it is now four and a half hours before class...and 15 of 25 students have completed the assignment.

Technology...it's my friend! *sighs*

Elliot

layerings

2008-08-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

welcome to our blog ... our public writing space ... where we can reflect, think, discuss, argue, develop our individual & collective thoughts about technologies, particularly those involved in writing and literacy. we'll be immersed in philosophical, theoretical, practical, & empirical considerations of literacy technologies over the course of the next several months, and our emerging (& burgeoning) understandings will surely layer onto earlier readings & discussions & our lived experiences. this blog can be center of those layerings ... some of the work here will be required, some of it will be spur of the moment, some of it will be self-sponsored. hopefully a lot of it will be multimodal (surely an overused word but one which suggests the multiplicity of communicative possibilities available here - especially when thinking about writing technologies in our digital age, this range of modes should serve to shore up, reveal, and complicate our arguments). i'm looking forward to learning from you all as summer dwindles into fall and winter ... pt

2008-08-15T08:16:00.001-07:00