Compositional Enlightenment Revisited

I don't know how many of you will read this since the class is practically complete.  However, I just wanted to make a final post that you may catch when nostalgically revisiting the blog someday.  If you don't want to read what I learned from blogging in Eng 529a, then just go to the bottom.  I have a list of thank yous to each person associated with the class (that I can remember).  If I skipped your name, let me know.  I'll put in a thank you :)  So now on to how I've been enlightened in this class...

Things I Learned From This Class 

(This is my enlightenment inspired font choice. Classy looking, huh? )

I find communicating on blogs difficult.

• There's just too much time to think.  I second guess myself in ways that I do not verbally.  If I say something off-putting (as I have been known to do), I know immediately and can try to diffuse it.  However, if I type it into a blog, not only do my colleagues and faculty know I say foolish things, but so does whoever chooses to mosey into our blog.
• When I did write on the blog, I tried to synthesize or compare a couple of readings, all of which were brand new to me.  Perhaps that was engaging well, or perhaps it was overcommitment.  Regardless, it made that part of the blogging process take concerted effort, and thus limited how much I posted.
• In the comments section I had some trepidation too.  Many (though not all) of the people in the class are from the same school. When they talked, there was a familiarity that I knew I did not have.  I felt like I might be intruding on a conversation between friends.

• I do think that writing on blogs has use in that it makes students creatively interact with the readings.  It certainly forced me to read deeply.  I might include it in a class on interpersonal communication to allow students to evaluate the differences between face to face and mediated communication.

Foucault is not always depressing--just usually.  He also looks like Christopher Lloyd

•  Discourses of power own me in my class.  It wasn't until after reading Foucault (again) that I realized how unquestioningly I follow argumentative structures in my classes.  Seriously.  I never even questioned it.

The concept of "voice" is as volatile here as in other disciplines.

•  Voice in composition is analogous to agency in the communication world.  Marx's ideas of structure and superstructure didn't allow enough space for people to choose.  Theorists Burke granted much greater agency to the rhetor.  Giddens created structuration as kind of a middle ground between the two (an extreme oversimplification, I know).
• Interestingly, one of the biggest debates in Theology is Arminianism, vs. Calvinism.  Arminianism states that we choose our faith and we choose our destiny.  Calvinism is much more deterministic.
• All these perspectives ask "Do we make ourselves, or do our surroundings make us"?  The arguments about the maker and the made transcend discipline.  I've come to the conclusion that the made or being made is just a question about the human condition that we will never solve.  I also believe that voice, structure/agency, nature/nurture, Calvinism/Arminianism might just be false binaries.

Bob Flannagan.  Wow.
 

•  Personal, painful performance art in my composition class?  Crip theory?  I found this section to be the most challenging in the class and the most personally condemning.  Why don't I want to use these pedagogical tools in my class?  It has nothing to do with composition and everything to do with me.  I'm too uncomfortable with the human body and all it's variations to do this.  Maybe I will improve in the future.

 The language I use in my syllabus says more about me than about the class I'm designing.  Scary. 

• I will never look at a syllabus the same way again. Personal pronouns are more revealing than I had ever considered.  I wonder if the theory by which I structure my classes is undermined by the very was I position myself in writing in relation to my students.  I just had not questioned this at all either.

The Division between English Composition and Communication had political underpinnings that have only made the division even greater.

• I find it humorous that if you wanted to teach public speaking, or I wanted to teach composition, we would be viewed as interdisciplinary.  The divisions we have made are being proven more and more arbitrary, but the political structure, rhetoric, and economics of the University demonstrate that there will be no reuniting anytime soon.

 The English department has some pretty good folks in it.

• So, looking back on the class and the blog, I think I've discovered much about the theory that is out there, and what I am doing wrong.  So I'll finish with a round of thanks to everyone in class.  If I skip anyone, I apologize, I'm going on memory here, and my brain is full.

 

The Official Thank You List

Thanks, Dr. Rouzie, for reeling me in when I went adrift, and for directing me to WAC.  I think this discourse will inform my scholarship for years.

Thanks Dede, for working with me on my late draft.

Thanks Brianna, for letting me know when I'm not funny and being nice to me anyway.  Also, thanks for your website.  I plan to actually use it to figure out that Twitter thingee.

Thanks Matt squared.  The double Matt powerhouse kept the conversation interesting, and gave me someone to commiserate on living with grad school and young kids.

Thanks Amanda, for promoting Appalachia, and for directing my emails to the appropriate people.

Thanks Sarah, for always asking the questions that I couldn't pretend to answer.

Thanks Ashley, for letting me know I did not make you (entirely) angry 

Thanks DC for writing about topics that I am utterly uninformed about.  Bifflebonk my friend.

Thanks Kate, for voicing your opinion about what needs to be treated with caution.  Just because an analogy works, does not mean it is wise or helpful.

Thanks Hillery, for always excellent and clear presentations.  You know what you think and why you think it.  That level of articulation never ceases to amaze me.

Thanks, Jonathan, for showing me how blogging is done.  I am impressed with how you use this medium.

Thanks Simone, for commenting on my blog posts and identifying with my concerns.  It made me feel more a part of the class, and I really appreciate it!

Thanks, James for introducing me to Postman.  I know its hard to believe, but I'd previously read nothing from Postman.  My future in argumentation will be drawing a bit upon him.

Yours Truly…

(The Now Enlightened) Aaron Duncan

Post class discussion :P

Hey, I just realized I never posted a post class discussion...

I wanted to (belatedly) thank everyone for participating in two really heavy readings in one class period.  We'll just say that since the session title was "Post Everything"  I decided to delay the discussion to when we'd completed everything because I'm that witty.  It isn't true, but we'll go with it. 

Sarah, I hope your date sacrifice will not be in vain.  Critical rhetoric does have much to offer, but, as Dr. Rouzie pointed out after my original post, maybe the direct desire to connect theory and pedagogy together is itself problematic.  Regardless, the fact that so many of you read it, and interacted on specific points of interest moved the conversation forward.  I really did not expect the volatility with the discussion on plagiarism, so I wish I'd spent more time linking it to critical rhetoric.  Maybe it could inform our understanding of plagiarism to some degree.  Sarah's question about doxa an kairos, and where voice rests in critical rhetoric made me think.  I had no idea where voice would be.  I've come to the conclusion that voice rests with the critic's agency to continue questioning.  Even though meaning arrives collectively, the ability to continue to question it gives voice to the individual "calling in the wilderness".  Or, at least that's a thought.

Also, Dr. Rouzie dismissed one of my arguments concerning postmodernism as "old" and not necessarily worthy of consideration.  We will meet again Dr. Rouzie!  :)  Actually, I'd like to engage it further some day, because I think it's a rather valid argument (but I'm of course the learner here).

Thanks again everybody!

Aaron

Finals Week + Caffeine Crash + The Doors = Blog Reflection

This is the End,

my only friend, the End.

I'm going to take a page from Amanda's book/blog and begin with some background concerning my own experience with them that, I hope, will provide some insight (to at least me) about my own work in the 592 blog this quarter.  I have always been intrigued by the concept of blogs, but have found that every time I attempt my own I fail miserably.  I had the same problem with diaries and journals as a child.  I do so thoroughly love freewriting though -- that to me is always a liberating experience.  So I wonder, why am I okay with freewriting and not so much with blogging?  I think a lot of it has to do with structure.  The posts I've done this quarter have all taken me about and hour and a half to two hours to compose, and they weren't even that structured.  

And yet I had incredible anxiety writing them the entire time, just as I'm having incredible anxiety writing this one.  Blogs are public, too.  Oh so public.  Not that I'm opposed to public sharing (I have a Facebook, after all) but I guess I just get extra nervous when I know I have to write something as intelligent as the posts of my peers and that is a daunting, unpleasant task for me.  Whereas freewriting is pretty private and requires no structure.

I guess I'm bringing a different perspective to the "blog as a good way to continue the discussions of class" perspective in that while yes, I do believe it functions as that for some people, I don't feel like it really functions that way for me as I would like it to.  For example, I've noticed that what I like about in-class discussion is the opportunity to process out loud.  I don't feel like I have to come to class with a definite, structured thing to say about the readings.  Rather, I like that I can come with vague ideas, throw them out there, and get different perspectives on it.  Whereas in the blogosphere, I feel like I have to be structurally and logically sound before I post anything.  Does any of this make sense or is it purely idiosyncratic?  Is it just that old devil resistance?

So maybe blogging is good after all, because it forces me to engage in a way I don't necessarily want to -- maybe it's good because I have to beat resistance to do it.  But at the same time, I personally have felt largely disconnected when moving within the space of the blog.  I guess it's a perspective thing, and I'm not quite sure how to go about changing mine to match others'.  We had to blog in Victorian Lit and I felt the same way about it as I do now.  I did, however, enjoy creating the wiki in that class for my final project, so I don't know what that's all about. Maybe because it was clearly rooted in my final, and therefore I felt the urgency of the situation that helped me compose.  Just speculations, really.  

I also want to say that even though I myself haven't had the most positive experience blogging doesn't mean I haven't thoroughly enjoyed reading everyone's posts.  It gives me great hope to read everything you guys write because so far I haven't seen anything unsophisticated aside from my own ruminations.  My personal favorite aspect of the blog has been the ever-shifting background image, videos, memes, and picture sharing that you all have used to demonstrate your intellectual connections to pop culture and your senses of humor -- sides of you I have enjoyed creeping on.

I'll just leave this here :)

Placing Theory

My suspicion is that my whole sense of what it means to blog will forever be influenced by the first essay I read on the subject, which coincided with the first blogging I ever did in my life , and which, coincidentally, was also the first real online posting I had ever done in any way shape or form.

The first kind of research or work on blogging I had ever done was, like Matthew, in the Computers and Composition course, where I read Tim Lindgren’s Kairos article, “Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs.” Overall, Lindgren looks at blogging as a way of building and sharing place- connections on a potentially global scale…blogging our localized “places” builds those relationships for ourselves, and potentially gives readers around the world examples of place-connection that they can utilize or modify for their own locales. The underlying effect of reading this essay so early in my experience with blogs is that I tend to look at all blogging as a place-building process. My sense is that, perhaps not wholly consciously, I’ve been looking at my blog entries as a way to dig me a nice little niche in theory land where I can live out my days (maybe with a dog and a nice garden out back). So it’s possible that my mental susceptibility has actually crystallized into a definition of “blogging” that I can’t shake, for better or worse.

I’m not sure this is entirely the best thing, depending on how you look at it. I can certainly see the danger of theoretical entrenchment, or entrenchment of any kind, as a potential negative. But looking back at the blogging I’ve done, I do see a themes emerging, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. Is there anything necessarily bad about establishing particular interests? Must it follow that, in forming interests or ideas, we somehow—even unknowingly—shut out others? Ultimately, I think what this has done for my sense of blogging and academic writing is to influence my approach to blogging as still somewhat solitary—I use it to build a sense within and for myself, more perhaps than to converse directly with others. Whether or not this becomes a problem depends, I suppose, on the blog in question and its wider purpose. Case in point: could anyone other than me possibly get much from this particular entry?

Blogging About Blogging

Before this quarter, the only other time I had to write on a blog was the last time I took a class with Dr. Rouzie. (Computers and Composition course). At the time (Winter 2011), I realized that not only was I not particularly good at design or bringing in images, video, links, etc to my posts. As I reviewed my posts for this quarter, I see that that is still the case. The only time I used images or links was when I posted my introductory and reflective posts for our discussion on Gee’s article. All of my other posts were just text. So, to avoid the “just text” post again, I think I’ll bring in some images:

Here, of course, I’m mainly bringing in images because I found them funny, I wanted to be multi-modal, and because my medium allows it. Of course, as I started getting at in my post on Yancey, sometimes I wonder about the necessity of being multi-modal.

Certainly others in the class have demonstrated a wonderful ability to use images, videos, etc very effectively. I applaud everyone’s efforts in making this blog multi-modal. The multi-modal features have greatly increased my enjoyment of many others’ posts. Generally, others’ multi-modal components had a pretty clear purpose.

Beyond the multi-modal components and capabilities, however, I found the function and use of the blog this quarter to be very important for me in both reading others’ posts and adding my own. The main advantage in my view is that on the blog I’ve read others’ great contributions to our discussion and application of the readings that we did not get to in class discussion. This considerably increased my understanding of some of the readings.

One disadvantage to the in-class discussion (which is always the case): With the way conversation and discussion goes in class, we just can’t cover all the readings as thoroughly as we might like. So, some readings are left with little attention. Additionally, as discussion moves in one direction, people usually only add something that is related to what is being discussed, and so those random unrelated things some of us would like to add or discuss from the readings might be left unsaid.

This is where I think the blog helped make up for some of the disadvantages of the discussion. For a couple of my posts, I wrote about readings that I thought hadn’t been discussed very much in class but that I had something to say about. Others in class did the same thing. I’m sure most of us know that feeling of frustration when in other classes we’ve read 4 or 5 articles for each class and then only discussed 2 of them, never returning to the neglected articles. This is one reason I liked the blog. We had a space to discuss the articles we didn’t have much time for in class.

Feeling Peculiar. Peculiar!?

First, I would like to echo others’ sentiments of weariness from writing finals. For me, this post comes in-between finishing a 20 page essay for History of the English Language and restarting my final essay. So, if this post isn’t very eloquent or insightful, I apologize.

I was considering posting Mr. Harding’s therapy session from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as front material for this post, but the video is somewhat offensive, and I thought, unproductive in this setting. Nevertheless, if you’d like to laugh along with me while your reading, feel free to Google.

It was interesting to read some posts, which found this space to be more perfunctory than productive. My “approach” to this writing space has been to wait to post until I felt as if I had to write something (not in the sense that I waited until the deadline to post, although that might have happened on once occasion, but rather I felt that if I my writing and thinking would be better if I waited until I couldn’t not write). For me, then, at least, I felt like my writing in this space was engaging for me as a writer. Of course, I don’t assume that it as was engaging for any readers.

Like many of you, I think that a “required” move, when using a blog space in a classroom setting is critiquing the blog, yes, in terms of its affordances, but also in terms of what it expects from us as writers. If we don’t do this, inevitably, the space becomes a remediation of that kind of writing we all hate doing, something akin to the weekly reading reflection, which exists more for accountability purposes than it does to encourage engagement with the reading (or, at least, this has been my experience). So, I think that this final blog posting is, potentially, the most useful to me personally, because it gives us space to reflect upon the material constraints of the space, and the way such a space has acted upon us, has generated certain outcomes and responses.

In another way, because this writing comes at such a difficult (physically, mentally, emotionally) time in the year, the writing seems to be influenced and predominated by those factors, so that this writing (any writing) feels almost hollow.

What I most enjoy(ed) about the blog space—getting a sense for all of your writing, and seeing how our online discussions are influencing each other’s thought processes, areas of interest, scholarship. Even if we weren’t all as engaged with the space as I found myself being, I enjoyed getting a feel for others’ writing, and this is something that we almost never get to do in a graduate seminar. For example, I found myself increasingly drawn to Matt Vetter’s posts because his approaches always seem well thought out, interesting, and vetted (hehehe) in theory. Similarly, Ashley’s engaged posts almost always seemed to take a different approach to the material than I typically would, so it was interesting to get a layered reading of our canon of texts. 

In any case, I found that this experience was challenging and fulfilling, but I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way. I enjoyed learning from everyone in this space and throughout this quarter, and I hope that my utilization of this space has, likewise, been at least somewhat beneficial as well.

Late(ly) I've Been Thinking...

First, my apologies for being a little late on this. I thought that we'd moved the due date for the self-reflection posts back to the 7th, but I'm guessing since everyone has already posted, that I wrote that down wrong.  And I was putting this off, because I'm actually really uncomfortable with doing this self-reflection in a public space. I asked Dr. Rouzie about sending this to him as an email instead of posting it here, but that was a no-go.  So, I'm struggling with how to modify my self-reflection with an awareness of how that reflection may deepen some of the divides that shaped my blog participation.

It's been obvious all quarter that we came into the classroom with different expectations from the seminar format, and with different levels of dis/comfort with the way that we each enacted those expectations.  Here, I'm going to borrow from Ashley to discuss how that difference appeared to me.

Ashely writes:

What I'm arguing is that we should [be forced to] engage with the material we read. Class discussion doesn't really cut it because this is what discussion is actually like:

Someone: blahblahblah what I think

Someone: *cuts them off* blahblah this is what I study and it's great

Someone: well I do this with my students and it's always been great

Someone: FOUCAULT

Someone: blahblah unrelated 12-minute ranting

Someone: name droppers be droppin'

Someone: I disagree *cries* 

Dr. Rouzie: let's talk about the article? thanks for coming. 

 How I see the seminar discussion:

Someone: I read Article X or Theorist Y as saying Z" and that makes me wonder about Z+something else.

Someone: *jumps in* Hey, what if we look at it through the lens of this other theorist/y?

Someone: offers an example from his own classroom experience, helping to ground the theory and deepen our understanding of it

Someone: FOUCAULT

Someone: synthesizes the class discussion with his own work and discusses possible intersections that would otherwise not be available to the members of the seminar, thus increasing everyone's breadth of understanding about the larger academic discussion.

Someone: engages theory/ist Y and theorists/ies A, B, and C and identifies useful tensions/agreements/confusions between and among them.

Someone: disagrees, which is often the most useful part of the discussion because it lets the other someones know when they've gone off the rails about X, Y, or Z... and isn't the point of seminar to float ideas that we might later develop into conference papers/journal articles/dissertation chapters/etc.?

The tension between those of us who are the someones who experience seminar discussion the way that Ashley has experienced it, and those of us who experience it as useful, generative discourse, was really palpable in this seminar, and it's a tension that I don't think I've felt so keenly since I was an undergraduate. I was deeply aware of the ways in which my own participation exacerbated the frustration that others were feeling, and spent a lot of time this quarter reflecting on how to mitigate that without losing what is the most valuable part of the academic process for me, exactly that intense engagement with peers that is how I experience seminar discussion.

I was also keenly aware of failing to do a good job mitigating my role in frustrating others, of being someone who Ashley has described as a "name-dropper'" and whose contributions she heard as rants or as blahblahblah.  So I had many stern conversations with myself about whether or not I should just shut the fuck up.  They went something like this:

Self: Just shut the fuck up in class tomorrow, Self, okay?  Really.  Give it a rest.
Self: But the only way I understand this material is by engaging in the conversation, and I really need to understand this stuff if I'm going to do anything in the field.
Self: Seriously.  Just shut the fuck up.
Self: It's seminar.  That's like saying "just don't turn in the final paper" or "don't prepare for your presentation." Self, you're essentially telling me not to do the work of the class.
Self: No, I'm not. I'm telling you to shut the fuck up.
Self: How about if I just say less?
Self: Good luck with that.

I made an effort to say less, and to identify when was I was saying was boring/angering/frustrating someone(s) else. I moved to the back of the classroom.  I bought an iPad and took more notes on what other people had to say as a way to synthesize the material.

It never felt like it made very much of a difference, largely because I don't understand why the conversation is frustrating to other people and so it's hard to know how to modify my behavior to meet needs that I don't understand and which were never made clear to me.

All of which gets, finally, to self-reflecting on my participation on the blog.  I used it as a space to practice shutting the fuck up most of the time.  So my responses were limited.  I understood that I was making it difficult for some people to speak in the classroom, and didn't want to replicate that experience on the blog. I didn't want to extend the discomfort of the classroom to this medium.

So, before I close, I want to say that in quoting Ashley, I am not trying to "call her out" or criticize her; only to respond to her post.  I'm thankful to her for addressing this tension so openly, because it gave me a place of entry into the conversation for my ow self-reflection. Which, again, I am really uncomfortable with now having done.

Sarah

I used to hate the word "affordances"

Hi.

I just wrote a 12-page paper for Modernism. It wasn't that bad. But my brain--like all of yours--is also dying at a rapid pace. However, we will prevail.

As we always do.

I bring up Modernism because it allows me to view blogging for this class differently. (Although I do this hesitantly, because the last time I talked about Modernism only three people read the post.) We had to write responses in my Modernism class. If we wrote six two-page responses in 10 weeks, we received credit. It was just something that we had to do. Imagine how difficult it sometimes was to engage with material in our own field (sorry non-comp people for your struggles) and then imagine writing about stuff that will never have meaning in your research like The Waste Land. 

What I'm arguing is that we should [be forced to] engage with the material we read. Class discussion doesn't really cut it because this is what discussion is actually like:

Someone: blahblahblah what I think

Someone: *cuts them off* blahblah this is what I study and it's great

Someone: well I do this with my students and it's always been great

Someone: FOUCAULT

Someone: blahblah unrelated 12-minute ranting

Someone: name droppers be droppin'

Someone: I disagree *cries* 

Dr. Rouzie: let's talk about the article? thanks for coming. 

Obviously we all have fallen into any of those categories (including me, because I can do more than cry), and it does not always make for a productive class discussion. So I see the blog as a way for the students who cannot or choose not to speak in class to say something. And, unlike my Modernism responses that only the teacher [maybe] reads, it is a chance to hear response.

This is idyllic. At times I rolled my eyes before checking posts, dreading the engagement I'd have to muster in order to respond. BUT I also think I learned more from doing it. And to me, that's what suffering through school is about.

When I posted about Modernism meeting Theory and only Aaron responded, I thought I was an idiot. It was personal. And even though that post was not fascinating, I wanted you all to respond. Or to take the time to tell me I was an idiot so it wasn't simply paranoia. So when my last blog post received lots of attention (EGO BOOSTERRRRRRRRRRRR), it made the blogging experience a whole lot better.

I'm researching this need for approval as part of my final project. Henry Jenkins claims the participatory culture (which is all of us since we're practicing online socializing like blogging) needs to know contributions matter in the community. I argue (here, not in my final paper) that if we were able to truly engage and devote time to this blog, it wouldn't seem so terrible. We would feel like what we were saying mattered.

What you have said on this blog has mattered. Even if the responses were forced and your post didn't get read by all 15 people in the class, someone read your thoughts. What was the day earlier in the quarter when Dr. Rouzie mentioned that little bits of information stick with students and they are able to use them in new ways later on? That's how I view our contributions on this blog. Either we will remember or we can look back and remember. (Oh geez, I sound like a football coach giving an inspirational speech.)

I might not enjoy reading posts or commenting or writing my own, but it sure as hell was a lot better than writing something with a check mark and a plus sign that will never be thought about again.



P.S. I rarely saw classmates using video or images in their posts. Like this one, it is devoid of even links. (James, you were constant in video postage. Props to you.) It makes me wonder if the subject matter was different if we would use the affordances of a blog differently. I'm sure I could find a hilarious video of some punks acting out or reading The Waste Land. But Foucault? All I could find was a Ryan Gosling meme and an old debate on YouTube. What kinds of pictures are we supposed to include? Do you really want to see what I look like right now as I write this? Because I could include an emo-girl duck-lip picture. No? I rest my case.

P.S.S. I am SO GLAD none of us accidentally deleted each others' comments.

Some Final Thoughts

Well...it's about that time of the year. Synapses are sputtering. My world is mediated solely through Microsoft word and the 13.5" screen of my mac. My wife excuses the fact that I'm curled in fetal position in my dark office while visions of sugared Foucaults dance through my head. I should probably take a load of dirty coffee mugs down to the sink now...but I'll leave them around for a while, if only to remind me of all the good times we've had the last 76 consecutive hours.

In other words, I'm delirious and tired and ready to start reflecting. I believe (unless I heard this wrong) that this last period's post is supposed to be a reflection on the course blog generally, though I'm beginning to think I misinterpreted this since I only see a couple posts that would be classified this way (maybe they're still coming?). I'll stay the course regardless though.

As I started to say in my comment on Hillery's latest post, I'm torn with regard to the blog's potential in a course. As you can tell by my previous posts, what I like about the blog is the ability to bring in exterior electronic sources that you wouldn't normally be able to do during class discussion. It seems the most obvious advantage of having a blog component to a course. But Matthew's eloquent final post has me thinking about the potential of incorporating some running meta-commentaries alongside (or inside?) the blog discourse. I suppose that this is actually happening right now...as I'm bringing it up in the context of a "final reflective post"...but it would be interesting to have some function of technological self-reflexivity built into a course blog that is always turning back and referring to/analyzing itself as an instantiation of electronic discourse (a la Postman and Kubey). I think this might be most interesting in analyzing the social dynamics of the blog and how discourse is shaped (who is silenced, who is voiced, how is language impacted, etc.) via each contributor's unique notion of themselves as a writing subject within the space. This might also just be really annoying and get so self-conscious as to implode, but I think it would be an interesting experiment. It might also allow for a space in which classroom communication and discourse becomes the subject of discourse (and so wouldn't just mimic the structure and power dynamics established by personalities in the physical classroom). It could be a project that forces students to self-consciously play with dynamics that go largely unexplored in a classroom setting (electronic vs. embodied personalities, classroom power dynamics, silencing/censoring, etc.) What would such a blog look like? How would you make such a space completely "safe" (which I think it would have to be in order to succeed)?

Anyway...for the sake of consistency, my final blog video:

What All Of Your Students Are Really Thinking At The End Of The Quarter...

Sorry, came across this and couldn't not post. Real final post coming soon...

"This is the end, beautiful friend, the end"

For your listening enjoyment, whilst reading the following post:

As I think about reflecting on the course, and specifically on the blog, Jim Morrison’s voice continues to boom in my head. Why am I so happy to see this blog come to its close? Well, let me explain. First, I always felt so pressured to create original and interesting posts, which was somewhat difficult, since we discussed so much in class and there were so many of us posting and commenting. Once I’d figure it out, I’d spend hours composing the post (losing one along the way, which caused a mini-breakdown in the middle of an-already-too-stressful weekend) and then check daily, asking aloud to my girlfriend, Ginny, “I wonder if anyone commented on my blog post?!” Now it’s become a joke, something she says before she opens her laptop. (No lie: she just asked our cat, "Frosty, did anyone comment on your blog post?!"). The sad thing is I really was anxious to see who had commented and what feedback he/she had provided, but not many people did. There are still some posts with no comments! "What up with that?" I think there were so many posts, and we are all so busy reading a gazillion other things, that there wasn’t much time to fully and thoughtfully read and comment on many posts beyond the required amount. Second, in my opinion, blogs aren’t really that much of an advance in an attempt to be tech-savvy in a course. They are linear and somewhat rigid, and when they are driven by mandates, I find them less exciting. I know, I’m a horrible person/student for saying all of this, but honestly: I hate blogs and blogging.

I did, however, appreciate the pre-presentation blogs because they were helpful in grounding us not only in the reading for the day’s discussion, but the presenter’s approach to the discussion as well. Instead of the mandatory three blogging periods in which everyone posts, I think it would be beneficial to have two people responsible for posting each week (either two independent posts or one main post with one main response post), so everyone is engaged in the same conversation rather than scant comments here and there, spread thin across forty-some posts. I think that’s the main issue for me: I’d rather comment in order to become a part of a conversation that feels on-going and fluid, rather than posting on something that feels static and immobile. Does that make sense?

And what did I <<heart>> about the blogging experience? Well, for one, I realized how adept and intelligent my colleagues are. The level of quality, commitment, and critical thinking in each post was stellar, and I learned a lot about everyone’s individual academic interests from the outside source material each person brought to the table (or maybe screen is more appropriate). The videos, images, memes, and backgrounds were amusing and made this class blogging experience better than others in the past that merely used the boresville Blackboard version.

I’m curious. How many of you use blogs in your composition classrooms, and how well do they go over? If we ask students to blog without putting number/time restrictions on them, will they actually blog and respond? What if we had students create their own personal blog that was meant to converge the class and their life? How might that go over? I’m certainly not giving up on blogging - I think the genre could be more fruitful with some insight and creativity.

For Stupid Fun

And the Blog Post Oscars go to….

Best post: “Queering Pinterest: An Experiment in Disruption” by Matt Vetter

Best post soundtrack: “Reading ‘Hectic Zen’” by Jonathon Harris

Best quote: “Don’t be an iPad!” – Matt Vetter

Best title: “Anzaldua, Orgasms, and Pedagogy!” by Aaron Duncan

Best meme in a supporting role: “Hey Girl. I loved your blog post today” by Ashley Evans (featuring Ryan Gosling)

Best image in a supporting role: James Gee caricature by Matthew Nunes

Best video in a supporting role: Postman interview in “Post-Everything…” by James Miranda

Who do you vote for?

(Sorry there are no outside sources or super-erudite thoughts here. It's just me being researched-out.)

The Agent and the Frame: Paradigmatic Tensions, Authority, and the Blog of ENG 592A

Paradigmatic Tensions

Do you remember Byron Hawk's "Rhetoric and Network Culture"? He begins the work, drawing from Mark C. Taylor's The Moment of Complexity, by claiming that "the desire for simplicity has haunted rhetoric and composition for most of its history." He then positions two opposing paradigms in composition/pedagogy theory: expressivism which abandons systematized theories of writing and teaching altogether, and process (and postprocess)-oriented theories enacted by "rhetoricians of various stripes who have tried to produce simple systems that make writing teachable" (831). The unteachable/teachable binary Hawk draws here should help us perhaps more fully understand the tension between disconnected theory and pedagogical research, as it has been raised both by participants in our classroom discussions as well as in the literature we've been reading all term. The application of theory to pedagogy will always simplify, codify and reduce the complex act of writing. The desire for this application is practical, utilitarian and very desirable, but it can also limit our scholarship. 

Hawk's attention to this tension should also help us understand another major (and related) conflict which emerges in the study of rhetorical theories, and one that has come to light again and again in our readings, that between the autonomous writing agent and the frame, the actor and the activity system, the agent and the complex network or ecology. Process theories and pedagogies position writing as an autonomous act undertaken by an individual writer in  a series of progressive acts. If we come to know what these progressive acts are, we can teach writing? Write? The social-epistemic movement in composition theory, on the other hand, positions the writer and her writing as negotiating complex social interactions within a community. And while this social "turn" moves our theories away from the isolated writer, it also perpetuates  a model in which the writing subject is central. She is negotiating a complex social environment. Hawk's appropriation of Taylor's complexity theory, as well as scholarship we've read on ecology theories, moves us away from these subject-centric paradigms toward a view of writing which imagines the individual as one of many actors in a complex ecology. The tension that emerges between these two paradigms (subject-centric and what we might call system or network-centric) is here to stay because process is here to stay. Process is thoroughly entrenched in our teaching and our scholarship. It is a frame we cannot escape.

And perhaps we are forever married to process because is teachable. Does that assume that network-centric theories are "unteachable"? Can we build a pedagogical theory that contradicts itself and presents both paradigms and their tensions? I don't know. But I do know that we should not neglect the study of theoretical advances for the purpose of reconciling pedagogy and theory. Simply put, attending to the frame, attending to the complex system or ecology, yields deeper understandings of writing. 

Authority and the Blog

Focusing more on the ecology means focusing on the technologies and media in which we write. To this end, how does the blog, as a writing technology, as a genre, a medium, as an extension of the instantiation of the academic genre that is English 592a, function? What kinds of discourse does it allow and disallow? What kinds of identities (I'm talking about us) does it co-constitute with other agents in a complex ecology? I've been thinking all morning about Dr. Rouzie's request that, for our final post, we reflect on the social dynamics of the blog. How is the discourse produced in this "frame" different from that produced in our classroom discussions? Jonathon's recent recognition of his shifting positionalities in the classroom, in the seminar, etc, helps me to think about the blog as an active agent in the production of certain kinds of writing, and certain kinds of writers:

I find interesting the ways in which our conceptions of author/ity change when we’re in the classroom (as teachers) in the classroom (as students) and outside of the classroom (as writers). All of the writers on this blog probably have realized by now that I’m unbearably quiet in the seminar classroom but that I’m long-winded as a writer. Almost none of you know that I’m confident (if a little Ludacris) in the classroom (as a teacher).  ("I Don't Always")

In this course, and I'll refrain from generalizing beyond that, the blog has allowed a multi-vocal (heteroglossic) production of discourse which was disallowed to a certain extent in the classroom. (Part of this production is certainly influenced by the course requirements, but I'm not willing to give those requirements full agency here). As Jonathon admits above, he is a "long-winded" writer on the blog but more refrained in the classroom. My guess is that other participants in the class feel the same. My own realization is that I'm able to make more complex arguments and take more risks in this space than I would in the classroom. I can draft and compose my thoughts in more productive ways through this medium. 

In the classroom, I speak up too, but as I come to a richer understanding of how writing ecologies are central to the enactment of writing (and speaking), I become less convinced that I am enacting my discussion contributions and more convinced that I am merely inhabiting a classroom role (one with some authority) that is predetermined by the academic ecology of "seminar discussion." Here's an example that might help. Do you ever feel, when you attend the first meeting of a course, that you've just got to speak up and say something thoughtful or it will only become more difficult to be a person who speaks up and says something thoughtful in future class meetings? I often do and I think this is because I want to establish myself in a preexisting role or identity in the social dynamic early when those roles are somewhat more fluid than later in the course. 

The blog, as it exists in a space that is somewhat disconnected from these classroom dynamics, allows us to adopt more authoritative roles than we might in the classroom. This space acts as an intermediary between our academic and personal identities and, accordingly, also allows more self-disclosure. Both Dedy and Aaron used the term "confession" in moments of self-disclosure on the blog while others (including me) chose to write more openly about personal experiences. How is the technology of the blog acting on us to produce this kind of writing? Typical (historical) usages of this technology are somewhat personal. Furthermore, Barton writes about the blog as a technology capable of helping students develop and understand subjectivity. But perhaps most influential here is the blog's hypertextuality. It affords us authority and permission to self-disclose because we are able to make any amount of appropriations (links to other discourses). When Brianna wrote about her personal experience growing up in Pikeville, she used a photo form another town to help illustrate her writing. Just as we enact authority in the classroom by appropriating (and taking apart/discussing) texts that are assigned to us (and texts that are referred to in texts that are assigned to us), we enact authority in networked writing spaces through appropriation.  I think the important difference is that the network offers us such a wider array of possible (appropriate) appropriations in a wider array of modalities: memes, videos, sounds, hypertexts, et al. (In this post, I don't do anything hypertextual. What effect does that have?)

Ultimately, if we want to arrive at complex understandings of writing, we need to consider the technologies and mediums within writing ecologies as participating agents in the production of discourse. (The network is a writing agent. The blog is a writing agent.) My analysis above has been an attempt to make this consideration, and at the same time, an effort to think about how the blog is acting in this course. If we want to arrive at complex understandings of writing, we'll also have to be able to live with the contradictions between subject-centric and systems-centric theories of writing both in our pedagogy and research.   

Works Cited

• Hawk, Byron. "Rhetoric and Network Culture." JAC 24.4 (2004): 831-850. Print.
• Barton, Matthew D. "The Future of Rational-Critical Debate in Online Public Spheres." Computers & Composition 22.2 (2005): 177-190. Print. 

Now the Class Ends, Let's Begin the Journey

Now that Spring quarter 2012 has come to an end, I would like to use my last blog post required in this class as a means of reflecting on what I have learned from our class. If you ask me how much I have learned from this class, my simple answer is "not much". However, I also believe that the real answer is not that simple. There is a complexity in that simple answer. While I have to admit that there were a lot of things that I didn't understand from our discussions, I can also say that there are a lot a great lessons that I got from this class, and for that I have to thank my classmates and Dr. Al.

As a student of applied linguistics, my main interest is in L2 writing instruction with a connection in technology. Since my department does not have  many specialized courses in L2 writing, I decided that I should try to find some course that could support my academic goal. The first time I learned about Rhetorical Theory and Writing course, I thought "That, may be the course that I will need". When I received a copy of syllabus from Dr. Al, I kind of hesitated since there were so many things in the syllabus that I was not familiar with. But I does not hurt to try, eh?


The class proved to be difficult for me to keep up with. I encountered  a lot of new things that I had never thought about, things that I either had never heard/read about or had thought to be of no interest at all. So, this class really opened my eyes on many realities that  was not aware of. Also, I learned from the many perspectives that my classmates and professor offered, the perspectives that I had never used. It was so frustrating but at the same time enriching. The biggest lesson that I learned from this class was that I now realize that I was not really critical. There were a lot of things that I used to take for granted happened to be very interesting, important, as well as complex. So, I am really glad that being in this class has enabled me to think beyond the box, offered me with multiple perspectives on things. Perhaps, I have been too long  confined in my comfort zone that I forgot that there were multiple ways of seeing things.

OK, I think that's enough for my confession (I have to confess that I confessed too much). There are also several things that have caught my interests. One of them was from our last topic about multi-modality. Fraiberg's article has especially attracted me. His proposals of re-conceptualizing writers as knotworkers (107) and expanding definition of writing (118) were really enriching. As the 21st century is witnessing the development of technology, we are now being bombarded by the coming of innovations that change our life as well as how we view our life. Such a development always amazes me, seeing how our concept of literacy has changed drastically. While some applied linguists and language pedagogists still believe that  literacy are strongly associated with writing (for example Mickulecky (12), it is actually a far more complex concept. As for now, to be literate people are also required to be able to understand and use multimodal media, not only limited to written form, but also other stuff like picture, audio, video, etc. So, being a knotworker--i.e. 21st century writer--one should be able to combine these multiple forms to convey their meanings. So, I think this will imply the redefinition of writing classes, or should we call them knotworking class? Hmmm. Interesting. Indeed, with the coming of the newborn generation, those who are born surrounded with technology, widely known as digital natives, how will we teach  them writing? Or, do we even really need to teach them writing? Or should we instead learn from them about this multimodality in order to be able to enter into their discourse?

Indeed, this class and all of what we have discussed and what we haven't, give me more confusion than understanding. Oh, yes, before I forget. That Mark C. Taylor's "I am writing as much as I am being written" thing is also one of my recurring dreams as well, the thought that have been provoking my mind. I have to be thankful to what we did in our class. This confusion, I believe, will lead me to some understanding. So, just as the class ends, my journey begins.


Works Cited
Fraiberg, Steven. "Composition 2.0: Toward a Multilingual and Multimodal Framework." College Composition and Communication 62.1 (2010): 100-126. Print. 
 Mickulecky, Beatrice. Short Course in Teaching Reading.   2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, US: Pearson Education, 2011. Print.

Attempting Trenchant Thoughts

How do I even begin to try and pull together everything I have learned this quarter? I started this quarter as a composition theory noob, and I have come a long way in learning about the theories and bases that make up my field! Obviously, I still have a lot of work to do in understanding certain theories (ecology, complexity, disability, and queer theory, to name a few). I also have some great reading recommendations from others in the class (not that I’ll have time to read them anytime soon, but we can hope!).

First, I was so glad to dip into learning about Appalachia and its role in composition studies—it was a total epiphany moment, but also hard to put away my own biases. I’d love to take a class devoted to Appalachia and its scholars someday, since I could contribute to the community. If I hadn’t already decided on a direction for my Master’s essay, Appalachia had potential!

Speaking of my research interests, this class also helped narrow/define them. I think it would be awesome to keep working on my final project even after the class is done. I could be a “Twitter scholar”! More broadly, I’d like to continue researching Remix, Post-Everything, and how those theories contribute to my interests in pop culture, digital literacy, multimedia, and hypertext. I was surprised to learn about the journals KAIROS and Computers and Composition, since they are also very relevant. Someday I hope that my meta-knowledge of pop culture, music, movies, and television will come in handy. If I’m not mistaken, this is called Convergence Culture? For now, I’ll stick with researching social networking and the classroom. Only now, I have theory to back it up!

Other directions that I could expand on are the relation to music and composition (it clicked during our last discussion that “composition” is writing AND music, a “no duh” moment), teacher technology training, and the differences in preparedness from undergrads, to grad students, to instructors—that makes sense in my head, but it does not translate well to words.

In my undergraduate coursework, I took an “Introduction to Composition” course that, while valuable, only emphasized works up to the 80s. Reading research and theory that was published more currently made theory more relevant to me, which is wonderful because I struggle to comprehend some of this stuff (sorry for the non-academic term “stuff”). During our class discussions, I yearned to apply *everything* to pedagogy, which I understand wasn’t the entire aim of our class. I made a lot of notes about how to apply various aspects of our discussions to pedagogy—trust me, you don’t want to sift through those! I ended up having an internal dialogue with myself during class that focused on pedagogy, which is probably why I looked “spaced out” sometimes (to quote Office Space). A good way to sum up this course is to connect it to a movie like Inception; if I were to take this course again and again, I would probably learn something new every time.

*edit* I totally just edited this post three times to fix subject/verb agreement. This is how you know it's finals week.

Yancey’s Multi-Modal Composition

[If my reading of the syllabus is correct, today is the last day of the third blogging period. (I hope I got this right, since I don’t see any new posts coming up, or am I really the last one? Nothing like me waiting for the last minute. Hopefully at least a few of you will have the chance to read this in the midst of final projects and grading student papers]

Our discussion on Yancey on Tuesday was focused more on the idea of remix and the Rhet/Comp program she describes than her CCCC address. So, I thought I’d offer a few thoughts/questions in response to her address.

First…on multi-modal composition…

I think what I’m interested in most with Yancey’s piece is her CCCC address as a multi-modal text (or should I say texts—one version at CCCC and another printed in the journal with her own additions, comments, etc.). First, I’ve read and heard scholars say that that with multi-modal composing, the canon of delivery is revived. This is certainly the case with Yancey’s address. In one of her added side notes, she describes the original delivery of her address:

“While I talked, two synchronized PowerPoint slide shows ran independently, one to my right, another to my left. Together, the two slide shows included eighty-four slides. There was one spotlight on me; otherwise, the theatre was dark, lit only by that spot and the slide shows. Oddly, I found myself ‘delivering’ the Chair’s Address to an audience I could not see. As Chris Farris pointed out to me later, given this setting, the talk was more dramatic performance than address” (298).

Several things really stand out to me in this first version of her multi-modal text. First, is that in the original delivery, Yancey can more easily use multiple modes. She uses lighting, moving images, and of course the way she delivers and speaks the text. (I could not find a video of the actual address). Also, the fact that the slide show is playing while she speaks helps set some kind of visual mood for the address and actually attracts the audience’s gaze away from Yancey.  I think the multimodality was probably more effective for Yancey in front of the live audience than in the text version. Certainly, Yancey admits that the text version is really a different text, with its additions, changes, fewer images, and the absence of the original physical setting, sights, and sounds.

Regarding the CCC version of the multimodal text, we get Yancey’s commentary in the margins. What makes it most multimodal, though seems to be the images. But I wonder: Would the text be just as effective without the images? What do the images add to the text? I’m sure that they really do add something, certainly giving us a better idea of what the original address was like. But what purpose do the images actually serve? Yancey doesn’t stop to explain the images, or comment on why she chose any of them, or how they affect her main argument. Certainly in the original address, and to some degree in the textual version, the images do make the reader perceive the text a little differently, and in the case of the address the images actually change the setting, which is important. But what are we supposed to be taking from the images? I am almost tempted to say that they are there only to make it multimodal. Why was it essential for her address to include the images? I’m not sure that I really know the answers to these questions. Perhaps it doesn’t help that I am often more of an aural than visual learner.

On another matter, but perhaps relating to the idea of deliver… I’m interested in anyone’s thoughts on some of Yancey’s wording for oral delivery. In particular, in every new section, Yancey would repeat the phrase “We have a moment.” This bugged me. If I were her speech writer I would have cut this and replaced it with something else (don’t know what). I thought it was a bit sappy and over the top. Feel free to disagree with me, though. I do like Yancey.