digital digs

transferring from teaching "academic" writing

In her recent CCC article, Elizabeth Wardle extends upon the argument she made with Doug Downs earlier in challenging the field to move away from conventional FYC pedagogies and curricula. As she notes, and I agree, the fundamental problem with how FYC is conceived is that it rests upon a faith in transference, that "writing skills" learned in FYC will transfer to other writing situations. This faith in turn rests upon a mythology of generalizable literacy.

The problem is that transference and general literacy do exist to some extent. All acts of reading and writing do share some common attributes, mostly the kinds of things that most kids learn in elementary school. And I think there is a limited property of transference. I am an expert writer in my specialty of digital rhetoric (if I may be so immodest). My writing practice transfers quite well to other areas of rhetoric and composition. It even would transfer fairly well to other areas of English Studies. I can write into interdisciplinary spaces. And while I wouldn't consider myself an expert writer in other humanistic fields, I think I could be more successful writing there than the average scientist. Certainly I would perform better than the typical undergrad. Also, my writing transfers fairly well from scholarship to this blog, to pedagogical texts I create, and to various institutional discourses.

Fundamentally we realize that investing time in writing will lead to better writing.

But that doesn't mean I could write a legal brief or stock market analysis or documentation for a weapons system or any other number of things.... Obviously.

When FYC began 100+ years ago, the range of undergraduate discursive practices was smaller. We didn't have as many highly specialized discourses. So maybe the idea of transference might have made a little more sense. But really transference isn't the problem. In order for a student to have a writing practice that might transfer from one discourse to another, that student has to have a writing practice in the first place!

So that's a problem and, no, FYC is not the solution. 

In addition, writing well in a particular discourse requires knowledge of the field it supports. I always use the iceberg metaphor with my students. Of course one of the perception issues for FYC on campuses is the belief that one can just replicate the part of the iceberg above the water without the rest of it. Writing well takes time, knowledge, and dedication. Students might acquire these in four years, but FYC certainly cannot assure that they do.

I would think that all of that should be painfully obvious to anyone. And the basis of Wardle's argument is that we need to begin rethinking FYC by rejecting the premise that it can achieve the goal of preparing students to be successful composers of the multi-genre constellation known as "academic writing." She also suggests that FYC might be seen like BIO 101 or PHIL 101 as an introduction to a discipline. That works OK for me, though I'm not sure that from there you can make the argument for the small, writing intensive courses that we have. That is, if FYC is to be like other Gen Ed courses and other Gen Ed courses are taught in large lecture sections, then, well...

And here we get an interesting departure based on institutional context. If you're a small, liberal arts college where most of the courses are small then there's no problem. If you are a state comprehensive school where most of the FYC courses are taught be contingent faculty, then maybe moving to bigger sections means people lose their jobs (albeit exploitative jobs). If you're a research university then those small sections fund your graduate students and you don't want to lose them.

In any case, "we" are in the business of believing that students benefit from sitting in small introductory courses where they write a lot. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. I don't think those courses can do the magical things that have been expected of them, but I believe that an intensive writing course where students study, practice, and reflect upon writing practices is at least as valuable a part of general education as any. I do agree with Wardle that such a course can serve as an introduction to the field of rhetoric, where I think the fundamental argument is that rhetorical-compositional practices are an intellectual advantage for students in the same way that thinking historically or reasoning scientifically or contemplating philosophically (i.e. things one might acquire elsewhere in Gen Ed) is an advantage. That is, they are an advantage in a general way that is only indirectly transferable to other contexts.

What genre should FYC students write if the fictitious "academic writing" is finally ripped away? That's obvious. They write in the only genre available to them: the genre of the FYC classroom. Genres are not plug 'n play. Genres emerge from a set of relatively stable contexts: writers, audiences, and exigencies. Not the other way around. FYC does provide this. Every semester, you have first-year students writing to one another and their instructors for the purpose of understanding how rhetorical methods and knowledges help us understand writing. Maybe students aren't all fired up about the subject. But then they aren't interested in biology when they take BIO 101 or history when they take HIS 101 and so on and so forth. That's the nature of general education. Students often aren't interested in taking it. That's part of the challenge.

In any case, if you think of the purpose of FYC in this way it can actually open the course up to a wider degree of variety than one finds in other disciplinary intro courses or even in current FYC curricula which remain tied to lock-step. oversimplified textbook versions of process, tired mode-driven pseudo-genres, and fantasies of academic writing that make virtually every FYC class seem like a failure.

The expectations of such a course should be simple. We cannot measure the success of FYC by how well a student does in some discipline-specific writing course two years later when they are next asked to write a research paper. The expectations should be analogous to those in any gen ed course. Students should demonstrate that they have learned certain introductory concepts and demonstrate some facility with particular disciplinary practices.

I find myself writing about FYC quite a bit. And in a year, I will find myself directing a composition program at Buffalo. So such conversations are interesting and relevant to me. At the same time, as a discipline I think we need to start turning more of our energies away from such matters and toward other rhetorical concerns that might speak to broader humanistic and cultural concerns.

In the end, FYC is just a couple introductory courses.

digital ethics and scholarship: more on Technological Ecologies and Sustainability

As mentioned in the previous post, some further thoughts on the recently released Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (free download). Admittedly, I am skipping around somewhat in the collection and writing today about two of the pieces in the final section on "Sustaining Scholarship and the Environment:" "Sustainable Digital Ecologies and Considered Limits" by Lisa Lebduska and "Sustaining Scholarly Efforts: The Challenge of Digital Media" by Cynthia Selfe, Gail Hawisher, and Patrick Berry. Clearly the notion of sustainability is at stake here. It's not only a question of can we build a lab, create a new course, start a new journal, or begin a new scholarly practice: it's a question of what does it take to keep such things alive. And I know from my own experience that bringing things like these to life in the first place can be such a difficult task that it is tempting to put off the question of long-term sustainability.

You might think that such a statement is a preamble to a warning about the danger of such an approach, and I suppose you can take it that way. However, anything short of legally-binding contractual commitments to sustainability (which you are not likely to get) are probably not worth much anyway. What I mean is that the bottom line to sustainability is access to material resources (money). There is really only one strategy for sustainability, as cynical as this may be: being successful in a way that can be communicated to, and valued by, the people who decide to give you money. In short, it is exactly the same strategy any professor employs in pursuit of access to that most important mechanism of sustainability: tenure.

Beyond that, I have never particularly felt the need to be an apologist or evangelist for digital media. Lebduska focuses part of her essay on the reasons why some faculty are skeptical or resistant toward new technology. In my view, some of these arguments are important and reasonable, some are poorly conceived, and others are just self-interested turf protection.

To put succinctly my own thoughts on this matter... if you have concerns about emerging technologies, that's fine, but for your concerns to have any merit in academic terms, they have to be based upon a disciplinary study of those technologies. In short, to have a legitimate academic concern regarding technology is probably as strong a reason for calling for studying these technologies as I can imagine. I mean, does it make any academic intellectual sense to say, "I think x is a matter of great concern for the future of our society, so it's my position that we should not study it."

In any case, in the big picture, 20 years down the line, one of three things will happen: most of the humanistic disciplines around today will be gone; most of the current humanities will have morphed into digital versions of themselves; or we will have reverted to print technologies and the humanities will remain largely unchanged. I wouldn't bet on the last one. What we do in the next decade might have an impact on which of the first two possibilities comes about. I suppose that is where this collection lies.

But I digress from my discussion of these essays!

In trying to move us forward, Selfe, Hawisher, and Berry identify three principles of feminist scholarship and sustainability:

Principle #1: The profession of English can retain its traditional value on scholarship that is original, innovative, intellectual and sustained, peer reviewed, and published, while acknowledging that scholarly fields, forms, and values change.

Principle #2: Scholarly models of production are not fixed. Rather, they are fluid, and socially and technologically shaped and contingent. Scholarship, increasingly, is created, maintained, and circulated in a range of electronic environments that can be used to extend the intellectual reach of ideas and the development of academic fields and subfields.

Principle #3: Social networks and collaborative scholarship—especially when informed by feminist values on sharing and connection—can multiply and leverage the innovation and contributions of new scholarly projects. They can also help increase the sustainability of such projects and the community at large.

This is certainly sound advice and, as the essay exemplifies, Selfe and Hawisher's careers as leaders in the field of computers and writing serve as evidence. I would expand upon this to note the importance of extending these networks beyond English, as organizations like HASTAC demonstrate. As reasonable as these principles sound, we know that strong objections remain to digital scholarship.

Lebduska invokes Lawrence Lessig's concept of rivalrous, non-rivalrous, and innovation commons in seeking to understand these objections. Though we can think of aspects of digital scholarship as falling into the non-rivalrous and innovations commons, along with other aspects of digital culture, inasmuch as digital scholarship draws on limited university resources, it is undoubtedly in competition with traditional practices, ranging from library budgets to hiring practices. It is perhaps not so easy to acknowledge that "scholarly fields, forms, and values change," even though change must be an integral part of any living, intellectual practice.

Setting aside the intellectual arguments, for those committed to traditional scholarly practices, for whatever reason, the primary advantages lie in inertia, bureaucracy, and the general conservatism of academic life (even if one doesn't otherwise share those values). For those interested in digital scholarship, the advantages lie in access to the nonrivalrous and innovation commons of digital culture, as well as all the external cultural forces that seek change in higher education (even if one doesn't otherwise agree with them). It does create strange bedfellows, where scholars who fought to open the literary canon now align themselves with the cultural conversative values that built that canon and scholars who critique corporate values find themselves in agreement on the importance of teaching "digital literacy" (or whatever you want to call it).

Taking the long view, the digitizing of the humanities seems inevitable, but it ain't going to be pretty. The only real, ethical question lies in what role one sees for oneself in the eventual shape those humanities take. The guidelines in these essays are not a bad place to start thinking about such things.

preliminary thoughts on Technological Ecologies and Sustainability

I've started read Technological Ecologies and Sustainability eds. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi A. McKee, and Dickie Selfe: the first book out of the Computers and Composition Digital Press (available here). This new press is an exciting proposition and it's great to see it come to life. Though I'm just getting into the text,  Technological Ecologies and Sustainability raises important new questions for us to consider. As the editors write in their introduction,

Why shouldn’t scholars and teachers of English studies once again envision a new institutional space for prioritizing propositions of compelling sustainable technological ecologies and establishing a temporary state of affairs? Why can we not imagine an institutional process that will eventually call that state of affairs into question, so that the process can begin again? We and our colleagues have brought to life unique and innovative institutional spaces before as we created (and continue to recreate) writing and learning centers or technology-rich labs and classrooms, as we create new techno-pedagogies out of each online space that leaps into existence (blogs, wikis, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.), and as we create new digital spaces for publishing online scholarly work. We are perfectly capable of creating institutional space for establishing temporary states of affairs on which we can base decisions in the service of sustainable technological ecologies. We are flexible and nimble enough to imagine policies and procedures that will, then, call a temporary state of affairs into question and begin Latour’s process all over again (collective gathering civil discussion  ranking of propositions  establishing yet another temporary state of affairs).

There's no doubt that we are in a challenging moment. It is nearly as difficult to figure out the questions that we need to ask as it is to seek answers to those questions. That process is not made any easier by the larger contexts of the economy and the changing nature of higher education (of which technological concerns are only one part). How should rhetoric and composition, or more broadly, English Studies, or even broader, the humanities, respond to the emerging practices of networked digital media? How should we approach the subject as researchers? How should we incorporate it into our curriculum? Into first-year writing? Into writing across the curriculum? Into undergrad and graduate degree programs?

Ideally the bottom line answer to these questions would begin with your degree of certainty in your understanding of where we will be in 2020. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone can have much certainty. As such it is imperative to move forward with a highly fluid and responsive set of tactics, which is something I see echoed in this collection.  The couple chapters I've already read all suggest that these tactics are heavily shaped by local, institutional forces. This is something I've suggested myself (so naturally I think it is a very astute observation ;-) ). That said, at some point, our disciplinary identity might shift so that the integration of new media would seem as normal as the integration of print texts, and then differences between local contexts will likely diminish as they have in terms of the expectations for English faculty in terms of books have. But that is quite a ways off, if it ever arrives.

In the first essay in the collection, Rylish Moeller, Cheryl Ball, and Kellie Cargile Cook, take up the question of tactics from the perspective of new faculty entering an institution. Specifically, the article recounts Rylish and Cheryl's experiences joining the Utah State faculty. As they argue,

One solution to this issue is to look at new English faculty as agents who manipulate certain pressure points at various times within a complex, political economic ecology—a social system demonstrated through material, measurable effects and affectations. These pressure points become more visible with the introduction of new agents and new technologies, both of which push the boundaries of a department’s constraints. 

This is an interesting perspective for me as I move to join the Buffalo faculty next semester. I think this is a useful essay for anyone in computers and writing entering a new position, or indeed any department hiring such faculty. Looking at the particular experiences of these faculty will likely give many readers new insight into what happens when digital media faculty are brought into a department. My own experiences at Cortland were not much different. At first I was given an office computer that was of little use to me. And it took a couple years to build a computer lab where I could teach my courses. The successes I did enjoy at Cortland came from building relationships with faculty and staff across the campus. This also seems to have been the experience at Utah State. It's really not surprising. And in the end, we might take comfort in recognizing the importance of good old-fashioned rhetoric and communication to these efforts.

In the end, it's not really anything new to reshape a department through new hires, but the move toward digital media takes this in a new direction. That is, making a move toward hiring faculty in a new literary specialization will make a difference internally to a department, but hiring digital media faculty changes the department's relationship to the material operation of a campus. Digital media faculty will establish connections and draw on resources that traditional literary faculty might never consider. For good or for bad, we shake things up.

So that's certainly one way to call the current state of affairs into question.

I'm looking forward to reading further into this collection.

Chronicle Article on the Internet and Student Writing

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh Keller reports on the research and debate over the impact of the Internet on student writing. Not surprisingly, there are differences of opinion to be found. While there is a general sense that more time spent writing is a good thing, the article also reports on concerns that the informal writing of social media leads to poor academic writing and sloppy thinking. Really, the more I think about it, the more this seems a "dog bites man" kind of story. The report focuses on several longitudinal studies undertaken at Stanford, Michigan State, and elsewhere with the idea that such studies might resolve these debates.

Yeah, right.

Why ask whether writing on the Internet makes you a better academic writer? Why not ask whether academic writing makes you a better user of social media? I suppose it is understandable that academics might want to value a particular kind of academic writing, but in the end that valuation is a demonstration of thinking that is no less sloppy than the poor thinking habits of which they accuse students.

I wonder where one might find the longitudinal studies and extensive research that demonstrates that academic writing (if such a thing actually exists and can be quantitatively defined) is the best possible genre for developing "critical thinking" or producing and disseminating disciplinary knowledge. Of course such studies and research do no exist. The value of academic writing is purely tautological. Academic writing is the best academic writing because academic writing is what academic writing is. 

If we give even a few minutes thought to the issue, we can recognize that academic writing practices emerge from historical-cultural-material-technological-ideological conditions. Whatever skepticism one wishes to turn toward social media discourses should be turned doubly so upon academic discourses.

When we talk about academic discourse we are really talking about two unrelated things.

1. The constellation of largely unrelated discourses employed in faculty research. These discourses are mostly untranslatable from one discipline to the next and often from one sub-specialty to the next. Generally, only a few thousand people worldwide could read any one of these given discourses. And whatever value these discourses may have in these small communities, they have no direct relation to the writing practices of undergraduates, who do not write in these discourses and rarely read them.
2. Another constellation of largely unrelated discourse practices undertaken by undergraduates in their coursework, which include everything from literary interpretation to lab reports to pseudo-professional genres preparing students for workplace writing in any one of hundreds of careers and majors.

The real problem with this whole debate is the continuing mythology that there exists some generalizable academic discourse. In the Chronicle article, Keller notes that skeptics believe social media genres "have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands." Really? and what "kind" would that be? Can you describe the "kind of sustained, focused argument" that is displayed in literary criticism and a lab report and a poli-sci analysis of public policy and a review of a marketing campaign and an environmental impact report and so on?

The truth is there is no "kind of sustained, focused argument." Now, if the purpose of college writing instruction is to prepare students to write 5-10 page, research, literary interpretation essays, then clearly that would be what you would assign students in a first-year writing course. But I imagine that even for undergraduate English majors, the goal is to prepare students to write in a broader range of genres than this. The goal, as I think most of us envision it, at least in liberal arts majors, is to prepare students to write in a general and flexible way for a range of civic and professional discursive contexts. And if one takes a look at what those contexts currently are and where they might be headed... well, an examination of social media discursive practices would seem a reasonable part of such a curriculum.

So, no, I don't think tweeting or keeping a blog diary will provide much help to a student writing a literary critical paper. And I've seen little evidence that writing a literary critical paper will help a student write a job letter or a marketing brochure or a grant for a non-profit agency. And just as the habits of tweeting may even be detrimental to composing academic prose, academic writing habits can be detrimental to composing successful business prose.

The best I think we can say is what should be fairly obvious. The more we write and the greater variety of genres in which we write, the better prepared we will be to write in a variety of genres in the future.

In short, this article indicates that we continue to ask the wrong question. And maybe I should have just written that, but I'm an academic writer by trade and my habit is to elaborate (typically beyond almost an audience's level of interest). Hmm... maybe I should be relying more on my habits of tweeting discourse.

taking speed seriously in English

James Brown offers some interesting observations on the response of our discipline to speed, in terms of Virilio's dromology. As is certainly a truism, the world keeps getting faster. We thought it was fast in the 80s or 90s but we had no idea what we were talking about. Scholasticism, critical thinking, serves as a counter-balance to speed. Maybe it always has, even as professors proclaim their own versions of liberal, progressive thinking. Mostly "we" (especially "we" in the humanities) are about slowing down, about conserving culture, about skepticism for whatever excites anyone (or especially everyone) else.

That's fine. And maybe good. I'm not so interested in judgments (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding).

However there is another way of thinking here. James notes: "Virilo’s description of the dromologist is telling: 'the analyst of the phenomena of acceleration.' Could we not rethink the dromologist as a practitioner rather than an analyst? ... what would such a dromological approach offer English studies?"

Part of this question lies in how we view speed. You'll have to excuse if my take on speed is as much about Deleuze as it is about Virilio. (That's just the price of admission at this blog.) Speed is intensity. Speed alters affective relations. That is, it alters the kinds of effects we have in relation to others. We can think of this in many ways in our discipline, from "covering" large amounts of material in a survey course to "keeping up" with technology or new research. The goal of traditional research might be to have some permanence, particularly in the humanities. But given the proliferation of scholarship in our field, to say nothing of data in general, permanence is likely a pipe dream, which is affectively quite different from taking speed.

That said, the weight and ponder-ance of scholarly critique were likely never a better bet for long-term relevance than the lightness and intensity of speed-induced thought. Ginsberg's Howl being the archetypal example. Now I am not saying that's the path to take, but the point is that just because our rhetorical, discursive expectations call for certain behaviors, that doesn't mean that other compositional practices might not yield worthwhile thinking.

I can say in my own thinking it works this way. And perhaps you'll take issue with it. But in research, reading, and writing, I know in an instant, intuitively I suppose, when I am on to something. Then it might be hours or weeks or months of work to be able to really understand that moment, at least within the terms of discourse in which I work.

Could I get you there faster by other means? That's the question I see being asked here.

on blogging and becoming a better writer

Part of a series of blog posts that will become an essay I am writing for the forthcoming Writing Spaces textbook.

Over the last 15 years or so, I've taught first-year writing courses at five different colleges (including my time in grad school). In my experience, one always sees a range of academic writing performance. More selective institutions might have generally better-performing student writers, but as far as I can tell there is rarely more than a handful of students in any class who have a real desire to become better writers that goes beyond the pragmatic goal of getting better grades on essay assignments.

Does that sound like a condemnation of some kind? It shouldn't. I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting to become a writer, anymore than there's anything wrong with not wanting to be a surgeon or a carpenter. As Malcolm Gladwell and others have observed, it takes some 10,000 hours of dedication to a craft or profession to become an "expert." Obviously this is a generalization that provokes as many questions as it answers, but the fairly self-evident bottom-line point here is that becoming good at anything worth becoming good at takes a lot of time.

Think about it this way. I've been blogging for a little over six years and have some 650 posts and quite likely 500,000+ words. Often when I discuss this with others, especially non-bloggers, they respond by wondering where I find the time to do so much writing. But the truth is that this represents less than 1000 hours of work over six years, less than 150 hours a year. If I am on my way toward becoming an expert writer in my field, which I ought to be as a tenured professor of rhetoric and composition, then I should be spending quite a bit more time than that writing. If I spent 10 hours a week writing, about 500 hours a year, it would take me 20 years to reach that magic 10,000 hour mark. At that rate, my apparrently prolific blogging would realistically be around 20% of my time.

So here are two analogies. I go to the gym and do my regular 40-50 minute workout. I spend 8-10 minutes on stretching. Stretching is to exercise like blogging is to my other writing. When I was an undergrad, I was in a band. We would get together and practice for a couple hours. We'd always spend 15-20 minutes just jamming and trying out new things... for fun. That's like blogging too.

Now that might sound like a criticism or belittling of blogging, but in my view stretching or jamming are integral elements of exercise and music. Blogging is a place where I can stretch myself, try out new ideas, keep my writing chops up while I'm in-between longer writing projects, and so on. And, of course, blogging can be more than that, and for other bloggers, this medium is where they do their most important work, but speaking strictly for myself, the blog is more of a place for working out ideas than it is the place where I envision I will do my most important work.

But what does all this mean for the student in the first-year writing course? For one thing, it should be an indication of the level of work involved in becoming a good writer. A hard-working student in a first-year writing course might put in 100 hours. A student in a writing intensive major might spend 1000 hours writing to get her degree. At that rate, one would reach expertise just in time to retire. Of course one doesn't need to reach "expert" level in order to get better. Very few people are expert writers, and being a little better might make all the difference in terms of a student's educational and professional goals. While becoming a better writer is certainly about more than simply putting in the hours, putting in the time is a necessary part. Unless one plans on being a professional blogger, blogging is essentially a place where one can hone one's skill as a writer that can be put into practice in other places that really count for you. Blogging can be more than that, but at minimum it can be this.

The average college senior writes around 150 pages according to the National Survey of Student Engagement. I'm going to say that's around 200 hours of work. What would it mean to spend another hour a week during the school year (30 hours total), blogging about the academic subjects on which those students are already writing? What it would it mean to publish these low-stakes musings on course materials and share them with classmates both on campus and taking similar classes around the nation? No one really knows the answer to that question. I suppose it might be of interest to our profession or to higher education institutions to pursue some kind of broad study of such practices, but I don't think that such research would be of particular use to individual students.  No, the truth is that taking up a blogging practice like this could be worthless or invaluable to the individual. The fact that most people might find blogging a waste of time does not make it any less valuable to me. It is valuable to me because I make it valuable.

As a student in a first-year writing course, you may not envision yourself as a writer. It is understandable that you may not want to dedicate yourself to the 10,000-hour journey toward expertise. However, you might want to dedicate yourself to a more modest goal. You might want to be among the best writers in your major or among the applicants for the graduate school or job that you'll be pursuing when you graduate. Part of reaching that goal will be putting in time as a writer, and a blog can be an invaluable part of the time you spend.

Digital video and scholarship

I put together this short video on digital video and scholarship mostly as an opportunity to mess around with my new flip video camera but also as a reminder to myself of the work that goes into even the most modest of video productions. Once we get past the questions of the genre that might/will develop for video humanities scholarship, including the questions of scholarly validity, we need to address the material constraints such work imposes. Even for someone with real professional expertise (i.e. not me), producing quality video is expensive and time consuming. Generally it takes a group of professionals. Of course, if you're going to shoot home video style that's easier but is that level of quality going to fly for scholarly work?

Certainly there is something in-between professional, academic video of the type we see on the History channel for example and home movies. With a couple assistants, modestly better equipment, and a little practice and training, I'm sure I could put together something that would be of acceptable quality. But even that means an investment in time and money that goes substantively beyond what goes into humanities scholarship now.

Where is that investment going to come from? And what type of return will we expect from it?

Creativity and Writing Pedagogy

Followed a link to an excerpt from Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Psychology Today. I think the creativity is a kind of sore spot in rhet/comp, maybe in part because of the longstanding tension between rhetoricians and "creative writing" in English, but also because of the strong social-cultural turn in our field. Csikszentmihalyi's work describes the "creative personality." The democratic impulse in our discipline would rail at the idea that creativity isn't equally available to all our students, and the critical-theoretical impulse would look skeptically at how such personalities are characterized.

That said, creativity is inextricably tied to writing. You can't have invention without creativity. There's a reason why writing assignments do not provide students with a thesis statement and a list of facts and then ask students to arrange them. And even then, the better results would reflect creativity in arrangement and style. But creativity is strangely an ugly word in education (as Sir Ken Robinson points out so well in his well known TED talk) and even within rhet/comp. Ask a classroom of students if they think of themselves as creative.

So Robinson argues that we all have creative potential but that it's beat out of us by formal schooling. Perhaps it is not just schooling alone though, eh? Perhaps it is the whole popcycle, as Ulmer puts it, the ideological processes of subjectification. I don't think it is necessary to get into the whole nature/nurture debate as to whether creative people are born or made. But I do think it is interesting to consider the whole challenge of teaching writing (and hence creativity) from the perspective of subjectivity (or psychology if you prefer).

Csikszentmihalyi writes "If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a 'multitude.'" Of course this immediately resonates with Deleuze and Guattari for me. The article then lists ten of these contradictory traits. Most of these are familiar and yet important to recall. Creativity demands an openness to play combined with a strong sense of discipline. Creativity requires passion for one's work but also an ability to detach oneself, to be objective and open to criticism.

I would tend to argue that pedagogy is always already about the production/management of subjectivity. After all, isn't the purpose of becoming educated to be transformed as a person? So perhaps writing pedagogy ought to be about recognizing or proliferating the multitude within.

I guess this would raise several questions.

• Is this possible? Can people be taught to be creative?
• Is this desirable? Creativity is not necessarily the best thing in life, is it? There seems to be a fair degree of unhappiness associated with creativity.

I would say that people can be taught to be more creative and that I've had my best success in doing that by putting students in unfamiliar genres (like digital composition). I can't say if it is desirable or not. However I must say that I found this short article interesting. I think it does reflect the creative people I have known. I'm not sure what it means but it makes sense that creative people feel comfortable doing things that other people do not do so well, that they have access to subjective states that are unfamiliar to others.

Why blog? on the rhetoric of social media

I am contributing an essay on blogging for the Writing Spaces collections being put together by Charlie Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. As part of my proposal I suggested the following

My intention is to present the essay as a series of blog posts. Since the collection will be available through a Creative Commons license, if it is acceptable to you, I thought I would post parts of the essay, in draft form, on my blog and elicit comments. This format will also allow me to demonstrate one of the key rhetorical differences between the blog and the essay: where the essay typically flows tightly from one part to another and is read as an organic whole, the blog takes a serial approach to subject matter where the relations between posts are iterative.

As blog readers and perhaps bloggers yourselves, you already know this, but I bring this up as I plan to be carrying out this blog-essay composition here over the summer. I'd appreciate any feedback you might hae along the way with the understanding that some of your comments might end up in the essay itself. (If you mention that you don't want your comments included then I won't include them.)

Writing an essay for a first-year writing course on blogging isn't as easy as it might appear. Obviously blogging represents a broad range of discursive practices so I intend to focus on the uses of blogging for novice writers and the advantages of maintaining a blog about one’s area of professional or academic interest.

For the novice writer, perhaps the most important quality of the blog is its invitation to a regular writing practice. Nothing is more important to the development of a writer than a daily writing practice. A close second though is the opportunity a blog provides to build an audience and purpose for one’s writing. In choosing to write about one’s area of professional or academic interest and connecting with an audience, one has the ability to engage current and important issues in one’s field. This provides an opportunity for students to articulate the relevance of their studies for themselves.

In my view, the fundamental challenges of blogging are not very different from those of any kind of writing. One requires sufficient exigency to write. Where does this come from?

• An urgency to the subject matter (e.g. a current event)
• An important and reasonable purpose (e.g. writing a job letter to get a job)
• A sense of authority, feeling qualified to write about a subject
• A strong personal interest (e.g. creative writing, political writing)
• An audience that will give you positive feedback

One doesn't need all of these. Over time, it is likely that different exigencies will emerge. More importantly, as one develops a writing habit, one begins to think less about needing a reason to write. Hopefully there is always some reason of course, but I think that as one becomes a writer that the act of responding to one's experiences with writing becomes more natural or expected. It simply becomes what one does. As a regular writer or blogger one begins to trust that exigency or purpose will become clear through the act of writing.

The best analogy I can come up with is being vegetarian. Most anyone could decide to not eat meat for a day or two. In fact, you might happen to not eat meat one day without even thinking about it. If you chose today to be a vegetarian, the first week would seem strange. The first month might seem very odd. You might think "so this is what it is like to be a vegetarian." But it isn't. At least not for me. I've been a vegetarian for several years and I give no more thought to eating a hamburger or a chicken leg than most people (in the US anyway) would give to eating a dog. In other words, it doesn't seem strange to me to be a vegetarian, like I'm not eating something I want to eat or should be eating.

As a novice writer, starting to write seems as odd as becoming vegetarian. We know there are writers and vegetarians out there, but we aren't those things. We may write sometimes, just as we eat vegetables, but that's not our identity. What would it mean to make writing a part of our identity? For it to be as much a part of our daily habits as the other things by which we identify ourselves? Blogging is a way to seek an answer to those questions.

Digital Scholarship and Tenure

This subject has come up again on Inside Higher Ed with some good comments from rhet/comp digital media scholars--Cheryl Ball, Will Hochman, and Heidi McKee. I think there are several ways to look at this issue.

If you are a graduate student or assistant professor specializing in digital rhetoric, you clearly have a great deal at stake personally in arguing for the validity of the work you are doing. Actually this is a challenge every grad student or asst. prof faces, regardless of specialization, but with digital media the rhetorical situation is notably different because one is doing work that is substantively different, in both form and content, from the work of the faculty hiring, tenuring, and/or promoting you. The IHE article reports on efforts by MLA and HASTAC to educate such faculty so that they are better able to make these evaluations.

This is how I look at digital scholarship. In the short term and for individuals, the arguments that we make today about the validity of digital scholarship are important. And for those reasons, they are worth making. But in the broader view, the success, failure, and general form digital humanities scholarship will take will have little to do with these arguments.

Digital scholarship will succeed for the same reason that we no longer share our research by writing letters to other members of our disciplinary societies (as would have been common in the 17th century). We will teach digital literacy (or electracy or whatever you want to call it) because it will be culturally necessary, and the shape of that digital literacy will no more be determined by academics than print literacy was. Certainly there will be specific disciplinary discursive practices within digital media, just as there are such practices within print literacy. But the book, the page, the paragraph, the linear argument--the fundamental features of print literacy--emerge from broader material, technological conditions. And while I think there's great digital scholarship out there and I admire the work done by my digital rhetoric colleagues, I believe we are still very much in the horseless carriage era.

What do I mean by this? Right now I think we are in a kind of make-work situation in English Studies scholarship and perhaps beyond that as well (though I am less familiar beyond our discipline). I write a 6000 word article. A relatively small number of editors and reviewers read it. Eventually it gets published somewhere, where it probably gets read by a few people, probably has little impact on them (since there are dozens of other articles out there to read), and probably doesn't get cited. It's not that much different from digging a hole, having someone certify I dug it to approved specifications, and the filling it in.

Now that article represents more thorough scholarly work than what appears on this blog, and it has been vetted by experts, but what difference does that make if few people read it? We don't write things to be read; we tend to write them to be published. Publishing is the end result, which if you think about it makes almost no sense. On the flip side, publishing here is worthless in itself. If no one reads this, then I'm largely wasting my time. Many blog detractors would say that's exactly what I'm doing.

But I say we have to answer this question:

Is the point of humanities scholarship to participate in the production and communication of humanistic knowledge, or is it to demonstrate a certain level of mastery or academic reputation?

Certainly one could say the answer is "both," and to an extent the two goals could be complementary, but I think our current situation demonstrates the limits of their complementarity. Digital scholarship doesn't solve this problem. Technology isn't a solution here. In fact, the spread of digital journals might even exacerbate the condition of make-work scholarship. As such, I believe we will find the answer to how digital scholarship ought to work in our discipline when we can re-balance this equation.

There is no going backward. Print publication makes less sense everyday. Online PDF or web journals with articles that look like print essays are, at best, short term solutions, and at worst, failures of intellect, imagination, and guts. We will move forward when we can recapture the lost exigency of humanities research through digital media by using networks to increase access, encourage collaboration, and foster conversations. When we discover the genre of digital humanistic scholarship it will likely no longer be necessary to have these conversations with tenure committees.