ENGL 584 Response 1: TIME MACHINE!

It was gratifying to return to Prior and Shipka’s piece on chronotopic lamination some six years after I originally read it (or a version of it) in the semester during which our son Colin was born—an event that made the chapter’s attention to writers’ control over time and space come keenly into focus as I balanced composition of a seminar paper with co-caring for a newborn. As I compare myself as a I writer now—with a laptop computer and access to any number of locations around town and campus that can provide free Internet access—to the writer I was then—tied to my home machine and a slave to frequent printing as I drafted (okay, I admit that hasn’t changed too much)—I see the ways in which digital writing technologies, growing smaller, faster, and more powerful allow writers new levels of control over the environments they can inhabit as they draft, share, edit, and publish.

Ubiquity of literate practice is a theme that unites this week’s readings, and I was continually struck at how digital technologies such as flip cams, laptops, and iPads are supporting the advancement of such distribution of writing across diverse and divergent contexts. As Hawisher, et al., mention, the ubiquity has always been there, but portable composition tools are changing the game in very interesting ways. Prior and Shipka report writers who recall traces of conversation about writing in bars; they also discuss the role coffee (and lack of access to coffee) can play in writers’ processes. This is not new—one hears stories of Shakespeare putting quill to scroll in pubs near the Globe because only public spaces could afford indoor lighting sufficient enough to write in the evening. Similarly well-documented is the role of coffeehouses associated with the exchange of ideas between the likes of Pepys and Johnson, both for their provision of social space, but for the chemical uptick associated with caffeine.

What’s different now is the level of additional control over environment and space digital writing tools offer us. I can take my laptop to a coffee shop to write because I want to, not because I have to (though sometimes that’s true). If I don’t have sufficient control over my environment at home, I’m not tied to a desktop machine to compose, edit, and share my work. In other words, I can go to the environment that allows me sufficient control over itself. (And even if the environment isn’t completely amenable to my writing needs, digital technologies such as iPods let me control the music I listen to, and the presence of the white earphones send a strong signal that I’m there to be left alone, despite being in a nominally social space).

Again, this isn’t completely new. Writers have taken their books and notebooks to cafes and libraries to get things done, but the compact multifunctionality of a laptop (as Lovett and Squier note) is new. I can do more than read research or edit or write a draft. I can share the draft with peers through Google docs; I can publish writing on the web through WordPress. To get a sense of the difference, imagine the awkwardness of an analogous situation from just a generation ago: a café full of tables with stacks of books and file folders for research; half-filled notebooks for invention and composing; and typewriters for preparing drafts for publication. Possible, yes; but convenient, no.

Revisiting Prior and Shipka’s piece in conjunction with Hawisher, et al., and Lovett and Squier helps me put into theoretical perspective a phenomenon I wrote about in Mark Dressman’s class last fall. He asked us to go somewhere and observe—then to try to make sense out of what we saw. It was a “loose” assignment, to be sure, and one that gave me trouble after I wrote down everything the patrons at Café Espresso on Goodwin were doing for the better part of an hour. That is, until on my way back to my car, I ducked into the Undergraduate Library to pick something up. I noticed that the two spaces—café and library—were much more similar in social function than they had been when I was an undergraduate. The conflation of purpose and environment is overwhelmingly attributable to the ability for digital technology to support reading and writing in contexts beyond the traditional print-bound confines. More relaxed library rules played a part as well, but I’m certain that the decisions behind such changes were informed by the need for libraries to compete with other spaces that can offer similar access to information and support—with “groovier” atmospheres.

As empowering and freeing as these aspects of digital writing technologies can be, I want to acknowledge the way in which they can add an element of sterility and invasiveness to the concept of knotworking—“part of the normal and routine management of multiple activity footings” Shipka and Prior cite. Having recently participated in a fairly high-stakes, deadline-driven collaborative writing project, I found myself dreading the act of checking my personal email account, knowing that at any moment my last week of summer—and into my first week of work—could be invaded with another draft, another round of comments, another passing of the e-baton. Supported by the ease of digital composition and the speed of digital communication, I found it hard not to work because of the networked knotwork. Yes, the laptop can support a notion as elegant and ideal as a “living pedagogy,” but it’s also the agent of constantly living requests for productivity that can get in the way of learning or recreation of a more personal, self-directed nature.

“Isn’t it rich?” Response to Week 10 readings

I appreciated that Pigg uses Anne Wysocki’s theoretical stance that resists privileging “technologies over creators or users…assum[ing] that technologies themselves ’cause’ new media text forms” (235). Doing so gave some substance to her earlier promising phrasing–“it is tempting to gaze on high-tech students whose bodies display the latest technologies and see packaged new media producers” (232, emphasis mine)–that so rightly identifies the need to interrogate assumptions (even positive ones) we have about the people with whom we’re writing. Meaning no disrespect, I frankly believe we give adolescents way more credit than they deserve as producers and consumers of digital texts, often confusing evidence of basic technical know-how/”familiarity” with evidence of understanding or control over choices and their effects.

I was disappointed, though, when Pigg shares the story of Paul who first blogs and then writes a traditional paper in which he takes on the persona and rhetorical stance of a character from The Laramie Project. She claims that his “message was changed not only by altering the medium in which he produced it, but also by changing the speaking voice, which built the ethos and constructed the writing body in a way that would appeal to a very different audience” (248). Her analysis of the role of medium is conflated almost entirely with audience, as she observes that he “relied on direct audience address…as well as strong, inflammatory audience,” moves she contrasts with “extended research” and “elimina[tion] of conventions more suited to a blog posting” (249-50).

It seems at this point that Pigg is conflating the genre and medium. A blog is a vehicle for communicating ideas with the potential to reach a wider audience more rapidly than an academic essay, but does it really have inherent “conventions” that imply (or even condone) direct audience address? Does the medium of a blog really disinvite the presentation of extended research? It seems to me that media have affordances (blogs allow for embedded digital media and hyperlinks in ways that print documents do not), but they do not have “conventions,” socially constructed boundaries and guidelines that are actually the features of genre. I would like to have seen her dig more deeply into that distinction in seeing how and why Paul wrote differently in the two different media. Hearing from his perspective would have been useful.

(This is a nearly unrelated quibble, but what does she mean, I wonder, by rich when she describes the out-of school digital writing she studied [234]? She uses varied immediately after, so I have to assume she’s not being redundant. The footnote offers evidence that implies the variety, but we’re left having to accept rich and interpret what it might mean. I’m always suspect when I see that word, often used to describe writing that happens outside of school).

I very much enjoyed our second Sorapure of the semester, though it was another frustrating read without the benefit of seeing the examples “live” as I read. Her framework of static, animated, interactive, and dynamic will likely be one that I take up in my seminar paper on digital reading. Stay tuned.

ENGL 584: Response to Week 9 Readings

I understand that it’s a convention to call for further research in an area, but one of Kirkland’s concluding comments really troubled me.  He concludes his Standpoints piece by stating that “Therefore, in ELA, we must seek to better understand extra space so that it can be put to better use for new century pedagogical purposes–chiefly to enhance and update ELA researching and teaching” (360).  Before I comment on the specific nature of my annoyance, let me first point out the way in which Yi and Hirvela’s article make a similar, though more specific call.  They recommend that

teachers acknowledge and learn more about the authentic and motivating nature of 1.5 Generations students’ self-selected experiences with literacy and consider those experiences an important stepping stone into formal writing instruction in school.  1.5 Generation students…can, for example, be encouraged to look for ways in which to incorporate their self-sponsored writing into more academically-oriented writing tasks or to apply more formal writing strategies and techniques to what they have previously composed outside of school. (106)

My practitioner-continuum self cringes at recommendations such as these.  First of all, they’re not specific enough to be useful.  How does a teacher “learn more about” this kind of writing?  The access granted to researchers is predicated on the understanding that the relationship is based on an attempt to understand those literacies, not to use them or change them in some way.  What does the recommended “encouragement” look like?  A passing comment when a student mentions she blogs?  An assignment?  It’s moments such as this that help me see the value in co-publication by researchers and practitioners.  Not only could such a partnership avoid recommendations that fail the authenticity sniff test, they could go a step further and provide concrete recommendations that, whether they “work” or not, are something specific enough you could imagine yourself doing (or not).

And speaking of “not,” I was surprised that Yi and Hirvela made such recommendations at all, in light of their previous framing of such literate practices as choices and their acknowledgment of the ideological hierarchy that favors school-based literacy over self-sponsored reading and writing.  They conclude that “the self-sponsored composing practices of Elizabeth…are anything but the ‘inferior attempts’ at using writing cited by Street and Street,” yet they go on to say that by bridging school and non-school writing, “self sponsored writing takes on an air of legitimacy that will empower writers like Elizabeth” (106).  Describing self sponsored writing as a “stepping stone” in need of “formalization” seems the antithesis of fuel for empowerment.

Back to Kirkland, then.  Is the “chief” role of understanding literacies in extra spaces to enhance and update the way we teach?  I guess it’s the phrase “put to better use” that bothers me so much.  If something is functioning as well as it is for Aja and Raymond, does it need school-based literacy support?  Is it all reasonable to think that the authenticity of the activities are replicable (in any way that’s above mockery) in a school setting?  The utilitarian nature of such an approach to understanding human practice leaves me cold rather than inspired to act.

Luke, in some ways, addresses a similarly utilitarian, commodifying relationship between education and the economy, scholarly work and corporate presses.  Situated within the context of Cope and Kalantzis’ commentary on the withering of the central state, Luke discusses how corporate money (and interests…and control) step in to fill the void left by withering state support for institutions of higher learning.  A related issue is Luke’s assertion that “academics essentially provide free labor to produce a product for a new breed of publishing mega-houses that stream profit revenue to shareholders not stakeholders, or reinvest fractional profit into ‘services’ that academics can no longer afford” (110).

Once I got over the brief initial shock of that notion, I realized that no one should at all be surprised by such a situation.  First, the labor isn’t exactly “free,” though I know what she means.  The monetary transaction takes place at the site of the university through salary, research versus teaching loads, and tenure agreements, so it is odd that the journals are directly profiting off that labor.  But the academy is far from the only line of production in which the lowest-level producers cannot readily afford  the end product to which they contribute.  I guess the shocking part of that sentence is the realization that academics are at the lowest level of a chain, with the corporate publishing structure superseding their importance through their ability to produce marketable versions of their intellectual product.

Such a realization does help put in perspective the need for alternative routes of publication that lead to the cache required in academia (recall Sonia’s and my presentation on Generacciones’ Narratives, for example) and the value of not-for-profit membership organizations such as NCTE that, even though their titles are accessible through subscription aggregators as well, make their journal content reasonably accessible through individual subscription and direct Web-based interfaces.

ENGL 584: Response to Week 8 Readings

A common thread that unites Black’s study to the Cope/Kalantzis address is the concept of the individual in the digital age.  Black approaches the idea via the individual’s role in collaborative writing and response—as well as in terms of the notion of imagination.  Cope/Kalantzis engage with it more in relation to the diversity at the level of the individual associated with the third globalization.  I’m most interested in thinking about the particular brand(s) of individuality they associate with participation in the digital age.

Granted, I’m not theoretically equipped to discuss philosophies of the individual, so my thinking here is more observational than anything else.  But it does seem disconcerting (is that the right word?) that Cope/Kalantzis claim that “We are returning to a deep logic of divergence and diversity not witnessed since we spoke the languages of the first globalization,” building in part on the examples of “endless television channels, streamed radio, [and] Web communities”  (372).  I use disconcerting because it seems very easy to confuse individuality with infantile selfishness when it’s framed in terms iPod and MyDirectTV (I don’t know if the latter exists…perhaps My is redundant next to Direct?).  Does putting together a playlist of the 10 favorite songs I bought from iTunes contribute to diversity?  I guess it does, in some way, but not in the way that I want to talk about diversity.

To be sure, Cope/Kalantzis do not rely on the commercial media examples alone, but when paired with Black’s study of imagination fueled by “poached” content, the idea of digital diversity seems harrowingly homogenized through the corporate media structures to which we’re so proudly reaffirming our identity-commitments.  While it was affirming to see that one participant chose to “right” the “social wrongs” in the anime series she was writing about, I think we do need to temper our use of the word imagination a bit when it is buttressed as strongly as it is by the “textual resources” of characters, plots, and situations that preexist.  (And for the record, Nanako is basing her story not just on the Western narrative of You’ve Got Mail.  That film, and several other works that use the same plot device, are adaptations of the play Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo).

At the center of my concern, I guess, is what do we mean by diversity, individuality, and difference?  If the metrics we use are the way people adapt commercial media stories to post and dedicate to our new boyfriends and girlfriends, that worries me a little.  If we seek evidence for difference in the preponderance of television channels that are individualized only because it makes delivery of marketing messages more efficient, that worries me as well.

ENGL 584: Response to Week 7 Readings

I’m interested in the different perspectives—one very corporate and one very personal—that Nakarmura and Kirkland take that together reveal an inherent contradiction in identity construction in digital spaces.  In critiquing the difference-less utopia (dystopia?) promised by the likes of Compac and IBM, Nakamura reveals the problems associated with “gesturing towards a democracy founded upon disembodiment and uncontaminated by physical differences” (16).  Her criticism is founded the corporate/capitalist nature of such ideology, an ideology with a very real interest in erasing difference to reduce the market to as homogeneous a level as possible.

Kirkland, on the other hand, shares the case of Raymond, who creates an identity in which difference is in opposition to Raymond himself rather than in relation to anyone else.    Raymond takes (at least temporary) solace in the ability to be differently gendered in a online environment; tech companies promise we’ll find happiness in an online environment in which difference doesn’t exist.  Both seem promising and problematic: Is either a more accurate descriptor of what digital spaces offer?

While Nakamura, Kirkland, and Ow all focus on aspects of digital identity that merit attention, I do find it useful to consider the very concept of virtual reality a little more carefully.  How seriously should we take the identities people can create—or have created for them (or uncreated?)—in online spaces?  This question came to the fore for me in Kirkland’s piece when he claims that on Facebook, Aja “inherited the strength to struggle, to carry her through the silent tempests of patriarchy” (15) and that she can be in “’more than one place at once,’ … reveal[ing] the complexity of space in the digital dimension” (16).

Granted, Kirkland is citing research from another of his studies, but without the data to substantiate these claims, I was left wondering just what was she doing online?  What constituted being in these different spaces? Does being plugged in, logged in, and available online count as being in this third space, or does some sort of activity have to be occurring?  What, then, is this activity that makes the virtual so live, so real, as Kirkland suggests?  It’s not so much that I discount the possibility as I felt shortchanged in the depth of his analysis.

Nakamura critiques the utopian ideology in the rhetoric of technology corporations.  I see Kirkland falling prey to overindulgent claims about the power of such digital spaces, though his claims are certainly of a different nature.  To frame the issue differently, as intriguing as Ow’s multi-faceted critique of a racist, sexist, violent video game is, part of the argument is based on the fear that, in its ability to seem more like life than other media, it becomes more than offensive (which it is).  It becomes a vehicle for creating people who think the way the video game does, and perhaps who start acting in that way as well.  Although Ow doesn’t go as far as to suggest this, isn’t that the thinking behind Kirkland’s inability to “deny the impact of the digital dimension to the expansion of pedagogical space and the intensification of human activities” (19)?

That said, I do find Kirkland’s idea of a hybrid notion of official space and unofficial space quite useful.  As online spaces become more “real”—connections richer and more complex, interfaces less and less virtual—and as the technologies that support them become more portable and more ubiquitous, looking for the ways in which these spaces inform each other seems more useful in continuing to discuss how different they are.

ENGL 584: Week 6 Response

It might be interesting to project an image like this and ask students to write for 10 minutes about what they think is happening.

One of my first thoughts as I finished this week’s readings related to the way Facebook asks, implicitly or explicitly, to reveal the facets of identity the articles address: sexual orientation and age. When setting up and displaying profile information, you’re asked for date of birth, including year. This is certainly related to minimum age requirements on the site, but it’s also part of the community-building feature so your birthday can become part of the daily feed, and you can harvest all the greetings from friends who notice it’s your day. Users, though, have the option of hiding their age. Facebook doesn’t let us opt out of the relative notion of birthdays–I’m having one, put something on my wall–but it acknowledges the need for privacy of the absolute aspect of birthdays–the number of them we’ve had.

Facebook is more complicated in terms of revelation of sexual preference. I think you’re required to state gender. There are options, though, for selecting relationship status (none of which indicate the gender of the person with whom you are or aren’t in the relationship) and options for announcing which gender (or both) you’re interested in. All of these announcements are optional, and thus relate to the intersection of mechanical means and identify information by which we control privacy (or not) in social networks (Lange).

Issues of publicity and privacy, then, continue to complicate our developing notions of literate lives in digital times. I take issue, for example, with Alexander’s statement that “pseudonymous participation ensure that the widest variety of voices will be able to speak in a public forum” as students role play various activities that question dominance of heterosexual identity constructs. Is a community composed of people who aren’t using their real identities actually public? I tend to think not–or at least it’s further down the spectrum in terms of Lange’s definition of “publicly private.” While I see the benefits that Alexander attributes to such a set up, it seems to contribute to his own critique of “teachers [who] are tempted to treat the subject gingerly, attempting to instill, at most, tolerance for homosexuality and an awareness of the unacceptability of homophobia” (271).

What messages does it send that teachers ask students to write about these issues only under the cloak of anonymity? Alexander’s pedagogy relates to the concern Addison and Hillgloss’ cite from Harriet Malinowitz, who “questions the degree to which gay and lesbian students in writing classrooms are able to situate themselves openly due to such powerful group norms–despite [or perhaps in Alexander’s case, because of?] instructor’s attempts to diversify those classrooms” (28).

Crow, in addressing the issues surrounding aging learners (and teachers) who need to (or don’t?)  “accumulate” new literacies” in a quickly changing digital environment, rightly identifies the unique position age holds in the diversity nexus, in that (barring early death), all of us will experience it (though differently, based on a variety of other identity factors).  While we all may benefit from the privileges afforded to youth (though not so heterosexuality, as Alexander, Addison & Hilligoss discuss), we’ll also face the challenges associated with aging (unless we’re able to shift the power paradigm to pro-age in the next half-generation).

I was reminded right away with the work we do in the University of Illinois Writing Project when Crow describes a colleague and herself “talking with a group of about fifteen writing teachers who are enthusiastic and kind, but as we examined possibilities for writing instruction using [a particular] feature on the computers, [she] had the sinking feeling that the workshop only reached a third of the participants at most” (13).  Though I take issue with the way Crow uses the word literacy as a stand in for technological know-how (e.g. knowing the genre conventions of writing an e-mail, yes; knowing how to manage the technologies of folders and out-of-office replies, no…though I know where she’s coming from) I know how difficult it can be to discuss the benefits of writing technology when the technology part seems a barrier to the composing part.

The most interesting aspect of her chapters, as they relate to an understanding of the field, is her seeming focus on the need for older writing instructors to maintain “their levels of authority and credibility” in the wake of writing technologies that might make some feel uncomfortable.  I’m hopeful that in later chapters she addresses this issue with a bit more complexity, but when she asks “How does one retain authority with a machine that won’t ever do what a person wants it to do, where files can’t be found, where things keep going wrong?” I start to question what her notion of a writing teacher might be.  I understand that she’s writing hypothetically, trying to get inside the head of an older teacher who faces a tech challenge, but I like to think that the defining characteristic of a teacher is the willingness to learn and the grace to do so in public, if that’s what has to happen.

As a whole, then, this week’s readings seemed to have as much to do with identity and learning theory as they did with writing per se–and this is not a criticism, of course.  Situating writing withing the realm of how we learn and what we learn and express about ourselves is one of the things that interest me so much about writing.

ENGL 584: Week 5 readings in conversation with Week 4 and beyond

Gal (2002) provides a useful lens for interrogating the meaning of and response to public/private erosions.  According to Gal, “public” and “private” are relative terms and shift according to individual perspectives.  The public/private dichotomy is thus more productively visualized as a “fractal distinction.” (Lange 365)

In September 2007, this basic information also became viewable to users who are not logged in to Facebook, and it is indexed by Google and other search engines.  Users are offered the option to opt out of this by choosing a privacy setting, but if the default is full visibility, most users will probably never fiddle with the settings to change this.  (Rettberg 69)

I like Lange’s conception of public in terms of “identity formation, content relevance [tagging], and technical access,” as it gives a vocabulary to the way in which users control who has access to what.  The least fun way to control privacy is, of course, identity formation, where users have be cognizant of the potential outcomes of sharing different pieces of personal information.  I think Rettberg’s assertion is overly simplistic and ignores (or simply couldn’t predict) the power of the social network itself to spread the word about privacy settings.  I do, though, think that Rettberg’s laziness theory is something to think about:

As social groups and professional organization increasingly supplement their websites with social network site components, it is important to be alert to fractalization touch points, where greater amounts of publicity or privacy may be required to meet different individual’s and groups’  social needs.  Technical features that provide participants more customization and control in creating public and private interactions could help to optimize social network site usage. (Lange 378)

I imagine the people most concerned with keeping information back might be the least apt to navigate the privacy area of social networking sites.  Take into account the likelihood that these “second-tier” social networks are less intuitive than Facebook or YouTube, and Rettberg may have a point in terms of the partial inapplicability of Lange’s notion of fractal privacy.

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“The corresponding argument today, simply put, is that for most people—including students—film, television, computer and online games, and music constitute the current vernacular.”  (Daley 171)

“People who do not regularly use YouTube are often critical of the quality of videos on the site. …. But critics fail to understand that video quality is not necessarily the determining factor in terms of how videos affect social networks.” (Lange 363)

I was not overly impressed with Daley’s argument for a new definition of literacy; I’m not sure if these two ideas together make me like it more or less.  The juxtaposition does suggest that the current state of popular video production literacy is that of the vernacular, ya know…kinda informal.  But Lange’s point is that the quality of the video is not only low but more or less irrelevant.  The goal of many YouTube videos, she contends, is to generate and affirm affinity—related, no doubt, to the evolution of the site as a social network—rather than to communicate competently.  Do so many lame, poorly produced videos suggest the need for more video production literacy?

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“In the Fall 2008 section of my ‘Writing in New Media’ course at UC Santa Barbara, I asked my students to create one or more visualization of a text of their own choosing using [infovis tools]. … Most students came to some new insights of confirmed existing intuitions about the text they chose, and many also developed a better sense of the strengths and shortcomings of the visualization tools they used” (Sorapure 64)

“If I ask people about the nature of language, I usually receive the response that language enables us to conceptualize ideas, to abstract information, and to receive and share knowledge.  The underlying assumption, so accepted that it is never stated, is that language means words.” (Daley 169)

I love the examples Sorapure offers from her New Media course.  Refreshingly level-headed in comparison to Daley’s more ideological stance, she points out ways in which writing teachers can use visual technologies to support the extant goals of reading and writing curricula.  I understand it’s not the popular view to suggest there’s a hierarchy of literacy—but for now there is.  I liked seeing how some visual tools were integrated into a language-based curriculum and were the object of critique themselves, not lionized as the curriculum themselves.

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“But [the open source movement]’s principles have been adopted by communities dedicated to the creation of other, more widely accessible types of resources.  Perhaps the best known example is Wikipedia, the online “open source” encyclopedia …. Becoming a trusted contributor to Wikipedia involves a process of legitimate peripheral participation that is similar to the process in open source software communities.  Any reader can modify the text of an entry or contribute new entries.”  (Brown and Adler 249)

“Wikipedia …asks us to reexamine our expectations for the stability of research materials and who should participate in public knowledge making.  …. With Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, the public has a larger role in knowledge making through writing.  Though this possibility is frequently posed as a threat because it challenges the academy’s control over knowledge production and dissemination, I argue this possibility is a chance to highlight how writing can advance and refine ideas through incorporating and balancing multiple voices.” (Purdy W352)

Last week, I wrote a bit about how Wikipedia reveals some shortcomings in the way American schools portray the concept of “knowing” to students.  I think Brown and Adler put side by side with Purdy adds an additional dimension to this idea by suggesting that Wikipedia might be considered an actual zone for apprenticeship into knowledge production.  While Brown and Adler discuss Wikipedia only as an example of the expansion of open source ideology, some of their thinking about “adding community to content” seems to relate to Wikipedia itself.  Though it lacks the specialized interface of sites such as the Decameron Web and the ability to generate communities around specific entries (as far as I know), I can see the potential for Wikipedia to morph into such a long tail of learning.

ENGL 584: Reflection on Wikipedia and its uses

I was working with a colleague today on a prompt she was going to be using with her students, and (of course) this note struck me as interesting: “Wikipedia and other generic info sources are not appropriate for this assignment.”  The appropriateness of Wikipedia wasn’t the focus of our work together, so I didn’t ask what specifically made Wikipedia inappropriate for citation in this assignment.  While I think her general sentiment is shared by many teachers, the label of “generic” got me thinking.

I suspect what she meant was, using her own metaphor from the marketplace (see Cummings), that it wasn’t “name brand”–or, more precisely, singly authored.  The lack of precise citation trail is certainly an issue for Wikipedia’s academic credibility, as is its eschewing of traditional peer review (see the interesting New York Times article, Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review for further discussion along those lines).  But to call it generic seems, to me, to lump it in with those content aggregate sites that my students stumble along all too easily, with product links in every spare space, including the key content words themselves.  Wikipedia certainly isn’t that–but such a comparison isn’t exactly high praise.

What I hadn’t thought of before is Purdy’s notion of Wikipedia’s rich potential as a site (pun intended?) for the exploration of the processes we often prize in composition–collaboration, deep revision, and communicating authentically to an audience.  I had heard of users’ ability to track back to older iterations of a page, but it never occurred to me that this provides the evidence of processes in action.  With careful entry selection and a well-structured assignment, I could see asking students to engage in such research themselves, particularly to look for instances of big structural changes like Purdy notes, the stuff we mean when we say “revision” and they hear “reprint.”

These two lines of thought work together, I think, help me understand some of the key issues at play in Trip Gabriel’s Times piece on Wikipedia and plagiarism, notably students’ perceptions of authorship and knowledge.  In academia, knowledge is something that is officially created through years of study and observation, writing and rewriting, peer review, revision, and publication.  Outside of academia, knowledge might be characterized as  something gained through experience, even if not subjected to the same “creation” processes.  Students too often think that “knowing” is equivalent to “writing/copying it down,” a notion too-often reinforced by notetaking from PowerPoints, textbook hunt-and-find fill-in-the-blank activities, and vocabulary exercises–all copying activities masquerading as instruction.

What would stop a student, then from thinking that the digital version of “cut and paste” is problematic?  Does the student’s teacher include citations and references in the PowerPoint from which he copied notes?  Does the student have to cite Webster when copying definitions during vocab time?  The messages we send about what it means to know something are mixed, and are complicated by Wikipedia, which seems to know so damn much and offer it so freely.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the student in Gabriel’s article who contends that “relaxing plagiarism standards ‘does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness.'”  I do wonder, though, if the laziness might not be related to somewhat lazy standards for instruction about knowledge production all around.  One of the values, then, of taking Purdy’s work into the classroom would be to help students see that real people did contribute to the entries they’re seeing–there are many authors where there appears to be none–and, we hope, that the entries they see are not, themselves, cut and paste jobs.  If not, great–lesson learned about the writing process.  And if they are–lesson learned about how shabby a source Wikipedia might be in the first place.

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.

ENGL 584: First post

History with digital composition

I can trace (blame) nearly all of my first real experiences with digital composition to work with Gail.  I “designed” a digital portfolio in a Writing Studies class in 2004 using Dreamweaver; I did something similar–though better–in Summer 2010 using Seamonkey.  Turns out the technology and I grew together over those six years.

I started this blog in the summer of 2008 during the first University of Illinois Writing Project.  I try to keep up with it, but chances are the only posts this semester will be those related to (required for) for this class.

I learned a fair amount about html, database work, and web design when I worked for two years on the ReadWriteThink.org project at NCTE.  I had some knowledge from Gail’s class, and as I assumed more responsibilities on the project I learned more about coding–or, more accurately, how to find code I need and steal it.  I learned some digital sound editing (using a program called Goldwave) while at NCTE as well.

Goals for technology

As part of the 2010 UIWP Summer Institute, I was supposed to make a writing process video, but instead I accidentally did something along the lines of a video essay.  I’d like to learn more about using video and audio editing software to share digital representations of data that otherwise have to be flattened into print text.