Diggin’ it Digitally

When I read Cheryl Ball’s article and got to the part where she admitted telling us to do something she doesn’t do herself (use multimedia to present scholarly work rather than just linear text), I had to crack up. I had been thinking about the same thing myself after reading the CCCC statement and the Kimme Hea piece. I kept thinking about how I am in a digital media program, and I don’t even have my own website, nor do I plan on having one. I also don’t particularly like blogging, and I don’t generally get fancy with anything I post on any discussion board to which I am required to post. I’m a bit of a luddite in a lot of ways, which is incredibly ironic given the program I’m in. But, and I’m going to sound like a broken record right now, I don’t agree with doing things just for the sake of doing them. I agree with Ball that we should use new media text, as she defines it, IF IT WILL HELP YOUR AUDIENCE. We talked about this some at Mitch’s last week. I can easily see, for example, writing a rhetorical analysis of a visual artifact, in which case it would be helpful to me to be able to display this artifact, whether it be a film, image, etc. But, if text is what will get your point across, then so be it. Leave it at that. I can’t stand having to read online articles that have all these bells and whistles that make me work WAY harder than I need to to get the point, just because someone else thought it was “neat.” Ball says at the end of her article, “While space prevents me from offering specific reading strategies that would help readers new to new media texts interpret (often experimental) aesthetic and scholarly elements that are usually found in their designs, I hope readers will take away the potential of reading and composing in new media as future avenues for scholarship in and out of the classroom” (p. 421). My point is, I don’t want to have to be trained how to read someone’s article. It should be user-friendly – period. And the other media inside the text should have an explicit purpose. It should either offer useful examples, enhance your argument, or help you support your claims, or it shouldn’t be there. I know. I’m stubborn!

Ok, enough said about that. I do worry, though, about my reticence toward new media forms, and it worries more and more as we discuss job searches. I can easily see an interviewer asking me why I don’t have my own website seeing as how I graduated from a digital media program. Just the name of the program will probably bring certain expectations as to what I can and can’t do, and what I know and don’t know about digital media. Having said, that, I would hope that my dissertation would take care of a great deal of that since it deals with a digital media issue. But, I still feel like I need to jump on the bandwagon and at least have my own website to display my competencies. As far as blogs are concerned, I think the most valuable thing about them is self-reflection, which is incredibly valuable. I have done quite a bit of self-reflection on this blog during the semester. The two blogs we were supposed to look at for this week (I’ve only skimmed them at this point), had different levels of self-reflection and information for others, which is also valuable. Shelley Rodrigo’s blog is very impressive. And I can see how this would help not only students, but also other scholars by sharing information and thoughts on scholarship. What I want to know is, how on earth do people find time to keep up with it????

I’ll have to say, as I sit here at the library writing this post, that going without my computer hasn’t been all that bad. There are several reasons for this: 1. I had a TON of reading to do in the first place, and I think I probably got more of it done, much more efficiently, because I wasn’t screwing around with my computer, and 2. I had to come over to the library anyway today to get books. Yesterday was a bit of a pain in that I had to go over to the neighbors a couple times to check my e-mail (I’m feeding their cats for the weekend). But, I don’t get much e-mail on the weekends, anyway.

I think the lesson this taught me was how obsessed I am with my computer. I am practically enslaved by it! I think I realize now that I really don’t need it as badly as I thought. Granted, there are times (like when I’m writing papers!!!) that I do need it desperately 24-7, but, when I don’t really need it, why can’t I just put it away? I’m tempted to make a pact with myself that I will try to do this at least once a month – put it away, and go without it for awhile. That brings me to another important epiphany I had in relation to this. I’m actually guilty of doing this in the classroom, too. The technology is there, so I use it. It dawned on me that I have never lectured or taught my class without it (mind you, I have only taught two classes, so …) But anyway, this led me to think about whether I am actually thinking about the use of technology, or just blindly using it because it is so ingrained in us that we should use it because it’s there. I should try to teach my class without it, and then see if it actually helps my students learn better. Heck, I may even be a better lecturer without using it as a crutch. Will I do that this semester? Probably not. I have only two or three lectures left, and they’re used to the way I’ve been doing it. But the next class I have, I’ll try it.

Now on to the readings: I’ll have to admit that Susan’s article made Sullivan and Porter’s model much more palatable, and I think it’s because it is situated, in this circumstance, around an area of study that would call for critical insight. Sullivan and Porter seemed to think it should be used in all cases. In the L2 arena, I agree that it’s important for us to understand our own biases as researchers, and also to take the opportunity to engage with these participants to better understand where they are coming from. Also, I’ve always been in agreement that, as DePew and Miller say on pg. 275, “…it is also of the utmost importance to consider the ethical implications of the study at all stages of the research process.” I think we should always consider this, and, in fact, we were taught to do that in Dr. Dannels qualitative class, particularly since as observers, and possibly participant observers, we could impact the scene. Beyond that, we always have reasons for doing studies, and those reasons are more than likely somehow biased. So we always need to at least acknowledge that, at least to ourselves, going forward to get a better grip on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

I’m not going to say a whole lot about the Wikinomics chapter because I might go off the deep end. I had to go back to see when this was published, because I simply could not believe my eyes when I read this sentence: “The growing accessibility of information technologies puts the tools required to collaborate, create value, and compete at everybody’s fingertips” (pp. 10-11). ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????? There are actually still people out there who haven’t heard of the digital divide? But, then again, it took me about a page of reading this to realize that it was written for business, probably by people in business. It wasn’t so much the buzzwords like “tipping point,” that gave it away as much as it was the totally unrealistic and untrue utopian picture of technology that usually comes from that sector of society. Anything that ends with “nomics” is going to draw red flags for me. I particularly love how they pay sarcastic lip service to socially responsible collaborations on the net, and those who circumvent corporate profit mongering with new ideas, only to get their ideas co-opted by it later. They end off with this quote, “For individuals and small businesses this is an exciting new era – an era where they can participate and add value to large-scale economic systems in ways that were previously impossible” (p. 33). Yea, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do with my life. NOT!!!! This stuff might help the capitalist economy, but as we’ve all learned over the past year or so in this program, it’s almost always for those at the top, and more and more to the detriment of those at the bottom – particularly those who don’t have access to the technology. I just had to get that off my chest!

On to the Howard article: I thought I would die laughing at this whole Turnitin.com plagiarism detection software thing. I had NO idea that this software existed. Anyway, this reminds me of a conversation I had last week about workplace surveillance (companies reading employee e-mail exchanges, monitoring Internet usage, etc.). I made the statement that people seem to jump to two conclusions when it comes to today’s technologies. 1.) That it’s going to MAKE people cheat more, or break the law more, and 2.) That you have to create some new technology to stop all this law/rule breaking that’s all of the sudden going on because of the Internet (or whatever the technology is). It’s a never-ending cycle. While it’s true that these technologies might make it easier for people to do certain things, I don’t necessarily believe that it means an automatic increase in dishonest, lawless activity. It’s very much a technological determinist argument. People were doing these things before the Internet ever came into existence. Students were using other students’ papers, paying people to write papers for them, etc., to get good grades. I hold onto the belief that if they cheat their way through college, it will eventually catch up to them.

Although I’m not real sure I understand this whole notion of intertextuality and Itext, this statement Howard made is inevitably true for those of us who do research, and work off of each other’s work to “continue the conversation in our field. “It is no longer possible to control access to text, and it is no longer possible to imagine that writers do not draw copiously on other texts, both consciously and unconsciously” (p. 11). My question is, in the spirit of the discussion we had at Mitch’s last week, when was it EVER possible to do that?????

I was a bit bothered by the assertions Johnson-Eilola makes in his piece for this week’s readings. I found it to be unrealistic in many ways. The whole notion of collaboration as freeing and socially responsible doesn’t take into account the many forms of “collaboration” that I consider horribly constraining. So, my main question is: what’s wrong with one student writing a paper in her own words? The reality is, when they get out into the workforce, most of them will never have that opportunity again. The “collaboration” will in fact be stifling. At newspapers and magazines, their editors will change their work and it will become something totally different than what they meant, and in many cases will undermine their attempts at being fair and impartial, and sometimes will make them downright unethical (I know this because I lived it. I was a newspaper reporter for eight years until I couldn’t take it anymore). What’s more, the newspaper will have its own political agendas, and the writers will be forced in many cases to conform to those agendas. When they go into a corporate environment, their writing will be censored and rewritten by managers, lawyers and others who will insist that they write in that corporation’s own tone and purpose. They will write the way IBM or Intel or Glaxo or whoever they work for tells them to write. This will be called “collaboration,” of course. The pivotal quote in this article for me was this one from page 457.

Maxine Hairston, summarizing the influence of Mina Shaugnessy’s research on basic writers, insists that “we cannot teach students to write by looking only at what they have written. We must also understand how that product came into being and why it assumed the form that it did. We have to try to understand what goes on during the internal act of writing and we have to intervene during the act of writing if we want to affect its outcome.”

The internal act of writing is the freedom for crying out loud! And, in this day in time, that’s where the social responsibility will come in – by not being influenced by so many other overpowering structures and people. In many ways, that student’s piece of writing assumed the form it did because that person has a unique view of the world unlike any other, and, at least to some degree, these views haven’t been warped by corporate forces yet. So, intervening during the act could actually be just as stifling as what happens when their work gets edited by some pompous corporate attorney (I know that from experience, too!).

Maybe I missed the point. But I don’t think so. I’m sure if I did one of you will tell me. At any rate, I still don’t get all these arguments that hypertext is somehow going to generate all this collaboration in positive ways and create more social responsibility. No one has shown me how that’s going to happen until the social structures and constraints under which we write are altered as well. It’s a pretty damn technological determinist argument, in my opinion. It’s like this quote from Bolter and Grusin in Sean Williams’ article stated. “No medium today … seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media any more than it works in isolation of other social and economic forces” (p. 469). AMEN!

Now, on to Williams’ piece: I was all about what he said about visual rhetoric being just as important as written and verbal. And it’s not because I took Dr. Gallagher’s Visual Rhetoric class last semester, either, although that class enlightened me quite a bit as to just how important visual rhetoric has become in our society. With the Internet and other new media, we are absolutely bombarded with visuals, all trying to influence us the way words do. I teach my students in Com 110 that when they give a speech, their visual aid can be as powerful, or even more powerful, than the words they say. Visuals in concert with text can be incredibly powerful and persuasive. So, while I found his model to be potentially stifling (it actually sounded like something right out of a technical communication class), in that it’s very formulaic, it does make the writer think much more carefully about what she is doing, why and what impact it could have.

When I started reading this book, I immediately thought of Stanley Deetz’s Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization, published in 1992. This is a book near and dear to my heart, since it basically is what inspired me to get a PhD and enter the world of academia. This book was a breakthrough in critical theory about organizational communication, and the role rhetoric plays in the corporate colonization of every aspect of our lives. He bases the majority of his arguments on the work of Foucault. It’s well worth the read.

At any rate, Deetz includes a chapter on communication theory that basically says the exact same thing Porter and Sullivan were saying. He criticizes research decisions made a priori, based on methods that we never question. “It is not in our theory and judgments that we begin, but in our pre-theoretical understandings and prejudices.” (p.66). He emphasizes that there are politics in knowledge and in the way we, as academics, approach knowledge. Our field is often a power structure that also leaves certain groups out. “The claim of the truth is more like a club than a new insight – a club in the double sense of a big stick that demands acceptance, and a group of people who share initiation rites, a special language, and rituals of purification.” (p. 78). Like P&S, Deetz calls for a new form of critical study that requires a reflexive element from the researcher, deliberately questioning what we do, why we do it, who it affects, what power structures are involved, etc. He suggests our research should be ethically and politically responsible, working to free the oppressed (in the organization in this case). And also, he suggests that we bring in our subjects as actual participants in our research.

As much as I love that book, and love Deetz’s theory, that chapter really got on my nerves because it sounded so self-righteous and arrogant. I felt the same way about P&S’s arguments. P&S, however, are basing their views in large part on feminist theory. I hate to say it, but I’m always skeptical when feminist theory is involved. While I agree with their points, and I agree that researchers should be reflexive about their research, and use their talents to positive social and political ends, both books talk about this method as if it is the end all be all, and that everyone else is just flat wrong. So, basically, they’re doing the exact same thing they accuse others of doing. Granted, they try to mitigate this with patronizing or apologetic statements here and there, but for the most part, that’s how I read what they’re saying.

I think that there’s a time and a place for this type of critical theory, just as there is a time and a place for the other theoretical views and methods they criticize. There are times when a researcher getting directly involved with the subjects will actually make the study null and void – period. And not getting involved is the key to getting the proper insight. In addition, there are plenty of quantitative studies out there that are socially responsible. Just read some of Melissa Johnson’s work on Latino biases. I think there is a lot of merit in the researcher trying to pinpoint social construction from an outside perspective, which means getting involved could be problematic. Having said that, I think there are plenty of methods that allow us to involve ourselves that don’t call for all the criteria these books call for. Rhetorical criticism is one of them. It often starts with our social and political views and being able to see injustices based on those. Then we collect the evidence and point it out. That is being socially responsible and attempting to free the oppressed as well. For example, I wrote a rhetorical criticism last semester about a piece of artwork at a homeless shelter that basically, I argue, simply upholds social hierarchical structures. I conclude by saying that things like artwork won’t cure homelessness and alcoholism. It is unequal social and economic structures that are the root of these problems.

The other point I want to make is that the authors of both of those books have the luxury of conducting research the way they want. As a budding scholar, I don’t have that luxury. I have to fit into the molds set forth for me, or I won’t get published, and therefore, won’t get a job when I leave here. For example, I just had to make a decision on whether to send one of my studies to a prominent communication publication based on who the editor is right now. The editor, after all, has everything to do with whether it goes anywhere or not. I was told that if I wanted to get a quantitative study published in this journal, this editor is the one who would do it. If I wait until she’s gone, they may go back to almost solely qualitative work. Politics and power abound in academia, as well as anywhere else. Those of us low on the totem pole in academia are victims of power structures as much as anyone anywhere. If I wanted to use the method set forth by P&S and Deetz, the ONLY reason it would be ok for me to use it is because people like P&S and Deetz (the powerful ones in their field) say it’s ok. Do you think anyone in the academy would accept this kind of method if a lowly graduate student suggested it?

Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep amount of respect for each of these scholars, and I am glad we have them to lead the way. But, when they talk from the high position that they’re in, they are being less than reflexive about the conditions of power and politics in their own field apart from the research.

As almost all of you know by now, I LOVE critical theory and plan to spend the better part of my academic life dedicated to it. But, I also see the value in the more practical methods (both quantitative and qualitative) that simply work to discover some phenomenon, or that work to make people’s lives easier and better in the world me must live in. At the moment, I do both. I’m afraid I may end up paying for that, though, when someone in the future interviews me and doesn’t want to hire me because I won’t chose sides.

I must say I found myself at a disadvantage trying to picture and understand how the articles for this week would help my teaching since I don’t teach writing and therefore don’t teach my students while they are actually using a computer. However, some of what I read made me think about my experiences teaching the opposite of the writing class – the speaking class. I face similar challenges teaching speech to students who are minorities or second language students. Pennington says in her article that “It is also important to consider what values should be stressed in evaluating students’ computer-produced work. For example, should originality be emphasized over correctness and quality of layout emphasize as much as quality of content and linguistic form?” (p. 420-421). I generally face this issue in dealing with one of the main components on which students are graded when giving their speeches – delivery. This not only includes what happens with the body during the speech, but also eye contact, voice control and vocal aspects. This includes the use of “appropriate pronunciation, articulation, volume and rate.” I have found grading this component of the speech to be particularly problematic with second-language students. Am I supposed to take points off because they are unable to articulate or pronounce an English word “properly?” There are also other issues that come along with this, as Todd Taylor put it in his article – black spoken dialect vs. “professional” dialect. In general, I do not hold these things against my students when grading delivery. If I feel they have done the best they can to “properly” pronounce and articulate the English language, I grade based on that. But, I can easily see how this kind of grading criteria would make my second-language, and possibly other minority students, feel they are at a distinct disadvantage. In fact, I have had several second language students come up to me after class following the lecture on delivery worried about not being able to speak properly, concerned about their accents. I still don’t think I have a proper response for them. I generally like to characterize what I’m teaching as “business speak,” as if in all instances this is the way we should be giving a speech, which certainly isn’t true. There are certainly occasions and audiences that would much rather hear the dialects they are used to hearing rather than some form of “professional” language use. It’s true that we try to teach our students how to speak in a variety of different environments to a variety of audiences, even if they go on to be politicians or simply end up speaking at a PTA meeting, the same delivery criteria apply.

At any rate, I understand why we teach the class the way we do. The world is a business world, and we do want to prepare them as best we can to be articulate in that environment for their own survival. If they want to get a job when the leave NC State, they unfortunately need to fit the dominant mold. Even if they don’t plan to get a job, they are expected to use proper English to sound and appear educated. But I still struggle with putting all of my students into that certain “mold,” and, in effect, possibly making them more reticent to speak in public because they think they must conform to a certain mold. As Taylor so aptly put it in his article, there are non-negotiable differences between people and attempting to negotiate around those usually ends up an unsuccessful struggle.

My eyes still hurt from that online session we just had. I’m not sure I would make it in a long DE class. I found it exhausting trying to keep up and watch the screen intently and hunching over the computer … Plus my screen is small. At any rate, I want to answer the question Susan asked about what kind of research we should be doing related to DE environments. This will come as no surprise to anyone, of course, but the e-mail aspect of it would be of interest to me. Specifically, how do relationships develop and how is it different totally online than f2f? That includes teacher/student relationships and student/student relationships. Also, what happens to power distance between teacher and student? What happens to teacher immediacy? Of course, some of this research has already been done, but I haven’t seen anything earth shattering yet. Some of my work lately has been on e-mail in out-of-class communication, and I have discovered through that research that students and teachers have different expectations about how communication should take place in CMC. The major different my research uncovered was with the use of informal vs. formal language. I would like at some point to take a look at that in the totally online environment and see what the expectations might be. Are they the same or different? Why or why not? Those are the research possibilities I can think of right now that can and should be explored further. Oh, wait! And, how can universities collaborate with DE to help combat some of the “efficiency” rhetoric that may actually be hurting the quality of the education we’re offering?

It was pretty cool reading two of our own professors’ articles this week. I chuckled a bit because I could hear Chris Anson’s voice sometimes when I was reading his, and Susan’s when I was reading hers. Anyway, some of the things Chris said in his article, and almost everything that DePew et al. said in theirs, made me think of Brent Faber’s (another one of our own) article that we read for ENG798 last week. The article is called, “Creating Rhetorical Stability in Corporate University Discourse,” and was published in Written Communication in 2003 (citation is below). Without going into too much detail, Faber did a really neat content analysis of “corporate university” discourse, and showed how the use of ambiguity and hedging were used to push a certain ideological view, specifically, a capitalist, market-based view of the corporate university and higher education as a whole. He says that “the colonization of academic space by market discourse has had very tangible consequences on the design of curriculum, the relations between faculty members and students, the significance of revenue generation activities, and the role of research within academic sites” (p. 397). It’s basically what Dr. Anson was referring to on page 57 when he mentions universities and the “growing competition” from non-academic providers of education. And, it is basically the same thing DePew et al. are referring to when they talk about the supposed cost efficient and pedagogical efficiency of distance education courses.

To get to my point, though, Anson brings up an interesting (hypothetical) scenario where two universities collaborate to offer the Swahili and Lakota language programs – both working on their own strengths – to offer students be best of both worlds, I guess. This then made me think of Pierre Levy and his notion of “Collective Intelligence.” For those of you who did not take CRD703 last spring, Levy, in his French Enlightenment effort, Collective Intelligence, says, “We must recognize the fact that the corporation, like other institutions, both encourages and promotes the development of subjectivity” to the point where he believes that the “continuous production of subjectivity will most likely be considered the major economic activity throughout the 21^st century” (p. 4). This, of course, includes the subjectivities created in higher education. Levy’s prescription for retaking control over our own subjectivities from government and capital is what he calls “collective intelligence,” in which cyberspace will provide a new “anthropological space” through which all will share knowledge equally.

“What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I’ll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities” (Levy, 1997, p. 13).

Ok, so where am I going with this? I’m so glad you asked! It seems to me that the example Dr. Anson uses about the Swahili and Lakota language classes being shared between universities is actually one of the ways we can use collective intelligence to work against the evil Empire (note the crafty reference to Hardt & Negri) of “corporate university” competitors. It would, however, have to be done in the right way. That is, NOT the way DePew et al. talk about how it’s done in their article. That is, it would not be a case of privileging efficiency and cost-effectiveness over academic rigor and pedagogical principles of dialogism and collaboration. It would be cost-effective by sharing the knowledge, while maintaining the academic rigor and standards that we all believe should be upheld in our universities. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, which is actually strange because I’m not usually optimistic when I’m talking about capitalist threats to the academy. But, if we thought more along those lines, and convinced the administration to do the same, we may actually be able to make some headway against these threats. Part of it would be to break through some of the ideological discourse, as Faber did in his article. We still have the ability and freedom to do that, and we should take advantage of it before that freedom is stripped away in favor of corporate university market ideology.

References

Faber, B. (2003). Creating rhetorical stability in corporate university discourse: Discourse technologies and change. Written Communication, 20(4), 391-425.

Levy, P. (1997). Collective Intelligence: Man’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Perseus: Cambridge, Mass.

So I totally cracked myself up after reading the Baron article about the history of new technologies and the process they go through to become accepted. That is, I cracked myself up because Baron was cracking me up, and not only was I literally “laughing out loud” to myself, I was writing “LOL” and “LMAO” in the margins when he talked about the “futurologists” predicting that the telephone would replace school or the library as the “transmitter of knowledge” or that prisoners could be “punished over the phone.” The other thing he mentioned was people freaking out about “romantic liaisons” over the phone, and operators cutting people off if they used inappropriate language. These are some of the same ways people talk about the computer (except I don’t recall ever hearing anyone say prisoners can be punished over the computer). Anyway, I kept writing in the margins of this book “LOL,” and “LMAO!” and then realized that I was using computer-generated acronyms in the margin of a book (old technology) like I would in e-mail or a chat room. I found it to be ironic, anyway, and fairly humorous. I remember reading some of this stuff in CRD701, but those writers weren’t near as humorous about it as Baron is. At any rate, the point is well taken. It seems every time a new technology is introduced, people attach all kinds of utopian and/or gloom and doom visions to them. It makes me wonder why we continue to make almost the same arguments. Not that they aren’t valid, but it seems that the possibilities become limited when we take these narrow views over and over again.

On a more serious note, I’m sure it will come as absolutely no surprise to those who know me well enough that I really appreciated Selfe’s article on the power differentials associated with literacy. Like Baron’s article, this article also points out that over time, not much has changed when it comes to the adoption of new technologies in terms of “literacy.” There is the utopian vision that the technology will “provide all Americans with an education enriched by technology, and, thus, equal opportunity to access high-paying, technology-rich jobs and economic prosperity after graduation” (p. 100). Of course, literacy, as Selfe so adequately points out, has nothing to do with the technology. It has to do with social inequalities that continue to exist no matter how great the new technology may be. As she says, “Literacy is always a political act as well as an educational effort. In this context, we can understand that the national project to expand technological literacy is motivated as much by political and economic agendas as it is by educational values and goals” (p. 104). We tend to assume that if we put some big initiative forth to make “everyone” literate, that they will have the wherewithal to afford the technology, the education, and everything else that goes along with it. As long as we continue to apply these cookie-cutter approaches to improving literacy, without dealing with social inequalities, literacy will continue to be a problem. But, as Selfe insinuates, this is not by accident. The nation needs the “illiterate” to “provide the unskilled, low-paid labor necessary to sustain the system I have described – their work generates the surplus labor that must be continually re-invested in capital projects to produce more sophisticated technologies” (p. 107). I’m tempted to quote Burke on his notion of “the order of things,” but I’ll resist that urge for now.

Beyond appreciating what Selfe had to say, though, I was particularly confused by one of her recommendations as to composition instructors are supposed to help solve this problem. In particular, she says that we need to do more than just teach students how to use the technology, but also “help them learn how to become critical thinkers about technology and the social issues surrounding its use” (p. 111). I’m all for that. Great idea. But she never gave me a satisfactory answer as to exactly how we’re supposed to do that. She says, for example, that we need to give them “the time and opportunity to explore the complex issues that surround technology and technology use in substantive ways” (p. 111). So, does that mean that they’re going to magically figure out how technology reinforces power structures just because we’ve “given them more time” to play around with it? Or, does it mean someone else will point it out to them? Or, are we supposed to point it out to them, and then if we do that, how do we do that without being blasted for pushing our own “political agendas” in the classroom? Stine asks a similar question in his article: “How actively should we be working in our basic writing courses to raise student consciousness about the power of symbols and the politics of the technological contact zone?” (p. 391).

Maybe I missed something when I read this piece, but I never got a satisfactory answer to that issue. She did, however, offer some good suggestions beyond that as to what we might do as teachers who use these technologies with our students.

Edit #2 for the day:

Speaking of writing in the margins: In the Reilly & Williams article on open-source software, (OSS) I wrote (more than once), in the margins, “Seems like a no-brainer to me,” and “No @#$%!” It makes me wonder WHY we don’t use OSS.  All I hear is how the university struggles financially – that we can’t keep our faculty salaries competitive, that we need to raise $1 billion in our capital campaign, etc.  AND, the most frustrating of all – we need to raise tuition every @#$%! semester to give our students the education they need. I would love to know how much money per year NC State spends on commercial software licenses. I would love to consider where that money might be better spent. Now, I am not saying that the university should not be using any commercial software at all. And, in fact, I understand the need for it in a lot of cases. But it seems that we can save a lot of money and spend it in better places if we used some OSS in addition to commercial programs. The programs in Reilly and Williams’ article sounded even better in a lot of ways. I know that Susan has mentioned the UNC system is exploring a couple of Blackboard-type OSS systems. That would be a welcome addition, in my opinion. I, for one, don’t mind taking a little extra time learning a program if I feel that it is helping us put money to better uses on campus. I realize that there are problems with OSS, and a lot of those are simply coming from resistance from the commercial sector. I think that once one or two universities start embracing it, more will follow, and it could become the norm rather than exception.

It’s astonishing how right Ohmann was in his predictions of literacy today. Basically, if you aren’t “computer literate,” you are considered “illiterate.” The most disturbing aspect of Ohmann’s article, though, is how the definition of literacy continues to privilege certain groups over others – in effect keeping certain groups in the social order at the bottom. It’s obvious that the corporate giants are the ones who are reaping the benefits of the new “literacy.” As Ohmann says on pg. 29, “Seen from this side of the market, computers are a commodity, for which a mass market is being created in quite conventional ways. And their other main use in the home, besides recreation, most likely will be to facilitate the marketing of still more commodities, as computerized shopping becomes a reality. Thus, in our age of monopoly capital, with new channels of power through which the few try to control both the labor and the leisure of the many.” 

In more simplistic terms, we call this the commodification of education. The job of the university today is plainly and simply to “prepare students for the workplace.” We have become a HUGE market for corporate giants who use tricky marketing tactics to make us believe we somehow NEED all this stuff in order to effectively teach our students what they need to know. In addition, we are being seen more and more as service providers, and our students “consumers” of knowledge. Students these days think they buy grades, rather than earn them. 

More than that, however, public universities are being forced to rely more and more on corporate funding to operate as legislatures short-change them in budgets every year. Now, we build corporate “partnerships” and consider that a good thing. Case in point: the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation on our campus bills itself as the only institution on campus funded solely through private funding. The majority of that money came from corporations, of course. All that means to me is that whatever comes out of that Institute will do nothing but further corporate interests and fatten wallets. 

The other problem is that the cost of higher education is more and more out of reach for the poor. Many critical theorists suggest that this is simply a symptom of the powers that be keeping people illiterate (as Ohmann mentioned in his article) to keep the poor in their place. 

This leads me to something I found to be alarming in the Morreale, et al. article. On page 420, the mention something about “outsourcing” the basic course. This, again, is a symptom of universities adopting the language and tactics of business. I am deeply concerned about these concepts because what it ultimately means is that teachers (whether they be GTAs or full professors) are simply a workforce. Our jobs are basically on a tightwire. There will more than likely come a day when there is no tenure, and we’re all “part-time” employees filling some need for corporations.  Like Ohmann, though, I hope that we all work to find more democratic ways to employ technologies, particularly since we are pretty much stuck with them whether we like it or not. 

One last thought that’s not so depressing: In the Morreale et al. article, they mentioned the difficulty in showing immediacy in online classes. I’ve addressed this issue in my research on e-mail in out-of-class communication, but I am curious about the differences in strictly online classes and how relationships develop (or don’t) between teacher and student because there is no face-to-face contact at all. I plan to tackle that issue before long.