4C’s reflection: Thursday

a continuation of my notes from 4C’s:

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.“