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.