The Anonymity Debate: Should commenters be allowed pseudonyms?

We recently discussed the issue of trolling–the practice of posting inflammatory comments with the intent of provoking others or igniting some type of emotional response.  With the recent media attention on cyber bullying, trolling can almost be seen as a form of that, played out in the arena of public opinion.  James Rainey wrote an interesting article in the LA Times, “On the Media: Your words, your real name,” regarding this very issue.

In attempt to counteract some of the mudslinging and derogatory commenting, the media has experimented with different methods of control, trying to keep the online commenting environment from becoming “too ugly.”  Sometimes that involves tighter monitoring from the moderator, but this can be difficult given the amount of content that many media outlets put on the web, and the dwindling staffing resources that they’ve been forced to contend with.  Rainey reports that big media outlets such as the Washington Post and the New York Times have employed staff whose sole job is to moderate the comment boards. Recently, the LA Times has adopted a self-monitoring system using a red flag icon that other readers can click to “report abuse.”  But can handing over the policing of the comment boards to the public really help solve the orignal problem?

The latest solution for managing, what’s become a costly and time-intensive feature in online news articles, is requiring readers to sign-in with their Facebook accounts.  The Bay Area News Group (which includes San Jose Mercury News) and the Los Angeles News Group (which includes the San Bernardino Sun, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star News, Los Angeles Daily News, and The Long Beach Press Telegram) have both moved to a model requiring Facebook log-ins.  The reasoning behind the decision was that eliminating the anonymity and forcing readers to sign-in with their real identities kept commenters accountable and cutback on the trolling.  The Los Angeles News Group has created a FAQs page explaining their reasoning for the change in policy stating: “We’ve found that article commenting became more civil when a person is easily identifiable with their name and face attached to a comment.”  Still, others argue that this new sanitation effort is a subtle form of censorship and doesn’t grant equal access.

Encourage critical thinking and problem solving

What will encourage, motivate and stimulate students to become critical thinkers and problem solvers? Richard Miller’s “This Is How We Dream, Part 2,” architectural design includes “the best of humanities and the best of sciences” in one sustainable building. Miller suggests we post idea-driven documents that belong to no one on the web to show the best of what we are in the academy. We may be at a time in our collective history in which teaching courses across disciplines will best meet our students’ needs. For example, computer science programming classes, art digital media, physics, mathematics, philosophy—compositionists could choose a discipline to collaborate with based on interest or friendship with colleague(s) to bring what an instructor knows about the conversation in his or her discipline to the table for a course that incorporates a collaborative, across-discipline process. I, for one, would not want to sacrifice the connections between learning strategies and writing (Emig, CROSS-TALK, pp. 7-15). However, I repeatedly see pleasure at work in discussions of how we began and continue to incorporate computers into our lives. bell hooks writes in the last paragraph of TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS: “The classroom with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In the field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand…an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (p. 207).  If we, as composition teachers, do not want to step outside the border of our discipline, we still have options for interconnectivity within our community of scholars.

My argument is that visual literacy creates concepts in much the same way as writing. Sirc’s essay in WRITING NEW MEDIA argues for the use of Duchamp and Joseph Cornell’s boxes as models of “sustained inquiry” to scaffold through class members’ individual contributions to an interactive project (p. 140). Other examples of art that demonstrate concepts include: Rauschenberg and performance art. Wysocki argues for establishing a relationship to design that helps student to re-vision our relationship to it (WRITING NEW MEDIA, p. 173). Kristie S. Fleckinstein calls it “polymorphic literacy,” reading and writing that draw on verbal and nonverbal ways of shaping meaning (p. 613). I argue that both composition and visual, digital literacy instructors apply rigorous assessment and unwavering values about what it means to communicate conceptually through writing, images, and design: Look for opportunities to respond to the digital literacy infants now learn as they also begin to walk, talk, and engage cardboard picture books.

WYSIWYG vs. XHTML/CSS

There’s a discussion on the techrhet listserv right now about teaching students to code (as opposed to using WYSIWYG applications like Dreamweaver). Folks who are interested in this might look at a 1999 special issue of Computers and Composition devoted to code (16.3). Also check out these online resources:

• Susan Delagrange, “When Revision is Redesign” (the section on “Code“), in Kairos — “I want to argue for writing code, working under the hood of what-you-see-is-what-you-get software to more directly effect an interface that not only provides an optimal user experience, but also more precisely fits the design to the rhetorical argument.”
• Karl Stolley, “Lo-Fi Manifesto” in Kairos — “[A]s teachers, we should actively work to provide students with sustainable, extensible production literacies through open, rhetorically grounded digital practices that emphasize the source in “free and open source.”
• Charlie Lowe, “The Future of the Book: Time to Learn Some HTML/CSS” on Kairosnews — “HTML will need to be the base format for manuscripts going into a design workflow that results in digital and print versions of a book.”
• Nancy Kaplan, “Knowing Practice: A More Complex View of New Media Literacy” — “[A]pplications and interfaces must remain visible and accessible to knowledge workers if they are to develop newmedia literacies.”
• Lynda R. Stephenson, “Road Trip,” in Kairos — “This webtext has pedagogical and theoretical intentions that allow readers to reflect on why we should learn to code.”

I find I’m a bit torn about the implications I see built around the idea of “composition” expanding to include “new media” elements such as video, audio, graphics, animation, database systems, and computer language programming. Richard Miller even gives the example of someone who is “composing the web.” I agree that the possibilities around all of these elements can generate a tremendous amount of excitement. And they should certainly be relevant and motivating for students. But I will argue that one fundamental core aspect may be lost, and that certain other visionary ideals may be practically unobtainable.

I’m not sure about this leap from “writing in an age of digital media” to composing all elements of digital media. I won’t say that there is not an evolutionary rhetorical connection and progression, or even that the act of writing cannot encompass all of these elements (as in scripting for film, video, games, and new media. But scripting is not an end “product”). But I do believe the leap is quantum in nature and that if we, as teachers, try to make that leap without having first facilitated a basis of competence in the rhetorical, formal, and stylistic form of regular old writing (i.e. sentences making a discourse that contributes to critical thinking) that this writing ability is not going to otherwise somehow come through being able to include audio or video in one’s product (ne essay).

Secondly, the excitement about new media has been with us for quite some time. There’s nothing new about new media other than that the tools are becoming more refined and powerful, and access to them is becoming easier. But the web has also spawned a growth in text-based communication. In other words (my premise): writing *for* new media has grown greatly in its importance. But this, to me, does not directly translate into writing *with* new media. Shooting and editing video is not writing. Animation is not writing. Scripting is coding, not writing. Using a blogging or website building application is not writing.

But perhaps we want to change the definition of what composition means (I sometimes see inferences to musical composition). So in that case, the composer would be “creator” instead of “writer,” and that is what we would be teaching. But this seems to me to be what used to be called multi-media and is now referred to as new media—we would be teaching new media, not writing for new media.

I used to program in Flash, one of the main programming languages for animation on the web. It’s a very powerful platform and has the ability to do “data visualization,” that is, building sophisticated interactive charts and graphs. But you have to be a pretty hard core programmer to do this. In the world of web programming there is the idea of mash-ups where developers with programming skills can mix—or you can call it composing if you like—disparate elements from disparate sources across the web—video, data, graphics, animation, and so on. Artists are often drawn to this interactive medium because of its visual nature. Writing certainly can and does play an important part in this, but there is, to my mind, a big difference between the parts and the whole. *Writing* composition is not *everything* composition. It’s great to become involved with all of it as an aspect of creative learning. But I think there should be a caution to not confuse one for the other.

Cynthia Selfe’s article on “Multimodal Composing” and Richard Miller’s “This is how we dream” YouTube video both stressed the idea of new media’s crucial role in the development of identity in beginning college writers.  I found this outlook on literacy and education to be refreshing-a breath of fresh air from what I consider to sometimes be a stuffy and stifling learning environment.  Learning and education need to move in the direction where the creator has the opportunity to express their ideas through multiple modes of media instead of being confined to a specific genre deemed proper by an archaic and selective institution.

Miller and Selfe agrees that the individual making meaning and producing for a global community is the new frontier for literacy.  New media enables creators to layer different modes and subsequently different ideas for all types of learners.  The process of the individual communicating an idea to a global audience fosters collaboration, another positive aspect of welcoming new media into education.  The self is not as autonomous, producing for a distinct elite who sets the rules and expectations.  Instead the individual is part of the group where learning and sharing can be given, taken, and is accessible to all.

I think its interesting that even though ideas communicated through new media are presented through so many sensory experiences in such a rapid and instant time frame the idea itself is not lost.  New media can even be considered to enhance ideas and creates and focus on the meaning conveyed.  As composition teachers I think it will be of value to evolve and grow along with the mentality and wants of society-socially, technologically, intellectually, artistically and culturally.

Openings, Moments, Tectonic Plates, Quartets and Dreaming: This is how we talk about New Literacy

In the preface to Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes that “…the healthiest way of being ill–is one most purified of, most resistant to metaphoric thinking.” The sexiness of new media speak and the metonymy we use to describe the importance of the change these media represent can leave us with a very sophisticated and inspired way of losing what we mean when we talk about new literacy. I’m not trying to poke holes in the print and digital texts by Wysocki, Miller and Yancey from this week’s (I want to say “readings” but perhaps we will need a more precise term for the homework we view/listen to/read/interact with/materialize each week as–if these authors are correct–teachers of adult literacy, we will be asking our students to interact with more than text on a weekly basis) assignments. But I do feel the need to cut through some of the metaphors and approximations about what this could change in the classrooms or English Departments in order to get at what I think they are telling me has changed as a result of new media, network technologies.

Argument is at the heart of our work in composition. How to discover and expose a line of reasoning, the construction of an idea, or the interpretation of a fact or artifact in order to make the world make sense is pretty much what i think were doing when we teach nonfiction writing (though i’m sure i’m missing something in that characterization). Speaking of the multiple media options available to users of the Internet, Richard Miller reminds us, “This is a way to push ideas into our culture. Why wouldn’t we be at the front edge of that?” While I know that our task is not to summarize or revisit the “readings” in these blogs, I still need to do a little distilling for myself: The argument that i think is being made in these readings and these classes is that we have a responsibility-to make available all of the tools in the Universe(ity) that will help our students (and ourselves) make effective, culturally relevant arguments.

Adventures in Interdisciplinary Composition

In part two of Richard Miller’s “This is How We Dream,” he asks, “What would it mean to build a building that united the best of the humanities and the best of the sciences?”  He even has a 3-D architectural model, one that takes out the parking lot in order to add a science wing onto his current humanities building.  I love this idea.  And not just because it gets rid of a parking lot.  Especially because I teach composition, it’s becoming easier, or maybe just more necessary (even obvious?) to see the broadening definition of what it means to compose.  With Miller’s idea for (the best of) English and (the best of) science together under one roof, it seems only necessary to adopt Brian Morrison’s definition of composing: “the thoughtful gathering, construction, or reconstruction of a literate act in any given media” (Yancey 2004, p. 315). And with this changing definition, it’s exciting to dream of the excellent interdisciplinary adventures that could ensue.

But I’m wondering if, first, it’s beneficial to imagine what a composition would begin to look like if several branches of the humanities (say, historians, linguists, and trustworthy philosophers) built a series of courses together. Or maybe it makes more sense to look at a more specific branch of humanities, like English studies. With partnerships between film & media, communication, and cultural studies alone, students could take classes that build their composition skills. That is, courses that build upon what they already know about producing, consuming, and critiquing texts–print or digital or whatever we conceive them to be. When I think about what English courses often do (gatekeep) versus what they could do, I feel a simultaneous jolt of excitement and sad resignation.  What should English do, except help students more successfully tell stories, understand  voices–their own and those of others, study the world, and critique all of these things, all with an end goal of helping students to navigate life, doing more than nudging them toward a predetermined social place. And if life is becoming more multimodal, more intertextual, then classrooms can play a crucial role in helping students to not only develop these types of digital literacy skills, but also critically engage with digital texts and cultures.

Yet, according to Yancey, “we have already committed to a theory of communication that is both/and: print and digital” (p. 307).  This simplistic acknowledgment, of course, isn’t enough, and I’m glad that Yancey questions the ready availability of technology in the composition (or any) classroom. She argues that “students will not compose and create” or, I’d like to add, make use of their ability to push the boundaries of language, persuasion, design, collaboration, and presentation, if their interaction is simply to “complete someone else’s software package” (p. 320). This seems to lead back to a question that Kory asked during one of our first classes: do students need to learn code in order to be able to truly understand and produce an online composition? (or something to that effect.)  The answer to this question may mean that the interdisciplinary work of English studies that  I envision won’t be enough. We may need to build English (or composition or humanities or…) courses with help from the best of the sciences (whatever Miller means by that). Maybe we do need to bring them over to the HUM building. Who’s good at writing grants?

Webinar on “Teaching Writing as an Information Art”

This is a very cool opportunity. Some smart folks will be putting on a free web seminar on “Teaching Writing as an Information Art” on February 28 at 9:00 am PST. Follow the link for more details and how to connect, but here’s how they describe the session itself:

Contemporary writing courses have been taking on computational tools, from word processors to wikis, for over two decades now, and for a large portion of that time, the tools have taken center stage. However, contemporary talk of media “literacies” has changed the place of tools in the classroom — or rather, has reframed the role of language as information. When students begin to study the role of words as tags, metadata, or search optimizing keywords, they are studying not just semantic structures but the logic and rhetoric of the flow of information. This panel discusses the idea of reframing those courses and their lessons under the title of Information Arts.

Sounds great. Hope to “see” you “there.”

Defining Digital Humanities?

I just got out of a department meeting where we were discussing the possibility of creating a new graduate certificate in the “digital humanities.” I think this is a terrific idea, but I have to admit I’m a bit ambivalent about the term “digital humanities,” partly because there’s some dispute over how to define it.

In a recent post on “The Digital Humanities Divide,” Alex Reid examines the CFP for the 2011 Digital Humanities conference, and finds that a

significant part of the digital humanities that is not captured in this call is the humanistic investigation of digital technoculture: no mention of games studies, social media, or mobile technology. In other words, no mention of the significant digital technologies and practices that are transforming human experience on a global scale. No, instead, we’re going to talk about writing software to analyze hundreds of out of print literary texts that no one can even name.

This aspect of the digital humanities is also reflected in the NEH’s recent call for Digital Humanities Start-up Grants. The call itself presents a fairly wide interpretation of “digital humanities,” but looking over the examples of projects that are getting funded (and based on a second-hand account of a conversation with a grant program officer), it seems like their main priority is on the activity of

planning and developing prototypes of new digital tools for preserving, analyzing, and making accessible digital resources, including libraries’ and museums’ digital assets

For the record, I don’t have anything against making such tools. However, as Reid points out, it seems odd that digital humanists wouldn’t be focused on “the powerful ways that digital technologies are changing the world.”

So, on the one hand, we have some folks saying there should be “more hackety-hack, less yackety-yack,” but on the other we have Neil Postman’s assertion that “technology education is not a technical subject. It is a branch of the humanities.” I think the tension here is not between digital and analogue, but instead in what we think the humanities is for. Is the point of the digital humanities to develop new tools for doing fairly traditional things with a narrow range of privileged texts, or is it to understand something about what it means to be human in a digital age?

Motives Matter

The California Faculty Association, which represents “professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches” in the CSU system, has a draft of educational principles titled “Quality Higher Education for the 21st Century.” The principle most relevant for our purposes here is this one:

Quality higher education in the 21st century will incorporate technology in ways that expand opportunity and maintain quality.

This statement stands in opposition to the view that technology — and online education in particular — will help ”save vast sums of money.” The drafters of this statement go on to say that

When online technologies are used for higher levels of teaching rather than simply for drill or transfer of information, cost savings quickly evaporate. In fact, many faculty who are proponents of and experts in online education argue that teaching a good online course is more labor-intensive and thus more costly than more traditional formats.

I’m not sure about the comparison here, but I would agree that good teaching — whether with or without technology — is a time-consuming, labor-intensive affair. The forces in the university who think we can package and automate (or outsource) quality instruction via technology are deluding themselves.

Online education is unavoidable. It’s going to happen. But if our primary motive is cost and efficiency, it’s going to suck. If, instead, we do it to increase access and opportunity for students, then it might just work.