Con Text(s): Perhaps Our Students ARE Conspiring Against Us 

In part what I am arguing here is that different physical contexts are in themselves crucial elements to rhetorical situations. Rhetorical situations are not "merely" textual. They are physical and they are spatial. Anyone who has worked with a MOO in the classroom knows that putting students in that spatiality/faciality creates different types of discourse/texts. We think less about this when we are in a regular classroom. The fact that it is ordered in a certain way that corresponds to the ordered texts we EXPECT them to write slips our minds. But what happens? They don't write orderly texts and we can't understand why. The problem is that their texts ARE ordered, but not ordered-based on our presumptions of order. Perhaps the order of the context isn't ordered the way we think it is. So we label their texts chaotic. It's only when we put students in a space like the MOO that the relationship slaps us in the face. I'm asking that we now turn this way of seeing back onto the "regular" classroom and question the relationship between these rhetorical qua physical situations.