digital digs

Are we there yet? Or have we been edupunked?

So the term "edupunk" is making the rounds right now. Read a good synopsis here on Blogher. Basically though it's what you would think it is: "corporate rock (I'm mean education) sucks." Much of this focuses on educational technology, particularly the Blackboard bogey-man. However it's not all about that.

I suppose you could say Socrates was edupunk. If the death of Socrates is simultaneously the cornerstone heroic and cautionary tale of pedagogy, then the role of teacher as outsider, as critic, has a deep history. Certainly in English Studies this is reinforced by the Arnoldian positioning of literature as a salve for the ills of industrial culture. But I digress.

On the other hand, I can imagine that the average person would chortle at the idea of teacher as punk. About the only thing most teachers share with punks is that both have a tendency to look like they got dressed in the dark.

Still, I think there's an interesting question here about how pedagogues position themselves in relation to institutionally-approved technologies and in the marketplace and commons of the larger techno-mediascape.

Jay Bolter, locative rhetoric, and eversion

Final post catching up on Computers and Writing on Bolter's keynote speech. The bottom line is that Bolter offers a vision of inscription (of writing/composition) that lies far beyond what any but a very small group of rhet/comp faculty, even within computers and writing, are able to engage. I think it shows us a world slipping away from us and really speeding away from what institutions are able to understand and do.

But I want to speak to some of the particular details. As I've mentioned before, in an interview with Arthur Kroker, Kate Hayles somewhat playfully identifies April 1994 as the end of postmodernism, signaled by the arrival of the graphical web browser. Bolter gives a related history, a history in which he played a significant role, in the development of avant-garde hypertext fiction and early web philosophy, inspired of course by William Gibson's kenning cyberspace. As Bolter notes, the early web articulated itself as a separate space whose utopian promise lay in its ability to allow us to leave history and materiality in meat space.

And I think we all know where that dualism leads, both practically and critically/theoretically. Nowhere especially useful.

open source and software ecologies

Continuing with the catch up on the Computers and Writing 2008 conference. I sat in on the town hall meeting issues of open source, particularly on the issue of standards for Open Office XML. There's a lot of interesting debate around this issue, including:

• Microsoft makes a boat load of money with proprietary office products and keeping people using them, but obviously only a fraction of the money goes into improving the product. Further MS's idea of improvement has to do with bottomline first and user experience second.
• One could make an ethical and political argument for supporting open source software.
• On the other hand, the average academic doesn't understand these issues, has other priorities, and just wants something that works.
• One could argue that Open Office and similar products are just dead ends anyway in the sense that they remain forever linked to MS-Office. The "real answer" is to recognize how word processors in general will be abandoned. E.g., Where do I do most of my writing? Right here in my typepad interface or in g-mail.

So I really have two observations to make...

Experimentation and expertise in web-based scholarship

I'm in Batavia NY for the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies and finally found some reliable wireless (I hope) in the hotel lobby about 100 yards of the interstate. So I'm going to try to catch up on some blogging about last week's Computers and Writing conference in Athens, GA.

As you may know, I'm co-editor of the Praxis section of Kairos, and we held a workshop for prospective authors last Thursday and also unveiled our latest issue. You may also know that several of my colleagues are hard at work on a significant redesign of the website. There's an interesting tension in the goals the journal identifies for itself:

1. Publish scholarly "webtexts" that make use of the web's possibilities of design, linking, and media.
2. Support scholars in doing this.
3. Establish the journal (and online scholarship in general) as serious intellectual work equivalent to scholarly publication in more traditional formats.
4. Provide leadership for the field in online publishing practices (e.g. use of standards, design, etc.)

So here's the tension. Many times we publish webtexts by scholars who are inexpert web designers. Indeed, I doubt there are more than a handful of rhet/comp scholars whose expertise in web publication matches their expertise in the field. As a result one can easily end up with good scholarship and mediocre design. Generally, in order for scholarship to be "good" it really needs to meet the rhetorical expectations of traditional print media in terms of argumentation, citation, evidence, etc., and then you shoehorn that into an online format. Now, technically it is possible to produce something "experimental" that doesn't follow the scholarly expectations of print, but if you do that then you are not stepping out into a realm of zero discursive expectations. No, you are stepping into a realm of web design or video or audio podcasting or whatever media it is that you're creating. As such, you can experiment by making video-based scholarship, but it had better be good video. Otherwise, it's just amateur hour all around: amateur video and amateur scholarship. Or at least that's how it comes off.

When Kairos began in 1996, none of these genres existed for anyone. Experimentation not only made sense, it was inevitable. This is no longer true. In 2008, we don't need to invent a genre for online intellectual discourse. We can see it everywhere from hundreds of online journals to Salon to you name it. It isn't hard to recognize. Perhaps it is a little depressing how much it resembles print, but that doesn't change the fact that we have a genre. I would add though that the resemblance to print is actually fairly superficial, and what makes online scholarship so potentially powerful is what can take place "beneath" the surface of the screen.

That said, there are still many possibilities for further development in online publication. We've hardly reached the end of the road! It's just that I wonder if a different strategy is now called-for in pursuing the development of new scholarly practices that allows for a laboratory where experiments are undertaken and a more familiar forum for discussing those experiments. That is what if we thought of this more in terms of scientific experimentation than artistic experimentation? In fact, if you think about it, even avant garde artists required more traditional formats from the manifesto to art criticism to evaluate and disseminate their work (as well as argue for its cultural value).

I suppose the bottom line is this. As I was sitting in the workshop, watching the faces of those prospective authors, I couldn't help wondering if the time had come to develop new practices at Kairos. This doesn't have to mean going all the way to publishing word docs and pdfs. Instead I think it means providing leadership in online scholarship by showing what editors can do with the familiar discursive practices of our field.

Ultimately, as cool as experimentation can be, what will be valuable will be practices that can be replicated by hundreds of scholars.

Digital Digs recieves John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award

Yesterday at Computers and Writing, Digital Digs received the John Lovas Weblog award. Unfortunately I had to duck out of the conference early and couldn't be there to accept the award. I got in last night at one am and right now I am running off to coach my kids' soccer game, then off to a family reunion this weekend.

However I wanted to say thanks. It's a great honor as there are many excellent blogs out there which inform and inspire me on a daily basis. I'll be back in a couple days with some thoughts on the conference.

Seesmic and Celebrity

Here's a post from Seesmic on the appearance of Harrison Ford, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and others on the eve of the new Indiana Jones pic.

And here are my thoughts about it

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and the power of radical transparency

Read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which is a NYT bestseller even though you can download it for free from his site. It's a Young Adult novel but it deals with some serious and interesting themes. Go out and read it. The novel is a powerful investigation of our civil rights in our "war on terror" and the role technology might play for good or bad. Along the way it provides a great history of civil disobedience and accessible explanations of surveillance and cryptology (and why you might care about such things). I'll be interested to see how HS teachers and schools respond to this YA novel. Doctorow provides usable instructions for circumventing existing school network security. Of course all that information is already available online but it's a little different when your teacher gives you the information, right?

So the book comes at you from two angles. First it deals with government brutality. Sadly it's not hard to imagine that if there were another terrorist attack of a similar magnitude to 9/11 that it could result in the abridgment of civil rights. It reminds us how important privacy is to freedom and how important encryption can be for privacy in the cognisphere. The second part, especially important for its teen audience, is seeing the role institutions play here. Maybe teens are all jaded and cynical, but not the ones I meet when they show up on campus. Doctorow shows students what we all know. Educational institutions present themselves as distributors of knowledge and information when it would be more accurate to understand them as guardians of knowledge and information.  There's a perpetual arms race between those who attempt to lock down networks in institutions and those who devise means to unlock them. Schools forbid cell phones, teachers keep computers turned off, professors tell students NOT to bring laptops to class: they don't do these things b/c they hope students will be able to access and communicate knowledge.

Anyway, that's all old stuff for us (though I think this novel is a great way to introduce these issues to teens, both in HS and college).

Importantly though, the other side of privacy is radical transparency. As Doctorow explains, the only kind of encryption that works is public encryption. Fortunately we don't live in a world like Little Brother in that Doctorow doesn't have to fear imprisonment for his novel or website. I'm presenting at Computers and Writing on open access pedagogy and will be talking about this. I don't teach in a public space because I have "nothing to hide." We all desire privacy. I operate in the open b/c it strengthens my teaching and scholarship. I mean here I am, 11 pm, having just finished this book, trying to figure out what I'm thinking right now.

(Perhaps such thoughts should be kept private, eh? Well I doubt anyone is forcing you to read this.)

The obvious part is that I can get feedback from others, and I won't ignore that b/c I really do value it. The second, maybe equally obvious part is the way that the demand to articulate my thoughts here pushes me. I can't just allow myself to settle for a thought resting in my mind.  However, openness has another important effect. It develops trust within a community.

Does this sound naive to you?

Think of it this way. In a department, all the profs have academic freedom. We teach how we want. It's unlikely that we share syllabi. Mine are available online at least during the semester in which I'm using them, but 90%+ of my colleagues are not. Our course evaluations are confidential (though rumors certainly circulate).

What does this accomplish? It often leads us sadly to imagine the worst of our colleagues. We operate in secret, insisting on our "freedom" to do so and the result is generally a broken community where our freedom manifest in our hiding in our classrooms and suspecting our colleagues of some unnamed infringement. Yep, I bet you always wondered what academic freedom was; well, now you know.

What would happen if it were all out in the open? I'm sure there would be some "discussion." But we'd all be swaying in the breeze, so to speak. In the long term, we'd have to learn to accept our differences. After all, we aren't going to dispense with academic freedom! Instead, we're actually going to use it to be public rather than private. The ultimate result of this transparency is a stronger privacy, a stronger, community-supported right to one's intellectual practices.

And that's what I think I get here. Not that everyone supports me of course. It'd be a pretty boring blog if everyone agreed with it. Hell, even I don't agree with everything I've written here over the years. That's not the point. Instead, I simply believe that by making public the things I'm thinking and doing as an academic, I strengthen the integrity of my everyday work, which by its nature often takes place in more private spaces.

All roads lead (eventually) to Athens

How do you get from Syracuse, NY to the Computers and Writing conference in Athens, GA?

1. Drive to Buffalo (2.5 hrs). Yes Syracuse has an airport, but it's really more like a mid-air mugging. Hancock is the 21st most expensive airport in the nation. Buffalo however is among the cheapest. Try half the cost. Also I could fly non-stop to Atlanta in a little over 2 hours. Flights from SYR required connections, which are always a crap shoot anyway. In short, it was both faster AND cheaper to drive to Buffalo.
2. Fly to Atlanta. (2hrs) That worked out ok. Same deal here in terms of not flying into Athens. Too expensive, too long, too many connections.
3. Rent-a-car. This was the cool part b/c I ended up with a Prius. It took about ten minutes and the help of two Avis employees to figure out how to get the damn thing started (simple once you know how but there was no manual in the car). I lived in Atlanta for two years, so it was nice to see it again, if only from the I-85 corridor. Google maps says 1.5 hours to Athens, but it was certainly more like 2+ with the traffic. Will keep that in mind for the ride back.

All told, I left home a little before 8am and was in my hotel a little before 5pm. Went to Grit for dinner. It was good, though I was starving; anything would have been good.

Tomorrow Kairos workshop.

Atlantic Monthly offers cliches of writing pedagogy

Much talk around the rhet/comp blogosphere and on the WPA-L about this Atlantic Monthly article, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower." If you haven't read it, in my view it is an all too commonly represented perspective on teaching writing. The anonymous author presents hirself as an overworked, underpaid adjunct who is placed in the unfortunate circumstance of teaching underprepared and disinterested students while serving as a crucial gatekeeper and protector of the standards of higher education.

Here is a part I found especially interesting where the author discusses a moment of doubt before failing a student.

I thought briefly of passing Ms. L., of slipping her the old gentlewoman’s C-minus. But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair to the other students. By passing Ms. L., I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked. Besides, I nurse a healthy ration of paranoia. What if she were a plant from The New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the nation’s colleges? In my mind’s eye, the front page of a newspaper spun madly, as in old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:

THIS IS A C?

Illiterate Mess Garners ‘Average’ Grade

Adjunct Says Student ‘Needed’ to Pass, ‘Tried Hard’

No, I would adhere to academic standards, and keep myself off the front page.

Who knows, maybe Ms. L really did need to take the class again, but somewhere along the line here she is transformed into an "illiterate mess."  Maybe this is a poor attempt at humor. However even if this is joking hyperbole about the author's level of paranoia, the focus on standards and judgment is noteworthy.

But that's not really what I want to talk about...

the intractable problem of contingent faculty

Another article on contingent faculty in AAUP that discusses some of the things going on at this campus. It seems to me that at an institution the size of the average college there will always be divisions: students, faculty, professional staff, administrators, clerical staff, food staff, janitorial staff, maintenance staff, and so on. As long as contingent faculty are essentially teachers, their jobs will be different from those of faculty who also do research and service.

There is an obvious interdependence in this ecosystem. Contingent faculty make it possible for tenure-line faculty to conduct research, prepare specialized courses for majors and grad students, and all the other service that we do. Contingent faculty keep college a little more affordable.

I don't foresee this class of faculty going away. However, we clearly need to alter the role they play in our academic communities.

First, some contingent faculty may be in pursuit of tenure-line jobs and we should support them in their completion of terminal degrees and with professional development opportunities to help them succeed in the job market. When I was contingent faculty, I got the support and appreciated it. That said, we certainly shouldn't assume that this is what all contingent faculty want. People choose these careers for a variety of reasons. They don't all want to be professors, as is made clear in the AAUP article.