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Articles Conference Reviews |
2009TH3ReedTown Hall III: @ Work, @ School, @ Play Participants: Jeff Grabill opened up the third of the Computers & Writing Town Hall session with a simple call for the community to focus on greater areas of “shared concern,” rather than following the tendency – all too common in the Humanities, I'd argue – toward ever-greater fragmentation of specialities and priorities. The community, Grabill argues, will be better off by diverting more conversations back to the truly fundamental questions of how technology impacts writing processes, of the value of technological investment in writing, of the nature of digital rhetoric, and of the importance of data structures. The second speaker, Virginia Kuhn, offered a kind of response to Grabill's call for fundamental concerns by positing a fundamental collapse of the “virtual” and the “real” as meaningful categories, arguing instead that the blurring distinctions between machine and person should instead direct our attention to matters of “intentionality.” Similarly, Charlie Lowe added that he was increasingly concerned over the fundamental question of rhetorical agency, referencing the Bill Cope keynote from earlier that day. Lowe proposed that we, as scholars, find ourselves now chasing down the concept of agency by looking at what others are working on. His notion that students are increasingly defining academic discourse for us was then echoed by Dan Melzer, who proposed an increased attention to self-sponsored digital writing through interfaces such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and iTunes. Steve Krause addressed that integration through the idea of “surrendering” (also a reference to Cope's keynote) ourselves to the shifts in technology around us. Cynthia Selfe then turned her attentions to the issue of long-term sustainability in our academic projects, placing attention on the dual importance of both compromise with and awareness of existing university structures. Similarly attentive to the role of the larger university ecology, Kathy Yancey moved to redefine the “university” as a place where work becomes play and, hopefully, vice-versa. Citing principles of knowledge transfer, she called on the community to “make explicit” the ways in which play contributes to the project of knowledge-building. During the Q&A portion of the town hall, the overall composition drifted strongly toward the broad issue of sustainabilty. Building off Grabill's observation that programming tools have proliferated widely on the web, making “procedural literacy” (to borrow a phrase from Annette Vee) more widely-available, Charlie Lowe pointed to the open and public locations where open-source project development occurs, and how those locations serve as archives that can teach students how to follow suit. Selfe continued to speak to the issue of sustainability for academic projects, particularly as part of the collaborative enterprise, which often times requires compromise between academics and the institutional structures in which they work. This observation prompted both Lowe and Yancey to reaffirm the important role of Creative Commons licensing in establishing long-term sustainability by virtue of avoiding entanglements with copyright law, entanglements that could be precipitated by compromise with university structures that tend to regulate academic work more tightly. The town hall wound down with a conversation about strategies for encouraging wider-scale “surrender” to the technologies and techno-rhetorics around us, a conversation that quickly identified the tension between institutionalizing writing technologies (with all the possibilities for passionate engagement entailed) on one hand and the imposition of values on the other. The latter perspective prompted Lowe to quip that technology, if imposed, becomes a “coup, not a revolution,” though Yancey took the opportunity to tie the proliferation of these technologies to a dissolution of the popular stereotype of the solitary, monk-like academic figure. Through more engagement, she argued, we may locate more possibilities for building sustained, innovative, and engaged scholarly communities. |