Do you use Posterous, Facebook, Pinterest, 8tracks, Tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, Google+, Vuvox, Prezi, Storify, or Voicethread in your classes? In your own intellectual or creative pursuits? How?
My digital composition students are researching these platforms to learn more about how they can be used for creation, invention, and composition broadly construed. If you have thoughts—brief or otherwise—you’d be willing to share, please send me a note at allison [dot] d [dot] carr [at] gmail [dot] com and I’ll pass them along. Examples (of your own or your students’ work) greatly appreciated!
I asked Why teach/do digital writing? I should’ve asked: What is digital writing? or even, What is writing?
What writing is not: penmanship, syntax, grammar (though these things are involved and do matter, but not on the technical level where students put them; they matter instead on a social/rhetorical level, what these things say about us. I return to the notion of literacy instruction and schooling more broadly as control mechanisms, tools of socialization. Talk this way, not that way. Write this way, not that way. Be this way, not that way. Students seem unwilling or unable to understand writing on a rhetorical level, want to think of it only as something external to themselves.
What writing is: representation. approximation. maybe. means of communication, yes. means of expression, yes. but more, right? Something affective here. Writing means something. It means. How we used to teach writing, how many still are taught writing—tradition. Standards. Correctness. Whose standards? I asked. “The standards we grew up with,” they say. Who made them? I ask. “Someone a long time ago,” they say. What color was his skin? I ask. “White,” they say, reluctantly. They do not want to talk about race. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up. Except that you can’t talk about tradition, standards, correctness, or how we got our ideas about writing without talking about where those ideas come from. And you need to talk about tradition, standards, and correctness in order to understand digital writing and how it is different. What it allows. What it opens up and what it excludes. What are its “consequences.” To understand voice, how it aligns a piece with this or that ideology. To understand story and how to know what story to tell. To engage an audience with something fresh. You have to think critically about your defaults and why they are defaults to know the potential of something different. Read the rest of this entry »
This week my students are reading WIDE’s Why Teach Digital Writing and watching Information Re/volution:
I’ve asked them to respond to the pieces with their thoughts, including how the texts construct writing, and how that construction butts up against their own ideas about writing (a prompt I adapted from the always-brilliant LRM). In the interest of fostering a nontraditional classroom space, I’m responding to this prompt as well.
Both texts (but the WIDE text more explicitly) take up what Miller offers in his This Is How We Dream lectures (part 1, part 2): evidence of fundamental changes: composing not with word processors (which enable incremental change) but with dynamic digital tools. The WIDE collective writes,
“Computers are not “just tools” for writing. Networked computers create a new kind of writing space that changes the writing process and the basic rhetorical dynamic between writers and readers. Computer technologies have changed the processes, products, and contexts for writing in dramatic ways
Though their “argument” in support of this claim could be considered by many to be pretty traditional in nature (text-based, linear, academic voice, etc.), there are plenty of signs that this text is interested in pushing boundaries of academic argument toward something more dynamic in nature. For one thing, the text includes superscripted star icons throughout, each leading to a pop-up with more information, or an elaboration of a point. Its antecedent may be the footnote or endnote, but the WIDE collective is more playful than those forms of note typically allows, including in one instance a quiz for readers which enables them to gauge their own level of comfort with or accommodation of digital writing. Secondly, the text is pretty open, more open than most academic argument (feminist and queer texts being the notable exception). Without making all the classic hedge moves we see in a normal research article, the authors readily acknowledge the limitations of their piece, writing, for instance, “Here are three implications we can think of….” allowing for the possibility of additions and, in this way, inviting the reader to the table for discussion. In the same vein, the text is question-driven rather than conclusion-driven. Anyway, those are some quick rhetorical observations, but so far I’ve not gotten to the question at hand–how do these texts construct writing? Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been thinking more about the chair’s address from last week’s C’s, remembering fondly (?) Sid Dobrin’s “performance” near the end. A few notable details: Dobrin was the first person to face the audience in delivering his “story” (which was more of a rejection of story), a gesture I found intriguing first for its contrast to the rest of the stories, and then, later, for the way it so perfectly exemplified the thrust of the message. Likewise, while most of the other stories were delivered in what I’ll call “professional” voices (modulated tone, perfect enunciation, even timing), Dobrin’s was full of life, or something lived (I use these terms to capture the almost improvisational quality of his story, not to imply that the others were somehow dull or dead). His voice, big and booming, redirected my attention from that feeling in the room (y’all who were there know what I’m talking about) to him, his words, his critique. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m writing from CCCC_STL, where I’ve spent the morning *not* attending sessions, exactly. Of course I went to hear Malea’s address (more on this in a moment), and then I spent a few hours at the DALN book listening to folks tell their literacy stories. Following that, I had a quick meeting with a Harlot editor about a piece we’re working on, so now I’m taking a lunch break and gearing up for afternoon sessions. While I haven’t seen any panels yet, I’ve still had a rewarding and stimulating day. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve had a moment of clarity in the last week, a feeling I haven’t experienced in quite some time (maybe ever, don’t tell). This clearing-of-the-clouds was a welcome change to the usual dark, hazy quality of my exam year thus far. Here’s what happened:
Early last week I finished Dobrin’s latest, Postcomposition, a book I was inordinately resistant to at first, advocating as it does a kind of radical reorientation of our field away from students and toward writing (an idea that puzzled me for some time), but eventually came to understand and appreciate its standpoint, even if the prose is a little, um, aggressive. How did I come around? Permit me a detour: Read the rest of this entry »
Someone remarked recently, when I professed ignorance of the far-enough-along pregnancy of someone integral to the department, “You don’t know anything; you’re stuck in exam year hermitage.” It’s true.
I was thinking tonight about how I haven’t blogged in awhile, despite my earlier resolve to keep a meticulous record of my thoughts and frustrations and insights over the course of this year. I felt committed to the notion that one reason graduate school is often so difficult—intellectually and emotionally—is because people don’t talk about it. Therefore, more talk, more effort at transparency and community-building and camaraderie could very likely alleviate some of the hardship. I co-wrote an article expressing this very thought, more-or-less. (It’s currently under review, so we’ll see….)
But here I am on the backcountry slopes of this massive endeavor, and I’ve not written anything about reading since early fall. What gives? Read the rest of this entry »
