#6.

 -New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review. 66.1(1996): 1-32.

 -Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, 2011. (read through pg 82)

I see a wild amount of connections between The New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures”, Jody Shipka’s Toward A Composition Made Whole and the timeline I recently constructed. Actually, a concern that Shipka mentions in Chapter One of her book seems describe my timeline better than I previously had done. Shipka quotes Carolyn Handa, writing, “Not all that long go our writing classrooms looked like any others in the university. They contained desks arranged in rows, a podium facing the class, and blackboards covering one or two walls. Technology may have existed only has an overhead projector displaying transparencies with additional class material. Occasionally, instructors would show films related to course topics…Visuals were incidental props, tricks to spark students’ interests, more than viable communicative modes in themselves…By contrast, today’s wired classrooms provide students easy access to “a flood of visual images, icons, streaming video, and various hybrid forms of images and text” (18). My timeline tracked the evolution of these remediated technologies. Shipka connections this idea of a technology dependent visual society with issues of accessibility, especially in learning computer programs. I address this issue with my timeline too, as I look at the development of coding. My timeline uses the (fake) hashtag “literaciesoftechnology”, because I did not want to generalize in terms of just one technology; Shipka’s view aligns with mine, as she writes, “what I am cautioning against here is, first, an overly narrow definition of technology. It is not entirely clear of Handa counts the blackboards, podium, or desks arranged in rows as technologies. It appears not. But the description clearly overlooks many of the technologies typically present in the classroom: books, light switches, lightbulbs, floor and ceiling tiles, clocks, watches, water bottles, aluminum pop-top cans, eyeglasses, clothing, chalk, pens, paper, handwriting, and so on” (20). Shipka asserts that these technologies are also communicative modes, making my (fake) hashtag apt. I also include another (fake) hashtag, #computerdevelopment, to discuss the remediation of computer based technology, which Shipka recommends we differentiate from other technologies.  

I feel that my timeline connects with The New London Group’s article by way of accessibility. The New London Group’s interest in multiliteracies, which “overcome the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students” aligns with #Ohmann, #Selfe1999, and their analysis of Design makes me think of #Fitzpatrick’s making versus creating. The idea of lifeworlds and our ability to help shape them takes us back to the debate between Selfe and Slatin (and, in my interpretation, Bolter and Grusin) regarding our responsibilities as teachers and where the boundaries of our classrooms lie. 

#5.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

I feel that an argument Bolter and Grusin make is that “whenever our identity is mediated [by technology] it is also remediated because we always understand a particular medium in relation to past and present media” (231). This argument is very relevant to English studies, especially when we think of remediated selves—both in terms of teachers and students. I see a connection between the remediated self and the online classroom. Bolter and Grusin’s section regarding the networked self relates to Marilyn M. Cooper’s article with Cynthia L. Selfe, “Comptuer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse”. Cooper and Selfe discuss online forums as a space where students can converse freely with one another without the pressures and inequalities of a traditional classroom. I view this online forum as a remediated space—that is, an online forum that refashions the classroom. Students are still responsible for attendance via participation, though their attendance is shown through their virtual submission. Students in these remediated classrooms must present remediated selves; interestingly, Cooper and Selfe present this idea in 1990, nine years before Bolter and Grusin’s groundbreaking book. While describing the parameters for their student’s participation on an online forum, Cooper and Selfe wrote, “class members contributed to the conference at their convenience, as long as they did so twice a week, and they were invited to use pseudonyms to identify their entries if they wished” (Cooper and Selfe 853). Thus, students like “Velcro,” “Disgruntled,” and “Bink” all projected remediated versions of themselves, giving their instructor the ability to see and juggle both versions of their selves, the self attending class under their given name, and their online self, posting under a chosen nickname. Being able to see both selves would change the way I’m able to interpret the actions of various students who are quieter in the physical classroom, which, in turn, might change the way I teach.

#4.

Faigley, Lester. "Literacy after the Revolution." College Composition and Communication 48.1 (1997): 30-43.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 411-436.

CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2004).

Having never attended any of the CCCC conferences, I can admit to being intrigued by the nightmare stories Faigley describes, especially about linguine. Linguine aside, I enjoyed the overall tone of both Selfe and Faigley’s essays. Here are overlapping ideas found within these essays:

-Members of CCCCs (and scholars in general) are uncomfortable with technology and talking about technology. Faigley writes, “Writing teachers who have been at the forefront of initiating change have run up against a multitude of institutional barriers and attitudes that would limit writing instruction to teaching students to replicate the traditional forms of academic and professional discourses” (32). By limiting writing instruction to the traditional forms of academic and professional discourses, writing students limit, and, as Selfe points out, cripple their students. Selfe claims, “technology is either boring or frightening to most humanists; many teachers of English composition feel it antithetical to their primary concerns” (Selfe 412).

-Faigley and Selfe address is the idea of technology accessibility technology, though they tend to disagree regarding culpability. Selfe asserts, “We also need to recognize that technological literacy is our responsibility... We need additional research on how various technologies influence literacy values and practices and research on how teachers might better use technologies to support a range of literacy goals for different populations” (431). In this way, Selfe argues that we, as teachers of literacy, must “recognize that if written language and literacy practices are our professional business, so is technology” (Selfe 431).  Faigley disagrees, stating, “we as teachers have little control over who gains access to higher education and even less control of access to the Internet” (Faigley 39).

Regarding the five assumptions—I do think these are all realistic goals to employ in my classroom, though I think it’s unrealistic to set every class in a computer lab, or have every class session revolve around technology. Assumption three includes the word “much”. What does “much” mean? Does “much” mean every day? Does it mean every other class? I feel that assumption four, “engage students in the critical evaluation of information” is something that most teachers currently do, especially in terms of the Internet and Wikipedia. “Provid[ing] students with opportunities to apply digital technologies to solve substantial problems common to the academic, professional, civic, and/or personal realm of their lives” is also equally doable, especially in a class structured like my English 101 class, where my focus question for the semester is “Who do you want to be?”. I ask my students to think about who they were, who they currently are, and where they want to go in terms of their lives and academia. Our use of the AML (as well as the AML’s orientation and helpful figures in blue), makes it easier to fulfill assumption one, which is to “introduce students to the epistemic characteristics of information technology,” and carefully structured writing exercises and reflections afterward encourage students to actively think about their choices with both technology and writing. 

#3.

Lanham, Richard. "The Electric Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution." New Literary History. Vol. 20, No. 2, Technology, Models, and Literary Study (Winter, 1989), pp. 265-290.

Slatin, John. "Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium." College English. Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 870-883.

Cooper, Marilyn M. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." College English, Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 847-869.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 55-65.

Other than the fact that all of these articles deal with technology and the way that we, as teachers, and as humans, interact with it, I found a few interesting connections, which I've listed below. (Also, was I the only one who kept wanting to call Slatin "Stalin"?)

• Technology is a tool, and that it has both flaws and major perks. Selfe and Hawisher express this sentiment quite well within their article, “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class,” arguing, “we can no longer afford to simply, and only, to dwell on the best parts, to tell stories about the best classroom moments, and to feature the more positive findings about computers. Rather, we must begin to identify the ways in which technology can fail us” (61). Lanham’s analysis of dated technology in the form of the textbooks student use in high school echoes this sentiment; he writes, “these volumes—physically ugly, worn out… bound in vile peanut-butter-sandwich-proof pyroxeline covers…written in a prose style intentionally dumbed down…do a terrific job of teaching students to hate reading” (271). He also notes that “digitization both desubstantiates a work of art and subjects it to a perpetual immanent metamorphosis from one sense-dimension to another” (273). Slatin addresses this issue through looking at the hidden dangers within hypertexts, referencing Jeff Conklin as he states, “because the hyperdocument contains so much material, and because relations between the components…are not always spelled out, there is a significant danger that the reader will get lost or become badly disoriented” (Slatin 875). Finally, both of Selfe’s articles, written separately with Hawisher and Cooper, address the “social and political dangers that the use of computers may pose” (Hawisher and Selfe 56)

 

• Within Cooper and Selfe’s article, “Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse,” they make the comment that “education, even as it empowers students with new knowledge and the ability to operate successfully within academic discourse communities, also oppresses them, dictating a specific set of values and beliefs along with appropriate forms of behavior” (850). I feel that this is comparable to Slatin’s analysis of how linear books are read. Slatin argues, “the reader is expected to begin at a clearly parked point whose appropriateness has been determined by the author…and to proceed from that beginning to an ending which is just as clearly marked and which has also been determined by the author in accordance with his or her understanding of the subject matter and the reader” (871). In this way, the students in an education empowering them with new knowledge while simultaneously oppressing them are similar to the students/humans/chimps reading linear books that empower them with new knowledge while simultaneously stripping them of agency.

• Slatin and Lanham both urge online publications, but for seemingly different reasons. Lanham thinks that by switching to an online forum, “the whole censorial process by which our efforts are judged ‘worthy of publication’ might change as the meaning of ‘publication’ changed” and cites an “80-90 percent” rejection rate for the social sciences and humanities, while Slatin states that switching to an online medium would cut costs, writing, “text is always mutable, always subject to inadvertent error and deliberate charge, and it has to be coerced into standing still. That’s why publishers charge you money if you make too many changes in a text after it’s been typeset”( Lanham 284, Slatin 872).

I feel that much of what these scholars were concerned with in the 1980s and 1990s is still very applicable today. For instance, Lanham poses apt concerns regarding the protection of intellectual property, determining what is “new”, and navigating co-authorship/property ownership that we’re still dealing with today, especially in terms of every new technological invention and the freedom to create that it gives us. Slatin voices his concern about the construction of hypertexts and balancing the need for readers to be able to predict things about hyperdocuments without giving up the author’s ability to shock them, for “there can be no information without surprise” (873). With so many multimodal scholarly journals, Slatin’s concern is clearly still very relevant. And as for both of Selfe’s articles? I don’t think there will ever be a time where good teachers aren’t worried about power dynamics in the classroom.