the month of June

In Transitions: Teaching Writing in Computer-Supported and Traditional Classrooms, Mike Palmquist, et al assure writing teachers who are interested in using technology that they don’t need to be an expert, “although you need to be familiar with the basic functions of a particular program to use it effectively, you don’t need to know all (or even most) of the functions of the program to be an effective writing teacher” (185). This attitude flies directly in the face of the kind of complicating work that I described Bradley Dilger doing in his work.

“In a writing class where producing text is more important than ‘presenting’ it, teachers are extremely successful with only a basic understanding of a particular word processing program” (186). The basic idea here is that presentation — color of font, specific layout features, etc. — aren’t important to writing. I’m not sure that this was ever the case, but certainly in terms of the new media practices found in a writing classroom ten years after this book was written we know that this is not accurate. Writing with technology, creating and producing a text *are* about presentation, the message gets told in part by the presentation.

Palmquist, et. al also address the issue of time/labor involved with learning a particular program well enough to teach (with) it. They suggest creating the “class plans far enough in advance” so that “you can learn the program before you assign it to the class” (186); however this recommendation is met with resistance from a teacher named “Caitlin” who comments: “When you have 75 students and you’re working to keep your head above water, the last thing that you think about doing is using some sort of new technology that would take, maybe two or three hours for you to sit down and figure out how you’re actually really going to make it work in the classroom. It’s something that just doesn’t happen” (186). And while these sentiments are nearly ten years old, they still abound in English departments and writing classrooms. This frustration, lack of time, unwillingness to invest, etc. is what I see time and again in my survey responses and results.

Bradley Dilger, in his essay, “Ease and Electracy,” (from New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy) points out that his work is incomplete and therefore does not present a comprehensive pedagogy, which is understandstandable. Also, I feel that Dilger’s work around ease is very relevant to my chapter on the use of CMSs, considering the fact that many instructors choose not to use new media because it appears too difficult, too daunting for them and still others choose to use these ready-made CMSs because they offer ease of use. However, I was also left with many questions.

One of the divisions that I see in composition particularly around use of new media is the question of “to code or not to code.” In other words, there seems to be a split in composition between those who understand the underlying layers of the technology they’re using and those who rely on the ease of the user-centered, intuitive interfaces of course-in-a-box type software like Blackboard or Angel. Dilger addresses this type of user (both as student and instructor) who sees technology as a force beyond her/his control. Dilger suggests iteration, which he defines as, “repeating the same task with slight differences each time” because it harnesses “the modularity and variability principles of new media” (131). Dilger’s suggestion for using iteration as a pedagogical approach, which I don’t completely understand (probably because, as he says, it’s incomplete) “would also provoke student interest in the creation of technologies by offering direct connections between technologies and human agents. In this way, the simplistic view of technology typical of ease would be disrupted; it would be difficult for students to claim techonologies they shaped were natural forces beyond their control” (132-3). Primarily, it seems, Dilger is working, in this essay, to complicate technology and new media, which I think is important and lies at the root of my desire to see tech tools, in particular, course-in-a-box software studied as objects worthy of critical attention (by both instructor and student).

In his incomplete version of this iteration pedagogy, Dilger explains that he’s not suggesting we turn students into programmers but rather he wants to “disrupt two assumptions (1) some people are programmers, and some people are not; (2) progamming is an advanced form of computer usage exclusive to experts” (132). He’d like to see what we consider “programming” change, and he describes this change as already taking place in document production. His example: “Everyday word processors allow writers to make decisions about page numbers, font selection, and other book encodings previously restricted to expert designers or printers” (132), but clearly this is not “programming” (even, I think, if we consider that term in some out-of-the-box way). I get that he is comparing this shift from in-the-hands-of-experts to in-the-hands-of-the-everyday-user, but also, earlier in the essay, Dilger describes the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (or WYSIWYG) editors that are used in so many current new media applications as an example of ease and its problematic nature and the transparency of technology that he is concerned with. Drawing on Marcel O’Gorman’s 2000 article, “You Can’t Always Get What you Want: Transparency and Deception on The Computer Fashion” that argues “as the desktop computer becomes more simple to use and more attractive to behold, the user is unwittingly faced with an increasing loss of power and control over the machine,” Dilger (who shares similar concerns) gives the example of creating a hypertext link: instead of learning how one functions, a person “learns how to make links with a certain program” (119). I guess my confusion stems from the fact that I don’t see a huge difference between this and the example of choosing font and page numbers in a word processing program. If we are going to attempt to erase, or at least blur, the separation between programmer and “not programmer”/expert and everyday user, then these functions are going to need to be…dare I say it…”easy” — usable with ease. But more importantly, I am left unclear as to what ultimately Dilger wants to see changing in terms of how we define “programming” or “programmer.” I get that he doesn’t want this digital divide of those who program and those who don’t, yet I’m not sure to what extent he expects teachers and students in a composition classroom to really understand and engage with code. I’m not intending this as a critique. I’m genuinely interested, because it’s something I’ve struggled with in using tech in the comp classroom. Dilger writes, “If, as I believe, ease shapes the way we understand the concept of technology, then composition instructors–who have always been ‘teaching with technology’–should understand ease” (110). And “ease” in the more specific context of this essay, focused on new media practices, “often means refusing to see the code: preferring a simple, pragmatic approach which doesn’t involve the complication of complete understanding” (109). Given then some of Dilger’s examples and his desire to rethink “programming,” I wonder if something as simple as revealing the code of a webpage or showing students the difference between the HTML screen and the standard WYSIWYG screen or the difference between using the code feature or not (I just noticed that wordpress has changed from the two screen options that used to be there) might begin to address some of Dilger’s concerns.

Another idea that I want to stress in my own work is the idea of dropping CMSs and LMSs entirely and and utilize the bits and pieces approach as an alternative. In this discussion of the Desire2Learn/Blackboard battle, readers are suggesting interesting combinations of PLE use along with “loosely joined possibilities”, “bits and pieces we find laying around the place,” etc. A commenter with the username Gardner suggests the ultimate first-year-writing experience: having a user created PLE. I think this type of assignment might be a response to the ideas that Dilger is laying out in his essay.

When Dilger describes the “lack of generalized knowledge” that “can cause serious difficulty if trouble arises,” he brings in Blackboard as an example: “widely used because it makes website production easy–with it, creating a sophisticated course website requires minimal technical knowledge of hypertext. To the instructor using it, the complex hypertext file structure is transparent” (119). And what if it wasn’t? (Again, I ask this ask of genuine interest, coming from place of my own concerns and confusions). What if the instructor had an understanding of the underlying system that makes Blackboard work, how would that change her/his relationship to the technology? Would that make her/him a more hesitant user? More willing to venture “outside the box” and use other available technology? Would it cause him/her to question the presence of corporate software on college campuses?

The more I write, the more I wind up with questions, so I’ll try to wrap up here. At the end of his piece, Dilger argues that the idea of ease need to be carefully considered “by composition instructors teaching the production of new media” (133). This is very different than the instructors who teach with technology (loosely defined) that Dilger mentions in the opening of the piece. And it is also different (I think?) than teacher who use new media practices in their writing courses. So I am curious as to exactly the intended audience/type of composition teacher that Dilger is thinking about here. All and all, I am just really trying to get out how we can complicate technology and the use of new media in the classroom and undo that transparency, which Dilger so well describes, while also not alienating faculty and other users. How can we actually teach that technology is not neutral to teachers who can then pass that on to their students, if so many of the faculty are unwilling to and fearful of these practices and/or opt for the course-in-a-box software that is so emblematic of “ease”?

I haven’t done any work on the diss since May. I never finished blogging the Computers and Writing Conference. I’ve been avoiding this blog because it reminds me that I have a dissertation to write. I had forgotten the way that summer courses can swallow you whole.

This morning I sat on my front porch and read an OLD (Feb. 2008) copy of the Chronicle, because it had an article covering the Blackboard/Desire2Learn patent dispute. Even though I know the outcome, I am still interested in how it gets covered in publications of higher ed. I then began to peruse the latest CCC. In the midst of cramming in a survey of women’s literature and feminist criticism for my summer course, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy “my” field and “my” work, how much there is that I’m missing when I’m not looking outside the pages of a Norton Anthology.

Here’s hoping that I can continue to devote a bit of time here and there to my own scholarship, even while I’m really enjoying a return trip to Renaissance literature written by women (scarce as it is).

The central idea of Jay David Bolter’s keynote address, “Open Spaces: Inscription and Technology,” was that we need to rethink what we count as inscription, and for his recent work this includes spaces that are hybrid in terms of including physical location(s). He began by providing a useful “old story” about origins of hypertexts and cyberspace. He admitted that he was retelling an old story but expressed the concern that it is now “so old” that many in attendance here might not know the story. The advent of computer games and Games Studies began to alter the “old story” through the constitution of a procedural rhetoric, use of persuasion, and explanation of how things work. He used Fatworld as an example, and one I hadn’t heard of, September 12th. September 12th gives a simple argument about the ways in which fighting terrorism with violence is an inadequate and problematic approach to dealing with “terrorism.” What is interesting about it, noted Bolter, is that it is an argument embodied in a game. It is rhetoric activated. The problem is that much of traditional literary study/theory does not accept this as part of its tradition(s) of writing.

Bolter moved from games to another “old story” about cyberspace, discussing how it was an abstraction, considered an escape from the “real world” and a release from cultural determinations and the body as marker. Cyberspace and virtual reality were the image of The Matrix. The vision of cyberspace, as represented by John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, was that we would would actually live this virtual reality. The problem, Bolter argued, was that the experiencing of virtual reality came with a certain disembodiment. The headsets used to experience this “reality” cut users off from the world. A paradigm shift can be seen in the works of Mark Weiser (his idea of ubiquitous computing is interested in the intersection of the human and the virtual/digital/computer) and Howard Rheingold. This paradigm shift is what has informed some of Bolter’s latest work. He’s currently interested in augmented reality. Augmented reality involves this intersection between the human and the computer and involves the physical manipulation of one’s environment based on computer information. Bolter gave the example of an early version of the interactive game, Facade, that has now been reworked as an AR game. In the AR version of Facade, rather than entering into an immersive, seamless, online environment where you are in the apartment of fighting couple, Grace and Trip, the user now uses a headset while navigating around a physical apartment and interacting with Grace and Trip. The possibilities for AR games run the gamut from entertainment to education and allow for new forms of collaboration.

Bolter made the argument that even virtual worlds such as Second Life aren’t really pure cyberspace, as seen by the connections to the physical world via the money made by some Second Life users and by the hacks some students at Georgia Tech have worked on that allow Second Life avatars to walk around their campus.

All of this is to say that there is a clear movement away from the verbal/written and we need ways to take these new forms into account.

I’m sitting in the Greenville-Spartanburg airport on my way home from the Computers and Writing Conference. I have a number of in-progress posts covering the keynote and plenary speakers, as well as some of the sessions I attended. This was my first time at this conference, and overall, I really enjoyed myself and found it to be a more valuable than other conferences I’ve attended. Janice Walker had assured me that we’d be well fed, and she wasn’t kidding. I spent very little money on food — with the exception of a delicious pecan-encrusted blue trout that I had last night at The Last Resort.

I’m also thrilled with the fact that I ended up flying into Greenville SC. First it was just an option to save around $800. But with flights stopped out of Athens and with Atlanta torn up by construction, it just seems like a hassle to have flown into either of those places. I made the drive in less than two hours, and this airport is calm and relaxing AND has real food. I feel as though I’m not in an airport at all.

A few other things I noted about my travel: Being a Northerner who knows little of the South I wasn’t expecting nor accustomed to the billboards on the ride between Greenville and Athens, which included a lot of fireworks, topless/adult entertainment (including the Risque Cafe — where couples are welcome and truck parking is available), and fattening foods. The radio was also interesting. I spent most of the two hours listening to the radio on scan. For some stretches of road there was nothing but country and Christian music. Today, Sunday, there was actually coverage of what was happening at area churches. However, I did get to hear some Rage Against the Machine, which took me waaaay back, and then some Guns N’ Roses, which took me even further back.

It’s looking like it will be time to board soon. I will follow-up with some conference posts soon.

I finished reading Water for Elephants (or, as I call it in my head, Like Water for Elephants — its namesake clearly being Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate). I’ve mentioned that it was an odd reading experience for me because I felt like I was reading a draft of a piece of fiction written for an advanced creative writing class/workshop. The writing was inconsistent — at times a beautiful sentence peeks out, and I would get all excited by it, but that was always surrounded by a series of overly simplistic sentences. The characterization was odd. The character who was most believable to me was Walter/Kinko the midget with the Jack Russell Terrier, Daisy; however, even he seemed to be a caricature of a small person traveling with a circus. The protagonist was flat in his almost-too-good-to-be-true personality. When the book opens he is ninety or ninety-three (he’s never sure of his exact age), and the dialogue is trite. I found myself asking, is this really how an old man speaks, or is it just how we (and Gruen) think an old man is supposed tospeak? He just wasn’t believable. All my complaints about spotty writing and flat characterization aside, I loved the story and found myself excited to get back to reading it each night. I’m not sure if this is simply because I was so craving a story filled with the details of circus life, and this one gave me the nitty-gritty I was looking for, or it is because Gruen does manage to keep enough happening that an otherwise done-before romance becomes a page-turner. There were moments when I found myself wondering how or why the story was compelling. After all, it is mostly the story of two people in love who can’t be together because one of them is already taken. Nothing new here. Still, there are enough of the circus-driven antics and incidents to keep the story exciting. And the animals. It seems as though Gruen understands animals better than humans, because she was able to bring them to life in ways she just couldn’t with the human characters. Perhaps this is because animals don’t talk and Gruen struggles with dialogue, but whatever the case, the depictions of the animals add an element to the romance that I’ve certainly never encountered in other books I’ve read.

I am lurking in Kim and Megan’s Personal Essay Filmmaking class for the next couple of weeks. The deal is that I’ll give them feedback in exchange for learning how to *finally* use my digital video camera. This will bring me back to the summer days I spent in my basement making videos with my little brother and best friend. Right now, however, we’re practicing embedding videos. Unfortunately I don’t have one of my friend and I performing the Eagles’ “Take it Easy,” so I’ll bring you this video instead (I actually have no idea what this video is; I’m just practicing after all):

How do you decide which books you will purchase as opposed to loaning, interlibrary loaning, or borrowing from friend or colleague? I’m mostly referring here to academic texts — texts you might be using for your latest project, class, or research in whatever form that might take — but you could also include reading for pleasure or other kinds of books. I feel like there is not much rhyme or reason to my own (sometimes) impulsive book buying. Like today when I hurriedly ordered this, while at the same time feeling like it might not say anything more than what folks like Jenkins, Shirky, and Bolter and Grusin have already been saying. I guess I tend to do it when the book isn’t available at the local library and interlibrary loaning it feels like it will take too long (even when, after picking up the book and paying for it, it can end up sitting there unread for a week or longer). Anyways, I’m just curious about the book attaining habits of folks out there who read and/or skim A LOT of books.

Yesterday, I worked through the results of my faculty surveys — crunching numbers, comparing percentages, calculating averages — all of that statistical stuff that I’ve been avoiding because it freaks me out. In doing this I learned what I already thought I knew: the majority of faculty use proprietary forms of course management systems/software because it is what is either “handed” to them by their institution or because they are (or feel they are) required to use it. Ninety percent of respondents to this survey answered that they chose the CMS they use because a) “This is the standard at my institution” or b) “My institution requires I use this program.” I don’t think that any of the three schools that I surveyed actually do require that faculty use the CMS that the school licenses; however, it is interesting that more than ten percent of faculty who responded perceive it to be that way.

Sixty percent of respondents use either Blackboard or WebCT (not for long, of course).