Thinking ahead

I just finished the first week of classes, which followed a full week of workshops--the semester is all downhill from here. We adjusted our placement procedures this year, and as WPA, I ended up fielding I don't know how many emails and calls. I've gotta admit that I actually like this part of the job--extremely fast-paced, problem-solving in nature, intense information management, I can generally help students and they are genuinely grateful (not always true of students in my classes : (

I wonder how many other WPAs like this part of the job? It seems gruesome to many of my colleagues.

In the midst of doing laundry on a hip and happening Friday night in Fargo, I started to think about the research I need to do this semester / year. My target conferences are GPACW, C&W, and WPA. I want to do something with McLuhan's hot and cool, Bolter and Grusin's immediacy and hypermediacy, Lev Manovich's film and database, and Scott McCloud's big triangle at GPACW--not too ambitious. I actually need to go back through this blog and find my notes.

C&W is the conference that I really thought about tonight, the conference with the "aah haa" moment. The theme is "open source: technology and concept," and while I haven't got much to say about open source technology, I keep trying to do what I would just call "open projects"--the Trivium Wiki, a CMS for our department website, other wikis for classes, blogs for classes--and I quite frankly haven't had any luck getting buy-in on any of these projects (except for Andy, but he is easy). It might be worthwhile to do a little reflection, a little research on online communities, and figure out what I keep doing wrong. Initial thoughts--the Trivium wiki is not open enough; too strong of an authorial stamp already on the piece. The department CMS; not enough time for others, not a sufficiently dynamic site or concept. We might be able to carve out a dynamic slot on the site, but ultimately it is going to fall on a few shoulders. Something like this could be turned into a potentially interesting paper; I wonder how well other departments have done with their CMS approaches? Clay wrote about the limited success at TTU about 5 or 7 years ago I think.

I also hatched an idea for a new MEmorial, and MEmorials ideally are "open projects" but I have some ambitious ideas for this open project that might limit participation. I want to establish a physical and virtual MEmorial for the citizen-victims of war around the world. The physical MEmorial would be at the International Peace Gardens located on the Manitoba-North Dakota border (ME having live most of my life in either MB or ND); I would like to turn the Peace Garden into a Mecca / pilgrimage site for Global Peace. I would like to see people make pilgrimages from all over the world to this remote, rural location, and then send post cards to the White House, to 10 Downing Street, to any world leader or organization the visitor thinks is responsible for war in the global village, and let those recipients know that they made the long trip to the Peace Garden as one way to express their commitment to global harmony. Would anybody make the trip?

My thinking on the virtual at this point is a video upload site; video blogs, video postcards, even more carefully produced and constructed video pieces that call for reductions in global violence in various forms. The virtual and the real would need to be connected, of course, through one site, probably with a web cam at the Gardens; maybe people can download images from the Peace Gardens, photoshop themselves into the pics, and then upload or send their own post cards? That defeats the purpose of establishing a real pilgrimage / mecca location, which might be a sad but realistic compromise.

And what would this have to do with C&W? A proposal for an open project that would acknowledge up-front the challenges of building community and getting contributions. More PR for the genre of MEmorial?

Sequence of assignments

I didn't chose a supplemental text for my fye class this semester, but as I am prepping the semester, I wonder what a sequence would look like if I had taught White Like Me again, and used an assignment sequence like:

1. memoir (grounded in research)
2. profile (read partner's memoir, follow-up interview + research)
3. rhetorical analysis (of WLM, or maybe Heart of Whiteness)
4. commentary (too much like memoir?)
5. proposal (instead of commentary)

A sustained topic like white privilege would probably wear most of my students down over 16 weeks. Maybe a graduate pedagogy or theory course that started with WLM and the topic of white privilege could explore how various approaches would handle such a topic.

Why do teachers resist teaching?

I'm wrapping up a full week of training new Teaching Assistants and facilitating a couple of additional workshops. The week has gone well, even though my entry title might suggest otherwise. I was just prepping one more session for later this morning about teaching peer review, and I was pulling together material from a graduate student who just wrote a good MA paper on peer review. She taught peer review through very deliberate, obvious steps--some might even say JR high-ish or high schoolish--but had good results.

Doing this work got me thinking about "why teachers resist training?" or why teachers (including me) might resist this kind of training? What struck me is that teaching a fairly deliberate approach requires a lot of confidence in that approach. It also assume as high level of pedagogical articulation--you really need to know what you want. Because many writing teachers (including me) don't want to box students in, and allow for invention, we sometimes want to back off of teaching when it actually gets too specific and articulate.

Betsy also reminded me of the McLuhanism--education is violence. Articulating specific expectations for a writing assignment or a writing process is an aggressive move. Doing so is not far from telling someone how to think or act, and even though education seems to be reasonably engaged in the act of helping others think and act, it can also be approached more environmentally--setting up assignments, courses, curriculums that provide a context for thinking and acting, but not a program for thinking and acting.

I guess I am getting myself into some familiar agency-structure questions about education, aren't I?

Theory-practice relationship

I've had lots of blog posts run through my head in the past couple of weeks, but I haven't found the time to get them on the screen. Thanks for the comment, Elizabeth--I will respond eventually!

Just working on my Pre-semester workshop for new TAs this morning, and I am thinking through how to talk to them about the theory-practice relationship. I've been skeptical of the theory-practice relationship for a lot time, having read Fish and Rorty, the other neo-pragmatists, having taken 3 classes with Tom Kent in grad school, and being a bit of phenomenologist at heart--seems to me that almost everything I "think / theorize" comes out of practice; my theories are indeed descriptions, not prescriptions.

What's prompting this reflection, however, is that I need to explain to new TAs how our first-year writing program's theory, a rhetorical-formalist, genre-based program, is related to our university's General Education goals. I don't have much problem seeing the connections, but the Gen Ed goals were concocted without my input, before I even arrived at NDSU, so it raises an interesting new relationship for me about theory-practice: our program's theory is not driving the goals, nor are the gen ed goals precisely driving our theory; each were arrived at independently. What we in the writing program have done is matched up our theory with the goals as best we can (although as I write I realize that we tweaked one goal to get a better fit) in order to create a semblance of coherence. I've always preferred coherence theories of truth to correspondence theories of truth, so again I have no problem with this relationship, but maybe what I am trying to get at is "what drives what, if anything?" Or can we abandon causal thinking in favor of emergent, situational, coherence thinking? Instead of saying we have a rhetorical-formalist, genre-based theory guiding our program (a label I came up with to try and describe what we do), maybe what we have is a pragmatic, situational program that responds to a variety of factors (institutional goals, personal preferences, personnel training, changing technologies, etc.) in ways that "we" think will lead to good classes, engaged and satisfied teachers, institutional buy-in, and decent results come assessment day.

Have I really said anything here?

Rhythm Science

Just finished reading Paul D. Millier (AKA DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid)'s Rhythm Science. I've become a tunnel-visioned reader, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating everything in the context of McLuhan, but until I develop other research interests, I guess I am stuck with those blinders.

I had heard and read others talking about Rhythm Science, but I finally got around to purchasing the book when I realized it was part of the MIT Pamphlet series, an series of books inspired in part by The Medium is the Massage--short texts, innovative in typography and design, not densely scholarly in citations, but clearly informed by a scholarly career. RS and N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines (another title in the series) are both much more autobiographical than MM, and neither are as visually interesting as MM, but RS offered me more than WM, which actually annonyed me because Hayles' called for "media specific analysis," a blatant but unacknowledge re-working of "the medium is the message," IMHO.

But I digress. Here are a couple of thoughts / reflections.

Miller / Spooky has actually used McLuhan's voice in his DJ work. He uses McLuhan on the CD to say "'electric circuitry . . . the flowing' is taking us on an 'inner trip . . . which involves us in depth in things that had formerly been merely superficial, visual, external and detached from our own beings.'" M/S goes on to argue that the opposite might actually be true "the specialization, fragementation, and routineization of work, space and life" has prevented the kind of in-depth participation McLuhan describes, and this particular description of postmodern life (for lack of a better label), continues to be problematic for me as I work with McLuhan. What M/S goes on to express throughout RS, it seems to me, is a desire for the kind of depth participation McLuhan describes, he just seems to think that very few people have achieved that depth participation. That might be the kind of account I am looking for and trying to articulate myself.

The mechanical age, as much or more than the electric age, seems to have influenced a culture of specialization, fragmentation, and routineization of work, space and life (think of some of Dickens' characters); the electric age seemed to presented the possibility of depth and integration, or a move from mechanical to organic metaphors, but the mechanical, modern infrastructure in place, the heavy weight of the way things are, and the mechanical, specialized nature of even many "electric" processes (i.e. writing code?!), has limited the impact of electric circuitry on our lives. Many educational theorists, however, now point out that our mechanical approach to schooling is dramatically out of synch with our students' "in-depth" living (although the "good students" learn to play along).

I am starting to digress again, and have exceeded my 10 minutes, so I will have to follow up with sequel.

Misunderstanding the Assignment

I am using Doug Hunt's Misunderstanding the Assignment in my TA Strategies Class this fall, and just finished re-reading the book. Now I need to remind myself why I decided to use it!

1. Accessibility: The TAs I have taught the last three years have often struggled with the more traditional academic article approach, or even the collections of essays I have tried. They have particularly been mystified by the debates the articles are often a part of. Perhaps steering away from the debate is going to turn out to be a bad idea, but I thought I would try a book that doesn't try to argue strongly for a position so much as try to increase readers' understanding of what happens in a first-year composition course.

2. Relevance: What could be more relevant than "seeing" how somebody else negotiated a semester of teaching first-year composition? I started to record my classes last semester, but I ran into some technical difficulties, and I was not capturing the students' perspectives. The 11 person research team was able to capture classroom data, student interview data, instructor interview data, and author analysis.

Upon re-reading it, and thinking about it as a teacher of teachers, I'm thinking about the following complications and possibilities.

1. The course taught isn't very much like the course we teach at NDSU. It seems to be a cultural studies class of sorts, asking students to analyze TV shows about the family, read and analyze free will in pieces of fiction. A syllabus and assignment sheets would have been a nice addition to the book. The big ideas are front and center, the teaching of writing happens inductively through workshops, conferences, and "Mr. Paragraph" classes. I do think this difference will turn out to be valuable in the long run, but the new TAs might have preferred to "see" a course more like ours.

2. I am excited about the possibility of "re-playing" some classroom scenes and some 1-on-1 conferences. I'm not saying the teacher handled situations incorrectly, but the book gives real situations (students in class who keep asking "what do you want?"; students in conferences who say little or nothing) that we might try to role play to give the new TAs (and me!) other strategies for handling these common situations.

3. I would like to design a smaller scale study modeled on this book. I have only 4 new TAs to work with, and they are primarily engaged in the process of learning how to teach, but I want to try and introduce them to the scholarship of teaching and specifically classroom research. My interest in computers and writing has me thinking that I would like to research the most overtly technologized assignments in English 120 and see to how our students are understanding them. I would probably ask the new TAs to function as the eyes and ears in my class (to put me under the microscope, rather than them), to conduct one interview with a select # of students, and probably to survey the 120 class as a whole. I used this mixed methodology with TAs two years ago and we published "What's Going On?"; maybe this year's cohort can develop another article.

A quick search revealed that Misunderstanding the Assignment was reviewed in Composition Studies and College English, but it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on the field. I think its project is worth extending--good book.

Online tools

I just discovered a new McLuhan resource, which I tagged in del.icio.us, and included a note that looks like a blog entry. I have been thinking that del.icio.us notes seem like blogging (250 words or less).

I was actually trying to use Zotero for the first time, but the Zotero icon is not yet appearing on my Firefox browser; need to keep messing around I guess.

Set up a Furl account on Friday; don't know if I will be able to use Furl and del.icio.us and Blogger. Testing the tools is interesting, but using and managing them all is difficult. Good thing I set up the Suprglu account.

FYC as Intro to Writing Studies: The Next Big Thing?

Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's lead article in CCC has gotten people on the WPA-L fired up. I tend not to post much to lists because I read them in digest and always feel out of the flow of the conversations. The 3-5 times I have posted to various lists in the last 3-5 years, my post almost always kills any conversation, or at least signals that the conversation was over two days ago. Also, as I think about preparing new TAs, I am also thinking about my own learning style--definitely an observer / watcher type more than any other style. Even kids in high school noticed my style.

Back to FYC as Writing Studies. I've been using and advocating something a tiny bit like what Downs and Wardle describe, but I have been using popular press kinds of articles, mainly about "new literacy," not writing specifically, so I guess I am philosophically sympathetic, but I could go much further in practice. Their article did make me think about scholarly articles I could assign in my fyc class without making a radical shift this fall, although I haven't made any decisions along those lines yet. I'm thinking about things like an article on peer review (Nancy Welch's "Sideshadowing"? -- too theoretical?), something on revision, etc. I also just started watching Take 20; I need to wath the chapter where people recommend a piece of scholarship.

What I really wanted to reflect on, however, is one of the posts on WPA-L that suggested that this article signals "the next big thing" in fyc and writing studies. I have no objections to this approach being the next big thing, but I wonder how we, as a field, could measure, evaluate, assess, document in some way, that "the next big thing" actually leads to some kind of improvement in something. That something might be better student writing, but I actually doubt that. That something might be TA training, which seems more reasonable (TAs are more likely to learn about scholarship in reading, writing, research, etc.), or that something might be "better classroom dynamics," although one of my nagging questions as I read the piece was "how boring / exciting is this classroom / pedagogy?" Geoff Sirc has challenged all of us to engage our students, and I am just not sure how well this approach would accomplish that goal. The student comments included in the article suggested some success in this area, but I wonder what the majority of the class thought? The authors acknowledged the high percentage of students who "failed" under this approach; my hunch is those are the students who might succeed under a pedagogy that doesn't so obviously remind them that they are novice writers who are unlikely ever to acquire the habits of expert writers.

Last thought on why I don't think student writing would "improve." Connors and Lundsford documented that student rate of error in writing has not changed statistically throughout the 20th century (I think this research was updated, but I didn't see the resulting article). Types of errors changed, but not overall error rate. I did some research about 5 or 6 years ago on a program publication that lasted 20 years and survived 3 theory changes in the department. The writing assignments changed, so the students' writing changed, but I got the impression that the program wrote the students, and each "big new thing" in the department lead to changes in assignments, teaching methods, and genres taught, but there was no evidence that student writing, as a whole, got better. Theory / approach changes often seem like window dressing; I'm not saying such things are useless (window dressing can be a valuable change), but changes in labor practices, infrastructure, staffing, etc., are more likely to get observable, documented, positive change. The Chronicle of Higher Ed, citing changes at Princeton, Duke, and a few other Ivy-ish places, called this change the "million dollar solution" to first-year writing. THAT would be the next big thing if public institutions like mine put up the money to take fyc even more seriously.

Back online

Took two weeks to re-visit the roots, rural Manitoba, and had a great time. I'm guessing not too many people have ever visited rural Manitoba, there being no real tourist destinations in towns like Virden, where I grew up, or Carberry, where my extended family grew up and still lives, but these places are quite beautiful in subtle, prairie ways, and, as McLuhan predicted, these people are pretty plugged into the global village. There were some throw back elements--not many wireless access points--but also cutting edge elements--my cousin monitors much of his farming operation over the Internet. I won $40 at Men's night in Carberry--a bit of a 50s masculine throw-back kinda event in which my skinny bookish masculinty seemed a bit out of place--but my high school reunion was hosted by one of my openly gay classmates. My vegetarianism was challenged to the max--I must have eaten about 4lbs of French Fries in Carberry, the potato capital of Manitoba--but my cousin's husband managed to track down some sort of faux chicken burger at the local grocery store.

I'm back in the midst of administrative work, which tends not to lead to much blogging, but I'd like to try to carve out a bit more research time this summer.

CFP Idea

Computers and Composition has a CFP for Graduate Education. Thinking of a few ideas, like:

1. "You will never teach this course again." -- I wonder how true this is for other PhDs who graduated within the last 10 years (could be a survey component)? I wonder how true this will be for the PhDs over the next 10 years. I did take a course on Visual Communication as a graduate student, but it looked nothing like the Visual Culture and Language (U-grad) course I teach. I wonder what kind of VC course our graduate student(s) will teach.

2. Andy and I have thrown around the term "electrate competencies." Can we nail some of these things down? How far do graduate programs need to go? And obviously there is not one model. Some programs will attract students because they aren't tech-heavy. How is "electrate competency" different from "critical technological literacy?" What are the low tech electrate compentencies? Does "visual thinking" count?

3. I've gotten to know Quinn Warnick from a few conferenes. He is in the graduate program I graduate from 10 years ago--I wonder how different his Program of Study has been? I wonder what his skill set was like coming in, what it will be like going out? I wonder what graduates of that program will study / do / be capable of 10 years down the road?

GAming school

Gaming school? Forget re-locating for college, I am sure my son will want to move to NY for middle school.

This story also made me think about my "field." If I simply studied what I wanted, without concern for employment, I would definitely have gone into "game studies." I had built up a pretty substantial understanding of game theory while working on my MA, and had read an awful lot of sports literature. I probably should have pursued that avenue a little more vigorously, although now, interestingly enough, my interests, which were very fringe in the early 90s, are now mainstream. I wasn't interested in video games at the time, and I am still only minimally interested in video games, but they are a medium worth paying attention to. I wouldn't even call myself a sports fanatic, which I think most people assume when they hear about my interests. I just know that sports and games in general penetrated my sense of self at a very young age and in a way that I can't quite shake. And why should I? They are engaging, fulfilling, generally good for mind and/or body, although they can be excessively time consuming, bad for your body, perhaps mind crushing.

When I think about my two dream projects, they are both game/sport related--my curling documentary, and a book-length project building on McLuhan, Understanding Games. I noticed some of the spark and excitement I had back in the early 90s when I was working on my MEmorial and the Roger Maris connection to the Lost Boys of Sudan. Maybe I have moved back into my field wihtout precisely realizing it!

Usable Glue

I've been working on an analysis of McLuhan and Fiore's The Medium is the Massage, but I keep thinking / wondering why Greg Ulmer has never done a really visual, or at least visual-verbal, text. He has included images in his work, and he does have interesting visual-verbal material online (much of it more visual than verbal), so perhaps he is making that medium divide (word = pages, images = screens). But if I were any kind of decent designer, which I am not, I think I would start working on a book called "Usable Glue," and I would try to make some of his concepts (or borrowed concepts) like felt, punctum, electracy, more visible, and I think I would try to play around with his sets of instructions. It might be interesting to try and work with his text in the way Fiore worked with McLuhan's text. Is Ulmer a master of the aphorism or succinct theoretical phrasology (hard to beat "the medium is the message / massage / mass-age")? Are his concept illustratable? I guess I tried this once: what do you think?

Looking for images

I've been thinking about some ways to revise my "MEmorial project" and have been searching for images of Maris sitting in the locker, looking really worn out (a picture I have seen in print). I did come across one of his Camel ads images, but I also came across Jennifer Ettinger's website, where she is still trying to sell the painting that appeared on the cover of the book my brother and I published about ten years, Thru the Smokey Endboards: Canadian Poetry about Sports and Games.

Jennifer has a cool new show at the Nat Bailey ball park in Vancouver.

Me and Mac (the scholar, not the computer)

I was just thinking, just trying to rememberer, "how/why did I come to McLuhan, and why am I such an advocate now?" His name was floated occasionally in the classrooms of U of Winnipeg, but always quickly dismissed by the professor. He started showing up in fragments while working on my dissertation--a history of writing instruction in western Canadian universities (snore)--those traces, I realized, were pretty interesting. I gave a seminar presentation on him during my last class in graduate school; it was very well received; Don Payne suggested I had just outlined a research agenda. If only I had known what that meant! The "agenda" remained hidden (as all the best are) for about 4 or 5 years, even though Anthony Ellertson expressed great enthusiasm for McLuhan in a graduate course I taught in about 2000. I remember worrying about the lack of political edge in McLuhan's work, I worried about the gross over-generalizations, I worried about the cultural studies critique of McLuhan. But I remembered Anthony's enthusiasm for McLuhan, and I saw that enthusiasm again among other students when I taught The Laws of Media and tetradic analysis. And I saw it frequently when I assigned The Medium is the Massage, occasionally identified by students as the most interesting book they have read. As a scholar, I started to see the political potential embedded in McLuhan's work--my potential to use his work as I saw fit. And I started to see and understand the formal experiments, which, strangely enough, I think I had been trying since I started in 'zine in high school. In short, I became an advocate because I could see McLuhan working for students--generating excitement and engagement--and that excitement in turn rubbed off on me as a scholar. Charlie Lowe has said to me a couple of times, "I like the way McLuhan makes me think," and that seems to sum up why I am pushing this drug.

Visual rhetoric and the encyclopedic tradition

I was just reading a book chapter by Charles Hill on teaching the reading of visual communication in the writing classroom, and Hill points out the common argument that our writing classes already try to do too much, and adding visual rhetoric does nothing to eleviate that problem, but only do to a history of specialization did we ever decide to separate out written and visual communication. He goes on to call for a broad-based rhetorical education, interdisciplinary in nature, which seems good and right, but I couldn't help but think about McLuhan and the encyclopedic tradition of rhetoric that extends back to Cicero, at least, and then I wonder, what if just "English" could become "Rhetoric?" Nothing new here, but in my constant quest to figure out why McLuhan should matter, I am almost always struck by how this professor of literature was able to make literature matter to his students in the 50s, esp. 60s, and 70s, and I am always struck by how effectively he reads and uses literature as part of his histories of rhetoric and technology.

I am also in the process of thinking about The Medium is the Massage (MM) again; part of a revision to a paper I am working on. I need to figure out why learning to read that text is relevant to learning how to read (and I suppose produce) similar kinds of texts. Part of my argument is that we in rhetoric and composition don't really perform many readings of visual texts, and certainly not image-text experiments like MM, instead limiting ourselves to ad analysis, and the rhetorical reading of film. The influence of MM seems to be pretty profound--I am starting to collect the MIT series of books influenced by MM.

Unrelated: I just noticed that I only made 25 entries between January and now, and that 7 of those were during videoblogging week. I made no entries in March, and if I handn't made an entry on May 31, I would have skipped May 2. Very irregular with my blogging / thinking.

I must have written this entry before...

I am working on my MEmorial project, but I keep thinking about McLuhan for compositionists. I keep asking "why McLuhan?," maybe phrased in Jeff Rice's language, why invest in McLuhan when the field hasn't for the last 40 years? Is the payoff really so great? I'm thinking about the way postmodernism is pursued as a goal--to have a postmodern pedagogy, to be more postmodern--and I think about the ways that McLuhan complicates that goal. He is sometimes labeled a proto-postmodernists, but I think he is best described as an antimodernist. Elizabeth Flynn has used "antimodernism" as foil to "save" postmodernism, to show the ways in which postmodernism is a better critique of modernism than antimodernism, but if the critique is reversed, I think antimodernism can hold up as a viable critique of modernism, which in and of itself ain't all bad. Maybe what McLuhan, in part through his Laws, can really get us is a break from dialectical thinking, from the Hegelian logic of progress, without giving us what is often perceived as postmodern uncertainty and drift. The Laws provide a structure for making sense of competing world-views as technologies, and for recognizing ebbs and flows historically, but also recognizing the human all to human need to recycle.

Ten Minutes A Day

Because I call my blog 10 Minutes a Day, I'm compelled to blog about this article. I know that 4th graders find 10 minutes a day difficult because a) college students find 10 minutes a day difficult, and b) my 3rd grade son tends to break down in tears after 2 or 3 minutes of writing.

The teacher who wrote this piece shreds her students' work in order to really emphasize the process--the message--of 10 a day. Write, free yourself, suppress the editor; the medium, not the content, is the message. Of course us bloggers like our content, and we archive these musings, but it might be cool to have a "shred" button for a blog other than the delete button: each entry goes through little electrode teeth, and maybe even builds a big pile of shredded entries at the bottom of one's blog. We could then at least measure our shredded work.

Was that 10 minutes worth?

MEmorial for Lost Boys of Sudan

I've been working on a really different project for me, a MEmorial, as theorized by Greg Ulmer. The project is hosted on a wikispaces, so feel free to contribute (you will need to request membership).

I don't think my final product is particularly electrate--I can't seem to keep words out of my compositions--but the process, as Ulmer suggests, is pretty fascinating, I learned a lot (about Sudan, about Maris, about composing with images and video) doing the project, and I think the connections I make between the Lost Boys of Sudan and Roger Maris are pretty interesting, but I guess I will need some readers to let me know (hint hint).

I am also trying out a new way to collect my various web "projects:" SuprGlu. I am actually using it as my "official" home page, at least for now. Aggregates this blog, my Bloglines blog, my del.icio.us entries, and my Flickr photos. Anything with RSS can be aggregated, and they provide room for links to static pages too. So far, so good. Need to add a photo.

Rhetoric of Cool

Just finished Jeff Rice's Rhetoric of Cool; got it Thursday and went cover-to-cover pretty quickly. I have been very interested in Jeff's work ever since I dreamt about him about 3 years ago; he has brought McLuhan and Ulmer together more consistely than any other scholar I am aware of.

Because I was familiar with some of the content of the book through his earlier journal contributions, what I liked best was actually the repetition--seeing/hearing him re-iterate the historical argument that composition missed an opportunity in 1963 to ground itself in the emerging technology, the emerging new media, and ultimately in "cool rhetoric," but the field in general chose to stick with print, not just in products but in logic. He makes some really compelling arguments that even the most visual texts and scholars in our field who embrace the "visual" do so from a print-logic biased.

I am frequently struggling with how to frame an argument for the role of McLuhan in composition studies, and what Jeff's book seems to do for me (after one quick read-through) is help me more clearly articulate his reading and use of McLuhan, which in turn will help me articulate my position. By linking McLuhan to cool rhetoric, and by really pushing the envelope for digital and electronic thinking, I can see that Jeff, like his mentor Ulmer, is a little more thoroughly immersed in the logic of electracy than I tend to be. I have been using and playing with the idea of "working at the interface" a lot lately, and by "working at the interface" I mean that I see myself working at the interface of literacy and electracy, print culture and visual culture, text and image, visual and acoustic space. Where Jeff offers the cool compositional strategy of juxtaposition in one chapter, I tend to use Scott McCloud's six patterns of word-picture relationships as a more detailed, and probably print-logical, way to approach the general strategy of composing through juxtaposition. Where Jeff emphasizes the rhetoric of cool, his articulation of that made me realize that I try to teach the rhetoric of hot and cool, and that I think students gain an understanding of both by seeing them placed side-by-side: working at the interface.

I'm looking forward to dipping back into Jeff's earlier "textbook," writing about cool, which I am sure will seem like a whole new text now that I have read The Rhetoric of Cool.

Do I have to explain myself?

After being away from the blog for so long, I wonder--did anybody miss it / me? Do I have to explain myself? Apologize? Naaah. Summer is here, high tide for blogging, so I might just start gettin' a little busy.

Just read/ watched Daniel Anderson's "Prosumer" multimedia piece from Kairos--very humbling he does such fine work, technically and intellectually. Heard him speak at C&W too; wow, great stuff. Don't know why I haven't sought out his work before now.

The idea that I wanted to record was his segment about getting students to work with still images from film as part of their literary analysis class. Made me think about the rhetorical analysis assignment I want to re-vamp this coming fall semester; I was planning to get students to do some screen capturing as part of their analysis in order to increase the visual literacy component of the assignment, but Anderson's piece made me realize that if the thing being analyzed (a segment from MTV Think) also included a video of some sort, doing a screen capture of a still would be a great addition. He mentioned quickly that he showed students how to capture a video from the web and then work with it in iMovie or another video editing program; that is a powerful little skill that untir recently had escaped me, so I might consider working that into the project as well, or maybe adding that into the commentary follow-up assignment.

Okay, there it is, back in the blogosphere, looking forward to a summer of brain flatulence. But no more than 10 minutes a day!