digital digs

strategic reorganization

I've been working on our department's strategic plan. It's really difficult to be "strategic" in a department as divided as ours. It's not that we are hostile to one another. Nothing like that. It's more like the amicable divorce where exes get along for the kids' sake.

But you can't really plan a future together.

Being divided hasn't been great for professional writing, but it hasn't been terrible either. We've been free to pursue our interests, but with only three of us, we're ultimately limited in the scope of our activities. There are advantages to being small, but there are also obvious disadvantages. On the other hand, I think it has been hardest for our teacher education faculty who have to run the largest program in our department and deal with all the state bureaucracy.

If you took away all the personalities and the history and examined the situation with a cold eye, it wouldn't be hard to determine that we are inefficient. We are inefficient because are department runs according to conflicting sets of external disciplinary values (literary studies, rhetoric, teacher education) rather than through some internal logic that would seek to maximize the department's human resources.

when sorting things out is a bad thing

Richard Florida mentions Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort.  The essential premise of the book is that as America has become more diverse, Americans have sought out homogeneity by moving into communities with people more like themselves.

This reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Maybe this is just an understandable product of increased mobility. Maybe it's people giving up on democracy. I don't know. Given a choice, would you prefer to live in a community with people who generally share your values, interests, culture? I wonder if this isn't more broadly a product of the social, economic, technoscientific revolution in which we are immersed. We are really at sea about the political, social, and ethical responses we ought to make about such matters.

It is pure coincidence that the same thirty years has seen the ongoing balkanization of our discipline? How pathetic is it that when humanities are in decline and we struggle to make ourselves relevant to students and the general culture that we avoid one another? that we gather in separate intellectual enclaves rather than communicating?

I'm not suggesting that we have to agree or even really get along (heaven forbid!). But how about figuring out a way of living that does more than just hope the rest of the world doesn't exist or won't call.

the brass tacks of public online pedagogy

I'm in the midst of writing an article on this subject. It's been one of the main focuses of my work this sabbatical. I presented at NEMLA on it and will do a related, more academic presentation at Computers and Writing next month. But I'm at the point where I am so hip deep in it--about 3500 words in with at least that much written and discarded--that I'm losing what I was trying to say.

So I'm here trying to figure that out real quick.

1. Despite our widespread belief in the socio-cultural function of discourse, we still treat composition as a fundamentally internal, private activity.
2. Similarly, we tend to view and value teaching as an intimate activity: smaller classes, faculty-student relations, etc. In part we view this as a kind of relative privacy, akin to the way college in general is sequestered from the rest of culture.
3. Both writing and teaching have always been networked activities but we tend to devalue and/or occlude those aspects. That occlusion has long been facilitated by the fact that the network in which we worked had been so stable that it was easily naturalized and/or forgotten.
4. The continuing emergence of social media networks has not only altered and made visible the networked relations of pedagogy and composition, but it has also created a more public network.
5. The expansion of social media networks into mobile networks now makes every first world, college classroom (and many beyond that) into a public, online, networked space.
6. These same technologies likewise make every composition for such courses into a public, networked composition. Like it or not, we are inextricably linked to this network, just as we were once linked to networks of library books, microfiche, typewriter ribbon, etc. In a sense, it is the same network, just simply an evolving one.
7. That said, a particular courses situation in that network can shift depending on a variety of factors, not the least of which being the faculty's approach. For example, faculty might attempt to control or silence social media networks by having students turn off mobile phones or forbidding "internet sources." Others might use the web in a regulatory way as with a cms or Turnitin.
8. So when I look at "public online pedagogy" I'm really looking at one way that faculty might respond to the context of teaching and writing in a social-mediated network.
9. I don't want to be an apologist for such practices. Nor do I want to present a heroic teaching narrative about it.
10. That said, I do want to analyze what public social media networks might facilitate. For example, they ease group-formation among students in a course. They also encourage group-formation with other students on campus, as well as off-campus. These activities can happen on-the-fly and more organically, without so much coordination by instructors or institutions.
11. Fundamentally though the point is to be able to share compositions with a public that has a real investment beyond the auspices of a course in what you are doing. It may be pie-in-the-sky to imagine some significant thing to happen through this public communication, but that's not necessarily what it is about. After all, I've written many things without moving the planet and I don't cry myself to sleep at night about it. The point is to have an opportunity as student writers to experience and analyze the rhetorical operation of such networks rather than occluding them.

OK, back to "real work."

who's your college campus?

OK, I swear this will be my last post on the Florida book, but I am a little curious to think about how the demographic shifts we're witnessing play out in higher education. At the C's Derek displayed some preliminary maps that pointed out where authors in CCC worked and also where they received their PhD's. There's not a lot of data there yet, but one can already begin to see the dominance of Big 10 schools (plus a couple Big 8, Texas ones) one would expect in rhet/comp.

In any case, I imagine a spiky map of higher education density would closely shadow the spiky mega-region maps in Florida's book regardless of how you did it: numbers of institutions, numbers of students, rankings of institutions, citations of faculty, etc. Clearly land grant institutions provided regional access to education, so every region has some institutions. However I wonder if the growing spikiness of the world will make it more difficult for institutions outside growing mega-regions to compete. It's one of those interesting conundrums where you might expect that the Internet would mean that it mattered less where you were as a student or academic. If you doubt this, consider this article in the Cornell Sun where even that Ivy League school reports struggles in recruiting and retaining top faculty.

Then I think about Cortland, located in the center of the poorest county in NY. The students of Cortland represent a great potential human capital for the county. It's hard to get people to come to Cortland I imagine. It's probably easier to keep the ones that are there. If Cortland where the kind of place that was welcoming to students and recent grads, they might be tempted to stay, assuming of course there were jobs. It's always the chicken and the egg thing there. But you might think about creating businesses that could draw on Cortland grads as young professionals.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that when you start to think about who your campus is, you also have to think about your city or immediate environs. Struggling relations with local communities go back at least as for as Oxford and the founding of Cambridge. I imagine that it would be very difficult to make the argument to local townsfolk that the future of their city might rely upon their welcoming college students. Obviously college grads are only one part of the equation. But any serious enterprise is going to require a bevy of entry-level, educated professionals.

The problem expands though. One of the issues with Cortland is that it is so heavily an education college. Unarguably, training the next generation of teachers is important work, but those graduates are not good candidates for participation in the creative economy. I believe the college puts some effort into creating some diversity on campus, but it's hard to convince a non-white student population that Cortland is the right place for them. It's not just about dragging the NYC students into the cow pastures either. There are sizable non-white populations in many upstate cities, like Syracuse. What Cortland requires is the positive energy that a diverse student population could bring--differing ideas, practices, cultures, ideologies. etc.  It's not simply about providing access to education for underrepresented students.

It's a multifaceted problem to say the least. Looking at this issue from my own area of concern, I wonder how social media might function to build and/or reinforce creative communities among students and perhaps serve to communicate with others in the Cortland community. Counter to the old argument about how the Internet breaks down local relations, we can now see that mobile social media primarily work to strengthen FTF bonds and perhaps maintain the weak bonds of looser associations which are still often local.

After years of really focusing on the potential of more distant networks and relations, I am now thinking more about these local networks. Not instead of distant networks, of course, but rather thinking how strengthening the local might resonate with building relations between more distant local nodes.

networks and mega-regions

I'm finishing up Richard Florida's Who's Your City?: an interesting and accessible book. I think I might use it for my senior seminar next spring. However I'm thinking today about how some of Florida's observations fit into other discourses for thinking about networks and emergence.

And yes, the rise of mega-regions--conglomerations of cities--are an emergent property of networks. Put briefly, Florida sees mega-regions as attracting educated, creative people. You can see this demographically by looking at concentrations of people with college degrees. Mega-regions become centers for innovation, which in turn drives the larger economy. For example, the Boston-NY-Washington mega-region generates $2.2 trillion in economic output, second only to Greater Tokyo ($2.5T). The only national economies that are larger than this are the ones that house these mega-regions, the US and Japan. The Chicago-Pittsburgh mega-region ($1.2T) would rank in the top ten national economies.

So I suppose the bottom line is that, depending on one's profession and aspirations, one needs to move to a mega-region. More importantly, educated and creative folks are often drawn to these places b/c that's where interesting things are happening.

In some ways this is the oldest story around. But it would seem increased mobility and globalization have intensified the process. Florida notes (pp. 93-94) that in 1970, 11% of Americans had 4-yr degrees. In half of American's 318 metro areas, grads made up 9-13% of the pop. The highest cities were DC (18%) and SF (17%). Today 27% of Americans have degrees, but in SF they make up 50% of the pop. There are five other metro-regions with 45% or more. On the flipside there are 12 regions with less than 20% college grads. They've stayed relatively stagnant despite the growth of education. This reinforces the brain drain point I made about central NY in a recent post.

So here are some observations coming from this text...

product orientation in the age of networked composition

Like it or not, despite decades of "process-talk," most comp instructors and programs, and certainly most colleges and universities continue to focus on final products. Assessment is based on final product.

But this really doesn't make sense anymore.

Does anyone think the following qualifies as cheating? Having a workshop in a writing class where students respond and make editorial comments. I certainly hope not. How about if the same thing happens in a dorm room? What if a student's older sibling or friend is a professional writer and s/he provides the same kind of editorial feedback?

They aren't writing the essay. They aren't adding material. They're just doing what editors do: correcting errors, clarifying sentences, suggesting ways to reword things, suggesting paragraphs might be moved. In other words they are doing what we do as instructors when responding to drafts and what we hope might happen in a peer workshop.

OK, so now what if a student pays someone online for the exact same service? Cortland is pretty cheap tuition-wise. In-state, you're paying about $450 for 3-credit course, plus books. In FYC, you write 12-15 pages of formal essays. You can get good quality editing of this material for under $100, maybe even $50 or so. Hell, you can probably get decent surface level editing for a buck a page.

Obviously students aren't doing this, but maybe they should. Maybe we should contract with someone and put it in the syllabus. Maybe we should provide this service ourselves and take it out of the hands of the contingent fyc instructor.

Of course that might raise an interesting question for some of these instructors: if we're not editing student papers, then what are we doing? I'd say you could ask the opposite question: if you are editing student papers, then what are you doing? Obviously you are trying to meet this institutional standard based on a product orientation.

But what we can see here is really the underlying problem of authorship in a network. At what point do you say that someone moves from editing to writing a students' paper? How is anyone to be certain of where that boundary lies? Is feedback like prescription drugs, only legal when given by a doctor? Should we say "don't discuss your writing with anyone"?

How comical would that be?

learn and serve America grant program

Some of my colleagues are putting together an application for the Learn and Serve America Higher Education College Student Social Media Initiative. Basically the idea as I understand it is to use social media to facilitate and increase student participation in service. It's a challenging proposal on several levels. I also wonder if social media challenge our conventional notions of service.

Thinking conventionally first, for me the first question is NOT what brings students to volunteer but rather what dissuades them from volunteering. That is, whatever we do, the messages we send, only attract a certain % of students. If the idea is to get more involved then more of the same message won't work. I imagine my service learning colleagues might have some ideas about that. Maybe it's just a matter of getting the message out in more compelling ways.

Part of the grant is partnering with a non-profit organization, so a lot of the direction we might go depends on that partnership. I would think that working with a group whose activities are focused on communication might make sense, but who knows.

Though I doubt we'll go in this direction, one thing I'm thinking is that social media can change the way we do work. As such they can change the way we do service. For example, if we crowdsourced service projects then students could pick and choose, doing just a little part. It might be an attractive experience to be smart-mobbed into some collective action.

So there are some very general ideas there, but something to think about.

invisible colleges, emergent colleges

A few weeks back at the C's, Collin's presentation mentioned the "invisible college," a reference to the precursor to the Royal Society as a predisciplinary network of academics. As Collin suggested, such invisible colleges continue to exist, particularly in loosely organized disciplines like rhet/comp. We don't really have a paradigm a la Kuhn; no normal science for us. Blogging networks and other social media relations are probably good examples of modern-day invisible colleges. That said, perhaps we are not necessarily moving toward more disciplinary-institutional identities as we no longer require the material capital of formal organization as group-forming and maintenance have relatively low costs. Then again, there are reputation issues to consider. In any case I don't want to go down that path today.

Instead I want to think about this in relation to the idea of emergent cities. Robert Axtell and Richard Florida have an article modeling the emergence of cities. They write:

cities emerge from the interactions of agents and firms. When many such firms have the same location, in our model, we call the resulting agglomeration a 'city.' Cities, in the model, have no agency, but are able to attract people from other cities to work within their population of firms. Cities are also able to house new firms, as when an agent decides to start up a new firm and stay in its present location. A finite set of locations is assumed, and the initial actors locations are random. People can join firms, adopt firms locations, or create new firms either in their current or a new random location. Thus, cities emerge through the interactions of purposive agents through the institution of the firm.

presenting on Second Life

On Friday, I'll be presenting with a number of colleagues on our campus' adventures into Second Life. Last year I wrote a small campus grant that funded the initial purchase of the island and a few other things. Information Resources came through with the money for the monthly fee. And so we began.

My colleagues in the library did the building on the island. (I still haven't given myself the task of learning to build.) I piloted using SL in my classes, including a learning community. I wish I could say it was a great success, but it wasn't. I will take the blame for that. It was a bigger commitment than I thought it would be. You'd think I'd learn. However I learned some things that I'll take with me into next fall.

1. This might be a fairly obvious observation, but only b/c it's foundational. The 2d web shifts time and space. Come to my blog from anywhere in the world and at any time. It's here.  We can converse asynchronously. SL is primarily a synchronous environment. Yes, there are installations you can visit, but the emphasis is on real time interaction. This strikes me as a challenge for course use.

If you have an FTF class, there's little point in using classtime to go to SL and interact. Maybe once just for the experience or to get people up and running, but not as a regular practice. If you have an online class, you have the challenge of getting students on at common times, unless you have an online class with an established meeting time. But I don't think anyone is ready for that yet. You could make this work with a hybrid/blended course, but still it would really only make sense if you are doing something in SL you can't do FTF.

2. The leads me to another obvious observation. We all know SL is somewhat like online games but w/o the purpose of gaming. We need to invent purposes for SL. This is especially the case for the classroom. There seem to be several common purposes: building, sociological observations, and educational simulations/installations. None of these really work all that well for me in a professional writing curriculum. At best I think we might investigate how people communicate/use writing in SL. Yea, there's probably some work to do there.

But what interests me more is using SL as a collaborative environment for working with students from other institutions. Of course there are serious logistical problems with meeting up, as mentioned above. It's like your worst GRE nightmare (that's for everyone in the crowd old enough to have encountered the analytical portion of the GREs). But assuming that you can make it happen, I think SL can help to establish group cohesion beyond what happens in asynch networks.

So that's where I am with that. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. The exciting thing is that there seems to be some real interest among my campus colleagues with SL. The more people who take it up, the more potentially useful it will be I think.

creativity goes crunch

In the fall I'm teaching a new course in our curriculum, PWR 412: Advanced Creative Writing Workshop. I've taught various creative writing courses at least a half-dozen times before and taken many more as a student. As such, I know the workshop drill as well as anyone. Show up. Share your work. Talk about it. Talk about other peoples' work. Revise your writing. Rinse and repeat.

It's a tried and true method, and what makes it good or bad is the quality of the professor, the commitment of the students, and the general vibe of the course. In my experience, some are just plain nasty--the classic long knives of grad school. Others are tepid or sugary in their praise.

Somehow though, this time around I'm just not feeling it. Maybe it's b/c that model supposes some things about writing and creativity that don't work for me anymore. I also feel though that my students need more direction than that, more direction than write stories and poems then get feedback. So this has me thinking about media mashups and writing machines. Of course it is always the problem of what is interesting to me rather than what is interesting to students. To be honest though, I've never had much luck with the latter inasmuch as students rarely have common applicable interests.  The trick is always to find balance, the middle path.