Hey, noble ones! I know the stickiness of getting stuck...and there's nothing like letting go to get back with the flow. Whether ye be ranting and/or chanting an editorial, cutting and repurposing your best prose into a methodological preface, considering a new audience for a reflection, editing a layout, making a new link or setting the envelope on established connection....in any case, the time has come to let go of those new ideas and those older concepts you didn't quite reach by releasing them and watching them transform into something else. Just show what you've got and use links to cue up the future. These "gutters" could be laid out/crafted/designed/linked (McCloud's "structure") in various ways, and this play will do all the "work" you didn't get done
Recently, Yggdrasil blessed me with cool haiku compression of a float report I composed for the the REST laboratory he supervises at Penn State. Haiku and renga (collaborative haiku), used this way, seem to dovetail nicely with the tagging strategies we've been growing here at 4260. Haikus as rhythmic storehouses for links!
Hotel Detectives Haiku - "American Bandwidth" Outtakes
In his call for proposals, Bazerman outlines a number of responsibilities that writing teachers have, foremost a directive to think carefully and critically about the realities writing creates. Our university is in a unique situation, as we have recently been granted separate accreditation from our primary campus, and therefore our division has a moment to reflect, shape, and change. Our college has divided, creating the Division of Languages, Literature and Writing, and we have had an opportunity to bring together 3 new faculty members in rhetoric and composition who have been charged with reconsidering our current Business and Technical Writing strand of the English major. Bound together by a common cause of advocacy and engagement, we seek perspective on what our students most need in our classes and in their lives, and then plan to integrate that knowledge into a program that effectively addresses how writing instruction can best meet the needs of our students. Heeding Bazerman's imperative that “as teachers of writing, we have a responsibility in our pedagogy to heed what research has found” and our belief in the primacy of the local, our response to this call is to conduct our own local research to help us create the most beneficial writing program for our students. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods to gather information about our current writing program reality (that is, how do the current writing offerings fit together) and asking questions of students and colleagues about what they say we need, our presentation focuses on our efforts to create a more cohesive composition program.
Drawing both from the literature of civic engagement and our own experiences, we speak, then, to the changing identities--of our colleagues, of the writing program, of our shared goals--that drive our broadly-defined program of composing: advocacy, media, outreach, and identity.
Speaker One will discuss the current reality of the writing program at our institution, based in large part from the data we receive from student and faculty surveys about how writing is currently being taught. Using this data as the basis for a curricular change, she will then offer a vision for the new composition program, drawing specific examples from her own experiences with her composition students and their work with the university’s Center for Civic Engagement, using advocacy as a means for inviting students to compose traditional and digital texts that help students connect with and influence local problems.
Speaker Two addresses the limits and potentials of campus technology by exploring themes from open source and diy culture with students. In one query, emergent technologies such as wiki were coordinated with "analog" writing tools like scissors and paste in an expository writing class. Whereas wiki helps to destabilize secure campus technological interfaces and make them available for experimentation and play, the passion and purpose found in 'zine culture provided templates and models for civic engagement. Hopping between these media while collaboratively using and openly discussing the role of technology in our projects focused attention on how--in different ways and by different degrees in different scenes of composition--medium matters, and rendered a surprising amount and range of feedback about and energy for finding a larger audience for writing produced on campus.
Speaker Three focuses on the civic engagement process as a vehicle for gaining knowledge, composing, and community action. Looking at civic engagement processes in the current literature as vehicle to change, Speaker Three will then reflect on what we are doing in the division in light of student/faculty feedback about the purposes of writing. Working to theorize and implement spaces and opportunities where students respond to and influence local politics through their research, writing, and advocacy, s he will provide specific examples of students' work based on local issues, and how students chose to address these issues based on their own stances and the research and writing/communication that takes place in the classroom.
Bazerman highlights the importance of responsible, well-researched, civic-minded change; our panel attempts to show what a new vision of composed engagement looks like in one composition program. This presentation exhibits both the research that is applied to a composition program and the manifestation of that program that can then be applied to other growing and changing programs while addressing the emerging research of national trends and specific student and faculty responses to civic engagement in the composition classrooms.
I forgot to tell ya
Yes, it's true I forgot to blog in advance about the honor of opening up for cewebrity Leslie Hall. Ms. Hall is a 21st century media hacker and multimedia compositionalist extraordinaire. Her artistic itinerary thus far suggests that she knows more than a little bit about how humans relate to machines, particularly machines of the networked variety. Ms. Hall leverages the parataxis of the world wide web by means of an illocutionary speech act: basically she samples the neologism "cewebrity" into the name of her first album (forthcoming), making herself metonymy-ous to, if not synonymous with, this emerging concept.
Leslie's peformance lived up to the hype, but the best part of the evening, by far, was seeing Jess. Nerds in paradise: talking technical writing at a nightclub! Yes!
Ms. Reali's wiki Perkins Elementary 1st graders have a new website
This periodic table of visualization methods and the graphical excellence handout provide a good survey of the various approaches technical writers bring to the presentation of statistical data and the compression of complex information into diagrams--basically, these links provide tech writing taxonomies of the amplification via simplification technique McCloud examines in comics (Understanding Comics Chapter 2). I share the screen-grab, above, because time-series diagrams are closely related to the paradigms of emergence, small-world networks, and rhythm that fascinate me. One example of a time series diagram is a footstep graph. In an effort to quantify web browsing strategies of selected participants in their study (sort of scary, I know), researchers in the department of computer science at the University of York use footstep graphs to mesh ethnographic and clickstream data. Let's each of us select (or maybe even create) a type of figure/diagram/icon for our own projects, and write about it's potential explanatory/persuasive force for our projects.
We are three professors of rhetoric who have strategically entrained our research itineraries in an effort to visualize and enact an open architecture for communication and learning at the University of South Florida St. Peterburg, the Pinellas County Public School System, and among marginalized communities in Pinellas County. Our proposed pamphlet will be structured as a conversation about our pedagogical bricolage. Our proposed pamphlet will focus on our local conditions, and emphasize awareness of differential access to the instruments of ubiquitous computing, but will also focus attention on the faculties and literacies of distributed communication that we all have in common. We will explore the idea of obsolescence in a social field saturated with emergent technologies to suggest that common modes of creative practice and the discovery of novel uses for technology happen in marginalized communities and resource-scarce educational contexts.
The "desktop" metaphor is tired one, yet, this image, bound as it is to the idea of a personal computer, remains fixed in Florida's public school systems. We teach and research at a small commuter campus still entrenched in this paradigm, effectively "firewalled from" the technologies and trends of distributed communication and ubiquitous computing. In this lacuna, we notice how the disjunction between restrictive technology policy in education and the free play between market forces and telecommunication architecture installs roadblocks to student participation in the forms of learning and citizenship emergent in our age of distributed work and ambient informatics. In our efforts to attend to an increasingly möbius digital divide, we recognize a need to elaborate a definition of “network” in-step with a social and human measure of interconnectivity, but also attuned to the exigences of educational technology policy.
In our context, a pedagogy grappling with the stakes and responding to the effects of the disjunction between policy and telecommunication architecture becomes possible and necessary. What are the practices that best define the social in this distributed yet segmented architecture? The construction, coding, and regulation of physical and virtual composing spaces are inextricably bound, and as the knot tightens, our teaching and our research may take place under the aegis of advocacy in ways we have yet to anticipate. We believe that our local budgetary and security constraints have made it possible to see connections in our research that otherwise would have remained unexplored. This awareness further directs attention to situated practices shared by marginalized communities and underfunded public schools, and necessitates a form of advocacy-as-research in university writing programs, whereby professors of writing become “literacy architects” charged with the description, definition, and teaching of literacy practices and modes of understanding common to both the haves and the have-nots already surfing or still struggling to survive the latest tide of the infoquake.
Feb6
Greetings fellow rhetoricians,
I will be just a few minutes late today--I suffered a corneal abrasion and I need to visit ophthamologist right away. I will see you this morning for our Unit One rough draft workshop!
Whoa--scratch that (not the eye, the lateness), I will be on time! The eye doc works quick, and says I'm 95% healed since Sunday. I may not even need to wear sunglasses in FCT 120 today. See you all soon.
Had an etymological discussion with my close friend and bandmate Matt Simmons last night. Matt's cousin is a Hellenistic scholar, and Matt was telling me about his cousin's book exploring the etymology of ribauld humor and slang terms. As a trained rhetorician, I get into these matters quite a bit myself, and I've taken plenty of Latin, yet, at the same time, my training is in rhetoric and composition, not ancient Greek or Sanskrit. So, I've been known to pen emails, or "memos," to scholars who have taken ancient languages as their focus and life's work. All of this reminded me of some of our Unit One projects, because some of us will need to figure out the appropriate recipe of formality and charm, or logos and ethos, for our proposal memos and even our emails that we write in order to research our topics. I thought I'd paste two examples of emails I've written in the past to illustrate the differences between 2 recipes--one of the emails below was written to a friend, the other was written to a friend of a colleague. I penned both while still in grad school, working towards my dissertation.
Dear Professor Cohen,
I am writing a dissertation on rhythm and the rhetorical uses of sound under the direction of Rich Doyle. In my research frequently come across the greek term "demos", and the OED renders this ( in Greek letters I cannot replicate in this email) as "commons." Do you think this is a fair treatment of the etymology? I ask because the idea of a "commons" is extremely important to my dissertation, and I am not a scholar trained in ancient Greek. My thanks for any help you can give me with this research question.
Sincerely
Trey Conner
Hey Debbie!
How are things? I'm finishing this dissertation on rhythm and the rhetorical uses of sound over here in the happy valley, working closely with Rich, enjoying life. Angie's writing her master's thesis. Odessa and Aeden are growing up fast, and making us proud. I've attached a couple photos.
I have a question for ya. I'm doing a work-up on "the commons" for an article, and I came across the greek term "demos"--- the OED renders this ( in Greek letters I cannot replicate in this email) as "commons." Do you think this is a fair treatment of the etymology? I ask because the idea of a "commons" is extremely important to my dissertation. My thanks for any help you can give me with this research question.
peace,
trey
See the differences?
Forgive my blogginess, but as I write on this wiki, another resonance just occurred to me--the ambiguity in Nietzsche's treatment of this term. Shadi's blog gets into this: the trouble with "herd" mentality. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says this,
"What, in the end, is common? Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however are more or less definite image signs for often recurrin and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experience in common. ....the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation--and on the basis of such quick understanding one associates, ever more closely. The greater the danger is, the greater is the need to reach agreement quickly and easily about what must be done; no misunderstanding one another in times of danger is what human beings simply cannot do without in their relations.....one must invoke tremendous counter-forces in order to cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the continual development of man toward the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike--common!" (BGE 268).
It'll take a while to unpack this....more later! See you in class,
I think this is very re affirmative. I love reading this. i WISH i HAD A KNOWLEDGE STOREHOUSE ON SOME WEIRD SUBJECT BESIDES weirdness to answer upon calls of this nature. I like lizards and I bet I know something know one else knows...It has a lot to do with plastic trolls and storage options-- but it's mine--so back off. hee hee Hah!!! jess
What is a wiki? Technically speaking, wikis are web presences that anyone can alter. Open in this way, wikis facilitate linking and make it easy for users to move from browsing to writing, and back again. On this continuum, users can coordinate activities and entrain ideas on subtle levels. In other words, with wikis, we can easily share ideas and therefore learn to write together. FINE, but this is all just a description of users dropping out of a desktop mindset and tuning in to an always already available resonance?
It becomes helpful, then, if not necessary, to ask,
This freesound is designed to shift our definitional attention towards the ceaseless movement active wikis can sustain, and prepares us to participate (but let's not hesitate!): wiki as verb. A living verb. I am following Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, who, following Vladimir Vernadsky, insist on troping the noun "life" to it's gerundive and verb forms, emphasizing the ongoing change and dynamics of living systems. "The question "What is Life?" is thus a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, re-creates, and outdoes itself" (Margulis and Sagan 14). The wiki way is the same: "to wiki" is to repair, recreate, outdo, alter, etc...
In "Metabolic Stability and Epigenesis in Randomly Constructed Nets," published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1969, Stuart Kauffman, reports on the order that emerged from random elements entered into a computer program in an effort to theorize cellular differentiation, and described the resulting coherence (in process apparently common to both living and nonliving systems), as "order for free." When Kaufman (2005) later reflects on his most popular sample/soundbyte, “order for free,” he explains how, unlike biologists who “suppose the order of ontogeny is due to an enormous and laborious effort,” he believes that “most of the beautiful order seen in ontogeny is spontaneous, a natural expression of the stunning self-organization that abounds in very complex regulatory networks....order, vast and generative, arises naturally” (p. 25). This is also what Socrates does in the Phaedrus, one the most often-sampled dialogues in the rhetorical tradition; he samples available order, for free, reminding us that rhetoric should always take place in a conducive ecology. Socrates in Phaedrus:
Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus cast us high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze—so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. (Phaedrus 230d, Jowett transl. http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/phaedrus.html)
Let's keep playing freesound. Working with sound in wiki seems to amplify the surprising and dense connectivity we share, and so we can hear the undeniable intertwingularity of it all.
January 24
I'm still gliding after a great session on Wednesday. And we didn't have nearly enough time to address and consider much of the marvelous patterning already emergent in our writing. It was great to hear from Russell, who's back in the 'Burg after traveling MLK weekend. I also heard from Marquel, who has an interesting idea for Unit 1, and is open to collaborating--I expect she'll be posting in the next day or so. Caitlin just posted an amazing meditation on the generative force of dissonance. The wiki is bubblin'! I'm up late facing a midnight deadline: a call for proposals for the Computers and Writing Conference to be held in Athens, GA in May of this year. While David will narrate this collective effort for an audience of USF faculty and administrators in April, Morgan and Jill and I will travel to Athens in order to garner feedback from composition professors from other universities at the midway point of our funding period. Here's the panel proposal I'm about to upload, which remixes language from the New Investigator Research Grant that will support the K12 outreach effort:
Scholar and technology advocate Cynthia Selfe argues in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century that we must pay attention to the omnipresence of technologies and the resulting economic and digital divides. Many people falling through the rift of the so-called "digital divide" already have valuable skills, technological and otherwise, but no resources for developing them into life-long learning practices in technological contexts. Given Selfe's premise, we recognize the importance of providing access to inexpensive, self-sustaining, open source technology to area schools and propose to systematically examine the role of distributed technology and emergent rhetorical strategies of community-building already percolating in Pinellas schools. Our panel reports on a K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) technology initiative and narrates a grant-funded effort to connect the Pinellas County Public School system to open source technologies and communities. Our query considers the role of open source culture in teacher training, the development of educational computing, the university composition curricula, and in forging relationships with other public educational institutions.
The primary purpose of this project is to provide an open_source alternative to existing computing technologies, create a transferable knowledge base and learning module for this alternative at our home post-secondary institution, and then duplicate the program at local secondary and elementary schools. The institutional constraints encountered in this process have thus far produced valuable data regarding the practicable diffusion of open source culture at USFSP. After jockeying for space, persuading colleagues of the surplus pedagogical value dormant in our institution's latent Linux culture, and wrangling with Information Technology over security issues, we eventually rendered a small clutch of salvaged computers running Ubuntu. In addition to the practicalities involved in cobbling together our open_source studio, our panel explores the perhaps even more important proprietary policies and atmospheres that created the conditions for our surprising collaborations based on the axes of politics and architecture on our campus. Because these policies are made more apparent when trying to create something "off the grid," so to speak—in terms of the grid of proprietary software and hardware—coordinating and harmonizing the premises supporting both standards-based policy and experimentation with open_source ethics in closed systems become the explicit and everyday work of computers and writing.
Our investigation also yields insights into the computer literacy and multimedia practices of teachers and administrators, both on our own campus and in Pinellas County Schools, and suggests that open source culture indeed opens up a space that is necessary for participatory research in the digital culture of young people that pertains to both writing and educational computing. There is a correlation between open source technology and values and the shift in pedagogical values from consumption to production. In order to participate in and help generate such a paradigm shift in the way K-12 institutions handle IT, a generation of educators must be trained to be conversant with the relevant technologies and their implementation. Our LSTP outreach is a step toward our institution's role in that larger goal. Our report concludes with recommendations—in light of the trends and policies in educational technology, today—concerning the place and potential of open source technologies and philosophies in computers and composition research and solicits feedback from the C&W community as we move into the second and final phase of our funding period.
DAVIS 130
Monday January 28th
7:00pm – 9:00pm
This was a pleasant and productive session. Less than a dozen people in attendance, but brief introductions revealed different experience with and motivation for tapping into Linux culture. I made a few new contacts, one of whom promised to donate computers to the grant cause. David and I were invited to make a presentation at a future meeting.
Just back from a visit to Penn State, and Baltimore. Splendid MLK day this year at the American Visionary Art Museum. Local youth groups danced, sang, and remembered, while Dr. King's speeches reverberated throughout the building. Electrifying Alex Grey paintings (including "Transfiguration," above) on display also held our attention and seemed to inspire the children beholding the cascading reduplications and generative lattice-work to forget that we'd skipped lunch. Best of all, educator and and re-purposing/recycling artist Abu the Flutemaker let all the children in the museum play his collection of incredible trash-to-treasure instruments. Abu even made a saxophone-type reed instrument out of his grandmother's bedpost! A universal message was woven into his own unique personal narrative, which he sang in rhyme: we are all "treasure children."
1. Today, having more fun in the GIMP....I first made a postage stamp sized cc logo, just to have fun, but soon, as is always the case when I harness my attention with the GIMP interface, the "tuning in" on the form of an image organizes attention by becoming something else . Perhaps I could use this description-image and icon to direct attention to the commons-logic of copyleft? Writing on a commons-medium like wiki, yes, perhaps, perhaps I can. Wiki (verb) early and often, almost like punctuation? Through repetition, a simple form of attention management? This is what wiki teaches us about attention even better than playing alone GIMP can: because when we pay attention in common, we begin to notice how the very act of "tuning in" organizes attention by becoming something else. Rhetoric today still entails finding what Aristotle called "the available means of persuasion," but rhetoric today has also become an art and science of attention management in communication ecologies marked by a surfeit of information : this is the major-premise and primary assumption supporting my rationale for selecting a copyleft license when I write in wiki.
The Creative Commons site features the work of legions of artists working across a diverse mix of media. All of this creative practice takes place “just in time” and, as such, is rhythmic, not metered. Crucially, for this creative practice to even have a chance, the patterns, again, must be available. Open not closed. In a recent article, "Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles," Gunther Eysenbach (2006) quantifies and explains how "articles published as an immediate OA article on the journal site have higher impact than self-archived or otherwise openly accessible OA articles. We found strong evidence that, even in a journal that is widely available in research libraries, OA articles are more immediately recognized and cited by peers than non-OA articles published in the same journal. OA is likely to benefit science by accelerating dissemination and uptake of research findings" click here to read Eysenback's article in full. Put simply, it is easier, or “more compressed” to create timely and persuasive patterns with actually available means (Aristotle), than to try to work with compositional units (ideas) encrypted under lock and key. With creative commons licensing (and therefore no longer as concerned with the copyright status of "files"), students and teachers are free to write with all the available means, with the rhetorical practices and content that the the digital commons generates continuously. In this way, the art of sampling, as evolved by African American poets and musicians, once again appears as the fundamental gesture of the peer-to-peer rhetor. Those who seek to define sampling simply as promiscuity and piracy risk recapitualating the deleterious effects that stem from the historical tendency in the West to privilege the visual over the aural; namely, the unfortunate effect of not listening, and therefore not noticing all the rest of what happens when we try to communicate, in the flesh or online. Hail the Commons! Wyrd to the Wiki!
check out this well-researched history of the The Winston's famous "Amen" break to hear an interesting, updated, and perhaps more problematic parallel to Lessig's Disney critique. by Nate Harrison
Jan 12
Encouraged by the insightful posts in response to the readings (see Chevonne's Chevonne2 and Jess's Building the Cathedral) I'm inspired to think that our collective analysis will produce, among other things, an occasion to create a new page on another wiki, that in/famous encyclopedia-as-wiki, Wikipedia. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth has a Wikipedia page, but I noticed that Fuller's notion of "Great Pirates," which threads throughout the essay, has no page. So I logged in, clicked edit and prepared the way for us to give it a shot. We could build our post here via our blogging, and then move it into the larger context of Wikipedia in class on Wednesday, as a fun warm-up exercise. Keep posting, as Chevonne and Jess and others have done, and I'll be back on the wiki tonight, and tomorrow morning, as well.
Indeed, a "technical definition" assignment would seem to be a good approach to Unit One. If you follow your interests across Wikipedia, the world's most popular open source database you will find plenty of "gutters," i.e. technical terms and concepts in need of a page, or with a page that is undeveloped, or controversial, etc.
Click here for more on the invention processes, learning objectives, compositional techniques, and evaluative criteria for this assignment.
On this day, shareriff will blog about the gif animation, above, which I made using the GIMP, consulting the free online GIMP manual, Grokking the GIMP (cf Free-Tools-and-Resources-for-Multimedia-Composition), using the image at the top of the JanNine page on our course calendar.
Jan 10
mood:
mode: gif-animatin'
listening to: Echo I love the crickets + piano crash addition, Jess. Marvin Gaye's gracefully delivered, sublime query, "What's Going On?" combines with the random/chaotic piano tones in the freesound sample in a provocative way--this easy addition (adding a layer of sound) dramatically dissolves my previous understanding of this freesound composition. Cyberneticist Gregory Bateson famously and simply defined this sort of sudden symmetry-breaking on and in one's sphere of perception as information: " the difference that makes a difference"
today's epigram, brought to you by Eric Raymond: "The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world...didn't fly apart in confusion" The Cathedral and the Bazaar
I enjoyed meeting all of you yesterday, and I'm glad we had a chance to navigate wiki entry together in FCT 120. We forestalled untold hours of frustration, and opened some bandwidth for diving into the readings. Soon we'll be brainstorming together on projects (by posting "early and often"!).
order out of chaos: please forgive the following reflection on the nature of transitions, featuring many, many synonyms
I'm always grateful for the first week of the spring semester. Diverse solstice celebrations with friends and family, traveling around and hosting guests, no school for the kids--all this fluidity and freestyling dissipates in a flash when the new semester metric is installed. "Chaos theory" has to be one of the most frequently cited and popularized version of nonlinear systems (cf trade publications like James Gleik's book on chaos). As much I welcome the "forced entrainment" of schedules and straight lines on the turbulence of the holidays, I by no means intend to disavow the rhythms that emerge out of discontinuity and "noise." Complex systems are difficult to describe, though--you really just have to run the program to find out what's goin' on. Same goes for the composing process, especially in technical domains, and especially in wiki (at least at first). Order, symmetry, beauty, etc "emerges" from random (or, seemingly random) elements and dynamics. I concede that my analogy comparing the nonlinear and complex systems of physics to writing is somewhat metaphorical, but I have tested this idea--adopted it as a heuristic--in wiki, where connections and possibilities become n-dimensional, and the heuristic method has taught me a great deal about collective problem-solving. Primarily this: it's ok--nay, more than ok, it's necessary--to "miscue," it's ok to "be wrong," it's ok to share "buggy" writing and ideas, it's ok to overstate or understate the present moment, and it's ok to address an audience in an alien or even an aleotory idiom. This is the way to find and meet your audience, and Russell was right on point yesterday when he said the most important thing about writing is getting in tune with your audience. The orchestra pit is noisy when the musicians begin tuning up....
to USFSP since 2006
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