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Articles Conference Reviews |
D.23 Digital Technologies and Classroom PracticeD.23 Digital Technologies and Classroom Practice “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties…” seemed to be a theme at CCCCs this year, at least in the sessions I observed, and this session was no exception. Trying to follow the presentation amid (albeit necessary) noise and distractions proved more difficult than I might have otherwise realized, and I apologize if I ultimately fail to do the first panelist, in particular, justice. Thankfully, by the second presentation, which relied heavily on the technology, the panel’s tech team had the necessary programs up and running. Kimberly Freeman from Northeastern University in Boston, presented first on “Green Machines? Eco-composition, E-portfolios, and Writing in the Disciplines.” Focusing on writing and sustainability theory, including the importance of context and local audiences, Freeman questioned the accuracy of our “chameleon vision,” i.e. seeing green, and whether online composition truly is green. Although we imagine online composition to be disembodied, it has a distinct materiality—it uses energy, for example, and we remain consumers of computers. Freeman’s conception of eco-composition also applied spatial and geographical metaphors to writing in the disciplines. Freeman asked us to consider textual production, particularly how the environments in which they write affect students. Action takes place in classroom spaces, but also online; cyberspace has physical manifestations and is not more virtual than imagination. The social reality is a hybrid of the human and the technological--metonymic extensions of self, according to Freeman. Students at Northeastern are required to write in the disciplines plus think critically about the writing throughout their composition coursework, metacognitively mapping the discourse of their discipline, (health writing, nursing, etc.). However, Freeman believes that both Blackboard and the e-portfolio classroom limit students’ self-presentation. Their self-description is interdisciplinary, and creating online identities, or achieving cohesion, poses challenges. Online composition is shaped by both communication and environmental co-ops, the genres students produce and consume in their disciplines. Therefore, Freeman’s consideration of student projects includes such components as the workplace and the context and material for production, and students’ e-portfolios remain open-ended, presenting the self and the discipline, as genres are blurred, similar to a post-structural breaking of boundaries. In this way, eco-composition is tethered to material world; although online and asynchronous, it still has material aspects and components. Mary Karcher from Wayne State University in Detroit presented next on “Participatory Culture, Fandom and Digital Writing: Identifying Criteria for Coherence in Digital and Multimodal Texts.” Karcher combines composition pedagogy and new media with alternate reality games, focusing on the participatory cultures of fan studies and cybermedia. Karcher contends that by creating new media, students are fostering a new set of literacies inherent to the new media consortium as visual-aural-digital combinations are juxtaposed against the loss of text. Referring to Henry Jenkins, Karcher argued that text is not so much lost as expanded; print literacy is an important component, but we need to expand both digital and traditional texts in addition to, not instead of, one another. A key component of new media is coherence, or the links between text and idea, and these links are seminal to making meaning, to developing the full capacity for thought and utterance, Karcher contends. New media flows smoothly and creates cohesion whereas print is static, linear, linguistic, visual. New media is aural, dynamic, non-linear, digital. Karcher expanded her talk by referring to Jenkins’ weave-order-threads complex; we can link the ways we read and evaluate new media--looking associatively for patterns/patterning, juxtapositions of text and visuals--with the way we assess e-portfolios and new media composition. Karcher also discussed the participatory culture of fandom: fans respond. She named various sites, such as Fandom!Secrets, Fringe Bloggers, You Tube, that, like Wikipedia, are examples of the participatory culture of new media. Drawing on work from Yancey and pragmatic linguistics, Karcher named skills or characteristics it takes to participate in online culture: appropriation, sampling and remixing, collective intelligence, transmedia navigation, association and coherence. Appropriation creates visual/aural cohesive ties; visual cues give connections. As an example, Karcher discussed Joss Whedon’s series Firefly and the movie Serenity that emerged from fans’ reactions to cancellation of Firefly. Karcher also provided numerous examples of multiple layers of intertextuality, referents that can only be understood visually and aurally. Karcher reminded attendees that new media combines elements of different media in new ways, just as tagging—effectively using keywords on YouTube, for example—greatly increases hits, building networks that are otherwise unimaginable. For reasons such as this, online networks build on, but do not replace, foundational print literacies. Karcher used her theoretical build up to call for students to develop their own criteria and standards for textual and contextual assessment, particularly those associated with insider versus outsider audience. Karcher believes corporate culture determines the rhetoric of the filter, essentially enabling and simultaneously limiting participatory rhetoric, yet fandom communities in turn both use and resist those filters. In a new era of folksonomies (Thomas Vander Wal), everyone can find information, tags help individuals remember personal vs. standard meanings, and folksonomies are driven by resistance to and rebellion against corporate and commercial forces. There is also dependency, and Karcher asked the audience to consider our relationship to people who own versus people who value. She recognized the dichotomy of ownership versus value, such as battles between fans and networks, and she believes we now have new possibilities for letting ourselves be known. |