Shankar via Lunsford: Spriting Talkuments
On pages 9-10 of Writing Matters, Andrea Lunsford cites a number of terms Tara Shankar invents in her 2005 dissertation, including
the key term spriting. By 'sprite,' a portmanteau combining speaking and writing, Shankar means speaking that "yields two technologically supported representations: the speech in audible form, and the speech in visual form. Spriting, therefore, equally encompasses digital speech recorders, speech editing tools, and any speech dictation recognition tools that would use speech in addition to text as an output mode" (15). The product of spriting she identifies as a spoken document, or talkument. . . Finding that students produce talkuments collaboratively with the greatest of ease, Shankar concludes that "spriting seems to admit even closer, more integral collaborations than does writing, perhaps because spriting can more easily incorporate conversation as both planning and composition material" (236).
I find this particularly interesting as I begin the Spring semester and ask my students to engage in some brief, regular low-stakes writing; in keeping a daybook. Last semester when I did this, the daybook took a variety of forms from blog to paper journal to daily text file, and as I'm increasingly syncing my composing media (phone to laptop to index cards to notebook to work and home computers), I'm realizing that I'll be composing via the spoken word as well as the written word, and that I should give my students the same latitude.
Kairos CFP: dot mil
Here's part of my excuse for not posting much lately. Alexis and I are pretty excited about it. And I might be soliciting some of you, dear readers, for contributions.
Kairos Summer 2010 Special Issue
dot mil: Rhetoric, Technology, and the Military
Guest Editors: Mike Edwards and Alexis Hart
This special issue of Kairos seeks to investigate the intersections between technology, rhetoric, and the military, as well as the connections between the military and literacy instruction. During World War II, College English published four articles (February 1944, May 1944, March 1945, May 1945) explicitly concerned with connections between literacy instruction in higher education and the contemporary military. Today, in a time of ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and anxieties about military action in Iran, such connections merit renewed attention. Furthermore, advances in communications technologies have complicated those connections. ARPANET, the first packet-switching network and direct predecessor to the global internet, went live as a Department of Defense project in 1969, and the intersection of networked rhetorics and military affairs has evolved in intriguing ways since. For example, email, web video, cell phones, video games, weblogs, and other digital technologies have become increasingly available as well as increasingly controversial within military contexts. For this special issue on rhetoric, technology, and the military, examples of possible topics of investigation might include, but are not limited to:
How soldiers', sailors', airmen's, and Marines' access to 24/7 networked communications technologies has changed the rhetoric of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Online alternative news sources and their influence on public perceptions of conflicts.
How digital technologies complicate concerns of operations security (OPSEC).
The Army's ban on weblogging by soldiers without command approval.
The rhetorics and aesthetics of military-themed video games.
Distance learning for deployed soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
The use of just war theory, torture, protest, and other military-related subjects as topics for argument essays in first-year writing courses.
Corporal Pat Tillman and the public uses of the rhetorical canon of memory.
The rhetoric of PowerPoint in command briefings.
The use of netwar strategies by insurgency groups and conventional military organizations.
Media representations of the ethics and rhetoric of the "revolt of the generals."
The rhetoric of recruiting.
Online "swiftboating" and the place of military service in political rhetoric.
The rhetorical framing of conflict in documentaries and news reports, as well as in first-hand accounts from on-the-ground warfighters.
Submission Guidelines:
For this special issue, we seek submissions for all sections of the journal (Topoi, Praxis, Reviews, Interviews, and Disputatio). We ask that contributors visit current and previous issues to determine which section best matches your work.
Topoi: Extended scholarly analyses related to the special issue theme.
Praxis: Longer classroom spotlights and brief digital tool-use narratives related to the special issue theme.
Reviews: Individual or collaborative reviews of books, media, and other texts of interest related to the special issue theme.
Interviews: Interviews with scholars doing work related to the special issue theme.
Disputatio: Short digital texts that invite or incite further commentary. This section operates like letters to the editor in more traditional journal venues; however, these texts take native digital forms, even if rudimentary in nature.
Additional Guidelines:
Please consult general submission guidelines at http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/cfht.html.
Kairos can accept most web-ready file formats (check with the guest editors if you are unsure). Please keep in mind that this excludes word-processing documents.
We prefer URLs for review purposes. If you do not have access to open (or password-protected) webspace, please contact the guest editors in advance of the submission deadline to arrange alternate means of delivery.
We cannot accept email attachments larger than 2 megabytes (MB).
Queries to the guest editors are welcome in advance of the deadline. (Responses may take up to a week.)
Submission Deadline (Proposals): November 1, 2008
Contact both guest editors with a proposal via email. (Subject line: "dotmil submission: YOURNAME".) The proposal should include a 1-2 paragraph explanation of the webtext's topic and argument; a 1-2 paragraph description of the webtext's structure, design, and associated technologies (including a URL and/or images, if authors wish); and a brief annotated bibliography. Authors will receive confirmation of submission, via email, within 2-3 days.
Publication Timeline:
Proposals due: November 1, 2008
Acceptance notification: December 1, 2008
Full webtexts due: March 1, 2009
Revised webtexts due: October 1, 2009
Publication date: May 15, 2010
Writing for the Turk
A few weeks ago, I netstumbled again upon Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a for-hire crowdsourcing system that I remember causing a brief buzz when it came out in 2005 or 2006. I was deep in dissertation tunnel vision at the time, not wanting to let myself be distracted, but I remember thinking it held interesting possibilities as a highly decentralized market for immaterial labor, and wondered how it might connect to what I'd been saying about the economics of writing.
So I've finally caught a short breather from the end-of-the-semester crunch -- I'm presently sitting in the hall while my plebes are about 25 minutes into taking their term-end examinations and typing busily away -- and did some poking around. Interesting stuff. The job requester command-line interface stuff is a little daunting, but on the worker side, there are -- as of this morning -- 111 jobs available with the keyword "write" in the listing. Which made me wonder once more: how much should you pay for a C+ paper?
Or, OK, to be a little less opaque about it: the Amazon Mechanical Turk offers one system of thinking about the value of what they call Human Intelligence Tasks. In looking over those Human Intelligence Tasks, I think they're certainly a form of Hardt and Negri's immaterial labor, but of a somewhat different order than, say, writing an essay. Yet some of them -- e.g., writing reviews -- come close to the types of low-stakes tasks we sometimes assign in FYC. And "stakes" is yet another term related to value.
Curious. Further investigation needed.
“Here, See for Yourself”
I see direct application to composition studies for two complementary social impulses that Yochai Benkler describes as being characteristic of the shift from industrial mass capitalism to a networked economy. I'm trying to get an article written now that condenses some of the work I've been doing over the past few years -- not all of the dissertation, but some of it, the new stuff I have to say about being careful in talking about writing studies and political economy, particularly in relation to the digital -- and Benkler has been useful in helping me re-see how what I'm looking at isn't just Pollyanna Web 2.0 evangelism plugged into the writing classroom or critical pedagogy fodder for jeremiads about access.
Benkler’s Production Grid
In my CCCC presentation, I tried to mash together Yochai Benkler's diverse motivations for production, my own thoughts about the work > appropriation > ownership > use > work cycle, and Gibson-Graham's tabular charting of the various market, alternative market, and nonmarket forms of economic activity, and to apply that mashup to the composition classroom. Right now, I'm planning out how to turn that mashup into an article, and I've gone back to Benkler and re-stumbled across yet another table, on page 43 of The Wealth of Networks. Benkler charts three types of strategies for "Cost Minimization / Benefit Acquisition" across three domains: the public, the intra-organizational (he calls it "intrafirm" but I want to open up that term to more explicitly include noncapitalist or alternative capitalist enterprises), and the semi-private. His three strategies are those of rights-based exclusion (in other words, profiting from copyright and associated strategies), nonexclusion-market (producing information from which to profit, but not via exclusivity), and nonexclusion-nonmarket (e.g., reputation economies and the like). I think Benkler's taxonomy is helpful, particularly in considering the domain/context/scope of activity, and I want to work to map it over Gibson-Graham's and my own subsequent elaborations, but I also think it's somewhat incomplete, particularly in light of Benkler's own work on non-market motivations for information production.
Which is what I'll be working on as soon as I see the light at the end of the end-of-semester forced march.
Computers, Pedagogy, and Priorities
Laptops are useless, technology is the devil, and computers make our students stupid.
Or at least that's what the New York Times would have you think.
Alex Reid, Jenny Edbauer, and Will Richardson have all commented on the NYT's recent piece of slack-jawed mouth-breathing idiocy, non sequiturs, and logical fallacies concerning technology in the classroom. They were rather more charitable than I'm inclined to be.
To be fair, reporter Winnie Hu makes slight attempts to offer balance and critical insight, observing the problems with "how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums" -- but the piece, overall, is a hatchet job; a slimy luddite screed that blames technology for the ways in which it's used and inadvertently highlights just how stupid and reactionary teachers and administrators can be when it comes to computers. In her observation, Hu is quite right: schools throw money at technology, imagining it as a quick fix, without a thought to how it might be used. Unfortunately, the rest of her article completely buys into precisely that mode of thinking, lamenting the vast sums of money expended and the apparent negligible results. In a lame and myopic attempt to indict what she sees as the problems with teaching with laptops, she describes how "Northfield Mount Hermon School, a private boarding school in western Massachusetts, eliminated its five-year-old laptop program in 2002 after it found that more effort was being expended on repairing the laptops than on training teachers to teach with them." Where, one might ask, does the problem with priorities lie?
CCCC07 O.07: Wireless Identities
After this, I've got notes on one more, and that'll be it for this year. As far as process goes, typing up my notes like this helps me figure out what I learned at conferences, and I hope also honors in some way others' work of composing and presenting -- but it's also a way of archiving, of coming back to how others' ideas have shaped my thinking in previous years and tracking how those threads and themes evolve.
This session, "Creating Wireless Identities and Literacy in Higher Education," was of particular interest to me because of the ways my institution has attempted to position itself as a leader in the use of wireless technologies. Several years ago, the Point was recognized for being one of the top "un-wired" institutions in the nation -- and yet in my classroom practice, I see frequent connectivity problems and reluctance on the Cadet side towards bringing their government-issued laptops to class. That resistance is reinforced by some faculty member's distrust of what open and connected laptops might mean in a composition classroom: what if we're not actively surveilling their screens, the worry goes, and they do something other than what we want them to do with their computers? What if our wireless network facilitates a somehow illegitimate backchannel discussion of classroom activities? I came to the session, then, out of particular interest in its subtitle: "How Emerging Technology Changes Institutional, Programmatic, and Classroom Roles."
CCCC07 F30: Self in Online Environments
Quinn Warnick and James Donelan's panel, "The Construction of Self in Online Environments: Helping Students Create and Understand the Virtual Realm," was small but well-attended, and what was perhaps most interesting was the way that discussion afterwards worked to bridge the apparent gulfs in philosophies and approaches. I don't think Warnick and Donelan ever explicitly disagreed with one another, but they were clearly approaching a common theme from divergent perspectives.
Warnick's presentation, "Would Aristotle Link to Wikipedia? The Role of Ethos in a Hypertext Age," began by noting that to speak about Wikipedia is to speak about a moving target, and that Wikipedia's evolving rhetorical ethos led him to continue to revise his presentation and conclusions until the day before he presented. Which sounds like a much better apologia than the unfortunate (and unfortunately common) CCCC confession that one wrote it on the plane -- but in Warnick's case, it certainly wasn't an apologia: his analyses and conclusions were sharp and spot-on. Warnick framed his examination of Wikipedia's ethos and its apparent sourcelessness, its lack of attribution, in the context of the familiar question from Foucault and Beckett: "What does it matter who is speaking?"
CCCC07 I14: Our Uses of
The full title of this panel was "Our Uses of Student Writing: Thinking Critically About Composition Scholarship." Mariolina Salvatori presented first, giving a general overview of the panel as a whole -- she would focus on scholarship, Jennifer Whatley would focus on research, and Richard Parent would focus on student writing in the context of the internet. Salvatori then moved into her portion on scholarship, offering as an introductory condition the assertion that a student text is to composition scholars as a literary text is to literature scholars. The difficulty, however, lies in that literature as a discipline has developed clear (albeit evolving: note the widely ranging reactions to Moretti's work) rules of engagement for literary texts, whereas composition's rules for engagement with student texts are still emerging, ad hoc, in process, to be determined. Furthermore, some of our conventions of engaging student texts are not in line with our theory, and this may indicate our ambivalence about the status writing about students may not grant us.
CCCC07 C.26: Textual Transgressions
Collin Brooke acknowledged at the outset of this panel that there were technological difficulties coordinating this panel's presentations, and the start of the presentations was delayed by six minutes as Collin (the chair) and others worked to overcome those difficulties. The panel's full title was "Textual Transgressions Online: Plagiarism and Fraud in Weblogs and Wikis," and the presenters offered a useful body of insight into the various ways that textual appropriation functions online, and how those various functions of appropriation serve to illuminate our practices and preconceptions surrounding the teaching of writing.
Clancy Ratliff's presentation, "Negotiating and Regulating Plagiarism in Everyday Blogging Practices," began from a personal example: her weblog, CultureCat, has been repeatedly plagiarized, in various and interesting ways. Ratliff has posted a brief recap with slides of her presentation, but I think she's being too modest in the account she gives: as is typical of her work, her presentation was insightful, witty, and focused. The first example of weblog plagiarism she offered came to her via an email that read: "You hv posted a very kewl blog. I have stolen a few things from It just to start with my own blog."