Transforming the Teaching of Literature from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

I decided to do my Computers and Writing presentation this year as a Sophie book. Sophie worked well at bringing together a number of videos and images and also at allowing me to weave in snippets of text. Having the ability to use timelines to sequence the pieces was also very helpful. The Sophie book is currently over 100mb, so I'm not linking it here. Instead, I have just done a screen recording of the project. In addition to this one from vimeo, there is a 30.8 megabyte QuickTime file.

I'm starting to think about the upcoming Computers and Writing presentation. The last time around I wrote prose, which was a nice change of pace from the show and tell routine I've been doing at conferences for the last few years. I'm thinking some combination of reading prose and showing stuff, but haven't arrived at a decision yet. I might just do a video ala 2006 (below)

Here is a draft of my bit for the panel Jenny Edbuaer Rice, John Biewen, and I will be putting on in New Orleans. The panel is on sound in composition, so it's a bit ironic that the audio quality of this is somewhat dicey, but you do what you can.

Musical Pieces: Readymade Audio Projects and Creativity from Daniel Anderson on Vimeo.

I've been long cured of the illusion that starting a blog or other networked accretion will translate into productivity for a writing project. Still, I'm always eager to break out of isolated author mode and take things public. With that in mind, I'm posting a link to NowWriting.

I envision this wiki as an article in terms of chunking it for work prioritization, academic weight and such. I think of it as nothing like an article in terms of its composition process. I hope to write on it in a number of ways: cobble on it over the next couple of months in blog-like fashion; spend some time refining and extending pieces; go fungal with links to partial ideas that might be dumped or expanded; see if anyone jumps in to add or change ideas or foci. I honestly only know for sure that I want to toy with the idea of enacting rather than describing an emerging and converging kind of writing.

I've enjoyed fidgeting with the wiki software. I'm struck by the way that composing wiki text feels closer to the raw HTML coding of the early 90s. It's very liberating to link when the urge hits. Going back and changing, though, is tougher, I think. The naming of files when the link is created runs counter to the provisionality and fluid form that should be part of this kind of project. In any case I'll be pushing this around for a while and welcome joiners.

This piece in the NY Times offers a nice counterpoint to some of the recent complaints about the stultifying state of most non-digital education. I pulled down some of the lecture video and added a few questions. The are other questions to poke at as well: what does it mean for the haves like MIT to hire such teachers and create such content while others get to may only be able to consume it on the Web? How is it that teaching like this get valued? Must it become public, superstar fare? Mostly, though, it's just nice to think about how teaching can take place outside of the digital box sometimes.

I've posted a video reflection of a recent annotation assignment. The Flash video is about 35mb, so click the image or use the link below only if you have a decent Internet connection. For the assignment, we used a CommentPress text set up by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Lot's of good things happened. I pretty much stepped out of the way (my favorite teaching style) while students worked with one another to pick apart the text. We wove in video clips from the film version of the story, so we got to think about media and narrative and a hybrid interpretation of the story. Great interaction among commentators. You can check out the online edition of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge we created or watch my video reflection on Student-Centered Literary Studies on the Web.

Faculty life seems to bounce between creating and grading assignments one moment and reading and writing professional texts the next. Activities move back and forth from teaching to research with the frantic energy of a flickering flame. When the movement is broken, it’s usually some administrative logjam (or, worse, bit of minutiae) to be gotten unstuck. So, what a joy it’s been to be working lately on a new school project, advising the English majors and their student organization.

Most departments have a club or association for their undergraduate majors. Ours has languished for several years, and I’ve been given the reigns. I quickly decided that we could use some social networking software to facilitate the group interactions. I’ve learned a couple of things.

First, there is no substitute for behind the scenes organization on the part of the members of a group. This is not new information, but it’s always helpful to have the knowledge reinforced. Setting up meetings, tracking down keys, sending e-mails, taking notes, following up—all the usual managing must be in place before anything happens. Fortunately, there is an untapped reservoir of interest among our majors; (many) students want more than just to take courses; they want to make connections, share their love of literature, learn outside of the classroom. So, we’ve got the baseline organizational structure and personal investments in place.

That means that building the social networking site has been more fun than I could have imagined. I’m always glad to tinker with technology, but it’s much more rewarding if a group of people use what you make. I’ve spent the last few weeks taking my relationship with Drupal to the next level; we’ve moved past that glowing-get-to-know-each-other stage, spent some time in the I-just-don’t-think-this-is-going-to-work-out stage, and seem to have settled into the boy-I-wish-I’d-known-about-some-of-these-quirks-but-I-guess-I-can-live-with-them-and-I-sure-feel-comfortable-together stage.

The main focus has been adding community-building modules to create the social structures. At first I focused on things like the birthday module or the avatar module, little touches that add a community feel to the site. I put up an events module/calendar to share information about readings and such. I then set up the organic groups module—a set of tools that allows the creation of sub-groups on the site—you can limit access to blog postings to members of a group, post group-limited announcements, and send messages to group members. My thinking was that the practical groups and events modules would be the most useful.

But then, earlier this week, students in my first year seminar complained that it’s difficult to read all of the postings and comments on the class blog without being able to attach a face to a name. Enter the avatar module. Why I didn’t think of this earlier, I can only attribute to thinking that the face-to-face time we had in class each week obviated the need to add the community-building measures to the class site. My bad. The avatars on the class Web site have gone up more quickly than those on the SOUL site. The students then asked to have their pictures appended to their postings and comments, which I set up.

I’m glad they set me straight, because I’ve been trying to study ways that the studio teaching model that I favor might translate into online spaces. I guess, though, this pokes a hole in my theory that working with the English majors organization was a break from the usual routine; my dabbling with the majors site quickly bounced into the classroom; and now it seems to be moving back toward scholarship. Fickle flame.

There has been a good bit of discussion lately about the recent piece in CCC about revamping first year composition as an introduction to writing studies, but I’ve actually been thinking about another piece in the same issue takes up the question, What are English majors for? The question comes at a good time for me, as we’ve been working on the revision our undergraduate curriculum for the last year or so, and it’s time to concretize the plans.

Much of our curriuclum revision stems from the experience of asking graduating English majors what they thought of the program and having them list a number of disconnected classes—“I took Shakespeare, Af-Am literature, a poetry class, etc.” There is little coherency and no sense of a trajectory that one takes through the program. To give the program more of a narrative arc we want to implement two seminar courses, one at the sophomore level and the second at the senior level—the idea is to create on- and off-ramps to the curriculum, an introduction to the major and a capstone experience.

Clearly, though, revising a curriculum in any significant way requires more than adding a couple of courses. In “What are English Majors For?” Thomas P. Miller and Brenda Jackson ask departments to transition from literary studies to literacy studies, opening paths for departments to focus on education, creative non fiction, media and other areas more relevant to students’ lives and the contemporary communications landscape. This makes good sense, and I hope that some of the changes we implement can move in these directions. Of course, local context is everything and the “let’s turn English into Communication Studies” approach is likely surely to be a non-starter here. In fact, one of my biggest concerns is that we will rearrange deck chairs and not do much to transform what it means to be an English major.

You can see some of the reshuffling in the goals behind the new curriculum. Roughly, we’re thinking students should

• develop a sense of the historicity of literary studies (old school),
  
• practice writing and revision of print essays and other forms of expression (new school),
  
• have in-depth exposure to several exemplary authors (old school),
  
• have a sense of major literary genres (with some emphasis on narrative and poetry) and a strong grasp of one or more specific genres (old school),
  
• understand a number of approaches to literary texts and representation (old and new school),
  
• understand the relationships between texts and historical and cultural situations (old and new school), and
  
• recognize aesthetic dimensions of works under study and identify connections between literature and their personal lives (old and new school).

Ideally, the on- and off-ramp courses would be developed around these goals. The tricky part in thinking through a revision, though, is figuring out what to do with the courses one takes in the middle of the English major. Right now, requirements essentially spread courses out chronologically and geographically, so students must take at least one pre sixteenth-century British literature course, one twentieth-century course, and so on. It looks like we will loosen some of these requirements but keep the general focus on time and place as an organizing principle. The challenge, then, is to layer over these requirements some additional criteria that can create a sense of narrative and coherency while opening avenues for pursuing the larger curricular goals and arriving at more significant transformations.

My response is to think about ways that tagging might possibly be used to reshape some of the offerings and the help students create connections within the array of courses that meet their needs. So, a course might be tagged British, Poetry, Theory, and Gender, to name some possibilities. The hope is that this might add more flexibility to the traditional ways of organizing the middle areas of the curriculum—not just time and place. Ultimately, though, I’d like the tags to do more in terms of transforming the curriculum. Faculty could extend their course designs by layering new categories over the existing, and admittedly constraining, containers. I’m imagining tags like Composition, Media, Education, Studio, and so on that would indicate different learning emphases and teaching models.

The challenge would be to limit the number of tags/categories so that a coherency can derive among related courses. What number of tags would allow connections to form among six or eight courses taken during a career? How many tags would be too many? What tags are essential for conserving the traditional values of an English major? What tags are likely to open avenues for transformation of the curriculum?

I'm thinking about ongoing and upcoming curriculum revision efforts in our department and thought I'd get started by putting the course descriptions of all of our Fall offerings into a tag cloud--the cloud includes terms that occur ar least eight times in the compile descriptions. Interesting that the most frequently occuring term by far is class, followed by course. Not surprising because many descriptions have a phrase like "This course. . . ." Still, illuminating in some ways that the thought process and engagement terms don't bubble to the top much. Discussion has some weight. Thankfully more than quizzes. Here is the tag cloud

Alex has posted some thoughts on the recent Computers and Writing Conference and others have also offered some reflections, so I thought I’d toss two pennies of my own into the hat. The first coin represents what to me makes the conference and the community worthwhile. I don’t think it is just nostalgia—C&W was the first conference I attended as a graduate student some thirteen years ago. There really is a tighter-knit group and a different dynamic at C&W than I have found at other conferences. I think this may stem from the original outlaw ethos of the group. It’s hard to recognize, now that technology is so ubiquitous in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, but it used to be the case that the technologists in writing studies were the oddballs and outcasts. From the word processor to hypertext to electronic communities to online spaces the history of the group involves a lot of work on the margins that were opened up by the technologies of the day. The main point, though, is how this status created a sense of cohesion and shared purpose within the group: “I come to C&W because I don’t have to define my terms—everyone speaks my language.”

The nature of technology-related work has also shaped the community. There is a good deal of informal teaching, hand-holding, knowledge-sharing involved in learning to use technologies—witness the view/borrow source phenomenon of the early Web and of programming languages, FAQ collections, message forums. The knowledge-sharing/borrowing approach to tech learning, I think, carries over to the Computers and Writing conference. In some ways it colors the general attitudes of the participants; schooled in the technical training way, they bring these sensibilities to the conference. The conference also maintains a lot of the show-and-tell approach to scholarship that has been bled out of the more formalized and abstracted field of rhetoric and composition. People theorize, but they also share through example more frequently with less fear of being seen as un-intellectual.

There is also the wonderful fact that Computers and Writing is in many ways lead by its youth. From Daedalus to Kairos to today’s Web 2.0 many of the best developments in the field have been driven by junior faculty and especially by graduate students. Obviously these groups have been supported by more senior people and institutions, but there are (or have been) more opportunities for people new to the community to have a real shaping influence on the field. This dynamic is felt at the conference as well. When the community gets together it’s common to see a senior person under the tutelage of a young scholar who happens to know more about the subject than anyone else. And, conversely, lots of presentations feature young scholars showcasing their work and actually getting feedback from the field.

Alex asks what the conference might look like in twenty years and also reflects on the status of the field in the context of rhetoric and composition, so let me toss out my second penny as a partial response. I’m discouraged, honestly, by the way technology has been integrated into the larger field of rhetoric and composition. Some of this might just be a sense of loss that comes from no longer being as easily labeled as innovative or unique. I think, though, that this inability to be readily tagged reflects a larger trend that is disheartening. The trend is the professionalization (read academic gentrification and abstraction) of knowledge work. We’ve seen this in the larger field of rhetoric and composition as evidenced by publications in the major journals—see Fulkerson's and Trimbur’s ruminations on the field.

In rhetoric and composition things must be cited, lit-reviewed, and filtered through the usual venues to be given credence and welcomed into the field. My sense is that the computers and writing community used to be given more of a pass when it came to this requirement. In the early 90s as the Web was exploding, people would allow that the creation of a class Web site with student-generated online compositions was innovative. Again, the outlaw nature of computers and writing was helpful. The work was fringe enough that people outside of computers and writing might not bother to try to academicize it. They might not exactly embrace it, but they wouldn’t also try to add the controlling layer of intellectual abstraction that goes with traditional scholaship.

This may just be my own wishful thinking, but I believe there used to be more options for just concentrating on the learning and the teaching in computers and writing. Outlaw makers would make stuff. The rhetoric and composition community let the making happen, even acknowledged and valorized it in some ways by agreeing to leave it alone. Now I think it’s a lot harder to pitch the argument that one is doing quality work in computers and writing because one is making new things, creating heretofore unimagined opportunities for learning and writing. That is fine to do, still, but no longer enough to count as knowledge production in a field more tightly wound within the larger rhetoric and composition community.

Maybe the misty time I’m imagining when that kind of simple making did seem like legitimate work never really existed. I believe it may have, though, and I worry that it no longer does.