Kairos Issue 7.3 Kairotic Technologization About the Structure of this Hypertext Works Cited Angelo Bonadonna Megan Hughes

Introduction to Kairotic Technologization Identity Narratives Professional Identity         Scholarly Identity         Learning/Teaching Identity         Personal Identity         Collaborative Reflections Collaborating with Megan Hughes         Megan Hughes's Reflections         Conclusion: Towards the New Coherence

Introduction

This article reflects on the causes and effects of the "technologization of the Teaching of Writing," an English education course that, like Kairos itself, centers its mission on the "intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy."

The article points to the somewhat ironic conclusion that the distractions, excesses, and general messiness of technologization present opportunities for a "new coherence" of roles and scholarship in academic life. The article builds this case by presenting a collection of memoirs grouped into two broad categories, "Identity Narratives" (written by Angelo) and "Collaborative Reflections" (one written by Angelo, one written by Megan). The Identity Narratives, listed below, trace my (i.e., Angelo's) development as a professional, scholar, learner/teacher, and person, as each of these identities was stimulated, enhanced, complicated, called into question, validated, and reformulated as a result of my tinkerings in academic technology:

• Professional Identity: The story of Randy Bass's 1999 AAHE Keynote Address and its effect on my professional agenda; reflections on the possibilities of a "scholarship of professionalism."
• Scholarly Identity: The story of my graduate student essay, "the greater part of any text is its context"; reflections on the heuristic possibilities of a deliberate advocacy of chaos in professional life.
• Learning/Teaching Identity: The story of the building of the English server; reflections on the efficacy of constructivism as experienced as a learner, rather than studied as a scholar.
• Psychological Identity: The story of the geek motive; reflections on the guilt of a Burkean technologist.

The Collaborative Reflections present a snapshot of what happened when the reformulated identities were let loose in the classroom. The reflections address how attitudes on learning, authority, and process implicit in academic technologization enable intense, productive, and friendly collaborations among faculty and students.

• Collaborating with Megan Hughes: The story of a three-year collaboration with Megan Hughes, a student whose interest in the Teaching of Writing class led to changes in the design of the course and in each of our professional/scholarly agendas; reflections on "finding our dialectic."
• Megan Hughes's Reflections: Comments on using the Teaching of Writing (TW) "system" to transcend the Teaching of Writing system; reflections on the role of professional agendas and agency in teacher education.

Finally, the article concludes with Towards the New Coherence, a section which celebrates the Web for the way it can provide access to the deep contexts of texts. The Web provides readers and writers a new mode enacting Kenneth Burke's critical ideal of "using all that is there to use"--and in a way to promote understanding of the hidden complexities often structuring apparently disorganized experience.

In all, the stories and reflections presented here will require a great deal of squinting on the part of readers, should they try to discern the clear outlines of the "new coherence." This difficulty is intentional, put there in the service of the article's ultimate agenda. For spread across these stories, which individually comprise but so many shards of the hoped-for integration, is an implicit, ardent plea for institutional stewardship in the form of wise recognition and encouraging support of the unlikely coherence, particularly in its inchoate forms. This plea is directed not to specific individuals or decision-makers, but much more broadly to something we might call the institutional unconscious. Conceived as a wry adaptation of Fredric Jamison's "political unconscious," the institutional unconscious would be the powerful, largely insidious Weltanschauung that constitutes and controls the substance of professional and academic motivation. The new coherence doesn't fit comfortably in the institutional unconscious, and thus technologizing academics often must struggle perilously to hold onto their sense of purpose, resolve, and value.

Stewardship is a large order (an outcome that probably will have to wait till the next full release of "Kairotic Technologization," Version 2.0), so as temporary fix, I would but settle for a recognition of the central irony tensioning professional matters in academic technology: the way that the new coherence has both been enabled and made necessary by the infusion of technology in education. On the one hand, academic technologization, with its needs for collaboration, new learning, interdisciplinarity, process-thinking, reflectiveness, and creative problem-solving, enables the composition scholar to see the makings of a new order of professional/scholarly identity, one that is rooted in the principles and theories of composition research in general and constructivism and chaos theory in particular. On the other hand, the obstacles to academic technologization, which range from poor resources and support, to daunting start-up requirements, to shifting technological systems, to the rigors of the promotion-tenure process, require the development of a new professional confidence ("coherence") to fend off collegial accusations of recklessness and to give order and sanction to what Steve Gilbert and the AAHE in happier moments call a "vision worth working toward" (128).  

Aside from the troubling issues of unconscious institutional culture and personal professional recklessness, there is an upbeat note to the texts linked here. In professional development literature (less so in a journal like Kairos), a common refrain is the "problems of technology"--the challenges, dangers, difficulties, injustices, inefficiencies, inadequacies, etc. of technological implementations in the current educational milieu. This article, however, comes close to celebrating the messy entanglements--the problems--of technology-influenced pedagogy--almost as ends in themselves. The optimism of this hypertext is wan, but real, and captured in the question that presides each of its stories and reflections: To what extent may the embarrassments of technology lead, if not to specific solutions, at least to better insights about learning, professional development, institutional roles, and academic missions?