I am a cyborg. If, upon reading that, you first thought of a human being whose identity is so interconnected with digital technology that the two create and recreate each other, you're probably pretty familiar with Haraway. If, however, you first thought of the Terminator, your relationship with technology might be a bit agonistic.
Technology has not always been such a part of my life; I spent the first ten or so years of my life running around the woods barefoot for at least six months out of the year, and viewed the first computers I encountered (2x86 IBMs at my school, my grandmother's inexplicable Texas Instruments with TI-Invaders) with more than a little suspicion, despite the fact that I still own my original 1985 NES and a few of the games that I never sold. Even in my twenties, I remained quite resistant to new technologies and thought of myself (to steal a line from "Californication") as "an analog man in a digital world." Really, most of my encounters with digital technology did not extend beyond video games or music, or the halcyon days of ICQ.
However, when I returned to WSU in the fall of 2007 after two years of flipping burgers and cursing furiously and often, I found that I was nearly illiterate in the technologies of the classroom. Everyone--everyone!--used PowerPoint (and I couldn't even afford MS Office), and almost all the students had laptops (something I'd dreamed of owning for years but could also never afford). Feeling as if I wouldn't survive college, let alone find a job as a technical writer afterwards, I critically investigated every technology that any teacher or student mentioned in (or out) of class. I sought out classes that would not only instruct me in the use of different technologies, but would also teach me how to shape my writing to these technologies (and visa versa). In short, I not only wanted to be able to use new technology, I wanted to bend it to what I wanted to do.
In adopting and immersing myself in new technology, I approach(ed) technology "alert to how these choices of material very much articulate into the other structures that shape writing and our lives" (Wysocki 10). For example, this summer I created a website for my English 101 courses. To create this website, I spent two summers learning XHTML, CSS, and Javascript (summer seems like the only time I have to learn something that isn't directly related to my coursework or research). Of course, it would have been simpler and quicker to use Angel or Google Sites to quickly generate a website for my classroom, but I wanted the website to reflect choices in design and content that were suited only to my needs; the site had to function as both a homepage for English 101, but also as a professional website for my academic career. In creating this site, I've found that an elegant few lines of code constitute a text that takes just as much work as this entire blog post; in other words, my writing is not limited to English essays.
So I'm a cyborg; I accept new technologies willingly, but critically, in both my classroom and my personal life, but like Wysocki I'm determined to "highlight the materiality" of the texts that I, and my students, create (15). One last example: in using Wikispaces this semester, my students are not just using the technology as an online word processor (I hope), composing content for the void, but are instead using their wikis as a public discussion forum, a writing lab, a social network, and a professional portfolio of their work. In doing so, they are learning why they are using Wikispaces, as opposed to another digital technology or even 8.5" x 11" double-spaced papers.
While I can still function in an analog world (visiting my parents, for example, who use the computer for FreeCell and refuse internet service because "the terrorists come in through the phone lines"), I can also excel in the digital one. For me, adopting technology is simply a means of survival; because it's not a new toy or game for me, I tend to be quite serious about its application--either in the classroom, or in my own life.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Gateways and Gatekeepers
I see my role, and--to a rather nosy extent--the role of other composition instructors as preparing students to succeed in the university and "the outside world." It's rather simplistic, I admit, but there it is. What this preparation means, though, is where I focus most of my pedagogy; for example, I take it for granted that my pedagogy needs to incorporate and embrace computers, community (often a la social networking), and new literacies (such as the blog, wikis, and the Twitter).
This assumption is certainly not shared by many of my colleagues, and so I realize I may be in the minority when I say that digital writing is critical to my students' professional success. However, I feel that to ignore this push is to ignore some of the important literacies that my students already bring to the classroom; while composition assumes that students have become literate in the sorts of skills that the gatekeepers look for--success on the SAT/ACT and college placement exams kinda demonstrates this assumption--it still feels to me like there's not enough use of digital literacies in the composition classroom. Students may enter my classroom well-versed in the five-paragraph essay, the presentation of a thesis supported by evidence, and the importance of running their spell-checkers before they print off their papers, but each year more students are entering the classroom as adepts of blogging and microblogging, web research, visual rhetoric, web design, and other literacies that incorporate forms of writing that were nonexistent in the composition classroom that I entered in 1998.
Yancey's proposal is both refreshing and reinforcing for my pedagogy because it provides a focus for my praxis: we should approach the composition classroom as an barn-raising rather than a gated community. Yancey describes this barn-raising--an analogy I use because of its associations with shared communities and inclusiveness, as well as the necessity of these things in accomplishing an otherwise difficult goal--as "a new curriculum for the 21st century, a curriculum that carries forward the best of what we have created to date, that brings together the writing outside of school and that inside" (308). In the barn-raising analogy, the classroom would be the new homestead, and the community that helps to raise that first barn--the one building that enables the work of the farm to begin--comes, of course, from the outside. The parallel to the gated community should be quite obvious: rather than welcoming the support of the outside world, the gated community erects barriers to shelter those inside from the influence of those without.
Finally, I must recognize two things: first, the irony of using the barn-raising analogy to describe the use of digital literacies; second, the more important point that this is not a new idea. I do not know of any composition classrooms among my colleagues that are hostile to new literacies, and in my occasional polling of compositional sentiment towards digital writing I hear (lukewarm) acceptance of the inevitable. However, what I also hear is a great deal of "It's great, but it's not for me/not my style." My role as a composition instructor is to make it "my style," and to pass that on to the .5 future composition instructors who pass through my classroom every year.
This assumption is certainly not shared by many of my colleagues, and so I realize I may be in the minority when I say that digital writing is critical to my students' professional success. However, I feel that to ignore this push is to ignore some of the important literacies that my students already bring to the classroom; while composition assumes that students have become literate in the sorts of skills that the gatekeepers look for--success on the SAT/ACT and college placement exams kinda demonstrates this assumption--it still feels to me like there's not enough use of digital literacies in the composition classroom. Students may enter my classroom well-versed in the five-paragraph essay, the presentation of a thesis supported by evidence, and the importance of running their spell-checkers before they print off their papers, but each year more students are entering the classroom as adepts of blogging and microblogging, web research, visual rhetoric, web design, and other literacies that incorporate forms of writing that were nonexistent in the composition classroom that I entered in 1998.
Yancey's proposal is both refreshing and reinforcing for my pedagogy because it provides a focus for my praxis: we should approach the composition classroom as an barn-raising rather than a gated community. Yancey describes this barn-raising--an analogy I use because of its associations with shared communities and inclusiveness, as well as the necessity of these things in accomplishing an otherwise difficult goal--as "a new curriculum for the 21st century, a curriculum that carries forward the best of what we have created to date, that brings together the writing outside of school and that inside" (308). In the barn-raising analogy, the classroom would be the new homestead, and the community that helps to raise that first barn--the one building that enables the work of the farm to begin--comes, of course, from the outside. The parallel to the gated community should be quite obvious: rather than welcoming the support of the outside world, the gated community erects barriers to shelter those inside from the influence of those without.
Finally, I must recognize two things: first, the irony of using the barn-raising analogy to describe the use of digital literacies; second, the more important point that this is not a new idea. I do not know of any composition classrooms among my colleagues that are hostile to new literacies, and in my occasional polling of compositional sentiment towards digital writing I hear (lukewarm) acceptance of the inevitable. However, what I also hear is a great deal of "It's great, but it's not for me/not my style." My role as a composition instructor is to make it "my style," and to pass that on to the .5 future composition instructors who pass through my classroom every year.
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