Here’s a great publishing opportunity, especially for those of you who are already in the middle of writing annotations for CRD 704 (hint, hint!)…

From: Gregory R Glau
Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 3:25 PM
Subject: publication opportunity

Chitralekha Duttagupta and I are working on the 3rd edition of the BEDFORD BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR TEACHERS OF BASIC WRITING, and we need folks to annotate the new entries.

We’ve pasted-in the url of available entries below. If you’re interested in annotating one or more of them, while we cannot pay you anything, Bedford/St. Martin’s will send you a copy of the text when it’s published, and we will owe you our debt of thanks!

Please note:

1/ you must have the essay(s) or book(s) you’d like to annotate in-hand; we cannot supply them to you

2/ annotations should follow the general form, style, and length of those in the 2nd edition (your local Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative can supply you with a copy, if you don’t have one)

3/ annotations must be sent to us by email by November 17, 2008

If you’d like to annotate one or more of the items in the list below, please send your selection(s) to Greg at Gregory.glau@nau.edu. Please do NOT reply to the whole List. Please note that items in BOLD are available to annotate (as we assign entries, we’ll “unbold” those we assign, so you can always see what entries are still available:

http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/grg37/available.doc

It’d be useful if you can send Greg your “first three choices” (or however many) as we have to assign these first-come, first-served and your first choice might not be available by the time we get to your email. Please indicate if you’d like to do one out of the three, or two, etc. and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

Many thanks,

Greg Glau
Northern Arizona University
Gregory.glau@nau.edu

Chitralekha Duttagupta
Utah Valley University
Chitralekha.Duttagupta@uvu.edu

I think I’ve figured out why I don’t prefer to read online. I like to read books and articles on paper. This week I’ve been reading a lot of online publications, and I’ve found that the problem for me is not the same as what I’ve heard a lot of teachers say when they protest the idea of designing a paperless classroom, posting readings online and responding to student writing on the screen instead of on paper. I don’t mind reading from the screen. It doesn’t hurt my eyes, and I actually prefer commenting on student writing on a computer than on paper. I type a lot faster than I write, and the older I get, the faster the hand cramps seem to start when I’m writing with a pen.

The problem for me with reading online is the DISTRACTION.

I guess I’m not as good at multi-tasking as I’d like to believe. This week I would start with The Horizon Report, but somehow end up in Facebook (yes, there really is a string of connections that can lead there).
Or I would open up an article, like Prensky’s Digital Natives piece, and wind up with five different tabs open, chatting with a friend while I’m trying to put a blog together and–yes–check Facebook at the same time.

Sometimes it feels like I can spend hours at my computer and get very little done. On the other hand, I might come away with several different ideas to follow up on. I guess online reading can be a kind of invention for me, but I always end up feeling like I need to chastise myself for not staying more focused.

But perhaps I’m missing the point.

I haven’t posted to my blog lately because I self-edit too much. I’ve started dozens of blog entries and then deleted them because I didn’t think that I had anything relevant to add to the blogosphere. Why clutter it up anymore than it already is? And then sometimes I wonder what others will think about what I have to say. Blogging and social networking can bring back tons of self-absorbed middle-school neuroses.

But seriously, why should I care? How many people really find one lonely little blog? And of those who do read it, does it matter whether or not they find what I write to be enlightening? That’s the beauty of the internet, isn’t it? We vote with our mouse. If we don’t like something, we go elsewhere.

This has made me wonder, though: How does blogging cause us to rethink what we write about, who we share it with, how we represent ourselves, and how others might perceive what they read? Why do people blog? What’s appropriate to blog about? Are there things that should just be kept private? But then there are private blogs for that, right? I guess I just don’t get the point of those. Perhaps someone else can help me understand?

In my graduate class, I require my students to keep blogs. But I can’t decide how I feel about the educational potential of blogging–is it inappropriate to coerce someone into blogging? Is there a unique potential learning experience that can only be found through blogging? Maybe I’m overthinking it. Or maybe I’m just too darn skeptical.

This week in our graduate class we read several articles dealing with the use of sound in composing. I’m fascinated by the potential connections between orality and writing, especially when technology is involved. As I read this week, though, I found myself coming back to the same question over and over again: where are the disciplinary boundaries now?

And what really counts as writing?

If I teach students to write with sound (oral composing?), then is it writing anymore?

Of course, the principles of rhetoric apply in all of these contexts, and perhaps the boundaries aren’t really the most important (or interesting) thing to consider. But the fact remains that universities are modernist, hierarchical institutions where we spend a lot of our time acknowledging and protecting disciplinary territory…and I’m a product of that context. I can’t help but wonder whether this “counts” as writing.

As I read this week, I felt like I had stumbled across an interesting kind of mashup in the form of sonic literacy (Comstock and Hocks, 2006)…one of a disciplinary kind. I realized that I need to be able to draw on all sorts of disciplines to talk about writing in a digital age. And what I was struck by the most today was my lack of knowledge about communication studies and media production. Man, I’ve got a lot to learn.

And I still can’t figure out what writing is.

In our graduate seminar this week, we read a decade-old book by Sullivan and Porter titled Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices. I enjoyed revisiting this text, partly because I found myself questioning (and sometimes remembering) the reactions and responses I had to the text the first time I read it as a graduate student. I remember originally feeling relieved when I read this book–someone was validating my desire to contextualize the research I was doing in a way that reflected the theory I was reading. As I read, I found myself realizing how much research has (and has not) changed since then.

Several of the students in the class commented on how the text introduces ideas and approaches to research that are not all that new anymore. Absolutely true. Yet, I’m struck by how pervasive the divisions between empiricism/theory/practice still are, as well as between qualitative and quantitative research.

And revisiting this text caused me to question some of my own assumptions a bit. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just list a few:

• How much self-reflection is enough? I accept that reflection is an important part of research and practice, but is there a point at which the reflection and the contextualization can begin to get in the way?
• Is there a way to get past the paradox that acknowledging one’s context introduces limitations that affect the interpretive power of data collected?
• In class last week, I asked a question about the perceived agency we assign to technology. If I adopt a position that technology has no (or limited) agency, am I denying the potential impact(s) of the designer of the technology? Or does the agency reside with the designer?

I had an unusual moment of self-discovery a week and a half ago when I was preparing for my graduate class on technology and pedagogy. We were discussing open source software, and I assigned an article for my class that was written by two friends, Colleen Reilly and Joe Williams (“The Price of Free Software: Labor, Ethics, and Context in Distance Education,” Computers and Composition, 23:1 (2006): 68-90.). As I sat down to read the article when I was prepping for class, I was particularly drawn to the section toward the end of the article that described the responses of faculty interviewed about their use (or lack of use) of open source learning management systems (such as Sakai or Moodle). One of the respondents that drew my interest was a community college faculty member that the authors referred to as “Shannon,” and she talked about the context in which she was teaching. She admitted that she used WebCT to offer her distance learning courses instead of an open source application, but she also mentioned that a faculty member who chose to use open source applications would probably not meet much resistance from administration or IT folks.

One of the reasons I was drawn to her comments was that I found myself wondering, “Then why aren’t you using open source?!?! Why are you still using WebCT???” But the other reason was that I realized that the responses sounded very familiar. The description of the community college sounded a lot like Mesa Community College, and her classes sounded a lot like what I taught when I was teaching at MCC.

And then I faintly remembered a brief interview I had done a few years back. I realized that Shannon was me.

What a strange, eerie sensation! Sometimes I have a moment of self-conscious awareness when I read something I wrote and published years ago and find myself questioning some of my own assumptions and conclusions. But this was a little different…I was able to suspend that self-conscious feeling because I didn’t recognize my own responses at first. I argued with my own self-reporting, questioning the pedagogical choices that I made just a few short years ago. I guess I realized that I always have something to learn.

Or perhaps I just realized that I have a really, really poor memory.

In my graduate seminar on Technology and Pedagogy last week, we read the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. Although it was just adopted 3 1/2 years ago (in February 2004), I found myself questioning some of the assumptions and statements in the document. And I also found myself thinking about position statements more generally.

When I taught at Mesa Community College, my colleague Richard Felnagle used to adamantly resist any attempts to write mission or position statements of any kind. I’m sure that on several levels his concerns were justified–in an English department we could go round and round for months about whether to place a comma in the opening clause of the mission statement without ever accomplishing anything. The writing of mission statements can sometimes get in the way of actually doing. But there can be a purpose in clarifying the position of a group, especially when the group is as large and diverse as CCCC.

Another potential frustration of mission statements, though, is that they are often read as acontextual, even though they are, of course, written in a particular context. A statement is representative of the circumstance in which it was written–the time and place of its writing and the people who drafted it–yet position statements can be read as somewhat “timeless” documents. They do, after all, represent the positions of their respective organizations unless they are changed or repealed.

As I read the position statement on digital environments for class last Tuesday, I found myself questioning the need for such a statement. Maybe circumstances have shifted so much in the past 3-4 years that such statements are no longer necessary. Or, maybe more precisely, I’m beginning to think that the positions that we take on teaching in digital environments are also positions that we should take on teaching in general–regardless of the medium of instruction.

The CCCC position statement has some wonderful stuff to say about teaching writing, especially in the section that articulates “Assumptions” about writing digitally:

Assumptions

Courses that engage students in writing digitally may have many features, but all of them should

(a) introduce students to the epistemic (knowledge-constructing) characteristics of information technology, some of which are generic to information technology and some of which are specific to the fields in which the information technology is used;

(b) provide students with opportunities to apply digital technologies to solve substantial problems common to the academic, professional, civic, and/or personal realm of their lives;

(c) include much hands-on use of technologies;

(d) engage students in the critical evaluation of information (see American Library Association, “Information Literacy”); and

(e) prepare students to be reflective practitioners.

As I read these assumptions, though, I realized that I could consistently substitute the word “writing” for “technology/information technology/digital technologies,” and the assumptions would still ring true. The last two assumptions don’t even mention technology at all. Do we still need to separate discussions about teaching writing in general from discussions about teaching writing with technology? Can we begin to assume that writing should be taught in a technology-rich environment because that’s where writing happens? Has our focus shifted too much to the technology itself?

Just before the section on assumptions, the position statement articulates a distinction between “two literacies: a literacy of print and a literacy of the screen.” I’m not sure I agree with this clear-cut distinction. Are these literacies really so easily distinguishable? Don’t they overlap and intersect with each other (or can we even separate these literacies at all)?

Perhaps this distinction is representative of how we thought of and talked about teaching (digital) writing before, but maybe it’s time for CCCC to take another look at this position statement and rethink our stated position and assumptions.

Well, I figured out one way to force myself to blog…I assigned blogged reading/technology responses in my graduate seminar and then told the students that I would blog along with them. So, I have no more excuses.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about forced blogging, or compelled public writing of any kind. NC State has a pretty conservative policy on the issue, and students who blog or write in a wiki in class must sign a FERPA disclaimer before participating. What kind of ethical responsibilities does a teacher have when asking students to write, or communicate in any way, in a public forum? Is that a potential violation of student privacy? Is it an integral part of education? I can think of arguments for both, and for many possibilities in between.

For now, I’m going to just try to get in the habit of blogging myself. I can theorize about privacy issues and writing in the public sphere, but with very little personal experience in this medium, I don’t have much ethos on which to base any argument or theory I might come up with.

So, let the blogging begin!