Play Date with Sorapure

I felt like I was back in my undergrad days, thinking about the elements of metaphor and metonymy. I had fantastic literature courses and professors who introduced me to new ways of thinking about writing and thinking about thinking; I count myself blessed for the experience.

The Sesame Street song "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong" is going through my head. I know I don't belong to this new pattern of information gathering and distribution we've been talking about, because as soon as I saw the option of downloading the pdf to read (versus navigating the Kairos site), I immediately did. Give me a straight line to follow through a text every time -- I will create my own networks of meaning, and I'd rather they weren't put there for me -- I find it distracting.

I thought the most interesting quote in this piece was, "Meaning emerges from interplay." I like the idea of meaning emerging, growing, slowly becoming apparent through effort and activity. And I especially like the idea of play -- how we play with meanings to make new ones. Play and effort are not mutually exclusive. It makes me think of how young children learn to read (acquire the foundational skills of phonemic awareness) by playing with sounds , how they learn to write by playing with shapes. They begin to make meaning through play. Whenever we're together, my brother and I do this constantly, playing with language to suit our own bizarre shared sense of humor. In our mid-late twenties, we still laugh hysterically, we still make new meanings and enjoy the play of language. No wonder he's a writer and I'm a language teacher -- we both found what we love. :)

So we need to make new assessment meanings. We need to decontextualize, recontextualize, and (to quote Scot) play around with our notions of what makes compositions work. I like what Sorapure called "broad rhetoric" -- letting a piece rise or fall on its merits by looking at its ability to create the desired effect on the intended audience. There's authentic assessment for you. But I also agree, for teaching purposes, we need to give more guidance. I think the best approach may be to look at pieces we can agree are excellent -- target models -- and try to ascertain what makes them work: How do the best compositions work? The metaphor/metonymy categories seem like a reasonable place to start.

Some stops on my train of thought

Everyone else has had such great comments, I'm afraid of plagiarizing their ideas! =) So I'll just give you the running commentary I had in my head as I was reading the first chapter last night: a collection of thoughts and reactions. I didn't have as much internal talk-back for the second chapter.

(18) Two of the most absolute, least CYA statements I've ever seen in academic writing: "All definitions of plagiarism will therefore always be contested," and "Plagiarism can never be remedied; it can never be fixed." Interesting how the author we're labeling postmodern is making such blanket modernist statements.

(20) Yeah, it may be ironic that plagiarism is so foundational yet so hard to define, but that's hardly an earthshattering idea. Everything important or foundational is hard to define, b/c multitudes of people experience the critical-vital thing in lots of different ways. Take love, or money, or marriage, or...? What does it mean and how does it function? Or take something more analogous to plg: what exactly constitutes murder, and what doesn't? The ambiguity is just part of its being a big important idea, I think.

(23) "everyone fears the plagiarists," No, just the people who have something to lose. Whether that's status, money, rights, sense of professionalism and integrity, etc. But I think there are plenty of people who don't fear pl. or even care much about it -- those people who don't see themselves as producers or accountable recyclers.

(26) The whole thing about pl. in teachers' lectures is ridiculous. Teachers/Professors don't try to represent the information/ideas as uniquely their own: they are intended to represent mastery of a subject or discipline. If you read widely and deeply, w/o a photographic memory, your mastery of the content will grow, but your ability to recall which specific author taught you which specific thing will shrink and become irrelevant. The only exceptions are things we already do: we "cite" Krashen's ideas about affective filter and I+1, for example. As for the body of knowledge, no one needs the citations that would go into it: they would be impossible to create and useless to receive.

(27) All learning as plagiarism? Now this conversation has gone completely over the edge past anything useful. I guess that's Howard's point, though I've never met anyone who actually believes that uncited learning = plagiarism (at least, who would admit it out loud).

(28) Gatekeeping: One struggle here is that we want the credential, diploma, grade, etc. to mean something. We argue about what it ought to represent, but educators usually agree that it ought to represent something, and this is necessarily gatekeeping. I had an experience with this at the first school where I taught: I argued that they shouldn't walk at graduation if they were missing more credits than they could make up in the summer. I also volunteered to tutor these students in academic assistance every advisory-lunch period for the rest of the school year to ensure that they made it -- all but one did, and there were serious medical concerns there. I thought graduation ought to signify some kind of accomplishment, and I can't apologize for that.

(30) Isn't it possible to see the purpose as helping students gain access, achieve success within the current model and/or work to change it using existing tools? I may not stand in favor of the "cultural system of textual purity," but I know my students have to learn to navigate it if they want to all-important signifiers like diplomas plus the security of unreproachability. (Is that a word?) How does it help them if I pretend that's not true, or I don't push the skills they need to operate in that system?

Directly Perceptible Fixations (Or, Dr. Freud, Your Slip is Showing)

"The fixation need not be directly perceptible so long as it may be communicated with the aid of a machine or device." (2)

What the hell does that mean? Is that meant to include grooves in a record, electronic files, etc.?

I wonder about how copyright, with its focus on things being "fixed," interact with the constantly changing world of the Internet, where almost nothing is "fixed" in a traditional sense? The article said copyright applies to works in progress in that the part done is the part copyrighted. But that presupposes some final, fixed state that we're just working toward. What if that's not part of the plan -- what if continued evolution is the plan?

Even that question isn't something radically new: how many editions did Leaves of Grass go through as love-of-my-life Walt Whitman revised it throughout his life? And what if he'd had fans, or apprentices, to keep revising past his death? At what point can you say something is really "fixed"?

Or "published," for that matter? That was fascinating: apparently, publication has to do with distribution by transfer of ownership (or rental, lending, etc.) to the public. I'd never thought about the word that way: public-ation. But what if nobody wants your books? What if, a la AOL CDs of the late 90s, you can hardly give them away as coasters? If no one buys or borrows your work, can you really be said to have published it? Totally irrelevant, but interesting.

BlogVoice

(I'll add something about the readings later -- this is what's been on my mind yesterday & today.)

So clearly I am not literate in blogging discourse.

I've done this a few times for classes, and people always wind up commenting on how "academic" my blogs sound. I never mean for this to happen - in fact, I was consciously trying to make the last one a little less formal, a little more stream of consciousness. But apparently my everyday voice is overly correct (what does that mean -- too Standard to be normal?). What's odd is, when I was "authentically" blogging with a group with college friends, that never happened -- they must have just been used to the way I talk in real life, which is a lot like the way I write, or else my diction didn't seem out of place for our discussions.

When I hear people commenting on how my posts sound, I feel my hackles raising and I hear my interior voice say, "That's just how I talk! That's just how I write!" But then I got to thinking -- that's exactly what adolescent students say when their teachers complain that their writing isn't appropriate to the situation or genre. Evidently, my writing voice isn't appropriate for blogging, and I haven't been able to develop one that is more suitable. I was sharing this with my PEOPLE students today as we talked about considering your audience, purpose, and genre before/as you begin writing -- just talking about how the experience was helping me understand how they must feel in the classroom when they get those kind of reactions to their writing voice.

I was trying to experiment with color, size, font, and links to get a feel for BlogVoice. But I think it comes down to the same things I've been harping on with the kids: vocabulary and grammatical style (including sentence structures). I think I would need shorter and less complex sentences, less technical/arcane vocabulary, etc. So do I value the opportunities afforded by this genre enough to work to develop BlogVoice?

No, for now, I think not.

De/Compos(t)ing

OK, so I read Rice's chapter on appropriation, and it was a bit of a struggle. He's even wordier than me, which is an accomplishment. A few thoughts:

"The preference for clarity via organization, I contend, weakens appropriation's rhetorical power." (59)

Really? Organizing something to make it clearer makes the message weaker? I'm not sure I buy that. I could get on board with the idea that organization in a multimedia sense may not look the same as linear argumentation in writing, or even two-dimensional print products. In new media literacies, organization may require the use of time, or sound, or other organizing principles rather than being primarily spatial. But I'm convinced it still exists and is critically important. Take visual art, for example, where the principles of unity and variety work together in design.

I'm a fan of Lakhoff & Turner's More Than Cool Reason, and I like thinking about how language and metaphor shape thought patterns (and, of course, are shaped by them). With a quick read of Don's first paragraph, I got to thinking about the metaphor of composing. At what point does composing turn into composting, into decomposing? That is, does there come a point where a collection of stuff is just that, and it starts to collapse in on itself and degrade? That extended metaphor seems to connect to what we mentioned in class about collecting information vs. gaining understanding, together with Tom was saying about coherence: composting can render fertile material, but you have to put it in a garden and plant something (activities involving some planning and order) for it to grow anything.

Total Side Note: I also watched the Cut Up Method video, which made no sense the first time through because I didn't know anything about cut-ups or Burroughs (thank you, Wikipedia), and the first six parts of the DJ Spooky lecture for EGS. The latter was really interesting, and the part about the trains made me think of ancient heroic codes, where the goal was to gain fame to create immortality. My husband's rhetoric of religion class was talking about something similar today: a theorist arguing that the desire to join a collective/network is essentially the same thing -- a way of belonging to something bigger that will outlast you, to defeat mortality in some way. But what does the transitory nature of our new technologies and literacies do to that? After all, no matter how many friends you have on MySpace, that is so last year.

Response to Readings for 6/25

Yancey (2009)
Yancey brought up an interesting concept with the phrase "citizen writers." In "Historical Perceptions" she talks about how receptive modes of oracy and literacy have been preferred, especially for young students, as vehicles for transmitting and preserving societal values. But I never see her go back and directly address alternative possibilities -- what the power and potential of a citizen writer might be, or what that might look like in our context today.

What could a citizen writer be, or do? Apparently they can play large-scale practical jokes (see "This is Sparta,"), but what else? In Yancey's conclusion, she calls for a way of imagining writing that fosters "a new kind of citizenship." However, she does not go on to describe how writing might help create a new kind of citizen, which I think is very interesting. Are we talking about national citizens? Global citizens? Web citizens? Traditionally, citizenship has been a dividing line, between us/them, haves and have nots. Could the Web be changing this in some ways? -->

Yancey (2004)
In the other piece by Yancey, she uses two phrases on p. 319 that seem to go along with this idea of citizen writers. In talking about how technology changes constantly and in unpredictable ways, and she mentions "worldwide distribution" and "democratization of authorship," which both have something to say about citizenship. Is the Web actually making the globe more democratic in some ways? Is it making writing more democratic? How could these things be interrelated, and what are their limits? We've tried artificially creating and militarily propping up democracies: should we be air-dropping wireless-capable laptops instead of bombs? I've heard it argued that the means of production, distribution, and networking have radically changed the playing field of knowledge and power -- that those who never had "voice" before are gaining it now, and are finding each other and joining together in new ways and for new purposes. Does Yancey's idea of a new kind of citizenship come down to increased agency (and therefore, maybe, increased responsibility)?

Baron (1999?)
There are plenty of other interesting things in the Yancey pieces to comment on, but I thought I'd try to stick to a theme. I will say, in reading the chapter by Baron, I learned much more about pencils than I expected. :-) It did strike me how everything comes back to money, from the development of writing itself through the various technologies of writing into our present-day issues about access and even copyright. And the first page struck a chord, as I mentioned in class: I hate composing without a computer, and I never do it unless forced. I often use pen/pencil to think -- I prefer it for notetaking and prewriting -- but I never begin to compose until my fingers hit the keyboard. My writing and thinking processes are radically different between print and screen media, and writing virtually anything out by hand is a stymying, frustrating experience for me. Realizing that has made me suspicious of a common schoolhouse model of the writing that places all computer work -- presumed to be typing and maybe formatting -- at the end of the line under the "publication" umbrella, something like dessert after all the meat and potatoes work is done. I really can't work well that way, and I wonder if my students may not have a similar experience.

Getting Set Up

OK, here it is: my official class blog for summer 2009. Exciting stuff. =)
More to come later as I do the readings and create a real post for today.