Hyperglyphics

Last weekend I attended the Computers and Writing 2009 conference which was held at the University of California-Davis. This conference is always extremely thought-provoking and inspirational to me, so I think I’ll kick off my new blog with a discussion of what I heard, saw, and learned from June 18-21, 2009.

let me emphasize again how much I love this conference. It is always nice to be with a group of people who shares your interests, and the folks that attend C&W are definitely my peeps! Sometimes it’s nice to preach to the choir rather than be on the defensive about the role of technology in teaching, scholarship, and society in general. These are people who know and understand how important technology is to our lives and there is none of the Luddite-ism that too often runs rampant through humanities disciplines like mine. That is not to say that C&Wers are uncritical cheerleaders for tech - far from it. What I like is that this group brings a critical eye to technology while recognizing that it’s not necessary to draw battle lines between the human and the machine. Human/machine is a false dichotomy anyway, one that I plan to write more about in another post (actually, many of my posts on this will likely touch on that theme in one way or another). So, rather than spending time trying to justify and defend the place of technology in writing and rhetoric, at C&W we can concentrate on evaluating the way that technology and new media facilitate, complicate, assist, and even impede our goals as instructors of rhetoric and writing.

This year’s conference theme was “@School @Work @Play: Ubiquitous and Sustainable Computing,” so it should be no surprise that one of the major themes was the fact that computers have, for better or worse, infiltrated our writing practices (and lives). The ubiquity issue is one of the reasons I have so little patience for the anti-tech crowd in the first place, and why I consider the human/machine binary so problematic. One of my favorite quotes from the conference came from Angela M. Haas’s (Illinois State University) presentation. She noted that “all writing is digital,” reminding us that the term digital derives from the Latin, digitalis, meaning of or relating to the fingers and/or toes. I like that literalization of the connection between the human body and the tools we construct to carry out such tasks as communication (tools as an extension of the body). Her talk was on Native American bloggers and the [mis]perception that American Indians are not technologically savvy or literate (driven by and driving that notion of a “digital divide” in which the world of technology is also the world of white privilege). However, her argument that things like wampum belts are a technology and a form of writing suggests that our notions of both are far too narrow. A wampum belt is a “book” in a sense. It is a communication practice enabled by and embodied in a particular technology - in this case, beadwork - just as the book is enabled by the printing press and embodied in the technologies of printing and binding.

This theme came up again in a striking comment made by Virgina Kuhn (University of Southern California) during the Town Hall session on Saturday evening. She noted that the “virtual is the real” and mentioned the scientific work being done on mirror neurons in mammals and how those mediate the perception of reality. She suggested that it might be that our world is always mediated by the physiological processes of our own brains. While this may be a biological (as opposed to technological, if you insist on going binary - though I’d propose that the workings of the neurochemical processor we call the brain actually is a technology of sorts) process, it suggests that we don’t experience some unmediated “reality.” While the notion of mirror neurons in humans is currently disputed, I think Kuhn’s comment that we live in a “mediated world that impacts us in ways we might not be able to control” is provocative and worthy of further consideration.

At that same Town Hall, Kathleen Blake Yancey (Florida State University) noted that school, work, and play are all connected and ubiquitous. We live in work, we learn in play, we turn play into work via schooling. She asked whether it is possible for “school to become a place where workplay happens.” I like the term workplay because to merge the two words softens the negative connotations they carry individually: Work is hard. It is boring. It is what we do because we have to in order to live. Play is frivolous. It is for children. It is something we have to give up when we go to work (except when we go on vacation). And, of course, while work and play have positive connotations as well, school is probably the least likely of those three to be thought of as valuable or fun (except in that it makes it possible to work, which makes it possible to play). And that was Yancey’s point with regard to technology and writing: our students “play” with technology outside of the classroom and, in that play - all that texting, Twittering, Facebooking, and IM-ing - there are literacies and rhetorical practices happening organically. Our challenge is to bring those practices into the classroom in order to evaluate, interrogate, and build competence in them without making them into just another assignment, reified, divorced from the real-life ways people use those technologies/media in actual work and play. My own presentation addressed this problem and I welcome further discussion on that text, so please have a look and leave me a question or comment.

I want to try to wrap things up a bit here, as this post is getting lengthy, but I have to bring up one more issue that was critical to my experience of this year’s C&W and that issue is Twitter. Yes, Twitter. I know, I know. We’re all suffering from media overload on the Twitter phenomenon. But, in fact, I think we’re still pretty early in Twitter’s 15 minutes (if you, like many, think Twitter is an interesting, but ultimately unsustainable, fad). C&W 09 brought Twitter fully into the consciousness of a group of people who are generally already at the forefront of the latest developments in technology because this year’s Computers and Writing had its own Twitter stream which created a real-time subtext/metacommentary of the conference. I’ll point you to this post from Steven D. Krause (Eastern Michigan University) on the subject because I think he sums some of the issues this raised quite nicely (and he also links to other posts by Patrick Berry, Amber from UIWP, and Dennis Jerz that discuss the Tweeting of the conference).

But let me just say that I was inspired by all the tweeting to start Twittering myself (I even downloaded Tweetdeck and am hearing a little notification trill as I type this). I was fascinated by the stream of comments and I think Twitter has enormous potential in the classroom. Yes, I said I think we need to bring Twitter into our classrooms. Of course, as my presentation on blogging points out, this will have to be done in a very careful, considered manner informed by the best and latest research on rhetorical theory, writing practices, new media, and student-centered learning. And we can’t forget workplay. But I think if we - if I - do this “right” (by right I mean in that careful, considered, informed, organic manner), there’s the possibility that a moment of true learning might take place. Yancey, in the Town Hall, stressed that these moments when we recognize the meaningfulness of what we’ve done are crucial to the project of teaching and scholarship. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it yet, but I can imagine using Twitter in the classroom in a similar way as C&W conference attendees did so organically: give students a space to comment in real time on what is happening in the classroom, whether that be a F2F discussion, a peer review session, a lecture or presentation, and see what happens. The real learning might be in the subtext. In fact, I think real learning usually is.

If you’re interested in hearing/seeing more about this year’s Computers and Writing conference, go to iTunes U and search for UC Davis. You’ll find podcasts and videos of a multitude of conference sessions and presentations.