Tag: conversation

Tough Room

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

Last week’s This American Life on Tough Rooms has been lingering in the back of my mind since I heard it—again, as a podcast to make time pass on the elliptical. The first segment on headline-invention meetings at The Onion struck me at the time as a fantastic clip for orienting the ENGL121 students I will have in the spring to the idea of entering the conversation. As usual, I’m mildly conflicted (and I have the luxury of time before this conflict must be resolved): it’s a bit more agonistic than irenic, but I am still thinking about its possibilities for framing how some of our in-class discussions could go. The idea of tough rooms could also be a useful counterpart to echo chambers. Could the two be joined to suggest a spectrum that has different consequences on either extreme—too much believing or too much doubting?

I’ve also been thinking about a sequence in ENGL121 that would adopt in turn composing logics associated with Grammar A (conventions; writing mythos; “Inventing the University”), Grammar B (Winston Weathers; crots), and Grammar <a> (Rice; networks; hypertext). I don’t know yet how I would position the three in relation, but I can faintly imagine a promising sequence that would help us gain traction on their differences, their respective strengths and limitations, etc.

Consulting by Discontinous Email

/ dmueller

In preparation for a Writing Center mini-seminar this Friday, I just finished reading the Yergeau et al. article, “Expanding the Space of f2f,” from the latest Kairos (13.1). In this nodal hypertext, Yergeau, Wozniak, and Vandenberg suggest a few of the ways AVT (audio-visual-textual) platforms productively complicate face-to-face or “discontinuous email”: two default modes of interaction in writing centers. They include several video clips from consulting sessions using Sight Speed, a cross-platform (and bandwidth heavy?) AVT application.

This is a pro-AVT account, with lots of examples to illustrate some of the
challenges students and consultants faced. The authors offset the positive
tenor of the article with grounding and caveats, noting, for example, that while
"[they] revel in the recomposition of f2f via AVT, [they] want to avoid an
attitude of naive nostalgia." Most accept that face-to-face consulting
allows for communicative dimensions not neatly duplicated via distances,
interfaces, and so on. But AVT consulting refreshes the debates between
synchronous and asynchronous, conversation and response, f2f and online.
The piece goes on to deal with the haunting of f2f genealogies of interaction,
Bolter and Grusin’s remediation (i.e., matters of transparency and opacity), the
(unavoidable?) regulatory role writing centers play, the degree to which
discontinuous email consulting undercuts much of what has motivated the growth
of writing centers over the past 25 years, and the bricoleur spirit of
online consulting initiatives. (I would link to the specific locations in the
piece where this stuff comes up, but the nodes-as-frames presentation
unfortunately does not provide identifiable URLs for any of the sub-content).

Computer technology’s rapid half-life aside, we also realize that
individual writing centers have their own specific needs, and any discussion
concerning potential AVT technologies must consider that center’s available
resources, as well as its student requests.

This point about reckoning AVT possibilities with local considerations is,
among other things, the purpose of Friday’s meeting. We have been piloting
online consulting sessions this summer, both by IM and by discontinuous email. I
tend to cautiously embrace consulting by IM because I experience the
conversational quality that makes writing center work worth doing. I have
many concerns about the way our email model is set up right now, and I suppose I
shouldn’t air those out here.

Along with Yergeau et al., we’re reading Ted Remington’s
"Reading,
Writing, and the Role of the Online Tutor," (PDF) which argues that email
consulting is potentially promising because it makes for a more
text-focused experience. Interpersonal dynamics and conversation don’t
detract from the text-as-written in quite the same way as in f2f sessions.
Also, he emphasizes that consultants, by writing, respond in kind, modeling the
textual qualities they value by virtue of the response itself. I’m not
convinced, at least not from this summer’s pilot, that students regard the
comments I make on their emailed drafts as any sort of model. But perhaps
this is because our current set-up doesn’t give us any way of knowing whether
students ever even read the comments at all, much less whether they regard the
writing the consultant does as exemplary. The time constraints (i.e.,
consultants are still paid hourly when responding via discontinuous email) also
throw a wrench in the works: there is only so much fine-tuning the
writer-consultant can do when dedicating one hour to a five-page draft.

Yergeau, Melanie, Kathryn Wozniak, and Peter Vandenberg. “Expanding the Space of f2f: Writing Centers and Audio-Visual-Textual Conferencing.” Kairos 13.1 (Fall 2008). 17 Aug. 2008. <http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.1/topoi/ yergeau-et-al/index.html>.

Feed Reader Live

/ dmueller / 3 Comments

Back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back consulting appointments in the Writing Center today. Nine of them; every time slot filled between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., although my third appointment (slotted for a half hour) was a no-show. Just now I had to check my “tutor utilization” report in Tutortrac to make sure I had the count right. By about 3 p.m., I was beginning to feel a little over-utilized. Simple fatigue more than disappointment or dissatisfaction. I singed up for this, and longish Fridays keep a couple of other days of the week free (free-ish) for pure, uninterrupted work on the blissertation.

The conversations went as follows:

  1. WRT205 inquiry essay on the constraints on graffiti as it is co-opted by corporations trying to appeal to a market niche while it also faces scorn as a vulgar form relative to more traditional and legitimized art forms.
  2. WRT205 cultural memory essay on the iconic force of MLK Jr.’s photograph in front of Lincoln Memorial. The claims and propositions have been a struggle in the essays about popular photos and American cultural memory; they risk tumbling into the abyss of grand sweeping declarations about what most Americans think.
  3. No show.
  4. First regular meeting with a student enrolled in WRT220: Writing Enrichment. This one-credit course pairs a student (who opts in) for weekly meetings with a consultant throughout the term. It is taken for pass-fail credit, and in the meetings we are concerned with writing across the student’s full set of courses (the focus is not exclusive to WRT courses, in other words).
  5. Break. But for the first half hour of it, I joined a conversation with an SU alum (recently finished undergrad) who set an appointment in the WC to talk with her former WRT instructor about how best to approach admissions to an MA in a comp-rhet program that would allow her to explore interests in creative nonfiction, TESOL, and professional/technical communication. I don’t know whether I helped matters any by carrying on about stuff to consider. Any thoughts?
  6. A SOC101 paper on the “sociological imagination.” Lots of references to “society”, which is, I take it, a major issue in today’s introductory sociology curriculum.
  7. A GEO paper on push-pull theories of migration.
  8. A follow-up (returner from last Friday) with an essay for WRT205 on food politics: the burst in organic goods.
  9. The rough half-draft of a 1000-word personal statement for a McNair Scholarship application.
  10. Another WRT205 inquiry essay: explain how specific examples of humor deepen and complicate a pressing social issue. Here the focus was on Moore’s Sicko and private health care.

I was warned that Fridays might be light and breezy, with few students checking in because it’s the spring semester and, well, it’s Friday. Need more reason than that to steer clear of the Writing Center? The packed Friday doesn’t leave any room at the end of my week for double-dipping (working while at work), but it definitely has its advantages. The conversations are focused and time-bound. Today someone suggested that my Friday hours were freakishly demanding, but I tend to think of it more along the lines of seven hours with an RSS reader, only the feeds are embodied differently; the writers of the works are sitting down with me and having a conversation: Writing Center work as a nine-scene Google Reader Live skit with a clearly defined “Mark all as read” at the end of the day.

Hyperthreaded

/ dmueller / 3 Comments

I’m reading Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined for 711, and
hyperthreadedness lingers among a few of the sticky ideas I’ve run across. 
Describing the multithreadedness of ordinary conversation, Weinberger
tells us that "threading is practically a law when it comes to conversations: if
you’re talking about the ending of the movie Deliverance, you can’t
suddenly say, ‘How about those Red Sox?’ (67).  Of course, much of this
presupposes coherence–the turn-taking assembling of packets (textual
units) into more or less intelligible arrangement (focal, listening, attentive). 
I suppose I’m leaving something off of this.  I’ve thought about threading
or "threads" in some of the online teaching I’ve done, and I always thought it
was odd that the simplest notion of threading suggests that conversational
interchanges are best represented by local (spatial, therefore temporal, gathering together) in the
interface.  Sure, it’s easier that way.  What happens when you
mention Red Sox after Deliverance in that sudden conversational switch?

Web conversations are also like this, but they aren’t just multithreaded;
they’re hyperthreaded.  Although they usually start with a topic that’s
more formally defined than real-world conversations, because Web discussion
may spread out across weeks or months the threads can become entangled. 
And because Web time is so fragmented, we can pose new topics that are only
tenuously related to the declared theme. (67)

The entangled quality of webbed discourse seems to me to be a more robust
(confused) variety of the intertextuality commonly mentioned when we talk
about referential, allusive language/text matrices.  But just when I think
I have a handle on the subtle distinctions, Weinberger introduces another
factor: "Web conversations can be hyperthreaded because the Web, free of the
drag of space and free of a permission-based social structure, unsticks our
interests.  The threads of our attention come unglued and are rejoined with
a much thinner paste" (68).  As much as I think I understand Weinberger’s
effort to distinguish web conversations from "real world" lunchtime
conversations, I wonder if this is more a matter of communication models than it
is about substantial differences in the threadedness of internet conversation
versus other kinds of conversation.  The notion of "unstick[ing] our
interests" seems especially useful; for me, it partially accounts for what
accompanies the habitude of reading and writing the web. Stick, unstick. 
But I’ve still got more work to do in this fast-passing weekend, so this’ll have
to do for now.