Big Shift 10

Will Richardson’s 10th Big Shift is really quite profound. As he states, the internet provides unprecedented opportunity for work done in the classroom to have relevance in the world at large. Students at all levels can enter communities and conversations from their desks, an accessibility that exponentially increases both the amount of information available to students and their ability to participate in the production of that information. This is a boon for education the potential benefits of which educators have barely begun even to consider.

We all know the feeling of laboring over a particularly painful paper, frustrated by the effort it can take to produce work that will be handed in, graded, returned, and thrown away. Though I know one person who has every paper and assignment she has ever written (EVER), most students dispose of schoolwork once a course is completed, relegating the fruits of their intellectual labor to the blue bin on the curb. They can find no place for their work on their bookshelves, let alone imagining a place for it out there, in the world. But modern network connectivity may offer student work a place in the world, a chance to contribute to scholarly pursuits and general knowledge, a chance to avoid the void of the blue bin. The internet has changed dramatically the way we find, store, and share information. Anyone can now publish work with a few clicks, and chances are there will be an audience for it.

The potential for student work to find an audience other than the teacher calls for a rethinking of the work we ask students to do. Perhaps students need a stronger voice in the creation of writing topics. The works we ask students to read were born not of essay prompts but of personal interest, commitment, inspiration, and choice. Why should we ask students to write something we would not ask them to read? Modern connectivity offers unprecedented opportunity for educators to get students to buy-in to the work we ask them to by offering unprecedented availability of audience for and recognition of that work. The internet has forever changed the way students approach writing assignments; it must, therefore, change the writing we assign.

imMEDIAcy and reMEDIAtion

Will Richardson draws our attention to several new forms of literacy and composition that are changing the way the world communicates, composes, and consumes information. The proliferation of accessible avenues for the immediate production, dissemination, and consumption of information – information here is used in the broadest sense, comprising facts, opinions, thoughts, feelings, interpretations, impressions, visions, rants, poems, songs, movies, videos, photo- and video- journalism…and the list goes on – has changed the face, indeed the foundation and material makeup of what we have come to know as “the media.” The fourteen year-old two houses down could easily be engaged in investigative journalism, capturing snippets of life that Geraldo Rivera would give his eye teeth for. But unlike Geraldo, the neighborhood youth needs no camera crew, make-up team, or catering service; he needs only his camera-phone, a reasonably up-to-date computer, and the urge to tell a story. The now almost ubiquitous ease of access to instant publication constitutes a reconstitution of the media, a reMEDIAtion. The fourteen year-old boy two houses down IS “the media.”

There is a long-standing credo (though by some estimates it is no longer standing strong) among journalists that dictates accuracy and responsibility in reporting. To safeguard the integrity of the information that is produced for public consumption, journalists have long been supported by teams of editors and fact-checkers who strive, ostensibly, to verify the veracity and uphold the integrity of the writing that is distributed to the public. The girl-with-the-cellphone-camera-two-houses-down likely has no eager collegiate intern to uncover the errata in her reporting. The girl-next-door-cum-investigator-reporter-editor-anchorperson must rely on her own skills to ensure, if she is so inclined, that what she is offering up for pubic cyberconsumption is true and accurate. Where does she learn these skills?

Richardson tells us that, as composition instructors, it is our duty to “prepare our students to become not only readers and writers, but editors and collaborators and publishers as well” (5). Inherent in this toolbox of skills is knowledge and appreciation of (or, perhaps, reverence for) responsible and socially-conscious citizenship. Is this too much to ask of the step- (bastard-?) child of the English department? Composition as a discipline was born of the perceived need of immediate remediation in 19th C. Harvard students. It now appears the domain of Composition to respond to and take responsibility for the imMEDIAcy of modern communication and its pursuant reMEDIAtion. I think we might need some help.

Tecnologically Speaking

I was first introduced to the idea that writing is technology as an undergraduate studying linguistics. It was hard to wrap my brain around the concept at first – I guess I had always taken reading and writing for granted. People read and write, right? My world has always been filled with various forms of the written word. For that matter, my world has always been full of technology – technology that I have, for the most part, taken for granted. The only time I really took notice of technology was when it wasn’t available to me – my neighborhood was one of the last in the area to be wired for cable television, and my parents waited so long to buy a VCR I thought my head would explode. To think about writing as a technology is to consider this common practice from an entirely different angle.

As Dennis Baron reminds us, the earliest instances of writing were not records of conversation but of business transactions. Writing then, it seems, is a technology invented by those with property as a means of memorializing and protecting their interests. While literacy has become much more common since those first scratchings, it remains a tool of the privileged. The language of the dominant group is always the most valuable literacy in our increasingly globalized community. Those with the means to access the technology of literacy have greater access to power and control in their lives and their communities. Writing, like other technologies, is a commodity.

Those with access to writing technologies by default gain access to broader, more complex ways of thinking, as Reid tells us. Though Plato denounces the written word for it’s inability to answer interrogation, it is the written word itself which allows us to so thoroughly interrogate discourse. As Reid says,”it is our ability to store and process information in spaces outside our body that allows us to engage in the complex thoughts on which consciousness is founded” (p.25). Had Plato not immortalized his thoughts in writing, we would be unable today to consider his views. Had the Canterbury Tales remained as stories transmitted only by speech, scholars would not have been able to build entire careers around their analysis.

I find myself uncertain of what it is I am getting at here. There is a tension present in this notion of writing as technology. Language expressed orally seems to have as its primary purpose interpersonal communication. People within the same community likely speak the same language – language unites them and allows them to share. Spoken language is available to almost everyone. The ability to write is harder won. As Baron points out, the first technologies of writing were costly, available only to a few. In our increasingly digital world the same holds true. Written language can leave behind those without access to the current technology, diminishing their power and control. Writing can be a great joy, a means of opening the mind to wonderful new worlds. It can also be the barrier to those worlds and to crucial aspects of our world. Writing can help you or hinder you, depending on your access to technology.

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As Clive Thompson’s discussion of Andrea Lunsford’s research project tells us, a new age of literacy is at hand. With the advent of technology and cyber-social-networking, more interpersonal communication is happening through text than any of us have experienced in our lifetimes. While the personal computer has been accused by some of hastening the decay of social skills and serving to further disconnect, rather than connect, people, detractors cannot deny the possibility for communication and interaction inherent in the internet. In the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments, the authors declare that writing is primarily a social activity, that is to say that people write for other people. Classroom writing done on the page is likely to be seen only by the student author and the teacher, but works composed in digital arenas are instantly available to vast and varied audiences. While it may seem that one is writing in solitude on a machine, the tendrils of cyber connectivity instantly join the author with countless others the world over.  As professor Wesch points out in his video, we are the machine. Even those who disagree with Lunsford’s findings in their comments on Clive Thompson’s article are demonstrating the instantaneous communication that technology allows – read, react, and respond, all in minutes. The author reached the audience, and the audience responded, all in the time it takes to drink a cuppa.