CCCC06: Blogging, Part 2

This follows up on yesterday’s post about the blog-related presentations from Quinn Warnick, Margaret Ervin, and Fred Johnson. That panel had a primarily pedagogical focus, while the panel I’ll talk about today had a primarily professional focus — but as I noted yesterday, my point in juxtaposing my notes on these two panels, beyond their obvious shared topic, comes out of Collin Brooke’s observations about the ways in which academic bloggers enact the theories of written knowledge as processual, embodied, and socially constructed upon which composition bases many of its pedagogies. In other words, blogging serves as a site where there’s considerable and highly visible overlap between our professional practice and our pedagogical practice, and as such is rather unique in composition — and (you knew I was gonna say this) that overlap merits further serious investigation.

Clancy’s presentation, “Coalition-Building on Weblogs: Negotiating Innovation and Access in Writing Pedagogy” examined an illustrative case of academic exchange on weblogs that demonstrated how the online scholarly review process — which she called “peer-to-peer review,” possibly John Holbo’s coinage — works in different ways from offline scholarly review. Clancy, as always, was razor-sharp and laser-focused in her presentation, and I wish there were some way to make those vague and mumbly scholars who don’t know how to give a talk go see her present. (I say this as someone who’s given a couple abominably obscure presentations myself.) She’s posted her talk online, so my notes — in the interests of avoiding redundancy — will be a little more in the reader-response mode than the summaries I’ve been trying to offer for other presentations.

The illustrative case Clancy discussed arose out of weblog posts and comments in response to Will Hochman and Chris Dean’s April 2005 Inside Higher Ed  “Hypertext 101” article (Clancy gives links to the subsequent April 4 2005-April 14 2005 discussion here). Hochman and Dean concluded that students and teachers need to “think critically” about technology, a rhetorical position that Collin Brooke strongly critiqued, arguing that we need to start assuming that students are, in fact, already familiar with technology — a position that for me still feels uncomfortably close to technological determinism, but I can certainly see where his critique is coming from. Brooke’s response spurred further responses from a total of 21 people, including Jeff Rice, who argued with considerable merit that the injunction to “think critically” has become a mantra without a referent; we say it so much that we don’t do it (and perhaps, in that sense, it’s performative: we say it so much because we don’t do it?). Sharon Gerald, writing from a very tech-poor community college on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, then brought up the problem of access. Collin responded by pointing out that questions of access can often be used as a sort of rhetorical trump card to shut down discussion, and I agree that there’s the potential for that to happen — but on the other hand, in discussions of technology and access, it might be worthwhile to examine rhetorical ethos.

Sharon, as I noted, writes from a very tech-poor community college in Mississippi, with a largely rural and working-class student population. I’m at a large public university in a state where the funding for public higher education each year ranks 48th or 49th out of 50, and our computing resources are so abysmal — particularly when compared to nearby Smith College, Amherst College, and Mount Holyoke — that we could never hope to host the Computers & Writing Conference. Stanford, the site of the 2005 Computers & Writing conference, has an $8.6 billion endowment, and computer resources so lush and swank it feels nearly pornographic. Syracuse University, while certainly not as cash-rich as Stanford, is still in the top 100 highest endowments, at $656 million — although I don’t know what their tech resources are like. So I think it’s safe to say that where one’s speaking from often has a significant effect on one’s stance vis-á-vis the access issue. (Again, Bourdieu’s point about one’s perceptions being considerably influenced to one’s closeness to dependence upon material circumstances is an important one, as Linda Brodkey makes quite clear in her work.)

In any case, Clancy then offered a way-cool graphic illustrating how the process worked, and a table (see her post) showing the differences between “traditional scholarly peer review” and “P2P review.” People involved in the process all knew who was referring to them via trackbacks and server pings, and that transparency very much appeals to Ratliff (and me as well, and I’m sure many others). However, Clancy suggested, the case does raise some questions:

• Couldn’t this have just taken place on a listserv? (I’d say no, because of the different senses of temporality, focus, and linearity typically associated with listservs: listservs have a chronological structure more “axial,” in Landow’s term, than “networked,” like Clancy’s graphic.)
• How could P2P review be implemented in scholarly journals?
• Could P2p review be used in a deliberate and systematic way in the classroom? If so, how?

Jonathan Goodwin’s presentation, “Blogging and Scholarly Publication: Some Thoughts on Access and Mediation,” followed Clancy’s, asking the fundamental question: how does scholarly publishing relate to academic weblogging? If the alleged academic publishing crisis does, in fact, exist (a contention to which Mike Palmquist offers compelling counter-evidence), then what should scholarly publishing do? According to Goodwin, the most salient fact about scholarly publishing is how little of it gets read (Mike’s editorializing again: “little,” of course, being an entirely relative term), and the attendant hyperspecialization of scholarly publishing. And as published scholars further their careers and their chances of future publication by publishing, they reach a sort of critical mass of scholarly influence, wherein invitations and opportunities to publish flow more readily to them, creating a scholarly circumstance where, as Goodwin argues, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

Goodwin then moved on to give a fair account of the debates about electronic scholarly publishing and their frequent concomitant print fetishization. He was a little more discursive in his presentation than Clancy, but that’s hardly a critique of Jonathan, since just about anybody’s going to look rather more discursive than Clancy by comparison. The one thing I did find a bit odd about his presentation, though, was the number of times he addressed the audience by starting a statement with the phrase, “I don’t know if you know this, but…” It struck me as an odd rhetorical position in which to put one’s audience — implictly doubting their expertise — and the first time I noticed it, my mental response was, “Well, actually, yeah I do know who Stephen Wolfram is, as do lots of other folks here.” What was more odd was that he said it six more times in his talk. I dunno, Jonathan: it’s probably just me being fidgety, but that’s a rhetorical move I’d try to avoid in talking to an audience of my peers. In any case: Jonathan’s argument in this portion of his presentation, at its core, was that when influential scholars start publishing electronically, then the anxiety about not publishing in print will evaporate, and (so we might hope that) the barriers to the circulation of knowledge that today characterize scholarly publishing will become much lower.

Then Goodwin’s talk turned a corner that I’m afraid I missed: he began to discuss the importance of “aleatory research” in the ways it allows people to make discoveries by chance that they might not have otherwise made. Web 2.0 technologies like tagging facilitate this aleatory research (um, I think, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting Jonathan here: this is where my notes start to get really lame) and promote the emergent ordering of knowledge. This is where blogging, with the way it facilitates that emergent ordering of knowledge (and here’s where I saw cool connections between Goodwin’s and Johnson’s presentations), offers its most significant potential in terms of changing our paradigm of academic communication. Blogging constructs scholarship as accretive and public, rather than relying on the humanities tendency towards constructing knowledge as innately esoteric. In the humanities, there’s a ridiculous and paranoid impulse to conceal one’s knowledge, to solely own it. Weblogs, Goodwin concluded, can help to “only connect” humanities knowledge in (and into) the informatic society.

Again, another excellent panel that I was really glad I attended, and one I think that — taken in conjunction with the panel I blogged earlier — says a lot about the overlap between pedagogy and scholarship, between teaching and theory. I’d be curious to hear what other folks think.