Friday, February 1, 2008
Kremers, "Sharing Authority on a Synchronous Network"
K remers, Marshall. "Sharing Authority on a Synchronous Network: The Case for Riding the Beast." Computers and Composition 7 (April 1990; Special issue): 33-44. <http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/archives/v7/7_spec_html/7_spec_2_Kremers.html>
Kremers examines different manners of teacher-presence in synchronous chats using ENFI (Electronic Networks For Interaction), an early multi-user LAN messaging client. How can the live chatroom interchanges bolstering student interest in the other writing they are asked to do in their writing courses? He is also interested in the risky, experimental side of the technology as it allows him to more radically vary assertions of teacherly authority: "The teaching model I am trying to develop is a networked writing class in which authority is shared, decentralized, distributed, even communal; a class in which teachers sometimes participate directly in the discussion and at other times stay out of things, letting their students take control of their own dialogues; a class in which students compete among themselves for influence in the group through the force of their language and the clarity of their arguments" (para. 2). He offers examples of the chat transcripts that best illustrate two primary approaches to pedagogy using the ENFI system: a teacher intervention model and a non-intervention model.
The teacher intervention model presumes a teacher-centered classroom or, at least, a scene in which the teacher's presence in the conversation actively moderates the dialogue. After framing his pedagogy as student-centered (following Knoblauch and Brannon's articulation of this model) Kremer explains that he prefers to use the chat room (during certain class sessions; not all of them) because he "want[s] to write with them rather than talk with them" (para. 9). What is gained by writing with? Positive aspects of this approach include a sense of ownership felt by students who, after they mature beyond a mutinous stage, stand to realize the advantages such interactions have for concept formation, inquiry, and invention. Even while using the intervention approach, Kremers says he does so to act as a guide (one who asks questions and collaborations) rather than as a dominating force of authority. He explains that the path of the conversation is unpredictable, that it is "more spontaneous, more organic" than in many of the more traditional activities they engage with in a writing class.
The non-intervention model, on the other hand, embraces precepts from Elbow's Writing Without Teachers: Kremers might leave the room or observe their interactions without getting directly involved. Later, he observed the chat transcripts to see what transpired. His example suggests a surprising turn, in which a role-playing activity around the issue of rain forest preservation resulted in the off-ing of one of the made-up participants (Pat Tree). Out of this, Kremers devised prompts for subsequent classes, and he found that the students grew still more enthusiastic about what they were being asked to do. The non-intervention transcript functioned as a catalyst for other writing.
Kremers mentions in his conclusion that "[f]or the most part...the students I have worked with so far have not taken up the offer of partnership as readily as I have wished" (para 22). The final section, "Authority Sharing in the Future," speculates that long-standing traditions of teacher-dominated classrooms affect the expectations of everyone, students and teachers alike, who gather in that scene. Kremers is optimistic about the promise of "networked co-authoring" for getting at some of the currents that run beneath the more decorously-ordered classroom.
There is an unmistakable parallel here between the creative and expressive dimensions of the LAN chat room and the more formal writing occasions served by these activities. The references to student-centeredness from Knoblauch and Brannon, the mention of Elbow, and Kremers' own appeals to the sparking of student interest in narrative ("So, by not intervening, I let the students set their own direction for their writing" (para. 19)), all seem to be lorded over by some under-represented force--the serious1 variety of academic writing. This is, then, an early example of "networked authoring," one that was promising because it is a relay in service of something more substantive.
Postied by at Thursday, August 23, 2007
Richards, "The Resourcefulness of Words"
R ichards, I.A. "The Resourcefulness of Words." Speculative Instruments. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1955. 72-78.
"Are we perhaps like mathematicians who had never thought of using the working of examples as a technique of instruction?" (77).
I.A. Richards ends "The Resourcefulness of Words" with this, posing a question of limitations, narrow perspectives, and a missed opportunity in thinking through the techniques of instruction appropriate to a course in dialectic (which, in this context, I take to refer to argumentation). This statement bears some resemblance to the David Foster quotation from JAC I have referred to again and again about the limits of what we will know.
Richards is responding to the suggestion from the President of Yale (Mr. Hutchins) that nothing coheres a course in argumentation, nothing "except talk of personality, 'character', and great teachers, the slogans of educational futilitarianism" (73). But what holds the course in argumentation together, answers Richards, is the resourcefulness of words--their versatility, their crucial part in structuring and connecting (ideas and things).
To a degree, Richards is concerned with stasis--with ways specific language in philosophy and metaphysics can lead to misunderstanding. His rhetoric is one that reconciles, patching up misunderstandings caused by words. He is not interested in "attempting to show our students (much less tell them) what Plato or Aristotle really meant" (76). Rather, students would study the ways shifting meanings in "central intellectual terms" (viz., being, have, cause, connection, same, etc.) has "give[n] rise to varied misunderstandings" (76).
The challenge I find in working with Richards is his proximity to New Criticism. Following through what Berthoff adds in "Abstraction as a Speculative Instrument," and what Haynes does, subsequently, to invoke Berthoff's notion of abstraction as a beginning point and an answer for pedagogies seeking to move beyond reason and argumentation, I would expect to find, in Richards, something that resonates with abstraction in this discussion of the resourcefulness of words. Maybe it will turn up in How To Read A Page, in chapters called "Random Scratching and Clawing" (the rustle of language?) or "To Unite, Abstract." Distant reading methods do not, per se, read a page, but a pile of pages.
The section on more expansive abstracting practices can get by without Richards. Yet his concluding thoughts in this brief essay relate to the semantic networks that are presented in, among other forms, tagclouds:
To develop a spatial metaphor here, which being all but unavoidable should be made as explicit as possible, all these words wander in many directions in this figurative space of meaning. But they wander systematically, as do those other wanderers, the Planets. By fixing a limited number of positions, meanings, for them, we may help ourselves to plot their courses. But we should not persuade ourselves that they must be at one or other of these marked points. The laws of their motions are what we need to know: their dependence upon the positions of other words that should be taken into account with them. (77)
In a fairly obvious sense, Richards is talking about context here. Words appear on a page, spatialized there--arranged in such a way that their sequentiality is implicated in their meanings. But I see no reason why this spatialization, this systematically observable wandering, and this hesitancy to fixate--why any of these should be incompatible with tagcloud as a visual model of a semantic network that drifts breezily along the same trajectories as the discipline of composition studies. Doesn't Keywords in Composition--"the first systematic inquiry into compositions' critical terms" (1)--advance this very idea? Yes. But Keywords in Composition Studies, like the class of texts dedicated to keyword extrapolation, including Williams' Keywords, is limited by its mode of presentation to a historical account of a term's wandering. [This is better elaborated in c. 3 than in c. 2]. The "systematic ambiguity" bears a past-ist orientation; its refresh rate is nullified by the limitations of its medium--print.
Note: Heilker and Vandenberg cite Richards' Speculative Instruments and How To Read A Page, but rather than going to the original publications, they draw on the excerpts reprinted in Enos and Brown's Professing the New Rhetorics: A Sourcebook.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Speculative Instruments
I 've taken lately to thinking about the thinspreaden feeling of dissertating like this: the writing moves in a forward direction, advancing ideas and discussions, attempting claims, suggesting reasons for limiting the discussion to these few pages. The reading, on the other hand, moves in a backward direction, filing through influences before influences before influences--something like tracking the (non-)origin of the Missouri River. Writing and reading in this way at once leads to the thinspreaden feeling--it is a stretch.
For example, I was, for a while (~15 pp.), writing about abstraction. The very concept of abstraction. From Cynthia Haynes to Berthoff. Berthoff's work with abstraction draws from I. A. Richards and Susanne Langer. I trailed off, reading some of Langer's work in Philosophy in a New Key and Philosophical Sketches. I also have a copy of Feeling and Form on my night stand. I've read zero pages of it. Every time I leaf it through, I feel this dreadful drain of energy until...lights out. I can see the tiny threads of influence running from Langer to Berthoff, but I still can't decide how much I need to write about them or how explicit those familiarities should be in the chapter itself. Langer and Berthoff have in common that they attempt to recover abstraction from the General Semantics movements and their strict verticalization of the Ladder of Abstraction. They tug abstraction over to the side of connotation, to the side of the "rustle" of language, away from scientistic referentiality. Were they successful? I don't know.
But what they were attempting accords with what I am trying to emphasize, following Moretti, in the discussion of visual models as abstract. Why call them abstract? The data they present are concrete enough (he calls the "consequences" concrete)? I mean that the data are replicable; any other researcher would come up with the same citation counts for articles published in CCC over the past 20 years, no? Berthoff reworked abstraction in her '86 essay "Abstraction as a Speculative Instrument." "Speculative Instruments" matches up with the title of I. A. Richards' book from 1955. It's a collection of "pieces [that] were composed at different times and for very different occasions and audiences" (ix). One six-page "piece" stands out: "The Resourcefulness of Words" which comes "[f]rom a Bergen Lecture given at Yale in 1940." It goes at matters of comprehension and interpretation: language is ambiguous, meanings are multiple. There is a certain "wandering" quality to the resourcefulness of words, Richards explains, trying to finesse systematic misunderstandings in language and this wandering quality. A few pages of this were reprinted in Enos and Brown's Professing the New Rhetorics. Richards also mentions that this short piece developed into his book, How To Read A Page. That stretch I mentioned earlier, it is sometimes a yawn (or a yowl of exasperation).
Another opportunity in this for digression (or call it redirection): Will I connect How To Read A Page with distant reading and the abstract visual models produced by these methods? Maybe. But not yet. I like the riff that goes for distant reading as How To Read An Epitome (of Composition)--something along the lines of layering metadata onto relatively stable forms (i.e., models), shoring up disciplinary data-sets, and so on.
What else can I say about Richards' Speculative Instruments? What a shame that the title--a title I like--was used up on this grab bag of "pieces." With this in mind, Berthoff's "Abstraction as a Speculative Instrument" comes back into the spotlight. For the chunk of this diss on the concept of abstraction, Berthoff's piece will have to do the leg work. But it shouldn't have to do all of the heavy lifting. Sure, there's Langer, but that's not the direction I want to go in. Berthoff's recuperation of abstraction--a recuperation Haynes says failed and must be broached once again--sticks with abstraction as forming. Berthoff entangles concept formation and writing as knowing: "[Abstraction] can show us how to think of forming concepts as a matter of composing" (236). Continuing, she goes at issues of writing across the curriculum (the relevance of language to all disciplines) and also to "abstraction as a speculative instrument [that] can help us re-think the nature of the relationship of 'the contingent and the particular' to 'the general orders" (237). I can't decide whether this last part has more to do with compositionists being "great minds" or whether it is an allusion to scalability constrained by the General Semanticist's Ladder analogy (referentiality, from particular to obtuse). Berthoff's is a discussion of abstraction I find to be slotted with a space for what, of late, is more commonly discussed in terms of networks, traces, and formative, inventive association--abstraction as forming (with or without reference to "speculative instruments" and the "wandering resourcefulness" of words) gives way not to a Ladder of Abstraction, which Berthoff firmly and persuasively argues against, but to networks, impermanent paths of activation, instigating clicks of fascination and intensity, and various other evocative, uncanny encounters. It's on this point that the pre-digital foundation of Berthoff's work on abstraction seems most conspicuous.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Rice, "Networks and New Media"
R ice, Jeff. "Networks and New Media." College English 69.2 (Nov. 2006): 127-133.
In his contribution to the College English symposium on "What Should College English Be?", Rice answers "new media" and, more precisely, the aspect of networks as connective, associative phenomenon proliferating throughout the digital, informational orders. "College English has not yet imagined or perceived itself as a network," (128), Rice writes, and while the ways "networks alter current understandings and rhetorical output still need unpacking and further study" (132), we might begin by with Hayles' suggestion of linking as an emerging form of expression or Burroughs' anticipation of "the rise of the network as rhetoric" (130), as we "reimagine English studies' efforts to generate a twenty-first century focus" (130). In the collection of essays titled Composition in the Twenty-first Century, David Bartholomae, suggests a focus involving composition's focus on "the space on the page and what it might mean to do work there and not somewhere else" (130). Rice emphasizes Bartholomae's differentiation between the page and the "not somewhere else," suggesting that, in fact, new media and networks compel us toward the somewhere else, the open space constructed out of connections where multiple writers engaging within multiple ideas in multiple media at multiple moments function" (130). In the "complicated act" that is "writing as network" (131), "'writing' feels too limited", its connotations of "fixity" burden the metaphor "in an age of total information and delivery" (129). Drawing on Hayles and Lyotard, Rice examines the paradox between "established knowledge" that is the prototypical concern of English Studies and the "momentary configurations" of networks and the texts that circulate across them.
Developing a strong case for new media and networks as a new focus for college English, Rice acknowledges precedents in "intertextuality, the avant-garde, or Bahktinian dialogue" (130), but these concepts have not theorized networks adequately, particularly in light of the Web. Rice's response to "What Should College English Be?" fans out, as well, through a succession of answers, one of which is that "College English should be the intersection of the various areas of discourse that shape thought and produce knowledge" (132).
"Or it may involve a complete reworking of how information is classified and stored, as the emerging practice of folksonomy, a system where anyone can attach any term to any piece of information, does in a direct challenge to referential organizational systems" (128).
"Whether for good or for bad, the network is reimagining social and informational relationships so profoundly that even if the discipline of English Studies remains wary of the network and suspicious of its place within the curriculum, the field can still benefit from learning how networks alter both understandings of writing and writing itself" (129).
"By social, I do not mean 'people,' 'friendliness,' or 'mingling.' Instead, I mean the ways bodies of information socialize, the ways they interact, or, as Burroughs wrote, the ways they associate" (131).
Terms: established knowledge (131), momentary configurations (131), emergence/growth (132), folksonomy (128), connectivity (128).
What is at the junction between Rice's call (new media/networks) and Bialostosky's (variegated reading and productive attentiveness)?