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I was reminded earlier of Don DeLillo's White Noise and the scene early in the novel where Gladney visits the "most photographed barn in America" and his friend observes that, of course, no one can actually see the barn. It's an observation that summons Baudrillard's precession of the simulacra. 25+ years later, seeing the same barn through an augmented reality lens (e.g. layar on a smartphone), what might we be able to say that we see?

My response has been that all subjective experiences (all the things we see) are mediated and directly material, that all mediations are material. And by material, I mean that all mediations are comprised of objects and forces that are actual and virtual in a Deleuzian/post-Deleuzian sense. As such, in the sense that we think about the "withdrawal of objects" (as a term of art) and the limits of human cognition/epistemology, our consciousness can only ever sense our exposure to the exteriorized relations in the assemblage that include us and the barn. Augmented reality, then, changes the assemblage to which we are exposed. I don't know if we can say we are exposed to "more data" through AR, but we might say that we are exposed to more information if we define information as a subjective, value-laden evaluation of data (i.e., information is data we value). On the other hand, another person might find the AR data interferes with the experience/information s/he's looking for. Either way, though, we have the same chance (i.e. none) of seeing the "real" (as in unmediated) barn. But we can be exposed to the barn (and AR) through an assemblage of exteriorized relations that are material (virtual/actual), real but abstract, and that's what we need to deal with.

Anyway, that's just a brief philosophical prelim to thinking about AR and serious/educational games. I'm directly involved in a game development project right now, and it has me thinking about these issues on a general philosophical level that I feel comfortable sharing here.

The first thing that strikes me about serious gaming is the fundamental disconnect between the rhetorical stances of games and schooling. Here are a few key ones. Generally speaking, schooling is compulsory and transactional. The discourse is rational and formalist. For example, you go to school and the teacher says, "we are going to learn about the American Revolutionary War." You get no choice in the matter. The teacher gives you a series of assignments, and you do them. And through the teacher's lectures, the school textbooks, and the student assignments the primary goal is clarity: to make available any and all knowledge about the war that is requisite for the curriculum. Rhetoric is simply a matter of style-correctness.

Games obviously present a different set of conditions. I'll circle back to the questions of compulsion and transaction in a moment and deal with the question of gaming discourse first. Obviously there are many kinds of games. However, I would suggest that in all games (video or otherwise), there are secrets. All games come with rules of play, but the rules do not, cannot, tell you how to play the game. The discourse is both hermeneutic and heuristic. That is, one must recognize patterns to discover the secrets of gameplay, but then one needs to turn that knowledge into inventive action. Games hide things from players; winning a game means discerning hidden things (e.g. the cards your opponent is holding, the next pitch to be thrown, whether the defense will blitz, the weakness of the boss creature at the end of a level, etc.). Often such discernment is intuitive (it cannot be reduced to rational thought) and draws upon an assemblage of data that we cannot fully account for in our conscious minds. 

As such, while such gaming exchanges are transactions, they cannot be reduced to the zero-sum game of rational exchange (i.e I do a, b, and c, and you give me an "A, B, or C."). And here is where I think we uncover the "compulsory" experience of schooling. The negative compulsion of schooling is its demand that we reduce our experience to rational exchange. One could suggest that this insistence on rational exchange is intended to condition students for the exploitative, vampiric exchange of labor for capital (i.e. the hourly wage), but I'l just gesticulate in that direction.

In any case, the question I see serious games posing to schooling is "can schooling accept learning as a nonrational, irreducible experience?" Obviously, it's an open question.

So now let me reintroduce AR as part of a particular kind of serious gaming environment. Here is the player, mobile device in hand, interacting with a physically proximate object and receiving augmented data in relation to that object. In schooling discourse, the AR data is rational and transactional; there is a compulsion that it be reducible to some set of objectives about "what we are supposed to learn here." In short, the AR data rationally informs us about the otherwise secret/inaccessible knowledge about the object we are compelled to know by curriculum. However, we (ought to) know (by now) that AR does not "reveal" but rather alters the assemblage to which we are exposed in our relations to this object. Furthermore, in a game, we know the key knowledge is not plainly visible. In fact, the key knowledge is often intentionally obscured. As such, in an AR serious game, the data presented to the game player contains secrets that must be discerned and may even be potentially misleading in some regard. That is, something is missing that must be figured out and then acted upon in an inventive way.

When we win the game, it is fair because we all play within the rules, but it is unfair in the sense that the winner acted on knowledge she discerned that others did not (unless it's a game of pure chance, but that's not for today). In schooling discourse it would be akin to a test that asked questions that "weren't in the textbook or lectures." Supposedly that's not fair, even though all students take the same test. On the other hand, in reality, I know students who succeed in a composition class often do so because they are better writers coming in through the door. Is it fair that my kid is a math genius and yours maybe is not?

All this should really tell us something about schools, right? Though, ideologically, they operate according to a transactional, rational rhetoric, their claims to reveal knowledge must operate by simultaneously hiding other data and information. As most students eventually figure out, school is a game, but it is a cynical game because the rules are unevenly applied. As such, it is like all the mind games we play in life. Winning the school game means discerning the hidden curriculum and recognizing that the information presented to you ("learn/do a, b, and c and get an 'A, B, or C.'") is just legerdemain, that the winning tactics are not simply rational, and that what can be valuably learned is irreducible to the crap in the printed curriculum. 

One can see this taking place in the little game where students come to you and ask "how can I revise this paper to get an A?" Maybe this is a naive question of someone with faith in the transactional rationality of pedagogy. But maybe it is gameplay. However the professor's office isn't the place to find the cheat codes or the walkthrough. If I tell you how to win the game, then you aren't playing the game anymore, right? But the secret is that you can't do a, b, and c to get an A. How do you get an A on your paper? How do you serve an ace in tennis? Hit the ball hard enough, in the right place. How do you do that? It's a secret that you can't be told but must interpret and invent. In school that seems unfair because of this illusion of rational transactions, but in almost any other context we understand this implicitly. You don't walk up to a beautiful stranger and ask them how to convince them to have sex with you. We reject the implicit terms of the car salesperson who asks "what do I have to do to get you into a car today?"

This may seem far afield from AR and serious games (ok it is). But I think my underlying point here is that the study of AR and serious games ought to be able to tell us some things about the schooling pedagogies that emerged in the context of industrial capitalist culture. Serious games give us a real opportunity to rethink education in a way that might lead us back from the brink of absurd instrumentalism on which we totter. 

Yesterday NCTE hosted this conversation with Selfe, Hesse, and about 65 other folks. We were in Elluminate, if you are familiar with that. If one is very optimistic, one could see the potential in such conversations, but we'd need much more practice and better technology. An hour obviously does not allow 65 people enough time to really converse. One has to appreciate Selfe and Hesse being willing to do this, but I do wish we might all have made better uses of our time.

That said, a recap and some thoughts.

Selfe presented an argument which is familiar if you have followed her work. Her main point was that multimodal composition allows students to communicate in different ways, thus not restricting education to those with facility at alphabetic literacy. Hesse didn't take up a position counter to that. In fact, the whole thing was mostly people agreeing with each other. Hesse's FYC program at Denver does quite a bit with digital composition, so at least in practice it would seem he has a fair degree of support for the concept. Furthermore, though not everyone participated, my sense is that the audience was one that was largely in agreement with the value of digital composition.

The only issues that were really raised had to do with resources and professional development. Those are certainly issues, but mostly if one hasn't decided that digital composition is a priority. And by "one," I mean as an institution and/or profession. IF, in a very hypothetical sense, at UB we decided, with the support of the administration, that digital composition was integral to composition, we could acquire the technological resources and provide the professional development needed. In fact, I think we are overly stuck on the notion of "computer labs," so when we get stuck on those costs, we may be going down the wrong road.

I appreciate Selfe's call for us to address students with non-alphabetic literacy strengths. However,  I fear that such an argument is one of dozens of things that universities should do. I think compositionists like to frame their arguments as ethical imperatives, and they respond well to such arguments. So while I agree that we should do this, I don't really see that as a positive path toward digital composition. For as much as Selfe states her dislike of the term "disability" (and I agree with her about the term's problematic status), her argument has a problem of situating digital composition as an "assistive technology" (at least for those less troubled by the term disability). And while these technologies certainly can be assistive in this sense, that's just one small portion of their functioning.

The other argument touched upon is the inevitability argument: all these students doing all these techie things and changes in communication in the workplace... inevitably we will need to address these technologies. I agree with that as well, but the argument does suffer from a few problems, which were discussed yesterday. First, what sense do we have of the prevalence of digital composition in the workplace or elsewhere in the academy? For the latter, the sense is not much is going on overall. Of course I always want to ask how many people are writing humanistic research essays in their workplace or in their other courses? So in part, I think this is a misleading concern, even though I do think composition ought to engage with such writing practices (but in a critical way, not in a way that is slavish to their trends). The second concern has to do with how much value we are willing to put on informal social communication, from texting to YouTube videos. Can we take these as indicators of where other rhetorical practices might go?

The other problem with inevitability is when. It suggests "some day" this will happen. But it doesn't necessarily create any exigency to do this now. Similarly the "should" argument is compelling, but there are lots of things composition "should" do.

I might add a different argument that essentially says that we have always taught composition in the context of available technologies. At some point in history, I'm not sure when, it became necessary to turn in typed essays (that was the case when I was an undergrad). Before that, handwritten essays were acceptable. Somewhere in the 90s, essentially all students started turning in word-processed essays. Each of these changes radically altered the materiality of composition, but we could ignore that because the materiality of the final product was the same (so much for our so-called "process orientation"!).  Now the materiality of our compositional spaces are changing rapidly. Not some day, not inevitably, but already and we are behind. 

We do not get to choose IF composition should change. Composition has changed. No matter what kind of assignments you create in your FYC course, the compositional contexts in which they are produced have radically altered. And we risk our intellectual and professional future by ignoring that fact.

As a side note...

The question I didn't get to ask was about networked, collaborative composition. Honestly I am more interested in the possibilities of students writing texts together using a range of networked technologies than I am in their bringing in non-textual media (though I think that is also significant). I think once you start composing online it is inevitable that you will bring in other media. I know I don't do it much here in the informal space of my blog, but if you look at my online publications, you'll see plenty of other media. If you were to look in the online spaces of my courses, you'd see a variety of media as well. But I digress. As I said, I think one of the important things to have happen in a composition class is for students to get practice in real collaboration. Not necessarily on a single document or paragraph, but on a site.

I didn't ask in part because we ran out of time, but also because I didn't see the point in asking. Just like conference panels, a conversation like that is highly performative and in my mind not really an opportunity to work through things. 

As a second side note...

One question I did ask when I registered got folded into the presentation and was answered (sort of), but there was certainly some miscommunication. I had asked if we thought that the fact that many rhet/comp folks have little/no expertise with digital comp was a problem for us in having this conversation. Selfe answered by saying that our state of not-knowing wasn't an excuse. That's an answer of sorts, but it doesn't really address the problem I was describing. The problem I was trying to describe is one where a majority of rhet/comp faculty do not agree with the argument that digital composition is integral to FYC and part of the reason they do not agree is that they have no facility with digital composition themselves. Yes they could be trained, but first they would have to want to be trained. They would have to see digital composition as integral to their work. 

So maybe this state of things isn't an "excuse," but I certainly think it is a problem we have to face.

In other words, right now I think it would be overly generous to say that 30% of rhet/comp PhDs have the facility with digital comp necessary to teach it in FYC. And I would think less than 5% of FYC instructors have that capacity (though they could be trained/supported if the programmatic/institutional priority was there). If the situation were reversed and 70% of r/c phds had this facility, I doubt we would be having this conversation. 

So to me, "excuse" or not, the whole problem we are really facing in this disciplinary question is the general lack of fitness among r/c faculty to address the concern. 

Because I do not expect anyone to pay one hundred and eighty of their hard-earned dollars for an academic book, I thought that you might want to let your school's librarian know about this great new book called Design and Implementation of Educational Games, which I co-edited with Diane Wilcox and which is to be released at the end of March or in early April by IGI-Global. if you don't like to read traditional books anymore, an electronic version is also available.

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Seth Godin wrote this post a while back. I don't remember if I read it at the time, but I was picking up on it again from a Will Richardson tweet. Anyway, he proposes several "crossroads" in education and suggests that they results in eight possible futures, which are basically described as:

• abundant, free, learning
• abundant, free, schooling
• abundant, expensive, learning
• abundant, expensive, schooling
• scarce, free, learning
• scarce, free, schooling
• scarce, expensive, learning
• scarce, expensive, schooling

He suggesting that "the free, abundant learning combination is the one that's going to change the world." I think he's right. This combo will change the world.... in the nineteenth century. This is what we call public schooling. Obviously we think of this as "abundant." It is free to the student. And students do learn there. I don't think we can quibble with the abundant quality of public schools, but maybe one might complain about the "free" part. Well, I would suggest, to quote Robert Heinlein, TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Just look at all the "free" social media out there--the concerns about monetization and immaterial free labor. That's what I am talking about here. So "free" is relative to the user/student in this case.

Now perhaps we also want to quibble over the learning/schooling distinction. As I see it, the distinction that Godin is making here is between self-paced, learner-driven inquiry and group-based, teacher/institution-driven instruction. I don't think this is to suggest that people don't "learn" in school, but only that it isn't a great method. I know where he's coming from. Nevertheless, I have long-standing criticisms of the fantasy that Americans are going to teach themselves through self-paced online courses and a community of experts freely giving their time. However I would be willing to see this as a methodological shift in terms of pedagogy. At one point, Godin describes an MBA program he attended as scarce, free, learning, so clearly he sees this possibility.

However, while Godin seems to think the problem is schooling vs. learning (as do many others), I think the conceptual problem lies with the idea of "abundance." What exactly is abundant about education? In the case of public schooling in America, it means that every kid has access to a classroom in a public school. It also means that we will hold schools, teachers, parents, and kids accountable in different ways for "learning" (as determined by performance on standardized tests). So rooms, materials, curricula, and teachers are relatively abundant, as are tests. If we turn it over to more of a "learning" model, what is abundant then? Basically all the same things. It's just that the curricula and pedagogy are different, and maybe we get away from the standardized tests, but maybe not.

I would suggest that whatever is "abundant" about education is a commodity. It is not worth very much. And, in the end, while necessary, it is not sufficient to make a difference in student learning.

For example, in teaching writing, books and websites about grammar and style are abundant. Syllabi, lesson plans, and writing assignments are abundant. Video games and multimedia exercises to teach you grammar are abundant. Some of those things are useful and maybe even necessary. But what makes a difference in a student becoming a better writer is the attention she pays to the task and the sustained attention she receives from an experienced, knowledgeable teacher and a community of dedicated, fellow student writers. It is the attention, the cognitive demand, that is scarce. Not only b/c people may not want to do it, but simply b/c that kind of sustained attention is not abundant. It is something that needs to be learned, developed, and exercised. And that attention simply cannot be "free." It is a cost unto itself.

So, perhaps perversely, I will completely disagree with Godin and say that it is scare, expensive, schooling that will change the world, though I will slightly amend his definitions to suggest that the pedagogical methods he describes as "learning" can and should be what we find in schools. What is scarce and expensive is what is valuable. And I'm not talking about an Ivy League degree. I'm taking about the scarcity and cost of paying attention, of the difficult cognitive labor of learning anything that is worth learning or developing any skill worth having. I'm talking about attentional demands that must be paid by both student and teacher.

What is necessary is to shift the discourse so that people stop thinking of education as abundant, and as such as something that is easily acquired like fast food. We need to help students understand that an eduction requires effort and hence it is not "free." And as much as I embrace the pedagogy behind what Godin terms "learning," we need to realize that it is an error to suggest that just following your nose and interests and links at one's own pace will result in learning. I'm as likely as anyone to while away a few hours surfing blogs on the web. And I learn some interesting stuff, and sometimes I blog about it. But I also realize that such practice is only a prelim to a very different kind of learning where I must meet other people's demands and expectations, where I have to confront difficult things, and work them out.

In short, TANSTAAFL..

Wired has a transcript of a Bruce Sterling talk at Transmediale 10 in Berlin early this month titled "Atemporality and the Creative Artist." In it, Sterling seeks to describe a shift he sees in research, if not intellectual practice more generally

Step one - write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. 

Step two - write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. 

Step three - write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. 

Step four - open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. 

Step five - start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. 

Step six - make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. 

Step seven - create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.

Step eight - exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. 

And step nine - find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’ 

(If you don’t get what atemporality is by the end of these few images, I probably can’t help you.)

I have to say that I get it, but I'm not so sure why it is "atemporal." Actually Sterling's point has something to do with the collapse of historical narratives and that as such we are not situated in a particular historical moment. The kinds of networked activities that Sterling describes reflect the opening of connections across media in a way that is very different from the more internalized, problem-solving processes of traditional scholarship. I see this as rethinking the productivity of the problem where problems are not meant to be "solved" but rather to generate intellectual activity, to spur invention.

I want to connect this with something Alex Halavais has suggested: 

there are long-standing historical precedents to many of social functions of modern mobile devices, and that our tendency to think in terms of physical environments has blinded us to these long-term social uses of mobile technologies. Moreover, it is useful to understand a range of worn technologies, from sidearms to spectacles, as inherently information, communication, and control technologies. By providing an outline and taxonomy of worn technologies, it is possible to more easily distinguish dimensions along which change may be occurring.

What are the connections? Well I'm thinking of digital scholarship as the mobilization of problems, as worn technologies. Halavais juxtaposes this perspective with the more common one of "understanding communication technologies and networks through the lens of the built environment." Our typical response to problems is to situate them in a field and build a discipline around them in both physical and abstract terms. It is a territorializing process. 

Now, of course we are already familiar with the "network as deterritorializing" trope. In fact what Halavais is suggesting here is that we ought to be able to find historical precedent for such matters (which, actually, I think Deleuze and Guattari do). What's going on in my mind is only tangentially related to Halavais' interest here, but it got me thinking that one way of understanding what Sterling is talking about is to conceive of "the problem" as a wearable technology, as a technology of mobilization. What maybe both Sterling and Halavais are describing are nonlinear histories. 

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write the following about technological development: 

Some of them, phylogenetic lines, travel long distances between assemblages of various ages and cultures (from the blowgun to the cannon? from the prayer wheel to the propeller? from the pot to the motor?); others, ontogenetic lines, are internal to one assemblage and link up its various elements or else cause one element to pass, often after a delay, into another assemblage of a different nature but of the same culture or age (for example, the horseshoe, which spread through agricultural assemblages). It is thus necessary to take into account the selective action of the assemblages upon the phylum, and the evolutionary reaction of the phylum as the subterranean thread that passes from one assemblage to another, or quits an assemblage, draws it forward and opens it up. (407)

Perhaps this is the kind of atemporality that Sterling is seeing, and maybe this is the kind of history that Halavais is describing. Either way, I see the the problem in Sterling's atemporal digital age as mobilizing us down phylogenetic lines and assemblages away from the territories and fields we have known.

Make your plans now! We invite proposals for work-in-progress discussions at the 11th annual Graduate Research Network at the 2010 Computers and Writing Conference hosted by Purdue University.

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Hi, everyone. Been awhile since I posted any updates, but a timely email from Charlie concerning the little bit part I've been playing in Stargate Universe sent me back here to see how ol' Kairosnews has been doing. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy a video interview I did recently with R.A. Montgomery, author and publisher of the famous Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series of books for young people. Mr. Montgomery and I talked about many topics related to the books, including his thoughts on education. Enjoy!

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I apologize for not being able to avoid the militaristic pun, but it is actually quite appropriate for the hierarchical, even hylomorphic structures we often apply in first-year composition.

Thanks to the conversation on my last post, we were able to come around to the significant recognition that the issue of the role of digital composition in composition is related to one's faith in the notion of composition as teaching some generalized mode of writing. As Joyce Walker put it in a comment on the last post

If we are still, ultimately, trying to teach a generalized essay form as "WRITING," then digital modes and genres remain an unnecessary extra. They detract from time spent on the specifics of the meta-genre of "school essay writing." But If we abandon the myth of transcendence, then exposing students to the analysis of different genres, different modes, and offering them tools to analyze, study, and compose using different frameworks becomes critical.

And I completely agree with this assessment. If we do move to the latter, one might potentially argue that digital genres are not among those we should explore, but I think that argument becomes very difficult to make.

However, I have been thinking about the idea of "general writing" in a different way in relation to the concept of general and restricted economies in Bataille. Basically the idea of the general economy is to note that there is always excess, waste, and loss in any exchange. Restricted economies focus on the immediate purpose of an exchange (i.e. profit, or in the case of writing, thesis maybe). But the cost of a gallon of gas does not account for the ecological damage burning fuels causes or the traffic fatalities resulting for an automobile culture and so on. Along this same line of thinking, one might say there is general writing, but only in the sense that all restrictive writing events include excess, waste, and loss.

Of course this general has abandoned his/her post in command of the field of writing. General writing, in this context would be specifically counter to the notion of command and control. Instead of Major Strategies who carry out purposeful orders, general writing must attract minor tactics. Here one turns to an Ulmer-esque development of grammatological techniques that take up the excesses of meaning in the always already processes of ripping, mixing, and burning compositions. That is, each compositional event requires ripping thought from the flow of distributed cognition, mixing those rips together, and burning them into a format that is accesible by others. Each step offers excesses that can be engaged heuristically for invention and the development of concepts. As a result of these minor tactical interventions, the private compositions of a restricted writing economy (the foot-soldier widgets of a transactional rhetoric that bear the stamp of labor-exchange, property, and marketplace) are inverted. They don't become "public" compositions, which are just the dialectical b-side of private property entering the market. They become compositions of externality, emergent events of the exteriorized relations of material, embodied, and technological assemblages. 

It should come as no surprise that the restricted writing economy of traditional humanistic essay writing wishes to imagine itself as being all that writing can be (another army pun, I know). Restricted economies typically create these kinds of illusions. However, they always ignore the externalities of the accursed share. The truth is that restricted economies couldn't function if they had to bear the "true cost" of their operation. Indeed we might even find it difficult to measure that true cost (e.g. how does one account for permanent damage to a global ecosystem?). However, in teaching a general writing economy one must begin with these externalities, with exposure to the outside, with assemblages or networks.

In other words, if we truly wish to teach a "general writing," the first thing we should begin with is our exposure to the digital.

CCC will be hosting a live online conversation March 4th at 4pm involving Cynthia Selfe and Doug Hesse on this subject. The conversation stems from an article Selfe published last year in CCC and Hesse's response (and Selfe's response to his response) in the latest issue of the journal. The conversation has to do with whether or not digital, non-textual composition has a place in FYC. On this issue I have one main thing to say:

Have this debate now while you have the chance...

Because by the end of the decade the question of whether or not composition is inclusive of non-textual communication will be moot. Of course such courses may not be taught by rhet/comp specialists, who by that time may have become a field that only studies historical forms of communication. Meanwhile digital media scholars and digital humanists are springing up all around us, and it will be their graduate students who will serve as TAs and teach students to compose in the prevailing contemporary media. Or perhaps we'll just abandon FYC altogether, and the abolitionists will get their way, though maybe not in the manner they expected.

Here are two ways to look at it. 

1. For decades we have included the analysis of non-textual media (advertisements, television, film, etc.). Why? Because we realize that significant rhetorical work is going on in these media throughout our culture. Is there any debate among compositionists (or other humanists) that our students ought to have a critical understanding of such media? Or that such matters are appropriate subjects for FYC? I think not. In more recent years, we have expanded to include the analysis of the web. Again, I don't think there's any debate that our students need a critical-rhetorical understanding of web media or that such is an appropriate subject for FYC.

So the debate does not seem to surround the rhetorical-cultural significance of such media, only whether or not students need (or would benefit from) a rhetorical-cultural understanding that extends beyond the consumption of such media to its production/composition.

2. In 2000, I think it is fair to say that web-based pedagogy was uncommon to rare in FYC or even in higher education. In the late 90s I was using newsgroups. There was no CMS at Albany in the mid-90s when I was there. We had only begun to pilot one at Georgia Tech in the late 90s. And at the beginning of the decade at Cortland, we had a Title III grant to pay faculty to become trained in using Web CT. So few faculty were using the web for anything. Obviously blogs and wikis (though existent) were essentially unknown. There was no YouTube or iTunes or iPods. Even texting was uncommon at the beginning of the decade. Furthermore, such things were not common in business or politics (remember how revolutionary Howard Dean's campaign was?)

Today virtually any college student has the technical capacity to compose and publish text, image, audio, and/or video online. They do these things in a very basic way all the time when they upload photos to Facebook or share music with their friends. Millions of people around the world have blogs, contribute to wikis, post on discussions, upload photos to Flickr, share videos on YouTube. These activities are a common part of political and civic discourses. They are a regular business practice.

Given where we were in 2000, where do we imagine we will be in 2020?

I admit to being perplexed by the argument that says we should continue to focus solely on teaching students to write the 5-page, double-spaced essay. Why focus on that one curious historical moment as the standard for how rhetoric and composition should be taught? And we do realize that that is all that that is, right? Just a genre in time? Why not argue that we should abandon writing and just teach speaking? Why have we taught writing rather than public speaking as our primary focus for nearly a century?

Well, because print-based writing was the dominant form of professional, civic, and intellectual throughout the 20th century.

And today? And in 10 years? Are we intellectually capable of getting our minds around the fact that writing essays is a historically and materially contingent practice that will not last forever?

So let me pose a hypothetical situation. If in your program, you had a cadre of instructors who were skilled at digital media composition and you had the physical-material resources you needed to teach digital composition, would you include it in your FYC program next year?

I think you would. I don't think you'd abandon writing texts. There's no reason to. But there's also no reason for students not to combine text with other media in compositions.

So let's face it. The main reason why we would entertain the argument that digital composition "shouldn't" be part of FYC is that we are not prepared to say that it should. We are not prepared to consider the implications of saying that it should.  And the main implication of saying that we should be including digital composition in FYC right now is that we TOTALLY FAILED as a discipline 10 years ago, when we should have realized that digital composition would be integral to FYC and we should have begun preparing faculty and establishing material resources to meet that demand.

So again, I ask, where do we think we'll be in 2020? How are we going to get there?

Enjoy the "debate" while you can.

In a conversation on EBR, Greg Ulmer describes what he terms as

the practical condition of the book review: the principal (and perhaps only) reader of a review is the author of the book being reviewed. Perhaps. Certainly as an author, one reads one's reviews with interest. I'm sure the experience is quite different for novelists and other popular writers who might find their work widely reviewed. In academia though, at least in our field, book reviews are an under-appreciated genre. That is, it is sometimes difficult to find people willing to write them. As such, I was happy to find a couple reviews of my book.

• In Composition Studies (PDF) reviewed by Cheri Lemieux Spiegel
• In Hyperrhiz reviewed by Beth Weaver

Of course it is easy to be happy when the reviews are positive, as these two are. As such I am fortunate to date to have not experienced what Ulmer describe when he observers that "A common feature of the review is the impression on the author's part that s/he has been misunderstood." Instead, I am generally pleased with the readings of my book represented here. If/when I uncover future published reviews I'll add them to the list.

I am reading two books for my two classes right now. In composition, we are reading Booth, Williams, and Colomb's Craft of Research as we are really getting rolling on our research projects for this semester. In my grad class we are reading Lev Manovich's Language of New Media. It's an unlikely pairing perhaps, which is partly why some fruitful connections might emerge between them.

In his introduction to Manovich's book, Mark Tribe says that "Manovich approaches new media in a way that is both theoretical and practical. This multilevel hybridity--simultaneously post-communist and late-capitalist, at once academic and applied--lends his ideas a richness and complexity that is more than a little unusual in a field dominated on the one hand by techno-utopians and on the other by ivory-tower theory wonks." Booth et al. offer a different view of the researcher, though not as different as one might think: "Most of the important things we do, we do with others. Some students think research is different. They imagine the solitary scholar reading in a hushed library. But no place is more filled with imagined voices than a library or lab." They also note that in this third edition (2008) that they have "revised [their] comments about online research. Rather than warning that all online research should be viewed with caution, we now emphasize the need to distinguish between many reliable sources based in libraries and those other less reliable sources that indiscriminate Web searches turn up." (Hey I resemble that remark.)

Listening to the imagined voices I hear in the conversation between these texts, I am reminded that "humanities scholar" is not a natural condition. Like the management and production techniques of early 20th century industrial America, humanities scholarship represents a serious effort to make effective use of available information and technology: the library, the note card, the pen and notebook, the typewriter, the postal system, the journal, the book, the office, the desk, the chalkboard, the bookshelf, the photocopier, the conference hotel, etc., etc. As Booth et al suggest (if I may take some license), every "solitary scholar" is linked to these objects and their mediations. I am not sure I would use the phrase "imagined voices;" I would instead suggest that this information network is quite real and material.

Tribe suggests that Manovich's network consists of different material from Booth's "solitary scholar," but it is just as real. In the acknowledgements to the book, among other people, places, and things, Manovich lists his particular word processor, web browser, laptop, mobile phone and so on. Tribe's description of Manovich's approach as "hybrid" seems apt not because he is networked where the "ivory tower theory wonks" are not, but rather because his network links beyond the familiar territory or family of objects that define the solitary scholar.

Of course New Media was written more than a decade ago, and nowadays it seems normal (at least to me), that a humanities scholar's network would include web browsers, laptops, and mobile phones, and may even include RSS feeds, twitter streams, google alerts, email lists, and so on. That said, for Williams and Colomb (who create the 3rd edition of Craft of Research after Booth's passing), the Internet clearly remains non-scholarly territory (with the exception of library websites it seems).

Not surprisingly, I take issue with The Craft of Research on this matter (though overall I think it is an excellent text for teaching the rhetorical tasks of research). My composition students' next assignment will ask them to research online conversations regarding the topic they have selected to research (the general area is digital media--surprise, surprise--but their topics include copyright, privacy, multitasking/attention, social media advertising (for cigarettes and military recruitment in particular), and related things). I know there is good research and stimulating conversation about these issues "out there." There's also a lot of lower quality and questionable material. As beginning researchers, perhaps the lesson should be to learn how to identify and ignore the bad stuff. But for more sophisticated researchers, particularly those in the humanities who would proclaim to study cultural practices, all this material is part of the dataset. It's just a question of how one approaches the material.

And isn't it always? Aren't we supposed to read everything critically? But I digress.

The Craft of Research does a good job of reminding students to think about audience, purpose, and genre as they plan and carry out their research. But it is not as successful at describing the material networks (the imagined voices and conversations) in which our students participate. The book creates a fun, fanciful yet instructive set of examples about a "lighter-than-air" scholar who studies 1930s zeppelins and imagines three different audiences: a presentation to a group of zeppelin enthusiasts, advising a movie producer on the accurate portrayal of a zeppelin, and giving a talk to fellow scholars. The examples get across the point of different rhetorical demands. However it might have been more useful to think of examples like maintaining a blog about one's zeppelin research or participating in an online discussion for the zeppelin studies professional organization or making a YouTube video for use in a class. I'm not saying all the examples should have been digital ones. My point is that just that it is precisely in such online spaces that our students are most likely to find audiences for their research (or at least avenues for making their work accessible to audiences). Those spaces are not "hybrid" to them but rather as mundane as the scholar's note cards.

There is a great deal of talk these days about "undergraduate research," about including undergrads in the research that faculty do and supporting undergrads in carrying out their own research. Digital spaces seem a logical avenue for the publication of such work, as logical as journals seemed when PMLA started in the 1880s. If we can connect such digital scholarly composition with students' existing digital composition practices, then we will succeed in making links that are analogous to the ones that might have existed between print research and typewriters and entertainment reading and letter correspondence 80 or 100 years ago.

So the argument begins with traditional composition's underlying premise. It is, in the end, not so very different from the premise that historically has allowed English departments to suggest that their majors prepared students to be good writers in some general way.

That is, basically, that learning to write the humanistic essay is equated with learning to write in general. 50-100 years ago, in a more homogeneous campus culture, that premise might have made sense. It was still a fantasy, but a more realistic fantasy. That is, it was like fantasizing about having a triste with your neighbor. It probably wouldn't come to pass. You'd probably regret it if it did. But under the right circumstances, with enough wine, who knows? Today, this fantasy is more like fantasizing about having a triste with a movie star. As such it is that much more enticing because it is so unlikely. The specter of the fantasy coming true and having to deal with the consequences never really enters one's mind.

So the project of composition, like some many grand narrative projects of modernity, never really gets off the ground. One could still have introducing students to the composition of the humanistic essay as a goal of FYC, but one can no longer imagine that it serves any grander purpose than teaching them to write in a genre most of them will never write again. Of course, general education courses face these problems across the board. General education itself is a failed project of modernity. That doesn't mean that students can't learn in such courses or that they aren't worth asking students to take. It means that conceiving of these courses as resting upon the fables of modernity is unsustainable.

What does one take away from Intro to Biology? or Intro to Psych? or Western Civ I? Some discrete bits of knowledge I suppose (most of which fades with time)? Some general appreciation for what folks do "over there"? Maybe you get interested in a field you never knew and find your major. Perhaps that's the point, to sample from the tasting menu before ordering. In any case, FYC is just as valid as any of these as an introduction to rhetoric. 

And we could leave it at that.

However I do think that composition has potentially more to offer. Composition can be a place where students take up the rhetorical methods they learn not only to study others' writing but to examine their own writing practices, and (potentially) to develop their own writing (process). Of course we cannot promise this last piece as it points to what students will do following FYC. But we can give them the tools to take advantage of this opportunity.

And here is where I see digital media as integral. We cannot know what kinds of writing students will be asked to do in other classes after the leave us. Maybe a lot. Maybe very little. Perhaps it will resemble humanistic writing. Maybe they will be English majors (it happens from time to time.). What we can know with a higher degree of certainty is that they will write for online spaces. Of course this writing is often very, very short and highly informal. But it is the one writing practice they actually elect to pursue.

My suggestion is that by incorporating digital composition into FYC we can make connections between their current elective writing practices and other writing practices that they might choose to adopt. I'm not so naive as to imagine that more than a few students will make that choice. But if we still see it as our goal to give students an opportunity to develop a writing practice then I think that's our best chance. I could also argue that studying digital media is a worthwhile inclusion in a course the purports to introduce students to rhetoric as general education but really I think that's secondary to the purpose I've just described. 

Ultimately, in a field where almost everything is uncertain, I think the one thing we could agree on is that if students are to become better writers, their best chance is if they can develop a writing practice that extends beyond the writing they are required to do for their coursework. Instilling a digital writing practice, in my mind, is the best available strategy for making that happen.

I've been thinking more generally about the digital humanities and how one might go about developing them on a campus. In particular, I was thinking about the familiar formula of innovators, early adopters, early majority, and late majority that Gladwell employs. The digital humanities represents a constellation of technologies and practices that are iterative. As such, some digital practices, like using a CMS in some minimal way are reaching the "late majority." Others like email are obviously well embedded among the late majority. On the other hand, some technologies like virtual worlds or mobile technologies are in the innovator or early adopter phase. (Social media fwiw mostly range in the early adopter to early majority phase in my view.)

When I look around at digital humanities centers and such, I read them as being concerned with identifying and moving practices into the early majority phase.  As such, one way of approaching supporting digital humanities is to identify faculty who are innovators and early adopters and support their activities in these areas. What do digital humanities researchers and teachers need that print humanities faculty do not? Two general things, I think. First, they need more technology (duh). Second, because digital projects tend to require a team approach (as opposed to the traditional model of the solitary scholar), they may require support to facilitate collaboration (hiring grad students and tech specialists, travel, meetings, and other management-type costs--even though social media might help to reduce these if properly used). Same things are true for digital humanities teachers. They need more technology in the classroom and accessible for their students. They also likely will require more/different external support (e.g. if you are going to ask your students to do a video project, you'll probably want there to be staff who can support student tech questions... I can't figure out how to upload my video onto my computer, etc. etc.).

Out of that, I get one thought, which is that if you want to support innovators/early adopters, you have to offer grants that are designed to help them get the things they need.

Another way would be to identify digital humanities practices that are growing among early adopters and publicize/support them to tip them into the early majority phase. I suppose the latter would mean imagining that a digital humanities agent has a missionary goal. And maybe it does, maybe all disciplinary practices have some aspect that seeks to grow and reproduce. As I see it, this approach means the following:

1. Identify a technology/tech practice poised to tip toward the early majority.
2. Recruit innovators and early adopters already using it for research/teaching.
3. Support and publicize their activities on the campus.
4. Make it easier for more early adopter types and early majority folks to get on board.

Just for sake of argument, I'll use the closest horizon technologies from the 2010 Horizon Report: Mobile Computing and Open Content. For brevity, I'll just use the first. So you first identify humanists who are doing research into mobile computing, using mobile computing to do research, or teaching with or about mobile computing. You write a targeted RFP for research in mobile computing. You create a speaker series around mobile computing. You get someone to offer a graduate course or two on mobile computing with support. You encourage faculty to develop courses using mobile tech by offering some workshops and other support (and maybe offer them an iPad or something). The goal is to move from a situation where maybe 5% of faculty are using mobile technologies to one where maybe 10% are.

Mobile computing is just an easy example and maybe it isn't the right choice. That's not the point. The point I'm interested in is the strategy behind the example. It's great to support innovators and early adopters. I put myself in that category and I'm happy for the support. But I think it is also necessary to consider how that support leads to wider adoption of digital humanities practices among faculty.

Every 3-5 years, I would think, one needs to sit down with one's program, undergraduate major, graduate curriculum, etc. and ask "What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is what we are doing (still) achieving what we set out to do?" These aren't easy questions to ask or answer. They often lead to acrimony, and they can be laden with all kinds of disputes--personal, local, disciplinary, institutional, etc.

Still, there's no getting around the task. We are, I would imagine, at least 20-30 years past the time when one could imagine it was self-evident (within the discipline) how a composition program or English BA or graduate program would operate. That said, this does not mean that one is "free" to do whatever one pleases as a program or as an individual within a program. And here I want to turn specifically to the question of first-year composition.

There is no simple answer to questions like "What is FYC?" or "What is the best way to teach FYC?" And yet, I would think that 99.9%+ of the possible answers in the English language are obviously wrong. FYC is not pizza delivery or changing the oil in your car. The best way to teach FYC is not by making your bed or walking your dog. So while we can have disputes about the answers to these questions, there must be something we agree upon that allows us to discount almost every possible answer. I would suggest that that "something" is actually a fairly complex assemblage of objects, and furthermore that that "something" is undergoing some interesting mutations and deterritorializations in its exposure to several trends: digital media, globalization, shifting student demographics, the diminishing role of the humanities in higher education, etc.

But I'll set aside those questions for now.

When one asks what FYC is or how it should be taught, the question is partly one of institutional history but it is also one of disciplinary history. One cannot ignore the WPA outcomes or NCTE best practices or the inertia of canonical rhet/comp or the FYC textbook industry. As individual programs or faculty we do not get to choose the fact that these objects contribute to the definition of composition. In addition, we do not get to select our students or our institution. The discipline of FYC, the student body, the material-bureaucratic shape of our institution: these provide the context for our program and teaching. Without them, there probably would be no need to have an FYC program or teach composition. 

So if we are smart (which, or course, "we" are), when we ask questions of our program, we take into account those things that we cannot change (at least not in the short term). As such, we might ask, "Given our sense of the discipline of FYC, our students, and our institution, what should we do?" This doesn't mean that we always have to agree with mainstream disciplinary versions of FYC or any other aspect of our context. It simply means that we have to respond to those things. We cannot act as if those things do not exist.

I've been thinking about those things as I've been revisiting Ulmer's Heuretics for my grad course. He writes (in the early 90s mind you):

There has never been a technology capable of fully supporting and augmenting intuition in the way that print supports analysis--until now. The multichanneled interactivity of hypermedia provides for the first time a machine who operations match the variable sensorial encoding that is the basis for intuition, a technology in which cross-modality may be simulated and manipulated for the writing of an insight, including the interaction of verbal and non-verbal materials and the guidance of analysis by intuition, which constitute creative or inventive thinking (140-1).

And then a few paragraphs later: "The challenge of chorography is: to remake the sense of judgment itself."

Just to touch upon that briefer quote first... all of the questions I pose above are obviously ones of judgment. The intuition of which Ulmer writes is implicitly intertwined with judgment on the level of geschlecht. Inasmuch as print both supports and interrogates analysis, making analysis visible and accessible in a way not available before writing, digital media offers us this ability to write judgment, as Ulmer says elsewhere, to investigate and support the processes of intuition in a way unavailable to us before.

This is clearly at stake in questioning the future of composition. Our beliefs about what composition should be, our judgments about "good writing," and our practices as writers are all largely intuitive, despite the existence of a large body of disciplinary analysis and research into such topics. The digital requires us to remake these judgments, and not simply by adding "digital" assignments to our syllabi. On the flip side, as I've just pointed out, one does not simply walk away from the assemblages that comprise the contexts of our teaching: the discipline, our institutions, and our students do not change overnight (though our students seem to be changing much faster than the other two). Instead, through Ulmer we might look upon the digital as an assemblage that has the potential to expose and interrogate our judgments and perhaps push us beyond the limitations to which we continually find ourselves returning.

Spatial Praxes: Theories of Space, Place, and Pedagogy, a 2012 summer special issue of Kairos
Guest Editors: Dr. Amy Kimme Hea, Ashley J. Holmes, and Jennifer Haley-Brown

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I am trying to connect my blog with google buzz. I think I've done the technical bits, but I'm not sure how long it will take for something like this to show up on my profile page.

This seminar focuses on helping first-year writing teachers and administrators improve writing instruction. Prominent figures in the field run all-day workshops that facilitate the integration of innovative pedagogies and practices. This year's keynote address will be given by Katie Malcom and Nancy DeJoy the evening of June 6. Full-day workshops will be facilitated by Bump Halbritter, Karl Stolley & Amy Ferdinandt Stolley, Patricia Sullivan, Lisa Green, Nancy DeJoy & Steven T. Lessner, June 7-11, respectively. Participants may attend one or more days of the workshop.

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In "ordinary life" I work as an administrator in the NHS, and in collaboration with my friends Julian Le Saux and David Hindmarsh I have recently started to put together a series of 10-minute puppet-videos chronicling the misadventures and frustrations of an ordinary (but rather hirsute) General Practitioner called Dr Hairy.

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Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an appreciation of Millie Niss, the writer and new media artist, who died in November of last year.

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This semester another instructor and I are going to attempt "across-section" collaboration on projects. For a large project pairs or threesomes of students from his writing section will collaborate with pairs from my section of a technical writing course. The goal is to have students experience online collaboration similar to an all-online course, but with with an extensive safety net.

Anyone else work with a colleague to create virtual teams? What worked and what didn't?

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