Words, words, words

By the time tomorrow is over, I will have spent about 45 hours in 4 days working with English 102 students and their portfolios.  I love my students, but I'm sick of words.  That's where this idea came from, as I lay in bed late Sunday night (Monday morning...) after reading the first batch of papers.  And obviously, it was also inspired by last week's discussion of Chun.

Cinematography by me
Music by Kaki King ("Bari Improv" from the August Rush soundtrack)

Holding class in SL...

Well, no one else was there, but "Mikey08 Market" and I had a lovely chat while sitting on our free bikes (mine was a gift from Mike). Since it was just the two of us, it felt a lot like your basic IM chat, except that we could see and hear when the other was typing, which was helpful, and it felt like I was actually talking with someone who was paying attention. Obviously, he could have been doing anything, but it felt like we were both more "present" for the conversation.

I saved the chat log, but it's five pages long with no spaces or line breaks, so I don't think I'll post it. Suffice it to say, we talked about surveillance, labor, self-determination, code, ethnography, and other stuff. And we wondered where Anne (and everyone else) was. Here we are!

P.S. Anne, I heard this evening that you were there on Sunday (with others?). I wonder why you didn't show up when Mike searched your name? I guess we should have looked around more...sorry! So just like in real life/first life/"meet space," we can miss each other by being in slightly different locations.

Attention Mac Users!

If you're a Mac user and you've been having problems with Second Life crashing, go to this link: Guide for Improving Mac Performance. After making a few small recommended changes to my SL preferences, I went from crashing within seconds of every log-on to a full session with no crashes or other problems!

Questions and thoughts on Heverly and Lessig

A few questions and thoughts in preparation for our Second Life discussion of Heverly ("Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life") and Lessig (Code v.2):

- Heverly, Lessig, and Chun are all preoccupied with "control."  In what ways do their notions of "control" converge and in what ways do they diverge?  (Sheesh.  Is that a 101 question, or what?!)

- How might Nakamura's discussions of subjectivity/objectivity be used to complicate Heverly's "active creation"/"passive object"?  Heverly talks about some of the unintended ramifications of young people who "embed themselves in digital media...by choice" and who are embedded by others against their will or without their knowledge (204), but he doesn't theorize this dichotomy too deeply.

- For me, this was Heverly's most interesting point:  "[W]e risk a future where the bullied remain bullied throughout their whole lives, where the space that children need to grow is wiped out by the permanence of the digital artifacts that are created when they err..." (216). We tend to emphasize the ephemerality of digitality (Wikipedia entries constantly changing, for example) and the ability to construct our own identities on the internet, but Heverly reminds us of both the potential permanence and uncontrollable nature of identity on the web. What does this mean for "digitizing race"?

- Lessig suggests that surveillance might be, in my words, a self-fulfilling prophecy:  "[P]rofiles will begin to normalize the population from which the norm is drawn.  The observing will affect the observed.  The system watches what you do; it fits you into a pattern; the pattern is then fed back to you in the form of options set by the pattern; the options reinforce the pattern; the cycle begins again" (220).  This reminded me of a point made by Robert McChesney in Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (from Dennis' class): In response to the notion that entertainment media "give the people what they want," he writes, "When people consume from options provided, the media giants then state that they are satisfying audience demand.  If some find the offerings imbecilic, the argument goes, that is because the people are morons who demand such tripe.  But this is a circular argument, since there is no proof that this range of choices conforms to something innate to the audience" (51).  We could perhaps say this about any digital medium: We are so accustomed to working within the constraints of Word, or Blogger, or Web 2.0 — in other words, any code — that we assume it's "what we want" ... the constraints become invisible as constraints ... they seem "innate" (to us and to the medium). The ability to produce code on the web does trouble this, although the vast majority of us don't produce actual code (certainly not binary machine code, at least), so we have to work through translating programs that, again, provide us with a particular set of options.

- I was very interested in Lessig's suggestion that social hierarchies, which were diminished due to increased mobility, are being reinstated through digital profiling: "An efficient and effective system for monitoring makes it possible once again to make these subtle distinctions of rank. Collecting data cheaply and efficiently will take us back to the past" (221).  Can/should we do anything about this, or is it a necessary evil?

Are video game makers squandering their cultural clout?

Just heard a short NPR bit on video games as entertaining diversion vs. art/cultural critique. Ian Bogost was one of the interviewees. Among other things, Bogost says that the politically motivated game BlackSite is "giving the industry the finger."

"Inextricably Fused"

While I have found great value in the blogging we have done this semester, this statement from Steve Anderson and Anne Balsamo really resonated with me:

"The uneasy hybridization seen in Web cast lectures and audience-response clickers demonstrates what is, in our view, a limited approach to integrating technology into education.  Even some of the most promising contemporary technologies that merge the advantages of networked communities with social software, such as blogs and wikis, may in some cases simply function as high-tech updates of timeworn practices, such as classroom journaling and shared notetaking.  Instead, we advocate a model that is genuinely organic in conception, centered on the development of pedagogical strategies that are inextricably fused with the technologies and social practices familiar to students of the born digital generation" (255).

Digital Natives in the Composition Classroom

Since I first posted project ideas exactly a month ago, I have considered at least a dozen different possibilities.  For some reason, I've had a really hard time settling on a direction that I found compelling and doable; or rather, settling on just one. Here's what I think I've decided:

I'd like to explore the pedagogical implications of "digital literacies" in the composition classroom.  Most (though not all, and this is a matter for consideration) of our students could be considered "digital natives," born about the time I sent my first email and weaned on computers and the internet.  In "Technology Learning and the MySpace Generation," Susan McLester compiled 30 characteristics of "digital natives," including less fear of failure, surface-oriented, thrive with redefined structure, instant gratification, all information is equal, extremely social, need a sense of security that they are defining for and by themselves, nonlinear, less textual/more modalities, and many others.  I'm wondering, then, not only how do we (and should we) incorporate digital technologies into the comp. classroom, but how might we best teach writing to and with the strengths (and weaknesses) of digital natives.

I'm still not sure how to represent this in a non-seminar paper format (which I know is an option, but I would rather do something different), but perhaps this is exactly what I'll be trying to figure out as I explore ways to teach writing multi-modally.  I'll post more of a "plan" soon.

A few potential sources:

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology." CCC 55.4 (2004): 642-692.

McLester, Susan. "Technology Learning and the MySpace Generation." Technology andLearning. 15 March 2007.

Perkel, Dan. "Copy and Paste Literacy: Literacy Practices in the Production of a MySpace Profile." Dan Perkel. Blog.

(P.S. Anne, I know this is a far cry from thirdspace and Second Life. Even though I would have a strong theoretical background for writing about thirdspace and the internet/Second Life, I'm feeling a bit burned out on the subject and would like to focus on something different and something a little more immediately applicable pedagogically. We can talk....)

CI

In composition pedagogy, we talk a lot about "collaboration" and "collaborative learning." Would it be possible to harness "collective intelligence" in the composition classroom? One of the problems with this is that there is no inherent "problem" to "solve" as a group.

This blog talks about, among other things, Collective Intelligence and Facebook. This blog has a post about Pedagogy for Collective Intelligence.

Writing in MMORGs

Ok, fourth short post of the day:

I was struck in a few of the articles (I've read all but the Anderson/Balsamo at this point) by how much writing goes on between gamers, particularly the "beekeepers" in I Love Bees.  This was brought out in the CCCC session I attended (see post below).  Presenter Joanna Phillips uses the World of Warcraft fan site thottbot.com to discuss rhetorical appeals with her first-year composition students:  Rather than learning to write just for a paper, she argued that gaming and game-related websites can help students transfer their writing and analysis skills to new environments.  She asks her students questions like, "What can we learn from the writing activities in a World of Warcraft fan site?  How do participants use ethos, pathos, and logos to acquire leadership in this arena?  In your environments (including Facebook and MySpace, as well as physical ones), how do people use these types of appeals?  What are the implications?"  Another presenter, Christopher Ritter, discussed the amount of writing that goes into the actual play of WoW, especially at advanced levels when gamers must constantly communicate with each other to complete a mission.  (The panel ended, by the way, with an amazing virtual presentation put together the day before by a member who was kept from the conference by a sudden family emergency; he used several different avatars to "speak" for him, along with charts, screen captures, etc.  It was really impressive.)

As we know, our students are already writing in these types of online environments (as well as, of course, blogs and emails and text messages).  Can/should we attempt to tap into this writing, to co-opt it for pedagogical use?  Or perhaps it would be better to ask, can/should we tap into the exigence that motivates the writing they already do?  Obviously, my students are more interested in writing on each other's "walls" and chatting in WoW than writing their research paper for my class.  But isn't that only natural?  Of course we're more motivated by and interested in our social, voluntary uses of literacy than in the literacies we're forced to practice in school.  I think it's ok for school to be school.  And yet, there's got to be something we can do to help students be more engaged in the work of school, or to help school be more engaged in the work of students.

Flowers and Puppies II

One more quickie: What's up with the Second Life article, authored by a Linden Lab dude?? Advertisement-cum-scholarly-article? Good grief. Some of the background information was helpful to me, but this was worse than Weinberger's flowers and puppies!

(By the way, I haven't read anyone else's posts yet; I'm sure I'm not the only one to have commented on this.)

Addendum: Obviously Jane McGonigal is also writing about a game/project on which she worked directly, but her article foregrounds (and greatly benefits from) this personal involvement, unlike Ondrejka's article. I had never heard of I Love Bees, but I could have read about it all day. Fascinating!

The Rhetoric of Facebook

This is going to be the week of super-short (or super short?) posts because I just have tiny gaps of time between classes, meetings, and conferences with students.

In "The Rhetoric of Video Games," Ian Bogost argues that instead of using video games as pedagogical tools, "supplementing and replacing lesson plans for concrete, factual learning, such as principles of chemistry," educators should "consider adopting video games as artifacts to be discussed alongside traditional media in subjects like literature, language arts, history, and art, teaching game playing as an argumentative and expressive practice alongside reading, writing, and debating" (136).

While I didn't do exactly this, and while I wasn't using video games, I led an activity today in my English 102 classes that begins to address Bogost's suggestion, I think.  The class is having a hard time talking abstractly (and even with student sample essays) about the "critical" part of "critical inquiry."  (For background, we have also been talking about—and troubling—the distinctions between "information-based" and "inquiry-based" research.)  So I asked them today how they would describe Facebook to someone who isn't familiar with it (like their parents, although I told them my mom is on Facebook and they were properly horrified [not that I am...love you, Mom!]).  We had fun with this, talking about everything from photos, to privacy settings, to the "What's your stripper name?" application.  Then I moved to a different part of the chalkboard and asked them to begin asking questions about Facebook.  As they began suggesting questions, I—and sometimes other students—worked to complicate them.  So, for example, the question "How do you decide what friends to add?" led into more critical questions about constructing identity, discourse communities, constraints, and the long-term implications of online social networking.

Like I said, it's not exactly what Bogost is suggesting, but I think we were learning from the rhetoric of Facebook, rather than just using it as a pedagogical tool  (although, of course, I was doing that, too).  Whether a social networking site like Facebook would be considered procedural rhetoric is another question.  Like video games, it does seem to call for a new understanding of persuasion, one that is not adequately accounted for by verbal, written, and visual rhetorics (125).  But I haven't yet worked out how I would understand a site like Facebook in terms of process.

C's

The very first session I attended at last week's Conference on College Composition and Communication was called "Reading and Writing Virtual Realities: Computer Games and Writing Instruction."  I was excited about this session ("oh, good—I can get my homework for 709 done!"), but I hadn't yet read the rest of the 350-page conference program.  Once I did, I realized that there was at least one session per time slot related to video games, Second Life, blogging, etc.  I'm not sure why I was surprised; this is definitely the "sexy" topic in comp. studies these days, at least among certain circles.  I wasn't able to attend any other sessions explicitly devoted to digitality—although a few of the sessions I did attend referenced it in some way—but when I get a little more time, maybe I'll list the names of some of the other sessions (so you all can see the work that others are doing) and report on the highlights of the one I attended.