To Erase or De-Race: A Rant on Cybertyping

I'm trying to remember what I was thinking when I designed Maitland Revolution, my avatar in Second Life. I flashed through skin colors, cheekbones, body sizes, hair and eye colors, clothes, and settled on being male and athletic looking, but not a Mr. America. Maitland was named after a character in a book, but he resembled me in his clumsiness--he had a penchant for falling out of space (not so different than driving off the edge of a highway) and walking underwater. I become confused talking about him because I don't know whether he is in the present or the past, whether he might reappear if I decide to follow him beyond my password (if I can remember it).

Maitland resembles the "'fluid selves'" Lisa Nakamura writes of in the Introduction of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet:

And as Caren Kaplan points out in Questions of Travel, tourists operate from a position of privilege and entitlement (62); to be a tourist is to possess mobility, access, and the capital to satisfy curiosities about "native" life. Chat-space participants who take on identities as samurai and geisha constitute the darker side of postmodern identity, since the "fluid selves" they create (and often so lauded by postmodern theorists) are done so in the most regressive and stereotyped of ways. (xv)

Maitland is stereotyped in that he is an avatar with limited variation from other avatars (unless their creators happen to be computer code gurus. I know that Second Life material/not material and real/not real goods can be designed—can avatars be varied beyond the embedded digital code? Maybe a little mutation here and there, or evolution, given enough time? I know that when bandwidth got sucked up, Maitland lost his clothes and fell on his face. Why not create, god-like, some digital designer genes/jeans?) In a sense, Maitland is stereotyped as one of the avatar race, a cybertype, and “being raced is in itself a disorienting position. Being raced in cyberspace is doubly disorienting, creating multiple layers of identity construction” (xv). Here my exposition dissolves because, in all seriousness, the real issues of race in any space are daunting. I could have decided to make Maitland an avatar of color but I chose not to, and at the same time I made him male but mentally positioned him much as I might position a younger, lither, female me. I don’t remember having the choice of making Maitland obese—chunky, Shwarzeneggerish, yes, but not fat. Is the world of avatars obesity-free? If it is, why? And what of the women—are there any Twiggy-thin female avatars? Ah…and when I was there in Second Life, I saw no children.

No children. Why? Was I in the wrong Second Universe? Or perhaps just as “mythologies of race that are nostalgic” are constructed narratives, so are the childless, fatless, thinless, spaces of online lives like Second Life. They are lives of “‘sadness without an object’” (Nakamura 26).[i]

Angela M. Haas’s Making Online Spaces More Native to American Indians: A Digital Diversity Recommendation speaks to a less theoretical and more practical push for online survivance (I think this might be survival + resistance, although the author writes survivance + resistance.) In other words, Haas is writing that American Indians’ access to the Internet, though limited, is growing, and in this growth, tribes like the Cherokee Nation are establishing online tribal identities they intend to

· preserve language, culture, history, and identity;

· demystify Nativeness and combat stereotypes and fetishism…;

· [and] provide “contact zones” for Natives and non-Natives to foster community and alliance-building.

One of the survivance tactics is digital rhetorical sovereignty, which “gives Natives a reason to be wired” and promotes the development of the items listed above. From my surfing with Jeanette, I have the impression that tribal presence, if not Native presence as a whole, is growing online, and in uniquely Native ways.

1. How can Native American people and tribes avoid being exploited voyeuristically or fetishized as a consequence of online presence?

2. Nakamura writes: “Cybertyping’s purpose is to representatively bracket off racial difference, to assuage fears that the Internet is indeed producing a monoculture. The greater fear, however, which cybertyping actively works to conceal, is the West’s reluctance to acknowledge its colonization of global media, and ongoing racist practices within its own borders” (19-20). Question: Did we learn anything from the American Civil War years that could translate into a peaceable resolution to end “colonization of global media” and “racist practices within [online] borders”?

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[i] More than a year has passed since I conjured Maitland’s code and looked at his back. My memory of the “game’s” capabilities may be faulty, and new possibilities are likely to have been programmed in during the intervening period.

[For] Crying Out Loud, the Fat Lady's Singing in Front of the Funhouse Mirror

I admit that I was uncomfortable while reading the articles for Thursday’s class, and I’ve avoided writing this blog entry because I haven’t been able to dodge the issues. In Fleeting Images: Women Visually Writing the Web, Gail E. Hawisher and Patricia A. Sullivan quote Tina: “The very idea of choosing a face to accompany my online words horrifies me” (268). I wrote “Yes!” in the margin, and double-lined and starred the lines. I feel like hiding my face, my body, all of me, and as Hawisher and Sullivan argue, “it is difficult to hide visible markers of difference” (270). For me, the marker is big(ness), obesity. If I could hide my body, I could represent myself textually as an intelligent woman who has fun (sometimes) and has led a full and active life. But when a photo is called for—as a way to identify myself to someone I know professionally and will meet at a conference, as a graduate peer interested in a writing project, as a newbie MySpace and Facebook member—I am traumatized. I look for photos I can crop to a head-and-shoulders view, or one in which the scenery dominates. And as long as the photo is available, I am uneasy. I find Bordo’s “everyday interpretation through two analytical moves”—homogenization and normalization—a difficult concept to apprehend when representations lie far outside the socially constructed and accepted normal and “how [images, photos, visual representations] go about representing that which the self continually measures, judges, disciplines, and corrects itself by” (271). Such measuring, judging, and discipline results in episodic self-flagellation because even when attempts at weight loss and conformity are successful for a time, the 75% to 95% recidivism^[i] rate^[ii] can seldom reach the goal of normal. (Compare weight loss recidivism to the 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics indicating 5.3% recidivism rate for sex offenders within 3 years of release from prison.) What about the social construction of normal creates a non-productive, even detrimental climate for body image among the obese?

Laura L. Sullivan writes in Cyberbabes: (Self-) Representation of Women and the Virtual Male Gaze that she

believe[s] that the objectification of women’s faces and bodies pervasive in mainstream mass media forms one of the cornerstones of women’s oppression. Women internalize this objectification and in turn feel bad about ourselves (how we look gets translated into who we are and how much (self) worth we have), because no woman can ever measure up to the stereotypes promoted by mass mediated images.” (192)

Every month, women’s magazines next to the grocery checkout counter promote quick weight loss and decadent chocolate desserts on covers that feature a famous/beautiful/successful/normal woman, someone that other women want to emulate. I don’t see those models as mindless—they inspire a certain amount of envy; a feeling of loss, even grief. I think that those models’ images were meant to speak to women “as objectified images to be consumed by the largely [fe]male viewers” (192, I have substantially changed the context of Sullivan’s statement by replacing male with female). Sullivan’s concern with the male gaze on female images online is legitimate as long as the demographic profile shows males’ access and use exceeding that of females. And her emphasis that “the public nature of this medium is not to deny the way that sexism, classism, and racism influence and limit access to the technology of the Internet…[and] may reinforce and amplify such oppressions in new ways” (193). One of these ways is through weightism, yet for at least 20 years, movements such as Big is Beautiful have existed. Leonard Nimoy, in an interview for the New York Times about The Full Body Project: Photographs by Leonard Nimoy, a book of photographs featuring nude obese women, talked about how he became interested in the project and his initial difficulty: “The nudity wasn’t the problem,” he said, “but I’d never worked with that kind of a figure before. I didn’t quite know how to treat her. I didn’t want to do her some kind of injustice. I was concerned that I would present this person within the envelope of an art form.” I don’t intend to critique Nimoy’s art nor to question the result of his efforts. I found his book when I decided—with great trepidation—to see what popped up in a web search for “obese women photos.” While not as bad as I feared, I wonder whether a man behind the lens can avoid viewing any woman without a trace of male gaze.

Susan Romano writes in On Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self about textual construction of online female identity in a sometimes hostile male environment. Male antagonization requires that females “accept, refuse, ignore, or challenge” the male characterization of women as a group, and each option “carries an array of immediate discursive consequences for the women students undergoing this form of interrogation. Indeed, the onus placed on women is striking” (255). Romano calls on Haynes and Le Court in her construction of “a new rhetoric of the self—for feminist performances in online environments” (257). I don’t quite understand what she means by this because she skips immediately to explaining the classroom example later in the essay. She calls her tactics reformist as opposed to Haynes’ and Le Court’s revolutionary mode (257). Roman’s posit of the “metaphors of recombination” offers hope for synthesizing a self-awareness, self-possibilities, and self-esteem (265).

1. I opted out of the first wave of feminism and didn’t know that a “new “feminism had arisen until four years ago. Now I hear there is a third wave. Where is this wave in its evolution?
2. I’m not sure how Romano’s “new rhetoric of the self” differs from “healing the inner child” or “building self-esteem.” Is she simply renaming preexisting programs in feminist terms?

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[i] Recidivism is an appropriate term for a lapse of behavior that returns the person to previous habits, but a strong connotative association with relapse into criminal behavior demonstrates how obesity is viewed in the medical field and in society.

[ii] Rosenbaum, Michael. Physiological Barriers to Weight Loss Maintenance. Medscape General Medicine. 2007; 9(3):18. Accessed 23 Feb. 2008 .

Chatdown

I'm all for the social construction of spaces, but in our Gmail Chat today, there was no pause, no place. The chaos frustrated me and cast me out, revealing (or suggesting) that my identity, as constructed for classrooms and face-t0-face social interactions is geeky and out of place. Is it age? Is it personality? What makes me supersensitive about being an outsider in this insider chat?

Okay, enough of the emotional reaction. Pedagogically, I would not want to initiate a synchronous chat in which my students could exclude me--they can do that on their own time. If I used it, I would set up small groups that met at different times and guide the conversation for instructional purposes.

You can see that my thinking right now is punctuated, its syntax slowed down by the staggering speed of the chatter(s).

And for the record, I love y'all! I'm just exhausted by the experience.

Yes, We Have No Bad Bammers[i]

Reading Geoffrey Sirc’s “What is Composition…?” After Duchamp shifts styles from theoretical doublespeak to gangsta rims like a click of the mouse on a speedy link. Negotiating the angles takes more than concentration, it takes gyration—mental gymnastics for codeswitching and mathematical (in)equalities. I’m not convinced that Sirc’s equations make sense in the inter(disciplinary con)textualization he asserts. However, when he combines his points into a sum(mary) of the whole, the his argument calls for a broader definition of composition. A shift in technology to glass-as-paper, document-replacing-product, and use-value-trumping-exchange-value (202). Sirc laments that self-replicating composition is museumifi[ed], with nostalgia for the “exchange-value as exhibition-value” (202). Sirc’s description of what composition is (or should be) at this time departs from Bartholomae’s as a proponent of process, who disappoints Sirc when Bartholomae mistakes his willingness to have students “fracture open the text” as innovation toward a new kind of text, but, rather, the resulting composition is an already privileged form of academic text (180-182). Of particular interest is a shift away from composition as “product-oriented” as opposed to “idea-generative” (195), and that Gervais’s maneuvers with hypertext are collected in the term “restricted teleintertext,” which are two or more texts written over a period of time (sometimes very long) by the same person (196).

Sirc’s extended discussion of Bartholomae’s question, “What is Composition…?” (with composition assumed to equate with and allowed to substitute for art—in the existential and eternal question, “What is Art?”) is facilitated by juxtaposing it with the art of Duchamp. Other authors take up the challenge to implement composition-as-art. For example, Kathleen Blake Yancey, in Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key, adopts composition/art structured in the form of music in her CCC (December 2004) incarnation of her “Chair’s Address” at CCCC, but she also composes with visual and aural components, a truly multimodal composition. Quoting Daley, Yancey writes states:

“…The ability to negotiate through life by combining words with pictures with audio and video to express thoughts will be the mark of the educated student” (“Speaking”). Specifically, [Daley] proposes that the literacy of the screen, which she says parallels oral literacy and print literacy, become a third literacy required of all undergraduates. (305)

Later, in Quartet three, Yancey asserts that

new composition includes rhetoric and is about literacy. New composition includes the literacy of print: it adds on of it and brings the notions of practice and activity and circulation and media and screen and networking to our conceptions of process. It will require a new expertise of us as it does of our students. And ultimately, new composition may require a new site for learning for all of us. (320)

That new site is technology, and here we get back to the fundamental question opening our discussion of Teaching with Technology: What is technological literacy?

Yancey is not alone in her call for increased emphasis on “composition in a new key.” Diana George writes in From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing that “current discussions of visual communication and writing instruction have only tapped the surface of possibilities for the role of visual communication in the composition class. Or, even more to the point—our students have a much richer imagination for what we might accomplish with the visual than our journals have yet to address.” (12) She comments on the tension between visual rhetoric and composition, with the visual a “problematic” or “a strategy for adding relevance or interest to a required course” (13). In other words, some people think of the joining of the written word and the visual as a how-to/way-to-do-the-impossible in 11 to 16 weeks, or more to the point a gimmick. George quotes Bartholomae and Petrosky (from Ways of Seeing) in another example of the disappearing lines between sensory literacies and the written word:

Seeing comes before words. The child recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it…(7-8)

Taken beyond the visual to sight, smell, touch, and taste—a sort of virtual world of the (un)composed possibilities that invite but do not privilege the written word because of utility, Yancey’s appreciation and use of the visual/aural and even spatial (recall the darkened room, where she seemed to float in the spotlight incognizant of the audience, not because she didn’t know they were there, but because she could not see them) position composition as a more adaptable Art, suitable for exposition and performance. (Here I think of Dene Grigar, DTC professor and performance artist at WSU-Vancouver.)

Anne Frances Wysocki, in with eyes that think, and compose, and think: ON VISUAL RHETORIC (I try here to display the visual rhetoric evidenced in her article’s title), adds Aristotelian definition of rhetoric (“the use of the available means of persuasion to achieve particular ends), extended to include visual rhetoric, to a 20^th century rhetoric that is situated in culture and comes up with this sum:

I want us to be aware not only of the particular visual strategies that a composer chooses when constructing texts aimed at persuading audiences toward specific ends; I want us also to be aware of how the strategies that we choose reinforce (and can perhaps help us be aware of the question) values, habits, and structures of our places and times. (184)

Wysocki outlines justifications for including visual rhetoric for teaching (composition) with computers, emphasizing the nature, prolificacy, usefulness of the visual in understanding and affecting cultural values. Yet by concentrating her focus on the visual, she neglects the wider possibilities attendant in Yancey’s address to CCCC.

1. Is composition bammer?
2. Is composition in a new key, especially the visual, appropriate for academic or scholarly audiences outside composition and rhetoric?

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[i] Definitions (Sirc 187-88): bad—bootsie, janky; bammer—busted and disgusted like half the definitions up on here (mod7316)

Time --><--Space

I am intrigued by the idea of articulation as an alternative way of thinking about what we do as teachers. Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola write in Blinded by the Letter that

“…this involves, then not just thinking that we should pass along discrete sets of skills to others—or pretending that those discrete sets of skills are all that it takes to have a different life. There are certainly skills needed for connecting and reconnecting information—but the relationships to communication technologies we are describing now and here ask, in necessary addition, for a shared and discussed, ongoing, reconception of the space and time we use together and in which we find (and can construct) information and ourselves.

This reconception is thus not about handing down skills to others who are not where we are, but about figuring out how we all are where we are, and about how we all participate in making these spaces and the various selves we find here.” (italics added; Selfe, Passions Pedagogies and 21^st Century Technologies 366)

Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola counter the banking method of teaching with a social constructivistic proposal for revitalizing the ways we know and teach, privileging communication over the traditional idea of literacy as mastery of skills. Literacy, as an over-arching term that encompasses many different subsets—reading, writing, math, technology, etc.—has traditionally been preferred, possibly because educators who are mandated to assess student learning can more easily measure definable tasks and configurations of those tasks. Moreover, the “‘literacy myth’” (attributed to separate writings by Harvey J. Graff and Ruth Finnegan) is a “belief that literacy will bring us” suffrage, a place in dominant culture, or acceptance in traditionally privileged communities like academia (353). Communication, in the form of articulation, requires rethinking assessment to uncover learning not easily isolated. (This is where Guba and Lincoln’s fourth generation evaluation, particularly the recursivity of hermeneutic dialectics, could be applied.)

In a way, resistance to Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola’s alternative of articulation, as opposed to literacy, could be compared to the resistance to forward-moving writing technologies discussed by Dennis Baron in From Pencils to Pixels. Why change longstanding practices? Why integrate new ways of doing/thinking when the old ways still work (or sorta work)? For example, Douglas Hesse argues that we should retain longstanding essayistic literacy at the same time as new writing technologies make possible listserv “essays,” hypertexts, and other forms of computer-generated writing and communication. He asks whether a discussion thread could be presented as an essay: “Would the result be recognizable as an essay? Even suspending the interesting issues of style and voice, the main quality that threads-as-essays lack is shape and closure” (44). However, Montaigne does not necessarily give shape to his essays nor provide closure to the reader in his chrono-logic (Paul Heilker) approach.

Questions:

1. The most interesting discussion presented in Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola’s article, for me personally, is the idea that “time and space collapsing into each other” (363). What purposes are served through this? How are physically distant place brought close and virtual spaces collapsed (leading “to the idea that real spaces are likewise”)? (364)
2. Do we want to promote the space-time compression mentioned in this article? What can we envision happening in the future as this becomes universal?
3. A question for me to follow up on: How would Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Soja, and Michel Foucault perceive this postmodern view of collapsed space-time?

Eks (x) Lifeworlds

I know a little about multiples—two of my nine children are twins. They shared the same womb, the same birth date (born 3 minutes apart), the same crib (for a week), the same feeding times, the same stroller. They began swimming lessons and kindergarten together. Despite the shared environment, the twins are very different. They share the same parents but not the same chromosomes: they are fraternal—a boy-girl set. The boy weighed 8 lbs. 2 oz. at birth; the girl was 5 lbs. 12 oz.—almost 2 ½ pounds difference. The boy was brunette; the girl blond. The boy cried a lot and needed adult attention; the girl was quiet, watching everyone and everything around her, attracting everyone’s delighted attention. They developed their own twin language: he was slow learning to speak English; she began talking at the appropriate developmental time and spoke for him, further delaying his speech. He watched birds and buses and trucks; she watched faces. Together they formed a unit, twins, which required a metalanguage to discuss the differences between single- and double-births.

The twins, in a simplistic way, resembled multiliteracies in that multivalent bonds formed between the two babies, the family, other people, and the environments in which we lived. As The New London Group writes in A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, “The challenge is to make space available so that different lifeworlds can flourish, to create spaces for community life where local and specific meanings can be made” (16). The twins needed to explore individuality within the community they inhabited in order to establish separate and viable identities. The multivalent quality resulting from interaction among different communities shows “their boundaries [became] more evidently complex and overlapping” (17). Moreover, neither was “a member of a singular community,” and each negotiated “multiple discourse of identity and multiple discourses of recognition” (17). The twins needed proficiency in inhabiting their individual lifeworlds (17). In other words, they needed a teacher or two or more, and the first one on the scene is usually the mother.

With this analogy, I am also demonstrating some understanding of conversationalisation, which “involves institutionally motivated simulation of conversational language and the personae and relationships of ordinary life” (16). I am making a private metaphor public, appropriating my memories “to serve…institutional ends” (16). The New London Group says that the process “in part destroys the autonomy of private and community lifeworlds” (16). I disagree. The private cannot be severed from the community in that the community molds portions of the private and the private molds portions of the community.

What does this analogy have to do with framing my understanding of multiliteracies? Like most people, I think in metaphors, in analogies. To find a representative example that I am unlikely to forget means finding an access point into a new concept and a higher likelihood that that knowledge will be retained. But to be more explicit…

The existence of multiple forms of literacy—multiliteracies—seems more relevant to the understanding and teaching of “ways that allow [students] to participate fully in public, community and economic life” (9). Reading in isolation from other forms of literacy bears little relationship with the lifeworlds of many young adults in the 21^st century. More apt is the wired vocal/aural/visual/tactile connection to multifarious electronic wizardry gadgets, computers included.

The New London Group’s statement on a theory of pedagogy clearly points to social constuctivism (30-31). Practical applications follow, with the charts and tables particularly helpful. I also appreciate the lists (Available Designs, Designing, and The Redesigned, 20; Design Elements, 25; Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing, and Transformed Practice, 35).

1. Eleven years ago Lester Faigley presented his CCCC’s address (After the Revolution), and wrote: “Very simply, the Internet is not the world. Use of the Internet is even more skewed than consumption of the world’s energy resources” (39).
2. For a long time people in the U.S. did not know or refused to acknowledge that oil consumption needed to be controlled. The 70s Arab Oil Embargo disappeared from communal memory (maybe Lois Lowry’s The Giver stored it for us). What kinds of unsustainable practices are we ignoring about Internet technology and its use that are likely to surface in coming generations?
3. What does it mean to be computer literate (Ohmann: Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital, 27)? Isn’t computer literacy really computer multiliteracies?

Conundrums and Cautions; Composition and Computers

Reading Lester Faigley’s transcripts of in-class discussions conducted online using InterChange made me think about online experiences of my own. The first is really an aggregate of online courses I completed as an undergraduate (two-thirds of my B.S Liberal Studies courses took place off campus and online, with a handful of weekend and correspondence courses in the mix). Online discussion took place asynchronously on Blackboard Discussion Boards. Teacher participation varied. At least one teacher monitored conversations and policed student interactions. At the other extreme, a teacher absented him/herself to the point that almost all students gave up on required discussions (tied to grades) by the fourth of an eleven week course. This meant that a student who wanted to complete the assignment—respond to at least one other student each week—could not complete the task. The second experience was a group project in Second Life (just two of us, Sarah and me) designed as a derive. We traveled together, communicated through written dialogue from different geographical locations (in both real and virtual worlds), and applied theories of space and place in order to gain an understanding of our virtual environment. This was a student-centered, student-driven research project, one that I hope will help me develop other such effective technological explorations.

These experiences involved discussion and students. What do my experiences say to me about teaching with computer technology in light of today’s readings?

Much of the online discussion during my undergraduate days followed the “traditional notions of education that permeate our culture at its most basic level: teachers talk, students listen; teachers’ contributions are privileged; students respond in predictable, teacher-pleasing ways” that Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe mention in The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class (35). Open-ended questions allowed students to make connections between readings, but often, especially in my scrupulously patrolled anthropology class, the questions were designed to elicit right answers, in the instructor’s view. Most of us accepted the scholarly authority of this anthropologist; however, one man refused to acknowledge any possibility that humans evolved. He began to attack other students’ viewpoints, then he attacked them as people. After a mild warning to the entire class failed to stop his forcefulness, the instructor publicly reprimanded him. I don’t know whether behind-the-scenes dialogue took place.

I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the students in the class had been left to rebut, rebuke, or shun the guy in a student-centered action. In this class, “[t]he use of computers…seemed to come between [the teacher] and students, pre-empting valuable exchanges among members of the class….The use of technology in [this class], far from creating a new forum for learning, simply magnified the power differential between students and the instructor” (Hawisher and Selfe 40, 41). This was a micromanaged class in many ways, down to the prescribed vocabulary, format, deadlines, and paper topics. Not that this was bad for some, in that we did learn. As Marilyn M. Cooper writes in Postmodern Pedagogy in Electronic Conversations, “…I do not mean that teachers should tolerate inappropriate behavior in electronic or any other class conversations, but rather that teachers need to find new ways to deal with it” (160). But the technology component, the necessary medium for communication, made high demands on student receptivity to new ideas from the moment the syllabus became available, and those new ideas made strong challenges to conservative religious and political beliefs. To some extent, the software set up a panopticon with the teacher in the middle looking out at the cells (discussion threads) occupied by each student. Some students, including the man who lashed out, felt Othered. Maybe a less traditional banking approach to teaching would empower such students to voice close-held beliefs and at the same time open their minds to critically thinking about oppositional ideas. As Cooper argues, “This is not to say that teachers should not offer their own perspective or other perspectives that are not known to students, but rather that these perspectives must be clearly connected with the students’ experiences and must be offered as perspectives, not as the official or correct view” (159). To me it seems that online educators, especially, must consider Cooper’s statement. Without the face-to-face interaction of a traditional classroom, the teacher-student relationship relies entirely on the quixotic written dialogue or multi-logue.

Questions:

1. I was surprised that I bristled when I read this from Hawisher/Selfe:

"Writing instructors can use networks and electronic bulletin boards as disciplinary mechanisms for observing studetns' intellectual contributions to written discussions. The institutional requirement of student evaluation contributes to this practice as instructors seek ways 'to give students credit' for conference participation....We know after all that electronic conferences are, in some ways, spaces open to public scrutiny, places where individuals with the power of control over technology can observe conversations and participants without being seen and without contributing" (42-43).

How do we, as teachers, determine when a listserv, discussion board, chat room, blog, social networking group, or any other assigned and evaluated online posting (either for a grade or for completion) crosses the line from pedagogically sound to disciplinary and inappropriate? Hawisher and Selfe write that "[w]e can, if we work at it, become learners within a community of other learners, our students" (44). This is all well and good, but how do we do it?

2. Cooper quotes Spooner saying that "in the postmodern age, the reader, not the writer, is the real tyrant: multi-tasking, channel-surfing, capricious and fickle, free to interpret, misread, manipulate, and (horrors) apply. We're all guilty; we start at the end, in the middle, we don't finish, we joyously juxtapose bits of what we read with other readings, other experiences. But the point is that this is our most natural process" (141).

Spooner describes a graduate student pretty well, perhaps scholars as a whole. I suppose this is a rhetorical question, but is it any wonder that the pedagogical underpinnings of teaching with computers should be so under-theorized, at least in the early days of its classroom application (the late 1980s and early 1990s)?