Blogging about Blogging

I enjoyed how both the Tryon and Richardson texts cheer along the blogging revolution and argue for its application in the classroom. Go Blogging! I’m writing about how blogging can expand students’ sense of audience awareness for my research paper, and it is clear from these readings that teachers have used blogs to do this and serve a million different functions at this point. When figuring out how to integrate blogging in our Composition classrooms, I think the important thing to remember is what we talked about a few weeks ago: the technology should serve our goals as a writing instructors, not be an end unto itself. For example, Tryon, says at the beginning of his article that his goal as an instructor is to nudge students toward “a sense that writing matters.” To achieve this goal, he used blogs to get students to engage with contemporary political issues. He helped his students see the role that bloggers play in politics and had students contribute to an ongoing conversation.

I think I’m pretty fully converted (and if I wasn’t already from our class discussions, this article from Computers and Composition put me over the edge), but I have yet to decide how and to what extent I’ll incorporate blogs in my composition classes. I can imagine a class blog that lists homework and basically distributes information (for practical purposes), and student blogs where they post reading responses (to push students to start engaging with their readings, record their reactions) and full-fledged essays (to aim for an authentic public audience), contribute to the class vocabulary page (to pool their resources–I wonder if this would work better as a wiki), collect links/sources for research projects (to share their critical analysis of sources), and of course, comment on each others’ posts (to build the class network/community). These are just a few uses that come to mind, and I’d love to hear how you all, web audience, use or plan to use blogs to teach writing.

Integrated Consuming & Producing

Yes, I’ve resisted the idea of replacing print literacy with all things digital and I’ve resisted the notion of burdening comp faculty with new responsibilities when teaching students to compose in one medium is difficult enough (hey, I’m a pragmatist to the death), but I found Lessig’s 2007 TED talk very compelling in how he juxtaposed the 20th century as the age of consumption of media with the 21st century as the age of both consumption and production. He shows how, with access to digital technologies, young people are contributing to important conversations in ways that they haven’t been able to in the past. In effect, young people have created new ways of responding as in the video remixing he illustrates. As Lessig argues, these creative modes of composing have become the “tools of speech.”

“Reading” this week’s texts about the read/write culture that many of our students are lucky to have been born into (I say lucky as I imagine the power and potential this “participatory culture” allows), I couldn’t help making connections to the Integrated Reading & Writing program and philosophy that dominates here at SFSU as a way to teach developmental writing. At least as far as the program is concerned, post-secondary reading is a difficult endeavor and we have to teach students to be critical consumers of college-level texts while teaching them to be critical producers. A program that has expanded the domain of our comp classes here at SFSU to a focus on both consumption and production seems naturally poised to make the most of the power and potential of digital literacy.

Perhaps, our own IRW can aim for the “media convergence” that Jenkins (2006) discusses and fully embrace the potential of “participatory culture.” It seems to me that by encouraging students to be real participants, contributing on the literal and metaphorical web in ways that will reach real audiences, we will encourage our students to be better writers/producers, and the awareness of their participation in ongoing network of conversations, in turn, will help shape their awareness of themselves as critical reader/consumers. In other words, we can’t artificially separate the two halves of literacy, especially when we include the realm of digitally literacy.

Don’t panic, but the future of human existence depends on what you choose to teach in your Composition course.

I couldn’t quite tell if I was sensing a tone of excitement or panic in this week’s texts.

While I think both Miller and Yancey (CCC 56:2) make excellent arguments for rethinking and possibly expanding our practices (we already inhabit a world heavily influenced by screen literacy), and I couldn’t agree more when both Wysocki (Writing New Media) and Yancey suggest that the writing we ask students to do in school is not connected enough to their lives, I’m still not convinced that this justifies changing the purpose of a first year writing course from “writing/composing” (as Hesse argues in CCC 61:3) to “rhetoric/composing” (as Selfe does, also CCC 61:3).

I do think we should teach composition in a broader context, integrating visual arguments and the rhetoric of new media composition, but I think this has to be a different course than what is usually conceived of as first year comp. Might a certain large, urban state university in northern California change the focus of its second year composition course, currently emphasizing writing about literature, to multimodal composition? I, for one, would love to teach a such a course, but I would want students in it to have a good handle on written composition (and here’s maybe where we need to expand beyond the singular focus on the academic essay, considering that the world we inhabit includes written composition in many forms, some of them digital), so that writing can be one of many possible modes of communication for our students.

So, while I hear the new media alarm, it’s competing with others that have been going off for some time—in particular, the one screaming about the need for colleges to equip students with basic writing skills.

Luddite No More

Over this past winter break from SFSU, I visited my mother in Connecticut for a few days and had the opportunity to check out a few of the local community colleges, namely Capital Community College and Manchester Community College. I was blown away by these shiny, new, and seemingly wired campuses. A computer in every classroom? Sure, maybe for Harvard, but I never dreamed I’d see that at community college. (The community college in California where I work doesn’t even have functional clocks and overhead projectors are a rare commodity.)  So naturally, when reading the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments, I was curious about the question of access to technology. According to the Position Statement, administrators should be responsible for ensuring access and, thus, bridging the “digital divide.” In the midst of California’s behemoth budget crisis, one would think wiring every classroom might not be at the top list of the administration’s priorities, but it is becoming increasingly clear to me, thanks to Michael Wesch’s The Machine is Us/ing Us and Andrea Lundsford’s Stanford research on students’ literacy habits  (discussed here) that there is no turning back. Literacy has changed and our students’ understanding of texts and communication goes far beyond the printed word. My tech eyes have been opened and I’m excited to see how I can capitalize on the interest and expertise in new media that our students bring to the class. I hope our community colleges in California get on board and find a way to meet new definitions of literacy with the material need for technological resources.