Top Ten Tips for Avoiding Reductive Lists

In Richard Ohmann’s 1987 chapter in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, his rather dire reading of the tea-leaves in Section 4 is titled simply “Computers.”

As Phil Kraft puts it, “all the skill is embodied in the machines”- in fact, that could be a definition of the term “user-friendly.” (“Designing for idiots is the highest expression of the engineering art,” in David Noble’s words…Operators seldom become programmers; programmers seldom become systems analysts; analysts seldom become designers or computer scientists (Corson 35). Graduates of MIT will get the challenging jobs; community college grads will be technicians; those who do no more than acquire basic skills and computer literacy in high school will probably find their way to electronic workstations at McDonald’s. I see every reason to expect that the computer revolution, like other revolutions from the top down, will indeed expand the minds and the freedom of an elite, meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce that have been hallmarks of monopoly capitalism from its onset. (708)

While I think he’s probably right, and that this sums up the current trajectory of most students, he also wrote that near the beginning of the seepage of visible computer technology into everyday life, and that some of his predictions are dated.  Sure, the department secretary is the only one who used a computer back then, mostly for typing up flyers; but I would hope that these days are long behind us and that many of us are using computing technology for a whole host of other things.

Therefore, I also think that part of our job is to ensure that students have their own choices about where they end up at the end of compulsory schooling, in composition or otherwise.  And now that the computer revolution is 30 or 40 years in the making, we – all teachers – should be able to get down to the business of critically involving technologically mediated curriculum at this remove.  Writing New Media attempts to do exactly that, and in the process demonstrate to teachers what their new media classroom assignments might look like and look for in student competency.  There’s always a danger in this, of course: Helpful handbooks on writing became the constricting Five-Paragraph Theme after what seems like a cosmic game of “Telephone” between the comp theorists and the practicing classroom teachers.  We should resist anything that boils down to a “Ten Top Tips” list and perhaps just get “start[ed] nonetheless” (WNM 45).

Additionally, I fear, as a teacher who has been in this rodeo for a while, that the neat and orderly control mechanisms Ohmann described are going to circumvent and then circumscribe my wish for an educational way of being that is not neat and orderly, one which challenges its students’, their teachers’, even its own “agency and materiality.”  I still have to teach the five-paragraph essay.  When my students post things in their academic blogs that they shouldn’t, we adults swoop in and scold them (and it has already happened).  This is the nature of the beast we seek to tame.

Some interesting ideas. Also, this.

At any rate, we walk a fine line, which is, I suppose, what this class is about.  I wouldn’t hesitate to use a few of the templates Selfe offers in her chapter titled “Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenge of Visual Literacy.”  These are outlines for dealing with a “new” type of essay, the “visual essay” (OH MY GOD are you kidding me?  It has already begun…).  But for teachers who aren’t ready to walk this dark path without a flashlight, this chapter (and others in this book) provides practical ideas for traversing this treacherous ground.  Got it?

The Medium and The Message

In “Opening New Media to Writing”, Wysocki invites teachers to use new media as an addition to their composition-based pedagogy, and to allow new media to inform the composition classroom in new ways. In “Composition in a New Key”, Yancey does the same, and Cynthia Selfe joins in as well in “Toward New Media Texts: Taking up the Challenges of Visual Literacy”.

There is a call to arms in Wysocki, Yancey, and Selfe’s articles to push composition into a future of public writings and readings, visual analysis in addition to text, and examination of the construction of self, identity, and place through the lens of the internet. Ohmann, a skeptic, offers some minor cautionings and perhaps occupies a similar mindset that I do in “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital”: New Media and technology have the potential to be incredibly beneficial to education as a whole, but our goals and purposes will ultimately decide whether it is successful or not.

While I am enthusiastic about the potential benefits of such an application, I conflict with the purpose of inserting new media in a classroom.  Each reading contained a specific kind of reasoning for this shift, however I still struggle to except justifications at hand.

So, by adding new media into the composition classroom, are we training students for future jobs? Ohmann seems to think that this is an exaggeration of the future state of technology. He relates this ‘age of technology’ to previous ages of economic revolution; in this, technology is a tool of workforce stratification where only a few will need the specialized skills of technology.  By no means is Ohmann alone in his skepticism of the political implications of technology.

Certainly there are niche jobs in technology, and training for them is done in specific classes that may even happen in specific technology-centered schools. And, if future students are becoming proficient with new technologies earlier than ever, then how are we, who may often be behind their skills, going to help them with future jobs?

While there are those who would argue that even the most recent generation is under-prepared for jobs involving even the slightest technological skills, I’m not sure I understand the task of training for technological jobs in the writing classroom. Based on my job technology-related job experience, I envision composition classrooms working in Excel, Word, Outlook, and alike. And this seems like a challenge to me, even if Yancey does detail an interesting idea for using PowerPoint in the classroom.

Then, if we are not training a future workforce, are we leveraging new media as a means to engage students and motivate them? Yancey offers different points in her articles where she details several moments in history where writing and reading activities were done on a large scale outside the classroom. She asserts that not only do people not need formal instruction to participate in different forms of social reading and writing practices, they especially do not need assessment to validate these acts.

Ultimately, people don’t need grades to be active readers and writers. If we then decide to pull things from technologies that drive people to read and write more into the classroom and assess them, are we just going to slowly suffocate their joy?

Ok, so we’re not trying to be kill-joys and grade your favorite internet activity. Continue to make Willy Wonka memes without fear. Then, is this move into a related, but seemingly separate field a last-ditch effort to give composition departments a fighting chance in the academic world? Yancey, Selfe, and Wysocki spend a lot of time detailing how composition should be moving into the future–presumably so that we don’t get left in the past.

There’s been plenty of concern about the direction of composition studies over the past couple of decades (See: End of Composition Studies by David Smit– the title says it all). And so, it’s no wonder that we want to make sure that we’re presenting something fresh and appealing to colleges. But I think some of this progress has the potential to dismantle the field and place it in the realms of other disciplines. I think this is why Yancey mentions WAC classes and their new importance to composition teachers.

Ultimately, I’m conflicted with what our purpose is or could be, even if I can see all of these justifications as potential benefits. The answers I have are certainly a product of being here and now for me, grappling with teaching myself for the first-time, and generally doubting everything I do in the classroom. Perhaps though, others have more insight for the use of New Media in the classroom and the choice, like inserting anything into your teaching, is a personal one based on personal reasoning. Clearly, I’m not quite there yet.

Writing Off Writing

In her case study of David John Damon, Cynthia Selfe contrasts his advanced digital literacy skills at college with his undeveloped conventional writing skills, asserting how the university’s overvaluation of the latter and undervaluation of the former were the cause of his eventual flunking out. Spending most of his time working as a Web design consultant and producing CDs, Damon failed two “conventional communication classes,” resulting in a GPA too low to continue at the university. Selfe concludes that Damon “failed out of the university—primarily because he couldn’t produce a traditional essay organized according to the print-based literacy standards of linear propositional logic, Standard English, argumentative development, and standard spelling” (“Students Who Teach Us” 49).

I am undecided about the value of teaching digital literacies, which Hawisher et al. (the ‘et al’ includes Selfe) define simply as “the ability to read, compose, and communicate in computer environments” (“Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology” 642). But I can spot a weak argument in support of digital literacies.

Selfe characterizes “conventional” writing classes in language which more or less equates them with the outdated approach of current-traditionalism, making “conventional’ seem like a dirty word. More specifically, Damon’s teachers in the English Department, Selfe writes, “were very concerned about his ability to organize and write formal essays, his inattention to standard spelling, his inability to write sentences that were grammatically correct according to conventional standards, and his problems with development and logical argument” (“Students Who Teach Us 49). Why, Selfe implies, should such old-fashioned, limited, even trivial concerns get in the way of a student whose literacy is so far ahead of his teachers?

I wonder, for a start, how Selfe knows that Damon’s teachers were so retrograde. Perhaps they were not as obsessed with spelling and grammar as she suggests. Perhaps some of them knew a thing or two about writing.

I also wonder if Damon, to put it bluntly, did his homework for those classes. As Selfe herself points out, he “continued devoting the majority of his days to online design work, spending weekends travelling to consult with his Web design fraternity clients,” and so on.

But I also wonder about the broader issue implied by Selfe’s article: the blurring of the concepts of ‘composition’ and ‘literacy,’ and the expansion of the concept ‘literacy’ to include anything, more or less, that we can say we ‘read’ or ‘compose.’ That is, not just words but images, videos, etc. Do we read architecture, dance, paintings? At what point will we say that composition does not need to include words at all? At what point will we eschew the complex things words can do for us and for others.

Hawisher et al juxtapose a visual composition and a “conventional” book report by a student, Brittney. The book report she wrote simply “to please her teachers.” (That sounds awful, doesn’t it?) The visual composition she wrote “to challenge herself and to engage in the literacy practices she knows will matter most to her when she graduates” (661). (How wonderful!) On the one hand, however, I think there is more to writing and knowing than a book report–not necessarily the best example of an exciting writing project. On the other hand, I’m wondering how I could critique Selfe and others, as I am doing now, with a visual Powerpoint text, mostly pictures with a few narrative words typed across them.

Ending with an attempt at humor, I imagine the following dialogue:

Digitally Literate Student (DL): Teacher, you know that saying, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Conventional Teacher (CT—could be mistaken for Current Traditionalist): Yes.

DL: And you know how you said our papers had to be about a thousand words?

CT: Er, yes.

DL: Well, here’s my paper.

CT: Where?

DL: In hyperspace.

CT: Oh, Ok. Hang on. (Time passes while CT looks up ‘hyperspace’ in a conventional dictionary and then takes a class on the new literacies. Finally:) Then here’s my evaluation: you wrote too many words.

New Media in Composition Classrooms

David Buckingham says in “Introducing Identity” that digital media shapes young people’s identities. I think that the internet makes it easier for people to create multiple identities.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/cybercrime-and-the-problem-of-online-identity-verification/7506

In “Students Who Teach Us” by Cynthia L. Selfe talks about how composition teachers are slow to utilizing media texts in the classroom. New media is different from print text in that it increases interactivity and creates multiple literacies (seeing, listening, writing and reading)

People who are familiar with printed text may have a difficult time adopting the new media.

Here is an interesting site

Something that print text cannot offer is aesthetics and design along with information. New media, therefore, caters to a wide audience. Some interesting quotes are brought up in this article:

“New media texts now exist on William Blake, the Salem Witch trials, hip hop, the architectural history of Rome… among many other topics” (44)

Coverage of historical events is more accessible and convenient for the younger generation to get a hold of.

Also, “Imaginative texts percolates through the sub strata of composition classrooms in direct contrast to students’ laissez faire attitudes toward more conventional texts” (44) This means that there is more enthusiasm to learning. If teachers can utilize this enthusiasm, it would make for a dynamic curriculum.

The essay also talks about how students can be teachers as well, as they can teach the older generation of new computer capabilities. Rather than curriculum being teacher-centered, students can benefit from teaching their teachers new computer skills.

In Selfe’s “Becoming Literate in the Information Age” there is talk of increasing computer usage. Selfe says “writers might compose differently with computers but probably not better.” This is problematic because computers may not help people become better writers.

Two people’s lives were followed as case studies in Selfe’s article. Both of these people, Melissa and Brittney grew up in middle class families. The term “cultural ecology” was introduced. Selfe points out that schools are not the sole places where people gain access to digital literacy (644). From 1978-2003 personal computers slowly became commercially available into composition classrooms. In the 1970’s computer programming was introduced into classrooms. Britney was born into an era of internet and email. She grew up with computer as a child while Melissa taught herself how to use computers when they were first being used in the military. Britney says, “I appreciate when my teachers embrace technology” (660). She also says, “We do best at things we have a genuine interest in, not those that are spoon-fed to us.”

If English teachers can address new literacies in their classrooms, that would make a more dynamic way for students to learn.

The Value of New Literacies in the Composition Classroom

We’ve all been there.  At least once in our academic careers we have spent the first 20 minutes of a class period watching the teacher or student presenter battle it out with the technology they were dependent on for that days lesson.  Does the occasional misfire of technology signal its unwarranted place in the classroom?  Are we wasting our time, or are we wasting the potential of the tools we have before us?

You have also very likely sat behind (and quickly learned to sit in front of) this guy:

who has been perusing his Facebook and email while typing a paper on the effects of Hurricane Katrina all throughout the lecture on poster propaganda in Berlin.  Bravo on the multi-tasking skills, but will he be fully present for the ensuing group work?  I’d rather not take my chances.

While these are two examples of many unfortunate drawbacks to technology in the classroom, they certainly cannot justify excising technology from schools.  Not only that, but they bring up very important questions surrounding digital literacy and our own agency.  What is the current role of technology in the classroom?  Is it effective?  Should we throw it out, work within it, or transform it to what we need it to be?

In “Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of  a New Media Text Designer” Cynthia Selfe points out that English comp teachers are becoming more and more interested in new media texts because not only do they see more of them and have more access to reading and authoring these texts themselves, but their students are paying noticeably more attention to these texts as well.  Selfe argues here that teachers should be paying more attention to them, as well as using them systematically in the classroom to teach about new literacies.  In the chapter Selfe uses the technological and traditional literacy narrative of one student to explore how this contested landscape effect students working in specific English comp programs, the role new media literacies play in the negotiation of new social codes, and what English comp teachers must do with this knowledge to squelch the risk of composition studies becoming increasingly irrelevant (or politicized as such).

As hard as it is to believe that something so absolutely necessary for the educational (read: professional, personal, future) career of American students (read: communities, future leaders, country) as the critical thinking skills learned through composition could be devalued by anyone with the power to support it, the sub-topic of the use of technology in the classroom comes with a built-in debate which could serve to bolster a positive view of the necessity of comp studies or derail it.  David Buckingham explains in “Introducing Identity,” how the long debate on the impact of media and technology on children has always served as a focus for much broader hopes and fears about social change.  The idea that technology is transforming social relationships, the economy and sprawling realms of public and private life is recycled in popular debates, drawing on its long history of public opinion ranging from celebration to paranoia.

Research like that of Kristen Drotner, who believes that schools need to more directly address the new forms of competence needed today and is concerned with the implications of young people’s emerging digital cultures and the role of schools, along with the digital literacy case studies carried out by Hawisher and Selfe can help us put together an informed picture of how new literacies can or should play out in the composition classroom; one not overburdened by celebration or paranoia, but balanced by the real emerging needs of students.  Though Hawisher and Selfe are (rightly) hesitant to apply their ethnographic research to form a larger narrative, their approach points out how little English teachers know about the numerous literacies their students bring to class, and calls on them to seek out and embrace a broad understanding and valuing of multiple literacies in schools to cooperate with those at home, in the community and in the workplace; the literacies their students shape and are shaped by in other (social, professional, educational) aspects of their lives.

Of course this “unique position of the teacher to make a difference in the literate activities of students” requires an aspect of pioneering bravery on the part of teachers (especially those who do not consider themselves tech savvy), and it will certainly include a learning curve (occasionally we will spend some of our precious class time searching for a dongle).  Introducing the specific strategies and activities she suggests to take this road, Selfe explains that these strategies will depend on the teacher’s willingness to: experiment with new media compositions, take personal and intellectual risks as they learn to value different types of texts, integrate attention to such texts into the curriculum, and engage in composing such works themselves.  Not to mention on computer resources, tech support and the professional development that they have available at their specific institutions.  This is clearly a risk for teachers, not only in their own dynamic with their students, but in breeching this learning curve quickly and smoothly enough to justify the value of new literacies in the composition classroom while the composition classroom itself is still in the process of being contested, questioned, and possible threatened.  The successful use of a range of literacies in the classroom may keep composition studies relevant to students, the students’ skills relevant to future academic and professional work, and therefore the composition classroom relevant to the university.

Kory has asked for some discussion of the question of locating Elbow. Here are a few thoughts.

• In one of the articles Kory has collected for us, Elbow defines academic literacy as how professors write for other professors. When last week we listed on the board terms we associated with ‘academic literacy,’ there were quite a few negative-sounding phrases—rigid, rule-oriented, prescriptive, formal, etc.—which suggests that we were to some extent linking academic literacy to the deservedly maligned current-traditional approach to composition theory and pedagogy. That is, how professors write for other professors often is portrayed as old-fashioned, formal, and not creative.
• Elbow argues that in FYC we don’t have to teach students how to write exclusively like professors. Life is long and varied, and there is more to writing—at work, say, or for fun—than producing academic articles. Perhaps professors need to learn to write like students as much as students need to learn to write like professors…

Source: The New Yorker, September 10, 2012, p. 89

• We should also consider the political dimensions to the current-traditional definition of academic literacy. To borrow Brian Street’s words (which were quoted in last week’s reading, “Blinded by the Letter”), the values we place on being able to write like academics “are merely those of a small elite attempting to maintain positions of power and influence by attributing universality and neutrality to their own cultural conventions” (723).
• So if like Elbow we teach a variety of writing styles in FYC, extending ourselves and our students beyond the current-traditional definition endorsed by those in authority, and since we are teaching these styles in the academy, what is to stop us calling what we are teaching “academic literacy”? (The answer is: those who have the power to stop us.) To put it another way, if we drop the limited, hegemonic definition of academic literacy and include literacies which people can use not just in writing for professors but in writing at work, for the newspaper, to friends, and so on—real-world writing—Elbow can be welcomed back into the academy. (Did he ever really leave?)
• What about the new literacies? Does Elbow belong there? It is interesting to note that we seemed to find it difficult, if not impossible, to put Elbow in the ‘new literacies’ category on the board, also. And yet, and yet…If a key feature of the new literacies is collaboration, then why doesn’t Elbow’s pervasive inclusion of collaborative writing (in his and Belanoff’s textbook, Being a Writer, for example) count? Is it because we have already defined him exclusively as an individualist and cannot see beyond that category? Is it because he is not associated with the technical stuff of new literacies, or new genres such as blogging? What about that new literacies ethical stuff—the emphasis on texts being written, shared, read, and rewritten together? Elbow seems to be as keen on that as anyone else.
• If academic literacy isn’t just current-traditionalist literacy, if, indeed, it isn’t just how professors write to each other but, more broadly, how people write to each other within the academy in a variety of contexts and for all sorts of reasons, including readying themselves for writing to non-professors, and if the ethical stuff is at the heart of new literacies, then I would say that Elbow fits fairly into both categories: academic literacy and the new literacies. Which, it seems to me, problematizes the categories rather than Elbow’s approach to writing.

Technology, Identity & Nintendo-Legs

I can recall a couple of years ago, an old lady friend and I were out having some lunch.  It was my first day off in a few weeks, and I just wanted to spend the day relaxing and didn’t want to exert myself too much.  But like my old man always says, “if it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”  This lady

Your texting skills are no match for Cell Phone Girl!!

friend of mine dropped her phone, splitting it in half.  It was obviously broken, and my day of taking a breather, I knew, would turn into a day of desperation and working against the clock.  Oh the calls, texts, emails, facebook updates she’d miss!  How would she survive!?  I on the other hand would be thrilled to be cut off from the world…but not her!

I feel technology has become such an intricate part of our lives, that for some, actually it seems that for many if not most, technology and digital literacy is more than just a simple way to communicate.  It’s shaped us and our identities into who we are and how people socially perceive us.  Do we define technology, or does technology define us?

British Sociologist Lord Anthony Giddens, who’s written more books then some people read in a lifetime, has done extensive research in regards to the relationship between social identity and technology.  Modern individuals have to be constantly “self-reflexive,” making decisions about what they should do and who they should be. The self becomes a kind of “project” that individuals have to work on: they have to create biographical “narratives” that will explain themselves to themselves, and hence sustain a coherent and consistent identity (9).

It seems that technology is doing more than just making the world and information more convenient.  It’s also defining and creating peoples identities.  Myself for example, am one that really only uses technology when I need to and when it’s convenient for me.  When I have to write a paper, write an email, look up the score of a game, when my two weeks are up and I have to call my parents, etc.  I’m one of the few people that I know of who doesn’t have facebook, I’m slow to respond to texts (by choice) and don’t really use technology to shape my identity, and because of this and various reasons I tend to avoid technology, I’ve become somewhat of a recluse in the eyes of many.  What ever happened to just picking up the phone and giving me a call the old fashioned way?  It makes me wonder what people did before cell phones and the Internet.  Were there people as stark crazy about staying in constant contact with others 24 hours a day back then like now?  If so, did they use to sit at home by the phone, and wait for someone, anyone to call?  Did they constantly check their mailbox, a dozen times a day to see if anyone wrote them a letter?  Or, was society way back when, not as caught up with maintaining today’s theme of being an active member of a communicative society?  What were people’s identities like before the technology boom which seemed to occur over the past 20 years?  Were people judged by how many real life friends they had as opposed to today when some judge others by how many facebook friends they have?

Also, has technology made our world any better?  Some say yes, and I’d have to agree to a certain extent.  We are now at an age of the “net-generation.”  One, which utilizes the computer and the world-wide-web for their instant source of news and commerce. “N-Geners” are “hungry for ex- pression, discovery, and their own self-development”: they are savvy, self-reliant, analytical, articulate, creative, inquisitive, accepting of diversity, and socially conscious (13, Buckingham).

We are able to get various accounts of news from all over the globe at the click of a button, so to say.  It has, made the world a lot smaller and has created a more open-minded society.  A medium for social awakening,” which is producing a generation that is more tolerant, more globally oriented, more inclined to exercise social and civic responsibility, and to respect the environment (14, Buckingham). And according to Brant and Myers, the emergence of technology has allowed us to get away from the global superpowers and has given the smaller countries a voice in the world (664, Hawisher).

Nintendo-Leg’s Fearless Companion!

But at the same time, it is worrisome.  Is technology making us lazy?  I recall when growing up, my best friends little brother was a lot more in tune to technology than we were, but we didn’t say that, we called him lazy.  He’d spend hours upon hours playing video games and surfing the net.  We use to joke that he had “Nintendo-Legs,” a wretched disease which causes one’s legs to be extremely thin and brittle due to long hours of sitting on one’s keester and playing too much Super Nintendo.  Now though, Mr. Nintendo-Legs has a job where his technology skills as a kid have made him into an adult with savvy computer skills.  He just bought a fancy car and his older brother rides a bicycle to work (and not because he’s thinking green).

Technology has radically shaped our lives and our society.  I feel it’s created more people such as myself to become more reclusive, but I really don’t mind.  In the past, I might have consulted my friends and family in regards to deciding where to possibly go on a weekend get-away.  Now, I just Google where to go, “best weekend get-aways near me.”  I’ve become more independent as have many others thanks to technology.  Is all this a good thing?  I’d say it’s still up for debate in my mind.  I’m not sure people really are as social as they once were, at least not in face-to-face interactions.  Why go to out and spend my whole night finding the right girl to buy a drink for when I can just parooze Match.com, or hell, even craigslist!  All technology and literacy’s have life spans, it’s just a matter of time before we’re on to the next, so I guess we had better prepare for the worse…er, I mean best!

De-Reification in the Digital Age

It comes as a shock for me every time realize that my students don’t know teachers are people, too.  When I was teaching adult ESL, it didn’t matter how many invitations I got to coffee or birthday parties; as soon as I started approaching a group of giggling students, the laughter would die down immediately if the “funny-fodder” was even remotely interesting. Now that I am teaching freshman composition for the first time, things have taken on a level of downright hilarity.  Adult ESL students at least saw me as a being that existed on the same plane of reality as they did.  These days, I am almost convinced myself that I actually cease to exist as soon as my students exit the classroom.  I think they are astonished to learn that I’m capable of re-materializing during office hours, and I don’t blame them.  After all, I suppose it was not so long ago that I myself made snide comments about not speaking to professors in any human capacity “until I’ve seen them bleed.”  It remains a surprise to have been relegated to that category myself, although I don’t know why it still surprises me, seeing as how I have just collected an essay from my students wherein I asked them to describe some aspect of slang and turn it into an argument about academic language.  Of course they think I am a robot.

When I met with each of my students as they embarked upon this essay, we arrived almost inevitably every time at the conclusion that when they wrote academically, they didn’t like it because they “lost personality” or became “boring.”  I loved the distinction here: they were not bored by academic writing, they were boring by academic writing.  Putting ideas into academic language has a homogenizing quality, a way of distilling any extreme flavors for the sake of appealing to a wider audience (we can’t all take the heat of Thai chilies, and if you haven’t grown up eating durian, forget about trying.  Ever.).  It makes sense that we have to make our arguments palatable to more people, over a wider range of time and experience, but the process of doing so can feel like it drains the life out of the writing.  We are forced to explain in an abundance of details that which seems obvious to a modern audience, and we must do so in as inoffensive a way possible.

So no wonder students think academics aren’t human.  Not only do teachers have to teach their students the variety of writing that necessarily asks them to distill their personalities and seems to suck the life out of every great idea, teachers themselves engage in this kind of writing on a regular basis.

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola, in “Blinded by the Letter”, discuss the dangers of academic literacy conventions my students seem to so resent:

“To the book, writers [discussed in the article] attribute our sense of self, our memories, our possibilities, the specific linear forms of analysis we use, our attitude towards knowledge, our belief in the authority of certain kinds of knowledge, our sense of the world…” but “[w]hat else might we be-or be open to-if we did not see ourselves and our world so defined in books?” (728)

The language of “the book” is that which defines all sense of knowledge and understanding, but which must do so in such a way as to transcend temporality.  This language encompasses all linear academic literacy practices that Hull (via Wysocki and Johnson Eilola) describes an “all-purpose flour” model for language, one that at once ignores the socio-economic constructs underlying them, and produces the uncomfortable, personality-stifling effects my students discussed with me in their conferences.

No wonder, then, that students prefer the kind of writing they engage in with the “New Literacies” described by Lankshear and Knobel .  Rather than purging elements of their personality from their writing in order to fit linear, homogenized, “White”-bread model demanded of them by academic institutions, “New Literacy” practices (Blogging, Manga, FanFics) give students the opportunity to write what they want to an audience that understands their intentions and contexts.  When given the option of engaging in a “New Literacy”, or to write an essay in language dubbed “universal” to hide its colonial underpinnings, the interesting choice seems clear. “New literacies” allow students to engage with writing in real time, to connect with a sociocultural reality in which they live, as opposed to, say, writing for an  audience in some distant future that just happens to be reading their Literacy Narrative essays defining modern slang, a situation as uninteresting as it is unimaginable.

And because this is a blog for future/current teachers, students be damned.  Academics want a voice beyond the language of the university as well.  According to Davies and Merchant’s “Blogging as New Literacy”, “to write a blog is a little like displaying a personal journal in a shop window, for friends and passers-by to read at their leisure.”  For academics, this new literacy practice can be an apt mediation point between work and life, especially if we consider that for most scholars, work is a large part of life.  The joy of the blogger is twofold: they break free of the shackles imposed on them by rigid editors and timeless-yet-linear literacy practices, and they get immediate gratification by hitting the “publish” button as soon as they finish writing.

Davies and Merchant claim that “Bloggers Have Feelings, Too,” and here blogging takes on perhaps its most interesting factor for me.  When I blog, or respond to a blog, I engage in a fresh and interesting conversation, and I’m allowed to say things like “students be damned”.  For the first time in my academic career, as I’ve blogged I’ve been allowed to maintain some personality, even (wait for it…) a sense of humor, irony, or fun.  “New Literacy” practices let teachers shed the grey cloak of serious academia, allow them to kill the machine, to de-reify, to personify, to breathe life back into themselves while they still get to geek out on school.  Through “New Literacy”, in the face of all odds and in the eyes of our students and the world, we the teachers are allowed to become human again.

Ah Violetta! A different kind of Multi-Tasking? Collaborative Function as an Index of PostModernity

Recently, at a desk bestrewn with empty coffee cups, a half-dozen books, digital audio equipment, handwritten lists, old syllabi, and class notebooks, I’ve found myself multitasking. Similarly, my typically tidy virtual desktop has become cluttered with quite a number of pdf articles, garage band files, electronic “sticky” notes in all colors, word documents in various states of editing or abandonment, and a slew of photos awaiting sifting and sorting.

Given the mundane/virtual dust-devil of texts I’ve been interacting with and generating these days, I’m very interested in the discussion of multi-tasking I’ve been encountering in critical discussions of digital and new literacy.  After all, if my desk/desktop is any indication, shouldn’t I, as a multi-tasker with a laptop at the heart of it all, be able to find myself represented in articles discussing digital textuality and new media?

Lankshear and Knobel, in their 2004 plenary address to the NRC, “New” Literacies:  Research and Social Practice, commented glowingly on the work of Angela Thomas, noting her interest in the “ways in which children construct their identities in multimodal digital worlds,” and held her research up as “an excellent exemplar of how weblogs and chat spaces, among other online media, can be used as research tools.”

When I cam upon Lankshear and Knobel’s discussion of Thomas, I was drawn to the words of Violetta, one of the digital insiders interviewed online by Thomas:

I need to make a confession right now, I am talking to you but at the same time I am talking to this cool guy Matt who I know from school, and trying to do some homework – an essay for which I am hunting some info on the web – you know, throw in some jazzy pics from the web and teachers go wild about your ‘technological literacy skills’ skills.  Big deal.  If they ever saw me at my desk right now, ME, the queen of multi-tasking, they’d have no clue what was happening.

Re-reading Violetta’s last line gives me, a teacher and older user of technology, pause.  Don’t older or less frequent user-creators of new media, many of us latecomers to the party, multitask too?  Are our styles of multitasking really so different from Violetta’s?

In “Sampling the New Literacies” Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel write:

Multitasking has become ubiquitous among digital youth.  Moreover, the multitasking mode is not seen simply [as] some casual kind of modes operandi confined to interactions with one’s closest friends – as when chatting, roleplaying, updating a weblog, IM-ing, etc. simultaneously . . . . Rather it is widely seen as a way of operating that applies generally in everyday life at home, at school and at play. (15)

On the basis of such input, I’m still not convinced that Violetta has anything on me.  I like to sneak a text out to a friend during class at least as much (hell, perhaps more than) most of my students.  And, to be sure, I’ll leave facebook open while paying bills, g-chatting, answering professional correspondence, writing for fun, emailing my parents, taking notes for a role playing game, listening to music, or playing/recording a guitar.

Through coordinations of self/technology/and context, we perceive ourselves, and intuit how others may read us.

However, Lankshear and Knobel do have more to offer.  In positioning their concept of new literacy into the discourse theory of James Gee, they cover the idea of coordinations through which our situated-selves enact literacies within discourse.  This catchall phrase reminds us to consider the myriad elements bound up with incarnating literacy:  thoughts, feelings, rules, institutions, tools, accessories, clothes, language, etc.  “Within such coordinations,” according to Gee, “we humans become recognizable to ourselves and to others and recognize ourselves, other people, and things as meaningful in distinctive ways.”

Perhaps Violetta’s statement suggests a refined sense of how the various coordinations invoked in her digital literacy present (or interpolate, in the Althusserian sense) her as a subject, one with creative agency, but one who also may be seen, even studied, as such.  After all, she casually mocks teachers for praising even a cursory expression of “technological literacy.”  That is, to take up Gee’s reasoning, she has a subtle awareness of how the coordinations that frame the ongoing practice of her own literacy simultaneously enables her generative self-styling of a public persona and provides surfaces through which others may find her persona legible.

Thinking through Gee’s coordinations again, which include thinking and feeling, I’m led to consider the possibility that, even if people like Violetta and I each use some of the same technology, perhaps even in somewhat similar ways, perhaps the way we think and feel about our respective digital practices are what matter.

In Lankshear and Knobel’s charting of the ethoi underpinning the practices of typographic and digital textuality, we find a wide range of theory suggesting that typographic literacy and digital literacy carry with them a number of rather different assumptions, such as the way in which ideas are given value – such as through scarcity (typographic) or sharing (digital).  I grew up in a world in which the economic model of scarcity-derived value gave ideas and academic credentials their feeling of worth; not everybody had them.  This kind of thinking is of course still with us, and I hear it expressed whenever a student expresses worry that someone might “steal”  his or her ” idea.”

Lankshear and Knobel quote Barlow’s perspicacious claim that “dispersion . . . has the value and [information’s] not a commodity, it’s a relationship and as in any relationship, the more that’s going back and forth the higher the value of the relationship” (11).

Perhaps this point isn’t so different from being, in the years before before GPS, lost with someone who checked a paper map versus being in the same situation with someone who was happy to ask for directions.  Is it worth starting a face-to-face relationship with someone when what you want is a bit of information? (Yes, this opens a fertile line of gender-based inquiry generally absent from the more accessible layers of the theory Lankshear and Knobel cite).

Barlow’s  idea, that information is conceptualized differently by practitioners of differing literacies, helps me to infer a possible difference between my own approach to the web and that of someone like Violetta.  Let me illustrate the point with a problem that came up during a recent period of multi-tasking heavily weighted toward my current academic commitments.

A few days ago, I encountered a problem using a forum a professor had set up using SFSU’s ilearn for a class.  I’d asked my professor to modify the default settings for the forum.  One of the side effects had been that all of the group members ended up locked out from posting to the forum.  Before alerting my instructor to the problem, I tried to query ilearn’s online help several times, and quickly came up against an electronic brick wall, a invitation to search that kept resulting in:  “There are currently no QuickGuides in the system that match your search criteria. Please try again.”

Reflecting on the matter now with Barlow’s statement in mind, I realize that I tried to solve the ilearn problem from a scarcity-model informational standpoint; the smart money would have been to solve it relationally, to find someone who could help me step by step through the situation, perhaps through the obviously displayed email or chat support options.  Seeking that kind of help isn’t as comfortably in my playbook.   Looking back, I realize I  also have a few people in my networks (both professional and social) with whom I might have interacted in order to solve my problem.

Why didn’t I?  I bet that, in terms of digital  literacy, I am several, even 10s of thousand of hours short of Violetta’s time online.  If indeed, as Walter Ong famously wrote, “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” Violetta and I may very well negotiate such problems differently.   I bet she would have gotten the results, and probably through a more social source than the help files I looked at, which are simply digital analogues of mundane owner’s manuals — a typographic solution.  A digital insider might ask: why open the manual when you can instant message an expert?  Perhaps Violetta might have started by asking that “cool guy Matt” she was already chatting with, and he might have had the answer.

I think that we might be in the midst of a social change that dethrones, or destabilizes, our traditional view of a narrowly defined executive function as the preeminent organizational skill.  It may be that this concept was formulated in an era of, or under the influence of values generated by, typographic literacy.  Perhaps collaborative function, an ability to effectively access collective sources of knowledge, is a more apt descriptor of the underlying capability for problem solving in the digital era.

Where is the collaboration in this executive function model?

Lankshear and Knobel note how wikipedia, for example, “leverages collective intelligence for knowledge production in the public domain.”  The literature on digital literacy that has come across my workspaces of late suggests that some kind of collaborative function will increasingly trump the sort of executive function that typically is associated with students’ ability to focus.  If we fail to recognize this, we not only impair our own digital literacy, and misunderstand the classroom presence of our students, but also, even while using digital and new media, stage our attempts at problem-solving with a scarcity-based model of information lurking in the wings.

Given the frequency with which New Media theorists invoke Jameson, Derrida, and other postmodern luminaries, it has become difficult to disassociate digital textuality from postmodernity itself.  Lankshear and Knobel note that the 2.0 digital mindset may be seen “as an aspect of the postmodern spirit.”  In “Blinded by the Letter:  Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Anne Frances Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola contrast, in a line of inquiry somewhat parallel to the scarcity/dispersion dichotomy, the private linearity of printed consciousness and the spatialized intertextuality of digital thinking.

Perhaps the world where the full implications of “an unseen network of reference” that is “visible, navigable, writable and readable, on our computer screens” is also the world of collaborative function, where users not only see/access links between texts, but are much more free to see/access the social relationships based upon textual exchange, the affective and informational networks through which texts, reified artifacts, useless in themselves, are transmitted and granted meaning.

In my youth, fan-generated responses to Star Wars often looked more like this.

Where Violetta and I may well overlap, in terms of our digital-literary consciousness, though, would be in our appreciation of fan-generated media.  Consider this fan-generated video of a Star Wars space battle, which reveals  the fervor and technical prowess of the normally faceless imperial pilots that form part of the menacing backdrop  of the films.

Sleigh Bells

Although my information-seeking instincts may be still been conditioned by a youth of scarcity-consciousness, at least I’ve come this far – I can admire fan-fictive remixing, and don’t want to see either Lucasfilm (or Sleigh Bells, which someone other than the fan-author added to the vid as a righteous musical backdrop)  pull down the video by flexing their scarcity-derived intellectual property rights.  I’d go further, and assert this fan-creator’s right to draw upon these sources to make new texts.  Many of you are probably already familiar with Larry Lessig’s TED talk on Read/Write culture, so I won’t belabor the matter.

One last takeaway from Violetta’s statement, I think, is that we don’t want, by studying digital and new medial literacies, to fetishize their demonstration.  Users like Violetta are aware that their practices are the subject of academic/pedagogical inquiry and appropriation.  They may know all too well that scholars like Lankeshear and Knobel dedicate works like “Sample ‘The New’ in New Literacies” to “the young (and not so young) digital insiders who inspire people like us.”   In that spirit, let’s make sure we do our best, then, to listen to what student-users have to teach us about working collaboratively with new media.

Get Digitally Literate Quick!

The theme of this weeks reading is ‘New’ Literacies. My reading consisted of three articles titled “New Literacy” – that is three separate academic articles with the same title. So, what is New literacy? What is “new” about it?

Teaching ‘new’ literacies (that is, reading and writing activities and more that take place in digital environments) is the new trend in composition classrooms. However, when we teach ‘new literacies’ we should be careful with getting on the bandwagon without reevaluating what we actually want to teach and want students to learn.

We should re-conceive ‘new’ literacies as not just a new label, a new term to sum up a cool new way to write online, but as a new way of thinking, of creating agency, of performing  and of creating an identity and composing meaning. In their introduction to A New Literacies Sampler, “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies.”  Lankshear and Knobel refer to new digital environments as “techno stuff” and the way in which we use and engage with them, “ethos stuff.” Teaching new literacies needs to be more than just introducing an online reading and writing forum. Something is only a new literacy when it engages with “ethos stuff” –“[which] are more “participatory,” “collaborative,” and “distributed” in nature than conventional literacies.” (NLS 9). Techno stuff is the new medium, new blogs or videos or memes; ethos stuff is the way we engage with that new techno stuff. New literacies are only new, Lankshear and Knobel argue, when we engage with both new forms and new ways of using the forms.

For example, If a student writes a standard five-paragraph essay and puts it on a blog, there isn’t anything ‘new’ about that literacy. This pushes us past just using digital environments to interacting and engaging with them. So, as compositionists, how we do we foster this? A new lesson plan on blogs?

Lankshear and Knobel, in their other new literacy article, “New Literacies: Research and Practice” state that “we would like to see a moratorium on research that ‘delivers’ activities and modules and professional development ‘tricks’ designed for classroom application” (Lankshear and Knobel 3).

New literacy is not a ‘get quick rich scheme.’ Putting a standard essay online doesn’t make it innovative. Similarly, equipping instructors with lesson plans that claim to create or enable new literacies in their students doesn’t get at the goal or heart of new literacies, that is, the ‘etho stuff.’ Instructors need to be equipped with not just the tools, but the ways to use those tools in meaningful and engaging ways. Something only works when it works.

For, when we engage in new literacies in a non-productive way, we are continuing the thought that new media is only a medium, not a new way of engaging and thinking.

In “Blinded by the Letter” Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola warn against pasting the label of ‘literacy’ onto new digital environments. The term ‘literacy’ often evokes a neutral association to the ability to read and write. They argue, however, that if literacy is just a discrete set of skills to master, those who do not have it are somehow lacking or deficient (723). When we then use this term in conjunction with digital literacy, ‘we ask them, by using a conception of literacy that allows us to ask them, to blame themselves.’ (723). If we think of technological literacy as an ‘skill’ rather than, like print literacy, ties to power, agency, and class inequity, we assume that those who don’t have it have failed, are not adequate. Wysocki and Johnson-Eliola push, then, to connect digital literacy with the same powers we attribute to literacy for they do, especially now 12 years later, increasingly have ties to.

(disclaimer: this meme is for example only – to show the innate ties literacy can have to power, agency, and class inequity.)

They then posit that we should move our definition of literacy to one that embodies a spatial relationship, not temporal or linear. I’m reminded of Nicki’s description of her many screens open “deftly maneuvering between my laptop’s split-screen (Google Chrome on the right, displaying a pdf along with numerous tabs of research material, and on the left, Microsoft Onenote.” It is easy to forget that when this article was written, 1999 , the so-called ‘information super highway’ was still a burgeoning idea. Now, we flip between screens like nobody’s business, deftly moving from one application to the next, scrolling and refreshing, while often also simultaneously looking at our phones or iPods. I’ve seen people out with a laptop, an iPad, and an iPhone. One screen, or one application, is not enough anymore. But how we do we tap this resource in the classroom?

***

Reflecting back on Lankshear and Knobel’s “New Literacies” we want to do more than show our students these cool new interfaces or demonstrate how to flip between programs. Instead, we should strive, as Cynthia Lewis describes in another reiteration of “New Literacies” from  Sampling, that “ we need to know what writers of new literacies do when they write—what they think about and how they negotiate the demands of new forms and processes of writing (NSL 229).

“What they (students who are being introduced to a digital literacy discourse) all have in common is the belief that true agency is arrived at through a mixture of process and product, learner control and imposed limits. The most important ingredient, however, is a meta-awareness of how the domain works and how one might work the domain” (Lewis 231). The question then, is how do we invoke this? How do we implement actual ‘new literacies’ in our classroom that are not “get digitally literate quick’ schemes. We want students to engage with not only the ‘techno stuff’ of new digital environments but also the ‘ethos stuff’ – how, why, for what purpose and to what extent are they using digital environments.