It’s been an exciting two days so far. We haven’t started with the Sony Readers yet, because the students are getting the books next week, but we’re starting the term off with a critical analysis unit on the non-neutrality of technology and design. We discussed Jennie Winhall’s “Is Design Political?” today in class, which was fruitful. Students are most excited (I think) that they don’t have to buy textbooks this term (and I don’t blame them — in fact, that was part of the reason I was excited). My students so far have been talkative and great and offered some interesting ideas and perspectives.

The thing that I’m most frustrated with at this point is the course blog. The teacher of the other section engaged in this project and I decided that rather than traditional journals or posts on ANGEL (which I loathe almost as much as Blackboard) that we would have class blogs. I set up a Movable Type blog on my PSU webspace (figuring that it would be best to keep things on PSU server space) and started immediately running into problems. I can’t invite students to the blog until they’ve taken an online questionnaire showing they “understand” copyright laws and PSU policy for their webspace. We did this in class today, but there is a 1-3 business day turnaround for their registration to go through, so I’ll have to wait to invite them to the blog. And I’m not used to MT (I’m a WordPress blogger, for certain), so it was a bit of self-teaching and information seeking in order to set comment moderation the way I wanted, to incorporate links in the sidebar, etc.

I’m not sure how much privileges I’ll be able to give students on the blog. I want them to have quite a bit of control to play with the blog, including adding links to the sidebar, should they feel so inclined, but I’m not sure what MT will allow for users who don’t “own” the blog. Guess we’ll find out.

What’s most exciting about this experiment is that it’s obviously an experiment. I view all my teaching as an experiment (like a pragmatist), exploring what works and what doesn’t, and what works in what situations. But this term, I’m doing so much that’s just new to me and to students. It’s probably going to take up a lot more of my time than teaching did last term, but that’s okay.

Additionally, we’re using the Sony Reader in one of my graduate courses, which is exciting, so the eleven of us will also be exploring the tool as we discuss literacies and technologies.

¹ The course catalog and ANGEL (our Blackboard-esque software) call it Honors Freshman Composition — a term I am not too fond of because of the gendered “freshman” and the lack of “rhetoric” in the title. Our non-honors sections are titled Rhetoric and Composition.

• Steven Krause links to Cory Doctorow’s 17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You. Good tips for people with websites who want the attention of bloggers.

• Ira Socol discusses the benefits of online information delivery over print journalism.

• One of the newest fads in higher ed are those stupid clickers students have to buy. Here at OSU, students might have to buy 3 or 4 per term, and, from my understanding, they can’t be reused. Rhosa Eberly has brought this up at the Blogora. Last month, Ira Socol wrote a blog post asking if perhaps using mobile phones instead of clickers might be a better idea, in addition to calling into question the traditional lecture format of these classes.

• The Chronicle reports that Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting portions of his book that he is drafting on the blog Grand Text Auto. This is kinda old news, but it’s still interesting. He’s getting feedback, and he’s also interested in seeing how the local comments he gets on the blog might contradict the global comments he gets from reviewers during the publishing process.

• Gregory has started a co-authored blog for our 4C’s workshop, What’s Queer Got To Do With It, where we’ll be posting (hopefully) our thoughts and drafts as we consider our upcoming workshop (in less than 3 weeks!). I’m excited for our project.

• Konrad Glogowski posts about his own voice in blogs while teaching 8th grade. I found his post really interesting in regards to personal voice and identity presentation/representation. An excerpt:

What I am really concerned about, however, is my own voice. For the past three years, my three successive grade eight classes enjoyed blogging and created successful and engaging blogging communities. Most of the time, this development took place without me. While I certainly encouraged my bloggers, discussed their work in class, and posted comments to involve my students in instructional conversations, I have always been absent as a person. This year, I want things to be different.

This year, I want my personal voice to be present in the community. I will, of course, continue to be present as Mr.Glogowski, the grade eight Language Arts teacher. I will be present in my didactic and supportive role of an educator, of a classroom teacher who guides and explains. At the same time, I want to be present as Konrad Glogowski, the human being who has his own interests and views. I want to be present as an individual, not an individual reduced to one role.

In other words, I want the students to see me as yet another blogger in their community, as someone whose reason for being there is not only to support and instruct but also to learn. To learn from and with my students.

• Via Blogging Pedagogy, among many others, Google has made a video explaining Google Docs:

• Clancy posted some interesting images on Kairosnews with visual representations of online arguments. Good for discussion prompts. Here’s an example:

Following Geoffrey Sirc in English Composition as a Happening, can we view blogs as palimpsests, the constant putting new ideas or artifacts on top of old ones, a constant revisioning of ideas, a collage? Blogs, even those that “look” neat and tidy, are messy compositions, right?

Oh, and I highly recommend Slideshare. My account can be found here.

“Asking Students to Write Online: Negotiating the Private and Public“
Michael Faris (WIC)

When we ask students to publish online, what issues of privacy arise? How does the Internet act as a public place where ideas can be shared, and what advantages and risks are there to student privacy? Come discuss and share questions about student (and teacher) privacy and publicity online.

So I’m working on finishing up my PowerPoint slides and jotting down notes on what to talk about. It’s been a long week, and I’d rather just go to sleep. Maybe some dinner would help.

Miller writes that “To base a classification of discourse upon recurrent situation or, more specifically, upon exigence understood as social motive, is to base it upon the typical joint rhetorical actions available at a given point in history and culture” (158). Motive at the level of the genre “becomes a conventional social purpose, or exigence, within the recurrent situation”; it is not idiosyncratic or archetypal (162).

When looking for genre, we might see “that a collection of discourses (or a potential collection) may fail to constitute a genre in three major ways”:
1. Not enough substantive or formal similarities among documents;
2. “inadequate consideration of all the elements in recurrent rhetorical situations”;
3. and “no pragmatic component, no way to understand the genre as a social action” (163-164).

Miller’s last paragraph ties to pedagogy: We cannot just learn “a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends,” but rather we may learn the variety of possible ends, an understanding of the situation, potentials for failures and successes. “[F]or the student,” she concludes, “genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community” (165).

Which leads me to questions about my thesis. What is the rhetorical situation of the magazine Fag Rag? Should I choose a specific blog to compare it to? Do blogs count as a genre? Certainly they have similarities in form, but in rhetorical situation? What is the social motive for the writers of Fag Rag? What is the social motives for, say, Box Turtle Bulletin, or Queerty? How are rhetorical situations typified for zines? for blogs? Are they not typified? What are the ends/goals of zines? of blogs? How does understanding blogs as a genre and zines as a genre help in understanding blogs in the classroom. Perhaps I should return to the essays in Into the Blogosphere. Oh, questions….

Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (May 1984): 151-167.

Friday:

F.06 old + old = new: Writing Multimedia, Remixing Culture, Remixing Identity

Some graduate students and an undergraduate student from Michigan State shared some really interesting ideas and experiences of their own literacy and analyses of some digital artifacts that interrogated issues of copyright, remixing, design, race, and culture. I thought a lot of their ideas were pretty interesting, and they shared their bibliography (yay!), but I didn’t take great notes. I might email one of them, Matt Penniman, and ask a question regarding remixing and cities, since his talk was pretty interesting and made me think about top-down approaches to city-planning and the valuation or devaluation of local cultures and economies (he drew from Richard Florida’s Cities and the Creative Class).

G.06 The Rhetoric of Recovery: Reconstructing Palestinian History Before 1948

I didn’t write down which speaker I took notes from, so it was either Anis Bawarshi (University of Washington, Seattle) or Matthew Abraham (DePaul University, Chicago), but his discussion of the marginalization and stigmatization of academics in the USA who discuss Palestine and speak against Israeli imperialism was pretty interesting. He made the case that perhaps Palestinians and Arabs serve as the “new Jews,“ and that perhaps Israel now serves as a wall for Europe against the East/Orient.

H.04 Representing Identities in Religious Discourses: Proclamation, Silence, and Social Responsibility

I went to this talk to listen to my professor Vicki Tolar Burton and her talk “Community Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: New Lives for the Poor.“ I’d say the talks during this session were interesting and well-presented, but I didn’t really take notes on it, and nothing inspired comes to mind.

I.31 Rhetorical Agility and Online Identity

Sara Jameson and my talk, “Who Are We/Who Are They? Self-Presentation by GTA’s Online“ (subtitle different from that printed in program), was first. I’ll post our talk at some point.

Thomas Burkdall (Occidental College, Los Angeles) shared some of the ways he’s used podcasting in the classroom, and our explored what exactly a podcast was defined. He proposed terms such as audio esssays, commentaries, and narratives, but then settled on viewing podcasts as thoughtcasts, a word suggested by one of his students. I liked that he stressed that podcasts brougth the canon of delivery back to rhetoric.

Melanie Kill‘s (University of Washington, Seattle) talk “Rhetorical Agility and Online Identity: Composing Self on MySpace“ was about the multimodal work that is done by agents online who create MySpace pages. It was pretty informative, and she shared images of MySpace pages and explained what all went into them.

The question and answer session that followed was fun, and we got to share experiences with Blackboard, MySpace, and Facebook.

J.16 1963: The Origin of Modern Composition, Part 1

In his engaging talk “Writing Classroom as Warhol’s Factory,“ Geoffrey Sirc (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) lamented that description and narrative had been removed from the writing curriculum in 1918 by Kurl (I think that’s the name I heard, though I should research to find it I’m right); the focus of the writing classroom became exposition. Sirc argued (as he often does) for the “writing classroom as collection depot.“ He quoted from Baudrillard that the best criticism is fun, amusing, and entertaining, and asked (I think this is a Baudrillard quote), “Can you imagine a dandy talking to the public without scoffing at them?“

Anne Wysocki (Michigan Technological University) spoke on “Inventing Humans: Computers, Metaphors, Writing, 1963.“ She explored science fiction books and nonfictional texts on computers in 1963 and the metaphors they used. I seem to have not taken as many notes on this talk as I should have…

Thursday:

A.23 Forging a Scholarly and Professional Identity Online: Blogging as Discovery and Externalization of Self

Geoffrey Middlebrook, Sandra Ross, and LauraAnne Caroll-Adler (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) all discussed their use of Blackboard and blogs in their composition courses, including basic writing, first year composition, and advanced writing courses. Middlebrook has his students engage in conversations online within communities of blogs within their discipline (the examples he gave were of a history major and an economics major whose blogs were cleverly titled and who had engaged in strong discussion with great posts on their blogs, as well as posting comments on more “expert“ blogs in their respective fields. I felt that they were rehashing something I was already aware of (though it was great to see how they were doing in their situated context!). One thing they reminded me of, though, was Charles Lowe and Tara Terra Williams’s Into the Blogosphere article. I remembered the article, but their discussion reminded me to check it out for a discussion of student ownership of blogs, so I’ll have to do that.

B.4 Globalism, Identities, and Digital Literacies

Gail E. Hawisher (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), in her talk “Redesigning Global Literacies in the 21st Century,“ showed a few videos from her international graduate students and discussed design. She cited a few texts that I think would be worthwhile to look into: Gunther Kress’s essay in Hawisher and Selfe’s Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies, in which he says that we should not focus on the past, but need to instead focus on the future; and Dan Norman’s Emotional Design: People and Things (2004).

Dene Grigar (Washington State University, Vancouver) brought up three terms that are pretty important in her talk “The Telebody: Case Studies of the Intersection of Globalism, Identity, and Technology of the Media Arts“: telemetics, telebody (Steve Gibson’s term having to do with “altered human beings in a digital world“), and telembody (from Loxana-Hemmer (sp?), the act of embodying and controlling global space as well as being embodied and controlled by that space). Grigar mentioned the books At a Distance by Chandler and co-author, a book about art and activism, and Writing Machines by Katherine Hayles, which offers a broad definition of writing (on page 20).

Cynthia Selfe‘s (The Ohio State University, Columbus) talk “Literacies, Identities, and Families in Global Context“ followed the literacy practices of one of her students who was staying in contact with her family in her home country, which was interesting, but I don’t remember anything more specific.

During the Q&A afterward, someone in the audience mentioned the book Imagined Communities by Anderson, in which the author looked at print in the nineteenth century to show how they were used to create an imagined community of a nation.

C.26 Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis

This session was fascinating and humorous. Clancy Ratliff (East Carolina University) talked about plagiarism in blogs, and discussed the ways that some people plagiarized and reactions to it. In specific, she mentioned the institutional reach of the academic definition of plagiarism, which seems to be in effect in the blogosphere, and the ways in which bloggers use copyscape.com in order to track whether anyone has plagiarized their work.

Rebecca Moore Howard (Syracuse University) had perhaps the most humorous talk I’ve heard so far because she showed a website by a professor somewhere who had termed himself a “plagiarologist“ and was bent on fighting plagiarism to a ridiculous degree. Howard noted that copyright and plagiarism are different issues, as copyright has to do with law and property, but plagiarism is separate from law and locationally and institutionally defined.

When she looked at how plagiarism was discussed on blogs, she noted that bloggers who had been plagiarized often interpellated their readers as vigilantes whose job it became to identify, pursue, shame, try, and judge the plagiarizer. Readers were treated and seemed to act as detectives, warriors, or hunters, and often plagiarism was treated as a disease. Interestingly, though, Howard noted that it didn’t seem as though the named and outed plagiarists were ever really punished, and it seemed that they continued life as normal without any retribution (other than shaming).

Sandra Jamieson (Drew University, Madison, NJ) discussed supposed fraud in writing by comparing the cases of Fry’s book title and the YouTube videos from lonelygirl15. Her talk was really interesting, especially in her discussion of Derrida, when she discussed our expectations of the presence of the author and our expectations for truth in text. She mentioned a JAC article “Myth of Presence“ that I’ll have to check out.

E.34 “Structure, Sign, and Play“: Serious Design á la Derrida 40 Years After

Unfortunately, Lebbeus Woods (Cooper Union School of Architecture, New York) had suffered a heart attack (and is recovering, luckily), so he wasn’t able to make his talk. Victor Vitanza (Clemson University)’s talk “Design as Dasein (sign)“ was fascinating, though, and kept my attention really well, even though I often felt lost (Derrida still goes over my head). Vitanza discussed scars and quoted Petra Kuppers’s The Scar of Visibility: “living in the scar is living in the borderlines“ (my quote might not be accurate). He also quoted someone else (though I didn’t catch who): “We communicate across our lacerations and scars.“

Cynthia Haynes‘s (Clemson University) talk “Muddy Waters/Serious Games (play)“ also went over my head a bit. She discussed Derrida’s belief that we should create solidarity around something that is not yet known, and his claim that we can find something in the city that can’t be found in the state because the state hasn’t held up to its promises to us yet (and probably won’t). She discussed divided cities, like Jerusalem, and made comparisons to such a city in World of Warcraft, which was interesting. She called into question the boundaries/conflations of war and game, and while I found her talk engaging as well, I didn’t feel like I followed it completely.

As someone in the crowd stated when they asked for questions, “I’m not smart enough to have questions.“