Friday, March 25, 2005

CCCC

Score me tardy, but I'm just now getting around to posting shreds of notes on a few of the sessions I attended at the conference last week.  Been called worse than a slacker.  Much worse.

A.15 Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging Practices
Lanette Cadle talked on her research involving four-month studies on the Livejournal weblogs kept by a group of young women.  She referred to at least two phenomena that made it into my sketchy notes: 1.) aggregated multiblog clusters determined by group friendship designations and 2.) friend cuts--the subtractive role call enlisting a note of "here!" to validate presence.  Cadle also mentioned the fluidity of identity construction; she seemed to be interested in exploring the ways communal practices and trends in linking impact, even accelerate, identity construction. But I might have this wrong.  Daisy Pignetti abstracted comparisons between the political weblogs used by Howard Dean and George W. Bush's campaign teams leading up to the 2004 Primaries.  She worked on questions about why the Dean campaign failed despite its robust start in the blogosphere; she also suggested the expanded role of weblogs as a campaign technology in 2008.  Clancy Ratliff led with reasons to complicate questions of "Where are all the women bloggers?"  I noted more questions and connections than tidy summary statements, so I can only say that the talk got me wondering about the relationship between audience and opportunities for dissonance, locationality-positionality, and the degree to which patterns of practice and stylistics in blogging might be understood as gendered.  Clancy also mentioned subaltern counterpublics--a nice conceptual hook due for more consideration in the often overgeneralized totality of the blogosphere.

B.26 Evaluating Academic Weblogs: Using Empirical Data to Assess Pedagogy and Student Achievement
I was on this panel, and honestly I didn't take any notes.  As well, in light of channeling all my attention and energy toward my own talk, I had a hard time focusing on the particulars of my co-presenters, so it's far and away more worthwhile to consider the generous summary-overviews here and here and here.

C.Featured_Session Writing Modalities within Literacy and "Electracy": A Conversation with Gregory Ulmer
Let me see.  Quite a lot going on here.  If only I could read my notes.  The talk was in a curtained space, so it was like a two-for-one, a polyvocal mingling.  Basically, Ulmer talked back to a series of questioners--Haynes, Coleman, Davis and Jarrett.  Ulmer initiated the talk by referring to the lack of felt he felt when he first read McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy.  He spoke of the developing apparatus--a social machine plotted in three dimensions: technology, institutionality and identity formation.  I appreciated Ulmer's re-articulation of heuretics (eureka!, heuristics) next to hermeunetics; he spoke of electrate people and non-electrate people, of moving into electrate possibility.  My notes tell me Cynthia Haynes declared herself a mystorian; she said Ulmer would have us consider a created mood.  What do we do with error?  Glitch heuretics--bug, blunder, fluke.  Graphic disobedience and propaganda remix.  State of attunement: how do we teach students to be receptive to their change? Punctum as a sting!, getting students to read.  Any technological apparatus is in service to memory.  Lisa Coleman talked about the felt, connecting it with bodily/affective and personal is political.  And then I wrote a whole bunch of unrelated stuff on my scrap of paper.  Weird.  I guess I'll stop here (even though I know Davis' and Jarrett's bits were sharp, interesting).  I'm not really doing justice to the complexity of these ideas; these ideas deserve better.  My notes: not so thorough.

D.24 The Aftermath of Access: From Critical to Creative Computer Literacies
This session was subdivided into four chunks, with Jenny Bay and Collin Brooke each working through two units. Jenny led the session off with some defining terms--intelligent agents and expert systems.  She spoke on interactivity, folksonomies and communal ethos.  Collin's talk started out with a recognition of the centripetality/centrifugality(!) of deictic gestures; he also talked through linking practices and power laws in terms of economies of abundance and scarcity.  Missed it?  Then you should go listen to these important, insightful talks on blogging now. (Yeah, how many pod-casted CCCC papers have you checked out before?). Ah, and better notes than mine over here.

G.23 Rapping Down the Gate: Black Women and Hip-Hop
A versusing of hypocracy and hip-hopcracy.  Elisa Norris?  Mm-hmm.  Makes my hands shake trying to recapture this one.  Good stuff on teaching within hip-hop framework, on the implications of partial invocations of African-American rhetorical traditions.  CGB's got notes here, too.

When I have more uninterrupted time (apart from writing a short essay on emergence and Vygotsky, chapters from de Certau, Porter and Sullivan, _Situated Learning_ and _Situated Cognition_, and prepping for a conference talk in Albany in mid-April), I aim to post more notes on the other sessions I attended:
H.30 Owning Knowledge: New Intersections of Intellectual Property, Technology, and Academia
I.26 Accessing Identities: Women's Life-writings in the Progressive Period
L.20 Exploring Online Communities
M20 Indigenous Rhetoric: Speaking to Power without Saying a Word

Posted by Derek Mueller at March 25, 2005 3:27 PM to Reading Notes