Messages from the International Peace Garden

I put together a short video of peace quotations that line the walls of the International Peace Garden's chapel. I hope to get this video streamed into the Second Life Peace Chapel I am building.

Importing Composition: Three Questions

Just read an article almost 14 years old but newly relevant to my interests in global collaborations. Muchiri, Mulamba, Myers, and Ndoloi's "Importing Composition: Teaching and Researching Academic Writing Beyond North America" (CCC 46.2 1995: 175-98) ends with a provocative set of questions:

Imagine you could pack something of the world of composition, just enough to fit in a small box that would fit under and airline seat. It is not for foreign aid, or for trade, both of which can be exploitive; let us think of it as barter. What would you pack in this box; what is essential in the composition enterprise? That's the fun part. Now here comes the hard part: Where would you send it? And even harder: What would you expect to get in return? (196)

I've been working on setting up an exchange of ideas / stories / essays between NDSU students and United States International University students in Nairobi, Kenya; I don't know if that is the ideal place to "send" this important aspect of the composition enterprise (writing for audiences other than the teacher), but it comes out of a connection / relationship. I imagine most importations of composition will be done on the basis of friendship / relationships / convenience, not necessarily ideal destinations. What do I expect in return? A raising of global awareness, student engagement on both ends, possible faculty collaborations.

How would you answer these questions?

Kairos 13.2--some notes

Just skimmed the Praxis article in the new issue of Kairos, "A Productive Mess." The article reports on an interesting classroom collaboration: four classes extended their f2f discussions not by going online in a discussion board, but by putting the four classes together in a drupal site. Smart. Students resist simply carrying conversation online when they talk to the same people all the time.

They authors also used a nifty schema to direct discussion: launch, query, extend, connect. I have tried a few different schemas for directing online discussion, but this one looks better than anything I have used. Of course, it also leads to stilted conversations and, as the authors report, it did not elimate "I agree" kinds of responses and it lead to one hostile exchange.

This article also reminded me that I could use the Virtual Peace Garden as a site for NDSU students to exchange ideas with students at the United States International University in Nairobi. That little project seems to be picking up a bit of steam.

"Rhetorical Velocity" by Ridolfo and de Voss has a nice paragraph on McLuhan; they also have an interesting press release assignment that makes the concept of rhetorical velocity a reality. Are rhetoricians ready to take over the PR world? I do think we have the potential to bring fresh insights and thoughtfulness into that realm.

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

I just learned about The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, a documentary that looks visually stunning and emotionally disturbing. A contemporary artist--part Mappelthorpe, part Pollock, but (post?) feminist--tries to make the first western adoption of two southern Sudanese Twins. She does all this in front of the camera--is it life or art? Is art anything you can get away with, Mr. McLuhan?

Who in the world is Tony Schwartz?

I came across Tony Schwartz in Arthur Berger's Seeing is Believing the other day; Berger referenced Schwartz's notion of "the responsive cord" to explain what McLuhan would call "media intensification." The responsive cord seems to be that "shock of recognition" that we get when we see intertextuality and allusions at work, when we see the revisionist history, the gender, race, or class revision. Schwartz, in other words, seemed to be getting credit for a McLuhanism--S.O.P in the media analysis world.

Then I stumbled across a Twitter feed that said something like "If you like Cluetrain Manifesto, you will love Media: the Second God by Tony Schwartz. That post was followed by "McLuhan called Schwartz the "electronic guru."

So obviously I need to find out more about Schwartz, and Wikipedia gives me a nice entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Schwartz

It also reveals why I haven't heard of him; he wasn't an academic, The Responsive Cord and Media: The Second God were his only two books, and those were published in 1973 and 1982. Undoubtedly gold mines of antienvironmental insight. Stay tuned!

It's Official: I'm Rich!

Be sure to check out where you tank in the world. I wasn't surprised at all to find out that I am pretty darn rich compared to the rest of the globe, but I was surprised to find out that even with my modest salary, I am still in the top 1%.

How rich are you? >> I'm loaded. It's official. I'm the 57,087,865 richest person on earth!

What do "we" need to know about violence?

I just finished Slavoj Zizek's Violence and am wondering where it fits into my thinking war and peace in the global village.

Zizek argues that the correct response to violence is to "learn, learn, learn;" he thinks that language, which is often seen as the medium of reconciliation, is actually the medium of division and conflict (he surprisingly doesn't deal with the Tower of Babel); he thinks that academics put on a good show but don't actually do much, he thinks that "liberal communists" like Bill Gates provide aid with one hand, but only after they have reaped the benefits of the global capital oppressive system on the other hand. He also believes that violence, struggle, revolt are, in some cases, necessary.

As an educator and specifically a professor of "language," I could probably work with Zizek's notion of "learn, learn, learn," but interestingly, both the students in this class (WPGV 2008) and I feel compelled to act, to get out of the classroom rather than just learn, read, propose, etc.. Educators, as many commentators have noticed, are in the awkward position of having to defend learning for learning's sake these days.

I'm trying to figure out, though, where Zizek rubs up against some of the other following people:
1. McLuhan: violence is a quest for identity.
2. Lynn Worsham: we have not brought emotion into pedagogy despite the violence and emotional upheaval of our culture.
3. Letters for the Living: a book about letting students write about the violence in their lives, as well as seek the moments and places of peace in their lives.
4. The Violence of Literacy: a book I need to read ASAP.

What I also need to figure out are the problems / questions I want to address. What do I need to know and think about violence to be a teacher of language? What do I want students to know and think about the violence of language and literacy? This second question might be the key, a question relevant to general composition courses, writing in the health professions, visual culture and language.

Here Comes Everybody: The final evaluation

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Okay book, but I keep looking for him to acknowledge and work with the Joyce reference in the title ("Here Comes Everybody" is the "hero" of Finnegan's Wake), and / or acknowledge the McLuhan influences that show up everywhere. The curse of being an academic--I am interested in the connections!



He does a nice job with technological determinism: he points out that the printing press didn't initiate the renaissance, but it significantly furthered it. He does a nice job of explaining why he thinks people contribute to Wikipedia, and he shows through a couple of different examples that social media sites rely on a few people to do a lot of work and many people to do a little work--good reminder for me every time I try to initiate a social media project that gets minimal buy-in.



Hhmmm, maybe I am liking the book more than I realized! Better keep going.



Dec. 28, 2008 Update.



I finished this book a while back; might try to use it in my electronic communication class. Definitely trying to apply some of his principles to my "organization without organization" http://africansoulamericanhear....


View all my reviews.

Zizek: Violence

Violence: Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Zizek

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Finally finished Zizek's Violence after having started it late summer or fall. Zizek offers the provocative arguments that instead of acting in response to global crises and violence, we need to "learn, learn, learn" and not perpetuate "our" academic activism of dialogue and critical inquiry. Seems a little contradictory that he supports learn, learn, learn but not dialogue. That said, I do continue to find Zizek compelling and interesting, a leftist McLuhan, a joker, but each joke a serious stab at dogmatic slumberers and liberals.


View all my reviews.

The Middle of Everywhere: Good Reads comments

The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community by Mary Pipher

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Fascinating book; heart-breaking stories; need to keep reading but wanted to see what others have said.



Dec. 28, 2008 update.



I finished this book back in August but forgot to update my thoughts. I enjoyed the broad view, but am thinking about a book that might follow three refugee families I know in more detail. Pipher gets at many of the challenges refugees face, but I am stunned by how so many small thing can make life precarious for those resettled to the US and other countries.


View all my reviews.

Library Project Money Bomb!

A Library Project for Southern Sudan is dropping a money bomb on Dec. 14; please visit their site and donate what you can. But first, check out their video.

Resisting AFRICOM video

A nicely crafted piece of rhetorical video.

Trip of a Life Time essay available.

I published a personal essay, "A Trip of a Life Time Doesn't Need to Come to an End," in the NDSU Magazine. The hard copy has many great pictures, not just the one at the top of the page.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

When I told friends and family members I was going to southern Sudan as part of a documentary film crew and humanitarian aid project, many asked me in different ways, "Do you think this trip will change your life?" I always answered with confidence, "no." I was just hoping to survive the trip without getting sick, shot at, killed in a plane crash, or stranded in a remote Sudanese village. I was pretty sure the trip would be memorable, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, but not life changing.

Of course I was wrong.

Study Abroad Notes: Field Research on the XO program

I am attending a Study Abroad meeting, learning how I might set up and run a faculty-led short-term study abroad program. I just learned that I need to start working with International Program Office 9-12 months in advance; also learned that I could have gotten emergency evacuation insurance much more cheaply through the IP Office than I did commercially last year! Costs are likely to be significant, perhaps prohibitive. Need to be upfront and realistic about costs, including the $500 in shots and medication, airfare, visas, etc. If enrollment goals are not met (costs not covered), would need to decide whether to go at a loss or cancel class.

I'm trying to imagine an appropriate study abroad experience for English majors (ugrad and grad) that would take them to Africa. I am particularly interested in making this into a research class that might set up a study of something like an XO Laptop program in Rwanda. Students would presumably do a little of observation, interviewing, perhaps teaching, maybe an introduction to video research. Probably a course that would make sense to graduate students; might seem too foreign for u-grads. Maybe I need to try this research out myself, first.

Found a blog by Dan, who traveled to Ethiopia to assist with the first XO deployment in that country.

Floating some ideas

Many project thoughts of late; wondering which ones I should pursue. Wondering if anybody wants to help.

1. A "global development / connections" initiative for the 7CS. Been thinking a lot about how to develop better connections with universities around the world, but why limit such projects to a pair of schools; let's get a lot of fish swimming!

2. Wondering about "Teachers without Borders." Heard about the tremendous need for teachers in Rwanda and Ethiopia, familiar with the tremendous need for teachers in Sudan. Start a local chapter? Join the global movement?

3. My idea for a Virtual Peace Garden in Second Life is still very much in the incubator; need to get some significant technical help with this baby. Maybe the Computers and Writing theme for 2010 will drive some traffic my way.

4. McLuhan's 100th Birthday is coming up: 2011. Occurred to me today that I ought to propose some sort of digital book happening for the Computers and Writing community. Need to look up the digital press. Anybody want to contribute to this unformed idea?

Must now turn computer over to son. Discuss amongst yourselves.

African Soul, American Heart Premiered!

I should have been much more active blogging the lead up to our documentary film premiere, but I can at least report on a very successful day. We had over 300 people attend 2 showings; we had great questions from our audience, and lots of interest in our project.

More photos on Flickr. More news to follow.

My GPACW Panel contribution

The Modal Divide: It will pass, but we still have lots of work to do.

Quick answer to the prompt: how will the modal divide by decided? The modal divide is largely generational and will become moot.

I don’t worry much about the modal divide—our program has room for teachers who want to explore with their students what it means to compose, but more traditional instructors can also stay within their comfort zone.

Our TAs are trained to teach in our genre-based, rhetorical program; we moved away from the essayist, text-only approach in 2003. They are trained to teach multimodal assignments like:
• Ppt music videos
• Visual commentaries (on the page and for the screen)
• Audio essays
• Weblogging as invention and reflection
• Print-based assignments with strong design elements.
Many TAs creatively and confidently develop their own assignments and approaches. We are constrained by some of our institutional limitations: access to video cameras and video editing software is the most obvious example.

Our more traditional instructors have shown an interest in design assignments, and they are interested in being pedagogically progressive via problem-based learning and service learning. They do a great job for us, and I’m convinced that requiring them to step outside their comfort zone would not make for better classes or better student writers.

So, the modal divide will become moot b/c todays TAs will become tomorrow’s faculty, but a text-based, word-focused approach will still be with us for quite a while, and as one slightly resistant colleague puts it: students need much more help with their words than their design. Staying committed to words-only, however, will simply not be possible; to do so would make compositionists anachronistic, and almost completely out of synch with our environment. One set of things computer do especially well is combine all modes of material, facilitate design, and deliver compositions in the broadest sense; why wouldn’t we want to be a part of such exciting work?

I would even like to be so bold as to say that the discipline has more or less made the multimodal turn; there is still lots of interesting work to be done—the how—but as this conference theme implies, we are pretty close to being done with questions like “should we make the turn?”

Marshall McLuhan and IA Richards pointed out 40 years ago that there are two other things that computers do really well; and it seems to me that we are further behind in taking advantage of these capabilities than we are in taking advantage of the design capabilities of computers. These two capabilities are perhaps not as obviously about “composing,” but the first one is a grand vision of networking, the second a call for the kind of database supported composition programs now in place at Texas Tech and University of Georgia.

McLuhan, the global village builder, says:
the real use of the computer is not to reduce staff or costs, or to speed up or smooth out anything that has been going on. Its true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way. (Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, WPGV, 89)

Richards, the educational programmer says:
The computer can now collect, scan, analyze, and report on learners’ performance amply enough and minutely enough to show the designer of instruction more about what his arrangement is doing than he could have thought possible only a few moons ago. (IA Richards, Design for Escape 24)

Now that we are all multimodal, I hope that we might begin to explore other true functions of writing and teaching with computers.

GPACW 4: Technology and change

Karl Klint from St. Cloud State ("A Position for Millennial Written Language within Education Settings") developing an argument for thinking about text messaging contextually. Running through a short history of communication adaptations to technology (i.e. the telegraph's effect on the production of minimalist prose). Text messaging a by-product of the technologies; sees the likely movement of text-speak into academic settings.

Jennifer Consilio and Michael Kapper, "Playground of the Mind: Online Play with Identity and Words," argue that students can learn (already know?) rhetorical concepts from their web 2.0 experience, which can in turn be applied in academic settings. Six word memoir gets a plug.


Sites to check out: The Shannonizer: converts prose into the recognizable style of your choice.
Worlde: tag cloud generator; word analysis tool.
Twitter: a tool for thinking about the general audience.
Yahoo Avatars. Robust avatar design site.

David Russell is reporting some good stuff on Twitter: "GPACW 4A. Free templates for science posters online. Federal free graphing program online. "

Interesting discussion; made me think about the need to incorporate Facebook profile analysis into job package; relevance of range of discourse for upper division writing, something I have been struggling to figure out.

Session 3: Four Videos and a Paper

The very talented and creative students in my graduate course, "War and Peace in the Global Village: Rhetorical Acts Post 9/11," showed off their excellent work.

Jenn Roos started with the paper, a very interesting "tri-modal" essay in which she juxtaposes Baudrillard (body text), McLuhan (marginal text), and images (including font experimentation) in a way that does not negate some of Baudriallard's bold claims about terrorism and globalization, but it does undercut them with McLuhan's more optimistic statements and images that also resist Baudrillard's reading of the globe.

Bob Becker explored Kenneth Burke's concept of "the negative" to show what GWB and others' rhetoric said about "us" and implied about "them" post 9/11.

Aaron Quanbeck set passages of McLuhan's WPGV to video clips from the 30s, 40s, and 50s in a film he calls "Vintage Modern Problems. "

Landon Kakfa produced a series of 4 spoof advertisements for "Freedom and Democracy," two of America's finest products.

Niles Haich assembled footage from popular movies and concepts from B., M, and others in what is a traditional "wandering" essay--but in video format. Wandering in the best sense, of wondering.

Good Q&A followed; very positive reception for these 5, four of whom were making their conference debuts.

Kathy Yancey's Keynote

Kathy Yancey delivered her usual stellar talk about composing in the 21st century. She argued for a writing curriculum, not just a first-year writing class or program, that would engage students in broadly conceived notions of composition. Her proposal recommends:

--three spaces of composing: print, screen, network.
--a choice of technologies so that composers develop proficiency in many.
--composing for many audiences.
--network literacy
--reflection
--theory / framework / vocabulary of writing.

The NDSU writing program does most of these things; could probably do more with networking. The theory / framework issue makes sense, but she didn't really grapple with that. Makes a big difference (perhaps?) if one's theory comes from McLuhan-to-Ulmer (electracy) or a more modest theoretical shift from classical rhetoric to the new rhetoric.