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But you should.

Access and Excess In Moran

"If as writing teachers we believe that writers are in any sense advantaged by technology, then access is the issue that drives all other before it." (GT 220)

Duh.

It's hard enough to get a person to open up and write on paper; let's worry about the inequity that some people are economically privileged and have ThinkPads while others are stuck with a pen and paper. Yes, it matters. No, it's not going to be solved without a drastic social change. I think it'd be great if everyone had a laptop, but I bet that's not the most pressing concern for many learners (maybe things like fair housing, biased police, health concerns or FOOD AND WATER are a bit higher on the priority list). You can't eat a computer; nobody writes with a bullet. Here's a solution, let's get corporations to sponsor classes. I'm sure they'd only request a little editorial control and propagandic space.

i feel like a speed bump on the information superhighway

So who's job is it to teach web design, multi-media literacy, and the odd blend of visual rhetoric and critical "reading" skills required by Al Gore's invention? Perhaps more pointedly, exactly how analogous are writing a website and writing an essay, or story, or other "composition?" The counterpointed viewpoints shown by Faigley and Neuwirth highlight the tension between "excluding" non-lingual components from composition courses and the overload/redundancy issues of attempting to be instructionally comprehensive.

Here's the overlooked problem in both views: when we talk about teaching writing, even Basic Writing, we aren't usually referring to the elementary skill set made up of penmanship, letter/word formation and recognition, and how to hold a pen or sharpen a pencil. But these are the equivalents of web-surfing, googling, and embedding web objects. 'How you use the tools' is different from 'making things with the tools.' Faigley explains-"What concerns me most in the gradual but evident movement of basic composition courses toward multimedia production is that the tools are becoming so easy to use that we'll simply teach students to do what the tools allow. The rhetorical dimension...is being lost in the interface." Now, obviously, I don't feel like multimedia production is as simple as physically writing a sentence, but that's because I didn't grow up "reading" the IntarWeb. What we need to give students is the ability to find their voice; what medium they choose to use is their decision.

Where does it stop? There are elements of visual rhetoric in my tattoos. Do we need to start handing out ink, autoclaves, and sterilized ultrasonic needle machines in writing class too?

The Magic Box

Ah, and now we hit it. The "Distance Learning Bogeyman" of Higher Education. He's hiding in your computer, behind your blogging, reaching out from the darkness of ANGEL to tear apart writer's voices and stifle those without the capital to provide themselves the Magic Keys. And those keys have a name, a word of privilege, a sigil of power: Access. In the current push for online courseware and the electromancy pioneered by the University of (the Order of the) Phoenix, can anyone not recognize soulless appetite of the great god Capital? On page 813, Anson writes "[via] technology supported shifts in instructional delivery, composition may be further subordinated to the interests of powerful subject oriented disciplines where the conception of expertise creates rather different pattern of hiring and material support." (Italics mine)
I know that the Marxist lens seems irritating to some, but just look at what drives the shift toward technological teaching. Fiscal constraint. Conditions of production. Training good drones for post-education jobs. Profit. And now look at what is lost. The student and the teacher are dehumanized into digital signals that are exchanged and categorized, their unique personhood is, more than subordinated, subjugated to the external power that needs it base to continue playing its role, maintaining the drones of the factory, the bureaucratic hydra, and the continuance of its imposed order in perpetuity.

Are we using the technology or is it using us?

By any other Name (Yes, I'm a cliche dork)

Ah, Rose and remediation. While the title of this post is a (not very) witty pun on the author's surname, it does relate to his subject matter as well. Much like our class discussion regarding medical metaphors in educational settings (e.g. diagnostic essays), the power of naming people, groups, and patterns of behavior is one of those common sense ideological enforcements that slips by unnoticed; it has a disturbing amount of impact on both the object of the label and the labeler (libeler?). "Tag some group illiterate, and you've gone beyond letters; you've judged their moral and their minds." (VV 561) Sticks and stones, no? It just fits with so many other examples of hidden connotative meaning we've already run up against like so-called "bad grammar" especially when that term is applied to something that might be better understood as differing dialect or rhetorical uses for ones writing based on audience. Standard Written English is not the only forum which people write in. Perhaps recognition of this oft overlooked detailed will make it easier to empower, rather than belittle, basic writers.

I just realized that while I did read the "Narrowing the Mind" Rose piece, the above post is on the second (read "wrong") one -- The Language of Exclusion.

CramminItAllTogether

I was unsure if we were pushing forward a week, and it was spring break (pronounced "Bender"). Therefore I've read some of the technology readings, and the basic writing section as well. I'll be pumping out multiple posts, at speed, now. Bear with me if it seems frenzied (It is).

I got into Sommer's article on revision strategies because it paralleled amazingly well with the problem my friend Bob is going through in composing music with his band. His guitarist and drummer are what he calls "riff writers." Bob, on the other hand has been playing bass for 17 years, and composes entire arrangements with the aid of his computer and knowledge of musical theory. I mentioned how Sommer's case studies discovered that "They [inexperienced writers] perceive words as the unit of written discourse," to him and he said that I could substitute "riffs" for "words" and see the same problem in musical composing. (VV 46) A pretty, polished song with technical excellence and variety can still be ineffective. Much like an experienced writer, he transcribes the first run, then finds out where it's going and reinforces the living growth of the song. Detailed editing comes at the end.

Critical Mass

Berthoff's critique of cognitive psychology based development models for writing capability and teaching is thoroughgoing and beautiful. Two points that seem to exemplify the critical attitude stood out to me.
The first is that we must think and question for ourselves. On page 331 in Crosstalk, she points out that “all method, including scientific method, entails interpretation...there are no raw data.” We live in a world where such cliches as “the numbers speak for themselves” and “you can't argue with facts” are considered as common sense. Their implicit authority is overlooked. The truth is, you should argue with facts and only people speak for themselves (and often they simply repeat others words, at that). By blindly accepting the false assumption that scientific evidence is unbiased and objective, we become trapped in a mechanistic worldview that values quantification and classification above all. The inherent problem in this view is that counting and labelling cannot lead to progress, change, or the solving of problems.
The other point is that there is no substitute training of the reflective mind. If we, as writer/teacher/thinkers cannot are unaware of our own conscious actions while doing X, then we mustn't assume that a lack of performance is the same as a lack of ability in doing X, whether that is writing a position paper or making a spicy lamb stew. Berthoff indicates this by her phrase, borrowed from Richards, of “'assisted invitations' to look carefully at what they are doing – observing a weed or drawing up a shopping list – in order to discover how to do it.” [italics hers] Simply put, we are good at things we need to be good at and new things are difficult because we haven't unconsciously practiced them.

And on to Myers. Be warned, after I drop the quote from page 445, you're all going to get a glimpse into the inside of my head. It does not follow a logical, or even chrono-logical order. It is a web of interconnected connotaive hooks. So, from the section titled Leonard and Reality:

“People have no simple unmediated perception of reality; the facts we are likely to take as reality are most likely parts of another ideological structure.”
Consensual Reality. I played that game, it was called Mage: the Ascension. The universe was made of what everybody in it thought it was. Damn Technocracy locked it all down. Leonard? Like Leonard nimoy? Mr. Spock, that's fits with the whole 'logic as king' thing. Still an ideology. Some people's real world is Star Trek. Mine is school and whiskey and friends and (lack of) women. Work pays bills, nothing more. Lying to myself again. The real world is all my life, and theirs. Perception, too, eh? Isn't what I see determined by where I look, what I look for? I only write for what I want audiences to see.