Writing

Classroom Economics

preterite Economics, Education, Writing

Varoufakis gives a basic definition of instrumental rationality: “A person is instrumentally rational if she applies her resources efficiently in order to satisfy her preferences” (44). Later, he summarizes the equi-marginal principle: “Stop acting when the marginal utility (i.e. the contribution to utility from the last unit of activity) comes as close to (without being less than) the marginal dis-utility (i.e. the losses of utility following that last unit of utility)” and suggests that, “According to instrumental rationality, the rational person chooses the quantity which best satisfies her preferences all things considered (e.g. cost, fatigue, etc.). If preferences are translated into utility, to be instrumentally rational is to maximise utility subject to various constraints (e.g. fatigue, cost, etc.). And since utility is maximised when the Equi-marginal Principle is satisfied, the instrumentally rational person must always respect this principle” (50). Furthermore, Varoufakis notes the neoclassical economic contention that the equi-marginal principle “applies generally to any situation in which you have to choose between different quantities of a single ‘experience'”(51).

My interests are in trying to figure out how these principles might play out in the wired writing classroom: after all, if I’m writing about class, and if one consistent factor across all the definitions of class I’ve seen is that they carry either an explicit or implicit economic component in their definitions of position and mobility, then it would serve me well to attempt to apply the principles of that economic component of the definition of class to what happens in the writing classroom.

Let me offer one more quotation from Varoufakis on neoclassical economic models before I ask a few questions trying to figure out some of the economic workings of the wired writing classroom.
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The Blogging Panel

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

I took notes on other sessions I attended in San Antonio as well, but I figure it’s probably best if I only post on the ones that I found really engaging. That said, much of the notes I took on the weblogging presentation by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy are redundant, because they’ve put their presentations online. All were engaging, and all were radically different in style and content, and all three of them did a fine job of usefully pushing the boundaries of the way writing teachers talk and think about the practices associated with weblogging.
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Tarquinius Suberbus

preterite Education, Writing

Yanis Varoufakis, in Foundations of Economics, uses the Roman story of Tarquinius Superbus and the Sibyl of Cumae to argue that “information is not like other commodities”, because “you cannot know its value (not even have a good estimate of it) until you have it” (68). For an immense sum of gold, the Sibyl offers Tarquinius Superbus the nine books containing the entirety of human knowledge; Tarquinius refuses, responding that the price is too high. The Sibyl burns three of the nine books and then offers Tarquinius the remaining six for the same price. Tarquinius again refuses. The Sibyl burns three more books, and Tarquinius finally caves in, purchasing the remaining three books for the price of the original nine.

I would suggest that “information is not like other commodities” for other reasons, as well, including — of course — Walter Benjamin’s notion of reproducibility, but the unknowability of information before one has it is part of the motivational problem at the heart of education.
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Blogging as Local

preterite Computers, Writing

Via MetaFilter come the findings of Fernanda Viégas for the MIT Blog Survey. The comments to the MetaFilter post remark on the institutional boundedness of the study: indeed, Viégas acknowledges that “the results from this survey cannot be generalized to the entire blogging community; instead, these results are representative of the state of affairs in certain portions of the blogging world”. However, Viégas points towards the conclusion that “blogging is a world in flux where social norms are starting to flourish”, and offers some interesting specifics. My somewhat tangential question might be: if blogging practices are in fact culturally localized, how might we start talking about discourse communities and contact zones in relation to teaching, learning, and writing with technology? John at Jocalo has done an excellent job of pointing to how many of the discourses of composition are institutionally bound; what happens if we attempt to look at weblogging in the same way?

(Cross-posted at KairosNews, sort of to accentuate my point: lots of folks read there who don’t read here, and I suspect there may be the occasional visitor here who doesn’t read KairosNews all that often.)

Consumption and Content

preterite Computers, Writing

I never knew what RSS was, or RDF either. I’d see the acronyms in Dorothea’s writing, or in the hard tech blogs I occasionally visit, and understand that they were, yes, a technology, something about gathering content, but I’d tell myself that I didn’t much feel like putting yet another thing on my plate — not only the dissertation, but also wanting to learn MySQL and PHP and Actionscript and freshen up my Unix skills and maybe some Grep as well — and so I’d say to myself: it’s a tech thing, and you’re not that hardcore. But then IA mentioned it in a post, and she and Jill and Dorothea are people to whom I’ve learned to listen re tech issues.

And I’m hooked. Condensed content is fantastic, and I feel like I can read much, much more than I could before, when I was reading all content via my browser. As you might expect, if you know me, this raises a couple questions.
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The Encomiast

preterite Culture, Writing

Or maybe that title should be, “The Would-Be Encomiast”.

I’m on the internet social-networking space Orkut, at the invitation of a kind and generous friend, who also wrote me what Orkut calls a “Testimonial”. While I know it’s rude to question the product of generosity, I’m not quite sure how to feel about Orkut: it makes me feel like I’m in a very demonstrative and cliquish high school where the accepted practice is to walk around and demand of people: Will you be my friend? If it’s not clear from what I write here, I was never good at that. I’m a big-time introvert. But there’s something interesting going on there, in that closed-off private networked space: people are performing encomia, for no apparent reason.

Why would anyone do such a thing? We review movies, we give books a set of stars, but can we commodify people, reduce them to a value? Well, of course we can. I haven’t yet (written a Testimonial, I mean), because I’m not sure how to start: all the good qualities of the folks to whom I’m networked seem self-evident in their profiles and online writings, so how might I be original in my praise without seeming obvious or redundant? Anyway: the existence of such things on Orkut makes me ask: how common a form is the encomium these days? Letters of recommendation — yes, I’ve written a few of those for students. Political endorsements — yes, I’ve heard a few of those this year. But the first form is hardly public, and both forms seem more deliberative (you should hire this person, vote for this person) than epideictic (praise for the sake of praise). And in the wider world, testimonials themselves seem to hold little purpose other than as the advertising industry’s form of deliberative rhetoric. So I’m led to what feels like a very odd question, one to which I think the answer is less obvious than it might immediately seem: why — to what end or purpose — might we publicly praise people?
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Let’s Not Get Rich

preterite Computers, Writing

Houghton leads off his essay (PDF; also linked yesterday) with the familiar instrumental assertion that the production and distribution of knowledge are vital to national (and, cheerleaders for globalization would add, international) economic prosperity. To which my quick rejoinder would be: can we be a little more specific here? As far as economic prosperity goes, the studies I’ve seen are unequivocal in their conclusions: economic inequalities — the gap between the rich and the poor — have grown hugely in the past thirty years. So, Mr. Houghton: economic prosperity for whom?
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Academics & Circulation

preterite Computers, Education, Writing

The good Chris Worth, and others, have recently forwarded some excellent links; here are three around a common theme — communication and the circualtion of ideas as one aspect of the university’s academic commons — that I thought far too good to keep to myself. I’ll try to have more to say about them soon; tonight’s kind of an off night, with still a lot left to do (including responses owed to a number of people, bills to pay, et cetera: talk about a lame Friday night).

Crisis and Transition: the Economics of Scholarly Communication (PDF link); a very conventional neoclassical perspective, in which Dorothea and Charlie and others might have a few holes to poke.

Open Source Content in Education: Developing, Sharing, Expanding Resources; an article that borrows some points from the one above, but offers a different perspective — although I’m uncomfortable with the separating-out of “content”.

Commons and Communities in the University: Some Notes and Some Examples (PDF link); another critique of the neoclassical market perspective as applied to the university.

More tomorrow.

H. Economicus in School

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Education, Writing

I’ve been following in the footsteps of a lot of people, Aronowitz included, in my concerns over the vocationalization of education: Aronowitz writes that “Even for those schools that lay claim to the liberal intellectual tradition, the insistent pressure from many quarters to define themselves as sites of job preparation has. . . clouded their mission and their curriculum”, and goes on to suggest that “Perhaps the most urgent questions today concern whether the academic system has a genuine role in providing the space for learning, whether or not its curricula are useful to the corporate order” (125). I’m happy to see Aronowitz arguing against a lot of what Allan Bloom has to say, but Aronowitz does agree with Bloom on one significant point: the conventional notion of the “comprehensive and rigorous core” of the liberal education has devolved today into an sloppy shambles of elective courses with no intellectual consistency or center (135). Even the University of Chicago’s vaunted core curriculum is an incoherent and feather-light mess, Aronowitz — following Bloom — suggests. What Aronowitz longs for — but sees little chance of achieving — is “a radical intellectual project that comprehends historicity without falling into the pit of relativism. . . and that supports student choice, but does not submit to the commodification of knowledge or require ‘usefulness’ as a justification for study” (134). As you might guess, that word ‘usefulness’ got my attention, since the privileging of simple utility over all else is something I’ve been trying to struggle against.
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Hate and Valuation

preterite Writing

A student in Indiana State University’s Center for Biological Computing makes it quite clear in an extended and profane — but engaging — piece of writing why he or she really doesn’t like personal weblogs. While I don’t agree with the student’s points, and wince to see that much anger, I do share the concern that some weblogs do become little more than vehicles for the author’s vanity. At the same time, even that seems to me somehow worthwhile, especially if it helps build a community. I’m happy to see the brilliant Curtiss back from hiatus, but on this topic, he takes quite a different stance from mine, adamantly refusing to ground his positions “on value or personal sentiment“: is this a good idea when discussing matters political? Or simply a different mode of writing? The ISU student in question offers an amusingly vituperative Statement of Audience at the end that inadvertently does a wonderful job of connecting concerns about audience to James Britton’s useful (if now somewhat out of fashion) category of expressive (as opposed to transactional or poetic) discourse. Could Britton’s work help one develop a taxonomy of weblogs that might help the ISU student to be a little less concerned? How do teachers and students construct the purposes of weblogs, in and out of school?
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