digital digs

"The" Writing Process begins with Google

I was an undergrad in the pre-Internet days (late 80s, early 90s). At Rutgers even the library catalog was still paper-based in those days (i.e. a card catalog)... if you haven't ever seen a card catalog, I suggest that you google it. I'm sure there were a lot of books in that library, and paper versions of journals: I imagine there was more paper in that library then than there is today.

I remember writing an essay in my composition course in response to having read Plato's allegory of the cave (so an excerpt from The Republic). As I recall, I spun a couple pages of BS about the reading in relation to John Lennon's Imagine, all written on an electronic typewriter (and yes, you can google that too). But let's say I didn't have a good grasp on Plato after half-sleeping through my 8am MWF class. I could go to the instructor/TA or a classmate, I guess. If I went to the library, I could look in the subject catalog for Plato and see what books there were. I could go to the reference area and look up Plato in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I could try finding some journal article on Plato by looking through all the paper bound annual bibliographies (the paper equivalent of searching JSTOR). Or my personal favorite, I could look in the paper Periodical Index, which might lead me to some microfiche copies of newspapers or magazines. If I was really desparate I could try to find a librarian.

Not surprisingly I spent very little time in the library. My English major was almost entirely "New Critical," so it was all about close readings of primary texts. I recall writing one researched paper as an undergrad for English. I believe I wrote two for my History major. But really most of my classes were far too large to permit much writing anyway; it was mostly in-class essay exams. However, setting my experience aside, the point I want to make is that in the 80s, when our contemporary disciplinary notions of "the" writing process were being developed, research was difficult and time-consuming. In the example above, I probably would have found my way to an encyclopedia or maybe some intro to philosophy text to help me understand what I had read, but I doubt I would have found much conversation about it. At the time I doubt I even knew that the allegory of the cave was part of a larger text, let alone what that text was about or its historical-cultural context. As a result, invention was a far more internal process, and this is what we classically see with the writing process: freewriting, brainstorming, and so on are all largely internalized heuristics where writers draw upon their own memories and perhaps the text that is immediately before them. 

Today, writing begins with Google or more broadly with a socially mediated search of the web. For example, I was working on a book chapter yesterday, and I got to a point where I wanted to write about research into working memory and writing. In the good-old, bad-old days, I would have driven to the library and probably spent at least one full day walking around the stacks, looking through books, photocopying journal articles, and, of course, filling out interlibrary loan forms. It would have taken days, if not weeks, to get my answer. And at this point, I wasn't even sure if this was a direction I wanted or needed to take in my chapter. I did a little Google searching to refine some of my search terms, to see how the conversation operated. I went to Comppile, because I knew that was a good database of research in writing, and I found some articles there that were available online. I also did some searching on cognitive science and its relation to activity theory, which eventually led me to some journal articles that were available through my library's online databases. So I found a dozen decent references, which I downloaded as PDFs and quickly scanned while searching for specific key terms. 

In short, I was able to write and research on a very tight recursive loop, where invention and research were tied to an already existing big picture of where the chapter was going. Writing in this way takes a fair amount of experience to do well. It's the thing I have most learned to do through writing this blog. However, inexperienced writers use a version of this process as well. As instructors we already know that students turn quickly to Google when given an assignment. I often hear this fact bemoaned. We bemoan it because we have a different, antiquated notion of how to teach invention in the writing process. We also worry that it leads to plagiarism. And there is no doubt that plagiarism is a concern, but it is partly a concern because we need to help students understand how to use Google for invention.

For me, this is part of a larger picture of recognizing writing as a networked activity of distributed cognition involving technologies, organizations, and other nonhuman objects (as well as other humans). The network in which college students write has obviously changed a great deal in 25 years, but we still teach them the same basic process. I've been reviewing a lot of textbooks recently, and some rhetorics are making a move toward changing their perspective. However I imagine that many are hamstrung by the expectations of writing instructors (or at least the way publishers imagine those instructors). It's hard to steer the giant aircraft carrier of compostion on a national scale. Indeed it requires a complex network of distributed cogntiion, as Edwin Hutchins famously explored. And if you don't get that reference you can google it (or spend a day at the library, where the reference librarian will probably look it up online for you if you get stuck).

Do MOOCs need guilds? #edcmooc

Life interfered a litle last week, so I got off-track on this MOOC, so today I will be responding to both week 3 and 4 of the eLearning and Digital Culture MOOC. These weeks deal with the topic of posthumanism... so something on which I've written a great deal. The instructors also offer up transhumanism. I can see the point of comparision on some surface level, but, at least in my view, these are two very different things and the comparision might lead to some serious misunderstanding of posthumanism. I'll get to those details in a moment, but I want to arrive there through a consideration of this question: do MOOCs need guilds?

What do I mean by that? While I am not a player of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, I am aware that much of the activity in these games is carried out by collectives of players known as guilds. Many of the missions in these games require the concerted effort of 20 or more players, so a fair amount of coordination is required both during the live event of adventuring and in-between. I realize I am an ususual participant in this MOOC as I am operating more as an observer than as someone who has specific learning goals. However I started thinking that serious MOOCers might benefit from being part of a small (20-50 person) group of participants who would commit not only to a single MOOC course but might undertake multiple courses over time. Different participants might offer different skills. For exmaple, some would have more or less time to devote to a particular course and bring more or less expertise to the content. As such their roles might change over time, sometimes being more like a mentor and sometimes playing the students. Members could divide the work of investigating different parts of the course and reporting back to the group. 

I suppose one's response to this suggestion might have something to do with how one views the ethical practices of learning. Do we really want students taking courses as a group, collaborating and strategizing independing of the instructor? Or do we ultimately want students to be independent in some fundamental way that would make a guild-type strategy unethical.

In part, this also has to do with how one envisions learning on a MOOC. In an email list discussion I had a few weeks back on the potential of a writing MOOC, I suggested that learning in a MOOC couldn't simply be measured by what individual students had learned, that instead the pedagogical activity of the MOOC needs to recognize what the collective network learns. This is not a spurious suggestion. Part of the premise here is that IF MOOCs are the "future of education" then that is partly because the future of professional labor and citizenship will take place through this kind of collective, networked activity where expertise is not so much about what is inside your head but how well you can connect your head to a larger network of cognition. 

Of course this brings to the matter of trans- and posthumanism. Transhumanism, at least as it is represented for the course in this article, is a political position that advocates for technoscientific experimentation and a legal system that promotes wide freedoms to adopt technological innovations. Posthumanism though is not well-represented, even though the instructors offer this introduction to a collection titled Posthumanism, which largely conflates posthumanism with poststructuralism. Unlike transhumanism, posthumanism is not about something that will or might be made to happen through technoscience. It is not even something that did happen, as in once upon a time we were humanist-type humans and now we are posthuman. Instead, posthumanism is about reconsidering what humans always already were/are. Basically, even though poststructuralism is certainly a critique of humanism, it does not do what posthumanism seeks to do in its attempt to understand the intersection of humans and nonhumans.

As a posthumanist, at least my version of it, one would look at MOOCs as networks of distributed cognition (which work with varying degrees of success). While the apparent goal of each course is mastering the content, the other, less obvious goal is teaching users to participate in a particular kind of information network, where knowledge is developed through a certain range of techniques. Of course we could say the same thing about the 20th-century industrial classroom. So, for example, 20th-century academic writing (e.g. first-year composition) was about

• close reading of print texts
• using a print library
• writing a linear text (e.g. thesis statements, paragraph development, etc.)
• working independently.

The 21st-century learning environemnt and digital composition is perhaps more akin to the wiki page

• distant reading of digital resources
• accessing information over multiple networks
• producing digital media artifacts with multiple audiences and access points
• working collectively

I don't mean to suggest that 20th century skills disappear, but I do believe they must operate within the context of the 21st century environment. For example, we still need to read closely. However, close reading is no longer enough and must be integrated with an ability to handle more information than one person can be expected to read in the time alloted for any given project. There will still be linear texts but they will not operate as they once did.

MOOCs can teach students to operate in these new environements. However I do think something like a guild approach would be useful in making that happen. 

the monastic academy #edcmooc

We often see studies of technology adoption by college students, such as those done by Pew. We know from our own classrooms and walking the campus that Pew's statistics that 96% of undergrads have cell phone and 88% have laptops, that 92% of students have wireless connection on some device, are reflected in our own observations. The general adult population is 82%, 52%, and 57% respectively. I wonder what the stats would be for humanities faculty? Lower than undergrads I suspect, but I wonder if it would be lower than the average adult. I don't think anyone would be surprised to discover that humanities professors spend more time with traditional cultural/media activities than the average adult or student: reading print books; going to museums, public lectures, and libraries; listing to classical music, etc. And obviously one should be able to live one's life as one chooses, including in terms of online connection.

Given the nature of our profession however, particularly our professional freedoms, these personal choices then become professional ones. To a certain degree, all faculty have needed to come online in one way or another: library databases, email, online grading and student information, and to a lesser though still significant extent, course management systems. Clearly all faculty have internet access at least through their workplaces. But to what extent have we collectively embraced networked culture? Certainly not to the extent that we have embraced the modern culture that we continue to celebrate through our curriculum. 

Why is this an issue? Let's say, for example, that I didn't really care for reading books. I would assign books for my courses because that was expected, but I didn't live a life where books were personally valued. How successful do you think I would be teaching print literacy? Teaching with digital networks requires a kind of literacy derived from a significant level of immersion. This is, I think, a real stumbling block for our profession in facing up to this challenge. And it's not just one decision that is crucial here, and I would agree that one can become overly and unproductively immersed in the digital world, but here are a few examples:

• Not wanting a smartphone or other mobile device because one wishes to be disconnected
• Not wanting to be involved in social media of any kind because they are trivial
• Not taking seriously conversations that take place primarily via the web, because that's not where serious conversations happen
• Viewing digital cultural activities from gaming to YouTube to any kind of user-generated content as crass commercialism not worthy of serious attention, as a kind of anti-literate, anti-intellectual space
• Viewing connectivity as an intrusion of valuable cultural activity, in the classroom or elsewhere. 

Again, there are valid points of concern here and these are all acceptable individual decisions. I have no problem with someone living their life this way, but if one puts this all together then I think one ends up with a faculty member who is not well-suited to meet the challenges of preparing students to live in a world that the faculty member has renounced. 

In the eLearning MOOC we've been talking about this in terms of Prensky's digital immigrants and digital natives. In my view this is an unproductive and even damaging perspective. Again, as with the utopian/dystopian discourse, perhaps the concept is to move people away from these positions. Reading the course discussion, there are certainly people who have arrived familiar with these terms and unhappy with them. (I would imagine anyone who knows something about these matters knows this is not a productive kind of thinking. It's akin to starting a composition class with grammar instruction because that's what the students expect, even though as an instructor you know that's not the right direction.)

The immigrant/native business sets up a false dichotomy and reinforces an unnecessary conflict. If you identify the faculty as immigrants, then you are really taking a hostile position toward them. But more dangerously you are setting this up as a generational problem wherein the immigrant faculty can just say let the younger generation, the natives, do this work. But that's not what happens because this isn't about generations. It's about disciplinary culture. I have encountered plenty of mid-20s English doctoral students. Yes, many have cell phones and laptops and such, as you would expect. But very few see digital literacy or practices as part of their teaching or disciplinary work. Instead, they are adopting the cultural practices and values of their discipline, which is print-based. 

English departments have always claimed that they are place where people go to become better writers. I have never believed that. I think English attracts students who are already good writers, and I think a literary and print-based curriculum can teach students to read particular genres in particular ways and write literary criticism with its specific discourse. Increasingly though, what is taught is a kind of monastic practice, one that clearly prides itself on its removal from the discourses of the marketplace and the larger culture. There is nothing wrong with monasticism.... for monks. However it doesn't have broad appeal, though there will always be some students who want that experience. We can't expect that there will be a generational shift that will lead to some eventual change in this situation. "Generations" are broad enough and the academic job needs are small enough, that there will always be potential hires and grad students to replicate these disciplinary values, just as there will always be people willing to live lives as monks. 

And of course it's not just English departments. It's all of the humanities and perhaps beyond. That's just the corner of academia where I live. Ultimately, I think meeting the challenges of digita literacy will require university strategies for hiring and supporting faculty that work outside the disciplinary/departmental will to repetition. 

why utopian/dystopian thinking is wrong-headed #edcmooc

With some 40,000 others I have started on this Coursera MOOC on elearning and digital culture. The first unit deals with utopian and dystopian perspectives on technology. Is it really necessary to explain why this is not a worthwhile way to frame this conversation? If we brought someone from where I live in Western New York from 200 or 500 years ago, would they look upon our world as utopian? dystopian? or just hopelessly foreign? I am guessing they would find it both alienating and amazing. Many of the values they would have would simply not make sense in our world. While technologies do not determine culture, they clearly participate in shaping the world (both naturally and culturally if you wish to make those problematic distinctions). It would be naive to view technological development as a problem solving activity: necessity isn't always the mother of invention. Technologies do not lead toward utopia. Sometimes technologies solve problems, but I think they're more likely to make old problems irrelevant. Did the automobile "solve" a problem with transportation? Not exactly. Did the light bulb solve a problem of darkness? I guess, but it would be more accurate to say that electric illumination created a new human space with new human activities. Put in the broadest terms, we no longer have the problems that 18th-century Americans had; we have new ones.

When we think of the technologies that are the focus of this MOOC--the social web, mobile devices, etc.--did they solve problems? Were they designed with some utopian impluse? Maybe, partly. Most people don't imagine they are doing evil. We could say that technologies are market-driven, but we wouldn't want to mistakenly believe that the market overdetermines technology. As if the market were some uniform entity. As if the market were not capable of error. In my view it's more accurate to imagine technologies as participating in a discontinuous process whereby new activities are generated, activities among humans and nonhumans. Sometime these activities solve old problems, sometimes they make old problems obsolete without solving them, and sometimes they create new problems or reshape old problems. Given this frame, what seems like a better starting point for me is attempting to identify the functionality of these media technologies and the activities that arise from them. Out of that analysis one might begin to think about their situation in pedagogies. I don't think that's a strictly technical or rational process, though obviously some technical understanding is necessary. That said, it's more about investigating what people do and the myriad capacities that might emerge when humans and nonhumans interact.

In other words, I think the utopian/dystopian business is a bit of boondoggle. I realize that we often think of technologies in this way, so maybe its an attempt to find a broad piece of common ground. OK. But as a teacher I would not want to spend so much time confirming a bias that I had to later undo.

This brings me to the MOOC itself. I'm very early into the experience. The typical thing users say is that they feel overwhelmed. That's not exactly the word I would use. The reading/viewing material is pretty light. There are a lot of potential discussion topics in Coursera, along with Twitter feeds, a Google Plus group, etc. etc. So it's a little hard to figure out where to find one's audience. I feel like my audience is here and connected to the MOOC through the Twitter hashtag. I will post in Coursera some, but I do face a rhetorical quandry there. I'm not sure what the point is. Maybe I'll find out. 

What a first-year writing MOOC would teach

The other day in our Teaching Practicum we were discussing Kathy Yancey's 2004 CCCC address, republished in CCC, "Made Not Only in Words." In it Yancey observes

it seems to me that in all our efforts to improve the teaching of composition- to reduce class size, for instance, to conference with students, to respond vociferously to each student paper, and to understand that in our students' eyes we are the respondent who matters-we seek to approximate the one-to-one tutorial model. Quite apart from the fact that such an effort is doomed-about a hundred years ago, Edwin Hopkins asked if we could teach composition under the current conditions, which conditions then are the same conditions we work in today, and immediately answered, "NO"-I have to wonder why we want to work this way, wonder why this is the neo-Platonic mode to which we continuously aspire.

The general, negative reaction to the idea of MOOCs for writing instruction is based on this premise: that writing instruction must occur through some approximation of the tutorial model. (And of course fears about what a MOOC would do to the economics of composition instruction, but that's a different matter.) This post isn't an argument for or against MOOC-based writing instruction, but rather a consideration of how the MOOC challenges this value.

As such I want to begin with two points. First, as I have argued here before, it is an error to approach online instruction of any kind with the question "how to can I import my traditional classroom activities into an online environment?" Asking this question generally ends up with the worst of both worlds: only those things that can be done in both contexts. Second, following on that, the appropriate question is not to ask how (or if) MOOCs can teach us what physical classrooms teach us, but rather, more neutrally, what kinds of learning happens via a MOOC? If the traditional classroom was/is modelled on the industrial model and prepared students for work on an assembly line, then it is fair to wonder if the MOOC is/will be modelled on a postindustrial model and prepare students for work in a distributed network.

What kinds of literacies, rhetorics, and cognitive processes (the art formerly known as critical thinking) will be appropriate in the emerging model? Perhaps the answer, somewhat tautologically, is those that are taught via networks (i.e. some future version of the MOOC). Industrial-print literacies are clearly linear in nature. And even though we assert the recursive nature of writing processes, they still smack of the assembly line in a way that is very different from the experience of thousands of particpants composing media in a collective, real time fashion (which is what massive, open online composing would be... a different MOOC). Change the process of composing and change what is meant by communicating. Change what is meant by communicating and change what is meant by learning. Change learning and change pedagogy and evaluation. Or in thise case, try to make that system go backward by changing pedagogy and evaluation first. 

The most obvious model for a composition MOOC would be freemium. At the free level there is a textbook. lectures, online discussion, and perhaps some kind of automated activity. There would be crowdsourced evaluation of writing and maybe some collective writing project along the lines of a wiki. In other words much like you have now. Then one could purchase tutorial sessions where one would get professional feedback on one's writing. Finally one could submit a portfolio and pay for some evaluation. Undoubtedly cheating would be possible, but in my view cheating is always possible. Since I call this the "obvious" model, I'm not offering it up with much endorsement. It is a model that still tries to reassert the tutorial approach to writing instruction. Another technocratic model might imagine some kind of artificial intelligence that would serve as tutor (and evalutor). These models still presume that we want to create individual writers in a traditional humanistic sense. However my argument would be that those writers never existed (at least no in the way we described them) and so we clearly never taught students to become them.

Instead, in sci-fi speak, in a MOOCC (the two Cs are "composition course"), students are the wetware nodes in a writing network, participating in a larger, emergent, rhetorical-decision-making structure. On a "massive" enough scale, those decision become statistical. Indeed even in the traditional writing seminar (and certainly on the level of program assesssment) the statiscial nature of student writing choices become apparent. The same rhetorical variables are recognized by the students, a predictable set of student responses can be identified, common errors (rhetorical and grammatical if you like) are visible, writing behaviors are largely consistent across the population. This is not unlike the way the Kindle identifies commonly highlighted passages. In other words, when one starts to think about 2000 or more individuals composing essays in response to a curriculum, one inevitably starts to see trends: common quotations, common theses, common organizational structures, etc. Arguably, the purpose of FYC is to normalize student writing in a particular way, to produce predictable outcomes with certain generic features. One could almost see this happening in real time with the right technical affordances as a kind of cybernetic feedback loop. This would be the post-industrial equivalent of assembly line composing.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that as desirable, as something I would want my kids to experience. However, I do think that there is likely some future MOOCC in store for us, and it will require us to recognize a few things:

1. That symbolic behavior involves nonhumans (e.g. technologies) in a networked environment that is increasingly digital in character.
2. That rhetoric and composing, which have always been collective activities, will be more palpably collective due to the speed of networks and the accessiblity of data. This intensification is reaching a point where some becoming is emerging (i.e. we're not just hot water anymore, we are coming to a boil).
3. That the tutorial model of writing instruction is not necessarily the best model (let alone the only one).

As I always tell my practicum students, teaching writing implicitly assumes an ontology. It begins with some assumption about how thinking and composing arise. It assumes something about the agency of students, about the choices that are available to them and the practices that they are free to adopt. Millions of people can collaborate to compose Wikipedia or the archive of YouTube or the Web for that matter. Generally all composition classes do is say that that stuff shouldn't be trusted. To be honest, what FYC (and academic writing in general) really must say is that the web isn't possible, because it violates many of its assumptions about how writing takes place. 

We ask scholars to produce scholarly writing because that writing is supposedly evidence of their capacity to think and to know their subject. We ask students to write academically for the same reason. But what if thinking and knowing didn't work that way? What if thinking and knowing were more distributed activities and what we were measuring with composing was not some inhered characteristic of individuals but rather their capacity to participate in certain networks? Networks that shift over time. In that case, rhetoric and composition would be about learning to participate, to relate, to particular networks in ways that are productive of thinking and knowing in certain paradigmatic ways. That's what a MOOCC would have to teach,, I think.

Noise, (ir)rationality, and debate

By now, no one really imagines that presidential debates are really, well, debates. Instead, we want a line going up and down measuring "undecided" voters. Are we measuring galvanic skin response? The raw, exposed nerve of collective unconscious? In our fantasies about debating, rational arguments are provided, suppositions are considered, evidence is evaluated, and conclusions are reached through the commonplaces of argument (deduction, induction, etc.). In a purely rational argument it should be possible to reach a conclusion that both sides would be forced to agree was correct. Or at least, the sides could pinpoint their disagreement over a particular piece of evidence or supposition that could, in time, be resolved. We realize that many disagreements stem from beliefs: suppositions that cannot be dis/proven. I think that most supporters of one political party over another act out of such beliefs, including myself. That is, there is absolutely no argument the opponent could offer that would change my vote. In rhetorical terms, we might view this as a matter of ethos, but even ethos is supposed to be rationally adjudicated. 

But what about the undecided voters? Are they meant to make a rational choice from the fodder of debates, campaign ads, and partisan analysis? No, not really. Rational debate can be composed, under sterile laboratory conditions. As with a scientific experiment, a rational debate requires the near elimination of external variables, and more importantly it requires the willing participation of everyone involved. In other words, debate requires that noise and irrationality be eliminated and the debaters must play a role in that. Of course a presidential debate isn't a lab experiment. It's an opportunity to incite people to vote. Maybe after the fact, we can retrospectively rationalize our choices and we can discover rational points and tropes in a debate. 

This is not just about political debate though. As an academic, I don't think I've ever seen a colleague change his/her position on a matter of importance. Perhaps, over time, from one book to the next, positions are modified. But, for example, when one engages in a disagreement on or between blogs (or at a conference panel), no one imagines that minds will be changed. One might learn about a new method or hear an interesting interpretation. These things might change our views over time. One could read over the posts on this blog on object-oriented rhetoric to see how my views have shifted through the consideration of new theories. But that is a span of years, and just as importantly, it is not a shift that I would describe as rational so much as intuitive. That is, my decision to pursue OOO is/was primarily a result of a feeling that something interesting/productive would result. And over the years I have come to trust those intuitions. I have also come to realize that the best decisions I have made, the ones that have made me successful (to the extent that I am), have been intuitive ones AND that they are decisions I do not think I could have made by rational, deliberative means. Starting this blog a decade ago is a prime example: a totally irrational decision.

I have these thoughts in mind when I watch (or don't watch) presidential debates or follow the arguments surrounding OOO: none of this is about changing people's minds by rational means. However, what pushed me to write this post was teaching Victor Vitanza's "Three Countertheses" essay in my teaching practicum. I imagine that Vitanza doesn't show up on many practicum syllabi because his work is theoretical and challenging and doesn't offer the kinds of nuts and bolts advice that are the typical staple of such courses. I suppose the focus of my practicum is different. To me, the key goal of a practicum is for TAs to understand that a writing pedagogy rests upon theories of writing, communication, and cognition. To teach writing well, one has to be reflective of the ways in which theory and practice relate here. Part of Vitanza's argument is about the resistance of theory to application. Another is the critique of our faith in rationality to explain how writing works. Before reading Vitanza, we have read Bartholomae and Berlin, who I think still represent the mainstream thinking about academic discourse, empowerment, and critical thinking (though they also differ from one another). We've also read Russell and Wardle as I think that CHAT and the issues of transfer and writing-about-writing represent significant (and relatively new) views in the field. However, all of those positions ultimately rely upon rationality as the foundation of writing, communication, and cognition. They are all asymmetrical in their identification of the human (and the rational mind) as the controlling force in a writing system.

So what happens when one takes up a flat ontological, symmetrical view of writing? Vitanza writes about the third sophistic position, the role of the other and noise, that both the speaker and listener (in a more conventional rhetoric) conspire to erase, even when they are supposed opponents in a rational debate. What about the nonhuman objects, including language, at work in any network of writing activity? Returning to the presidential debate, this is how I see Latour's object-oriented democracy functioning. The extended network of objects participating in the debate from flag pins, cameras, and teeth whiteners to Twitter, drinking games and real-time polling: there is no ontological boundary between rationality and otherness, between noise and message. 

 

Full-Stop Interview with Gregory Ulmer

Full Stop has a new interview with Gregory Ulmer here that is part of a new series on experimental pedagogy. 

in which The Atlantic demonstrates its understanding of writing

The Writing Program Administrator's list has been discussing the recent Atlantic series on writing education. The series begins with Peg Tyre's "Writing Revolution" and then a series of pro/con responses follow. However, the entire series seems to create a bewildering dichotomy. Actually, that's not true. "Bewildering" would suggest that it's genesis is hard to follow, and I don't think that's true at all, as I will try to explain.

Briefly described, here are the two sides. Tyre is advocating what she sees as a kind of revisionist back-to-basics approach where students are given formulae for constructing more complex sentences that will lead to more complex thinking. If you are familiar with They Say, I Say then you get the picture; otherwise, read her article. This instruction is connected with argumentative, expository essay writing, which Tyre opposes to the expressive, creative writing she claims dominates public education, especially at early ages. She offers the story of one school (how many times have we seen this trope) where the test scores changed radically. And in a way, it makes sense. The state test (in this case the NYS Regents) will give you a good score for a formulaic, expository essay. So if you focus on teaching students to write that, then they should probably pass the test at a better rate. 

The other side of the "debate" is represented by the Freedom Writes and National Writing Project approach, which is characterized (in Atlantic) by journal writing and self-expression. Here the counter-argument is that students will tune out formulaic approaches that devalue their own perspectives and do not connect with their lived experience.

This debate would be a head-scratcher for me, except that is history is recognizable. I will only briefly rehearse that history that begins with rhetorical invention dividing into scientific method and romantic inspiration, turns arrangement into form, and forgets about memory and delivery, leaving only "style" as rhetoric. It's the history that also separates literary practice and study from rhetorical practice and study more than a century ago. The basic problem is that very few people are at all interested in understanding what writing is and how it actually operates: an understanding that you would think would be crucial to teaching. Instead, whether we focus on process or product or the demonstration of some critical-thinking ability, writing instruction has always emphasized the more pragmatic concern of getting students to produce texts that we judge as "good."

The difference between the understanding I am talking about and the more pragmatic concern is analogous to the difference between a heliocentric and geocentric model of the solar system. The latter may offer very accurate predictions of the movement of heavenly bodies (it produces good results). It's just totally wrong. In fact a more accurate analogy might be sacrificing goats to ensure a good crop. There's no doubt that the cultures involved in ritual animal sacrifice believe it produces good results. I'm fairly certainly they are wrong about the casual relation there, but there is very little common ground on which either party could go about trying to change the other's mind. 

I think that we can all agree that students tend to struggle to produce the kind of academic writing expected by these Regents exams, as well as the kinds of writing asked of them in college composition courses. I would also suggest that students struggle to produce the more self-expressive writing that represents the other side of this debate, particularly if we held that kind of writing to any quality standard. So we can agree on the problem, but we probably can't agree on what causes the problem. Texting? Bored students? Angry gods? Burned-out teachers? Economics? Rigid institutions and policies? All of the above? None of the above?

I suppose the first question we should ask is why we want students to produce this particular kind of writing and why we establish the particular standards that we have? The answer to the first question is more crucial, and I believe we teach a kind of writing that we imagine as a general, foundational kind of argumentation. This imagined foundation spawns from our observation (reading) of many different kinds of texts and our discovery of these common attributes in our reading. But to me this is like the geocentric model. The ability to describe and even predict textual features bears no necessarily relation to the ontology of those texts or the process by which they were composed. The standards then follow upon this intellectual error and constitute what we describe as these general features of argumentative writing. But our descriptions of argument rest upon ontological assumptions that arise from Enlightenment thinking about humans and language. Personally I would suggest that one is better of sacrificing a goat before writing an essay then going with those assumptions, especially if you can bring yourself to really believe that the dead goat will cause you to write well. 

What is writing then? Well, it's not human. Let's start with that. Then let's add that it is many things that withdraw from one another and that cannot be overmined by some generic account. I think that activity theory and actor-network theory approaches to examining specific sites of writing are a good start, but are probably not enough. And it might be a long journey from there to teaching. Or not.

If we recognize that the idea of a generalized writing is no more real than say "nature" then how do we change our writing instruction? What becomes the objective of K-12 rhetorical education? There's the writing revolution that we might need.

 

frustrations in composition pedagogy design

I'm putting together the common syllabus that will be taught by our 17 incoming TAs in the fall. It's not easy designing a syllabus that will be taught by 17 people you don't know, but that's not the frustration I want to talk about today.

My frustration is a technological one.

Here is what I need to have in a technological solution:

• Create assignments and have students submit files in a variety of formats (text-only, video, image, audio, etc.). Most CMS can do this to some degree.
• Share that student work with groups of students in the class, the whole class, and perhaps wider audiences. Most CMS can at least do the first two.
• Provide feedback on these assignments (both peer and instructor) and assign grades. Again most CMS can do this, though the mechanisms for doing so in some systems are not very good, in my view. Also the reviewing capacity for non-text media is generally lacking.

So far, so OK. Here's where it starts to get trickier:

• Allow students to create profile pages that are customizable, something like a WordPress site with a blog and with static pages that might serve as a repository and portfolio of their work. It would be great if this content could be exported in a format that would translate into other common blog formats (say as easy as migrating from Blogger to WordPress, which is to say not super-easy but doable). There should also be levels of sharing here: private, instructor-only, custom group inside the class, the whole class, and potentially larger audiences (e.g. the web). I haven't seen any CMS that do this.
• Something Google+ like. An activity stream into which you can directly publish. Rather than user circles I think topical circles that would work something like conventional discussion threads do now. So every discussion post, blog entry, shared link, or general status update in a course would appear in each students activity stream. With only 22 students or so, it wouldn't be that much content to manage. Again, there is no CMS version of this very common kind of social media activity. 

I suppose you could say that on a minimal level I am looking to combine common features of CMS with common features of social media. That would probably be enough for the course I want to design for the fall, but I do have some more advanced requests. Let's be able to do all these things with mobile technology. And let's build some mobile apps that would facilitiate writing and research activity. To do this, we'd need to operate on a larger scale. Not the 22 students in the class but the 2500 students taking composition at UB each semester. For example:

• I just posted on my blog. Find other student bloggers among the 2500 with similar interests. Maybe we would make a good peer group for reading each other's work. Maybe we can support each other in doing research.
• I'm in the library (physical or virtual) and I find an interesting piece of research. Can I share a link? Can I find out if others are using it? Can I find out what other sources they used? Can I get any kind of recommendations based on community activity?
• Can we do some writing version of dailymile? (I guess 750 words is something like this). Can I make a work plan and track it? Can I see what others are doing?
• Can we leverage those 2500 students and 80 instructors as a powerful audience for student writing?

My last frustration is with finding content for the course. Writing Spaces is great for rhetorical instruction. What I need is around a dozen essays, videos, etc. that are more topical. I can't bring myself to charge students $50 for that, especially when I am not using the supporting materials in a reader AND I am not particularly happy with the selected content anyway. Especially when there is usable material freely available online (or available through our library). It's just that the work of sifting to find the right stuff is exhausting.

 I suppose I will be stuck with kludging together two systems. Anyway, back to it. 

composing the hominid ecology of the future classroom

I largely agree with Levi Bryant's recent post on hominid ecology. I'm not sure the term will catch on, but his Latourian observations about the intermixing of the natural and the social/cultural make sense to me and I think resonate well with what I've been working on here. In what I imagine would appear as a very different line of thinking, Cathy Davidson has a post exhorting further innovation in online and blended instruction. However, to put this in a straightforward manner, I see the pedagogy Davidson is proposing as acting upon the philosphical realization we see in speculative realism. Rather than siloed disciplinary knowledge, we have an investigation that rejects the modern split between natural and cultural realms. Furthermore, we have a pedagogy that recognizes that learning isn't "social" or "discursive" or "subjective" but a kind of hominid ecology. In some sense, we've had these things in pedagogy for a long time: interdisciplinary courses, learning communities, activity theory approaches to teaching, and so on. However, in those cases there still remained asymmetrical relations. One studied science alongside culture. There were objects in the classroom but they remained mute and subservient to human-social objectives. 

So I spend a lot time thinking about what it would mean to study and teach writing/composition/rhetoric as a hominid ecology (to continue with Byrant's term for a while). And I spend a lot of time thinking about how pedagogy changes as it intersects emerging technologies. These are related thoughts for me. Next year, we'll have around 3500 first-year students entering UB. This is the kind of number I think with. We can study writing in a way that would cut across disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences: rhetoric, history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, biology, etc. I am not suggesting that on some level, well beyond the general education of a composition classroom, specialization and professionalization are not necessary. More than ever it is the case today that one cannot know it all. This is a matter of linking knowledge networks together in new ways, and perhaps even recognizing the networked operation of information and cognition in the first place. 

Rhetoric at least has the potential to be a particular kind of meta-discipline in this context by studying these communicational networks, objects, and practices. On one level it seems reasonable for rhetoricians to focus on symbolic communication (that's a broad enough space) but only if we realize that communication relies upon objects and nonsymbolic exchanges. I've written a fair amount here about a "minimal rhetoric," by which I mean an investigation into the basic requirements for rhetoric to operate. In part one could conceive of this as a historical question, a question of ancestral knowledge to use Meillassoux's term: where does rhetoric begin? Though I am curious about that question, I don't think it is necessary for us to nail down an origin (which is good, given our skepticism regarding origins). It's more important, from my perspective, to conceptualize rhetoric as an ontological phenomenon, specifically as a capacity (to use Delanda's term): that is, as a quality of an object that emerges only in particular relations with other objects. Not all objects have rhetorical capacities and those capacities are not present in every relation. I have taken to thinking of the rhetorical capacity in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of expression and order-words. Here expression is autonomous and auto-objective. In the expressions that we make, we have the capacity to develop agency and cognition (think about something and say it), but expression is also autonomous from that agency: it becomes its own independent, withdrawing object--a sound, a text, a video, a gesture, and so on. The expression also exists in relation to those who perceive it, though it also withdraws from those perceptions. Expression does not require symbolic behavior; instead symbolic behavior is a kind of expression. The important distinction is that expression does not rely upon solely upon the exchange of physical forces in order to have an effect. Physical forces are required. I need to see or hear an expression for it to affect me. But I am not "blown away" by the sonic force of your words. I might be blown away by what they express though. This can be as true of the way bacterial colonies alter their genetic expressions in order to defeat cheaters in their midst, in chocies made by artificial life, or a potential mate's response to a birdsong as it can be in human conversation. What then becomes relevant is examining the networks/assemblages that operate in relation to that expression, so that the "I do" you say has different implications in different networks, and claims about the environment have different force with a laboratory and peer review to back them up. And this text operates differently here on this blog than if I just wrote it out in my notebook.

These are the kinds of things I think rhetoric can and should be about. It is no longer so productive to focus simply on the discursive, even if we connect discourse some representational notion of ideology and materiality. That's not enough. We cannot abandon those concerns but we must understand how matters of concern are composed in a more expansive way.

Turning back to pedagogy, it is not sufficient to teaching writing as a discursive and subjective process, even if we present those interiorized processes as impinged by ideology. Nor can we think of learning in these terms either. It is not simply enough to think of teaching as a matter of discourse (of discussion, lecturing, reading, and writing) or as subject/student-centered (which allows us ultimately to focus on the activities of individuals, particularly in terms of grades). We need to think more expansively about the role of objects and networks in compositional and pedagogical processes.