Digital Rhetoric/Remediation and Remix - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

A cool project someone started:

Digital Rhetoric/Remediation and Remix - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum

A great new media text about prosumer approaches to using new media in composition classes:
Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum

Day Two with the Droid

I continue to struggle to overcome the feeling that I'm talking into an mp3 player. As with the day before, my experience began with disenchantment -- my first dropped call. The whole impetus for choosing an Android Incredible over a Apple Iphone (business philosophies aside) was that the gurus in the Office of Information Technology told me the Iphone drops a lot of calls. For some reason, I can't get many bars in my house, causing my phone to drop my mother. To further test its capabilities I took the phone on a field trip to the basement of Delta College, a place known for abysmal reception. There my faith in the Incredible was restored.

User awkwardness continues. I hung up on my graduate committee director because the speaker button and the call end button are in near proximity. Forget about making a phone call when driving until shortcuts and voice activation are programmed. This is my next task programming, choosing a ring tone, basically making the phone function with me.

MIT TechTV – Session 3: Transmedia for Social Change

MIT TechTV – Session 3: Transmedia for Social Change

Day One with the Droid

Problem #1 - The Android Incredible is not an I-Phone

Some may say this is exactly the beauty of the Droid -- it is a dazzling smart phone that exists outside the Steve Jobs/Apple Closed System Universe. However, for those of us who began with the I-Pod touch (i.e. the mobile gateway drug), it comes with a learning curve. For instance, the on button isn't located conveniently under the touch screen. The first few hours I had the Android I was convinced Fed-Ex delivered me a dud. Of course, that was before I read the directions :) The button I had been pushing was actually the "optical joystick" (not a day one task). When I final understood where the power button was I waited for my Apps to magically appear before me in nice neat rows. Instead, I found myself staring at the time displayed over a fiery red background. At this point, I believed that I would be taking back the phone and succumbing to the Steve Jobs' Way. Eventually, when I actually could focus on what the Android could do and discovered all the wonderful free apps, my evening turned around.

Sophie's World

While beginning my own intellectual journey at Michigan State University, I became enthralled with the coming of age story/introduction to philosophy Sophie's World. Jostein Gaarder's novel begins with a fourteen-year-old Sophie receiving two questions in her mailbox, “Who are you?” and “Where does the world come from?” Her journey takes her through the theories of Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Freud, and Darwin, among others. Each theorists raised new questions, both for Sophie and myself. And while Sophie's journey may have ended, mine continues.

I thought of Sophie when I was introduced to a new Sophie, also coming of age, at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference in Anaheim, California. This Sophie, found at www.sophieproject.org, hopes to revolutionize our conception of what a book can be. Sophie, a free program, gives users the ability to create multimedia, interactive texts. Instead of typing onto a page -- you drag and drop elements (audio and video clips, photographs, text files, etc.) onto a "canvas". There are still separate, sequential pages; however, you can also run the book like a video, using a timeline to make the various elements run and appear at different moments. Not only does Sophie change our conception of a book; it changes the way we think about reading.

Like great philosophers, these new tools raise the questions, "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Whether you are a gamer, a hacker, or a blogger, you look to form an identity by what you can do. What level have you achieved in World of Warcraft? What software have you cracked? And how many people follow your blog? These platforms, networks, and virtual spaces are a world we create by our actions. That is perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Internet -- this world comes from us and is (on the whole) made better than us.

These questions of our relationship with the Internet are important, as they tie to a great public debate -- does the Internet make us smarter? According to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, the Internet has hurt our ability to concentrate and driven us to constant distraction. He cites hard scientific evidence about the neurological affects of long-term Internet use, which causes our brains to constantly scan for new information -- even when we are away from the keyboard. His argument directly contrasts Steven Johnson's hypothesis in Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson argues that popular culture is becoming more complex and that viewers/users/players are required to focus on multiple narrative threads and pieces of data and connect them in meaningful ways.

One of the keynote speakers at the New Media Consortium, John Seely Brown, took up this question of fast analytical processing versus focused deep thought, using the example of Speed Chess Players. Speed chess is where players are required to make their move in under thirty seconds. What he discovered is that those who engaged in the exercise of speed chess were more likely to win in traditional chess tournaments. Speed chess helps the players identify patterns and rapidly identify the tactics of their opponents.

Speed chess is a good metaphor for the way we process data online. We are constantly pulling new bits of information and updates up on our screens (both mobile and static). Based on these constant streams and the patterns we find, we form our relationships and ideas. Learning is tied to interaction, collaboration, and constant seeking. It's networked, not unilaterally delivered from a professor or textbook. To go back to Jostein Gaarder's Sophie, she didn't learn philosophy by sitting and reading a stack of textbooks. She explored and collaborated with Alberto Knox. Together they problem solved riddles, both theoretical and personal. At the end, she understood not only philosophy, but how to apply it in her own life.

Switching to Augmented Reality

The first month of my spring/summer hiatus has been filled with various realities -- the reality of putting a home up for sale, the reality of finishing a dissertation before having a second child, etc. Tonight I'm exploring the buzz word "augmented reality" in preparation for the New Media Consortium Summer Conference. According to Wikipedia, this is "a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality." It's a familiar concept, but it's not lingo I use in my daily life. Right now, I'm looking at incoming tweets with geophysically near to me through an Ipod app. Not sure what to do with this information :)

The Art of Revision

Prospectus submitted, prospectus returned. Looking at it now, I'm embarrassed at my hasty draft. However, a crappy draft, a detailed editorial review, and a healthy dose of shame to drive revision is really how I work best as a writer. Of course, there is already a snag. I initially wrote that critical pedagogy has lost popularity and credibility in the academic landscape. To prove this, my advisor suggested checking the critical pedagogy hits in College English and College Composition and Communication over the years to show a decrease of interest. However, there isn't a significant shift in the number of articles. I assume, though, that current articles are more critiques of critical pedagogy rather than pitches. I'm assuming because certainty would require a lot of sifting - 1500 articles worth of sifting to be exact. Instead, here is my current introduction (which looks to bypass that work for the moment):

Dissertation Prospectus - Critical Pedagogy 2.0: The Post-Fordist Classroom
When critical pedagogy rose to popularity in the 1980s, there was clear justification for its appeal. In a time where composition was looking to distinguish itself as more than a service industry, scholars and teachers seized the opportunity to bridge teaching composition with the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, and Foucault, amongst others, to illustrate that the teaching of writing had always had larger and ethical and political implications than we traditionally acknowledged. It also helped rationalize the problems that arose after open admissions policies changed the socio-economic make up of college campuses, connecting student success and engagement with the students' ideologies, which were formed based on their economic and social status in society. By the end of the 80’s, although the diversity of sources and methodologies taken up by critical pedagogy continued to expand, it became an umbrella term that described the various ways educators work to critique the capitalistic institution of higher education and to empower those who have disenfranchised by the system.
Since the term critical pedagogy was coined by Henry Giroux in 1983, there have been dramatic changes in the economic and social landscape, mostly driven by the rise of the Internet. These changes raise questions about the effectiveness of standard critical pedagogy approaches and give cause for practitioners to consider new ways to achieve the same goals. In the words of Paulo Freire, "This pedagogy makes oppression and its cause objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade" (33). My dissertation will examine how critical pedagogy in composition classrooms was made and how it could be remade to address changes in labor and social modes of power. Could there be a critical pedagogy 2.0 that thrives and functions within new media ecologies and takes into consideration new forms of capitalism and modes of power? Throughout my diagnostic and prescriptive sections, I will be focusing on three key questions: How has labor changed? How have modes of social power changed? And how does our conception of critical literacy need to change?

Philosohical Foundations

Quoted from http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/Philosophical_Foundations.htm:

Philosohical Foundations

Critical Pedagogy, then, is defined by what it does - as a pedagogy which embraces a raising of the consciousness, a critique of society, as valuing students’ voices, as honoring students’ needs, values, and individuality, as a hopeful, active pedagogy which enables students to become truly participatory members of a society who not only belong to the society but who can and do create and re-create that society, continually increasing freedom.

Building a Chapter

I type today with dusty fingers, both literally and figuratively. We are preparing our home for sale to inhabit a new space that will positively shape our interactions and lifestyle. Today, the basement is being prepped for carpet. Luckily, I am only the sweeper and can escape from time to time. Figuratively, my fingers are dusty from use. A friend sent me a quote of an email I wrote before motherhood and tenure track, and I thought, "Wow, who wrote that?" Once, I had a voice instead of job. So here I begin to find it again.

What I'm discovering to be the hardest part of the dissertation is the time investment for the output. After reading and researching all day yesterday, what I had was a few short paragraphs with placeholders and new books ordered through the Michigan Electronic Library. This is hardly an impressive result to justify daycare, a messy house, and not teaching the spring semester: "In order to best understand the rich, complicated genealogy of critical pedagogy, I will be tracking its history using Raymond Williams concepts of emergent, dominant, and residual. As a social practice tied to classroom interactions, critical pedagogy wanes, shines, and ebbs in relation to cultural shifts -- in particular those related to labor. [Discuss of Williams terminology]."

Dissertation Summer

Currently, I'm going through work withdrawal, a malady typically associated with Winter and Spring Break. However, I fear the magnitude of this illness as I now look at four months without grading a paper or fielding questions on various rhetorical strategies. It's imperative to treat my current symptoms with healthy doses of dissertation research and writing. Currently, I am waiting approval for my prospectus. It's the type of proposal writing that I despise.

To all the blogs that have come before...

For years, my loyalty lay with Wordpress. However, when asked to do a professional development session on blogging, I recognized the superior usability of blogger for a novice. In order for me to know what is best for my students, my colleagues, and for the genre of blogging in general, I've decided to conduct my spring/summer blogging on Blogger.

Last summer's blogs are below:
http://cyborginterrupted.wordpress.com/
http://criticalcapitalism.wordpress.com/