“Composing Digital Writing Relationships: Toward an Infrastructural Approach to Digital Design and Pedagogy”

Abstract:

Working at the intersections of recent innovations in network theory and digital rhetoric and writing pedagogy, as well as their combined experiences helping to build new media infrastructures in the local community of Lansing, Michigan and Cortland, NY, Speaker 1 argues for an infrastructural approach to digital writing instruction and design. Founded in the assumption that enacting digital writing within networked spaces involves a transitional mentality, he conceptualizes rhetorical moves across and between disparate networks such as workplaces, peer groups, classrooms, and neighborhoods, moves that, like a needle threading through separate pieces of fabric, can help weave community-based infrastructures by inviting individuals into common acts of participation and collaboration via digital media. In order to highlight such moves that he has woven into a several new professional writing courses, speaker 1 will also voice his professional and writerly position, as a digital composer, facilitator and newly minted assistant professor of digital writing. From these positions, he will illuminate successes and failures in efforts to enable clients, colleagues, students, and stakeholders to move from thinking of writing technologies as tools with fixed attributes that make writing, to thinking of writing situations as rhetorical opportunities to assemble the tools, people, and activities that best meet the needs of the occasion and that also create the best possibilities for future occasions.

Composing Digital Writing Relationships.pdf

I wanted to take a moment to showcase a presentation I did last month for the composition program here at SUNY Cortland entitled “The Art of Fostering Student Writing in the Digital Age” http://bit.ly/uy1PCL. I think I articulated my own digital pedagogy well, here, as well as providing a list of useful tools for fostering digital writing.

That’s what this work is. Ending my second week as faculty, drained but excited for new possibilities. Inventing new curricula. Revising poetry manuscript. Connecting with new community partners. New student needs. Resurrecting an article I let lapse. Inventing a new one. Thinking about a book project. Thinking.

Retreat this weekend at Raquette Lake. Writers retreat with everyone from PWR. Writing. It seems my life is writing now. Student responses. E-mails. IRB protocols for student research. Protocols for my own research. Articles. Books. Soon the start of a tenure file. So many new genres it makes me dizzy. So many institutional points of contact, like my new writing life is a virus spreading building to building, server to server. And I thought grad school was tough . I hear my dissertation chair laughing, saying “told you so.”

So: he was write about ONE thing (Freudian slip intended). What’s left? Conserving energy. It is highly possible I’m spreading myself too thin, trying to do too much at once, but I feel like… there’s always more to consider, more to tap into. Need to learn the art of artful boundaries again. Got good at that in grad school… have to learn the edges of things again… like a toddler testing objects for the first time… eventually I’ll have tried everything and will realize what I’m really like…

Just a few days ago, I successfully defended my dissertation, and am now on my way to my new job as Assistant Professor of New Media, Rhetoric, and Professional Writing in the English department at SUNY-Cortland.

My committee told me I may have a book project on my hands. Exciting. They also had loads of useful suggestions for revising/reframing my dissertation into said book. A reminder that, in the words of one committee member, “writing is never done; it’s just due.”

I’ve also really enjoyed and learned a lot from teaching this summer class, as well, a class in which I had the opportunity to develop, with my students, some projects that I think will follow me to NY, where I’m slated to teach/develop a class called Writing in the Digital Age (previously Writing in Cyberspace).

Transitions. Always bittersweet. There are definitely colleagues and mentors I will miss in Michigan, but I look forward to new directions, colleagues, projects, networks, writing. (Re)writing. Always bittersweet.

“Community Mediation: Writing in Communities and Enabling Connections through New Media”

Abstract:

The question of how best to facilitate the creation of sustainable new media compositions within communities is vital if these compositions are to become a permanent part of community knowledge-making practices and to reach audiences in a meaningful way. We explore a model of community mediation that is cognizant of the practices and structures of communication within a given community. This model also acknowledges the boundary between the definition of community identity and the possibility of connection to both internal and external audiences. We illustrate this model of community mediation using three cases in which it was practiced: the creation of an informational video that profiles a local neighborhood center, the building of a digital installation on the history of the Cherokee Nation, and the preservation and practice of Indian classical dance amid its remediation via new media technologies. These examples reveal where and how stabilized meaning-making practices can emerge when researchers and other facilitators of new media composition are cognizant of existing mediums that community members use to represent themselves and the complex lifeways embodied by those mediums. Because all cultural practices resist mediation to some degree, we ultimately find that the only way to insure sustainable community mediation is to use existing practices and structures as infrastructures for building new compositions.

Here‘s a link to the article.

“My E-Petition Does SO Matter!!: Challenging Othering Practices in Social Media through a Rhetoric of Community Media”

I think my panel had… 7 or so people? An okay crowd. Panels I’m on never seem to get a lot of discussion, though for some reason… My powerpoint, for any interested: C’s 2011.ppt.

My fun innovation this year? I used Xtranormal to depict some Facebook debates I’d engaged in over political issues with colleagues and friends. Unfortunately, my internet connection broke after the first one, but showing the one was fun!

Here’s a Tumblr post on an early draft of it as well…

(a semi-poetical, mostly professional, somewhat multimodal reflection)

It’s been a long time coming. From poet to teacher to activist to researcher to activist to multimedia composer to facilitator. And back again. Not a linear evolution. More like a feedback loop. Stellar shrapnel:

Rhizomatic. Irregular growth. A mentor once told me I am perhaps best at doing many things at once.

Another said that I care most when intellectual work engages people beyond universities. True times two.

Grad school. Doesn’t it go by in a blink? Not really. More like a long, dizzying afternoon nap. The kind you wake from not knowing, for an instant, who you are.

Less dramatic than that. Painful adaptation. Growth at the impetus of need. Better.

Who hasn’t gotten lost and found themselves again in the flux of information flows? Who hasn’t become a teacher to get political only to discover that politics get worked out much better through collaboration rather than brute force?

There is a certain quality to this academic life. A negation field:

Ideas striking reality and bouncing off. A reality composed of activity, institutions, ossification, effort.

Not just your advisor, either (though it can seem that way sometimes . Communities. Committees. Belief structures. Value systems. Time. Money.

What’s left? Another mentor asked: what do you notice? And so fascinated was I by that question, I turned it into a poem, a dissertation, an orientation, a life. A life of but also (hopefully) beyond the mind. A life of paying the best attention I could.

A life about impact, meaning, being of use (hopefully). And now? The plan is to pull up stakes. Just when I get the hang of one set of networks, I must enter another. Just when I learn the application of a set of tools, I must apply them somewhere else, in the service of new infrastructures. Such is the way with things here, in our turbulent, often multi-mediated, sometimes bureaucratic, hopefully democratic times.

Beginning. I feel like Walt Whitman (a little):

“The impetus and ideas urging me, for some years past, to an utterance, or attempt at utterance, of New World songs, and an epic of Democracy, having already had their published expression, as well as I can expect to give it, in LEAVES OF GRASS, the present and any future pieces from me are really but the surplusage forming after that Volume, or the wake eddying behind it.”

This from the guy who created how many editions of that well-known work? My point: I feel like I have a personal (infra)structure now, a philosophy, an epistemology, whatever you would call it. I feel, in other words…ready.

I presented to a small, but committed audience at C&W, but thought that my presentation was easy to understand and well-framed, considering I’m not completely done with my data analysis yet. I think the biggest contribution I made to thinking about multimedia writing processes in the presentation was my idea of moving away from a ‘success-based’ model of collaboration to a ‘iterative’ model of collaboration (slide 9)…

GGetto2010CWPresentation.ppt

Though this video had to be played by a fellow presenter because I had a dissertation data collection opportunity that I couldn’t miss, I think I captured here a real sense of my pedagogy as it has developed while teaching WRA 135:

(Done for the annual review of my progress in my Ph.D. program the year I created this site).

What happened this past year in my professional life? I became a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Writing, which means that I passed my exams. I’m now something like an academic adolescent: not quite an adult, but no longer a child either. I’m reminded of that quote from the bible: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

I’m not honestly sure how that applies here; I’m just reminded of it. Perhaps it applies because I now see some order from the chaos that was my life before this moment. There have been many times over the past year, for example, when I thought that something like this might be happening:

“Negation Field”

And maybe it was. During my dissertation prospectus defense, for example, I felt like a blithering idiot, like nothing I was saying was making any sense. But now, putting together this website, I feel like I do have some expertise in what I have been studying, teaching, and doing for, not just this past year, but the last two and a half years.

I read my research, teaching, and other links and they actually make sense to me, and also seem like the kinds of things that would make sense to other people in the field, or even, perhaps, in other fields.

Those of you on my committee who read this post will recognize much of the language from my 2008 reflection (this is not to assume that anyone else is going to read this post . I have repurposed much of it for this site, but have changed it slightly so that it communicates better with a broader audience. My original teaching philosophy, for example, started like this:

“My insights as a teacher stem from my experiences as a first generation college student turned labor activist turned community media facillitator, who is also from a low-income, working-class background and who has managed to negotiate several institutions of higher learning.”

Now I read this, and hear “blah, blah, blah.” I think this first sentence communicates very little about what I believe as a teacher. It’s setting up my background, but it’s trying to do so too quickly. And honestly: how much do people who are interested in me professionally for whatever reason really want to know about my background in that first sentence?

The new first sentence on my teaching page is a lot better, I think: “My teaching philosophy is that in a democratic society all citizens deserve equal access to the most effective modes of communication.” Bam. Simple, direct, and to the point. My core beliefs boiled down into a few key ideas. And this is what I think now (I think).

Perhaps that’s why I thought of that quote above. I spake as a child…I understood as a child…I feel like my entire professional relationship to the world has changed in the past 2.5 years. And the way I name what’s in the world has changed, too.

If someone were to ask me what I teach now, I’d say something like: “writing. Actually, I have students do academic essays as well as multimedia projects with community organizations. Stuff like videos, websites, brochures, etc.” The ability to say this, of course, has developed over two semesters of teaching my WRA 135 class, two semesters of asking students and interrogating with them: why exactly are we doing this? Why are we doing multimedia projects with community partners? In a writing class of all places?

And the answer to this question has become something like my new first sentence from my teaching philosophy: because people in the local community want to communicate in those ways. And because they need help doing it.

If someone were to ask me what I research, I’d tell them: “well, I’m interested in a lot of things, like how media function in our culture, and how people use them to get their message across.” “Oh, really, like what kind of media?” “Well, right now I’m looking at how service-learning students use different modes of writing to make media for community organizations, stuff like writing for the web, or editing a video, or formatting a brochure.” “So you’re interested in how they do those things?” “Yes, but I’m more interested in what they need to do those kinds of writing: like infrastructure and know-how. They need equipment, for example, and they need to know how to use that equipment.”

“Well, how will you figure out what they need and how they figure out how to use the stuff that they end up using?” “Simple: I’m going to videotape them working on their projects and I’m going to ask them about what I see. I have a hunch, though, that they use knowledge they come into the classroom with in very particular ways, something we might call ‘cultural know-how:’ knowledge they’ve accumulated just by making and consuming media within infrastructures they’ve been part of (like high school or a community media center).”

“Well, I have just one more question: how do you define things like ‘media’ or ‘mode’?”

“Uhhh…well I’m hoping to articulate those definitions through my research…” (phew, this guy sounds just like my committee

This answer, again, has developed over the past year and even longer in close collaboration with not only my committee but the research participants for my pilot study that I conducted last spring.

Finally, if someone were to ask me how I serve my local community, I’d say something like what I say on my reciprocity page: “Instead of engaging in acts of ‘service,’ I believe in engaging in acts of reciprocity and in developing professionally so that I might better engage in such acts.” This has helped clarify for me the relationship between what I do professionally and my personal value system: I’m continually learning skills that can help other people. This translates right through my teaching and research agendas, as well.

It may sound strange, but I haven’t had much faith that I was actually doing this until now, helping other people I mean, and I think some part of me, the “radical,” “activist” part still doesn’t believe that what I’m doing is useful to other people. Perhaps this is part of developing into a professional, however: you find some way of believing in what you are doing.