See, I Even Nitpick the Things I Like

Let me state at the outset that I'm so glad Lana did her presentation on wikis...I feel like I understood the Cleary et al article much better, having some notion of what wikis could do and how they could function.

And I'm glad I could understand it, because this article has some significant things to say about the ways composition seems to viewing wikis as components of the writing class. And, although the article is overall pretty enthusiastic about the potential wikis have for writing students, from my perspective it is the "negative" things the authors have to say that I find most valuable.

Perhaps negative is a strong word. I'll say instead, "honest," which is what I marked several times in the margins of my article print-out. (On a related note, let me also add that online publishing is all well and good, but I will likely never become comfortable with reading longer articles on a computer screen. If for no other reason than I'd miss scrawling my marginalia.)

My first margin scrawl came toward the end of the introduction. I'm much more used to articles written largely to expound on successful classroom tools or practices, so I was a little taken aback to see the authors, who like wikis, admitting that their classroom successes could not be attributed "to our use of wikis." I was also at this point much less certain about what I would be reading  over the next 29 pages of my print-out. (And let me tell you, I wasn't all that excited about reading 30 pages of Wikis: YAY!!! at the beginning. Ten or twenty pages, maybe, but 30 pages of pedagogical exuberance is pushing it for me, especially since I think the word "wiki" sounds like it should be the name of a candy bar.)

The "Improving Skills" section also got an honest rating from me, for its discussion of a subject I find somewhat vexing: collaborative writing. Any teacher who says that every collaborative writing project they've ever assigned has resulted in sterling work and phenomenal student growth needs to contact me, 'cause I have some questions. Apparently Cleary et al do too, because they stated that "collaboration did not always result in improved writing." And while the authors don't necessarily attribute this failing to the use of wikis, they recognize that the wikis didn't solve it, a fact that runs contrary to the concept of wikis as the ultimate collaborative writing technology. As the authors later state, their previous understandings of wikis led to "overly inflated expectations," which were not met.

As much as I love their honesty (and I do, honest), I'm still critical--and perhaps cynical--enough that I found a point to nitpick. In the “Student Response to Wikis" section, the authors state:

              "Because technically wikis are quite easy to use, we attribute (student) resistance to the challenge     and anxiety generated by one more new thing to learn for non-traditional students for whom much of the college environment is already foreign as well as to the learner-centric nature of wikis, which gives students more responsibility for structuring their learning."

Let me unpack the problem I have with this section. A) Don't state categorically that anything is easy to use, because nothing is easy for everyone. Would you tell someone with dyslexia, "What's your problem? Reading is EASY!"???? B) People who don't find it easy, or just plain don't like it, dislike it because they aren't up for a challenge. And C) People who don't like wikis may also not like them because they are somehow more lazy than other students, and don't want to take the extra "responsibility" for their own learning. Ok, ok, I don't think the authors were intentionally stating that they thought non-traditional students were timid and lazy--in fact, anyone who has worked with non-traditional students pretty much knows that the timid and lazy never return to academia to BECOME non-traditional students. But I do think the authors were a little too desperate to defend their pedagogical work in the end, and tried to pass some of the blame for any failures onto their students. Next to the above quote, my own marginalia response to the authors states, "Hey, don't be mean."

In conclusion, I think this article was valuable not just for its insights regarding the use of wikis as classroom writing tools, although the treatment and suggestions offered by the authors were logical and helpful. It was also useful as a "what-won't-work (necessarily)" discussion, which is something I haven't seen much of, all told. Even if they tried a little too hard to justify their wiki-work at the end, arguably at the expense of their students. 

The Creepiness Conundrum

Geoffrey Sirc makes some good points....

We could try to make composition more interesting to students. (In fact, most of us do try this.)

Few of us are happy to think of ourselves as an “academic gate-keeper” (126).

That said....

...did anyone else reading this essay get a little creeped out?

Let me gather some examples:

Sirc seems to encourage authors perceiving text production in the way the artist Cornell “loved his objects, 'happy to possess them'...the materially interesting, then, is what should guide acquisition” (116).

Later, he affirms: “A primary goal now in my writing classes (is) to show my students how their compositional future is assured” (though in what way assured I'm less certain) “if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic” (117).

On that same page, he proposes “composition as craving; teaching students to feel desire and lack” (117).

Soon after, he celebrates composition materials “chosen on the basis of exoticism and strong interest” (118).

And he argues that “the grammar of the box can keep us grounded in the basic image, in things we really care about” (119).

***

In other words...Hey people, let's colonize composition!

Yes, this is probably not Sirc's goal. I highly doubt that, if asked, Sirc would feel we should take the same social aesthetics colonizing powers took toward empire-building and apply them to composition.

Unfortunately, his wording could not have been more ill-chosen, at least from my perspective. Many of his descriptions of composition or the way teachers should approach composition have tinges of either colonialism or sexism. The materials of writing are like “objects” that should be “acquired” and “possessed.” They should be “exotic” and “craved.” Composition itself should be focused on the aesthetic, as the “image” equates to “things we really care about.” (By the by, isn't caring only about the "image" of almost anything considered fairly shallow?) I'm sorry, I'm putting an “image” together in my head of composition as the unknowable, exoticised, eroticised female “other,” defined best in terms of what she lacks, and born to be controlled and possessed by the patriarchal gaze.

Umm...Excuse me. You're making Composition uncomfortable now.

C'mon, I can't be the only one who finds Sirc's use of this language weird, right? 

In fact, this language alienated me to the point that I'm sure I've overlooked much in this essay. Looking over it again, I can see there are places where I've marked “hmm,” in the margin, my go-to marginalia for sections I feel deserve deeper thought. But Sirc's deep, deep interest in aestheticizing composition (to the point that his noting that students should be learning “some kind of basic prose styling to help them avoid verbal pitfalls in formal settings” seems a grudging after-thought not included until page 128) rubs me the wrong way.  

It's What All the Cool Kids Are Doing

Of course, it's possible for me to dislike an idea, even to disagree with it, without necessarily thinking it's wrong. Just let me say that now.

J. Elizabeth Clark's article makes me flip-flop so much I feel...spin-ny. 

So ok, Clark and I started off on the wrong foot. She stated, "almost every facet of our personal and professional lives has shifted to new uses of communicative technology. With the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 comes a shift in our cultural norms" (27; emphasis mine). I'm a little wary of the assumption of "ourness", because it seems to oppose a "not ourness." Who is silenced in the assumption that there is a cultural and technological "us"? Teaching at community college, I've had many students who have never even typed a paper on a computer, let alone had fluency with email or internet. Does that mean they are not part of "our" culture? That they are abnormal? Maybe they are, by a strict definition of the term, abnormal--but what harm do we do them by insinuating that such people are not "21st Century" enough? Do they become invisible because they are not part of "our" culture as Clark conceives of it? 

However, Clark won me back a little bit with her John Dewey-love, and her interest with "the civic importance of education" (28). (I was also enamored with her history lesson on page 28—history minor, right here). In fact, I would have liked her to focus more on her definition of education for civic participation. I'm not satisfied with her insistence that we make “the now” our central focus. (Again, I wanted more explanation. My first instinct was to smart off about that very history section I just praised: jeez, for someone who's all about pushing “the now,” she seemed to have found something interesting in the “then,” didn't she?) I'm pretty sure she's not equivocally cutting off the past as a realm with nothing to offer us as teacher or our students as learner. But what is she saying about “now,” exactly?

I suppose most of my actual evaluation of Clark's proposals is dependent on how they are approached. For example, she seems to believe in the great success of Second Life as a teaching and learning space: “In my Composition 1 class, I am using Second Life as an environment for the equivalent of digital field trips for my students, and I base writing assignments around these field trips.” My gut response to this is a mild form of despair; why not take real trips, to real places? (Don't beat me up over definitions of “real” at the moment; I'm going somewhere with this.) I suppose I can answer my own question, in that it's likely such “real” places don't always exist that can coincide with her assignments. As she continues, “As a class, we take field trips from our college's computer lab to different sites in Second Life that intersect with writing assignments.” But again, my initial reaction is displeasure. Why not compose writing assignments that can help students engage with the physical places and communities around them? Why make these interactions exclusively virtual? Clark might say that its because in the world of “the now,” learning to make connections in the virtual world are as important as any others. Or, she (or any other instructor answering the call to her pedagogical banner) might say that she uses these virtual connections as a means of teaching connection with all places, connecting the skills it takes to be a good Second Life neighbor with the skills it takes to be a citizen of our physical neighborhoods. I agree that the digital world can be a powerful mediating force for learning how to interact with the world. But for me to feel compelled by Clark's pedagogy, I would have to believe that the teaching going on is considered in this light, rather than simply as approaching digital literacy of and for itself alone, as the “now” way to live in the (virtual) world.

New (and Old) Media

by Anne Frances Wysocki, et al.

I was trying to piece together Wysocki's definition before she directly stated it, and I kept noticing her references to the composer/writer's role in utilizing available materials. (For example, on page 7 she states that writing teachers “can bring to new media texts a humane and thoughtful attention to materiality, production, and consumption, which is currently missing”; in expounding what new media lacks, Wysocki seems to be indicating what to her definition is absolutely necessary: human thoughts manipulating and interpreting available means.) I also noticed a theme of visibility—in essence, that new media is writing's “material designs” (13) made visible. These themes seem to play prominently into Wysocki's ultimate definition of new media texts as “by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality” (15) in order to draw reader attention to the text's production.

I'm liking Wysocki's definition of new media largely because it speaks to my own concern about losing the human element in advanced technology. Wysocki foregrounds this concept, stating directly that she want new media to maintain a strong human agency, not to merely be technologically-composed products. Her definition—that new media is text specifically produced with an understanding and foregrounding of the material options available for production—makes human agency inextricably linked to what New Media, at heart, is. (I'm sorry, is anyone else finding themselves wanting to capitalize New Media—even though Wysocki doesn't? I must analyze this further...). By this reasoning, new media texts do not have to be digitally-produced, despite the sense many may have of new media as exclusively dependent on digital production.

I like this definition, because it makes even someone as technologically-remedial as myself capable of producing new media projects. (I could write with crayon on construction paper and it would fit Wysocki's notion of new media, provided that I produced that text intentionally, with a clear sense of the whys and hows of its purpose and audience effect.) That said, I don't think that just because Wysocki defines it that way, others would embrace my crayon-construction paper effort as new media, particularly if it were compared with the shiny video essay somebody else shot on their iphone, even if it covered the same subject as my crayon opus. (And no, I don't really know what I'd write about, or who for, that would best be served with crayons and construction paper. I'm still a new media fledgling.) Wysocki quotes Manovich's alternate definition of new media, which focuses it solidly outside of human intentionality, as “graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts that have become computable” (18).

Uh oh. My crayon opus ain't gonna cut it in Manovich's class.

So while I prefer Wysocki's vision of new media (a definition that “encourages us to stay alert to how and why we make these combinations of materials, not simply that we do it” [19]), I'm not sure it will carry the day as far as composition theory goes, given that digital technologies tend to whip us into a collective frenzy of the cool and computable. For too many people, just that we can (or, I suppose, at least they can) use advanced technology is enough to make it mandatory, without significant attention as to why. If a focus on how and why can help us maintain a solid connection to the kinds of rhetorical principles we try to teach regarding alphabetic writing, and if we can sustain a sense of human agency amidst all the shiny technology at our disposal, new media may yet maintain the “humane” vision Wysocki hopes for.

”And New Media's heart grew ten sizes that day...”

Just as the hatchling turtle must struggle through the heavy sands toward an ocean he has never seen, so too does Amanda struggle toward technological literacy. (Push, little turtle, push!)