Teaching Technical Writing Post 1.5: Course Goals

In my upcoming efforts to teach technical and professional writing, I hope to (tentatively) address the following objectives. By the end of my class, my students should be able to:

-          Develop Strategies for planning, drafting and revising writing

-          Critically analyze samples from multiple genres of writing

-          Critically analyze and create technical documents using different modalities

-          Reflect on how digital technology can dictate or influence the shape of technical communication

-          Write for multiple audiences, including those within their disciplinary community and for laypersons

-          Make informed choices about the different means of persuasion dictated by the social, cultural, and ethical backgrounds of discipline and audience

-          Learn to work collaboratively with people from a variety of different fields and specialties for specific project goals

-          Produce their own technical writing artifacts that may be used in their career development.

-          Utilize open access digital venues for fundraising and publication. Study the persuasive techniques of newer business models.

The last two points are key. I hope to use Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding within my class to hopefully give my students the opportunity to produce an actual project to post on websites like Kickstarter.com. By being able to actually create something of potential real world value, I hope to give my students a sense of the practical applications of both the theory and the practice of technical communication.

Here we go again: English 534

I was debating whether or not to go into Kristin Arola's course on teaching technical and professional writing with a clean slate. After all, this is a new class, with a new cohort, and new goals. Why clutter up the interface with the ghost of my old ramblings from a year ago?

Obviously, you'll notice that I decided not to go with the clean slate route. I made this choice for two reasons: the first is old-fashioned laziness. I have a hard enough time managing my personal digital footprint without also needing to keep track of my academic one. The second reason is a bit more noble. As I delve deeper into the study of technology, this space will, in some ways, serve as a timeline to track my own development as a digital humanist. I suspect that my opinions about technology will remain mostly the same (I'm still a dogged positivist and techno-optimist despite my discipline), but hopefully my ability to see (and discuss) the increasingly varied considerations that actually go into studying technology will show some evolution. In a way this blog keeps me honest by keeping my scholarly evolution all in one place.

But enough about me. On to the reading: User-Centered Technology by Robert Johnson.

I liked the questions raised in this book. I felt that the problems proposed by Johnson were aptly observed, and, while I liked the ideas behind his solutions, I found his calls to implement them a bit too vague or grandiose.

1. The problem Johnson discusses in the book is a broad, systemic one despite the book's specific focus on academia. His overarching argument is that, by viewing technology as a collection of artifacts handed down from on high by the superior ("Experts") to the inferior ("Users"), we fall into the trap of thinking in a "system-centered" way about technology, which reinforces hierarchical systems of power and renders users helpless to shape the ways in which technology influences their lives. He argues early on that in taking for granted the notion that technological innovation and development is best left to the experts who possess a "knack" for it that "we also surrender fundamental democratic rights and responsibilities" (11). Essentially, if technology dictates how we work, learn, and communicate, than only those who control technology's development can really have a voice. He argues that this attitude of the user as helpless or "idiotic" stems from the system-centered view of technology, which he defines as a view that is "based upon models of technology that focus on the artifact or system as primary, and on the notion that the inventors or developers of the technology know best its design, dissemination, and intended use" (25).

2. To solve this problem, he argues throughout the text that scholars and technologists need to cultivate a "user-centered" approach to technology by changing, from the bottom up, the intended "end" of a technological artifact or process. His argument is that the current "end" or goal of technology is to serve the developers, disseminators, or researchers, and that a more democratic, user-centered approach would focus more on providing technology that serves practical uses to a wide variety of the different, subjective goals and experiences of its users (21). He argues that this can be done by using the rhetorical concept of the techne to give users of technology a say in its use, and a personal sense of responsibility over the course of its development. Rather than burden experts or companies, he argues that this would invite a variety of different considerations into the technological process: "Users as producers have the knowledge to play an important role in the making of technologies; users as practitioners actually use the technologies and action; users as citizens carry user knowledge into an arena of sociotechnological decision making: the area of the polis, or, if you prefer, politics" (64).

3. My question with this book, then, comes from the "how" of it. Some of  Johnson's ideas have already, in some ways, come to fruition: his argument that a user-centered approach to technology casts the users as "active participants in the design, development, and maintenance of technology" (32) reminds me of websites like Wikipedia or Kickstarter. However, in other areas it seems like Johnson's reach exceeds his grasp. I therefore have two questions about this user-centered approach.

A) According to Johnson, user-centered views of technology emphasizes "the localized situation within the user resides" (129). A user-centered designer must created technology with a mind to the specific time, place, needs, cultures, and circumstances of the artifact's users. How, practically, is this to be done? Johnson argues that this is a viable approach in terms of long term vs. short term costs, but I'm more concerned with the logistics of actually implementing this. How is a designer, whose own rhetorical situation is limited, supposed to predict the needs of a potentially infinite audience across a potentially infinite period of time, with a potentially infinite set of different, sometimes mutually exclusive, needs? He briefly mentions the possibility of "user analysis" as an essential, but under-appreciated part of the development process, but how much analysis can be reasonably conducted during a development cycle? The only solution I can imagine are data-mining algorithms, like those used by Google, Facebook and the NSA, but that leads to other kinds of problems. Moreover, with technology (and the uses of said technologies) changing at such a rapid rate, isn't even trying to predict the needs of users a Sisyphean task?

B) My second question relates to how this argument applies to the classroom. Johnson argues that technical writing instructors should teach students to act according to the Aristotelian concept of acting, and thus develop curricula that incorporate "the good." (156). Throughout the text, he argues that users should not only be given the power to develop the technologies that they use, but should also be aware of the ethical responsibilities behind those technologies. To be blunt, though, what if our students don't care? If a student comes into a classroom with the goal of learning a set of skills, is it fair for us, as teachers, to decide that they should instead want to learn to deconstruct, critique, and politically engage with these skills? Moreover, what if the students' ideology is in contrast to ours? Johnson speaks of his students as critical agents who participated in efforts against a local uranium processing plant, but suppose one of his students worked at, or supported that plant. Johnson writes that "we do not want our students to become ballot box-filling or check-writing automotons" who are content to indirectly advocate for change (161), but doesn't this risk casting the teacher as a kind of moral "expert" and the student as an "idiot" user of the technology of the classroom? How can we integrate the techne Johnson describes into the classroom without falling into the same system-centered trap?

4. Finally, I'd like to know more about the critical and theoretical background that informs Johnson's methodology. This book was published in 1998. How have ideas about technological determinism and user-centered technology changed (or evolved) since then? Does this approach still hold up in the modern context of the digital humanities? What is the current consensus (if there even is one) on technological determinism, and how might that relate to our efforts in the classroom?

It seems one thing hasn't changed: A year later, and I'm still wordy and opinionated.

How I Spent My Fall Semester

This is a link to the website that I fervently hope will ultimately become a successful seminar project. I'm loathe to attach my name to it, since the whole project is about how anonymity can be a useful tool in online classrooms and taking credit for the work somehow seems hypocritical, but there you have it. 

Entry 9: Happy Halloween!

Hey everybody! Happy Halloween! So this post is a little bit long (I got carried away), and I'm sure you've better things to do than sift through my memoirs for a point, so if you are in a rush you can probably get away with reading the first and last two paragraphs and skipping my ramblings in the middle. The bulk of the piece is just to give some personal context to my conclusions. Anyway:

A few years ago, a good friend of mine took a trip to Israel with his girlfriend. They both went as part of the “Birthright” tour, where young people of Jewish heritage are taken on a free tour of the country. About halfway through the trip, the pair visited the Wailing Wall, an important landmark in Jewish culture. As they neared the wall, they were approached by a black-clad Hasidim  a member of the Jewish Orthodoxy, who asked my friend two questions: “Are you Jewish?” was the first, to which my friend responded yes. The second question was “is your mother Jewish?” which he answered no. At that the man politely nodded and moved on to another group of young men without another word. My friend, who had only gone on the birthright tour because it was a free vacation, didn't care that he had been passed over for what turned out to be an invitation to an evening prayer meet. His girlfriend, however, who had both a Jewish mother and a deep sense of religious and cultural identity, was angered both by the fact that she had been completely ignored because of her gender and because her partner had been judged as somehow lacking in Jewish identity. In the United States, both my friend and his girlfriend were identified as Jews. In the eyes of the Israeli Orthodox, though, neither of them were proper Jews; at least not in the ways that mattered.

As this was happening, I was busy with my first semester of teaching community college students. I had only just overcome the insecurities of a recent graduate; the students were comfortable with me, my nerves about the job had started to settle, and the impromptu syllabus I had assembled was beginning to come together. While my friend was an ocean away, being judged and found wanting, I was finalizing my plans for the next few weeks of class, a series of lectures about the basics of writing an argument. Many of my students were ESL or remedial, and I knew that the lesson would be accompanied by extensive lectures and questions. I was confident, however, that I would be able to answer any issues that might come up. Then I got tonsillitis. Just like that, my plans were shattered. All of the confidence I had built over those first few months fled as I first tried to ignore and lecture through the pain in my throat, and then when that failed, scrambled for alternatives that would give my students the tools they needed for the upcoming deadline. As an adjunct, I was lacking health care, financial stability, and the possibility of a substitute teacher, so I spent those two weeks figuring out a way to teach without the use of my voice. I wound up bringing handouts of my lecture to class, asking students to present them for me as part of their participation grade. When that didn't work, I asked for their suggestions. At their request, I spent the bulk of my time answering questions via email (or, as the deadline approached, typing out the answers onto the projector in class). I felt limited. I felt like I was trapped in my own body, helpless as it failed me and undercut the confidence I had spent so many weeks building.

These two events have little in common beyond a relatively (and, considering how fickle memory is, probably imaginary) similar timeframe. However, the arguments put forth in Ben McCorkle’s “Whose Body” and Kristin Arola’s “It’s My Revolution” reminded me of these two events, and of why I have so much (dare I use this word?) faith in the promises of technology. McCorkle, referencing the concept of embodiment writes “Thus, embodiment involves a state of comfort, which allows us to forget our bodies as objects. In the colloquial sense, embodiment is the state of being in the moment” (176), describing the ways in which our tools can temporarily remove us from the experience of our physicality, and when they fail, can also radically remind us of it. He also adds, in describing the design philosophy behind increasingly haptic technologies like the iPhone, that “[t]he pathway to the embodied interface doesn't just reconfigure the experience of bodily contact with the machinery; in some cases, the goal is to minimize or eliminate that contact altogether, creating an almost telepathic conduit between user and device to create an augmented mode of being that doesn't feel augmented”(180). In a way, this was reflected in my classroom experience as I became sick. Both my students and I had grown accustomed to a specific form of classroom interface, the traditional lecture, which had gradually become invisible. I felt comfortable in the mechanisms of the classroom, and when that mechanism was disrupted by the embodied reality of my illness, I had to redraw the contact lines in a way that not only restored my own confidence, but that allowed my students to keep up. In a sense, the power shifted in those weeks away from me and towards my students, as they ultimately wound up dictating which teaching styles did or did not help them. The first attempt to have my students lecture from notes that I prepared failed, but the technological medium of email allowed us to create a supplement to it that enabled them to decide the appropriate level of interaction (which turned out to be extensive). The “disruption” exposed some of the inner workings of the classroom lecture as a technology, and gave the students a chance to reconstruct it in ways that were beneficial to them. Whether this ultimately helped them or not is hard to say, but I do know that I subsequently changed my teaching practices to be less lecture-focused and more open to dialogue and conversation in and out of the classroom.

In describing the dilemmas facing mixed-blood Indians, Arola states, “These forces include real legal forces concerning what it takes to be an Indian—for example, blood quantum and enrollment cards to mark who still counts as Indian—as well as our own mythos of what an Indian should be. While there might be a real political or personal impetus for mixedbloods to be included as Indian, as Bizarro contends, the fact remains that mixedbloods don’t fall into a neatly decided racial category” (215). My friend and his partner were similarly confronted by a contact zone of the political and the mythological aspects of Jewish identity when they visited the wall. In Israel, there are numerous material complications surrounding the politics of identity in terms of “purity” of lineage and in terms of gender. Both were denied access to a potentially enlightening part of their heritage by these largely artificial distinctions - more so for the girlfriend, who, like all women, wasn’t even allowed to visit the wall proper. Both of them were rendered as “other”, though only one of them was a mixed blood. Returning to the issue of technology, Arola argues that the digital can serve as a space where people can explore their connections to cultural and racial heritage by adopting it as a form of Regalia. She explains, “Regalia, in the sense I’m using it, refers to the outfits worn by powwow dancers. In a powwow, the regalia functions as an expression of dancers’ lives and represents a range of the dancer’s experiences” (219). ). In this way, the digital space became Regalia for both of my friends and provided them a way to engage with their heritage and respond to its limitations. When his girlfriend was upset about being unable to see the wall my friend “snuck” her in by using his cell-phone’s camera to video conference the experience to her phone. She later complained about the discrimination on her Facebook profile, giving voice to frustrations that might have otherwise gone unspoken. Additionally, they were able to find out more about the ceremony that they had been denied when another Birthright traveler, who was allowed access, tweeted the experience to them. In their own way, each of them used the digital as a way to identify their own place within their culture. While my male friend illustrated his contempt for what he perceived as Orthodox Judaism’s outdated rules by using technology to subvert them, his girlfriend used the digital space as a way to affirm her Jewish identity by responding to and critiquing certain aspects of its tradition.

In “The Politics of Interface” Richard and Cynthia Selfe argue that the user interfaces of computers can be oppressive to students of different classes and cultures, stating that “If the map of the interface is oriented simultaneously along the axes of class, race, and cultural privilege, it is also aligned with the values of rationality, hierarchy, and logocentrism characteristic of Western patriarchal cultures” (491). This is echoed in McCorkle’s argument that “While technological standardization is not necessarily in itself insidious, it does create conditions by which control is exercised over people: by sanctioning purposes of use (valuing business and commercial interests, devaluing artistic, civic, or informal ones), reinforcing literacy thresholds (rendering learning or physical disabilities impediments to proper learning), and validating certain styles of delivery over others (devaluing gender or cultural differences marking how people speak or move)” and that “In order to stave off this analytical obsolescence, we ought to extend the conversation of access—that crucial buzzword that seems to offer us a way of bridging the digital divide between the technological haves and have-nots—so that it applies broadly to the realm of interface design” (186). I don’t disagree with either concern. Interface design – specifically ease of use – is essential to technology’s impact. The easier it is to use, the less time someone spends wrestling with or stressing over it, which means that they will have more time to actually use the technology in a way that is liberatory (or at least useful).

My friends in Israel were able to critique their culture and weave an online Regalia of their experiences precisely because their devices were intuitive and invisible; had they not been able to easily run a video feed or access their social media profiles, they would probably have just dismissed the whole episode out of frustration. Similarly, my students and I only thought to re-structure the mechanics of the classroom when the limits of my biology forced us to; the lecture format wasn’t necessarily bad for them, but until we were forced to critically engage with it we hadn’t even realized that there were better alternatives. While I don’t necessarily subscribe to McCorkle’s notion that the body should always be considered with regard to technology (one of the things I love about the internet is how it can liberate us from the limits of the physical), I do agree that it is at least important to periodically take a critical look at the ways in which technology interacts with us and how we interact with it, if only to see if there’s a simpler alternative. When it comes to the digital humanities, I think that the first thing to consider should always be ease of use for the widest range of people; technology works best when it makes problem solving simple.

Entry 8: I Hope I Don't Get In Trouble For This

Marcel O'Gorman's E-Crit was an interesting read. In many ways it reminded me of Slatin and Selfe's arguments for a study of the digital humanities as a new medium of discourse with new rules and outcomes rather than simply copy/pasting the same old print-oriented methodologies of written text. Where Selfe was focused on pedagogy and Slatin and Lanham were more interested in hypertext as changing the act of creating texts, O'Gorman seems more interested in academic theory and scholarship. His overall thesis is best summarized when he states: “As Guillory reveals in his introduction, Cultural Capital is not really about canon formation…Rather than joining the debate about what should and shouldn't be canonized, he turns to what he calls the ‘impense of the debate’, namely the category of literature itself…and the capital value of literary study in a techno-scientific culture. Guillory suggests that the canon is nothing more than a product of the scholarly imaginary, and that the debate points essentially to a crisis in the humanities wrought by a fetishistic clinging to traditional concepts of literature and scholarship” and “…this study is more concerned with the category of ‘academic writing’ which is the primary vehicle for mediating the ‘imaginary structures’ of higher education…This study, however, asks how writing becomes scholarship and it does so not only by examining the practices and structures of the academic apparatus, but also by imagining a new method of scholarly writing (hypericonomy) and a new curricular strategy (Electronic Critique).” (5) Essentially, he argues that academic writing needs to adapt to the new possibilities afforded by the digital humanities to expand its scholarship into newer, more postmodern styles of analysis (which involve the personal and the poetic) rather than endlessly repeating the factory-like reproduction of the same old texts. He also argues that visuals are the new primary communication in our culture, and that academia has been woefully slow to even admit this:

“If indeed we are in the thralls of a hypervisual, picture-oriented, digital age, then a scholarly discourse suitable to such an age must accept not only poststructuralism as prior knowledge, but also the fact that technologies of representation have induced a pictoral turn in our culture” (25).

So, in an effort to work in the frame that O'Gorman envisions, I'm going to spend the rest of this blog post posting some relevant quotations from the text, as well as visuals representing my reactions to them. So as to not seem academically lazy, however, I'll summarize my position here. I agree for the most part with his arguments that digital culture offers new ways to approach every aspect of the humanities, including critical theory, and that the "official" realm of academic discourse seems stodgy and redundant in comparison. His overall assertion that the writing style privileged by the "Republic of Scholars" doesn't really lend itself to new, original thought, and their (supposed) resistance to any flairs for the poetic or personal doesn't help anybody in an age when texts are becoming increasingly visual. We do need to help prepare people to engage critically with visual texts so they are not bamboozled by advertising or other forms of non-verbal manipulation. That said, I feel like this went too far in a postmodern direction, and that some basic structures from "traditional" academic discourse is needed to properly communicate to an audience, whether that audience is made up of a board of O'Gorman's much maligned publishing referees, or a wider audience of students. Even digital texts need coherent structure. Plus I feel like a lot of this argument was steeped in resentment, which made some of his conclusions hard to take seriously. For example, when he said “This speculative imaging, I’m sure you will agree, is far too complex for the written word, and provides a regrettable insistence on the failure of language” (26) I feel like that only proved a failure of HIS language rather than language as a whole. 

Incidentally, here was my reaction.

Overall I feel that O'Gorman has some keen observations on the state of academia and the promise of digital humanities towards critical scholarship, but the direction he takes these observations here is either too presumptuous, too postmodern, or too vague to make practical use of. I may find more to sink my teeth into in future chapters, but for now here are my gut reactions to his various arguments and examples. Now, on with the show.

“Even so…those who seek to liberate the remainder will face political resistance, ideological dismissal, and even personal denigration.” (5)

The Digital Humanist?

“Once this discrepancy is recognized on a large scale, then the digital-centric standards of evaluation will be applied to essays submitted to supposedly digital-centric journals. But until that recognition is realized, academia is faced with an inevitable anachronism” (9)

“To put it in the bluntly economic terms of Katherine Hayles, we are in a situation of ‘too many critics, too few texts,’ and the result has not been innovation, but repetition, recycling and reduction” (21)

“It should not come as a surprise that the overwhelming majority of scholarly Web sites are merely Web-based translations of printed journals, designed according to the print-centric logic of the hard-copy versions” (9).

“Remediating the canon requires a concerted focus on the materiality of writing, and not on the writers themselves” (11). 

“A pictures tends to speak with less authority than words; it is not subject to the same, rigid rule-set, and therefore it is more capable of generating divergent cognitive responses from the viewer…Still, pictures seem to possess a greater propensity for facilitating remainder-work, and for generating divergent responses. This fact is well understood in the work of advertising” (12)

“The existence of culturally determined mental sets provides advertisers with a means of creating ads that will target a specific audience and insure a predictable emotional response…But the most successful advertising strategies are able to insert their own images into the audience’s mental set. The Nike symbol, primordial archetype of everything athletic, is a case in point – an exercise in the corporate manipulation of human pattern recognition” (30).

“I would argue that it may be possible to teach creativity by providing individuals with an apparatus for knowledge-building that allows them to maintain access to a more diverse range of information” (14)

“The Republic of Scholars, with its faith in transparent language, scientific proof, and the text-based, linear, sequential essay provides the methodology and discourse for all who wish to maintain affiliation with the academic apparatus” (24). 

“The process of reading text or pictures involves various physical and mental operations, some of which the reader may not always be aware. In order to withstand the image bombardment being deployed in the current mediascape, readers and viewers must possess a means of filtration that will allow them to consciously organize visual information and arrange it into manageable patterns…But in order to develop such an apparatus, it seems that a reader must dismiss the notion of transparent communication and accept the impossibility of a universal perspective” (31)

Before the ellipses...and after.

“The electronic tools only account for a portion of the new apparatus. In truth we do not know exactly how to use these tools in a way that will adequately serve our need of inventing a new discourse…One alternative might be to design our own (non-electronic) software, or our own discursive approaches based on models provided by methodological inventors of discourse in our cultural history” (42)

“Of course, unwieldy graphical representation would never make its way through the cogs of the current academic apparatus except in very rare cases…But those who lack such academic notoriety (let alone the generous financial backing of a lucrative press) should not shrink from at least conjecturing about graphic strategies” (26)

“By focusing on pictures in a new mode of scholarly discourse, I am not necessarily recommending a radical revolution but, in some ways, a restoration of a holistic humanities-spurred formal experimentation in the ‘sister arts’” (36).

In sum: Overall I agreed.

Entry 7: Who's Remediating Whom?

In two sentences, Kathleen Blake Yancey summed up what it’s taken me six journal entries and a timeline to even hint at: “Never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside. Never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres.” I would be annoyed if I didn’t feel so vindicated. I’m not really interested in laying blame or leveling accusations of privilege at any group, ideology, or modality; the flaws and limitations of print as the dominant modality, while numerous, are not really the issue to me. While I don’t disagree with anything that Cynthia Selfe says in Movement of the Air, I think that her concerns are misplaced. Our students aren’t the ones who are in danger during the technological revolution. We are. As Yancey describes, “Today we are witnessing a parallel creation of a writing public made plural, and as in the case of the development of a reading public, it’s taking place largely outside of the school – and this in an age of universal education. Moreover, unlike what happens in our classes, no one is forcing this public to write. There are no As here, no Dean’s lists, no writing teacher to keep tabs on you” and “writers in the 21^st century self-organize into what seem to be overlapping technologically driven writing circles, what we might call a series of newly imagined communities…that cross borders of all kinds – nation state, class, gender, ethnicity.” Selfe calls for greater access to digital technologies and aurality by arguing that the students suffer under the yoke of logocentrism:

As faculty, when we limit our understanding of composing and our teaching of composition to a single modality, when we focus on print alone as the communicative venue for our assignments and for students’ responses to those assignments, we ensure that instruction is less accessible to a wide range of learners, and we constrain students’ ability to succeed by offering them an unnecessarily narrow choice of semiotic and rhetorical resources…For students, the stakes are even more significant. Young people need to know that their role as rhetorical agents is open, not artificially foreclosed by the limits of their teachers’ imaginations. They need a full quiver of semiotic modes from which to select, role models who can teach them to think critically about a range of communication tools, and multiple ways of reaching their audience. They do not need teachers who insist on one tool or one way (644-645).

To me, though, Yancey’s assertions (and, earlier, Lanham’s) seem more reflective of what is at stake. Where “the influence of writings as the primary mode of formal academic work, commercial exchange, and record keeping” (625) once gave the academic institution power to dictate not only which methods of communication were preferred, but which cultural artifacts belonged to the “high” culture, and which belonged to the “low.” This was facilitated in large part by the level of accessibility to this information: before mass communications, knowledge was expensive and arduous to obtain. That would naturally make the keepers of this knowledge privileged over what was considered valuable. Now, however, with the widespread proliferation of information and mass communication technologies (a proliferation which I have argued will only grow as time passes, and will soon include all people over a wider range of socioeconomic and racial strata), the academy is quickly losing its hold over cultural capital. Yancey cites Daley’s argument that “the screen is the language of the vernacular…if we do not include it in the school curriculum we will become as irrelevant as faculty professing in Latin.” This is the true danger of not embracing alternative modalities. Where before if a student fell outside of the logocentric “high culture” of the university curriculum, he or she would have no recourse, now that same student can find an avenue for his or her interests in the digital space – a space that is becoming increasingly relevant to the professional and social worlds.

One need only look at a negative review on ratemyprofessors.com, or an angry series of tweets about an unfair assignment to see how students are using writing to fight back against the privileged modalities. One need only visit any number of websites, youtube pages, viral videos or discussion boards to see an array of young authors designing multimodal projects that are informed by their interests – many of which show a level of expertise that borders on professional. These same digital authors are in our classrooms, churning out bland by-the-numbers papers (many of which are based on templates they found online) with the intention of paying their academic dues so that they can move on to the classes that really interest them. We can insist that these projects are less meaningful than their work in the classroom, but we may find that before too long our voices might be the ones drowned out in the exponentially growing tide of newer, more innovative content. Where before disenfranchised students had to change their voices to adapt to the academy, we may soon find that those same students will simply leave for greener pastures.

This isn’t to say we’re all doomed. Yancey, Selfe, and George all outline good models for integrating newer or different modalities into the classroom. However, I would stress that we shouldn't try to keep up with or compete against these new modalities. That would be intruding where we are not wanted, and anyway, we could never hope to keep up. Yancey cites D.J. Leu et. al. saying that “technological change happens so rapidly that the changes to literacy are limited not by technology but by our ability to adapt and acquire the new literacies that emerge.” Put simply, we won’t survive by acting as cultural gatekeepers anymore. Instead, our role should be to teach students to respond, adapt, and use the mediums that they are most familiar with to express their interests and generate new content. We don’t need to be experts on visual, aural, or digital modalities, we just need to give context to the students who are. Our students are going to express themselves with or without us; our job is to make sure that they’re getting the most out of their preferred means of expression.  

Entry 6: Things Fall Apart

I wrote my timeline to illustrate a tug-of-war within technological and social arenas. The basic idea I wanted to get across was that with technology (as with society) there's always a push and pull between what a system is "supposed" to be used for, and what it can be used for. iPhones get jailbroken, The Kinect was used for everything but playing video games, the capitalist-designed Twitter was used both to protest and to enforce capitalist regimes. Systems are most apparent when they break down. As Shipka and The New London Group illustrate, changing cultural systems demand changing pedagogical systems (and vice-versa). They also show how this can lead to new, unexpected complications. For example, take this quote detailing the dangers of changing pedagogy in "Postfordist" capitalism: "As we remake our literacy pedagogy to be more relevant to a new world of work, we need to be aware of the danger that our words become co-opted by economically and market-driven discourses, no matter how contemporary and 'post-capitalist' these may appear. The new fast capitalist literature stresses adaptation to constant change through thinking and speaking for oneself, critique and empowerment, innovation and creativity, technical and systems thinking, and learning how to learn" (New London Group, 7).

When I read that line, my first thought was "too late." Every time a departmental meeting turns to the question of how the Humanities can stay relevant, we see how market-driven discourses inform our pedagogy. More specifically, regarding technology, this co-opting is obvious whenever a teacher is compelled to use a modality that he or she is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with due to administrative or social pressures. Shipka states that "Although it may often appear...that a cultural tool is naturally or in and of itself tied to superior levels of performance, it is often the case that the continued use or dominance of that tool is based on other factors such as historical precedent, fear of or resistance to change, or the fact that the particular tool has been invested with so much cultural or institutional authority that it appears natural" (47). Though not speaking specifically about digital technologies, I couldn't help but have traumatic flashbacks to workplace experiences where the management bought a new (and faulty) system and then forced us peons to use it under the auspices of "superior levels of performance." Most of us have experience with a technology (digital or otherwise) not doing the work it's supposed to, but that "constraints may be deliberately overlooked or strategically downplayed" whenever we try to go back to, or devise, a system that actually works (48).

In short, things never work out the way they're supposed to. In acknowledging that "We live in an environment where subcultural differences - differences of identity and affiliation - are becoming more and more significant...Indeed, in one sense it is just this historical shift in which singular national cultures have less hold than they once did. For example, one of the paradoxes of less regulated, multi-channel media systems is that they undermine the concept of collective audience and common culture, instead promoting the opposite: an increasing range of accessible subcultural options and the growing divergence of specialist and subcultural discourses" (9), The New London Group demonstrated how changes in media have unexpected consequences for cultural and sub-cultural groups. In calling for a pedagogy that takes this growing plurality of "life groups" into account, the group opened the door for both "A Composition Made Whole" where different modalities are allowed into the classroom ("Muffie's" use of dance in a writing assignment, for instance) and an environment where some programs adopt multimodality for multimodality's sake in an effort to respond to market driven discourses. If digital multimodality is encouraged in our official pedagogies, then it may sometimes be shoehorned in even where it doesn't benefit anybody; here I'm thinking back to Cooper and Selfe's warnings about classes that use mutlimodal (digital) technologies without considering how the modality changes what an author can or cannot do.

To me, the solution is to follow Shipka's strategy of examining how "an action is simultaneously enabled and constrained by the mediational means or cultural tools employed" both in the classroom, and with regards to technology (digital and social) in general. Technology, whether digital, analogue, or cultural, only works when it becomes invisible. Think about the first time you rode a bike or used a computer: if every subsequent use demanded that much cognitive effort, you would never touch those things again. If we forced our students to examine every technology they use in the composition process, we would never get anything done. On the other hand, the only way to devise new uses for a technology is to (at least temporarily) render its inner workings visible and tinker with its guts, a method which is certainly necessary in composition. This space between visible and invisible is most apparent when systems break down (or are broken down). Shipka states that "We count on things working in the specific ways we have become accustomed to" and that when technologies break down we notice things that may have escaped our attention before (55). Though she is talking here about methods of writing, this also applies to technology. As technology becomes integrated into every social (or physical) practice in our lives, we should periodically stop and examine this symbiosis so that, if the system breaks down or changes, we can adapt constructively. The panic that sets in when the internet goes out - almost like losing a limb - is just one example of how using a tool eventually changes the way we work with other modalities. If your internet breaks down, how many times will you try to check your daily news websites before you get back in the habit of going out to buy a newspaper? The disappearance effect isn't the problem; the complacency that it creates is.

In the classroom, we can take advantage of this by encouraging students to pay attention to the systems they use, and how it both makes their lives easier and more difficult, regardless of which modality we're most comfortable with. In a larger context both of these readings show that new mediational means transform mediated actions (Shipka, 49). Just as Twitter was used both to organize Occupy Wallstreet and to spy on those same protesters, and information can be used for either liberation or surveillance, technologies in the classroom can either empower or frustrate students and teachers in ways that no pedagogical system can anticipate. The trick isn't to eliminate those breakdowns, but to examine and to learn from them.