Thinking about Technology

As I think about my syllabus and assignment, and using technology in the classroom, issues to consider:

1. Different people have different relationships with/experience of technology—this is an extension of the disparities between students in terms of their history and ability with, say, theory, or writing, or education. People with flickr accounts already, for example, have a massive head start when it comes to projects revolved around flickr. People who are new to applications and processes, however, may spend double or triple the time that others do learning to use them. How does this affect content and level of reading/writing required? To what degree does one grade according to the quality of the content versus the time spent engaging with the technology?

2. Privacy issues. On the one hand, you could argue that education and the modern world demand a new organizing of public and private. Certainly, youngsters seem to have a different relationship to these ideas. On the other hand, UM policy requires instructors to provide alternatives for those who do not wish to make their writing public. For an elective, one could simply require public participation. For a mandatory course, the ethics are different. Screen names may be one answer, passwords another. How to provide alternatives without undermining group learning/experience?

It’s You, Xanadu

I am really showing my age (and the fact that I wasn’t even cool when I was young) with these last two titles.

From Yancey: “The new, then, repeats what came before, while at the same time remaking that which it models” (314) As in Ulmer’s remake of Kublai Khan. Not a restating, Ulmer says, drawing on the history of composing, but an asking again of the original question and an answering anew in a new medium, the generation of a new delivery. Striking is the loss embedded into both Coleridge’s poem and into the Benjamin tale, by the way, the loss, the interruption, the need to start again, writing of course being a separation from a real or imagined original, ideal, a pining for the aura, which is embedded in the image, not the word. Do Internet delivery systems and visual argument allow better for representation of the loss, the gap, make visible their seams and interruptions than the traditional essay can?

Or is it simply that the form of delivery shapes the product, as Yancey says, requires a transformation, some things to be left out, others to change, and produces a different kind of involvement, a necessary engagement (involvement) with not only the content but the form and the methods of production and delivery? Is it really just that?

Now That I’m Here…

Is it not necessary to draw a line between those who can believe we can continue to situate our present discontinuities within the historical and transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century and those who are making a great effort to liberate themselves, once and for all, from this conceptual framework? (Foucault, “What is an Author”) 

Slowly, some of the pieces are starting to come together for me. For example, the degree to which the essay, literature and composition have been historically constructed, and the degree to which they, as they have informed the (writing) classroom, derive from the past and its particulars. Also, the way they have normalized and naturalized themselves to such an extent that they have come to equal “writing,” to the exclusion of other discursive practices, methodologies and forms—in other words are themselves ideology.

Duh.

Ulmer, George, Yancey, Gilyard, Collins, and others we’ve read would fall on the latter side of Foucault’s line, if I am understanding both it and them correctly. Remake, remix, visual argument, non-linearity, networking, involvement, juxtaposition, even Sophistry, as principles not only of composition but Composition, all represent a return to those points of origin where writing was tied to type, where rhetoric was tied to philosophy, and signifier to signified (NOT that these are all the same types of moments), and creatively and intellectually deploy the gap.Nothing like being thrown into the middle of a giant row when you don’t even know what everyone’s so upset about. Which just about sums up my experience of academia so far.Novelists work in a nostalgic form, of course, poets less so. For nearly twenty years now I have not been able to look at a flock of birds in flight without hearing (seeing) Cixous, who described them as writing in the sky. In more recent years I have often thought of Arthur Tze saying that the Chinese place the character for “fire” on top of the one for “tree” to create autumn: the literal translation is “tree tips on fire.” Situational rather than nominal, perhaps.

I always saw the space around and between letters and words as wide-open space, where the imagination goes to work and meaning forms and banks and breaks apart; I always did read aloud in order to better understand whether and how writing worked; I always worried about whether to break to the next line, whether the em dash or the comma worked best on the visual as well as punctational level. And Sal and I have often wondered why the best of films still doesn’t move either one of us as the best of books do—and she’s a video maker, not even a big reader anymore. I always thought that had something to do with the pleasure of the image being deferred in words, fully realized only in the mind, that the pleasure lay somewhere in that gap and the work it demanded. Of course, people like Ulmer and Vitanza and Collins are not arguing for a move away from words, far from it, just more and different forms of invention and delivery. I do get that. I think.

Centipedal

My eyes feel like centipedes. So overworked by staring at screens are my eyes, by reading print-outs, reading books, reading the letters that pop up one by one as I type, and watching them reorganize when I edit, that they feel as though they have sprouted a hundred legs each, each leg now attached to some object, now detached and waving weakly in the air.Or maybe it’s my brain.

I find Collins’s weblog essay fascinating on the level of content and form, even if it has contributed to the centipede effect. On the one hand, it’s so much easier to both loosely hold the whole idea and still be aware of how the strands shoot out and loop back, connect and criss-cross, than when reading a fixed, linear printed text, easier to “know” swiftly and intuitively, very different from the methodical hunt and pick I normally do when I read theory, copying out notes by hand, thereby automatically privileging and imprinting some points and not others.

Will anything stick, though? Only time will tell. Actually, and speaking of time that’s not quite true: those elements that ring an old bell will, I reckon, such as the questions of now and time and moments. I learned from Anne Carson that ancient Greek actually had a tense–perhaps it was called deictic or epideictic, I don’t remember–to describe the precise moment when the sun was directly overhead, noon exactly, when shape and the shadow were fleetingly united. I have used this shallow knowledge in the past to discuss the short-short as a form in fiction. Of course, there is no such tense in English. When I brought this up with respect to Derrida in a class, I was reminded that he would say ’tis impossible, the signifier and the signified, shadow and thing, can never occupy the same space. What the old Greek tense, and this essay seems to say, however, that the fleetingness, the temporality can be built in, referred to, approximated if not represented. So is deictic temporal as well as spacial?

This has interesting possibilities for my periodic work on literary impressionism in Deborah Eisenberg.I love the idea that with all these discussion of the modern we are always returning to the ancient, and from MacLuhan via Heston, from technology to the body…

These are just silly many-legged notes and here are some more:

1. Class blogs as centripetal vs. centrifugal. Which is the case with these blogs, the ones for Pedagogy? They are centrifugal, or mine has been at least, in so far as they spin off texts and discussions that are other parts of the class, and we use them to connect to other aspects of experience and learning. They are centripetal to the degree that we use them to pull out points from the authoritative texts, stick close to the centre, and to the degree that there is an RSS feed directly to an instructor who can respond negatively or positively within moments. Centripetal to the degree that I feel as though I am not following the instructions on the syllabus whenever I am most engaged with writing and the blog.

2. My own Comp course and teaching style are deeply centripetal. I started them off in small groups discussing clips from This is England, but they were so quiet, so low-energy today, that when I asked them if they would be more comfortable in a big group discussion that they all shouted yes, so I reorganized them again around my authoritative identity, and let them just make comments to me, get my response, answer my questions. What a cop-out. But cannot even the most apparently centripetal student experience be centrifugal in the long run, insofar as it is networked to the rest of their lives and learning, as Collins says our own teaching experience is? And here if I knew more about physics or had more confidence I could talk about the universe’s expansion, and questions of time and speed. Perhaps Collins himself says this; to know I’d have to click back and click around. That’s a challenge, too, trying to write and read on the same small physical screen. Trying to slip out from under the sun, or is it the shadow, long enough to speak.

3. I think I might try a course blog next semester. Just see if it makes things a little easier, gives them some space of their own, one that isn’t a windowless cinderbock cell overpopulated by me.

Review: Literacy, Technology and Society (Prentice Hall) (Final)

Literacy, Technology and Society: Confronting the Issues (eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia E. Selfe) is a 1997 textbook that aims to engage with technology as both object and method of study, framing information technology—specifically, computers and the Internet—in social, political, historical and critical terms. Its project, and the need to imagine using this book in a composition classroom, have prompted me to re-imagine, perhaps for the first time, a way for learning to take place—even as the book’s out-of-datedness in terms of not only content but style (I can’t believe I just said that, me the fuddy of all print-duddies), unfortunately ruled it out as a primary text I would choose for that experiment in teaching. I hate to begin a review on so evaluative a note, but I honestly feel that in this case it’s warranted; the rapid and minute evolutions of technology have, of course, resulted in a whole new landscape into which this text only awkwardly fits, and I will say more on this later.

First, though, on to what Literacy, Technology and Society does offer. The book is divided into five sections: “Social Issues and Technology;” “Education and Technology;” “Ethics, Law and Technology;” “Gender and Technology;” and “Government and Technology.” Each section contains a mix of scholarly essays, articles aimed at a broader audience, visual representations of technology, and fiction. There are also four appendices: a guide to how to “look” and analyze visual text; guides to citing electronic text in the APA and MLA styles; and a copy of the Bill of Rights, which is intended for students to use as they consider the various ethics, legal implications and possibilities at play and at stake in the Information Age—which a number of the essays and exercises will ask them to do.

What interests me most about this book is its explicitly ideological position that one does, should and must confront “issues” when using technology and its interest in drawing students’ attention to those issues—and as I mentioned earlier, this led me to think about working with technology differently than I have so far, and to a new conception of teaching, in which I (as teacher and fuddy-duddy) might be able to help students gain some critical distance (”academicize,” as Stanley Fish would say) technology even as they train me in it, or rather in their immersion-experience of it. After all, this is the sea they swim in, at least at MU, from what I can tell of my students so far; whether they have ever taken a step back and analyzed that experience or even tried to make it visible, is another question, one this book could help to explore. So if they work within and produce New Media, what I can do is help them to look at it critically, revise the product, just like I do with papers. (Oh. Will I forever be struck by the blindingly obvious?) Meanwhile, they would be able to bring to bear their own unique experience, authority and identity around technology; it would all become more of an exchange of perspectives than I have yet been able to achieve around, say, literature or film or political writing of my own choosing, and about which I inevitably feel more prepared to speak than they do.

Even the age and creakiness of the book may be of some value. Reading documents produced prior to and assembled at the brink of the information and technology explosion—several of the materials produced, in fact, in the 80s, and some of the fiction even earlier—could provide fodder for discussion of and writing about how the information landscape and aesthetic have changed in the years that these students have spent growing up. Also, those articles which examine, for example, the kinds of lifesaving communities that the Internet offers gay teens, and problems of Internet stalking, could provide the basis for wider research and discussion, a kind of bringing up-to-date of the discourse.

As with Reading City Life, and as the previous paragraph implies, I see some meta-value and meta-possibilities for this text. Its sheer size and look—601 pages, mostly of dense, black and white text—offer an aesthetic experience so at odds with the aesthetic experience of the world it is discussing that I imagine that contrast itself constituting the course’s central exigence. Students could discuss what a book which aims to provoke critical thought about the Internet in 2008/9 should look like, or whether such a critique should be in a book form at all, and over the course of the semester work to create an alternative version. This could involve excerpting from the book, reorganizing, and writing their own contributions. They could contrast the science fiction with more contemporary fiction, including, say, fan fiction on the Internet.

As for the collected materials, and their framing, taken together (and in some cases individually) they do operate according to the social-epistemic model, asking students to consider technology from a number of vantage points, and its impact upon different areas of social, economic and imaginative life (the imaginative being represented by the science fiction and articles on cyborgs and so on). Its left-leaning, progressive ideology is fore-fronted in mini-introductions to each text: one, with regard to an academic journal article on “the specific problems women and other underrepresented groups on campus encounter online” (348), invites readers to “think about electronic groups in relation to sexism and to decide what, if any, actions need to be taken on your own campus” as they read (348). The writing exercises that follow involve contacting women’s groups on campuses and intervewing representatives, making lists of ways that online communities “discriminate against men,” and developing workable plans for combating online discrimination that are to be sent to appropriate faculty, staff and students. “Writing and Learning,” as Hawisher and Selfe title the exercise sections following the articles, are therefore deeply connected to taking action in a real world context in this book—again, consistent with the social epistemic model of pedagogy. There are also multiple extended writing exercises that involve online research, identification of relevant URLs, and so on, but most of these introductions to the actual use of technology seem buried in the text-dense, traditional writing-focused context. A teacher would probably do well not to rely on this text as a prompt for the hands-on work, but to use it instead as part of a broader and more applied syllabus, in which it could serve to generate wider historical and ethical discussions around that work.

Every Second Counts

I’ve been thinking about what I said about academia/deconstruction appealing to people because you get to sit around and invent quirky titles. By people, I meant of course me.

That fancy of mine comes straight from my mother’s father, whom we called Papa, pronounced to rhyme with Napa. Mum’s mother was Nana, and it was all very pretentious for Glasgow, part of Mum’s mythology that we were French on her side rather than pure lace-curtain Irish, eaters of red lentils and sadly not black ones. In any case, Papa used to enter all the contests for jingles and slogans on the radio and in the paper. Once, he was even on a television game show called Every Second Counts and got stage fright—though with a show name like that, can you blame him?

He stood there frozen while the clock ticked and the other contestants banged on their bells and gobbled up the points, and he said not one word. He failed to answer a single question. The only prize he came away with was the one you got just for showing up, a crystal decanter engraved with the name of the show, and four matching glasses. He gave the set to my mother, and we had it for a couple of years in our rented house in Farnham, until I threw a party when my parents were out of town and one of my teenage wastrel friends stole it.

What a shame. It would be great to be able to pour myself a drink in the evening from a decanter that said Every Second Counts. The point of all this being that I’ve inherited from Papa, whose name was Joe Houston, my nerves around deadlines and my temporal anxiety in general, that sense of time draining away, and me only wanting to turn my face from it, every wee ending a reminder of the big yin tae come—and didnae Papa’s, and mah Nana’s tae, come awfy, awfy soon?

Review: Reading City Life

Bruch, Partick and Richard Marback, Ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.

Reading City Life is a short anthology of readings for college students that focuses on something we all share no matter where we live: city life. We may not share city life in the sense of living on the same block; many Americans don’t physically live in cities at all. But we may share city life in the sense that we all read city life all the time. Listening to hip-hop music, watching television shows and commercials, reading magazines and newspapers, keeping up with fashion, being sports fans, or just participating in conversations with friends and family, one of the topics that’s always on the table is city life. (v) 

This slender volume is, as its title suggests, organized around urban experience and its attendant complexities. Comprised of essays, articles and memoir excerpts that consider the central theme from a variety of vantage points—inside, outside, personal, historical, sociological, meditative, activist and polemical—Reading City Life falls easily into the cultural studies camp of composition pedagogy, and the category of textbooks which wear their ideologies on their sleeves, from the choice of organizing theme to the pedagogical approach and editorial language, to the list of contributing authors.

The book’s trajectory goes roughly from local to global, through five chapters titled, consecutively “Cities and Neighborhoods,” “Cities and Crime,” “Cities and Suburbs,” “Cities and Race,” and “Cities and Citizenship,” and homelessness, graffiti, the Cincinnati riots of 2001, suburbs, talk radio and sweatshops all making an appearance in their pages—but while there is a logic to the organization, that logic is not essential, and given the large degree of overlap in the material itself, it would be perfectly possible for a teacher to skip about and reorganize in order to make the book/syllabus responsive to, say, current events.

Preceding each short text is an essay that summarizes the article, presents the authors’ subject position and credentials, and offers suggestions for thought while reading. Following each short text are two sets of questions, one designed to “stabilize” the text, which is to say make certain the student has read carefully and understood the ideas, the second to “mobilize” the text, that is to encourage application, response and critique. The authors and arguments presented will furthermore be familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in feminist, Black, urban and or cultural studies during the last twenty years, or is a reader of left-wing journalism. Angela Davis, Patricia J. Williams, bell hooks, C. Carr and Manning Marable all contribute, and even the more conservative voices present, such as that of LAPD police chief Daryl Gates, or Leonard Kriegel, who takes on (recent) graffiti as both symptom and cause in urban decay—adopt a relatively critical approach to mainstream media assumptions and representations of issues such as race, community and crime.

Bruch and Marback have made a concerted effort here to teach students to contextualize readings and representations in terms of authors’ subject positions, to provide training in careful reading, and to allow room for personal response as well as more dispassionate critical discussion. A teacher could rely on this text entirely for a syllabus, using the questions as prompts for in-class writing exercises and papers—or use it as a jumping off-point, bringing in more current discursive examples and mixed media projects, and as I’ve mentioned before, picking and choosing from its selections.

Another very interesting possibility, at least to me, however, is the degree to which Reading City Life, by making its own ideology so visible, could invite the student to study the book itself as a textual object. The preface, whose opening I quoted at the start of this review, instantly provides fodder for discussion and thought. The notion that even realities that may seem remote at first glance have a deep and possibly personal impact upon all of us—this breaking down of Self and Other—not only seeks to justify the relevance of this book, but also provides a starting point for considering the short texts the editors have included in relation to each other, and even their very inclusion in the text—and inviting the question of what has been excluded. It also provides proof that a thesis statement—if one is choosing to teach thesis statements— need not be dull and dry, that it can contain a provocative and only partially articulated idea, so that the rest of the paragraph or essay becomes devoted to exploring the thesis. The decision to include authors such as Daryl Gates and the LA Bloods and Crips coalition, alongside the more traditional writer-figures of scholars, journalists and novelists, could also generate discussion about authority and identity, as well as ideas for non-traditional sources of information and that information’s use and organization. (One idea that occurred to me as I was reading it, was, what if one asked students as a class to create their own book on city life, or campus life, or Columbia life, each of them a contributing author, with one short paper.)

The arguments for working with a textbook such as this are as compelling to me as the reasons not to, and many revolve around the decision to commit to a single, albeit rich and broad, topic. On the one hand, coming at the same issue again and again from different angles could allow for more in-depth thinking and writing over time, and give students a chance to reflect back upon previous essays when writing about any given one, possibly even begin to reflect upon and revise their positions, which in turn may be a fruitful source for writing. On the other hand, if the topic itself fails to engage—or if one as a teacher fails to engage—the students early on, then the rest of the semester, surely, could be a bust. To the degree that the content of a text like this might coincide with one’s own intellectual interests—cultural studies, women’s studies, Black studies, political science, even rhet/comp—it could benefit a teacher’s pedagogy; to the degree that it does not, well, obviously that may be detrimental. The specific choice of urban life and its representations as a topic does allow for special access, I think, to New Media and to mainstream media, and entertainment/pop culture and politics and youth in a way that may make it more useful in a new composition context than other sociological subjects.

Weird

So, this morning, after one hour of sleep and a week and a half of near-nervous breakdown, I had my best teaching experience since getting here: starting from error rather than trying to remove it seemed to work!

I had students write, in small groups, the worst opening paragraph to a paper they could possible come up with. We brainstormed lighthearted and in some cases “silly” topics: leprechauns who play Guitar Hero, facial hair, why presidential candidates should have to appear in swimsuits, and the history of dirt. And then I told them to put in every single example of “bad” writing they could think of: redundancies, cliches, sentence fragments, unsupported claims, informal language, spelling errors, subject/verb disagreement, disorganized ideas, you name it. And they—well, 95% of them—went wild.

They got to write their bad paragraphs side by side on the board and make corrections as the class called them out, and we talked about where the errors lay and what the effect was…for the first time, I had to tell *them* when class was over.

(This was following a day of playing Exquisite Corpse, by the way, which also provided a fun way to talk about how one sentence follows another, how a word can generate an idea, how accidental connections and coincidence can be fruitful, how words have more than one meaning. So maybe that laid the groundwork. I don’t know.)

Thomas, did I steal the error-based writing idea from you? Because if so, it’s a good ‘un. I recommend it to everyone.

One boy did raise his hand at the end and say rather sadly that he didn’t understand how this would help his writing skills. I tried to explain, but I don’t know that he was convinced, so will have to follow up on Monday.

Window

There’s a lot more I’d have liked to have said in my presentation. One area I wanted to explore had to do with post-modernism and teaching, about post-modernist, deconstructionist, New Media and experimental forms of production in the comp classroom—and how they relate to/could be an antidote to the strange sensation I have teaching comp, which is of somehow stepping back in time, and a time I never even really inhabited, at that.

The space itself—a windowless, cinderblock room in the basement of Strickland—felt so alien and stultifying the first time I walked in. It reminded me of no other room I ever taught or was taught in, except perhaps a room in the public high school in Albany, Georgia I attended for 6 months at the age of 14.Textbooks, too, seem to belong to that moment, and to a world of systemized, mechanized, thinking and learning I was never at home in.

So, I can see, could essaywriting itself. One of my happiest pedagogical/writing memories may have been choosing, from among a list of possible essay topics in a class with Mary Gordon at Barnard, a comparison between the voice of irony in The Good Soldier and the voice of faith in Diary of a Country Priest, and in that moment several of my intellectual interests being born. I remember someone saying to me, years later, paraphrasing Judith Halberstam, that desire cannot be willed, it either finds its object or it doesn’t.

And so even if there are a couple of students who find they love the material, or the subject, the more they delve into it, there are many more who won’t—not if it’s chosen for them—and how horrible, and how backwards, to force students to study what someone else finds fascinating, whether it’s a short story or a set of social arrangements or food practices on campus.

Are new methods of invention a way to reinvent the classroom and move away from an outdated physical and social environment that cuts off, that tries to force the world as it is now through narrow methodological filters that deny desire (need, exigence) as well as the accident, spontaneity, randomness that can better trip off desire than systemized instruction and production can?

From my prose poem Window:Everything. And it all wants out of the motherless box.

Compare and Contrast

From a student paper on Paul Bowles’ “A Distant Episode”:

“They treated him so bad. Especially when they cut out his tongue.”

When I first read this, I laughed aloud. And then I had the predictable intellectual reaction: oh dear, how do I fix it? Later, though, I returned to that initial, pre-intellectual response of laughter and realized that the root of the (all?) laughter was not contempt, but recognition.

One of the things I had found most perplexing as I asked my students to compare and contrast “A Distant Episode” with “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was the gap between what they and I found funny. Just as my humor seems sometimes too sharp-edged for them—they looked so shocked when I said in a moment of mock/real frustration at their lack of focus in group work, “You would of been a good class if it had been someone there to shoot you every minute of your lives—“ they found neither story remotely funny. A few looked at me askance when I laughed aloud at certain sections. Most of their essays and analyses, moreover, were hyper-serious, and they probably got that cue about schoolwork both long before me and also, ironically, from me. Certainly, I let it stand in this case, was so concerned that they get the meaning that I forgot about the humor, which might have been a way to help them find pleasure. I guess I felt in my heart that either you get a joke or you don’t.

Q: What did zero say to eight?
A: Nice belt.

Anyway, the reason I laughed about those lines in the student essay was that their very wrongness—their understatement—was in fact perfectly right. It was in the spirit of the texts themselves. It was as though one of Flannery O’Connor’s characters were to discuss the poor Professor’s fate.

If I were a more experienced teacher, I’d perhaps have known how to use that as an opportunity (I will cut out my own tongue before I ever use the phrase “teaching moment.”) As is, I do feel rewired, a bit. That has been the message of the readings we’ve done of late, it seems to me, and of this class in general.

Rethink. Rewire. Self-question. Change.