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.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
PaStIcHe: examining remixing
"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?]
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
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.
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
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:
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.
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
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!!!
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?
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.
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.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Composition as assemblage
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:
“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).
"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."
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
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?
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?
Monday, November 17, 2008
Writing Technology, Activism, Coalitions
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?
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
--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….
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
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:
Wikigroaning II: The New Batch
Wikigroaning 3: Wikipedia Sucks and Here's the Citation
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
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.
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
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Writing Teacher's Tribute to Gloria Gaynor: "I Will Revise!"
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.
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
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-Ã -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.
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
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.
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
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
Best regards,
Ignorant PC user
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Open source vs. the constraints of licensed technology
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.
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.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
unfair use
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
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
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Pennell
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.
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.
Monday, November 10, 2008
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.
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
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.
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.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Politics loves the Internet
“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.
“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.
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.
“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
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...
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)
(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.
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
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.
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
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.
writing by dictation--inarticualte ramblings
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.
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.
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