May 22 Deliverator Video

“Watch the Bubble” screencast plays while narration is performed:

So this is my memoir. It's going to be pitched as a history of computers and writing. Just doodling here. Let me get started by grabbing some sound. Some music. Like any history, this will be partial. It covers certain times, places, perspectives, but it's good to lay these out. Let me adjust this a little bit. So I'll look backwards, but hope the focus doesn't get too pixelated, so I'll weave in some claims and questions as we go. I'm playing with this image right here just messing with what I want to say with these random flows of material. Shapes. Layers. Words that launch me into memory.

When I was about six I went to the Twelve Gates Free School and this was in 1968, 1969, hippie school, and the only rule was that the teachers couldn't tell you what to do. We wandered around downtown. Hiding by the hospital ramps. Asking the Coke truck driver for samples. Learning.  But I soon had to go to public school and this was in first grade, public school, and the first thing I did was say shit or some other word and had my mouth washed out with soap.

 My first question is personal. What one thing would you change about education?

My Computers and Writing memories start with 1993.  For that moment there are two dimensions. One can be captured in an acronym, DIWE (Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment), and really the focus there is teaching on the LAN. But more important, DIWE  was built by graduate students and faculty in a basement, driven by new faces, formed in the bubble of what is possible when technology and teaching converge.

So I'll toss out an observation: Computers and Writing is comfortable being led by new faces. And a question:  Who are the new faces and what can they tell us?

So, this is a piece from 1994, a time piece, if you will. It takes up the second dimension to my early Computers and Writing memories, hypertext. This is a HyperCard project. Kind of a baton passing as I write about it on the Web, which leads to an affirmation. Computers and Writing is comfortable with "tweak first, theorize later."

So, if we jump forward to 1998 we can see people talking about notions like the cognitive dimensions of non-linear texts.

Quick Monday morning quarterback question: What do we make of these claims now? And what new claims do we make about the human and the machine?

And we also see in this piece the strong urge to make the Web porous, to make it writable, which brings us to another key element of Computers and Writing, its DIY focus. Computers and Writing practitioners are interested in not only using but also building the writing tool.

So my introduction to formalized education was rough. But I also had some wonderful teachers. In second grade, on another first day in another class, Mrs. Buchannon told me "stick to your guns" when you think you're right. Looking past the ratty hair and backing the new kid, she showed me that learning is always about reinvention.

In Computers and Writing history this piece is 2003, and this is multimedia taking deep root. This piece, this moment might best be seen as a response to programs like iMovie and the lowering of technical hurdles. This is the prosumer push full throttle.

My best class ever was auto shop in high school. My teacher, Erwin Schlaack, taught me to recognize the poetry in mechanical things. Lots of hands on work. Lots of life lessons. Lots of fixing. So these educational episodes (from soapy mouths to mechanical mentoring) lead me to another question: What is the teaching philosophy of Computers and Writing?

Computers and writing has been a place of experimentation. A place where you can try something out. Who knows what will happen? I'm showing a portfolio of work from a recent class. Every project should be a revelation. It's okay not to know how to do something. It's okay to make mistakes.

When I first went to college I brought my Mexican mesh bag fully stocked for the beach. Frisbee. Sandals. Sundries. Played percussion in a band. When I took a second crack at university learning an English professor, Mike Fischer, taught me how to write about texts and ideas. I thought I'd take on deconstruction. Felt like literature didn't dissolve anything but generated being through insights and emotions. Thoughts too deep for tears. Sang in a band. Then I thought I'd found the transcendental in the sounds of Wallace Stevens.

Then I started teaching with computers and found transformation there in the bubble.

Here, my life memories merge with my recollections of the field. I think of John Slatin who taught me the joys of technical work and the poetry of people. We are the lab discipline of the core humanities. The place where art, music, film, and word can be freely toyed with, where found tools are poked and bent, reworked, refined, or tossed away. Where new tools are created in response to the material world. "The river is moving." OurField must be mixing.

We come to the connotational space still slick with linguistics. I'm talking about extending the beating in the veins and tracing it all the way through software and symbol and sound and soundboard and keyboard. I'm feeling still the need to push. We find in the connotational space glowing image edges amid desktop under glass. We cast texts and songs and lights and people. I'm rolling toward the final question of the technopoet: O' Do not ask . . . must we always manifesto? The question's rhetorical. This moment is now part of the memoir. Should we use this music? The question's rhetorical. How could we not? It's a part of me, now part of the memoir.

This is the twenty-third take of a live improvisation. Twenty-three takes among hundreds of unsaved instances coming and going like the folding edge of time. This is me typing into the take. This is you watching. This is me talking over the take. This is me listening. Me clicking. This is me moving sound. Beating. Playing with the band. Me imagining. Me reworking the twenty-third take of a ten-minute moment.

I used to think that the prosumer agenda was important for students, which it is, but what Computers and Writing means to me is that the prosumer is really all about teachers. I realize that. You don't create the prosumer, you prosume. You don't study computers and writing, you perform it. Must we always manifesto? Yes. The question is how now? Will we see the word as material, akin to image, sound, and movement? Will we see the faces, inventing anew the field? Will we build our own tools focused on the local and then zoom out to the global? Will we bring our hearts forward in philosophies that say don't watch your mouth? Watch the bubble. Watch the bubble.  And I'll type out loud.