Dec. 29, 2006

Validation

By oronte

Yesterday I went to the session on Literary Studies in the Public Sphere. For two of the speakers, Amardeep Singh and Michael Bérubé, public meant Bloggic. I felt great personal warmth for Singh when he said that pen names in blogging did not reduce ownership or validity; indeed, he said, a pen name is a system as genuine as a legal name, so “Bitch Ph.D. is the same as Foucault.” That is, there can still be “a commitment to textual authenticity.” (You’d better believe it.)

Bérubé said that academic blogs are valuable because they show what professors and grad students do not only as teachers but also as people with whole lives. The young woman in the seat next to me smiled hugely and squirmed in her chair. Bérubé added, however, that he felt blogging was not a form of publishing (at least not one worthy for the c.v.), but that it was “marginal in the best sense of the word.” (In that case, a blogging adjunct, marginal in two ways, must be great.)

I also went to the poster session on Innovative Uses of Technology in L1 and L2 Writing. Matthew Klauza, from Auburn, showed how he used Mark Twain’s manuscripts on CD in the comp classroom. There are, he said, a thousand changes to the manuscript of Huck Finn, and tracking some of them with students is a good way to model revision, especially for clarity of image, tone, and concision.

I started thinking about innovation by individual teachers, and resistance to it by their departments. I once developed a lower-level lit class that asked students in groups to create casebooks on a text read in class. Included would be their critical essays, annotated bibliographies for print and film resources, and other writing. Then they’d use digital camcorders and editing software to make short films about that text, either updating the original for their own time, or doing an anatomy of it, a la Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard.

The College of Education wanted the course, and was willing to pay the English Department for me to teach a section or two, so they could channel through their students who needed both writing and technology credits. In the end, the English Department declined, based on the idea that video editing is not writing (it is construction of text, and there was plenty of traditional writing to be done). They also foresaw difficulties in finding a place for such a class in the course rubric. Now the Art Department is developing some awfully similar courses.

Anyone else experience resistance to new technologies?

Comments

Tech Resistence

Oronte, Dr. Churm, how do we address you? Great you are here at IHE.

1.) There is a history professor, I hope still at UVa, Charlottesville, with just the same issues. Can’t remember his name. It will come to me. I heard him speak three or four years ago. He put together three or four years ago remarkable interaction pieces on the Civil War. All about one town and all the entanglements. No one quarreled with the depth of his research. The rub: Because the work was interactive, and not linear like a book or peer-review article, was it “history"? Did it count for tenure? 2.) I went to the Nieman Writers Conference this fall. All the best writer/journalists told everyone to watch more television and movies because that’s where the best editing can be — point of view, scenes, moving from one issue to another. At odds with the trouble you are getting. 3.) At a business job in the 1980s, we couldn’t get computers. Secretaries used them, not professionals. The budgets had money for secretaries, but not for computers. So, back to pencils and paper and no end of reworking time. Resistence continued. Only changed a few years later when we were able to dictate that no promotions, even among vice presidents, without demonstrating technology proficiency — just a bit of spreadsheets and word processing.

Your issues are the tough ones. Age old — prophet without honor but in his own land and all. Technology is very subversive. Which is why it’s such fun and must be aided and abetted all the time.

Wick Sloane, The Devil’s Workshop column here in IHE.

ws, at 9:21 am EST on January 2, 2007

popular culture

i’m sorry if this doesn’t have much to do with your posting, but i’ve been reading some of your stuff and i’ve been asking people questions about designing a masters in pop culture studies (as of now i’m working in russia until i can figure out how to sell it to nyu). seeing as how you work for a higher learning institution, maybe you could give some advice? i know this is vague. sorry, i’m in the hague right now and don’t have much time to post.

rachel irene lunan, miss, at 10:55 am EST on January 2, 2007

Wick, great examples of tech resistance. I’ve also experienced the “technology for the support staff” phenomenon, which in some cases feels more like patriarchy—throw the underlings a bone in the name of democracy.

Twenty years ago, administrative assistants were given computers, but the quid pro quo was being put in charge of the monthly newsletter, which was A) More work for them, and B)Something they weren’t necessarily trained to write or design. Democracy, it turned out, meant “we don’t want to deal with it right now.”

Oronte, at 10:35 am EST on January 3, 2007