Computers

About the Tools

preterite Computers, Openness

In comments, John writes:

I will agree that we haven’t developed many good tools for helping students re-enter their word-processed drafts. Or, perhaps more accurately, Microsoft has not incorporated the kinds of tools that writing teachers might recommend. There’s an interesting question: why hasn’t our profession (and groups like CCCC and WPA) found a way to challenge Microsoft to incorporate useful teaching tools into Word?

To which I want to say: I like the sentiment, but no, no, no, no, no. Don’t teachers who employ digital technologies in the classroom already do enough unpaid sales and marketing work for Microsoft? Aren’t we already doing more than enough to lock ourselves into using the tools of big corporations so that they can wring ever-increasing amounts of cash from our educational institutions?

Charlie Lowe is doing really good and important work with the open source community on developing digital tools for writing teachers, and the open source community is likely to be much more responsive (or at least responsive for the right reasons) in terms of developing those digital tools than Microsoft. Please, let’s get away from this logic that favors the relentless increase of privatization.

Left Behind

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

Collin’s post a while back, and the discussion that followed, got me thinking; it troubled me some in ways I couldn’t put my finger on. It’s not that I don’t think Collin makes good points in his post — he does, many of them, foremost of which being that the Hochman/Dean piece to which he responds is rather dated in its perspectives on technology and doesn’t represent the cutting edge — or even the blunt edge — of research in computers and writing.

And it’s not that I’m one of those people he blasts as being “behind” and orders to catch up: at age 12, I was installing additional RAM in my Atari 800 to kick it up from 8K to a whopping 48K, programming in BASIC, and — as Collin puts it — “futzing around with sound.” By 1987, I was on Usenet, and passing an 800K disk with a copy of Michael Joyce’s seminal hypertext “afternoon, a story” from friend to friend. 1988, I had a good grasp of basic Unix commands and was writing Turing machines in Philosophy class (it was Carnegie Mellon, which should explain a lot). 1989, I was learning how to program in LISP (which I’ve since completely forgotten) and making my own hypertexts (Apple called them “stacks”) with Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard. And so on. These days, I’m good with CSS and HTML, having been one of the first in my writing program to tinker with visual Web editors and the first to get sick of them; I know some ActionScript, a little PHP, a tiny smidgen of Perl, and I’ve forgotten lots of javascript; I can write a good regex without struggling too much; I have a part-time gig maintaining a godawful database cobbled together out of Oracle, ColdFusion, and a crawler that nobody supports; I’ve installed and tweaked and tinkered with various versions of Movable Type, WordPress, and Drupal (and completely fouled up installing two different types of wiki); and I can make various pixel-pushing digital-imaging applications stand up on their hind legs and bark in three-part harmony. (Yes, I’ve got that last one as a line item on my CV.) And, to borrow Collin’s words again, I even “know how to put together a QuickTime movie.” So no, I’m not behind.

But upon seeing Sharon’s response, I realized that it was the “behind” part of Collin’s post that bothered me some, and — thanks to Sharon — I also realized why it bothered me.

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4Cs: Final Thoughts

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

I had a fine time in San Francisco, and I’ll share John’s sentiment that CCCC is much more than the sessions. While I didn’t get a chance to chat with Steve Krause, and I missed Jenny Edbauer’s presentation, I was glad to finally meet Derek Mueller (whose presentation, it doesn’t hurt to say again, totally rocked), Daisy Pignetti (who is absolutely charming), and Joanna Howard (whose Montgomery College t-shirt John was wearing at the Thursday night meet-up in South Beach; I spent a semester at MC as an undergrad). And it was good to see Brad, Charlie, Clancy, Collin, and Dennis again, as well as many other colleagues and instructors past and present.

And now, as Collin points out, it’s time to start thinking about next year. I’ll share Collin’s sentiment that the “trend […] towards increasingly arbitrary and unclear categories” on the CCCC Call for Proposals is problematic, and I’ll add a question: do the proposal form’s “area clusters” perhaps actually hinder our disciplinary conversations? I noticed that a lot of bloggers went to a lot of the technology-focused panels, which of course is to be expected (it’s become axiomatic that the thing bloggers most like to blog about is blogging) — but I didn’t see any panels that had only one or two tech presenters; the tech panels were all tech, all the time (somebody, please, correct me if I’m wrong), which I think makes for a sort of echo chamber effect. It can also lead to attitudes like the one I (perhaps mistakenly) perceived in Anne Jones’s troubling “dark ages” comment; attitudes that pedagogies associated with digital technologies are somehow beyond rather than a part of composition’s body of knowledge. I wonder what might happen when composition reaches the disciplinary point that the New York Times reached on March 24, when it eliminated the Circuits section because of the way technology concerns had begun “migrating into the mainstream.”

4Cs: Evaluating Academic Weblogs

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

With my ongoing interest in understanding the pedagogical purposes of weblogs, in understanding what they do with the intersection of reading and writing and how they help teachers to help students write better, this was a panel I couldn’t miss. I wasn’t disappointed: the four presenters offered a really useful and provocative prism through which to start understanding these things. And, actually, I just realized that this is one of the panels who I didn’t ask for permission to blog my notes, which means that I’m going to be sending out some e-mails once I post this.

Bradley Bleck went first, offering the results of a pilot study he performed in his own classroom with an eye to how the technology of blogging might help to enhance student motivation in writing. In an American Literature course, Brad had students use weblogs as daily reading journals, with the hope of fostering inter-student dialogue beyond the “grading black hole” of paper journals. (In writing this, it’s suddenly more clear why Brad asked the questions he did at my presentation, and why I had such difficulty answering them; we’re all familiar with the tension between wanting students to learn for their own purposes but trying to use external pressures and motivations to get them to do so. I can only offer here the neoclassical notions of opportunity cost and the marginal rate of substitution: in a system of finite resources [including time] one does one thing at the expense of another, and the neoclassical economists love to talk about work versus leisure, like how many weblog entries is Jane willing to give up so she can go to that kegger, and what are the grading rewards she gets from doing so versus the social-psychological rewards versus the intrinsic hedonic rewards — because I think most composition teachers want their students to get those intrinsic hedonic rewards, that pleasure in the act of writing itself, but dammit it’s a struggle to make them like it.;-) Brad presented a lot of hard numbers on students’ uses of computers, but maintained some skepticism about some of their responses to his survey questions, as I think any effective teacher-researcher would. The students who liked weblogs the most were, perhaps not surprisingly, the ones who had the most difficulty with other assignments, but the most provocative finding Brad offered was that there was no apparent correlation between student blog quality and other writing ability. Which — as Brad acknowledged — seems like a really strong demand for further research beyond this pilot study.

I don’t think it takes anything away from the excellent presentations that Brad, Anne Jones, and Dennis Jerz gave to say that I thought Derek Mueller’s presentation “Ping: Readdressing Audience in the Blogosphere” was absolutely extraordinary; I characterized it to Clancy as a tour de force, and I won’t be able to even come close to doing it justice here, but I’ll at least attempt to offer a brief sketch of Derek’s ideas.

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4Cs: Weblogs as Social Action

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Writing

I’ve had a much busier conference experience than I did last year, attending a whole lot of presentations and wanting to attend even more. I won’t blog all the ones I go to — sometimes I like to just sit and listen — but I’ll do my best to do justice to the ones I do take notes on. I’ve been trying to ask people for permission to blog their sessions, with — for the most part — success, but I’ll acknowledge when I haven’t been able to ask presenters for permission. As always, it’s great seeing colleagues in the halls and sessions, folks I haven’t seen in a while, and I’m particularly glad to put more faces to names that I’ve known only by their writing.

Anyway: went to the first session of the conference with Lanette Cadle, Daisy Pignetti, and Clancy Ratliff talking about thinking of weblogs as social action. Good stuff, and raised some really interesting questions for me about the different rhetorical and/or pedagogical uses to which weblog writing gets put.

Lanette Cadle began with Jill Walker’s now-canonical definition of the weblog and then described her study focusing on the “personal” weblogs of girls between 15 and 22 at LiveJournal. Sixty-seven percent of the 4.35 million LiveJournalers are female, even though women are historically underrepresented on weblogs. According to Cadle, these women are remediating (to use the term Bolter and Grusin have given a new currency that intersects in problematic ways with how Mike Rose and other scholars use it) the historical genre of the diary: the weblog, Cadle suggests, is the paper diary plus links. The rhetorical activities on these girls’ weblogs include “Daily log[s], vents and raves, links, comments, quizzes, memes, and images,” and in an interesting aside, Cadle distinguished these activities from those of “the information-conveying political weblog.”

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On Scarcity

preterite Asides, Computers, Economics, Writing

For the first time in a long time, my blogroll extends. The limitations imposed by my “twenty” theme were problematic: the theory I’ve been working through for my CCCC presentation suggests that scarcity often serves as a technology of domination. This is, of course, an obvious economic insight, but one that I’d never thought to apply to writing.

What Do Weblogs Do?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

I’ve been meaning to respond to Clancy’s post on assessing student weblogs for a while, but in and around reading Wayne Booth and not having fully sorted out my own thoughts on student weblogging, it took me a while to get around to it. I was going to post this as a comment at her place, but it looks like there are some technical difficulties going on over there as I write this, so here goes.

Clancy notes that my post a while back on the Ask MetaFilter thread on life-changing experiences got her thinking about how writing teachers who ask students to maintain weblogs evaluate what their students write. Her considerations of the nature of assessment when applied to weblog writing, while not a response to me :-), offer a lot to think about. Clancy seems to me to make two major points: first, what she thinks the weblog should do, “which is primarily to enhance community in the classroom, but then they invariably end up learning a lot about audience and rhetorical practices by engaging in the conversation, too.” Second, how she evaluates that writing — and it sounds to me like she’s arguing that her grading policy (essentially, just participate) places primary importance on the community-enhancement function, and the latter part — what students learn about rhetoric by engaging in that participation — will come naturally out of the first and needs or bears no evaluation of its own. (Is that fair, Clancy?)

In my own pedagogy, I’m still a little uncertain about what it is that weblogs teach students in the classroom.

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Zuboff, Maxmin, and Elbow

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Writing

In The Support Economy, Zuboff and Maxmin offer “metaprinciples” for what they call the new “distributed capitalism.” I’ll quote some of the more interesting ones here.

  • All value resides in individuals. […] Individuals [rather than enterprises] are recognized as the source of all value and all cash flow. […] Distributed capitalism thus entails a shift in commercial logic from consumer to individual, as momentous as the eighteenth-century shift in political logic from subject to citizen.
  • Distributed value necessitates distributed structures among all aspects of the enterprise. Value is distributed, lodged in individuals in individual space. This is the common origin for corresponding distributed structures in every aspect of the enterprise. It necessitates distributed production, distributed ownership, and distributed control.
  • Relationship economics is the framework for wealth creation. Distributed capitalism creates new wealth from the essential building blocks of relationships with [perhaps ‘among’?] individuals. Using the new framework of relationship economics, enterprises […] invest in commitment and trust in order to maximize realized relationship value.
  • All commercial practices are aligned with the individual. Under distributed capitalism, commercial practices are aligned with the interests of individuals […] . This is operationalized by a strict dictate that cannot be compromised: no cash is released […] until the individual pays. […] Cash flow is thus the essential measure of value realization.
  • New valuation methods reflect the primacy of individual space. New approaches to valuation emphasize the intellectual, emotional, behavioral, and digital assets that enable infinite configuration, sustain alliances among enterprises, and nourish relations of deep support with individuals. (321-323)

Now, some of this sounds like the bad old new-economy cheerleading, and I wonder how much of that comes out of Maxmin’s corporate background (founder and Chairman of Global Brand Development, former CEO of Volvo UK and Laura Ashley, et cetera) — but if you read closely, there’s some genuinely revolutionary stuff in there.
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Educational Comment Spam

preterite Computers, Education

I’ve been receiving comment spam lately from degreeusa.com (under the cover of other URLs), who claim an affiliation with the University of Phoenix (note the alternate non-.edu URL). Usually, I don’t worry too much about comment spam: just put them into MT-Blacklist (my personal blocklist now has over 2,000 entries, with many naughty words) and go along my merry way. But this comment spam I found particularly irritating, because it associated itself with for-profit education. Now, I’ve taught for the for-profit UMass Division of Continuing Education (note the non-.edu URL), and I have to say, I don’t much like them, both for the way they treat their teachers, and for the downright nasty practices they’ve historically engaged in against academic labor. But maybe this example will highlight the particular problems I see with online for-profit education:
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Teaching’s Assembly Line

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

Today was a good teaching day with my sections of computer-lab first year composition. I’m happy to see the students, and I was grinning when I left campus. I like them a lot. And we got a lot done today, even though I overplanned, like I always do, and we didn’t get to everything I had in mind, so there’ll be plenty of overlap and catch-up time with the new add/drop students.

As I indicated yesterday, we did break up the activities, moving from individual writing to one-on-one peer interaction to individual writing to group sharing and discussion, back to peer work and individual writing. This back-and-forth is something, to me, that feels much more native to the computer classroom than to the paper-and-pen classroom. In the paper-and-pen classroom, a discussion or one-on-one peer work or small group collaborative writing can go on for the entire class session, but in the computer classroom, I always feel like I’ve got to mix things up and shift from task to task, and I wonder why it’s so.
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