FoolsCap

Some afterthoughts from a conversation M. Karcher and I had during C & W.

M. was trying to find the so what? question for her upcoming presentation and we were batting some ideas around.  She was presenting on the online Snakes on a Plane phenomenon (or maybe phenomena) but hadn’t yet found a way to make it of pedagogical/rhetorical interest.  One question we were both interested in: How to make available a forum for students to use that encouraged the sort of self-sponsored, invested, creative writing that was evidenced by the fan communities around this film?  What made this difficult to answer is also pointed to in the fate of the film itself: New Line, the film’s producing studio, co-opted the fan creations and incorporated fan art, fan writing, fan music etc into their own marketing strategies–and, famously, into the production of the film itself.

Quinn–whose last name, sorry, I don’t have at hand–had by this point joined our little discussion, and he ruled out blogs, since his experience had been that student blogs just become reified as class work–his past students didn’t invest in blogs in a substantive way and the resulting work was little more than a typical reading journal, albeit in a digital medium.

[While I admit the journal-ization of blogs is a very real risk for instructors using them, I still like using them.  Even if the content is little more than reading journal entries, they’re still journals I don’t have to carry to and fro and every week.]

the problem, M. and I decided, was that students cannot escape the institution of the classroom.  Even were we to assure our pupils that we were taking a solely observational role in opening a forum to them, we would still be present as observers, and as Heisenberg teaches us, even an inactive observer changes the nature of that which is observed.  This is important, because what M. and I had suggested was a forum in which students could feel free to offer critique and feedbac on the instructor’s pedagogy, syllabus etc. without fear of reprisal.  Another problem, of course, is the obvious potential for conflicts of interest in such a forum being created by instructors–to be of any value (to students) it seems as though it would have to be student generated.

But the phrase I used to describe the instructor willing to implement such a forum has stuck with me since the conversation: "transparent pedagogy."  I’m not claiming to have coined it, but the idea has been floating around in the back of my mind of late.  What would constitute a transparent pedagogy?  Is it appropriate to incorporate different levels of transparency?  How might different participants in the university–students (both undergrad and grad), instructors, administration–benefit or be harmed by transparent pedagogy?  And, perhaps of more immediate interest as a possible entry for future C&W work (if noone beats me to it), how have students imposed their own forms of transparency via such sites as Rate My Professors?  How do/should instructors make the reasons for their pedagogical choices and their course material apparent to students?

Do we more to gain or to risk by becoming transparent pedagogues?  Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

So here’s some [further and more elaborate and specific] things I’ve gleaned from the C & W experience.

This conf seems to fall into a more practical area of the broader field of C&W, in that many of the presentations were oriented toward reporting on new software packages, new websites, classroom practices, online social trends, etc.  In addition to this, I observed a strong interest in literacy and literacy practices and how they’re changed by an engagement with computers and writing and associated pedagogical practice.  While all of this is of interest, I found it limiting in that I’m developing a keener interest in theory.  This suggests neither that the C&W presenters aren’t grounded in theory nor that I’m dissociating theory from practice.  Rather, I found myself longing for some presentations that were more invested in theory–part., of course, those theorists I’m interested in right now–and that used individual teaching practice or software models or whatever as examples of theory put into practice or as reflecting certain theoretical tropes or something.

Why?

Well I think part of it is that I’m still catching up to a lot of the folks at the conf, so there might very well be references to theory embedded in their talks that I didn’t recognize–what my class and I discussed as passive intertext (as opposed to active intertext–a great discussion, but I’m not sure, on second thought, if itext can be passive after all.  More later.).  So there’s that.  Also, however, other than outright stealing someone else’s assignment, I’m not really sure yet how to turn what I learn at a conf into my own pedagogy and practice.  This will come in time, I am sure, but for now (curiously) I’m more inclined to approach theory and make that work into pedagogy/practice.

The other lesson here, of course, is that one needs to learn the details/goals/strengths/weaknesses of confs just as one must learn the same of journals . . . if C&W is more praxis and empiricist, I might need to choose on occasion which I attend, esp since as Rice mentions, there will on occasion be scheduling conflicts.

What follows is some feedback and commentary on the panels I was able to attend.

1. Further thoughts on C & W
2. Responses to two articles I’ve read
3. Response to Spivak’s into to <i>Of Grammatology</i>
4. The usual excoriations of my own limited talents

A compendium of lessons learned and thoughts thunk during the 2007 Computers and Writing Conference, May 17-20, at bee-yoo-tee-ful Wayne State.

1. Holy damn, putting on a conference is a lot of work.  I do not envy the organizers of larger conferences (the Cs, for example) their task.
2. The best way to learn your campus is to tell a stranger where they’re going.
3. The Ferry Street Inn is on Ferry Street.  And, on Friday morning, had the most scrumptious fresh-cinnamon roll smell wafting through the lounge/dining area.
4. The C&W community likes the following stuff: free crap, beer, bowling, helpful grad volunteers, accessible parking.
5. The C&W community does not like the following: unreliable wireless access, the staff at the Towers dorm, lunch shortages, name-tag shortages, program shortages.  For all participants who suffered through these and other inconveniences: apologies and gratitude for your patience.
6. Geoff Sirc is, in person, as interesting and engaging as his writing and nowhere near as intimidating as his UMinn faculty pic.
7. Richard Doyle reminds me of a favorite line from <i>Hamlet</i>: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t."
8. Who is the fellow with the mutli-colored mohawk?
9. Oh, that’s [insert respected scholar’s name here]!
10. Helen Liggett is a terrifically nice person and I wish I had been able to make it to her talk.  Still, I had the chance to drive her and Keith Dorwick from the Ferry St. Inn to McGregor and had a nice chat about WSU landmarks.
11. If someone compliments me personally one more time, I’m going to get paranoid.  But thanks, Richard and Jeff, anyway–it meant a lot.
12. I think Vered would be huge here.
13. McGregor has the ugliest doors in Christendom.
14. A (partial) standing ovation from one’s peers and colleagues for all one’s hard work?  Priceless.
15. I love free books.
16. These publisher people are really helpful.
17. I’m horribly underdressed for this museum banquet.
18. A flitting uncertainty as to who’s faculty and who’s still grad students.
19. Open Source Software: I understand its importance and all, but I’m not sure I really quite care yet.  Although Pruchnic’s New Order-themed panel was pretty sweet–in particular, I liked the extrapolation from this one phenomenon to broader social/pedagogical/theoretical concerns.
20. If you want to, you know, attend panels, volunteering to work the conf is not the best way to do it.

Other thoughts that require more in-depth explanation:

I admit I’ve been hesitant to send out paper proposals/abstracts because I didn’t feel like I had had the necessary "Big Idea."  But from what I’ve seen during the conference, the BI doesn’t seem to matter so much.  This is in no way a diminishment of the work presented at the conference–all the panels I was able to attend offered creative, engaging, rigorous scholarship.  Rather, though, one thing I’ve learned from the conference is that the conf paper doesn’t have to be a major statement or a field-changing intervention, but rather can be a work-in-progress, some half-formed-thoughts, a way to present ideas and conjectures and get feedback from one’s peers.  A major relief, then, as I start hypothesizing ideas for next year’s C & W.

I am not a natural schmoozer, but need to work on it a bit.  The few participants I had a chance to talk to at length were gracious and warm, so I’m encouraged about future attempts to meet and/or greet.  I admire those whose crippling personal doubts and anxieties don’t stand in the way of successful networking.

My impression is that the event was a huge p.r. smash for WSU and the Detroit area in general.  Which, as we WSU students eagerly assured each other, bodes well for the next round of hirings and future grad applications.  In particular, conf participants seemed impressed by the dedication and efforts of the grad volunteers, by the accessibility of most campus points of interest, the close proximity of two bars to campus, the proximity of Detroit’s cluster of museums to our campus, and the attractiveness overall of Wayne’s cmapus.  This last point is of interest, I think, because too often Wayne folks take their surroundings for granted–at least I do.

I’m sort of getting sick of writing this, but I’ve more to say about various panels I attended, and a possible realization about a direction of study for yours truly.

My brain has been fried by all the writing lately, what with seminar papers coming due.  But I still want to write here, in this space–indeed, I often had to resist writing here while drafting seminar papers.  This venue seems, in some ways, so much more compelling.  Is it the promise of instant feedback, or that I can respond to people’s comments–where I can’t exactly write Dr. Flatley a note about his comments on a seminar paper. . . .

Interesting things afoot on Rice’s blog of late to which I want to respond, at least in brief:

1) The emphasis not on what is new or not new, but rather on the changing work/writing space that shifts from hypertextual paths (Bolter) to networks (managing these environments/synching them/seeing them in relationship to one another on the desktop/browser).

Hmm. . .while my first instinct is to freak out–just as I’ve started getting some thoughts together on hypertext, networks come along and shift the whole paradigm–I’m not sure that it’s as big a leap as that gut reaction suggests.  In a sense, we might think of networks (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong) as hyper-hypertexts.  That is, if hypertext is the creation and use of connected texts, one way to think of networks is as the connection of texts that comprise connections–and, as Rice suggests, mananging those connections-within-connections, putting them to work in increasingly flexible, movable, and personalizable writing spaces.  What is compelling (for me at least and, understanding some of Rice’s interests, him as well) about these new spaces is how they seem unbounded by questions of genre (as he notes in his post) and just sort of unbounded generally.

For example, what does it mean to have a kairotic moment if your writing moves with you across writing spaces?  Marback pointed out in seminar last semester that kairos is at least somewhat dependent on physical space, and this leads to interesting questions here–mot only about kairos (is kairos the same at different workstations, or the same at work and home, or . . .?) but about the very "space" metaphor itself.  There is a tendency, at least from my limited exposure to the metaphor, to equate space with either

• medium:the blog is one space but print is another

or

• genre: the academic essay as space vs. (say) the personal narrative as space.

Of course, material spaces become spaces for writing as well–I’m thinking here of Rice’s HASTAC presentation, with his layered metaphors  of space, networks, and databases.  I’m not criticizing the space metaphor, here: I’m interested, in one hand, on its flexibility, but on the other I’m wary of getting too accustomed to one metaphor, regardless of its flexibility.  Still, the space metaphor seems to have some life in it yet, so the question then becomes more about how we adapt the space metaphor to acknowledge an increasingly unbounded understanding of writing.  One thing might need to be thought of: is our use of the space metaphor dependent on assumed boundaries?  If so, how do we work past that or accomodate those boundaries into new forms of writing–or, should we have boundaries?  Hmm.

And as long as I mentioned networks here, I can include the quick blurb for a thought on a possible project about them:  Heidegger mentions Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the first practical study of being-together (god I hate H’s neologisms).  If we can think of networks and network theory as also a study of being-together, how can we use that link to Aristotle to construct/perform a rhetoric that is inherently and essentially of, in, and, for the network?

2) And yet there comes a time when calls for awareness and activism must acknowledge not only their desire for change and eye-opening but the limitations of such acts in of themselves.

Admittedly, I sort of chose this sentence at semi-random to serve as the jumping-off point for something of my own.  It is tangentially related to Jeff’s post though.

In designing my FYC syllabus for this semester, I deliberately avoided doing the semiotics/cultural studies approach specifically because I couldn’t really convince myself that it was my responsibility to show my students how they’ve been oppresses and exploited by the culture industry.  For one thing, I’m not sure I buy the whole culture industry hypothesis.  For another, it seems awfully presumptuous of me to assume I can do so anyway.  I admire Berlin’s idea of social-epistemic rhetoric, but (maybe naively) I just don’t feel that cultural production is all that sinister.  (Though Marcuse’s "Affirmative Character of Culture" has been a big influence on me of late–but that is more about the ideological uses of culture than an outright suspicion of culture.)  Liberation sounds like a great ideal, but from who or what am I meant to be liberating my students?  Ideology?  Big Business?  Globalization?  The Man?  Whitey?

One trope I’ve observed in my students’ writing this semester is the rush to condemn popular culture/the media (or often, "The Media" as though it’s the brand name of an international conspiracy) for ideological constructions.  "’Culture’ teaches us . . ." or "’The Media’ tells us . . ." are usualy how such sentences begin.  On one hand, I admit, this might point to a weakness in my pedagogy–did I accidentally somewhere suggest that such a conspiracy was taking place?  On the other, I think it points to a certain degree of student awareness that we (as instrucutors) often teach with the aim in mind of bringing students into "awareness" or "critical consciousness" or something similar–and if students just plug in the buzz word du jour (the Media, Popular Culture, Ideology) they’ll show us, gosh darn it, that they’ve been enlightened and (in Townshend’s words) won’t get fooled again!  I find the appearance of this trope so interesting specifically because it’s been so absent from what we usually talk about in my class–which is more about texts and their relationship to other texts we’ve read.  It must indicate something, then, that students are recognizing this trope and exploiting it–not always (or even usually) with great accuracy or efficacy . . . but I wonder why it pops up so much.