I teach in a Freshman Studies program here at St. Ed’s. My particular section is Science & Theology – a 120 student lecture looking at how the two fields operate and how they can exist in harmony. I don’t teach the lecture itself; rather, I teach a Basic Writing course tied to it (otherwise known as remedial English). This semester, due to a tragic loss of one of our lecturers, I’ve been grading some of the essays written by all 120 students. And grading those essays has led me to see Basic Writing students score systematically higher than those in Rhetoric & Composition II (2n semester FYC).

The essays that I’ve been grading have been theological essays (yeah, way out of my comfort zone) that define and apply some basic methodologies. The prompts don’t ask the students to make any profound claims about the nature of the Ultimate Mystery. Rather, they’re simply looking for proof that the students know what the methodologies are and how they can be applied to a straightforward Biblical story.

Quality of the essays

The Basic Writing pieces that I saw were by no means stellar. There were the standard issues with spelling, grammar, and simple organization. But the content was on the whole very solid. While the students didn’t write in any particularly eloquent fashion, I could easily judge the level of competency that they had. And they obviously referred to their notes and class material as they crafted their essays. If the reader has a modicum of patience to get over the linguistic difficulties, she would find a coherent and largely accurate message.

The Rhet Comp II students, though, had no consistent approach of clarity or accuracy. A handful of students wrote absolutely stellar and highly articulate pieces explaining the issues in the prompt. The majority wrote 2-3 pages of fluff and bluster that would talk around the issue without ever addressing the core debates. Routinely, it would be obvious that they were writing based on just what they could recall without any reference at all to the literature or notes. A handful tried to create clever twists on the prompt that would answer the question in round-about or subtle manners (though none with any real success). In short, their demonstration of any knowledge or mastery of the material was weak or nonexistent.

Why?

I’m still trying to figure out why this happened. I understand the Basic Writers’ approach well. They can’t yet produce quality college-level prose. But they put forth a tremendous amount of effort to make sure that the content was accurate. I can personally attest to the days they spent writing their responses and the multitude of outside support services they sought to improve their work.

The RC II pieces are more of a mystery. These students were outdone by the Basic Writers and the Rhet Comp I students both. My best explanation is that they had an undue level of arrogance in their skills. This was in a fall semester, so these students had all “clepped” out of RCI. They were the best writers in their high schools. Most likely, they had been told for years that they were superb writers and had learned that they could produce (comparatively) top notch papers with little effort.

But my assumption is that they were taught to master the 5 paragraph essay as a way to really nail the SAT and other standardized tests. Why then, would they do so horribly in creating coherent arguments. I would expect them to produce articulate and structured pieces, even if they were lacking in the “fine polishing” that comes with time and revisions. Instead, they produced vague and often disorganized pieces.

Have they really figured out in high school that bluff and word inflation are ways to score high points? That seems unlikely. Even SAT exam graders will look for a clear message in their writing.

Implications?

At this point, I’m confident that we’re on the right track with how to improve the writing skills of the Basic Writers. Letting them deal with simple content while they work to improve the linguistic qualities of their writing.

As for the RC II students, it seems that what they need is not instruction in creating more articulate language. Rather, what they need is a hard lesson in including specific and deep content in their work. Rather than work on linguistic elements, RC II students can benefit most from working with challenging content. A “no bluff” zone is critical here. Force them to create deep arguments using complex data. Let them use their already strong sentence crafting abilities to say something meaningful with their language.

Nothing profound

Nothing in this is particularly profound. But this is the first time that I’ve really had driven home to me how readily skilled writers will fall back on fluff and bluff to avoid the effort required for them to produce clear, specific prose.

I’ll be looking for ways to give these students a carrot to produce that clarity, rather than the stick of low or failing grades. If you have any favorite carrots of your own, please let me know.

My current question is how do we balance is two needs. What do we do with the newbies who don’t know how to do basic things. How do we work with them and make a conference useful to them, while also having sessions and conversations that the really skilled workers can benefit from and learn from?

It’s easy to say that the opening session should have a schedule that works with both of them. But one of the problems is that they both want to talk about the same general topic. So the natural move is for them to both propose a joint session and think that they will both get quality information out of it. When the session happens the highly skilled workers feel that they need to help the newer ones. They will spend a lot of time teaching, however they themselves may not learn a lot or may not pick up a lot of new ideas. And while it is great to have the experienced once teach the new ones once new tricks, we still want the experienced ones to walk away with high-quality tips and tricks.

I am currently torn. I am not sure with you best way to handle this is, however my reaction is that we really need to separate these two groups out during the THATCamp. But this feels so unnatural to me. I don’t want to have to have two different back camps going at once and I don’t want to say you can’t talk with these other people over there.

I guess my big question right now is what purpose a THATCamp serves. Is it supposed to provide an introduction to digital humanities? Or is it supposed to provide digital humanists with a way to pick up stronger skills and new techniques? Because those two questions seem to represent the needs of the two different participants that we get, at least at the liberal arts colleges conference.

And no you can’t answer yes to both questions. It’s an either or situation.

A related issue is when the new participants try to talk about issues where they don’t have the expertise yet. This pops up in issues like geographic information services and e books. Both of these topics are really complex issues with a large amount of background information that people must master to do it well. However these new participants are trying to wrestle with these issues and I think they walk away with more frustration than optimism. Skilled participants would be happy to talk about these complex issues. But there are often enough of the skilled participants to have a full panel on these issues.

I know, I know. It is a THATCamp and we aren’t supposed to be strictly formatted. However, as an organizer you still want people to have a productive time and enjoy what they do. If anyone has advice for how to handle these different skill levels I would love to hear them and I would love the chance to pass it on to whoever does that camp for liberal arts colleges next year.

Going into the final day, my best thought is that we need a chance for people to simply talk with others. That may give the skilled digital humanists a chance to talk with other ones and share ideas and share techniques that they can really benefit from.

Love the way that it gets students to really read the source and think about what it says. They just won’t do that if their first exposure to a source is when they’re in the middle of writing a research paper. At that point, the use of the source becomes far too much of “quote mining” (see The Citation Project for background).

Hate the monotony of an ann bib. Students detest writing them. The first 2 sources get good treatment, the rest a cursory effort. And there’s a lot of resentment that develops in the students because of them. I’ll say it, too – I hate grading them. And you know you do too.

Plus, one of the key features of an ann bib is supposed to be getting students to see how sources interrelate. How well that happens in your traditional, running list of sources is questionable at best.

This semester I may have found an answer to the “hate” aspects of this assignment. I had the pleasure of teaching Rhetoric & Composition II Honors (FYC II Honors, basically). We put a multimodal focus on the course. Their big research paper was multimodal-based and a lot of the assignments and discussions were multimedia in nature. But the kicker, at least for this post, is that their ann bib for the big research paper was done in Prezi.

Prezi as the medium

I go back and forth as to whether Prezi is good for presentation support. Yes, it’s far better than your typical PPT. But the movement feature is hard to use well and easy to use horribly. The one thing that Prezi does well is big picture communication. It hit me that this idea of big picture communication is one of the overriding concerns of an ann bib – what is the “conversation” about a topic. So my students were tasked with creating an ann bib using the power of Prezi to communicate the relationships between their sources.

Annotations stayed pretty much identical to what they’d be if done in Word. A couple paragraphs summarizing key points, author’s perspective and bias, and potential uses in their paper. I even encouraged the students to write their annotations in a word processor first. But then those paragraphs had to be copied into Prezi text boxes. And the students had to design the Prezi in a way that communicated how the sources related to each other and to the research question.

The easy formatting was to group sources by topic. And I encouraged them to use size as a signal for relevance: bigger = more important. I put together a sample ann bib to give them an idea of what I was thinking (always a good idea for strange or new genres). It’s got the standard filler text for the annotations; I wanted the sample to be about formatting, not about annotation templates.

Response

The students seemed to love the assignment. I had many of them tell me that they actually liked doing it! That’s something that knocked flat on my back.

But what I really loved is that the students had to stop and think about how the sources related to each other. They went deeper than just “this source says the same thing as the source I read right before it.” The students really thought about how the sources compared to each other and where they conflicted. And they thought about how relevant the source was in serious ways.

I’ve included a couple screenshots of two students’ works (both with permission). One really ran with the idea of arrows for connections. The other went in a new direction and mapped out the sources on a timeline – highly relevant as he was tracking how texting grammar had changed over time.

Scalability

This assignment really seems like something that can be used more broadly. I realize that my students were honors-grade, but your typical student should be able to produce a Prezi formatting that communicates relationships.

If you’re a teacher considering doing this assignment, probably your biggest fear is that you don’t know Prezi and you don’t think you can learn it. Can I comfort you by saying that I spent zero (0) minutes teaching my students how to use the application? Prezi has an incredible tutorial system and I told my students to walk through their guides before tackling the ann bib. I did spend 10-15 minutes talking with them about formatting ideas. They did just fine at brainstorming ways to show relationships between sources. If you really understand this assignment conceptually, you should be able to field that discussion easily.

Need help? Have a better idea?

If you want to use this and need help, leave a comment below or email me.

If you’ve got an idea to improve this assignment or a better solution, same deal.

Assignment

This is the assignment I gave my students. Note that the annotations are short – I emphasized quality over quantity for these. Each sentence had to communicate specific, relevant information. And the bit about “quality sources” is based on a class session where we developed a class definition of what that means.

Overview

For your research project, you’ll need to incorporate a number of high-quality sources and relate those sources to each other and to your argument. For this assignment, we’ll be using Prezi to examine those sources.

Key factoids

Due: Mon, Feb 27
Length: 8-ish sources, 200-300 words each
Audience: Yourself
Media type: Prezi presentation
% Final grade: 20

Description

First off, we’re using Prezi for this. It’s a free online PowerPoint alternative that works well as a giant digital whiteboard. You’ll want to create an account – free if you use your St. Ed’s email.

In class I’ll show you a walk-through of the software. Here’s a link to a sample Ann Bib in a Prezi format. Use this for formatting inspiration, not for content (the annotations are nonsense). In short, you’ll type up your annotations elsewhere and then move them into the Prezi. The annotations will be grouped by connections between the readings.

Annotations should be 400-500 words that describe the essence of the source. Questions that you should probably answer are below. Note that you don’t have to answer every question for every source; but you should answer most questions for most sources.

1. What is the source’s background and authority?
2. What did the source attempt to find out? What was his/her question?
3. What are the limitations on the source’s arguments or study? Does s/he acknowledge any? Can you find any?
4. What are the source’s claims?
5. What important evidence does the source use to support his/her claims?
6. What concessions does the source make to opposing claims and evidence?
7. How does the source attempt to frame a point and to “sell” you an interpretation of that point using rhetorical strategies?
8. How does this source fit in or work against your other sources in the overall “conversation” of your research question? Be specific.
9. What does this source contribute to your efforts to answer your research question? In other words, “so what?”

Formatting Prezi can take a number of forms. Use the powers of the whiteboard to communicate larger information about the sources. Some example formatting options:

• Size to indicate relevance or quality
• Proximity (close or far away) to indicate connections and similarity
• Labels for grouping
• Arrows for connections
• Sequential ordering for publication dates (think a timeline)

Grading criteria

Quality of annotations: Have you seriously read and considered the sources? Have you thought about what arguments the author makes and how it relates to your topic?

Quality of Prezi: Have you made connections between the sources? Have you demonstrated those connections in Prezi?

Grading rubric

Note that this rubric is a general guideline to how your annotated bibs will be graded. Particularly poor performance in any one area will lower the grade.

And I’ve got to be honest, I am really sick of this argument. Because all of them I have seen to date are so methodologically flawed. I know, I know. It’s Cracked. But in all of these, there’s no attempt at applying basic methodological rigor. They never try to discern the path of cause and effect or using some type of experimental setup to define a clear causality. Rather, these various pieces simply recognize that there’s something of a correlation between media presentations of male behavior and observed male behavior and assume that the media is causing boys to act badly – because, hey, it makes sense!

But the argument that sexist media causes sexist boys is really, really weakly founded. Yes, we can find a number of media examples of nasty portrayals of women. All kinds of movies show women as sex objects, or as Cracked puts it, the prize for winning a battle. But why do we assume that the movies actually have an influence on how boys think of women? Developmental psychology doesn’t even list mass media on its criteria of influencing factors – instead, we talk about Mom, Dad, siblings, friends, and the womb. As far as I can tell, the entire basis behind an approach of “the media made me do it” is that it’s feasible it could have an influence.

Sounds an awful lot like the whole boob tube argument – TV makes people stupid despite the fact that we’re a lot more knowledgable than our grandparents were.

So I started thinking – how could we test for media’s influence on boys’ views of women? A controlled experiment is really out of the question. Methodologically impossible and highly unethical. But we can look for natural experiments. Let’s look for cultures that have been exposed to Western depictions of women and those who haven’t. If we can see some kind of positive correlation between media exposure and negative views of women, then we can at least claim a causation is feasible.

I decided to run this experiment very informally (read, in my head). The results? Not good for Cracked and Jackson Katz. Let’s name regions that have been exposed to the corrupting influence of Transformers, Star Wars, and Karate Kid:

Exposed regions:

• U.S.
• Canada
• Western Europe
• Central America
• Post-Soviet Russia

And how about regions that haven’t been? I’m going historical here to get a larger sample pool. But I don’t see issues in analyzing developed historical cultures if we’re simply trying to measure the effect of mass media.

Un-exposed regions:

• Rural Africa
• Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other conservative Middle Eastern countries
• Much of South America
• U.S. and Western Europe before 1945
• Ancient Greece and Rome
• Europe during the Middle Ages
• China and Japan during the Imperial Eras
• I’ll stop there

Think of attitudes toward women as objects to be possessed. Where is it more common? By my count, overwhelmingly in the un-exposed regions. It’s not even close. Sure, my sample is incomplete and most likely skewed, but I don’t see those dynamics changing the conclusion.

So the result of this highly informal, highly un-rigorous experiment? There is no correlation between exposure to Western media and attitudes of women as prizes. In fact, if anything the reverse is true. Exposure to Western media goes alongside viewing women as fellow humans.

Why, then, would Cracked and so many like them try to claim that media exposure warps little boys’ minds? It’s not a simple confusion of correlation vs. causation. Rather, it’s a case of wishing something to be true. We’d like to blame the views of men toward women on some type of corrupting social influence. It means that the views (and all their resulting problems) are something that can be fixed. If we can just have higher quality movies, all would be right with the world.

I just haven’t seen any evidence to support that view. Sorry, Cracked.

Disclaimer: This post is a thought-in progress. Hence, the ideas will be underdeveloped from where I eventually want them to land. And it will be more about problems than solutions.

Problem

I’ve got a problem that is far from unique. My students, especially my freshmen, have a really hard time thinking about their audience when they write essays. I don’t mean that they ignore the idea, or get the audience wrong. I mean that they just have a hard time conceptualizing what Suzy’s reaction will be when Suzy reads their paper. This really hit me the other day when I was talking with my Freshman Comp II Honors class. We were talking about the differences in writing process of skilled and unskilled writers. When I talked about the skilled writer really thinking about the audience through the whole process, I just got a bunch of blank stares.

That reaction is far from new. The freshmen that I’ve taught have always had problems conceptualizing their audience. They just struggle to think about the reader’s needs. They have a hard time getting out of their own heads and into the heads of someone different.

I’ve always blamed this on inexperience. In my mind, they just haven’t had enough practice writing for other audiences; their papers have been too focused on the generic. And the rhetor / tech writer in me has always cringed in the audience-free meanderings that they would produce. I’ve always thought, “If you don’t know who you’re writing for, how do you know if what you’ve written is good? Good is subjective based on the readers and their needs.”

Origin

But an idea hit me today while I was on a long, multi-hour drive. Maybe the problem isn’t inexperience or lack of training. Maybe it’s psychological. I don’t have a ready source for this claim (part of the undeveloped nature of this post), but contemporary psychological development theory contends that the human brain goes through a final major stage of development somewhere between ages 19 and 24. Before that stage, we are still in something of a narcissistic state where we can think only of ourselves. It’s not necessarily that we don’t care about others; it’s that we can’t really understand them. That’s why our parents baffle us so much as teenagers and why we don’t understand their frustration when we’d rather spend time with our friends than them. That’s why we fight so much with dorm mates. It’s something vaguely related to austistic problems with “other minds.”

(Side note – another side effect of this psychological underdevelopment is the sense of immortality. What makes teenage boys drive 90 mph down the highway and college girls go on drinking binges.)

It’s not until we hit that final stage of development that we begin to appreciate others, their motivations, their knowledge, their needs, etc. Think of that famous quote usually attributed to Twain

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

That quote emblematizes our final stage of development.

Connection

So if it takes us until our final mental developmental stage to understand our father, why are we surprised that they can’t understand a reader that they’ve never even met?

Why are we surprised that they can’t take their reader’s needs and wants into consideration when brainstorming content? When they can’t imagine what their readers will and won’t understand in their prose?

Solution

Not sure yet.

Right now, I’m leaning in two directions.

1. Let them keep writing their audience-free generic essays until they hit that final stage of development. Work instead on logical organization and poetic prose. Work on skills that tend to be transferable to most mature audiences.

2. Force them to keep writing for an audience even though they can’t quite do it yet. Drill that idea into their heads so deep that, when they can understand the reader, the technique becomes reflexive. A bit of a “Wax on Wax off” scenario.

I first thought of doing a Myers-Briggs styled personality inventory. But that would give me FAR more information than I needed. I really don’t want to know if my students are sociopaths.

There are other “business personality tests” on the web, some for free. But they’re pretty skewed, biased, and just plain odd.

So I decided to build my own. I’m going off of @baconred‘s system, with a bit of a twist. Greg’s using a system that he tweeted about:

@johnmjones @rhetorryan twitter.com/baconred/statu…

— Greg Wilson (@baconred) January 26, 2012

It wasn’t quite ideal for what I was doing. He designed his for peer review. I’m looking to have students do a semester-long group proposal in my Tech & Business Comm class. But I liked the simplicity of the circle graph. Here’s my modification:

At the start of class, I’ll have every student complete the “test”. Then I’ll group them based on two factors.

1. Organized people get to work together. That should make for less group stress.

2. Big picture and detail people get distributed. That should make division of duties more intuitive.

Will it work? Don’t know. I’ll tell you on Tuesday.

So, what do I mean by badge-ifying the university? I mean turning those esoteric life skills that we teach into something that can tangibly be measured and, more importantly, sold to an employer – badges that we can put on our resume or pin to our lapel. Please contain your rage and hear me out. Yes, it seems inane to turn critical thinking into a certificate. Or, turn adaptability into a two week seminar. But maybe there’s a way. And maybe it’ll be good for us, our students, and our students’ employers.

Why badges in the first place?

Certifications (badges) have become commonplace in the IT world. I can be certified in PHP, Adobe Creative Suite, Windows Servers, mouse battery changing, or any number of elements. And there’s probably 2 seminars next weekend that I can attend to get another certification.

But this idea of certification, commodification, badge-ification, or what-have-you is really quite widespread. College degrees are seen as a badge that we can use to get into law school, or get that nice job with the fat paycheck. Classes that our students take are “gotten out of the way” – or in other words, marked off of a degree plan checklist as a form of a badge on their way to graduation. Internships are not a place to apprentice in your trade, but a chance to list a well known company on your resume.

Sounds terrible, right? And it definitely has its drawbacks. We no longer pursue an education or experience for the content, but for its badges. (The Boy Scouts and their merit badges have ruined us all!) But I contend that it’s just a by-product of large, mobile capitalistic economies.

An example:
Let’s role play and pretend that I’m an owner of a small business in a town of about 300,000 people. My web designer recently resigned and I need to replace him. Having had a web presence for 10 years or so, I know what qualifications I need in my new web designer: creative and critical thinking skills, problem solving, adaptability, and the ability to learn. Specific programming skills aren’t that important. I’ve seen web technologies come and go, and since I’m hiring for the long term any specific technology isn’t that important.

I run an ad on Craig’s List announcing the position. And, not surprisingly, I get 100 reasonably qualified applicants. (That number is conservative, by the way.) I would love to judge each of them on the qualifications I’ve determined, but it’s quite challenging to figure out whether someone is adaptable or a problem solver. I just don’t have the time, energy, or mental gymnastic abilities to do that for 100 individuals. So I fall back on their badges – whether they know PHP, are proficient with my content management system, and have working knowledge of my server’s OS.

Using these badges, I whittle the pool down to just two applicants. They come in for interviews and I can then try to judge them on those esoteric qualifications I initially wanted.

But at the end of the day, badges were the most efficient, most pragmatic way for me to sort through the massive pool of applicants I got.

The flip side:
I’m a web designer in a town of about 300,000 people who’s looking for a job.  One day, I pop open Craig’s List and see a position listed for a job at a small business that’s right up my alley. So I decide to apply.

As I’m drafting my application letter and resume, I try to get in the head of the employer. I know he’ll be swamped with applications. So to make myself stand out in the crowd by emphasizing my vast array of technical knowledge. That’ll jump right out and grab the employer’s attention. I’ve earned far more badges than my peers because of my propensity with new systems and drive to learn. Just before I send off my materials, I remember that training seminar I went to a couple weeks back. Hey, that’s one more badge I can list to stand out in the crowd.

Sure, I’ve got all these intangible things going for me. I’m highly driven; I love to learn and play with new technologies; I’m really creative. But those are really hard to communicate in a brief letter and a resume. So I focus on my badges.

The moral:
Neither of our two personas really want to focus on badges as the primary qualifications at stake. But the nature of the game requires it. When you’re dealing with large pools of qualified applicants and limited resources to communicate qualifications, badges are the natural fallback. There’s no better solution for the dilemmas both our personas are faced with.

Why badges in Higher Ed?

That’s all well and good for technical fields, but why have badges become so important in all the disciplines? I’d contend it’s because of the changing demographics of our college students. Faculty who have been around for a while often lament that students no longer care about “learning” – they just want skills they can put on a resume. And I think those faculty are right; higher ed has become dominated by a drive for badges. That’s why there are so many technical schools and community colleges.

But why? It’s because we have a different group of individuals in our classes. College enrollment has skyrocketed. Since 1970, it’s up 238% (source). Since WWII, there has been a huge desire for a college education by the middle class. The G.I. Bill’s 8 million college-bound soldiers is just one example of that move. Success in the middle class now requires a college degree; a high school diploma is grossly insufficient.

What that means for our classrooms is that we have a large group of students who are there for reasons other than a “love of the mind.” Though I have no hard numbers for this, I would contend that the same percentage of the population goes to college because of a desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. The life of the mind most likely appeals to about the same percentage of people as it always has. But our college classrooms now include students who are there for other reasons. Badges.

Trying to deny this fact is an exercise in futility. Trying to ignore it, a sure way to a slow demise. Trying to embrace it, potentially a way to revitalize our image and empower our students.

Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!

What do I mean by embracing badges? I don’t mean that we should all be come technical schools. Let me repeat. We should not become technical schools. Basic technical skills without the kind of reflective thinking that we teach is pointless and counterproductive. The world still needs students who can question the nature of existence, challenge preconceptions, and work to change the future. In other words, the world still needs the kinds of ideas that we have been teaching for centuries.

But the world also needs badges. The raw numbers of our economy demand a simple and direct way to categorize and quantify skills and people. As much as my humanistic instincts rail against that, I see no other option.

So is it possible to turn those esoteric skills that we teach into badges? Maybe. I’m not proposing a class in critical thinking, or self-reflection. That’s not how you learn those skills. You learn them by taking a multitude of classes over several years, and by complementing those classes with extracurricular activities. They’re not something that can be taught in a two week summer seminar.

Rather, I’d like to expand on an idea floated by Julie Sievers. End-of-degree portfolios. To graduate, students must produce a portfolio that demonstrates they have learned what they are expected to have learned during their time in college. I support her idea of basing a college degree off of the ideas that one has learned, not the courses that one has completed.

But I’d like to take it a step further. Why should we not create badges that a student can earn by demonstrating certain skills and knowledge in that portfolio. Don’t simply say, “You’ve successfully produced a portfolio; now you can get your degree/badge.” Rather, make the portfolio a chance for students to earn additional badges. If they can demonstrate extensive critical thinking skills, give them that badge. If they can prove that they can adapt to new situations well, another badge. Not every student will graduate with the same badges – thus making badges themselves more meaningful (for the reverse, think of the insignificance of a B.S. in Business Management).

Yes, there are a slew of challenges with this system. How can you demonstrate in a portfolio that you have critical thinking skills? I’ll pass the buck and tell the student that task alone is proof of critical thinking skills. But seriously, it can be hard to judge these abilities. I’d challenge that it can be done. Proof of adaptability is not insurmountable. Proof of self-reflection can be done in an extended essay. The point: there are ways to demonstrate these skills.

As for the administrative side of enacting such a system, I’ll leave that to my peers who are greater experts in evaluation.

I may have a fairly unique situation, but if not, here’s my problem & solution.

I run several class blogs as subdomains on ryanhoover.net (2325.ryanhoover.net, 13o2.ryanhoover.net, etc.). Before this solution, I’ve been installing each class blog as its own instance of WordPress. Of course, with the near-daily updates to WordPress, I’ve been updating 8+ blogs routinely. A network installation would make my life so much easier.

But here’s the kicker. I don’t want the root page at ryanhoover.net to be a WordPress blog. I’ve got a fun little setup there that I don’t want to lose. Plus, I use that page as a playground for new html tricks I want to try.

My solution:

1. I installed WordPress to the root of ryanhoover.net
2. I moved what used to be in my index.html file into homepage.php
3. I added this code to WordPress’s index.php file

if ($_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] == 'ryanhoover.net' || $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] == 'www.ryanhoover.net')
{ include_once "homepage.php"; }
else {

//Wordpress files

}

What this code does is simply test the server address of the page. If it’s at the root address (either ryanhoover.net or www.ryanhoover.net), it loads what content is in homepage.php. Otherwise, it loads the standard WordPress stuff.

Works like a charm.

I hate the “academic research paper”

Not sure I can be any more blunt than that. I see the academic research paper as an entirely artificial genre, one that has no known equivalent outside of the hallowed halls of our universities and colleges. And it is quickly making us a running gag in the “real world.”

Why, you may ask?

1. It has no audience, at least no audience the student has any knowledge or grasp of.
2. It imposes ludicrously outdated styles of writing known as — wait for it — MLA and APA
3. It assumes a level of knowledge in our students that not a one of them possesses

It has no audience

So, for the typical academic essay, who is the audience? If you ask the teacher, you’ll get an answer that is something along the lines of “the student’s peers” or “the academic community.” If you ask the student, there is one universal response: “the teacher.” That’s because long ago students figured out what we teachers have been fooling ourselves about. A teacher assigns a grade on an essay based on what that teacher feels is good writing — and every teacher has different standards for what good writing is. Smart students figure out how to game the system by figuring out what that teacher is looking for and writing the essay appropriately. In other words,

The teacher is the audience, whether he wants to be or not

And, the more we deny that we are the intended audience for the “academic research paper,” the more our students chuckle behind our backs. Those essays will never be read by the students’ peers – except in the rare case of a peer review of a work-in-progress. And they surely will never be read by the academic community, exempting the 0.3% that might get published in some form of student academic journal (completely artificial stat there).

It uses an outdated form of writing

When students go to write an “academic research paper” what format should they use? MLA, right? Or for the more freewheeling among us, maybe APA?

Both are horribly outdated and designed for the typewriter era. But how, you may ask?

• They’re double spaced. Double spacing is horrible on readability – the lines are so far apart the eye has a hard time tracking from the end of one to the beginning of the next. Yes, double spacing is better than single spacing. But we have word processing software now – we can do 1.5 spacing, or better yet 1.15. Why do you think that Word, html, and all other writing technologies default to something other than double spacing?
• They have a strictly standardized header across the top of every page. Why? In an age of digital documents, why do we care if the student’s name, class, and the page number are at the top of every page? That would only be relevant if we were still carrying stacks upon stacks of unbound pages with us everywhere we go.
• They use — gasp — standardized citation formats. Oh, and those standardized citations are horribly inconsistent with digital records. Go ahead and cite a quote from an article published on a major news blog. I’ll wait. What? You couldn’t figure out how to? You couldn’t find the issue number, much less the page number of the quote? Well, feel free to cite a print book now. Did you remember to include the name of the publisher, along with their physical location? Tell me why, again, we need to include that information? Does anyone actually use the physical location of the publisher to track down a copy of the work? Why not just include the ISBN number? It’s universal, easily Googled, and much more succinct. Or just hyperlink to the source. Really, that’ll fulfill 98.43% of our citation needs (more fake stats).

It assumes an outrageous level of knowledge

What is the most common metaphor that we give our students when they go to write the “academic research paper”? Burke’s parlor conversation, right? But think of how hard it is for them to join in the conversation. Think of the level of knowledge they’re expected to master in order to contribute something new to the conversation. Our students have to have mastered all related topics for decades (if not centuries) in the past. Without having done that, the student can’t really know what the conversation is, or whether her brilliant insight is irrelevant (or, worse yet, already been said). Oh, and they only have a couple weeks to master this.

So, what’s the reality of what our students write? They don’t try to join in the conversation. Rather, they try to guess what will impress us, the teachers – and they write a topic about that. They don’t really try to join in the conversation. They don’t really do mountains of research to write their paper. They find a couple sources that will provide good quotes, or at the least, fit into an MLA-based bibliography. They write up their own thoughts about the topic. And they pepper the essay with enough quotes and citations to pass the research requirements we’ve set up.

So what am I to do?

There are some alternatives to the “academic research paper” — really, there are.

Have your students write about an issue that has relevance to their own lives. And have them write it for an audience that cares about that issue. They’ll have more fun with the paper, they’ll have an easier time judging the audience, and they’ll feel much more comfortable with the writing style. The “letter to the editor” is a classic example of this type of assignment. Just note that print is dead, and our students may have never read a letter to the editor in a printed newspaper. Doing a post for a political blog is a modern equivalent, and one that my students have easily grasped. Reports to the city council, or proposals to a local business also work well.

Have your students invent their own citation style. Lay out some ground rules – the citations have to be consistent, and the reader has to be able to easily find the originating source. Then let them figure out the best way to cite the work. It teaches them the fundamental rationale behind citing in the first place, and not just how to conform to some rules laid out in a book.

And while we’re at it, have your students use the best type of document for the topic. They don’t necessarily have to write an “essay.” It doesn’t have to be paragraphs of text with perhaps a heading or two. Let them figure out what kind of document best suits their topic, and then free them to write in that genre. It may be a report, something that looks a lot like an essay. It may be a letter, a blog post, or even an essay if that genre is appropriate. But force your students to consciously choose the genre. They’ll learn far more from that act than they ever would learning how to write in the “academic essay” genre.

Have your students write on something they already know a lot about. Why not let them use their pre-existing knowledge when they write for your class? Why force them to write entirely about completely foreign material? Rather, tell your students to use the new material they’ve just learned to explain or improve their own lives in some fashion. Perhaps Aristotle’s ideas of truth and rhetoric help elucidate politics in their hometown. Perhaps modern notions of rhetorical agency could improve working conditions for the restaurants at which they wait tables.

We teach academic essays to teach our students a couple different skills. We want them to defend their points with sources, with the words, ideas, and facts of others. We want them to write clear and organized prose that creates a logical argument. And we want them to consider who their audience is, and how to write in a way that will captivate that demographic. I fail to see any way that the criteria above are inferior to the “academic research paper” in teaching these skills.

But hey, if I’m wrong, let me know in the comments!

Question for the day:
What makes up the rhetorical agency of a posthuman author?

Background definitions

Rhetorical agency: The ability to speak, or to express oneself. Agency is generally defined as the ability to act. Rhetorical agency is the ability to create rhetoric. This isn’t a binary “either you have it or you don’t” quality. Rather, rhetorical agency exists across a continuum of empowerment.

Posthuman author: A reconfigured definition of ‘author’ that combines the human author with the technologies used to write. This is based off of the recognition that no one writes in a technological vacuum. Rather, the technologies we use shape how we write. Writing in MS Word will cause us to think in terms of pages, paragraphs, and Times New Roman. Writing by longhand will cause us to write shorter works (it’s slower), and to revise less (more effort than with MS Word).

Impetus for the question

Ages and ages ago I wrote a dissertation on the National Science Foundation. And while I talked little in the document about FastLane, NSF’s grant submission website, there’s some really interesting stuff going on there. Specifically, I have some observations from my 19 researchers and program officers that made me think of FastLane in a new way:

• Every one of the 19 people used FastLane in different ways, capitalizing on different functions. And many of the 19 used the tool in ways that NSF never intended. This idea is consistent with what new media scholars call “customization” (Manovich).
• Those who used FastLane in one way seemed to think about their research differently than those who used FastLane in another way. That is, how someone used FastLane changed how she saw what she wrote. Pretty standard posthumanism (see, for instance, Feenberg).
• Some researchers felt more empowered by FastLane than others. A couple researchers found the site to greatly increase their rhetorical agency. A couple researchers found it to sap that agency dry.

How rhetorical agency and posthumanism mix

Doing a rhetorical agency analysis only of these phenomena is pretty straightforward. People who were “tech-savvy” tended to find their rhetorical agency increase when using a complex piece of web technology. People who were “technologically illiterate” tended to find their rhetorical agency decrease when using a complex piece of web technology. Seems intuitive, no?

In the dissertation I tried to create a formula for figuring out whether someone would gain or lose rhetorical agency in a particular situation. Basically, it amounted to

Rhetorical agency = habitus + kinetic agency

Habitus: accumulated predispositions based on past experiences
Kinetic agency: the kairos of the moment, where we find agency in each moment’s unique properties.

So, in our basic rhetorical analysis, we can use this formula. Whether or not someone is “tech-savvy” is a part of her habitus. And using FastLane to create a grant proposal is part of the kinetic agency.

Problem is, this doesn’t account for the posthuman factor. Because in the above scenario, FastLane is just an outside force that makes up part of the kinetic agency. Posthumanism contends that the technology is part of the writer. The theory contends that we are all cyborgs – an amalgamation of human and technology.

So, to try to reconcile this dilemma, I’ve reworked the formula:

Rhetorical agency = rhetorical agency (human) + rhetorical agency (tech)

Rhetorical agency (human) = habitus + kinetic agency

Rhetorical agency (tech) = interface + back-end code

Rhetorical agency, then, is the sum of the human’s rhetorical agency and the technology’s rhetorical agency. And the technology’s rhetorical agency is a combination of two things. The interface is what we non-programmers interact with. It’s what you get when you fire up Word on your computer or when you visit a website. The back-end code is, in simple terms, the 1s and 0s. We’re talking how efficient the program is, what core functions it provides, whether it crashes or runs smoothly.

And it is possible for a technology to have a strong back-end code with a poor interface, or a strong interface with a poor back-end code. Windows, arguably, has a strong back-end code but a poor interface. System administrators like it because it has a massive amount of functionality to it. Users hate it because the interface is clunky and counter-intuitive. Yahoo Mail is the reverse. The new version is very pretty. It’s actually kinda fun to use. But the back-end code is weak.

The shortened version:
A technology’s rhetorical agency – its ability to communicate – is a combination of how well it itself works (the back-end code) and how well it can be used by a human (the interface).

Limitations of the formula

Now please note one thing – this formula is of the social science / humanities variety. That is, it’s a generalization of a trend and not an absolute equation.

This comes up most strongly with the fact that no two humans will use a technology the same way. Or, inverted, no technology will affect two humans in the same manner. There’s no specific portion of the formula that accounts for this realization. Rather, I lump this oddity into the “kinetic agency” portion.

*And a side note, no technology will affect a single human the same way two times in a row. When I use Word tomorrow, it will affect me differently from when I used it yesterday. That’s because I’m a different person – my habitus has expanded and changed.

The formula in practice

This formula, and the ideas behind it, matter (in my eyes) to two groups: technology designers and technology users. Could I be broader!

For technology designers, there’s that critical realization that, no matter how good your technology’s rhetorical agency is, the human component can still screw things up. Your best bet is to make your technology human-agnostic (adapting the term “device-agnostic” from Ethan Marcotte). Make your technology attractive to a wide range of user-types. Make it flexible, and adaptable. And make features open, rather than locked down to accommodate those who want to use it in non-traditional ways. A simple example of this last is letting the user type in a font size, in lieu of a dropdown menu of font sizes.

For technology users, realize that the technology’s rhetorical agency affects your agency. And do all you can to make that technology work for you. Be consciously aware of how it’s directing your efforts. See if you can change how you use it to maximize that agency. See if you can change the technology to better fit your needs. In other words, DON’T USE THE DEFAULT SETTINGS!!!

References

Feenberg, A. (1991). Critical theory of technology. New York: Oxford UP.

Manovich, Lev. (2001). The Language of New Media. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.