Reading Ranger: Organizing the Bookshelf

Yancey's Wisdom

2010-06-16T09:35:00.000-04:00

In "Writing in the Twenty-First Century," Kathleen Blake Yancey describes the history of experiential and curricular writing in the US, noting that today we are in a completely different era in which writing acts as participation and is available to students in ways to which we must adapt our teaching and composing models. She writes that:

We can and should respond to these new composings and new sites of composings with new energy and a new composing agenda. Let me also suggest that an historical perspective like the one I’ve sketched out here helps us understand an increasingly important role for writing: to foster a new kind of citizenship, one that has roots in an earlier time but that is being reimagined today.

I completely agree with this statement, but wonder how we can do so in such a way that avoids the "creepy treehouse" model theorized over the TechRhet listserv. Creepy treehouses are spaces adults build for young(er) people in attempts to attract them to the spaces or activities they want the youth to attend to by making it seem like the spaces youth enjoy. Students or young people see right through the attempt, of course, and often play along but half-heartedly. The difference is about self-sponsorship (a la Brandt). We want to take our agendas for writing development to the places where young people already enjoy writing, but even using these spaces their writing is no longer self-sponsored; it becomes compulsory. What sort of means are available for making room for truly self-sponsored writing in the 21st century writing classroom???

TechCamp T'inking

2010-06-15T09:28:00.000-04:00

Reading Wysocki's piece I am struck by her call for us to reflect upon and define the materiality of writing as it unfurls across various media and in so many spaces. It occurred to me that I have a difficult time thinking of the new media spaces and old media texts in a strictly material way. The google sites I use in my classroom, the pdf's I upload to it, the writing tasks posted by my students, the videos we create and share, I tend to think of these in almost purely social and epistemological terms---they are ideas, they are thoughts, they are inquiries, they are investigations. I can only hope that this does not reflect a lack of cultivating criticality on my part.

While many people consider me "techy," and I certainly employ lots of rich digital writing spaces in my classes, I wonder if I haven't yet developed the proactive stance that considers writing in multimedia. As Wysocki calls for new media to be opened to writing, I believe this will be an important starting point as I move along and develop as a teacher of writing. I know I bring to digital writing assignments rhetorical questions: how will your readers expect to be able to understand this? What signposts can you provide that will direct them in understanding the richness of your investigation and argument? But a richer articulation of how writing may vary in these as well as traditional spaces. I spend much time helping students recognize that they are already familiar with the conventions, time helping them articulate their meaning within them, but perhaps not enough time bridging the two. If there's anything I know about teaching with technology, it's that there is a ton of trial and error, and a ton of room for growth and development.

I have not, for instance used blogs particularly well by some standards. While I do take the time to comment on students' posts (not all of them, mind you), I do not spend enough time, perhaps, developing a sense of the genre of blogging. I have up til now used blogs as a sort of prewriting space where students can develop ideas in candid ways while having some sense of audience–their classmates, for instance–and getting a sense for the social nature of research and writing. I have seen students integrate thoughts and ideas from their peers' comments in productive ways in their final essays. But I have not taken the time to have students initiate blogs toward their own ends, to do the small, tedious and meticulous efforts it takes to become part of a community of bloggers in a particular area of knowledge making.

In short, Wysocki's calls are well-heard for me, but not yet well-implemented. I think (to pay attention to the institution and particular material circumstances), that part of this has to do with the careful thought it takes to work these issues into a particular curriculum. Yet investigation of critical writing need not be separate from the issues of diversity and difference that many sections of our required composition classes take up: just look at Adam Banks' work for a clear model of how that might be done. It takes time, which as a CCR student I feel is limited, but small potent gestures of critical reflection on the materiality of the writing in my courses will go a long way, and each semester I believe I get a little bit better at helping students to cultivate engagement with text as writing, materiality, genre, and rhetoric.

IP and MLA

2010-04-19T21:31:00.001-04:00

Despite being here in this program Becky calls home, I haven't put much of my intellectual inquiry time into thought about copyright law/intellectual property. But in "Parsing Codes," Logie's positioning of the historical expansions of copyright law over the last couple of centuries as a particular concern for technical communicators for whom-as we saw last week-writing is often a matter of remixing/textual curation, sets up the topic as something I am instantly more curious about than I've been up til now. Especially of interest to me is the degree to which he traces the extent of parallel between copyright law and technological developments as relates to reproduction and distribution, and memory technologies in different media.

Looking further into the more frequent and high-impact changes made to copyright law in the digital age, Logie highlights the US's adoption of the European model of not just legal permissions connected to the author's control of a work, but also a moral understanding of textual ownership, which he explains "are grounded in a belief that an artist's act of creation carries with it certain natural rights that typically include exercising a measure of control over a given work even after it has been sold" (230). As Logie then explains four monumental changes in copyright law made since 1997 which have totally changed the landscape of copyright towards serving not the public good, but rather the interests of whoever stands to make money on a particular text, we see the familiar problematic that repeatedly emerges when attempting to balance a positive, protection-of-the-individual perspective with the frequent consequence of the serving of capitalistic interests: the individual corporation (like Sony, for instance), becomes protected, while smaller-sized individuals-to be frank-get screwed.

Porter, in "The Chilling of Digital Information: Technical Communicators as Public Advocates" nicely follow's Logie's critique with a discussion of ways in which not only the shifting legal landscape, but relatedly the cultural landscape of intellectual property law is having disturbing consequences for the public sphere. Not only is the all-important fair-use doctrine under attack, but the very act of linking which practically defines web writing is also facing attack by (often corporate) authors who wish to prohibit deep-linking which subverts a site's homepage and instead links directly to one of the many pages buried within a site. As Porter describes it, "The AMC citation principle [which views linking as an online version of citation] is based on an academic, gift-exchange model that encourages cross-referencing and acknowledges the interconnectedness and collaborative nature of knowledge. But that philosophy runs counter to an ownership model that attempts to establish clear, unambiguous proprietorship" (251). This made me wonder whether there was perhaps some of this "chilling effect" at work behind MLA's 2009 style changes.

I wondered if the recent decision to no longer include url's in works cited entries for online texts, and to replace the url with the word "Web" was potentially motivated by fear of being labeled, as the DMAC prohibits, a force that helps circumvent copyright law (and thus erode fair use). The MLA handbook, though, presents itself in fairly neutral terms however, explaining that:

In the past, this handbook recommended including URLs of Web sources in works-cited-list entries. Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value, however, for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors’ names than by typing URLs. You should include a URL as supplementary information only when the reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your instructor requires it. If you present a URL, give it immediately following the date of access, a period, and a space.

The rhetoric describing the shift as one that facilitates ease of cross-referencing and research might be disarming, but is not wholly satisfying. Either way, I will keep my ear to the ground as I continue to work in the field, considering what it means, as Porter argues, to be a public advocate for access to information (255).

Usability 2.3

2010-03-23T00:18:00.000-04:00

This week's readings in usability made me think a lot deeper about what's involved in design than any up til this point. As a way to get started, here's danah boyd's opening talk at South by Southwest... (among other interesting things, she refers to FB's Zuckerberg in a crisp and offhanded comment worth smirking along with, lol):

So here boyd describes privacy as a form of control a person has over information-their own information. It never occurred to me before how much control is a part of usability (and privacy by extension). If a user does not have control over the language or iconography of a knowledge space, for instance, then the space will not be usable, and the information not usable.

Add in a person's already heightened sense of a lack of control, as in over the fate of their child's health in a battle with cancer, and we have an even more highly precarious site of usability, as Kim et al illustrate in "Keeping Users at the Center: Developing a Multimedia Interface for Informed Consent.” The authors add in factors like the problem of coordinating experts' schedules, sharing decision making across unequal power planes, cross-cultural communication, unequal access to or familiarity with the threshold of medical familiarity necessary, and it gets only more and more complex from there. In fact, there is so much out of the designer AND the users' control, it comes to feel sort of miraculous when any sort of communication happens at all. And yet it is here that the user is most important, as they describe: "this article begins from the premise that to place the pediatric patient or parent needs anywhere but at the forefront of the design effort is to dilute the intent of informed consent—to protect patients" (Kim, et al. 336). I've never seen the users' emotions considered before now.

In "Rethinking Usability for Web 2.0 and Beyond," Wolff, Fitzpatrick, and Youssef ask how the new literacies at work in Web 2.0 have bearing on the ways in which technical communicators are responsible for their content once is is moved into another location by an app like, say, google reader. With these apps, users want to be able to control content. As the authors point out, "Dismissing the applicability of usability because of the supposed goals of the creator is not only condescending but dangerous. It suggests that an agenda grounded in the idea that standards are permanent structures that don’t evolve with the times." In other words, usability test must in this way ALWAYS be user-centered, even when trying to satisfy the goals of a company or organization. The user must perceive herself as having significant enough control over the space to be able to carry out the actions she chooses, and those which the company or organization has some investment in. To meliorate the many conditions affecting any given users' levels of control over a space, knowledge, a task, is ultimately the goal of the designer. (and to throwback to datacloud, this is how flattening has been simultaneously very useful and very frustrating, depending on the user.)

WikiWiki-What?*

2010-02-28T20:34:00.001-05:00

*Title borrowed from a former colleague in my MA institution...

So, right off the bat, I have to say that I'm responding only to the introductory essay in this week's reading:

George Pullman and Baotong Gu. "Guest Editors’ Introduction: Rationalizing and Rhetoricizing Content Management." Technical Communication Quarterly. 17.1 (2008) 1-9.

The authors advocate that we think rhetorically about the CMS, and each essay they've selected to be part of the special issue does that in some way. (They also advocate the need for TCers to be a part of the design process for CMSs, since they're one of the primary groups of end-users...). But I'm going to spend the space of this brief blog interrogating, for myself, the definition of a CMS they offer, compared to several def's of wikis, held up against my own CMS-wiki-google site thing. (With a little workflow analysis thrown in, maybe...).

Soooo Pullman and Gu define CMSs as:

A content management system, then, is any systematic method designed to organize and distribute information, while content management system software automates the system, typically providing “a platform for managing the creation, review, filing, updating, distribution, and storage of structured and unstructured content” (White, 2002, p. 20). (1)

The purpose of CMS software is to centralize all communications practices, to standardize layout and design, and to increase efficiency when it come to distributing information, ensuring that the company stays on message and does not issue redundant or conflicting statements. In order to achieve this level of control, every piece of information an organization issues has to originate from within the CMS database, and thus everyone writing for the organization has to get used to creating, storing, sharing, and publishing within the system, which means that nearly everyone has to change his or her writing practices to fit inside the CMS’s framework. (2)

And in a recent (Fall 09) Kairos article on teaching with wikis, "Working with Wikis in Writing-Intensive Classes" the authors collected the following definitions of wikis:

“. . . wikis are an ideally designed, open-source space that takes advantage of the messy, dynamic nature of writing” (Garza, Loudermilk, Hern, 2007, emphasis added).

". . . wiki software presents an ideal platform for generating reading and writing assignments that encourage language awareness in the literary domain" (Farabaugh 41, 2007, emphasis added).

I'm not sure that any of these wiki definitions are "agreed upon," or credible-the official word on wikis, but they offer what I feel is a nice sort of rounding out of the definition of CMS that Pullman and Gu provide- a way to think of CMS's in a more experiential way. In the first wiki def above, the authors, importantly, distinguish wikis as "ideally designed," a characteristic that according to P & G's critique distinguish wiki's from CMSs. They are also free and open source- another bit of salt in the wound for the problems P & G reveal. In this way, wikis have one up on the bulky and expensive content management systems.

But the next definition thinks about wikis from a critical and epistemological standpoint, which P & G advocate for the CMS. So if we think about a space that:

is cheap/free
is user-centered
promotes user work that facilitates literacy-development
centralizes communication
facilitates collaboration
allows for the generation and distribution (before and for production) of information, documents, etc.

we end up with something of a hybrid. My point here is that CMS-style spaces have extended from belonging to the realm of information workers to belonging to all those who work with information. To move to my personal example of this...my google site.

I'm not sure if you can see the features carefully, but let me write a bit about the space and what it allows me to do. First of all, I do not use my gSite on its own- I use Delicious to tag and later locate pages within it, and I'm going to be using Zotero-i think-to keep track of the citations within the site. True to the CMS, there are some standard features-the "notebox" on the left side of the site gives my standard note-taking model-taken from Collin Brooke's advice. Below there I have some important tags that I add to my notes-namely one for my dissertation and one for each of my three exam areas. This standardization allows me to easily maneuver within my own generated content. (The search feature of the site also looks through the text of attached pdfs, which is awesome!)

The site is free. I've built it myself, and changed it's structure and organization many times (though I'm reeeeally happy with my current layout-it might just carry me through). I think it facilitates my literacy development...it's where i draft everything, and post revisions for later reference. I can also post everything in multiple places, and linking is super easy. Collaboration is possible and I use similar sites for that kind of work, though this one is all for me. And, I store information that can be easily repackages, reassessed, rewritten, remade for distribution in different spaces- like the way I'm boutsta repurpose my C & W proposal for this class by reinterpreting it from a techcomm framework. Same general info-different purposes.

I think it's obvious that I have an ecology set up here, and that I'm doing symbolic-analytic work. But I wonder how we are to think about the CMS differently from a wiki... I want to make a big R rhetoric move and say that my computer is an information/knowledge/content management system that has structures I work within and against in order to structure my own knowledge-work and practice. What do you think? Am I over simplifying? In what ways does the CMS work as an apt metaphor for our individual workflows (to build off of Johnson-Eilola)?

And beware the disgruntled employees!

2010-02-14T23:59:00.000-05:00

Describing recent privacy policy changes, Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder says in an interview:

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it." (qtd. in Kirkpatrick)

He wanted to keep a beginner's mind, a beginner who presumably fits into the social norm of accepting default publicity, searchability. But I wonder who this person is-and to what extent the average user of social media is strong-armed into the narrative of a space? Is the beginner one who is already part of this public-loving cultural trend Zuckerberg claims to reflect? Or is the beginner someone who takes to the default like baby formula-cautiously clinging to their noob-garb, slowly learning the customizations? In which case- how can we lay accountability on the user whose opening experience is determined by the Zuckerberg's of the world who are trying to think like the newbies? Just one example from this week's readings that made me cringe a little as I asked "who the hell are these people?"

The next came from The Rumpus, who offered us an interview with an anonymous Facebook employee. The loose-lipped worker spilled her guts about a master password that once allowed its user to assume the identity of any FB account holder. A few points of interest here:

they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit done. Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done. And it goes a long way. Because I know I can get these things done. I know I’m going to have to go back. And I may be there until ten or eleven tonight.

Sweet! Drunken FB employees have access to all my information-everything I've ever said or done or clicked on-at ten at night. But, luckily, she only knows of two instances of people being fired to foul play. Course then there's the users- who is this guy?:

This guy had emailed my friend at school a very very odd message, pertaining to the name ‘Caitlin,’ which is her name, and ‘poop.’ It was literally one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen: a two-page message about the name ‘Caitlin’ and its semantic relation to ‘poop.’ We found out that he had actually sent it to the first two hundred Caitlins he found on Facebook search.

So...we got dudes who are anal retentive about Caitlins (ahahahahaha), drunk employees with unlimited access to our info, and really rich people controlling the situation by trying to think like beginners. Awesome.

I believe Gurak's discussion of bottom-up online rhetorical communities can help us understand something about who these people are and why/how online debates about online privacy are so complicated. In discussing the reaction to Lotus, she writes:

The bottom-up structure of this protest, so conducive to individual participation and open debate, is thus highly susceptible to the intrusion of inaccuracies, which, given the rapidity of online delivery, can easily be compounded with each new posting. (91)

In the case of Lotus I wondered who these people were who just signed petitions and supported causes they didn't really understand. But as Gurak explains it, many people participating in these protests did so on the basis of commitment to the perceived ethos of the group- things circulate quickly, people side with their friends, people get fired up and pass things along with trust... come to think of it I AM that person! I have been known to vote Dem in local categories without really understanding the issues or candidates' platforms. I have supported suggested Facebook causes. I have click "accept" on more terms of service than I can even pretend to have actually read. I'm busy, and I don't feel that that should keep me from being a good citizen, so I rely on what I have come to believe I can trust-the Dems are the good guys (and gals), gay marriage should be legal and if my support of a FB page can help, word, and most web services that aren't porn related will not try to steal all my info or give my computer viruses, right? Hmmm.

I think what this all boils down to for me is that people are just people on both sides of the public/corporate privacy battle, and people are busy, and greedy, and manipulative, and anal retentive, and they like to drink with friends even if it means they have to work late. So the accountability is just as dispersed and widely distributed and bottom-up and top-down and beginner-oriented and susceptible to intrusion as the networks that Gurak describes.

As a side note-though perhaps the most important point I'm making since above is really just an expression of head-shaking disbelief, I wonder what Gurak's study would look like today with say the comments on Kirkpatrick's blog alone? This is definitely not the only place this conversation is happening, and it seems to be a bottom-up protest all over again. I'm guessing someone has already made a petition using Facebook's causes or fan pages against itself-hell there are like 10 with different names. Is there the same sort of identifiable community ethos thing going on? Wouldn't it be interesting to look at how Gurak's ideas about community are challenged by broader access alone? I wonder if/how a protest against this privacy policy could even be effective now. (Though I remember the users pushed for the overturn of the whole FB owns all original content posts through Notes thing after much outcry from a presumably experienced user-class who know what they can expect as far as their rights to privacy and such go....) K, I'm disgruntled myself now and going to bed. Happy Olympic Gold on home turf, Canada!

Has anyone seen my rose-colored glasses? These ideology-vision goggles are giving me a headache.

2010-02-01T19:59:00.000-05:00

My title here encompasses a lot of the themes of what I'd like to talk about- questions raised for me through the readings in Spilka for this week (I haven't gotten to the Milner yet). There's is issue of evolution of technology, the problem of the physical self in relation to its technology, and the larger philosophical understanding of the relationship between technology and the subject.

Splika's introduction prepared me nicely to expect discussions of the rhetoric of technology, information design, and content management, all of which I would agree come up in the four other chapters we read. She suggests that the scholarship in TC must get past the question of field definition and instead begin to justify itself in terms of serving needs of other fields through its own expertise (5). Answering these questions in terms of what the new digitally affected economy is the focus of the collection.

So from Caroliner we get a nice history of how authoring, publishing, and management technologies came about and shifted the job descriptions of TCers (see 46), discussed often in terms of the design/content and theory/praxis binaries. In other words, shifting trends in technological development were accompanied by questions over the role of technical communicators- should they be programmers who can speak to networkers, or writers who can speak to end users? TC was affected largely by what was needed and could be afforded by companies whose objectives and audiences were simultaneously shifting. K. But there wasn't much problematization of technology here, more concern about how it changed the field and what TC needs to do to stay relevant therein-a largely reactionary perspective. Enter Dicks.

Dicks' title seemed to be the next step, claiming what I was looking for in Caroliner:"The Effects of Digital Literacy on the Nature of Technical Communication Work." (BTW- I fully recognize that it's my own interests that lead me to perpetually read things as begging the question, and then being disappointed when they don't.) This article was fun and exciting, and offered the play of social and economic analyses that I think ought to accompany discussions of technology. It also had the enthusiasm I like to see-the speculation about how the things we interact with shape our world and how we shape the world through them. The integration of Web 2.0, symbolic-analytic work, and the support economy seem to support the New London Group's idea of shape-shifting portfolio people who need to explore and build and broadcast their flexibility of talents- something I see as less exploitive than recognizing of the experiential and organic nature of work and working. The symbolic-analytic work idea is a bit vague to me, but either way, the mood in this piece is less than outwardly critical of technology, I would say.

The notion of the support economy and Dicks' description of how it might affect business practices are interesting to think about in terms of digital technologies and technical communication. It may seem romantic on my part, but I love the idea that

organization [will] allow customization of their products and services and, with Web 2.0 and other technologies, increased customer participation in product development, review, and maintenance. (57)

(I'm not so opposed to the next line either, lol.) Somehow it seems like increased customer participation is more democratic and hence better supports the ideal of freedom. But then there's the notion that customer data mining can do the opposite by allowing greater manipulation of the buyer's consciousness. If customization merely means better control of a market population, well... Additionally, if the prediction that "technical communicators will be officially unemployed by constantly working"(59), in what ways can we (to anticipate Katz and Rhodes) shift our ethical frames for how we understand what it is to work? Essentially, it seems there are a lot of cool things to look at in these essays, but what concerns me was lurking in the shadows until Clark's investigation into the rhetoric of technology, in which issues of power get mentioned a few times within the descriptions of types of TC scholarship and theory that fall under that category.

Most interesting to me, however, is the dualistic to pluralistic perspectives of the nature of technology implicit in the ethical frames Katz and Rhodes define. The frames seem to elicit anxieties about both technology and theory itself. Their point that we need an ethical frame that matches our current communicative situation is well taken. But in many of the frames they identify, I see an unnecessary flattening of the reality of technology, which I suppose is ultimately their point. They define ethical frames as

a set of philosophical assumptions, ideological perceptions, and normative values underlying and/or guiding how people relate to and exist with technology. (231)

The authors recognize that these frames are socially constructed and dynamic. But the descriptions of the frames seem a bit more "stiff" than need be. Whether a particular manager or the employee handbook's author is the voice driving a particular frame seems to be quite pertinent when a TCer or anyone else is tying to fulfill a particular purpose with technology within a company, and the decisions of the individual actors therein should be taken into account as reflections of the dynamic reality of the ethical frames in practice. It's confusing to me why, for instance, a person would take on a study like Rhodes'.

The authors describe the purpose of the study as an attempt "to capture a more comprehensive picture of employees' email relations through the application of communication theory and rhetorical analysis" (242), though the analysis seeks to explore when and where the ethical frames they described step into the picture. What confuses me, however, is in the "Email as a Tool and an End" section in which the authors use Uncertainty Reduction Theory to assess the ethical frame enacted in the study company's email exchanges. They conclude that "the organization and its employees participate in frames that both regard and utilize email as simply a means to an end-a tool to accomplish work goals (tool frame)" (243). But what bothers me here is that the theory itself provided the analytic lens that produced those conclusions- they claim under this theory one can see that the participants "simply" see email as a work tool, and yet that's the only result the theory allowed the research to see. They acknowledge this on the next page, arguing that we must use rhetoric to understand more about how technology and the workplace and the social context therein have mutually informed each other.

I guess my point here is that it seems like a lot of work to use narrow communication theory to prove that theories of technology are too narrow. My intent here is not really critique so much as to question how we might see this same problem throughout the articles. In Caroliner, the subject seems to sort of drift from place to place as new technologies emerge- the subject is reactionary to technology. In Dicks, the subject makes and is made and displaced by technology. In Clark, lots of stuff is going on and our theories are plentiful. Katz and Rhodes suggest that we need to catch up, epistemologically, to the realities of technology and interpersonal communication. I see some huge questions here about the nature of the subject in relation to technology, and about the inadequacy of our theories for addressing those questions. There's just a huge array of how to think about what's clearly a huge topic- and I wonder how such a diverse collection of essays indirectly positions the reader to face these questions...

Spinuzzi, Chapter Three

2009-11-19T09:53:00.000-05:00

Main Claims
At this point in his analysis of the Telecorp network, Spinuzzi recognizes the need to more clearly justify the use of both ANT and activity theory. Rather than attempt to force peace between them, he posits the two in a sort of theoretical celebrity death match. (jk)

I think a good metaphor to understand the basic differences between the two would be that AT could well describe the butterfly's wing causing a typhoon, where as ANT might be visualized more like watching raindrops hitting the surface of a pond- all the ripples blend into and change one another. I would label AT modernist and ANT postmodernist.

It seems that the two theories have more disagreements than commonalities (93-5), and that what we get from placing them together is presumably that ANT can gain from AT the attention to "developmental issues and issues of competence and cognition, it is in a much stronger position to explain how workers learn and how the develop resources" (93). ANT's benefits include the understanding that every point in a network changes every other, and that these relations are continually renegotiated, in any direction. ANT is less prescriptive.

Essentially, Spinuzzi agues that we must take each on its own merits- we cannot expect ANT to be a theory of learning and AT is not an ontology. Hence, they can mutually inform each other.

Assumptions about Method/ologies
It's difficult for me to pin this down because I know sooo many of the theories he's drawing on, but I've never seen them talking to each other in this way. For instance, the chain: Socrates, Machiavelli, pragmatism, and ANT. What!? I think in a way Spinuzzi is sort of embodying his commitments to both ANT and AT as he brings together all these actors and tries to understand the systems they construct and how they change each other.

Key Words
Activity theory, actor network theory, weaving and splicing, dialectics, symmetry-as-negotiation, boundary crossing, polycontextuality

Key Texts
Machiavelli, Latour, Callon, Engestrom, Deleuze and Guatarri

Questions/Challenges
For me, this stuff is really complicated-I wonder what kind of reaction people committed to either AT or ANT have had. I wonder if they bought his bridging of the two was effective. I bet not, the way he described the bitter criticism they have offered each other. Do you buy it?

What is the point of bringing the two together if they have such distinctions? Why not just propose that one adopt the principle it's missing from the other? Can the two be held together as units at the same time or do they become a network which change each other?

Vicki Tolar Burton: "Walking in Light, Walking in Darkness."

2009-11-05T12:21:00.000-05:00

Main Claims

In this Rhetoric Review essay, Burton begins by paying tribute to feminist scholars in our field, such as Bizzell and Glenn, who have authorized or precedented projects like hers that "'remap rhetorical territory"' by revisiting rhetorical sites in history and re-placing women within their rightful contexts (336). That site for Burton is women in early British Methodism. She first traces John Wesley's founding of Methodism before giving space to the voices of women preachers and parishoners who he authorized as both leader of the faith and editor of its many publications that sought to convert followers away from the sinful practices, arts (i.e. novels), and rationalism of the time.

Burton sites that Wesley "not only functioned as the production authority for the methodist movement as a whole, he also individually authorized, encouraged, and nurtured the writing of individual women" (344). Hester Rogers is exemplified as among the most important of these, despite her resistance to actually preaching. Rather, she was in Wesley's view, one of the few men or women to have truly experienced the "union with God," though Burton also speculates-I think correctly- that part of Wesley's fascination with Rogers may have been due to the highly erotic description of that union (345, 347).

The essay concludes with a description of the "institutional darkness" into which women of Methodism were cast after Wesley's death, citing many examples of despicable private and official communications by men in the church who condemned women's preaching, as well as the drying up of publication of women's writings. In one of the best lines of the essay, Burton sadly reports that "it has taken the women of Methodism nearly 200 years to reclaim the rhetorical space they lost when John Wesley died" (351). Here, she postulates that the reason Hester Rogers' narratives were so widely published and distributed past the time of Wesley's death is that her story was heavily edited and she was essentially repackaged as as Methodist woman who reveled in he spirituality in the most private of literacy spaces, thereby comprising the ideal model for other Methodist women who were no longer offered the stage, mic, or page.

Assumptions about Method/ologies
In the conclusion of the essay, Burton again speaks directly to the project of feminist revisionist history, citing "Tim Miller's lead into the rhetoric of traditions, expanding the boundaries of the history of rhetoric from the centers of the privileged [male] intellectual power outward to include the outposts of cultural production like religious movements, in the process bringing to light persuasive women and recovering their texts. This recovery in itself is a feminist act (see Bizzell)" (351).

Key Words
Feminism, John Wesley, Methodism, rhetoric, women, public, private

Key Texts
Bizzell, Glenn, and other primary, secondary and archival texts from the history of Methodism

Questions/Challenges

I have a couple of related issues with this essay. The first is that I wonder why Burton didn't push a little harder against the portrait she paints of Wesley as savior to women, without further questioning his motives to amass followers. It surely wouldn't be the first time that a minority group was "used" for their numbers.

Secondly, I wonder to what extent she recognized the paternalist image she casts of Wesley. She seems to so fereverently celebrate this man who she describes with words like control, edit, authority, protect, nuture, etc., in relation to his engagement with women's texts. Is paternalism in itself a bad thing? What is the ill in relation to the good in this case? In other words, is the rhetorical space and ethos he helped open up for women more important than how tangled the motives, positioning, and intentions may have been?

Nancy Welch's Living Room: Chapter One

2009-10-21T16:34:00.001-04:00

Main Claims

In her introduction to Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, Nancy Welch seeks to combine conversations about public writing and rhetorical history (with emphasis on the canons of delivery and memory) to understand how people have in the past and can continue to be successful in helping to shape the course of world events in the face of increasing privatization and constraint (1-6).

She targets neoliberalism as the enemy, noting how the combination of free-market ideology and social darwinism contribute to the eroding of public spaces for dissent and aid in the private sector's mission to repeal public programs and federal regulation that protect public interests (7). She spends quite a bit of time explicating the correlations between the aims of her own work and that of June Jordan's, from whom the title is borrowed, tracing the events and milieus through changing administrations from 1985 on to further detail the dramatic imapact of privatization on possibilities for public writing and individual liberties (7-13).

In the concluding part of the chapter "A Public World is Possible," Welch notes that though the complex nature of these power structures and hegemony-reinforcing events might seem overwhelming to the small acts of individual civilian writers, still there is hope (14-19). She marches us through examples like the the rallies of Latino workers in Spring 2006, or the setting up of a tent city on the UVM campus by conscientious students in protest of an expensive new building project. These examples, she asserts, "are genuinely grassroots. They are also remarkably, and necessarily, inventive as individuals and groups come together not only to raise good slogans but also to figure out how, through mainstream and alternative channels, to make their slogans heard while facing multiple foils" (17).

In the interlude that accompanies this first chapter is interesting in it's use of Gee's C's talk in which he advocates teaching (D)iscourses that have power in students' lives, as well as the languages of power as tools students can use to navigate within them towards their specific rhetorical (and frequently material) goals (21) She comments that though this is a "nice" thing for a bunch of comp teachers to hear, as it helps validate their daily and lifetime work, but often the reader/author/audience just doesn't care and come armed with prewritten dismissive responses. For her, the benefit of teaching these languages (or rather, for employing them) is so unlikely that it may not be worth it at all and students may come to internalize that failure, thinking that their efforts weren't enough. She advocates that we need to teach more comprehensive "rhetorics of power."

Assumptions about Method/ologies

I'm really not sure what to put here, honestly. I think it's clear from her introduction that Welch advocates the combination of valuable lived experience from people in all positionalities, as well as an incorporation of public memory, or history for evidence. Past that, I'm not sure how to categorize her methodology or her views on methodology based on this chapter.

Key Words: Public Writing, Protest, Globalization, Neoliberalism, Grassroots, Critical Literacy

Key Texts: June Jordan, Harriet Malinowitz, Susan Wells, Kieth Gilyard

Questions/Challenges

The weight of evidence Welch gives us in this chapter for all the ways public writing is in trouble seems to leave little room for hope, and yet she clearly retains some. I wonder how it is that Welch evaluates the good of public writing. In other words, is it enough that public writing happens at all, or do we need to see some real change come from the work we do in order to count it as a win?

Christopher Schroeder. "The Ethnographic Experience of Postmodern Literacies."

2009-09-30T23:57:00.000-04:00

Main Claims

Schroeder begins his chapter with a lit review that draws the connections between new literacy studies, ethnography, and composition studies necessary to his project. Using his experience as an ethnographer in a graduate level course on cultural linguistics, Schroeder enacts a theory of new ethnography and literacy models, both of which feature the central characteristic of being dynamic. Whereas old ethnography required rigor, cold hard facts and distant, objective observation, new ethnography provides "access to culture," and pomoethno (my wordplay, not his) represents "the formation of a critical cultural politics centered on the role of the body in meaning-making, the fluidity and permeability of boundaries, and the need for self-consciousness about textual productions" (66). "The question of communities is central to the study of literacies," but the community he speaks of is one rooted in the material and cross-cultural, rather than an imagined space of shared investment and returns (61). Schroeder concentrates on new literacies as "sites of competing discourses and cultures, and literacy acts are efforts to navigate among these within specific social, material, and political contexts" (66), and the contexts offer constraints and possibilities for the range of choices a subject is able to negotiate within. Schroeder's chapter embodies his theory, as he "found [him]self trying to negotiate among discourses and cultures" (66), as teacher and ethnographer whose very presence is deeply affected by his position as white, middle class, male. He begins the very important and often overlooked step in which the researcher recognizes him or herself as inherently part of the subject of study. To drop the curtain and reveal the wizard takes little away from his gifts, but rather builds trust and a space for understanding for the audience.

Assumptions about Method/ologies
Schroeder does not give in to the traditional linear structure of the academic argument, which is pretty appropriate in this case. Rather, his structure reflects the recursiveness that he describes of his multiple positionalities as classroom ethnographer. Additionally, his parenthetical style citation (dropping a list of names connected to the development of an idea or concept), his personal and theoretical stance, and the inclusion of emails and evaluations as primary texts demonstrate Schroeder's commitment to the productive discomfort inherent in the composing of a postmodern text. As he puts it:

In drafting early versions of this text, I experimented with a range of discursive practices, from academic exposition to mosaic and academic argument to scrapping, and yet in trying to keep within the constraints of this collection, I was confined in the ways that I could connect and elaborate on these pieces, which I eliminated in the final version. These negotiations are significant contribtions, as the epigraphs to this text suggest, cooperatively evolved texts that are, at the same time, emeshed within the cultural practices of the academy. (67)

Key Words
Intersubjectivity, postmodern ethnography, new literacy studies, current vs. dynamic literacy models

Key Texts
Dwight Conquergood, Ellen Barton, Cope and Kalantzis, Ralph Cintron

Questions/Challenges

I should likely come up with more, but for now, my major challenge has to do with the negotiating process. In each of the author's sample texts from his course, either Schroeder himself, or the very traditional literacies his positionality represents tend to be the point of orientation that the students are negotiating toward. I believe that more work needs to be done in this area about just who is doing the negotiating, such as in Bizzell's "Rationality as Rhetorical Sovereignty at the Barcelona Disputation."

Ellen Barton. "Linguistic Discourse Analysis: How the Language in Texts Works."

2009-09-14T09:28:00.000-04:00

In this piece from What Writing Does and How It Does It Barton introduces the audience to linguistics that focuses on the social in general and to rich feature discourse analysis in particular. As she explains it, discourse analysis looks at "how specific features of language contribute to the interpretation of texts in their various contexts" (57). Rich feature analysis take a specific feature, chosen for its "interestingness" or likelyhood of proving significant to understanding the structure and function of that feature in a particular context, and codes a representative sample of texts in order to analyze and draw conclusions from the data. Discourse analysis tends to be qualitative with quantitative "verification" (usually through coding).

Though Barton does tip her hat to the complicated nature of academic discourse (65), still she seems to privilege the "epistemic stance" of those she identifies as experienced writers (which in the case of her study refers to experienced academics writing for a general academic audience). While she criticizes the work of her students as overly general, which motivates her 1993 study, she does not comment on the stance of experienced writers, whose stance toward the making of knowledge she identifies as "oppositional, the product of contrast and competition" (74). My belief [look, an evidential!] that she (possibly unknowingly) privileges this perspective is furthered when she fails to recognize a complication in her frustration with the work or writers who place the privy of knowledge in "general society" (74). Meanwhile, she terms experienced writers as part of an "academic community" without commenting on how the notion of community founded on opposition and conflict is a sort of complex situation. In many ways I realize this quarrel is not quite fair; for one thing, I'm charging Barton with not paying attention to something that is one of my declared projects, not hers. Second, she claims that her study is a way of helping educators understand the foundational difference between positions of what she names experienced and inexperienced writers, and I think this is clearly an important project for composition as well as any field that struggles with student writing (likely all of them).

Though she may do so in the extended articles on the topic, I also wish she's have thought about, or at least mentioned the difficulty in selecting pieces from experienced writers who had time and exigency to write their works, but choosing as representative of inexperienced writers whatever they produced during proficiency exams which were most likely timed and in response to often unconvincing prompts. Also, in critique of what I called "social science-y," Barton uses terms like the context of "academic discourse," and "analyze," and "representative" that are portrayed as valueless, but which I think carry much ideological and constructed weight.

But again, the tone of the book is very textbook-y, and textbooks being meant to introduce and inform (if not indoctrinate) I can see how Barton may not have felt this chapter as being the right space for posing many of these questions. And, the chapter does do a great job of introducing discourse analysis as a genre and its many iterations. She describes structure and function (terms I was not familiar with in this context prior to reading) in manageable and accessible ways and the examples are quite illustrative (see 62-3).

I find among the most useful citations to the chapter's intent that of Thomas Huckin (1992) whose procedure for discourse analysis she reproduces on pages 65-66:
1. selecting an initial corpus
2. identifying salient patterns
3. determinging "interestingness"
4. selecting a study corpus
5. verifying the pattern
6. developing a functional-rhetorical analysis

I also found some interesting citations relative to my own project on pages 65 and 67.

Hope this has been somewhat helpful...

Researcher Profile

2009-09-10T12:55:00.002-04:00

Researcher Profile

I was Rosa Parks and the Statue of Liberty. Our elementary school plays were unconventional (unless as a future mother to elementary school students I learn otherwise). I believe, though, that the enacting of such prominent figures of justice and deep democratic concern for all peoples was not lost on me even as a child. This same concern propelled me through an undergraduate degree in literary studies in which I analyzed the plight of characters subject to oppressive social circumstances. And in my dual studies in philosophy I looked for theories that helped explicate the larger systems and positionalities of subjects within them that nurtured and developed such circumstances. It was not until my first semester in a master’s program in English with a concentration in literature that I met Victor Villanueva and Bob Eddy who helped me initially see that all I was doing in Lit was rhetorical analysis of racism and sexism. Combined with problems and possibilities I saw as a FYC TA, I began to understand the Rhetoric and Composition was the place for me.

This conversion narrative, as they’ve been termed in many instances of Rhet Comp scholarship, is not at all uncommon, but it is indeed what brought me to seek a doctorate at SU’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program. Still, my time at Washington State University with Victor and Bob, as well as Kristen Arola, Patty Ericsson, and Barbara Monroe did much to cultivate what I am beginning to formulate as my scholarly project. It seemed to happen through a series of accidents, really—if I hadn’t taken Barbara’s “Rhetoric of the Contact Zone” class my second semester, if patty’s zeal for participation in our professional community at every level hadn’t been so contagious, if Victor hadn’t provided me with a language for describing the serious economic disparity I’ve witnessed first hand, and if Bob hadn’t exposed us to so many works in composition that sought capture through practical pedagogies a way to deal with social injustice and attempt to reform the university as an institution from within, I don’t know where I would be now. (Though I’m fairly certain a lack of passion and particular skills would have barred me from any kind of successful career in Literature.)

In our Theories and Methodologies of Teaching English 101 course, Bob consistently begged us to consider the racial histories and politics that inform the writing classroom. We read Rochelle rock’s Sista Talk and Adam Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. We thought about the material conditions of our students (mostly white, middle class) in comparison to the situation of writing classrooms in other parts of our country. And we asked “How? How can we use the space of the classroom to help our privileged students consider the cost of their own privilege on others whose perspectives are not readily available to us?” This question and the work of Paulo Freire, whose liberatory pedagogy left me feeling righteous and excited for when I’d teach for the first time in the Spring of 2007. But when I got to that classroom and found my students so resistant and unwilling or unable to challenge their own assumptions and positionalities, I became angry. Once, I screamed at one poor student “That’s the kind of racist comment that will get you kicked out of my classroom!” Another time during a conversation about Du Bois, I called my students out, exasperated: “I get the feeling that most of you think that people are, at any given time, where they are because they chose to be.” They nodded in incautious agreement. “Why would my mother choose to be a crack whore?” I practically screamed. One of my scholarly projects was born. It has since been fascinating to me how we position ourselves as teachers in the classroom, and how we can invite students of the dominant social categories into the conversation about oppression and social injustice in meaningful ways that maintains the dignity of everyone involved while not yielding to a bourgeois practice of niceness. I see conflict as healthy in a classroom and something we need to learn to artfully cultivate and navigate. I have also since learned that we need to be suspect when classrooms seem to be going too well. These events have led to one of my upcoming exam areas in Critical Pedagogy and these questions I’ve posed will doubtless be a source of lifetime contemplation, scholarship and growth.

In Barbara’s seminar we read Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone,” which spoke well to my difficulties described above. We also read Scott Lyon’s “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” and Bizzell’s “Rationality as Rhetorical Sovereignty at the Barcelona Disputation, 1263.” In addition to having read Bootstraps and Canagarajah’s “The Place of World Englishes” for Bob’s class, these works taken together helped me to conceive of a fundamental problem at the center of my new work—whom did the content of my teaching actually serve? Whose writing was I teaching, professing to be correct? Out of this class was born my fascination with the politics of discourse. I have yet to really flesh out the scope of this project, but I have some of my preliminary projects and interests down. For Iswari Pandey’s class on contemporary rhetorical theory I wrote an analysis of what we mean when we use some of the most basic terms of this field: English, Basic Writing, and Academic Language. What I found is that these terms, as evidenced in Parks’ analysis in of the STROL debates in Class Politics, actually convey much more about power than they do about language. They function to create ominous and unstable communities of membership, and more often, exclusion. I see it as an essential part of the commitment to justice in rhetoric and composition work to remain true to our acknowledgement of the epistemic and ontological centrality of language and cultivate the best practices possible in our classrooms given the diverse literacies and languages of our students. This is another problem I see as inherent in the work I do as a teacher and scholar.

The third primary area of my research, and incidentally what will be my major exam area, is that of technology and literacy. In Bob’s class one of my esteemed peers suggested in conversation one day that idea of using MySpace in the classroom. Thinking back now it seems like such a simple moment that could have just as easily passed with my taking no notice, but it didn’t. I was an avid MySpacer myself and sought any opportunity to connect with my students on a personal level; so I tried it. This became the substance of my first two conference presentations, one at the Eastern Oregon Rhetoric Conference and the other at the C’s in 2008. The project also served as my portfolio paper for my Master’s degree and my writing sample for Syracuse University. Combining aspects of my other two research areas, in my students’ work (mostly reading response) on MySpace I saw alternative forms of discourse and prominent themes of racism and sexism that went unspoken in the primary work of the classroom. I saw a sense of abandon that made me question how students conceived of audience differently in online social spaces. I saw a building community that was absent from the community. In essence I saw possibilities, challenges, and a severely under-researched space of literacy.

Continuing my interest here was a class I taught for Upward Bound at the University of Idaho. The deft with which my first generation college student, or even first generation American in some cases, students of color from low-income families picked up the skills of writing and creating in digital spaces as we created a magazine and website with the Adobe Creative Suite seemed to complicate previous scholarship I’d read in which issues of access and ideological design in technology in effect shut down the conversation about the potential of technology to serve as a means to social justice. In our magazine these high school students explored questions of racism in material distribution, domestic violence, homelessness, the energy crisis, and even MySpace. They represented things that mattered to them in video, graphic design, podcasts, and traditional writing. I saw in their work an enthusiasm, and even hunger, for the chance at expression outside of the realm school typically insists is “fit” or “right.” This led to my second appearance at CCCC and as I’ve already expressed, my major area of scholarly inquiry. Among other things I’d like to investigate how we can reconcile problems in technology with its possibilities, how to work with teachers who represent the more Luddite among us as they begin to incorporate technology into their classrooms, how to work with those who still refuse, and how various technologies facilitate or silence the very diverse and politicized literacies of an increasingly diverse body of students. As I continue reading and growing here in the CCR program, these questions are also expanding to ask questions about service learning and community literacy, and I seek a dissertation and career that will enact these questions and values—but lets get through coursework first, yes?

Although I describe specific incidents as happy accidents that occasioned to fashion me into the scholar I see myself becoming, I must admit that a lot of these projects were a long time coming out of my own biography. My already alluded to mother’s (and father’s actually) addiction, my budding literacy, my need to rely on school and other communities during my formative years and my witness of things unsavory and unjust and just plain painful as a kid helped plant these seeds within me. Role models like a woman who stood up against a machine of racial political when she was already tired enough, migration stories that painting this nation, my home, as a place for gathering together and assembling of new and brighter families and opportunities were narratives I needed just to survive. I had no way of knowing then just how important these stories would be or how far they could take me.

If every scholar has one central project or questions that they spend their career thinking about, I want mine to be one that falls on the left side of the rhetorical spectrum I’ve identified. I want to know all the ways we can expand the means of and meaning of knowledge and authority such that we can expand the material realities of who has access to and can produce it. I want to work in a field that values many contributions from many voices with many methodologies. I want to see the problems and multiplicity and live in the ruins of it all. I recently came across one of the most beautiful quotes I’ve ever read. It was Michael Eric Dyson who wrote: “Social Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.” Composition and Rhetorical Studies for me is like hearing the language of love in the most unlikely of places, and maybe even learning and teaching how it’s spoken.

calendar trial

2009-06-24T16:51:00.001-04:00

More thoughts... What's different

2007-10-04T12:06:00.000-04:00

Selfe and Cooper are referring to students in a tech/comm class, so students who are presumably older than my 17 and 18 year old freshmen. That my students are younger and most are ingrained in MySpace culture long before they came to WSU. They have already developed a strong online identity and community, and they mostly live with their peers.

S&C claim that in part due to the use of pseudonyms, and in part due to the fact that "information about gender, age, and social status disappear unless individuals choose to reveal themselves" (852), students in a computer conference can rach a more egalitarian state. What they forget here is that even though others cannot know these things about a person, still, even when behind a computer screen, the individual enacts the roles they've played due to their privileges or lack thereof. But I agree that the fact that anyone can write as much or little as they want without being seen and certainly without being interrupted helps to mitigate the traditional difficulties of power within a classroom. And, the teacher can largely step out of an authoritative role.

Back to the race and gender thing, one huge point of MySpace, conscious or no, is self-exposure. People can display their voice, interests, bodies, and overall identity through a series of rhetorical choices. So, again, w/MySpace, identity politics do not disappear.

"Resisting through discourse means that individuals challenge and attempt to change there predetermined roles to produce alternate roles, or subjectivities, for themselves." (851). "Creating these alternate subjectivities allows students to become active in their own learning process, to become active in their own learning process, to become speakers in a dynamic context rather than being the subjects of a predetermined discourse" (851).

_________________________________________

danah boyd

"Why Youth <3 style="font-style: italic;">MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume (ed. David Buckingham).

"Interestingly, I have found that race and social class play little role in terms of access beyond the aforementioned disenfranchised population ["those without Internet access, those whose parents succeed in banning them from participation, and online teens who primarily access the Internet through school and other public venues where social network sites are banned"]. Poor urban black teens seem just as likely to join the site as white teens from wealthier backgrounds- although what they do there has much to do with their level of Internet access" (1).

"Many began participating because of the available social voyeurism and the opportunity to craft a personal representation in an increasingly popular online community. Just like their older counterparts, teenagers loved the ability to visualize their social world through the networked collection of profiles." (2)

~~~This is how it happens: visualizing social communities, why not visualize the academic community and make it social???

"The practices that take place through the use of the most relevant three--profiles, friends and comments--differentiate social network sites from other types of computer-mediated communication. Furthermore, what makes these three practices significant for consideration is that they take place in public: Friends are publicly articulated, profiles are publicly viewed, and comments are publicly visible" (7).

"A MySpace profile can be seen as a form of digital body where individuals write themselves into being. Through profiles, teens can express salient aspects of their identity for others to see and interpret. They construct these profiles for their friends and peers to view" (13).

What boyd would next attend to here, were she in the field of rhetoric, would be a question of how students use written and visual language to construct that identity, and how uses of language in identity construction vary from comments to blogs to description sections. In MySpace, the space is theirs to use language as they will, construct audience and resonds to the needs of that audience as they deem appropriate.

___________________________________________________

CCCC. "Students' Right to Their Own Language." CCC Special Issue, Fall, 1974, Vol XXV.

"We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language--the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they ind their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity."

"If we name the essential functions of language as expressing oneself, communicating information and attiudes, and discovering meaning through both logic and metaphor, then we view variety of dialects as an advantage. In self-expression, not only one's dialect but one's idiolect is basic. In communication, one may choose roles which imply certain dialects, but the decision is a social one, for the dialect itself does not limit the information which can be carried, and the attitudes may be most clearly conveyed in the dialect the writer finds most congenial. Dialects are all equally serviceable in logic and metaphor" (11).

_______________________________

James Paul Gee. Situated Language and Learning.

In an analysis of how of the video game "Rise of Nations," reveals its assumptions about th learning process of its users, Gee compiles a list of 25 learning principles that could relate to other learning environments as well. Among them are several that connect to what I have assessed as the benefits of writing work on MySpace:

1. They create motivation for extended engagement.
6. They build in choice from the beginning.
8. "Basic skills" means what you need to learn in order to start taking more control over your own learning and learn by playing.
9. "Experienced" doesn't need to mean "expert," it can mean that one is well prepared for future learning.
13. They offer supervised (i.e. guided) sandbox tutorials (safe versions of the real system).
15. They give information "just in time" and on demand.
16. Learning should be a collaborative dance between the teacher's guidance and the learner's actions and interpretations.
17. They let learners create their own unsupervised sandboxes (i.e. let them be able to customize what you are offering).
22. They allow learners to practice enough so that they routinize their skills and then challenge them with new problems that force them to rethink these taken-for-granted skills and integrate them with new ones.
25. They ensure that leaners have and use an affinity space wherein they can interact with peers and masters, near and far, around a shared interest (even passion), making use of distributed and dispersed knowledge.

These learning principles apply to MySpace as a site for writing instruction just as well as to video games and the general education that Gee mentions.

MySpace Research... ewww

2007-10-03T02:24:00.000-04:00

"In Between Lauding and Deriding: A Pedagogical Review of MySpace." James J. Brown and Lacey Donohue. Currents in Electronic Literacy, Spring 2007.

"It behooves educators to understand how such sites operate, the ways in which our students operate on such sites, and how their interactions and relationships with the site can be incorporated into our teaching."

"Some instructors have expressed concerns about privacy invasion and the potential for blurred lines between student and instructor. If you are aware of these issues, ready to face them, and comfortable with the site, MySpace offers a number of possibilities for the writing classroom."

"If our students enjoy writing on social networking sites, and if a significant portion of their lives are spent creating, commenting on, and 'pimping' profiles, it is in our best interest to begin exploring and re-imagining these spaces as sites of instruction."

__________________________________________________

"Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." Dec. 1990. College English 52.8: pp 847-869.

"We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms--group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments--generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine th appropriate an inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patters disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse, as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority" (847).

Disruptive behavior is usually related to course material, students' dissatisfactions with it. They don't object to the learning, but the teachers' methodologies.

"We will argue that these computer conferences are powerful, non-traditional learning forums for students not simply because they allow for another oppurtunity for collaboration and dialogue--although this is certainly one of their functions--but also because they encourage students to resist, dissent, and explore the role that controversy and intellectual divergence play in learning and thinking" (849).

"Education, even as it empowers students with new knowledge and the ability to operate successfully within academic discourse communities, also oppress them, dictating a specific set of values and beliefs along with appropriate forms of behavior" (850).

"Thus, we know that using discourse effectively as a social force involves understanding both the values of constancy, or convention, and the value of change, of resistance to convention" (850).

"By encouraging students to resist in academic forums, we recognize and authorize them as members within the educational system, with as much right to initiate change as any of us" (851).

_____________________________________________

How is MySpace different from these online conferences??? It's inherently social, involves online identity, blogs???, power is compromised, I'm a user just as they are...

James Paul Gee... the sandbox: allows them freedom of play, they can choose how much, how little, what, to say. How.

If Burke is right, and language is epistemological, then doesn't it serve students in the process of learning to do so in their own language. Learning is moving from what is known to what is unknown (Barbara)... moving from their own language to the language mandated by convention...

At the same time, in response to notions of teaching change..., in light of our responsibility to give them the tools to succeed in a world so governed by conventions, we must provide the rhetorical toolbox necessary for recognizing, analyzing, and reproducing the rules of a particular discourse community... then they can decide when to push boundaries and when to conform.

danah boyd

Working Bibliography List... Ewww.

2007-09-12T20:19:00.000-04:00

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps.
Monroe, Barbara. Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology in the Classroom.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives.
Brock, Rochelle. Sista Talk.
Banks, Adam. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.
Schroeder, Christopher, Helen Fox and Patricia Bizzell. Alt Dis.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Winant, Howard. The New Politics of Race.
Dixon, Kathleen. Outbursts in Academe.
Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe.
Gee, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning.
Panetta, Clayann Gilliam. Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited.
Warren, Thomas. Cross-Cultural Communication.
Plato. Gorgias.
Plato. Phaedrus.
Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured.
Qunitilian. On the Teaching of Speaking and Writing.
Cicero. On Oratory and Orators.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists.
MacIntyre, Peggy. Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Priviledge.
Pratt, Steven. "On Being a Recognizable Indian among Indians."
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone."

Bill to keep MySpace out of schools....

2007-04-22T00:17:00.000-04:00

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Deleting Online Predators Act of 2007 (Introduced in House)
HR 1120 IH
110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 1120
To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
February 16, 2007
Mr. KIRK (for himself, Mr. MATHESON, Mrs. BIGGERT, Ms. GRANGER, Mr. ROGERS of Michigan, Mr. SHAYS, Mr. FOSSELLA, Mr. KUHL of New York, Mr. DAVIS of Kentucky, Mr. MARCHANT, Mr. MCKEON, Mr. GERLACH, and Mr. ROSKAM) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce
A BILL
To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Deleting Online Predators Act of 2007'.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
The Congress finds that--
(1) sexual predators approach minors on the Internet using chat rooms and social networking websites, and, according to the United States Attorney General, one in five children has been approached sexually on the Internet;
(2) sexual predators can use these chat rooms and websites to locate, learn about, befriend, and eventually prey on children by engaging them in sexually explicit conversations, asking for photographs, and attempting to lure children into a face to face meeting; and
(3) with the explosive growth of trendy chat rooms and social networking websites, it is becoming more and more difficult to monitor and protect minors from those with devious intentions, particularly when children are away from parental supervision.
SEC. 3. CERTIFICATIONS TO INCLUDE PROTECTIONS AGAINST COMMERCIAL SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES AND CHAT ROOMS.
(a) Certification by Schools- Section 254(h)(5)(B) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 254(h)(5)(B)) is amended by striking clause (i) and inserting the following:
`(i) is enforcing a policy of Internet safety for minors that includes monitoring the online activities of minors and the operation of a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with Internet access that--
`(I) protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are--
`(aa) obscene;
`(bb) child pornography; or
`(cc) harmful to minors; and
`(II) protects against access to a commercial social networking website or chat room unless used for an educational purpose with adult supervision; and'.
(b) Certification by Libraries- Section 254(h)(6)(B) of such Act (47 U.S.C. 254(h)(6)(B)) is amended by striking clause (i) and inserting the following:
`(i) is enforcing a policy of Internet safety that includes the operation of a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with Internet access that--
`(I) protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are--
`(aa) obscene;
`(bb) child pornography; or
`(cc) harmful to minors; and
`(II) protects against access by minors without parental authorization to a commercial social networking website or chat room, and informs parents that sexual predators can use these websites and chat rooms to prey on children; and'.
(c) Definitions- Section 254(h)(7) is amended by adding at the end the following new subparagraph:
`(J) COMMERCIAL SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES; CHAT ROOMS- Within 120 days after the date of enactment of the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2007, the Commission shall by rule define the terms `social networking website' and `chat room' for purposes of this subsection. In determining the definition of a social networking website, the Commission shall take into consideration the extent to which a website--
`(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
`(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
`(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
`(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
`(v) enables communication among users.'.
(d) Disabling During Adult or Educational Use- Section 254(h)(5)(D) of such Act is amended--
(1) by inserting `OR EDUCATIONAL' after `DURING ADULT' in the heading; and
(2) by inserting before the period at the end the following: `or during use by an adult or by minors with adult supervision to enable access for educational purposes pursuant to subparagraph (B)(i)(II)'.
SEC. 4. FTC CONSUMER ALERT ON INTERNET DANGERS TO CHILDREN.
(a) Information Regarding Child Predators and the Internet- Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act , the Federal Trade Commission shall--
(1) issue a consumer alert regarding the potential dangers to children of Internet child predators , including the potential danger of commercial social networking websites and chat rooms through which personal information about child users of such websites may be accessed by child predators ; and
(2) establish a website to serve as a resource for information for parents, teachers and school administrators, and others regarding the potential dangers posed by the use of the Internet by children, including information about commercial social networking websites and chat rooms through which personal information about child users of such websites may be accessed by child predators .
(b) Commercial Social Networking Websites- For purposes of the requirements under subsection (a), the terms `commercial social networking website' and `chat room' have the meanings given such terms pursuant to section 254(h)(7)(J) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 254(h)(7)(J)), as amended by this Act .
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Busy Bizzell: Basic Writing, Correctness

2007-03-16T21:29:00.000-04:00

Bizzell, Patricia. "Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or, What to Do with Mixed Forms of Academic Discourse." Journal of Basic Writing. 19:1. Boyd Printing Co.: 2000. 4-12.

First phase in "Basic Writing" studies decided that basic writers didn't write SWE correctly.

-Andrea Lunsford's '80 essay "The Content of Basic Writer's Essays" "treats the reliance of basic writers upon personal experience in their arguments as one sign of their arrest at an early stage of Piagetian or Vygotskean cognative development" (4).

Second phase, which Bizzell's own early work falls intoargued that the students weren't dysfunctional, the system was (more or less), and "aimed to initiate students into traditional academic discourse in a way that remained respectful of their home discourses and cognative abilities" (5).

Bizzell '86 "What Happens When Basic Writers Come to College?" Writer's difficulties are attributed to "clashes between their home worldviews and the academic worldview" (5).

But, the problem still remains in phase two, that they are seen as having issues of "correctness."

Phase Three:
"the

Patty Bizzell: Hybrid Academic Discourse

2007-03-16T16:25:00.000-04:00

Patty's revisiting her earlier claims about the need for teaching academic discourse, as she and her colleagues were inattentive to, if not unaware of, the "conflicts such teaching might generate for students coming from home discourse communities at great remove from the academic" (8).

-Joseph Harris won an award in '89 for exposing the infair pressures that notion of community (academic discourse community) "places on students and the ways it disguises internal disagreements" (8).

While there is still a traditional academic discourse, in many fields today it must "share the field with new forms of discourse that are clearly doing serious intellectual work and are received and evaluated as such, even as they violate many of the conventions of tradtitional academic discourse" (8).

These are hybrid academic discourses.

But we still need to know how to evaluate them and help their users improve them.

Traditional Academic Discourse:

There are certain rules and standards of a discourse community... "the way one employs these language-using conventions (with familiarity, with grace, or tentative bravado, for example) establishes one's place within the community: people of higher status use language (within the shared conventions) differently than do people of lower status" (9).

The community uses and shares this language for common projects and goals. The disourse and its standards and how a person fits in there has a profound impact on the individuals who use it. It's wisespread over land, class, culture, and even time.

But: "Actual humans are usually acquainted with more than one discourse, without being essentially defined by any--which helps give rise to hybrid discursive forms in which the language-using practices of more than one disoourse are blended, sometimes not smoothly" (10).

"Grapholect" is a form of language too complex to be spoken, the most "formal and ultra-correct" form of a language.

ADC’s enforce “a typical worldview, such that the persona speaking” projects objectivity, skepticism, and argumentativeness (10-11). Hence, also male.

Hybrid Academic Discourse:

Growing due to the more recent and growing diversification of academia.

“After all, in how many communities is it considered appropriate to critically question everything one’s interlocutor says, picking apart the other person’s statements and even her or his grammar and word choice, while keeping one’s own emotions and investments in the topic carefully hidden?” (11).

These hybrid languages open up the field for new possibilities. They’re “openly subjective, incorporating an author’s emotions and prejudices, forms that seek to find common ground among opposing positions rather than setting them against one another head to head, forms that deviate from the traditional grapholect by using language that is more informal, that includes words from other languages, that employs cultural references from the wide variety of world cultures rather than only the canonical Western tradition, and so on. These hybrid discourses enable scholarship to take account of new variables, to explore new methods, and to communicate findings in new venues, including broader reading publics than the academic” (12).

Victor’s discourse is “a hybrid form that borrows from both [newyorican speak and TAD] and is greater than the sum of its parts, accomplishing intellectual work that could not be done in either of its parent discourses alone” (13).

Gee Whiz: Situated Learning

2007-03-15T13:05:00.000-04:00

On the New Capitalism:

"Much work in the new capitalism involves teams and collaboration, based on the idea that in a fast-changing environment, where knowledge goes out of date rapidly and technological innovation is common, a team can behave more smartly than any individual in it by pooling and distributing knowledge" (97).

Affinity Spaces:

intensive and extensive knowledge: (each person entering the space brings some special knowledge); (each person enthering the space shares some knowledge and functions with others.
knowledge is distributed:across people, tools and technologies, not held in any one person or thing
Knowledge is dispersed: that is people in the space, using modern information and communication technologies, can draw on knowledge in sites outside the space itself
Knowledge is tacit: built up by daily practice and stored in the routines and procedures of people who use the space
(98)

New Capitalist workplaces require individuals like those at whom shows like Blues Clues are aimed: people who are empowered and can think for themselves and who think of themsleves as smart and creative people. (middle class, these shows assume that parents are actively involved in their children's development, they prize things like working together and commonality and community.) (102)

Reading Recovery

2007-02-05T18:39:00.000-05:00

just a simple place to write/respond/recollect... keep all this in order...