The Zone of Proximal Discomfort

August 22, 2012 in academia with 1 Comment

Someone is less than amused by the lack of content around here lately.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week, unfortunately, my workload basically took my good intentions with respect to MOOCMOOC and turned me into a lurker, and the past couple of days’ worth of orientation activities wiped out whatever rest and energy I’d managed to save up. Hooray, end of summer.

On Monday, we had our annual grad program orientation day. Considering that last year at this time I was having my gall bladder removed, I can say without a trace of irony that there are worse places to be.

Anyhow, one of the conversations we had was about program values–what does our program do well, and where might it be stronger–and the discussion followed fairly predictable lines. One point that I raised then is something I want to mention here. While I was directing our graduate program, I considered it my duty to advocate on behalf of the graduate students in every way I could. The basic ethos behind that hasn’t changed for me–I doubt there are too many graduate programs out there we could accuse of caring too much for their students, and it shouldn’t just be the job of the graduate director.

At the same time, I think it is important to acknowledge the limits of what a graduate director, program, or faculty member can do with respect to graduate students. It’s hard to talk about this without feeling like you’re “shaming” specific people or like you’re advocating neglect. On Monday, the word that I ended up with was “discomfort,” in the sense that there is a certain amount of inevitable discomfort involved in graduate education which the program simply can’t address, and perhaps shouldn’t. I say this because, institutionally, the position of a graduate student isn’t an ideal one. Graduate school is an investment whose return won’t happen until later, and given the current climate, that return is less than guaranteed. Even if it were, though, the conditions under which our students learn and work are nowhere close to optimal, much less comfortable.

And I mean comfort in a variety of ways. Very few students enter their programs fully conversant with the issues, vocabulary, and texts they’ll need to succeed–discomfort should be a spur to catch up, as best as they can. After a couple of years, when perhaps they have caught up, they lose a lot of the structure provided by coursework–discomfort should be answered with a conscious ownership of work habits, organization, self-discipline. As they dissertate, there should be a certain amount of discomfort with the limitations of a process that asks 3-5 people to stand in for the whole discipline–there’s an inevitable awkwardness that comes from being (arguably) the most expert person in the room on one’s own topic but not having a vote on whether a dissertation is sufficient.

I know that “discomfort” may not be the best word in each of those circumstances, and I know well (as I sit here a year later still experiencing some of the aftereffects of major surgery, posting to a blog that went dead for 3 years as I struggled with grief and depression) that not all discomfort is simply a matter of “sucking it up.” There are important ways that we can design and structure our graduate programs such that they aren’t more difficult than they need to be. But there are also ways, sometimes, that we try to make them easier or more comfortable than perhaps they should be.

I’m struck by how difficult it is for me here to articulate the idea that graduate school is not easy. Maybe it’s a matter of sorting through all of the different factors, and understanding that some forms of discomfort (financial, e.g.) can and should be addressed, while others (intellectual, e.g.) should be preserved. If only it were that easy. The truth is that many of them are beyond our control (cost of living, e.g.), unfortunately invisible to us (interpersonal jackassery, e.g.), and/or institutionally mandated. It helps me a little to remember that graduate programs are greedy institutions, with a stake in naturalizing themselves, i.e., turning “the way we do things” into “the way things are.” In that light, discomfort might be something that keeps us from identifying wholeheartedly with a program, and understanding that it’s more of a stepping stone than a destination.

 

You say it’s your blogday?

August 13, 2012 in Random Access Monday with 2 Comments

It’s my blogday too, yeah.

On August 13, 2003, I uncorked what would be the first of a little more than a thousand entries on my old blog. At the time, apparently, I had Cracker’s “Teen Angst” running through my head, because I think three of my first ten or so entries troped on the “what the world needs now” line from that song, including the first one.

It hasn’t been one long, uninterrupted string of blog entries, but it’s been 9 years since the first one, as of today. I’m still figuring out the new ratios among platforms, but I’m pretty comfortable with the pace that I’ve set for myself here this summer. Next year at this time, I’ll likely feel a little less sheepish about claiming a blogiversary.

MOOCery #moocmooc

August 13, 2012 in writing with 4 Comments

“[Rhetoric] seems to me then . . . to be a pursuit that is not a matter of art, but showing a shrewd, gallant spirit which has a natural bent for clever dealing with mankind, and I sum up its substance in the name flattery. . . . Well now, you have heard what I state rhetoric to be–the counterpart of cookery in the soul, acting here as that does on the body.”

Ahh, Plato, our old friend.

Yesterday was the first day of MOOCMOOC, a massive open online course devoted specifically to the topic of massive open online courses. Follow that link if you’d like to take a look–my understanding is that lurkers, observers, and hangers-on are welcome. Far as I can tell, there are a few hundred participants at the moment; other than posting an introduction and missing a Twitter social this evening, you won’t have missed much if you hop on in.

One of the values that I’ve already found is that the readings for each day provide so much more context for MOOCs than the infotisement columns that have been floating around lately, dutifully penned by those with a corporate stake in the success of a certain brand of MOOC. If you’re like me, you’ve gotten quickly tired of them. And by quickly, I mean that I now scroll to the bottom to check the identity of the author before I’ll even bother with paragraph 2. Anyhow. The readings for MOOCMOOC are refreshing in that respect. If you’re doing anything related to digital pedagogy for the upcoming semester, there are worse things that you could do than pulling together those resources for yourself and/or your students.

There’s an internal, winding path that took me from thinking about MOOCMOOC to the Plato quote above, not the least of which was the opportunity for the pun in my title–the MOOCs, they are fond of the puns. As I’ve been thinking about how I (should) feel about MOOCs, it did occur to me that, if I wanted to hop on the Plato side of things, I might dismiss them as “showing a shrewd, gallant spirit which has a natural bent for clever dealing with [humanity].” And I’m not sure that I blame folks for feeling that way. The way that MOOCs have been infotised to us lately does seem to imagine the world of education occupied by students, teachers, administrators, parents, governments, and employers. And you might be forgiven for imagining that the solution (MOOCs) proffered appears to be to take all of those stakeholders and to phase out the one group of people among them who (a) has some sort of professional stake in knowledge, and (b) has some sort of professional stake in education. And you might also be forgiven for imagining that by phasing out, they mean turning 0.003 percent of educators into “anchors” and the rest into glorified teaching assistants. After all, I’ve heard that offered as a serious model in the past, and no doubt will again. Having forgiven you for all of those assumptions, I could hardly blame a body for finding some resonance in Plato’s dismissal of rhetoric.

(There’s a part of me, too, that imagines the dystopia of the 1.3 million-member Comp 101 course, and my future career looking like a permanent seat at an AP Exam Grading session, complete with a clock to punch. Frankly, I’m not sure that there aren’t folks out there drooling over this possibility.)

I forget the place where I saw this and for that, I’m sorry. I’ve been reading so many pieces about MOOCs over the last few days that I finally sort of lost track. One of them, though, actually made the MOOC – cookery connection, in terms of the food culture that’s emerged in the U.S. over the past 10 or 15 years. [Edited to add the link.] There’s a sense in which the Food Network is massive, open, online, and educational–most folk don’t have the time or the inclination to attend culinary school (although there was a time in my life where I actually seriously considered it). You could argue that it’s not really possible to become a serious chef by watching Food Network, but then, not everyone’s after being a “serious chef.” And it’s not as though the Food Network makes it more difficult for actual chefs to find work (I don’t think). If anything, I’d argue that a lot of their shows have raised the level of food discourse and knowledge for a healthy percentage of people in the country, making it more likely that they will support quality establishments, rarer ingredients, organic food, etc. This is completely back-of-the-napkin on my part, but I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that food culture has shifted for the better in the wake of Food Network.

The other thing that strikes me here is that cookery isn’t a bad analogy with writing, because they’re both crafty (in both ways). There is a certain degree of unapologetic cleverness about each when they’re done well. But more to the point, they’re practiced, over and over, not absorbed. I can watch wall-to-wall Food Network, and that does less to make me a better cook than an hour spent in my mom’s kitchen over the holidays. I can easily think of circumstances where it’s been helpful for me to work in that kitchen, times when it was easier to test something out on my own or on friends (and sometimes fail), and times when I brought something to an expert for a tasting (I did a little baking when I was younger). Point is that there’s no one way to learn cooking, nor is there any one way to learn writing. Ideally, I’d hope the folks who come through my classroom are learning to write from as many sources as possible, as much as possible.

That doesn’t mean that I believe that writing courses can simply be ported to MOOCs, or that that kind of instructional model can take the place of everything we do. I do think, however, that it pushes us to consider how much of “learning to write” as it’s currently happening is actually “learning to write an essay,” and whether or not that’s the best way to approach things. To push my analogy further, it’s a little like saying that “learning to cook” actually means “learning to cook a roast.” You can improve your roast-cooking without ever touching one, by learning about ingredients, cooking time, managing your food prep, and some of that can be accomplished by watching Food Network shows (I imagine). More to the point, you can learn to cook (and I’d guess that many, many people do) without ever touching a roast, much less learning to cook one. Similarly, I can imagine MOOC experiences that would help students practice and develop the skills that they need to become better writers, regardless of whether or not they’re writing “essays.”

And that’s kind of where I’m at right now. I’m setting aside my (earned!) suspicion for the week, and trying to imagine what might be gained by students and teachers alike if a MOOC were done well and centered around questions of literacies, communication, and discourse. I’ll probably watch an episode or two of Chopped, too.

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Addendum: Pamela Hironymi, “Don’t Confuse Technology with College Teaching,” in today’s CHE:

As someone who spends time with students in directed conversations on difficult subjects, I’m sure the online model won’t work. We will, instead, produce graduates who cast assumptions they’ve never really questioned into grammatically correct slogans, and the sloganeers with the catchiest phrases, the most confidence, and the most money will shape the future.

That sounds a little familiar.

RAM: Seriality and Serendipity

August 6, 2012 in Random Access Monday with Comments Off

I spent a little quality time in the cgbvb archives last night, and thought I’d dredge up the entry below. It’s a nice example of the kind of seriality that Kathleen was talking about, and also highlights for me the kinds of serendipity that online scholarship is capable of. Sadly, the blogosphere isn’t quite the metonymy machine that it used to be, but this summer, I’ve been feeding data from my desktop and my iPad into Instapaper, and I’m finding that the same kinds of patterns emerge.

I also found out that at some point, for a while anyway, I was ending blog entries with “Snip, snap, snout.” I don’t have any recollection what that was about.

[This entry is a little more impressive with all of the links that I originally included, but now that they're mostly dead and gone, I went ahead and scraped them. Dead links are not as impressive.]

 

“So that’s how it works!”
Collin vs Blog, 18 September 2006

I have a folder on my desktop that I’ve been gradually filling for almost two years now. I probably add something once a month or so. Maybe I’ll pull something off of a delicious bookmark, or I’ll see a link to a pdf through Bloglines, and just dump it in.

So anyway, I didn’t have a “next” thing to read about 10 days ago, so I went into that folder and grabbed a pdf. Turns out it was James Moody’s “The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963 to 1999.” I read it right before I left for Jeff & Jenny’s wedding, so I marked it up some with the intent of bookblogging it. Before I could do so, I was browsing my blog stats, and found some visits from a site I hadn’t seen before, and followed the link, coincidentally enough, to the page of a grad student who’s working with Moody.

Which was enough to send me browsing through the various pages associated with the Sociology department at Ohio State, including Moody’s, which took me to the page for his course on Theories of Social Action. And although there are lots of texts both there and on other pages that ended up in that desktop folder of mine, the one that happened to catch my eye was Mustafa Emirbayer’s “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology” (JSTOR), which of course I’ve now read and intend to bookblog as well.

And in the works cited for Emirbayer’s essay, I happened to see an entry from David Kaufer, whose Rhetoric and the Arts of Design I’m a fan of. And it turns out that he and Kathleen Carley wrote an essay on semantic connectivity back in 1993, which of course is next on my list and will be bookblogged once I do. But the emphasis on relational sociology (as opposed to sociologies that assume substance) in Emirbayer’s essay connects for me with Latour (whom Emirbayer cites), which is close to the top of my brainpile thanks to Jenny’s post.

But it’s Debbie’s post, along with the comment about verbing rhetoric, that reminds me that I need to go back and dig up Michel Serres’ stuff about philosophy that would focus primarily not on nouns or verbs, but rather on prepositions. And the appeal for me of the word pre/position, as something both that is relational and that precedes the stasis of positioning, clicks together pretty nicely with Massumi (whom Debbie also mentions) and Jenny both.

That it inches me closer to the things I want to say, by this point, is almost gravy. That’s how it works.

4Cs just not that into you?

July 26, 2012 in academia, conferential with 17 Comments

Late July is awfully early for CCCC notifications, but the Facebook and the Twitter were all abuzz tonight with news of whether or not our annual conference hit the Like button on our various proposals. Since I ended up doing a blog entry’s worth of writing in people’s FB comments as a result, I thought I’d collect my thoughts here. 4Cs might actually make a good theme for an upcoming Random Access Monday–there was a time when I was pretty shrill about what was wrong with the conference, even when I was in the middle of a long streak of acceptances.

The good news is that I’m no longer quite so shrill about it; the bad news is that the conference hasn’t really gotten any righter in the interim. CCCC ’13 will be the 4th or 5th in a row that I won’t be attending, after a 1992 debut, and a streak of 10 accepts in a row in there. While I didn’t get accepted this year, my record is still pretty solid, but it’s gotten harder and harder for me to get motivated to submit, much less attend. Health precluded me from attending once, and I didn’t submit for a few years after that, although I was a Stage I reviewer a couple of years, and an official proposal coach for a while as well.

I don’t claim to being a historian of the conference, although some of my first experiments with text mining were conducted on 4Cs program abstracts, and I have a broader interest in the structures and processes of disciplinarity. So you should probably take what I say with a grain of salt and understand that my take on this is a fairly anecdotal one. It’s a little amazing to me that I attended my first CCCC more than 20 years ago, and honestly, given my introversion, a little surprising that I’ve been to as many as I have. There was a time, though, when I thought a lot about the conference, and some of my work on networks has as one of its origin stories a paper I delivered in 02 (iirc) about how we misunderstand the conference program.

Anyhow, my take is that a broad range of factors combines to result in a conference that ultimately appeals to certain members of the field and far less so to others, and I find myself in the latter group. When the conference began, and for a long time after that, it represented an oasis for a small, dispersed community, many of whom found themselves the only person in their department interested in the teaching of writing. It was small enough, even as the field grew, to be organized and programmed by a single person, a senior scholar who could reliably make judgments about the quality of proposals across the field. As the field continued to grow, though, in terms of journals, graduate programs, and specializations, certain changes were made to the structure of the conference (multi-stage review, blind review, single submission, topic areas) designed to make the process more manageable. There are other factors that I can’t speak to (the incredible lag time between proposal and conference, e.g.), but they’ve contributed to this as well. There are some ways that the conference is still modeled on the idea that rhetoric and composition is a single, coherent community–the idea of a single chair, a conference theme, etc. There are also still significant portions of the process, to my mind, that presume particular technologies as well.

The conference is finite in the amount of space it can give to presenters, and as the field has grown and the number of proposals has risen, the selectivity of the conference has gone up, not in the conscious sense of “we need to be more selective” but rather the pragmatic sense of “we can’t fit any more sardines into the can.” Having just presented at a conference that spread over four days the number of presentations that appear in a single CCCC concurrent session, I can tell you which I prefer. :) But there’s also been a push in recent years to be more inclusive. First time attendees, whether they receive special treatment or not during the proposal process, are asked to indicate that status as part of their proposals. In the conscious sense, inclusion is a worthy goal; in the pragmatic sense, though, it’s an illusion. If you’re limited in the number of proposals you can accept by practical constraints, then one conference can’t really be more inclusive than another. Unless. Unless inclusion is a value that gets transmitted to the reviewers, who then allow it to guide their decisions, and assume that the broader the possible audience for a proposal, the more appropriate that proposal is for the conference.

The bigger that potential audience gets, the more implicit pressure there is on the reviewers to pass along panels with a broader appeal. If you’re reading a number of proposals on technology, for example, it may make more sense to you as a reviewer to choose those panels that the other 95% of the people at the conference will be able to follow and/or be interested in. And there’s nothing wrong with this per se. Programming a conference of this size means making choices, and I think there’s value in the idealism of believing that every panel should be intellectually accessible to first-year graduate students and full professors alike.

What is sacrificed in such an approach, however, is a certain sense of progress. If you go to the panels in a particular area for a few years in a row, and feel as though the panels at this year’s conference could have easily appeared 5 years ago, that can be a little frustrating. And without continuity among the people who make the decisions about the proposals, there’s no way to control for this. There are certainly always exceptions, but they tend to be few and far between. Again, this is not a bad thing. But it leads to a conference that is more appropriately thought of as an introduction to the field than one for experts in the field. And it wouldn’t be as much of an issue if we didn’t self-present the conference as “selective” in the conscious sense. But we do. And we still treat the Conference Program, to a certain extent, as the “yearbook” or “best of” when it’s not, really. Speaking purely for myself, I can say that the best of my work that I’ve presented at 4Cs tends to be whatever portion of it I can translate to a general disciplinary audience, and yes, sometimes, the less-than-stellar conference themes. When I’ve gone ahead and tried to do what I think of as more “advanced” work, those have been the times when I’ve gotten rejected.

The thing about it is that it’s not something that has be either/or, but the way that we’ve structured it forces that choice. There are implications to rules about single submission, 100% general blind review, with a dash of conference chair latitude. And that’s okay. According to a particular definition of fairness, we have a scrupulously fair process for our conference.

All of which, to be honest, is cool by me. But if you were to ask me what my relationship to CCCC is, I would tell you that it’s a conference where only rarely are there panels that interest me and only rarely am I able to present the work that really energizes me. And as a result, even though I enjoy the time I spend there with my friends, it’s not really a conference that represents me in any meaningful way. Insofar as they can only accept a dwindling percentage of proposals in a given year, I have no issue at all with that. Insofar as we still think of it as the flagship conference in our profession, I think we’re deluding ourselves a bit, though. It caters really well to the field’s newcomers and to the featured session superstars, but as I’m no longer the former, and highly unlikely ever to be the latter, I haven’t spent a lot of time over the past few years regretting the fact that I haven’t been. And I’ve probably spent more time tonight thinking about it than I’m likely to spend over the 8 months leading up to it.

 

“No DH, No Interview” revisited

July 23, 2012 in academia, DH with Comments Off

William Pannapacker published a followup to his tweet from DHSI that I responded to a while ago. I spent a few minutes weighing in on the comment thread, and thought I’d go ahead and post it here.

I think what I’m responding to here is a general sense that the digital humanities is just another “area” to be “covered.” I don’t think anyone out and says so, but the vibe I’m getting is that notion that in a generation or so, people will all use these tools, and it’ll just be part of how the humanities operates from that point forward. Maybe so, but…

I take their project to be a little more far reaching than that. Could be partly because I’ve just been reading Hacking the Academy, but I think part of the DH agenda is to move the whole academic apparatus forward. That means making room for experiments with the review process, accepting forms of scholarship that aren’t always or only words in a row, and taking on an evaluation system that currently doesn’t accommodate the kind of “making” that DH advocates. Did I convey this successfully?

“such a person never needed a distinct, interdisciplinary field called DH to do that”

Well, yes and no. It’s certainly true that such a person could succeed without DH, by publishing articles and books, incorporating those passions into his or her teaching, etc. But one of the things that DH folks are advocating for, as I understand it, is that such work doesn’t necessarily (or even optimally) take the form of print, and that is a fight that’s still ongoing. I’ve been around long enough to hear the horror stories of colleagues’ digital work being misunderstood or misrepresented in tenure reviews, for example. I know places where they still hold to some fundamental distinction between print and online publication, even in cases where the peer review process is identical (to say nothing of more experimental moves towards open review). For many departments in the humanities, if those questions are settled, it’s because they haven’t been raised in the first place.

If our geographical Wordsworthian wanted to spend a couple of years developing the tools to be able to do that work, there are a lot of departments where that would not be considered valuable academically. And that’s a place where the fallback reliance on peer review doesn’t help. Traditionally published, innovative scholarship is going to be judged by the reviewers for journals and presses, but the humanities have not traditionally held themselves accountable for the kinds of “making” that Ramsay argues are central to DH.

I don’t think that most DH folk would suggest that other kinds of work in the humanities are less valuable, but I think it’s important for everyone to understand the ways that DH work differs from that work, and may need to be evaluated differently. My first foray into the job market was when “Computers and Writing” was trending in my field, and I had a number of friends who struggled, not because they couldn’t do “traditional” work, but because they were loaded up with responsibilities that ultimately counted for little later on.

All that said, I’m pretty ambivalent about the idea of “no DH, no interview” for a lot of the reasons explained above. I also believe, though, that part of the reason for the DH zeal (some of which I share) is that it takes a lot of pushing to shift some of the mindsets that I’m talking about here. For me, it’s more of a both/and than an either/or, though.

RAM: Workflow

July 16, 2012 in Random Access Monday with Comments Off

It occurred to me that if I wait for a big block of time to go back through the hundreds of old posts from the first iteration of my blog, that day will never come. So, inspired by nothing more significant than the fact that Monday and memory start with the same letter, I’ve decided to implement Random Access Mondays here. Every Monday, I’m going to spend a few minutes poking around in my archives for a post that strikes me as relevant, clever, or resonant, something that I want to pull forward to this site.

First up is a post that I referenced in a recent Facebook update, from 2005. One of the strategies that I use to break myself out of the writer’s block is something that I cribbed from 43 Folders back in the day, the idea of “breaking big nouns into little verbs.” It’s a strategy for elaborating the shorthand that we fall back on when we write to-do lists. Instead of working on my next Book or even Chapter With A Looming Deadline, the idea is to break those big nouns down into much more manageable chunks of activity. Do enough work at the level of sentence and/or paragraph, and voila, you’ve got an essay or a chapter, and eventually more. Small verbs are easier to handle, provide you with a time-bounded task to complete, and can ideally be done in a single sitting.

The frosting on the cake here is the list of note-taking strategies that I was working out back then. The idea behind this was to help students develop a sustainable workflow for taking notes that would be aggregable in the space of a seminar, but might also be useful for major projects like exam preparation or the dissertation.

[Note: I've pretty much left it as-is, with the one exception of scrubbing out dead links]

How to tell when Collin’s feeling punchy

Collin vs. Blog, 23 September 2005

Well, the first sign is that, if you have to ask, then I’m probably not.

When I’m working with minimal sleep over a couple of days, though, what I find is that I get increasingly manic. And while I hate hate hate being tired, one of the things that also happens is that I get increasingly efficient when it comes to managing all the bits and pieces of my life.

And so, little wonder today that, in my graduate course, we spent the first hour or so talking about note-taking strategies. I can feel my energy starting to ebb, now, but for class at least, I was positively chatty. I asked all of the students to sign up for Basecamp, a site whose virtues I’ve trumpeted here before. And I’d meant to talk about using it last week, but our conversation got away from us (me) a little. So this week. Note taking and organizing.

The big thing that I was pushing in terms of Basecamp was using the Milestones to keep track of deadlines and events, and then using the To-Do lists to manage time. Over the past two days, 43 Folders has re-run their two part feature on “Building a Smarter To-Do List,” an article I can’t recommend enough. My new mantra?

break Big Nouns into little verbs

It’s partly, I’m sure, because I’m a little tired/manic/punchy that this appeals to me so completely today, but actually, it’s on all the other days where I need to remind myself of this regularly. One of the things that I emphasized in class today was the need to develop systems that are sustainable, things you can do (and keep doing) after the initial motivation has passed and the glow has faded. And for me, Basecamp has pretty well fit the bill, even though I’m probably not still using it to its fullest potential (or giving it more control over my other projects).

So, organizing. And then note-taking. Again, I pushed developing a system that was sustainable. Derek and I have talked about this some, and here’s what I suggested to my students: buy a little notebook/journal from one of the bookchainz, and when you read a book (or a week’s set of readings), do this: put the info at the top of the page, and give yourself only 1 page, and only 10 minutes, to take a verbal snapshot of the reading. Some possible categories for this activity:

  • The 1-sentence summary. Obvious enough.
  • Keywords or tags. I’m more and more enchanted with this method of “distant reading” a text.
  • Yes/No. We talked about why we “go back” to texts, and often, it’s either because we want some support for a claim, or because we’re working against it in some way. So jot down 2-3 fairly central claims with which you agree, and 2-3 with which you either disagree or about which you have doubts or concerns.
  • Passages. Some people copy out key passages, but I’ve always found it more useful to do a quick transcription: page number, and a quick description. I often do this when I prepare to talk about a text in a course.
  • Top 5. Imagine being able to ask the author, based purely on the text in front of you, who their top 5 suggested sources would be. That is, what are the 5 texts that would help you read this one better?

I’m sure that there are other possibilities, but you get the idea. The idea is to only take 10 minutes and to use categories that are recognizable once the reading itself has faded from memory. Imagine being able to look over a semester’s worth of entries, and look for those authors whose names appear most frequently in the Top 5′s (this might answer the question “what should I be reading?”). Or being able to see some patterns in the kinds of claims you pay most attention to, or the thing(s) that you have the most skepticism about.

In a lot of ways, and I talked about this too, this has everything to do with what we’re trying to do with CCC Online. There are definite advantages to having pages and pages of reading notes (although my own graduate school experience yields depressingly few examples of this…), but there are also advantages to the kind of snapshotting (or what Gladwell in Blink calls thin-slicing) I was advocating today and that we’re accomplishing at CCCO. A little one-page slice, multiplied by 10-12 books for a course, by three courses a semester, and by 2 years of course work would give our students a fairly compact, searchable aide-memoire as they move on to exams and dissertations.

Of course, they could blog this stuff, but I think that one of the things that keeps folk wary of doing so, at least when it comes to things like class notes, is the public dimension. In the margins of our books, we don’t feel any compunction about drawing angry faces, harshly angled question marks, the occasional “WTF?!” and so on. Not so easy to do when it’s possible that a random ego-surf will bring your current or future colleagues to that entry. Maybe another way to describe the conversation I had today in class, then, is to say that I’m encouraging them to blog without blogging?

That’s all.

Filter Bubble, Toil and Trouble

July 16, 2012 in media literacy with 2 Comments

I finally got around yesterday to spending some quality time with Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, and I’m sure that I’ll be using at least parts of it in the digital literacies course that I’m scheduled to teach in the fall. There are plenty of reviews out there, so I don’t feel any real need to offer an extended read of the book. If you’re like me, though, you tend to flag tech books, and add them to the “when I have time” pile. I’m glad that Pariser’s book made it to the top of that pile for me; it’s a book that really speaks to issues of privacy, personalization, and the “next wave” on the Internet. It’s unusual for a pop book to have a significant impact on the academic work that I do, but this book might, depending on how I eventually take it up.

I mention it here today because I was reading it today at the same time that a piece over Gawker came across my radar, “Just because you don’t like a study doesn’t mean it is wrong,” an unfortunately titled essay about a problem that I think more and more academics will begin to encounter, especially as access to academic work is opened up. The study, ”Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women’s Sports.” appeared in the journal Communication, Culture and Critique, and was picked up by a number of mainstream outlets, who proceeded to give their coverage splashy titles to drive their pageviews. Of course. And this snowballed into a typical calm, careful, and measured discussion about the merits of the study race amongst online outlets to see who could misunderstand, mischaracterize, and abuse the study the most, by responding to each others’ headlines, rather than the coverage or (God forbid!) reading the actual 20 pages for themselves. Hamilton Nolan notes

Not only were the purposes and conclusions of this study mischaracterized, but that mischaracterization led to widespread derision from feminist blogs over methodologies that were explicitly feminist in nature.

Nolan’s piece does what it can to undo this, by reading the actual study and following up with an interview of one of the writers, but really, I can’t imagine that those folks who dismissed the study as stupid bullshit are likely to follow up on it, nor is the emotional damage of those attacks going to disappear with a wave of a magic wand, no matter how well-intentioned. To say nothing of the Google rankings.

Part of what Pariser talks about in Filter Bubble is the way that outlets like Gawker and others measure success, drive traffic, and conduct business. I’m not personally interested in demonizing them for it, because they’re simply figuring out (faster than most) how to play the cards they’ve (and we’ve) been dealt. Nor am I going to launch into a rant about the misappropriation of academic work, or suggest that the almost-certain-albeit-unintended outcome of open access will be more of this kind of “coverage.”

What’s chilling for me is how there is no longer much of a threshold that divides browsing from linking or choosing or endorsing. Maybe what I want to say is that Pariser’s tracking a phenomenon that erases the boundaries between Daniel Kahneman’s two different systems of thinking–we tend to believe that we are the sum of our conscious choices, but online, we’re not. Every action, every link followed, every status update we like, every extra minute we stay on this page rather than moving on (regardless of the reasons for it) is being tracked, analyzed, collated, and used to shape our experiences and the information we have access to, and that’s spooky to me.

The revolutionary thing about Google’s PageRank was that the threshold necessary to link to a page signified some of sort of endorsement (even a negative link was still an endorsement of its importance), but the optimizers broke it because that threshold vanished with the ease of automated blog/wiki spam assaults. PageRank struggled increasingly to sift the information from the noise. If I read Pariser right, what’s happening now is that search personalization simply ignores the distinction–everything we do online is information. Everything we do signifies equally about our preferences, our tastes, our affinities–of course, the flip side of “everything is information” is “everything is noise.” Our noise happens to be a little softer and perhaps more patterned than the spambots’.

For what it’s worth, Pariser does offer some tips for popping the bubble. Guess what I’ve been doing today?

Surreality

July 13, 2012 in academia, writing with 4 Comments

(This is a riff off of Kathleen’s post on seriality and may make more sense if you read that first.)

One of the years that I was in graduate school, the Computers and Writing conference was held in Hawaii, a fact that drove me bananas. Bad enough that it happened every year at the end of the fiscal year (guaranteeing the absence of travel funding), and bad enough that I could barely afford any conferences, but to hold it in a place that was extra expensive to get to? So, one evening, I went on this prodigious rant in front of a couple of friends, enumerating all of these points and more–apparently, at some point I convinced myself that I’d made two points and needed to gear up for a third. I said, “And C…Hawaii?!?!” (imagine this in my best whatever voice) whereupon we all collapsed in laughter. After that point, regardless of how many items were on the list, “C. Hawaii?!?!” became our way of poking holes in each others’ will-to-rant. (It works best, I find, if I number my points, and then break out the C.) And I still think about it from time to time, if I get particularly wound up about something, and need a way to defuse. So clearly, it’s a charter member of my Inside Joke Hall of Fame.

Inside jokes are interesting to me, in that we talk about them primarily as a strategy for patrolling the boundaries of a given social group: You don’t get it. You’re not one of us. You had to be there. And C. Hawaii?? But no one sits around with friends plotting out how they can exclude everyone else through the use of obscurity and in-jokes. There’s something to the in-joke that’s typical of social networks in general, something that doesn’t have only to do with exclusion.

There’s an analogy here to be made between the inside joke and scholarly publication, but the analogy is less perfect than I think critics typically let on. Think for a moment about the criticisms of disciplinary specialization that complain about all the jargon, the barriers to entry, the tiny number of people who comprise the intended audience, and you’ve got a bumper sticker: Print publication is the inside joke of academia. But it’s a little more complicated than that, yes? Part of the point of publication is that you don’t have to be there and then, and thank goodness for that. Whatever the truth of execution may be, part of the point of a published essay or book is that it intends to rise above the messiness of the moment (deixis!) to make some sort of statement that incorporates both the flashes of insight and the perspective of reflection. That perspective, ideally, allows us to select and combine the insights that have some lasting value, those that are worth preserving precisely for those people who weren’t there in the moment with us.

One of the very few moments of friction for me with Kathleen’s post comes in her historicization of academic discourse, and only because I think that

The first modern scholarly journals came into being as a means of broadening and systematizing such correspondence, and in the process, gradually replaced a sense of ongoing exchange with one of formal conclusion.

is a thin description of the shift to formal publication. (I actually talk a little bit about this in a CCCC presentation I did a few years back.) Not that I disagree with it, but there are a lot of advantages to be had in supplementing conversation: community, memory, storage, preservation, hypotaxis, et al. There’s perhaps an argument to be made about how that shift parallels the one from orality to literacy, but I’d have to do a lot more research to make it. At the very least, though, I think there’s a danger in imagining the modern scholarly journal as simply a fall from seriality–I don’t think K does this, but I definitely get that vibe from some who advocate for open access. For example, the phrase “guerilla self-publishing” brings into play a whole host of associations that position us in particular (undesirable?) ways, and tend to return us to the bumper sticker understanding of things. (For the record, Aimee doesn’t use that term–I’m fairly sure she got headlined.)

I’ve titled my piece “surreality” partly for the homophony with “seriality,” but mostly because I don’t think we can talk about the horizontal of seriality without considering it in combination with some vertical quality, and “sur” (over, on top of) + “reality” (duh) fits cleverly. The inside joke is a micro-example of this ratio in action–something happens over the course of a conversation (seriality) that’s particularly funny, and it becomes a touchstone or reference point (surreality) in later conversations. A discipline is a much much more complicated site to think about this, because you have to get into talking about a lot of different layers of surreality. In one important sense, seriality doesn’t change (Randall Collins has a tome); it is the foundation of what we do as writers, as social beings, as communities. But as any community expands to the point where its members can no longer sit around the same table, or fit into the same room, surreality begins to assert itself. Actually, that’s not quite right, because it implies that there’s some point prior to surreality. Fact is, regardless of how reflexive or naturalized the process becomes, we’re always choosing the words we use as a result of the combination. Within a complicated, dispersed community like a discipline, surreality manifests itself in a broad range of genres, from course syllabi to reading lists to published scholarship–we are constantly engaged in the process of sorting and managing our serially generated knowledge along that vertical axis of evaluation, priority, importance, salience.

And yet. It’s not just the case that, back in the day, academia flipped the switch and got to publishing. The system we have now is broken, in part, because surreality drowns out the seriality, and again, I firmly believe that this is a question of scale. (I also still believe that there are important steps that we can take to deal with issues of scale, that we don’t.) At a given size, a community outgrows itself in certain ways, almost like phase transitions. Aimee’s essay (not to mention countless others) points to some of the implications for this outgrowth: the model we have often results in long lag times that erase seriality even further, specializations become ever more insular and inaccessible, and institutionally, we can become overwhelmed with the added layers upon layers (please write an executive summary of the committee report compiling the outside reviews of the scholarship section of the tenure packet, would you? oh, and write another book while you’re at it.). It can become an Escherian vision of interlocking, overlapping synecdoches–wholes distilled into parts gathered into wholes distilled into parts gathered into wholes–that’s disorienting and demoralizing.

In that sense, the metonymy machines of social media are a refreshing alternative. And honestly, I think we desperately want that alternative. Some of the most popular essays in my field are those that highlight their seriality (Elbow v Bartholomae, Gale v Jarratt/Glenn). Think about all the energy generated at conferences, in part because of the stark contrast they provide to our normal academic lives. The surreal pressures of academic life (and here I’ll use it both ways) have created a space where our cv’s, the tiniest surreality tip of the seriality iceberg, replace all of the energy, exploration, invention, experimentation, community, and (yes) excitement that should accompany what it is we do. It’s freakin hard to replace “I have to get another line for my cv this semester” with “I want to explore this set of ideas and talk with these people” as a baseline motivation; one of those goals is measurable, and one is not (or at least not necessarily so).

One of the cool moments for me about K’s piece was that it sent me back to my essay in Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media–in a sense, that essay’s actually all about this issue. And the fact that it appears in a book that’s library-priced only underscores the point. Anyhow, among the recommendations I make there is one about turning our graduate seminars more towards seriality. Let me quote liberally:

As disciplines grow, and the ground that we must cover in our courses increases, the temptation is to rely more and more heavily on the shortcuts we develop, synoptic texts, surveys, anthologies. We rely upon the consensus of the field to determine our texts, comfortable in the assumption that while our students might not be exposed fully to the conversations in the field, they’ve acquired some sense of what’s important. As I hope I’ve implied above, one problem with such shortcuts is that they skip over the very processes our students need to understand to arrive at that perspective. There is no single, correct model that could be applied to every subject matter, but one important step we might take is to treat at least some of our graduate courses less as sites of coverage and more as sites of topical development. In other words, our courses could serve as disciplinary simulation, where students can study a topic or issue as it unfolds in the discipline over a particular interval, even if that unfolding doesn’t provide the coverage that a more synoptic survey might.

An important part of such a course would be attending to the conversation as it emerged, taking texts chronologically, of course, but also studying them closely for their epistemic practices. It would be worth examining how the texts during one time frame take up or set aside those texts that preceded them, and reading one week’s texts as the consequence and outcome of prior weeks’ readings. Certain texts would begin to acquire disciplinary density and centrality; others might prompt a week or two of discussion and fade into obscurity. Such a course would ideally train students to read the discipline, helping them see how each successive text built on what preceded it, how each framed issues in particular ways, how certain texts were taken up and canonized, and others set aside. A certain amount of time would be need to spent exploring and explicating the texts themselves, but the emphasis in such a course would be intertextual, exploring the impact that the texts had on the network formed through the conversation they engaged in (102). (“Discipline and Publish: Reading and Writing the Scholarly Network”)

[Alex's piece on "how to do things with a humanities phd" just came across my reader, and it occurred to me that the idea of "microecology" links up nicely with what I'm suggesting above. He writes: "A microecological approach, at least as I see it, suggests that elements might combine in unexpected ways, and that while the totality, seen from a great distance, might look the same (i.e. from the outside an English department still looks like an English department), from the inside (of any discipline), the relations might look very different." Metonymy!]

Wow, I should wind this up. Let me close with the same issue that K does – evaluation. Like her, I really value seriality, and I’m conscious of the fact that in today’s academy, it’s a privilege to be able to embrace that value. I think the question of credit, though, can drift dangerously into the surreality side of things. It can reterritorialize seriality, if we’re not careful about that. So I think there’s some strategy in looking to the sites where seriality hasn’t been erased–like conferences–to think about how we’re able to preserve seriality. Where I get a little tangled up is in the “prepositional differences” I wrote about in response to the OPR document: should blogging be more like publication? should publication be more like blogging? should both be more like conferences? do I really need one thing to rule them all? (probably not.)

I’ve got more to say, but I’ve also got more clever post titles to invent, so I’ll do both later. After I finish this damn essay.

 

Academic Horoscopia

July 12, 2012 in academia, DH, pedagogy, writing with 1 Comment

Gah. I’m taking a break from putting the (semi) final touches on my contribution to the updated edition of A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. My chapter is about “New Media Pedagogy,” and it’s one of the most difficult things I’ve had to write in recent memory. I’m really hoping that it doesn’t turn out to be one of the worst things I’ve had to write in recent memory. So, fingers crossed.

One of the things that they don’t tell you as a graduate student is that there’s a special genre of writing that you get to do later on where failure is all but guaranteed. You get a little taste of it during the job search, I think, but because you’re competing against other candidates who are all faced with the same impossible task, there’s something mildly comforting about that. The best example of this is probably the teaching philosophy statement (the acronym for which should sound familiar). That statement needs to be general enough to fit into a couple of pages, and yet, the values/perspectives that operate at that level of generality are largely shared in a given community. If you asked most people in a given discipline to list 5 terms/phrases characteristic of their approach to teaching, my guess is that the overlap would run in the neighborhood of about 95%, and much of the underlap would have to do with only a few factors (early v late tech adoption, e.g.). There are strategies that we can use (examples, stories, assignments) to make ourselves somewhat distinctive, but honestly, even those are pretty generic. We are forced in the context of the old TPS Report to try and locate some middle ground between the universal, disciplinary values and the particularities of our classrooms (which often depend on factors beyond our control anyway: location, student population, time of day, curricular guidelines).

I can think of no better analogy for this sort of writing than the horoscope, and I think sometimes about what it would mean to have to actually write them for a living. You’re not allowed to be stupidly obvious (“You will wake up today.”), nor meaningfully specific (“That cutie on the elevator today will make eye contact and smile at you!”), so instead you’re stuck with this awkward language that implies specificity (“Today is an opportune time for changes and new things as long as you choose things that continue to pique your long-term interests.”) while still being vague enough to apply to roughly 1/12 of the population. So the horoscope has to try and capture both the macroscope (you’re a Pisces!) and the microscope (you’re a snowflake!), and ends up doing neither particularly well (“You might look around your house and think of some new and exciting ways to spruce it up a little, Gemini,” unless you don’t live in a house, work more than one job, need to spend that money on food and shelter, and/or are turned off by anyone using the word “spruce” as a verb.).

Back to my problem. One of the things that’s really valuable about books like GCP is its ability to distill a lot of expertise and sourcework into a small space. This is incredibly useful for folks who are new to the field. And yet, the process by which that work is published and made available is the same process that results in our specialist work. And so yes, it’s inevitable that this chapter I’m writing will be read alongside much better, more focused scholarship, and it will look like a poorly dressed bumpkin next to that work. I’m in the position of having to cover a lot of ground in a distressingly small space–pan out too wide and I’m obvious, zoom in too close and I’m pointless. If I try to be timeless, I can only speak in the broadest and most meaningless generalities; if I go timely, then I’m guaranteeing myself a six month shelf life. I remember sitting around as a graduate student, ripping apart others’ horoscope essays, taking them to task for all of the weaknesses that are built into the genre itself, not realizing until years later that maybe they weren’t such dullards after all. It’s not easy to write looking forward to that kind of reception.

It is both the best and the worst thing that horoscope essays are often read by more people than the combined scholarly audience for everything else an author has written. And yet, it’s also an honor to be asked to write them, despite the frustrating built-in failures of the genre. Gah.

For what it’s worth, I have to admit that I momentarily flirted with the idea of writing: “Today is an opportune time for changes and new media as long as you choose assignments that support your long-term pedagogical philosophy. You might look online and think of some new and exciting ways to spruce it up a little. Now, here’s a 25-page bibliography to get you started.”

Gah.

(ps. If ever there were a genre that would lend itself to crowdsourcing and curation, it is this one. Don’t think for a minute that I didn’t think about that as well.)

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