ENGL 584: Scott Filkins is remediating his literacy narrative

It was a trip to New York City that encouraged me to take the plunge into social networking.

It was the summer of 2007, and Sarah’s sister had come along with us, partly because she had never been to New York and partly because we all knew the trip would be more fun if there were an extra adult to allow for pairs of us to leave in the evening while Colin went to bed. She was getting ready to start a new teaching job, and she brought along some curricular materials and her laptop. I don’t know how much she did with the curricular materials, but I know she paid for wireless access and, every evening, she updated her MySpace profile with a photo, news about the day, and a different New York City-themed song.

MySpace: Exhibit A

I was a teacher too—and had been for the nine years leading up to that summer. I knew about MySpace, had friends who had MySpace profiles, and liked being able to listen to tracks on musician’s pages. But I was adamantly opposed to having a MySpace profile myself. They seemed tacky.

Conjuring up the lists of “favorites and interests” seemed like a lot of work. I didn’t want to have to deal with the privacy issues associated with student friend requests and so forth. Seeing how Jamie was using MySpace to generate nearly real-time conversations about our adventures in Manhattan made me a little envious, though. I admitted as such, and she said she’d show me how to set up an account.

When we got back to Urbana, I took the plunge and set up a profile. I remember carefully planning what I’d include in my lists of favorite books and movies. I looked at profiles of people I knew in search of guidance. I particularly liked the way a colleague (call him “Jan”) had organized his, but I knew I could only “borrow” so much of his structure. Earlier in the summer, one of our other colleagues, “Saul” had inexplicably copied and pasted all of the “Jan’s” favorite TV shows to his profile. We thought it was some sort of an ironic joke, but it wasn’t—and the incident established that cribbing too heavily on someone’s media-identity-generating content was not cool.

I can’t recall having too much turmoil over the potential teacher-privacy implications, largely because I set a rule for myself to keep things on the up-and-up on my profile and because I was actively seeking employment outside of the classroom at the same time as the trip. Just a few weeks after I set up my MySpace account, I interviewed for and got a job on the ReadWriteThink.org project at NCTE.

The coincidence of edging into online social networking at the same time that I starting a new job, outside of the classroom, with an organization that was trying desperately to edge into social networking itself contributed immeasurably to the speed and depth with which I began developing these literacies. For one, I could “friend” anyone I wanted from my old school; even the students I had the previous year were “former” in a way they wouldn’t have been if I were still teaching. More significantly, though, I had created a digital version of myself that I knew people at NCTE would see—and that would allow me to gain different insight into some of them that I would ever have access to without a MySpace account.

I didn’t realize then that I was joining MySpace when it was in its terminal stages, at least with my social/peer groups.

Much better.

Because I was seeing the fun and advantages of networking with people and sharing information about myself through MySpace, when conversations with my now former teaching colleagues shifted to Facebook from MySpace, I had no qualms about setting up an account there as well. I distinctly remember thinking how convenient it was that I had already done all the “favorite” thinking with MySpace and I could just copy and paste things over. Incidentally, I felt the same way when I completed the new employee “getting to know you” questionnaire at NCTE that resulted in a print version of something very much like a Facebook profile. But any interaction about that profile had to be had through conversations in real life. How odd, right?

Not long after I started at NCTE, they were preparing to launch a new version of their website and were considering starting an organizational presence on Facebook. I was too new to be given this responsibility, but some people were tasked with setting up accounts and doing “environmental scans” to see what things were like for a professional organization in this brave new world. Of the many adjustments of shifting from a public school job to work at a professional not-for-profit, few were as surprising as finding out being on Facebook there could legitimately count as work. Granted, constant connection to the Internet and proximity to one’s computer may have led to significant abuses of work time and Facebook, but how odd it was that sites that were blocked at school were part of daily work here.

When NCTE did eventually set up its Facebook page, certain staff members were charged with responsibility for its function and maintenance. On some occasions, I’d be called to someone’s work area to collaborate on how to make specific things happen or troubleshoot why something that seemed plausible to do was in fact impossible.

That overlap of my “real-life” digital literacy learning was merely funny to me. Much more significant was the opportunity afforded to me because of knowledge about blogging I acquired at the UIWP Summer Institute and then transferred into my work at NCTE. Because I was visiting the SI only two days a week, I missed significant chunks of instruction that the regular participants were getting. I attended the first Monday, and didn’t come back until the Friday of that first week. As the other participants were engaging in morning writing, Patrick asked me if I had a WordPress account. I knew what he was talking about, but I didn’t have one, and I frankly wasn’t interested in one.

To his credit, he ignored my indifference and walked me through the steps of setting things up. I still didn’t think I’d use the blog, but that afternoon I started poking around and realized that a blog interface worked the same way as the ReadWriteThink site at work, with a Content Management System on the backend and a templated front-facing area where work was published. I had no idea that’s the way the web worked prior to these experiences, but as I saw the interconnections, I felt confident I could make this blog thing work. What got me hooked was, like MySpace and Facebook customization through images and “media identity” lists, the style templates for the blog. Since I knew the blog would be a digital representation of me, I scanned all the possibilities and looked for ones that communicated what I wanted to say about me. Most were too frilly; the one with a red pen (called Rubric) would not do.

I chose something rather formal—in fact, it might been the one that looked like a scroll—and got to my first postings. Because I was the SI on NCTE time, I reported on what I was doing there, and I shared the link to my blog with people who asked.

Not long thereafter, responsibility for writing the NCTE INBOX blog was going to be dispersed among several staff members, not concentrated with the two authors as was the current system. I had particularly admired the blog entries Traci Gardner did—always thoughtful and engaging, and so well written. So when someone said, “We know that you blog” and asked if I’d be able to contribute one entry per month, I was excited but nervous. I looked forward to sharing my thoughts about teaching through this venue—with that audience—but I was skeptical that I’d have worthwhile things to say, or that I could express them well enough to measure up to Traci’s work.

I struggled with my first entry—framing some thoughts about writing assessment and digital technologies (the worlds are in full overlap mode at this point) with a personal story, but being uncertain about how “big” to take the conversation, and how to balance the personal story with the more conceptual stuff. I sent drafts out for feedback—to the other blog author and director of communications and to Gail—and finally got the piece ready for publication.

The blog goes live late afternoon on INBOX days, and the actual INBOX email goes out overnight. I sent out news of the entry to people I thought might be interested (using Facebook, of course). I was checking the blog constantly to see if I had generated any comments, well before there was any reason to suspect it had been read. That particular entry generated a fair bit of commentary, the mark of a job well done (along with the click-through data that I learned much later how to ask for).

The inspiration piece.

I never got tired of doing the INBOX blog and in fact looked forward to my monthly turn. I began perceiving the world in terms of blog-ability—discovering the issue, finding the hook, working through the examples—and would often have several ideas filed away, mental drafts already started when my week came along. This mentality came in handy one week when the designated blog author discovered she wouldn’t be able to make the deadline. Someone sheepishly asked me mid-day on publication day if I thought I could possibly get something done. I could, I said. And I did—a pretty good piece on teaching poetry, if I do say so myself.

The INBOX job is gone now, and without the pressure (in a good sense) to write once a month, I hardly find time to write for any blog—personal or otherwise. So, for now, I have to content myself with the online writing I do in the tiny box on Facebook, the space I avoided so cavalierly for so long.