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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008A16HochmanDisrupting the New Order: Resistance to Evolving Web Standards First, I’d like to offer a bit of personal disclosure. This session was made for me. When I scanned the program, I spotted this session, and it instantly felt like a custom made suit I’d been wearing most of my academic life. Unfortunately, it was not as customized as I imagined, and, as it wore on, I felt the fit in a more generic way. Daren Young: Towards a Rhetorical Theory of Hypertext Pastiche Young began by explaining that his paper is a “cut down” version, and he asked the audience to follow some leaps based on trying to write a presentation that would be more interesting to this audience. Young said he is exploring “new media texts,” and he sees a need to unify rhetorical principles that will improve the shift of students “from web consumers to web creators.” Young defined “new media texts” as texts intended for the internet and texts that use the multimodal possibilities for action online. Young claimed that “instead of a constellation of theory students need a conceptual handle.” In his paper, he said that he wants his definition of “new media texts” to go further than visual rhetoric; he wants it to include the many modes of expression available in hypertext, and he wants to find some more unifying understandings of the hypertext expressions of students. In his talk, he cited Kress, Bhaktin, Moulthrop, and Bolter to focus on new media design and to find a single, unifying theory. Young claimed that available modes act like a language, and that is why he proposed that the necessary theory spring from rhetoric. With changing technologies, Young said that he believes we need more flexible theory. Young went onto say that hyperlinks are an expression or utterance, and “hypertext pastiche” makes multimodal design key to any emerging theory of “new media.” Young professed that this theory would be useful in the composition class, and that rhetorical models for theory allow analysis of new media while recognizing that hypertexting pastiche is necessary for the field to assert key ideas. I couldn’t agree with him more, but I was left wondering about a synthesis of the four sources Young used. I’m not certain that I had gotten any closer to the theoretical insights Young pointed toward, but I am certain he’s right in pointing out a “thinking need” in our field. Patrick Corbett: If I Can’t Find It on Google, I Don’t Need It: A Usability Study of Digital Library Research Habits of First-Year Composition Students Corbett began with the idea that many FY composition teachers have mixed feelings about search tools. He values significant inquiry and deeper researching and tries to think about ways to improve digital researching acts of his students. He originally thought about offering better help tools to avoid the kinds of cursory online research that his students were doing. He hypothesized that different modes of help may improve the research qualities. Corbett brought them into his online classes by programming them into the University of Louisville system his students were using. Corbett and his techie collaborators embedded help sheets, videos and made sure that the help pages were functional in addition to being instructional. He found that students resisted this approach despite being required to use the new help tools he installed. The academic search paradigms conflicted with the way students already used and relied on Google because “the web was on Google, rather than the other way around.” Corbett wanted students to use his school library more, but because library sources don’t always have sources and Google almost always does, more student resistance was encountered. Corbett said that the issue is not teaching students to do online searching so much as analyzing the ways search engines work and teaching their limits. Corbett designs classroom activities to use and analyze search tools and their research challenges, but he didn’t have the presentation technology available in the session to show some of the activities to the audience. For Corbett and his students, Google and Wikipedia become “objects of class discussion” to understand how they work, how to recognize their limitations and how to explore obvious search resources more critically. In the Q&A, Corbett went on to explain that Google is based on profits. Corbett suggested some metatexts on Google and Wikipedia as a way to negotiate the dilemma of avoiding quick research but occasionally finding very good information. He wants to stimulate his students to analyze search tools like an expert. A librarian pointed out that information retrieval is not the problem so much as information use is the problem. Another librarian in the audience pointed out that we should go to library conferences and that many of the vendors of library search engines are trying to be more and more like Google. Jill Parrott: I’ll Google It!: How Collective Wisdom is Changing Search Ideology and the Rhetorical Canon Parrott began with handouts, and he wanted to follow up the pedagogical presentation by Corbett with some theoretical insights. Essentially, she argued that search engines are themselves, a “rhetorical document.” She discussed “Google bombing” as an illustration of how bloggers manipulate PageRank systems. For example, Parrott said that recently if you google “Miserable Failure,” you will be linked the White House, and she offered some analysis of search engines that ranges from seeing google bombing as graffiti to understanding searching as the rhetoric of collective intelligence. Knowledge is created by collaborative interaction, she claimed, and she discussed Wikipedia as a successful example of “the collective wisdom of its users.” Furthermore, she explained that Wikia Search “will play an even greater part in the arrangement and delivery of search results.” Finally, Parrott claimed that, as scholars of rhetoric, we have to pay greater attention to the success and problems of this changing research paradigm. I think it’s fair to say that the presenters are directing more attention and good scholarship on some of the most important techno-rhetorical problems teachers are now facing. |