The Digital I & Thou

December 7, 2011 By 3 Comments

At a recent faculty roundtable, a familiar conversation surfaced: why do students incorporate the rhythms, abbreviations and tones of digital communication at all the wrong moments and in all the worst contexts–using emoticons in requests for paper extensions or text-speak in formal essays, for instance? A core complaint runs through this line of questioning: technology has ruined students’ ability to write. And as familiar as these dilemmas are, so too is one potential pedagogical response: the problem is not texting or emailing or twittering; it’s learning to teach students to move competently and consciously amidst various modalities, to identify and name types of writing and forms of mediation, and to practice when and how to deploy them.

When I first taught freshman composition, I was charged with covering the five primary rhetorical modes. Of course there have always been more than five, but the contemporary moment demands that we re-direct our gaze toward the reality of an infinite body of modes (even if we continue to insist on the tidy and classical handful of five: they can still be useful). This doesn’t mean that every classroom must embrace and welcome tweets and texts and slang into its culture and content, but rather that even if we want to limit the language-types circulating in our classrooms or in our students’ essays , we’re going to have to name them, collectively, first. “The ability to write” does not constitute one undifferentiated field, and as teachers we must liberate ourselves from that fantasy.

I’m curious to hear about strategies others have uncovered for teaching multiple fluencies. One of the challenges of living up to the promise of this pedagogical approach is that the very assumption of audience that underlies the conventional conception of rhetoric has been thrown into deep disarray.  To whom is a Facebook status update addressed? Is it to an individual, to some parcel of one’s collection of “friends,” to some imaginary conglomerate Other, or an aspect of oneself?  I’m quite sure that in many cases both the identities of speaker and audience are unknown. Perhaps one route of entry into the new rhetoric of communication is via a return to, and revision of, an elemental study of self and other: one that accounts for student, teacher and screen.

 

 

Filed Under: teaching, Technology, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

Stitch and Ink

March 3, 2011 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, talk focused on strategies for teaching close reading. Unanimous nodding broke out when John H. mentioned the importance of asking students to write out, on paper, the very lines of literary text they’re grappling with. Something about the intimacy of bringing one’s hand, mind and ink into sync with a given stretch of words–so that inscription belongs as much to the student as to the Great Works anthology–seemed essential. Hours later and a few blocks away, I found myself cramped into the 5th Avenue window display at the Graduate Center, arranging small, hand-made books to draw attention to the the Third Annual Chapbook Festival (www.chapbookfestival.org) — taking place March 2-5 both at the GC and at other locations throughout the city. The Festival celebrates, per its name, chapbooks–small publications, usually of poetry, ranging from the simplest construction of sewn sheets to elaborate, collectible editions–produced outside the machinery of commercial publishing. The colorful, beautiful little books in the window–etched, embossed, embroidered, delicately made–seemed to belong to the same universe as the practice of writing out lines of text — both not-so-lost arts.

Filed Under: Art, Language, literature, Uncategorized, Writing Instruction

Cheating for Adults

September 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, faculty and fellows discussed the overlapping worlds of plagiarism and assignment design.  Toward the end of the session, talk turned to the role classroom conversations about plagiarism play in the larger context of teacher-student power dynamics.  So often plagiarism reduces the complicated acts of composition and grading into a parent-child chase marked by sneakiness, discovery, and punishment.


Sherrie Levine shoots Walker Evans

Do we do our students a disservice by failing to place plagiarism in the larger spectrum of discourses about linguistic re-use? It seems that to really usher them into “adult conversation” would be to move beyond invokation of rule-based compliance and to acknowledge and explore the larger arena of poetic re-use.  The point is not at all to re-brand academic plagiarism as acceptable or as poetry, but rather to open up the dialogue so that students themselves are responsible for naming and analyzing varieties of borrowing and stealing, and become full-fledged participants in the larger contemporary cultural dialogue involving writers and artists such as Kenneth Goldsmith, David Shields, and Sherrie Levine.

Filed Under: Acacademic Integrity, Pedagogy, Plagiarism

Back to the Future

March 23, 2010 By 1 Comment

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart presented a 90 minute demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) in San Francisco.  He and his research team from the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute had been developing an online system (called NLS for oN Line System) since 1962, and at the FJCC they debuted the first computer mouse and demonstrated hypertext, file linking and tele-conferencing to an audience of one thousand.  Engelbart was concerned with collective intelligence and networked knowledge; only these paradigms of shared thinking, he proposed, could effectively meet the urgency and fast-changing nature of contemporary problems.

Engelbart is oft-associated with firsts and technological history; in the photograph below, his 1966 workstation is complete with keyboard, monitor, and square black mouse on the far right.

But at the same time, many conversations about the future of technology and networked life invoke Engelbart’s theoretical positions and proposed practices as guiding principles and visions not-yet-achieved.  He is as much a part of the discourses of origins as he is with those of the future. I thought of Engelbart recently while reading about poet and essayist Lewis Hyde’s new project on intellectual property and the cultural commons.  Hyde argues that we have not yet spoken back to the market-driven gluttony of copyright law by articulating precisely where and how a limit should be set between public and private.

So it was somehow no surprise to learn that the mouse-maker himself awarded the first Collective Intelligence Recognition Award for an organization to Creative Commons, the non-profit dedicated to promoting sharing within the limits of copyright law, at the 2008 Program for the Future conference.  It was a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the famous 1968 demo — and a simultaneous anointment of Engelbart as oracle of what’s to come.

Filed Under: Copyright, Symposium, Technology

MOVEABLE TYPE

December 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Moveable Type

The forward-and-backward-oriented theme of the Institute’s upcoming tenth annual symposium–The Future of Communication: Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been–captures the peculiar way nostalgia for old forms often gets integrated into and re-imagined in the most current technological creations. Moveable Type, artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen’s permanent installation in the lobby of Renzo Piano’s New York Times building on Eighth Avenue, hearkens back to the earliest wood and metal typographical and printing systems in order to focus attention on the expanded language field of a 21st century newspaper. A grid of 560 small fluorescent screens displays fragments of text that have appeared in the newspaper from its 1851 founding until today, and that includes reader-generated remarks and search terms from the paper’s online home. Algorithms search, sift and sort the vast database of words in a variety of ways–looking for first sentences, for instance, or phrases that contain a particular word. In this way the installation becomes an ever-pulsing hybrid of historical and contemporary discourses and technologies.

Filed Under: Art, Symposium

Deliverance

May 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Last year the new media artist Ramsay Stirling revised Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s seminal “Television Delivers People” video from 1973.  In Serra and Schoolman’s six minute piece, scrolling yellow text on a blue screen, accompanied by Muzak, spells out a blunt critique of mass media as a form of social control with such statements as “You are the product of television” and “In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold.”  Through “entertainment,” the video declares, television serves the gods of corporations and the status quo.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G64GwcXEitM[/youtube]

In his 2008 net art adaptation, “Internet Delivers People,” Stirling similarly scrolls yellow text on a blue screen set to elevator music.   But he replaces key words from the original video and shifts the apparent locus of critique to the internet, now offering up such statements as “The Product of the Internet, the “.COM”-mercial Internet, is the User” and “The Internet delivers people to an advertiser.”

Take a look.

What are the theoretical stakes and results of Stirling’s substitution of  “Internet” for “television”?  And how might we integrate those answers into the discourse of decentralization and democracy that dominated our recent symposium?

Filed Under: Art, Internet, Politics

More to Say

January 26, 2009 By 1 Comment

Everyone seemed a little bit smarter this past Tuesday.  Usually ruthless in my assessment of newscaster-types (whose articulate and enunciated speech often seems most directly tied to a desire to assert their own relevance), I was embarrassed to find myself smiling at the MSNBC inauguration-commentators, impressed by their analyses.  Suddenly it seemed as if there were more to say, and that a shadow discourse about the history and potential of the United States moved swiftly from private, academic and background locations and into the forefront of public view.

It strikes me that Obama’s take-over marks, among many other things, a movement to un-repress language from the many dusty hideaways (bunkers?) where it’s been stowed for the past eight years.  Every utterance by George W. Bush was a reminder that he had not yet formed an independent, adult relationship to language: his speech, rhetoric and policy were marked by painfully primitive and highly polarized conceptions of democracy, freedom, and the very value of human life. The spontaneous production of a single sentence was, for him, a tension-filled act.  Obama, on the other hand, appears to thrive in quite the opposite linguistic terrain, one marked by fluency, curiosity, multiplicity, and maturity–not to mention ongoing reading and writing.  We can’t yet predict the ramifications of this dramatic shift–I’m not suggesting that a cure for all the nation’s ills is imminent–but at the very least it’s worth pausing to note, and make use of, the expanded space for words.

Elizabeth Alexander had clearly channeled this return to language-as-the-key in her inauguration poem: “any thing can be made, any sentence begun,” she read.  “We encounter each other in words.”

Filed Under: Politics