Maybe I Should Research K-Pop?

In their articles, Black (2009) and Buck (2012) both speak to how social media platforms, ranging from Twitter to fanfiction sites, constitute spaces for important literacy practices, especially among youth. While Black’s (2009) and Buck’s (2012) articles emphasized different kinds of users and different platforms, their findings both made me think of K-Pop fandoms.

In Black’s (2009) case study, three young fanfiction writers developed agency in the act of contesting plots of their favorite anime stories and through making meaningful contributions to discussions of these stories. These young women were also able to access their personal cultural knowledge in profound ways, becoming experts to some readers. In this, I was very much reminded of the current phenomenon surrounding K-Pop Fans. Based on my limited and outsider experience with K-Pop fans, there seems like there may be the same kind of channels for agency that Black (2009) discusses. Namely, bilingual speakers of Korean tend to be the avenue through which those who aren’t fluent in Korean can truly participate in the K-Pop lyrics and discussions.

Further, as the young women in the fanfiction case study accessed different languages to construct and play with identity, a common trope in the discussions of K-Pop songs includes Romanized Korean words. In fact, many of the YouTube videos that allow for streaming popular bands like BTS provide Korean characters, Romanized Korean, and English versions of the lyrics in the video, as you can see here, at your own risk. These videos are created by fan accounts, typically by people who have a working knowledge of both the Korean and English, which is reminiscent to the ways in which Grace, Nanako, and Cherry-Chan “leveraged their own transcultural identities and multilingual skills to gain status within the community” (Black, 2009, p. 415).

K-Pop Fans, From Flickr

Finally, the expansive audience of K-Pop extends into many languages and cultures much like the audience of fanfiction.  Again, I am reminded of Black’s (2009) discussion of contemporary imagination where technological mediation works “to provide points of contact and cultural exchange for youth from across the globe” (p. 416). 

While, thanks almost exclusively to the work and writing of my students over the years, I was able to directly connect Black’s (2009) ideas to the fans of K-Pop, I wonder if research would reveal that the points brought up by Buck (2012) could also connect to this large group of fans. Specifically, I wonder if actions reflected in Ronnie’s negotiation of the social media interfaces could also be seen in the K-Pop fan group and how they use Snow and Amino, apps that are exclusively developed for the K-Pop fan on the go. Like Buck’s (2012) work with Ronnie, interrogating the social media use of a K-Pop Fan could reveal some fascinating behaviors and habits.

Critical Digital Literacy: Theory to Practice

For four years after high school, I lived on campus at my undergraduate home SUNY Purchase. Known for its 1960s brutalist, modern architecture, the campus has always received criticism for its starkness. However, one of the more intriguing aspects of the campus design remains how doors, building shapes, and step depth alike were all designed to thwart massive on-campus protests. Selber (2004) mentions this type of architectural design when commenting, “that certain technologies have been designed to oppress subaltern groups” (p. 89).

In thinking of critical literacy with technology, a large concern both pedagogically and generally lies in the design of any given program or device. In the case of the difficult-to-open doors at SUNY Purchase, the design encouraged students to exit and enter a building one at a time, opposed to en masse.

SUNY Purchase Campus, From hauntedhouses.com

The uses of the building features were mostly invisible to users, who were simply annoyed by the heavy, difficult doors until a design student conducted a historical assessment of the buildings. In many ways, this is the kind of project Selber (2004) seems to be getting at in “Chapter 3: Critical Literacy”.

For Selber (2004), “a critical strategy would be to seek oppositional discourses that defamiliarize commonsensical impressions of technology in educational settings” (p. 88). In investigating some of the aspects of this literacy, Selber (2004) encourages the use of metadiscourse heuristics which asks students to view technology as an artifact, rather than a neutral tool. This examination, according to Selber (2004), will often lead to students recognizing four distinct contexts: design cultures, use contexts, institutional forces, and popular representations (p. 106). The design student at SUNY Purchase, who discovered the hidden agenda of the school’s architecture was likely using many of the contexts Selber (2004) speaks of.

Throughout the text, Selber (2004) provides examples to think through these contexts; although, many of them are are located in the year 2004 (For example, Girlhoo is no longer in commission) and, more poignantly, focused in the specific school scenarios that raise issues of access. Repeatedly, Selber (2004) mentions that students must have access to technologies he proposes examining. In terms of theory to practice, I am left with a number of questions and concerns.

As with all things related to teaching with and through technologies, I can’t help but wonder how we begin to overcome the issues of access. While we can try to work in the absence of technologies, I’ve worked at schools that did not use certain tools, not because they were ideologically opposed to them, but because there simply wasn’t funding for them. Of course, students could begin to examine the larger political implications of this, but I have to wonder what the payout would look like in this case. Is there something especially stark when critical assessment leads to the conclusion that students attend a poorly funded school? In some ways it seems so, since most students already know this to be the case. Of course, this could lead to a larger conversation about funding and how schools collect money, but this seems to pull us away from the use of technologies. Cut and dry answers around access don’t seem to exist, as so many factors contribute to what constitutes access. However, it’s something I can’t help but grapple with.

Additionally, while Selber (2004) suggests a great many activities to consider in the classroom, we also have to consider the currency of time in a given class. Tackling all of this in even 15 weeks seems difficult. Because of this, perhaps the functional, critical, and rhetorical must overlap. Undoubtedly, this would mean losing nuance in some of the parameters that have been so carefully parsed out. Or, this could mean that teaching digital literacy needs to be a wider university/college goal.

Layering Rugs

This week’s two main texts from Writing New Media (2007) begin to centralize the discussion of technology and literacy in the writing classroom. Both Anne Francis Wysocki in “Opening New Media to Writing: Opening and Justifications” and Cynthia E. Selfe in “Toward New Media Texts: Taking up the challenges of Visual Literacy” are advocating for a move to acknowledge diverse literacies that have been fostered in digital spaces in the writing classroom. From my perspective, these kinds of practice-oriented texts are especially potent in beginning to understand why teachers choose to include and exclude technology and new media. What Selfe (2007) refers to as opening new media to writing or what Knobel and Lankshear (2007) call new literacies, is a new frontier for many longtime composition instructors who have for years prioritized alphabetic literacy in their classes.

What both Wysocki (2007) and Selfe (2007) bring up, that I find especially important, are the tensions surrounding the adaption of new literacy for teachers. I’ve seen and heard this tension and anxiety in many of my teaching experiences. (We even watched a rather dramatic retelling of this tension in class.) Specifically, Selfe (2007) refers to the discomfort experienced by teaching literacies that we are not entirely familiar or acquainted with and because “they confront us with the prospect of updating our literacies at the expense of considerable work, previous time, and a certain amount of status” (p. 71).

Delicate Tension by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923 AD, aquarelle and ink on paper

Certainly, a lot of time and effort has been invested in pedagogies associated with alphabetic literacy and the ever-changing and quickly evolving digital landscape does not offer entirely solid ground for teachers to stand on. In the digital landscape, it is difficult to become expert that we might want to be as teachers.

 

While the tensions are real, some of our misgivings as teachers seem to be about abandoning or leaving behind our old literacy practices in order to make way for new literacy practices. I agree with this–to an extent.  Of course, some of our older classroom literacy practices will have to take a backseat to make room for new literacies, but that doesn’t mean alphabetic writing will cease to be. The shift isn’t necessarily from one form of literacy to the other, but rather in valuing multiple literacies, as the New London Group (1996) have argued.  Selfe (2007) makes this point in discussing how visual texts have traditionally been viewed as “second-class” texts (p. 71). If you were to look at the classic composition classroom assignment of advertisement analysis, I think this becomes clear. The visual ad is not a real work of composition, but the essay constructed about the ad is.

However, when we consider Cooper’s (2010) point that writing tools do not arise separately, but rather they inform one another, it becomes more of a reciprocal relationship between old and new literacies. In this case, I hope we can move past seeing these new classroom additions as having the rug pulled out from under us as Wysocki (2007) suggests in her opening; instead we could begin to think of it as layering rugs. In this layering, our classes can consider how alphabetic writing informs and is informed by digital literacies or new medias, rather than feeling like we have lost our old mainstay. In this way, writing teachers can act as both experts and learners alongside our students perhaps bridging our practices and minimizing some of our fears.

 

Level Up Your Classroom

Original NES: A thing of wonder

Sometime in high school, I came to an important realization about myself: I’m a gamer. At that point in my life, it wasn’t something I was particularly proud of, but by the time I got to college where girls who played video games where a hot commodity, I was embracing it. I grew up with Nintendo paddle in hand, beating Super Mario Brothers, questing my way through the gold cartridge Zelda, and becoming a master of Tetris–and there was certainly no denying how my brand-loyalty continued with Nintendo64.

In “36 Ways to Learn a Video Game” from What Video Games Teach Us, James Gee speaks briefly about his first moments of playing video games and realizing the potential learning benefits of them (there’s also a great video with him talking about it too). There’s this perfect moment in this article when Gee realizes that consumers seek more challenging video games. It is absolutely true that they do. This is exactly the reason why I have always played the various Zelda games that are filled with time-consuming tasks and puzzles. Completing the game was fun and rewarding.

Gee comments about a game’s learning mechanisms, or their ability to teach the player how to play, and how these functions are important to a game’s success. Again, he is right. If Zelda games weren’t scaffolded in such a way to get the player from the forest to the field, then no one would ever be able to complete the longer tasks–and save the princess, of course. However, there seems to be an element that Gee only begins to approach in this reading: the collaborative nature of learning in video games.

I recently began playing an online, multi-player strategic game called Kingdoms of Camelot. The game is all about building up your kingdoms and your troops in order to conquer the world and battle other players. Your success in this game is dependent on building up your kingdom, and, more importantly, the community around you.

 Kingdoms of Camelot (K.O.C.) is similar to what the game described by Ian Bogost in “The Rhetoric of Video Games”. The more soldiers you train, the more resources you need, and so on. It is also similar in the way that the community has developed social norms and ways of interacting through a specific function called ‘global chat’ where players talk about game strategies and plans. As a new user, you must learn the different ideas and concepts of the game through the coded speech of the more advanced users. Containing an unprecedented amount of symbols and codes, the game tests a player’s ability to dive into conversation, use context clues, and use their perceived definitions to further their advancement in the game. Eventually, you get to a point of knowledge where you can join a specific group called an Alliance and build a community within the community.

Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North

In this way, Gee’s ideas about a multiplicity of literacies in “Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a ‘Waste of Time’?” becomes evident in games, as well as ideas around Game Based Learning. But what Gee does not get to is the way groups of players develop these meanings together. In the groups of K.O.C., new players work together to interpret the strategies and codes of the more advanced players. Much in the way that we ask students to collaborate in the writing classroom, certain games allow for groups to convene regarding a certain topic or obstacle and develop a solution together. Indeed, users even use wikis to collaborate on knowledge regarding the game.

We’ve worked on ways to bring wikis into the classroom, and some groups have even spoken about ways to bring video games in as well (others outside our classroom have too). So, let’s say we had students choose a game in groups; together, they play the game and develop their characters, worlds, etc. Afterward, we ask them to consider the implications of their game play and ideas of literacy, community, identity, code-switching, or other valuable composition-related ideas. Is there some way to get them to consider these complicated ideas in the same collaborative way that certain games allow for collaborative meaning making? Would asking the students to create a wiki about the game knowledge and their experience get at this, or could there be something more? After all, a lot of our students are playing video games anyway, right?

YouTube, ITube, WeAllTube

In ‘An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube’, a team of students from Kansas State University and their professor, Michael Wesch, provide viewers with an emic account of the video-sharing site. In this, the students and professor joined their online culture of study by uploading their own videos to YouTube. It is impressive and captivating to watch the clips of their videos as they figure out the unique experience of talking to everyone and no one at the same time, and as they relate their experience to those of others.

After watching the KSU video and their use of YouTube as a field site, I am curious how this website could be used in the composition classroom. From a class of our’s recently, we know that students use YouTube for a variety of projects. These projects typically involve a remix of some kind; often, a piece of literature is transformed by a student or group of students in some way. Anyone searching can find a myriad of these videos, tackling a variety of books and readings. However, if you search YouTube for various key terms (composition, writing, classroom, revising, essays, etc.), you will not see videos of students referring to their own writings, but only videos of students repurposing someone else’s writing. So, in a writing classroom that focusses on the student’s writing and their process, where does YouTube come in?

Instead, your search of these terms will likely uncover a legion of educators sharing different strategies and instructing online. In fact, there are many different videos where teachers are teaching other teachers to teach using YouTube (how meta is that?). Indeed, we have taken it so far as to write about the ways we are using videos in the classroom. Admittedly, the instructional video route is a good racket. I watch them, I search for them, and sometimes, they are even helpful. However, very little is happening by way of writing-centric student activity on YouTube.

If you look through educational blogs, you can see a few different ways in which teachers are currently using YouTube in their own classrooms. With a large focus on watching videos for informational purposes and as a way of providing alternative examples of different topics, the way we are currently using YouTube in the classroom seems to offer the same ethos problem that an early post discusses. Sure, YouTube is flashy and fun, but if we are just plopping it in the classroom to replace video strips, are we really providing students with new ways to interact with new media?

The KSU video offers a key moment where I think we as instructors could begin to consider new ways of incorporating YouTube into the writing classroom. As the KSU video grew in popularity, Wesch looked to how their video had circulated through the internet. After being tagged on a user-generated site, moving through the blogosphere, and showing up across the web, their video hit number one. My question, for instructors near and far, is how do we use this idea of user-generated and circulated content to get students to consider the complicated audience-awareness/presentation of self and performance that YouTube so brilliantly highlights? And, how do we incorporate YouTube in a way that showcases both process and awareness in a student’s personal writing while still considering the overall ethos of new media?

If there are any interested or informed parties, please share your thoughts. In fact, you could even post a video about 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.