July 25, 2005

existential cris-ish

i don't want to be a phd student anymore. i suppose it's only fair to acknowledge the contextual reality that i decide this at least once a year, but what that means might just as easily be "it takes time for these realizations to sink in" as "it's passed before & will pass again." will it? should it? or is this the slow-wave repetition of one of those inner voices i really ought to listen to?

i've spent the day sending proto-reading-lists for my exams (what other people call "comps," although they aren't actually comprehensive of anything other than the unique, much-abused & severely truncated (while still being perversely expansive in purview) wish-lists we build ourselves) back and forth with my advisor. these are long, long lists of books and articles i've never read, that i should choose wisely among (based on titles & some rare flickerings of name-recognition) to decide which among them i most need to read in order to answer a set of questions i haven't written yet--but will be expected to write, again, before having read the texts to know whether or not they'll actually equip me to answer the questions i write. so it's an understandably frustrating process, made, i'm sure, more frustrating to my advisor by my complete inability to play along. i keep asking questions. annoying questions. horrible questions. like "okay, how many things am i supposed to read?" and "how long is this supposed to take, anyway," and "why, again, am i doing this?"

the logistical answer to that last question is "because it's a graduation requirement." the more biting but generally-accepted-as-true answer is "because phd programs have always done exams. your professors had to do it, so you have to do it." i'm currently teaching my 205 students about warrants. short version: warrants are those assumptions about the world that underlie the claims and arguments you ask an audience to accept/believe. if your warrants reflect beliefs that your audience doesn't share, your arguments will fail. because warrants are generally unstated, it's important when writing an argument to slow down and examine your own warrants, then consider your audience & their likely expectations; if these things don't match up, you'll need to explain and defend your warrants rather than leaving them unstated. it's pretty simple stuff, although the first time we do it in each class, my students flail and weep. in any case, the argument, that exams are necessary (for graduation, tradition, etc.), only holds if the audience (currently me) agrees with the warrant that graduation (tradition, etc.) is necessary.

so why, again, am i doing this?

holding a phd in rhetoric and composition--even if i overlook the fact that living my life in the now, a now i spend primarily cursing at books and lists of things i can't even explain the value of to the people who matter most to me (which is in part because i question that value myself but is mostly because the things are so entrenched in their recursive vocabularies that there's no way to explain what they mean without defining fifteen terms and recounting at least 40 years of mind-numbingly specialized academic history) is tantamount to wasting air and precious resources since i'm not accomplishing anything of value at all--will not enable me to change the world. it will not make anybody's life substantially better. i improve, minutely, the lives of a few undergrads a semester who would have (at the extreme end of my egotism) a slightly less good experience if someone else taught the course instead of me. with a phd, i will be able to do this with a few fewer undergrads in exchange for a handful of graduate students i'll be primarily setting up to replicate my near-uselessness. i will also be able to attend, i've been assured, a wide array of administrative meetings to have long, often fruitless conversations about how best to keep doing something of minor but genuine value (strengthening students' communication skills) against the continued onslaught of budget cuts and economic crises created by the cruel outside world of the university franchise and its consistent prioritizing of money-crop departments over humanities-centered endeavors.

i will make more money for doing this than i make now, but i will always make far less money than my friends without phds who work in money-crop industries making much more significant--if capitalistic, questionable, and sometimes downright evil--impacts on our world. i will continue to directly influence only a small handful of people each semester. i will be qualified to reach for the job-security of tenure, a process requiring even more hoop-jumping than procuring a phd, but will achieve it only if in addition to meeting a great many other criteria i manage to complete and publish a single-authored theoretically-focused full-length composition and rhetoric book--not a textbook, mind, that someone could use to teach anybody else, but just an ordinary "here are my ideas about x, properly contextualized among the ideas of all the right writers i'm supposed to mention to prove that i'm paying attention" academic book like the ones i'm supposed to be putting on this exam list.

if i fail to achieve tenure, i can look forward to a life of adjunct work almost identical to the one i'd have if i quit now and went to work with the degree i already have.

why, again, am i doing this?

i'm fresh out of idealism about it, frankly. the best answer i can come up with--and i've dredged, believe me--is inertia. i'm already rolling in this direction. to stop would take effort. to start again in another direction would take more effort, and, more importantly, another direction to start in. i used to have a whole host of other directions in mind. i'm fresh out of those to. at the moment, i'm wasting my life--i'm not helping anybody. i'm not changing the world. i'm not stopping this war. i'm not creating anything new. i'm not even raising a child--simply because i don't know what else to do. this is a rut, not a calling. this is a groove i allowed myself to be railroaded into because i didn't have any good reasons at all to say "no."

this is where paul shakes his head at me in deep disappointment. the one thing i was never allowed to do, he said, was get cynical. i don't mean this to bash the work of anybody who's got a niche they fit in and doesn't think what they're doing is a waste of time at all. i don't think this wastes everybody's time. i know people (with different interests and foci than mine) in this field who actually are making the world or at least the lives they touch--and who are damn good at rippling to spread that touch around--significantly better. i'm just not one of them. and i'm not sure this is how i can or am-supposed-to be. so i've failed him. just like i'm failing those long-ago dreams of doing something that mattered, of teaching something that would change people for the better to people who wanted and needed to change. & that's how i'm failing myself.

Posted by ttobryan at 03:15 PM | Comments (4)

May 19, 2005

theory and the ibsc*

karen burke lefevre (invention as a social act) calls them part of an "internal dialogic."

psychiatrist harry stack sullivan says "the formation of the self depends in part on a dynamic process in the individual, involving internalized others," some of whom form "supervisory patterns" who "often take the form of internal critics--readers of one's own writing, listeners to one's talk--who may help or hinder a person" (lefevre 57).

"'it is as if there were two people,' sullivan says, 'one who actually utters statements, and another who attempts to see that what is uttered is fairly well adjusted to its alleged purpose.' such constructs continued to evolve through one's life. they may be derived from actual people one has known, from 'eidetic' or imagined people, or from a blend of both. especially pertinent to composition is sullivan's example of the effect that one of his own supervisory patterns, that of 'reader,' has on his writing:

he's a charming pill, practically entirely responsible for the fact that i almost never publish anything. he is bitterly paranoid, a very brilliant thinker, and at the same time an extraordinarily wrongheaded imbecile. thus when i attempt to use the written language to communicate serious thought, i am unhappily under constant harrassment to so hedge the words around that most bitterly critical person will be unable to grossly misunderstand them, and, at the same time, to make them so clear that this wrongheaded idiot will grasp what i'm driving at.

like sullivan, w. h. auden talks of an inner critic. auden's 'internal censor' of his poetry provides helpful correction and is more like a 'censorate': 'it should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish'" (lefevre 57-8).

novelist anne lamott suggests the following:

close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. and so on. drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won't do what they want....then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. leave it down, and get back to [work]. (lamott 27)

for the ultraviolent, lamott adds: "a writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. but i think he's a little angry, and i'm sure nothing like this would ever occur to you."

*ibcs = the "itty-bitty-shitty-committee" that lives inside your head & tells you your writing is CRAP. as far as i know, it's paul heilker's term; if he's passing it along from somewhere else, i don't know where.

listening to: urchin | nile rose

(xp to compositionism)

Posted by ttobryan at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2005

IS style paper intro

listening to: ttws | butterflies

I bought my first CD as a senior in high school, a time in anyone's life when almost everything is terribly profound. The CD, still earning its keep in circulation in my collection, is Toad the Wet Sprocket's Fear, track 3 of which includes a slightly eerie yet intimate female voice-over most of whose narrative about looking through coin-operated binoculars is relatively forgettable. This line has always stood out, however; I still hear it in all sorts of situations with no apparent connection to the song's preoccupation with sea-coasts, loud cars, butterflies:

You know how when you get so close to something that big, you can't see anything at all?

Even the most oblique reference to the study of style—or, really, the defining of, discussions about, classroom and hallway pedagogically-focused mentions of, pontifications on the stuff—brings that line around in my head again. The very word unsettles me, making me feel pinned to cork like a butterfly when asked to speak about it, progressively disqualifying me from expertise a little farther every time I learn a little more about the stubject, clouding my tenuous grasp on any one approach each time I encounter another. My students make statements about the stuff that I know I've made, statements that seem naïve, limited, problematicly exclusionary in their implication, and I'm frustrated every time by having no idea where to start to correct them, by being unable to decide whether correcting them is ethically any more responsible than leaving their perceptions alone. Style is political, hegemonic, prescriptive, descriptive, grammatical, creative, constricting, liberating, revolutionary: it's that big. From far enough of a remove to list those adjectives, it's possible to at least aproximate a sense—to have a feel for, if not any kind of vision of—what one's trying to ascertain. Any closer, and you can't see anything at all.


i have no idea where i'm going with this, by the way, but if i commit beginning to the page--and to the web--i'm hoping that'll shame me into conintuation. any suggestions?

(xp to compositionism)

Posted by ttobryan at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2005

paradoxical

i am becoming, at this particular moment (it happens infrequently, but not so much as to be an unrecognizeable phenomenon), a writing teacher who hates writing.

the exigency of the situation for which i am currently writing is inauthentic, for starters, and while i know i still haven't solved the puzzle of how to spare my students the same plight, at least (a) i try to get them doing it with things they care about, so that they have edification as potential gratification & not just completion, and (b) they don't yet know any better anyway; they still believe that "because it was assigned" is reason enough. i am not so unaware, and neither is the assignment writer for whom i'm undertaking (okay, right this minute, avoiding) these gymnastics.

frankly, though, the question of authenticity bugs me less than the overwhelming improbability of my work's positive reception. i know enough to know where this will land, no matter what i stretch or pound it into, and it's damn hard to motivate like that.

i'm actually thinking this, as a means of self-encouragement: "you may as well crank out any old crap; [he/she] is going to trash it anyway."

this isn't dour moodiness, for the record, just an accurate appraisal of the situation. if one has to wonder about my mental state, one should wonder why i'm still at this business, anyway.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:54 PM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2005

felt-top calvinball: house rules

for my project in 611 on collaborative writing, one of the things i'm reading is kenneth bruffee's 1984 "collaborative learning and the 'conversation of mankind,'" which i'll be summarizing elsewhere in a bit, but i'm not done with yet; i'm still extracting gems, & here's the current if-too-dark sparkle:

bruffee doesn't surprise me--i've had way too much education training not to have heard it a hundred times already--when he says "most of us [teaching in the humanities] believe that 'class discussion' is one of the most effective ways of teaching. the truth, however, is that despite this belief the person who does most of the discussing in most of our discussion classes is the teacher." what's so pivotal & immediately relevant to me about this, though, is the reasoning he gives & the things i hear it speaking to (all of these lines are in immediate succession, by the way):

on what's still too true about how we (& i'm shifting the "we" here to mean "grad students," because that's what he's talking about, even though he's looking at graduate education as a now-finished contributor to a current situation, and i'm still in a place to see it as an ongoing influence on both our now-and-future teaching and our now-and-future contributions to the field that we, ourselves, will be perpetuating) position ourselves and our work, no matter how much we might wish to believe otherwise (& work our assess off to make otherwise, or at the very least work in ways we honestly believe ought to make otherwise):

behind our enthusiasm for discussion lies a fundamental distrust of it. the graduate training most of us have enjoyed—or endured—has taught us...that collaboration and community activity is inappropriate and foreign to work in humanistic disciplines such as english. humanistic study, we have been led to believe, is a solitary life, and the vitality of the humanities lies in the talents and endeavors of each of us as individuals.

on how this positioning plays out too often in our face-to-face attempts to come together to talk about what we're reading & learning:

what we call discussion is more often than not an adversarial activity pitting individual against individual in an effort to assert what one literary critic has called "will to power over the text," if not over each other.

on networking & wovenness--in simplest form, what plays out on the pool-felt as a cooperation vs. competition-based approach to playing (with) the game:

if we look at what we do instead of what we say, we discover that we think of knowledge as something we acquire and wield as individuals relative to each other, not something we generate and maintain in company with and in dependency upon each other.

when j and i play pool, we start the game like everybody else does--taking turns, designating colors, following an agreed-on set of rules about what happens when somebody scratches--but it doesn't end that way. when somebody "wins" (assuming we've gotten that far without starting to replace off-shots with do-overs and the like already) either by virtue of a brilliant move (usually not me) or by default (much more often me) when someone else's brilliant move goes astray, we pick new rules & play on for as long as there are balls left on the table.

our surface-level justification for this is simple: we've payed to play with the toys; we may as well play with them for as long as the money down covers the activity. (and economics is definitely the easiest way to explain this to other people.) the underlying truth seems to take many more words, and be much more confusing to explain, although to my way of thinking it's simpler still: we play to play.

neither one of us has a thing to gain by winning; "winning" at pool, as far as i can tell, just means quitting while there's still something left to play with, some other physics-stunt to try, some playful backwards shot to laugh at trying to bend over the table for. competing--creating "winner" and "loser" categories--doesn't make either of us better at the physics, more likely to control the ball next time around, or better-pleased by the activity as a whole, whereas cooperating at the task--whether the task (and maybe here's where i'm such an oddball--for a lot of people i suppose winning is the task) is clearing the table, improving our hand-eye coordination, or amusing one another--makes all of these things far more likely to happen.

we play to play. we play to learn--but not to learn how to "win"--we play to learn how to play, to learn how to learn more from playing. and the best, most productive, most learning-centered conversations about rhetoric & composition that i'm involved in--the ones that happen almost exclusively after hours, over the back of the break-room couch, or across the table in chuck's, or trooping through the snow on my walks to school with ty, or in cordell's living room, or on IM at 1 in the morning--the ones that made me want to be in grad school in the first place, the ones that (sometimes are all that) make me want to stay--play just like those pool games.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:22 PM | Comments (1)

March 11, 2005

i've been cited!

in the "scholarly journal" (i've never read it, but now i want to!) Marvels & Tales (Volume 18, Number 1, 2004), Martha P. Hixon's article "Tam Lin, Fair Janet, and the Sexual Revolution: Traditional Ballads, Fairy Tales, and Twentieth-Century Children's Literature" cites an annotated bibliography of "the ballad of tam lin" that i created for a research-methods course in my master's program (& which i really need to update) & web-published in 2001, which the wonderful abby at balladry notebook & tam-lin.org has been kind enough to host for me for the past few years.


i'm there under my maiden name, but i'm there--in both a footnote and a bibliographic entry at the end.

i know this doesn't really count, since it's a lit publication & now we're comp/rhet scholars, but... ::does little academic happy-dance anyway::

Posted by ttobryan at 12:02 PM | Comments (4)

February 27, 2005

how i win at kevin bacon

i'm starting to catch up with the class in watts' six degrees, and while i'm not holding on to as much of the math as i'd like to be (i spoke this language once, i swear, but it's been so very long), i'm seeing the impressions emerge, & digging the already-dead metaphors of streams and currents, webs and handshake-associations, even (although i'm glad i'm almost through that chapter) viruses--i knew about melissa, but i didn't know the simpsons had anything to do with it! & i'm finding a lot of kernels like that in watts, more, certainly than i expected: it turns out that all those years i spent as the only humanities major surounded in a social network of CEs & CivEs & double-Es & programming inclined nerds who dropped out but kept geeking anyway have paid off & informed my thinking & ability to grasp things that ought to be outside my realm in really fortuitous ways.

when he says, on pg 156, "just try playing six degrees of kevin bacon without the computer," though, i have to laugh at him.

geeks watch a lot of movies; i don't need a social scientist to tell me that. & while my geeks weren't at uva designing oracles for the purpose ("the university" has actually been the sworn nemesis of every school i've been at until now!) we were certainly familiar with the kevin bacon game. watts' initial treatment of the game as he knew it intrigued me enough that i went to the oracle (which despite my vast experience with the game itself i hadn't heard of until watts explained) & spent an hour-long aim chat with a friend in florida trying to find anyone in the movie database with a kevin bacon number of 4 or higher--we failed, & had to admit defeat & get back to work. part of what frustrated us, though, was the rigidity of the criteria. tv didn't count, bollywood didn't count, stage productions didn't count--and none of the tricks we used were even vaguely admissable. another thing that got old quickly was that the same movies that we'd never heard of kept coming up over & over. the computerized version lacked the resonant associations that mattered to us. it didn't even notice the movies we'd seen & enjoyed remembering, because they weren't significant enough as hubs for the purpose of the game--which wasn't creating interesting chains, at that mathematical level, it was just to minimize the number of steps. kevin bacon has been in a lot of heavy-hitter movies. watching the computer win just for the sake of winning wasn't fun for long.

the latter link above actually describes a much more accurate version of the game we used to play in college--only and always without a computer: whereas the oracle admits only hollywood actors & only collaboration on a film as legitimate associations, we'd take any connection at all, & in so doing, played a game much more like the kinds of multi-group, multi-path-type associative networking watts describes later on. for starters, our connections were relevant to us. if a movie came up in the game at all, it was because one or more of us had seen it (which often led to recommendations and movie-night selections)--it was a conversation, not just a fact. it was a genuine connection, the kind with multiple meanings, not just a binary data-blip flipped to "on" on both sides of the question.

more importantly and far more interestingly, though, we had fewer restrictions on our associations. any connection to kevin bacon was... a connection to kevin bacon. it was that simple. my friend in florida has a kevin bacon number of 3, because he dated a girl who had thanksgiving dinner one year with julia roberts, who was in flatliners with kevin bacon. & me? my kevin bacon number is 1: he & i share a birthday.

(x-posted to 711)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:53 AM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2005

do gnats dream of electric clowns?

i have all the focus of a gnat this morning, but i dare anybody trying to make coherent connections between quantum leaps & transactional reading theories to do any better.

quantum leap: the moment the both-possible solidifies, actualizes, becomes one, not both, & makes the other impossible... or maybe it's the many-possible (all-possible?) becoming one & thus denying all the others.

there aren't (are there?) any quantum leaps in network theory; possibilities increase or decrease the likelihood of other possibilities, but they don't eliminate one another. there are critical points, places from which movement, likelihood, & connectivity increase exponentially, but they're still arrays of options; there may be points at which one or another possibility is denied, but all the others remain open, creating instead of a yes & a possibly infinite array of nos, one or another no that actualizes, having little bearing on the overall array of possible yesses.

listening to: one a.d. | dubometer

this song has a repetitive electronic noise that sounds like maniacal clown-laughter in it, which is not helping solve the gnat problem. tricksy association games come full circle: quantum leaps are impulse-gnats, laughing like electric clowns. i'm blogging theory at 11:30 on a saturday morning. i think i hear the big white padded van turning onto the end of my street...

EDIT: theory-genius husband-person, while reading over the short paper the above puzzle was a part of, said "where'd you get 'both-possible'? who is that?" i'm sure i looked very sheepish when i said "it's me. i don't know. i didn't know what else to call it." i'm still sheepish about this. am i allowed to do that? make up terms? are the theory-police going to lock me up? rhetorical giants come after me with their thumb-wide sticks?

excuse me while i scurry back to the safety of the six degrees of kevin bacon.

Posted by ttobryan at 11:02 AM | Comments (2)

February 24, 2005

"if you want to know what the man believes in, look at his metaphors."

--becky howard, specifically in reference to bob connors, but highly generizeable.

Posted by ttobryan at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2005

a post-what WHAT?

brooks, nichols, & priebe characterize their students responses to using blogs in a variety of ways to extend classroom work into other writing opportunities as follows:

the generally positive response to weblogging that emerges despite these differences suggests that as the genres and motives for weblogging are understood more clearly, the practices has sufficient cultural and pedagogical appeal to encourage and motivate student writing even in a post-literate age.

i hit the end of that paragraph like the titanic on that infamous iceberg. a post-literate what? a post-what age? i'm beyond confused, but i think first that maybe i'm missing something; maybe this is one of those terms that seems transparent but in usage has come to masquerade as something else.

so i "google" "post-literate age,"--an activity, i hardly think i need to add, that involves a several-tiered process of textual negotiation requiring a great deal of print literacy (what i assume they're referring to) in addition to what others variously call "computer literacy" or "technology literacy"--and found two dominant explanations of the term. one distinguishes between a "scientific" & literal conception of language and a more poetic, fluid conception, applying the term "post-literate" to the latter; the other, which i'm assuming is what brooks, nichols, and preibe had in mind, can be exemplified by the following explanation in a 1997 essay by brian rotman:

We are at a juncture when computer technology, a medium as awesomely powerful, transformative, delimiting and invasive as writing once was, is changing the world forever; we've reached a point when 'writing', as the linguist Roy Harris put it, has 'dwindled to microchip proportions' [The Origin of Writing: ]. We are living in momentous times: the inventions spawned by computing and the digital logic that goes with it are gobbling, at an accelerating pace, ever larger chunks of human culture and rendering obsolete practices that have lasted for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. As the medium of writing displaced orality and changed forever how humans encounter, respond and imagine each other, so the medium of computing, just as totally and relentlessly, is displacing literacy.

say what? i'm no less confused. everything i do with relation to computers is textual, literate, screen-print (most of it easily transferable to print-out). my geeky (no offense, anyone) coder/programmer friends spend all day writing--sometimes documentation in sentence form, sometimes memos and briefs in paragraphs, sometimes, yes, code, in a different language than the one i'm using now, but it's still a writen language system--it's still writing. it still requires literacy, where literacy = the ability to decode/make meaning from (theoretically definable as two very different things, i know, but i'm leaving that be for now) a visual collection of symbols representing word-based information.

how can that possibly be post-literate? when has any civilization ever in the history of the world made literate practices--reading, writing, whether on paper or on screen, usually both--more fundamental to its functionality? if anything, i'd call us uberliterate--but "post"? or is there something about what these writers mean by "computing" that's eluding me completely here? or is there some theoretical association with "post" not actually meaning "after b/c instead of" that i'm missing?

i've spent long enough looking for the context of the harris quote rotman's working with; i don't expect 1997 = 2005; i'm out of disclaimers. maybe instead of missing something i'm missing a lot of things. but... post-literate?

(x-posted to 711)

Posted by ttobryan at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2005

quotable

Underlying this misconception of distinct, linear phases [in the composing process] is the idea that language is a muffin tin; that we have meanings, a kind of batter we then pour into molds. What we need, instead, are ways of thinking of language as an instrument, a means of seeing and articulating relationships. (Berthoff 25)

(from the making of meaning, or "the book of many 'm's," subtitled metaphors, models, and maxims for writing teachers.)

i don't have a home for this gem as of yet, but i didn't want to lose it. perhaps it will be pivotal some time down the road; perhaps it's already been so pivotal, in the 25 (ouch) years since its 1980 penning, that it's a commonplace i'll never need to pin-point. in either case, i like it, for its no-nonsense presentation of what jen wingard and i affectionately call "the scholarship of 'duh,'" and because she uses the word "muffin." c'mon, how often in the serious scholarship you're assigned do you run across the word "muffin"?

the question, though, because once i catch a good c.s. lewis line (this isn't it, but a tangential spin-off i want to come back to later) it's in my skin with permenant marker that takes years to rub off, cell by cell, is "is this a pupil's metaphor, or a master's?"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2005

and

also janet emig's "the uses of the unconscious in composition" (also in twom) is very nice stuff, although it works, perhaps, a little too well. her point, to oversimplify, is that it (the unconscious) is there, is in use, and no amount of scientific language, artful arguing, or deliberate, cat-like ignoring is going to make it go away--by which she doesn't mean just "cease to exist" but "cease to be absolutely crucial to everything that happens on--and getting to--the page."

the result, however, is that now i'm much more strongly motivated to go drink some coffee, fondle soft parchment, grind my own black ink, and write poetry than i am to carry on summarizing and synthesizing academic articles!

Posted by ttobryan at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

the believing [thing]

janet emig, in the web of meaning, presents the summary of elbow's believing/doubting game i find the least insulting of all those i've read, maybe even moreso than elbow's itself—i can't honestly remember right now if i've been to the source or not, only that the idea usually bothers me. emig says:

Essentially, with the believing game, we begin by accepting the author's or initiator's premise or proposition as our own, and live inside her paradigm for the length of the argument. With the doubting game, we find ourselves a congenial vantage and peer critically into the paradigm. Elbow suggests that we can gain the most in any intellectual enterprise by playing both games, but that it is cognitively more profitable to play the believing game first. (155)

and that makes sense to me.  that's productive and good.  what isn't--and what almost all of my experience with this oft-referenced "game" system has seemed to advise--is using the term to talk only to/about teachers encountering student texts.  in that context--not as an "also," because i've never seen it as "intellectual endeavors including student texts," but in isolation--it's always struck me as incredibly insulting. mostly it's the term "game" i can't get over, & the insincerity it almost can't help but imply.   "i, the mighty teacher, am going to play a little game; i'm going to pretend to believe that you're not an idiot and know what you're talking about, for the 20 minutes it takes me to read & respond to this piece, & then, game over, i'm going to return to my normal mental state wherein i know i'm great & you're stupid."  is this how it looks when he does it?  or is this just the resonance of the horrible things that have been done with his idea, which in emig's summary seems highly useful & not insulting at all.  its ramifications are all about the context of its application, though; in emig's summary, this "game" is a reading-tool we should be using in our own scholarly work and teaching to our students, not a farce to enact almost as a weapon against them only when evaluating (and stigmatizing) "novice" work.

(x-posted to compositionism)

Posted by ttobryan at 03:58 PM | Comments (5)

January 28, 2005

blogging (with) students

lowe & williams have--and link to--a lot of really productive ideas for using blogs in, instead of, alongside, etc. classrooms--as teaching tools, as interactive media, as semi-public spaces, as hybrid forms of journaling & peer collaboration...

and i'm really enthusiastic about these ideas. or at least i'm enthusiastic about them as ideas, as terrific ways for other people to engage other students in other blog projects. i don't have any intellectual reservations about class-wide blogs or individual blogs on class-wide aggregators, on closed or open systems... it sounds like an awful lot of play room with huge potential for using new spaces to get new students to do more of the "old" thing--writing--which of course is never really old, because it evolves along with its users and media...

but i have emotional reservations that i don't entirely understand.

(x-posted to 711 & compositionism)

i've had a personal blog--one that's not really a diary because i'm too conscious of who's in my audience, but that serves as a space to keep in touch with my far-off friends and talk primarily about things that are not academic--since 2002 (my goodness, i'm almost old school!), and i don't think i had it running for 24 hours before i started thinking about its implications as a classroom tool. so it's not like i was slow to catch on to the idea.

but since 2002 i've held off on implementing any of those ideas, and not because of the technology involved. (like blogger accounts, livejournal accounts are free, incredibly easy to set up, and terrifically user-friendly. they make closed communities easily, or can be left open. they have an array of who-can-view-this posting functions... all push-button accessible.)

i've held off for reasons having more to do (as i think about it now) with those shifting definitions of personal and private space. blogging with my students, when i imagine doing it, feels like an invasion. in both directions, to some degree. my blogspace is my blogspace--sharing it with friends is one thing, sharing it with a faceless, infinte public is another, but sharing it with students... there's a line there, and things change with its crossing. (i could certainly create an alternate "identity" to work with students online in, and never tell them that the ones i've used so far exist. there are ways to both be "out there" and invisible. but it feels like a place to me--too many viewings of tron as a child, perhaps--and unlike the supermarket, it's a place where teachers--as they appear in my head, however against my inclinations to say i don't see them this way at all--and students--in those same constructions--don't mix.) there's also a line the other way--i know most of my students have some kind of online identity, whether it's in a blogging community, through friendster, or just on instant messenger, and although i've started using IM to conference with students in the past few years, i'm still very respectful of the distance i perceive as appropriate. i almost never "ping" them to initiate conversations--if i do, it's to respond to a question i said i'd gather more information before answering.

i want them to have their world without me in it. the fact that it's in many ways an almost entirely textual (with bright pictures) world makes that more important to me as a writing teacher rather than less--i want to interact with them in ways that encourage/foster writing, sure. but (and maybe this is because all of my teacher-training was focused on the teaching of adolescents) i can't help feel that one of the most encouraging things i can do with regards to their writing is to leave them a space where they're alone--or at least alone-with an audience of their choosing & defining--alone away from me--to do it in.

Posted by ttobryan at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2005

711: lexicon

today's new words:
transclusion. bloggers apparently know this word, and use it right and left with great furiousness. wikipedia's entry, like most of those i've come across, can't help but get into coding. apparently this isn't just a verb, it's a technical, medium-grounded verb, a verb that can't be metaphoricized or removed from its physical circumstance of existing only in the non-physical web-world.

and remediation (which is not like "remedial")--"new media present themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media" (cgb).

ex: "hypertext remediates books" (cgb)

and weblogs, as we learned firsthand this morning, don't easily, at least in their current-natural capacities, remediate classrooms.

Posted by ttobryan at 03:18 PM | Comments (3)

611: a starting point:

hayden white's "moves" (categorizations of discursive "tropes"):

(x-posted to 611)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2005

711: blogs and (+"rhetorical") genre

this particular slice of van dijck's article i selected as a direct result of derek's challenge to applying the term genre to blogs (madeline, i hadn't read yours yet when i started this):

i too have the same problem with calling all "blogs" members of "a genre" as does van dijck below:

Weblogs or ‘blogs’ is a rather general container for a variety of genres; the so-called lifelog seems to come closest to the traditional diary genre. But can lifelogs and blogging be considered the digital counterpart of what used to be a paper diary and diary writing? As the cartoon implies, the answer to this question is a paradoxical ‘yes and no.’ Cultural practices or forms never simply adapt to new technological conditions, but always inherently change along with the technologies and the potentialities of their use.

as van dijck points out, the problem with naming a genre "blog" is that there are many kinds of blogs--people blog in many different genres. (i'd never heard the specific term "lifelog" before--how 'bout the rest of you?) but people talk about them as if they are a genre, or a few genres ("lifelogs" vs. "academic blogs" vs. "poly" (multi-authored) blogs vs. ???)--a move that seems to make at least a little sense because they're clearly something other than the print-genres we're used to--so, the logic goes, they must therefore have a genre of their own.

i see the slippage there coming from two places:

1) new technology seems to easily lead to blurred distinctions between genre and medium--a blurring that would never occur in the standard print-genres of the technology we've gotten used to. one doesn't wonder whether a poem is still a poem or becomes prose if it's on parchment rather than notebook paper. it's possible to say that "blog" is the same thing--just a different kind of "page" on which any type of thing can be written.

in their 1997 "postings on a genre of e-mail," michael spooner and kathleen yancey* have the genre-vs.-medium debate about e-mail (the title is misleading; the designation begins and ends under debate, so they never agree that e-mail is a genre at all). the arguments they present will sound similar: e-mail is a way to convey information, but that information can appear in different forms--so it can be used for many different genres. BUT it also allows for, encourages, even demands textual practices that are different from what print media allow, so it creates (or allows the creation of?) (a) new genre(s). their point (that they can't answer the question?) is underscored by the format of the piece--appearing in a collection of scholarly essays, their contribution appears as an e-mail transcript, a print-out of a conversation going back and forth between correspondants, much like these postings turn into conversations in the comment sections. print genres don't do that. one person speaks. another person might speak later in a rebuttal, but both (many) voices don't appear to challenge and contradict each other. in e-mail, as in the blog (and here i'm getting to madeline's ideas), the audience speaks (strikes? i couldn't help it!) back.

2) genre means very different things in the literary tradition, where it's primarily spoken of as a form-based classifying appellation each particular work carries or a set a work belongs to, and in rhetoric & communication fields, where "genre theory" is theory about & the study of the purposes that drive, demand, and modify form. so while coming out of the literary tradition we might look at a blog to see what properties it has on its page, and compare those properties to the propertires of other pieces of writing on their pages, and from such observations decide what generic category to place it in (or that it needs a new one), a rhetorical genre scholar is more likely to look at what the blog does--what need it was created to fill, how it fills that need, what other ways of filling that need there might be--to answer questions about the uniqueness of that need. are blogs just another, comparable way of doing something old, or do they do something different and new?

*in bishop, wendy; hans ostrom, (eds.), genre and writing: issues, arguments, alternatives; portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook publishers. at comppile, search under "myka."

(x-posted to 711; see comments there)

Posted by ttobryan at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2005

611: method/methodology resource

this is the short (9 pages, & good luck w/the formatting, because playing with that was part of my point at the time) piece i wrote as a final synthesis/theoretical essay (yikes) in margaret himley's methodology course in fall of 2003. our esteemed professor has suggested i share it with anyone interested in taking up further examination of the conversation we started in class on thursday. it takes brief forays in several of the directions we thought about but resisted starting down in the interest of time; our conversation reminded me a lot of margaret's class and of writing this paper, so i'm using this medium as it's designed to be used, & linking: here's a downloadable copy of the document itself.

(x-posted to 611)

Posted by ttobryan at 07:56 AM | Comments (0)