Poet Ponders the Digital

Should we teach our digital composition students the "tricks of the trade" for bloggers and other new media publishers? The ancient texts on rhetoric discuss proper attire, gestures, and tone of voice to appeal to audiences. Aren't these almost as shallow as writing the best headline to drive traffic to an online post? Clearly our Greek and Roman ancestors understood that the superficial (nice robes, deep voice) was part of the persuasive art. We tell our students to focus on the quality of their arguments, while blogging, reporting, and scholarly writing fades fast on the Web of today. The great World Wide Web that was going to bring information to everyone is one giant magazine rack, thanks to Facebook and Twitter. Short headlines, ideally implying something sexual in nature, drive traffic. Shocking. Horrible. You won't believe your eyes. From the Huffington Post to old-stalwarts like The Atlantic, clickbait headlines dominate the flow of information (as op...

Like most educators interested in technology and pedagogy, I have followed the digital revolution down many dead-end paths. We want to believe in publishing (and sharing) for the masses, but I'm less convinced today than I was twenty years ago that the masses want to share serious ideas. The masses want to share kitties, their latest meals, breaking celebrity gossip, and photos they will regret sharing almost as soon as the images enter the data stream. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. I have five semi-active Blogger-based blogs. My wife and I have a less active writing blog. I have Facebook pages for the blogs, Twitter feeds, and two Tumblr accounts. The traffic to the blogs is in decline, from thousands of weekly visits to a few hundred. The Facebook pages are also trailing off, as Facebook seeks to charge for promoting content. Twitter just annoys me, with an endless stream of automated tweets. I do have one account from which I follow real people posting real,...

Selected Bibliography Some texts either specifically or indirectly on the history of education and education theory (pedagogy) that have influenced me. The list is exported from my Bookends database, so there might be some formatting errors. I am trying to clean up my database, but I have several thousand books in the system (and on my shelves). Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures : Refiguring College English Studies . Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition. West Lafayette, Ind.: Parlor Press, 2003. Corbett, Edward P. J., Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate. The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook . 4th ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 0195123778 (alk. paper) Cuban, Larry. The Blackboard and the Bottom Line : Why Schools Can't Be Businesses . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. ---. How Scholars T...

The word "community" is overused in academic fields, but it is the best word for what it on my mind today. I closed a Web server this week on which I had created a Drupal and MediaWiki site on special education. The site was functional for about two years, which is an eternity online. The reality is that online communities come and go so rapidly that what was popular a year or two ago is often "inactive" now. There are dozens of Yahoo groups that are dedicated to special education. Most of these were active five years ago, but have since fallen out of favor with users. Just as the Usenet groups and most "listservs" have faded away in the last five years, so have many online forums. The Internet has accelerated the speed with which a community grows, propers, and then declines. The timeline of the Internet is punctuated by technologies and business ideas that were "hot" for a moment. When is the last time you used IRC or read a newsgroup? Remember...

While working on the research for my dissertation, I have read page after page on writing pedagogy asserting that the goal of a university writing course should be to teach students that knowledge is socially constructed and that "truth" is relative to culture and community. The problem with this assertion is that students with autism and similar conditions (my scrambled brain, apparently), are not relativists. Various researchers (Wellcome 2008, Frith 2001) have found that individuals with these conditions are more logical, unaffected by emotional inputs or rhetorical framing. I've found quite a bit of research on this aspect of brain trauma and autism and am including these findings in my dissertation. If a group of people are "wired" to think there is a "truth" -- that knowledge is not created but discovered and then applied creatively -- who are educational theorists to consider such people "immature" or "simple-minded" in s...

I am currently dealing with three major projects: Completing my dissertation. Applying for 2010 positions Finishing home renovations. The middle task, quite literally sandwiched between the other two in my daily life, is one of the most difficult for any person. I tell my students that career changes -- including starting a career -- are always difficult. The likelihood of rejection, at least a few times, is quite high. It is emotionally draining to hunt for work. To be in the job market along with my students will be interesting. It should remind me of the challenges they face. Portfolios are common for my students. Many have studied fashion design, architecture, or landscape horticulture. They need to present evidence of their projects to prospective employers. I also have to present evidence of my work as a graduate student, teacher, and writer. The portfolio will be something of a shared experience, this year. I'm not yet sure if a digital portfolio will be ...

Responding to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004): 1) What should we be teaching as composition? (p. 110) I do not spend much time on Web design (HTML, CSS) because those technologies will change within a year or two. Rhetorical thought, however, is a skill that can be applied for both analysis of existing material or synthesis of new. Thinking strategically is a portable skill. 2) I truly despise the "creativity" of making blocks of text non-columnar (113). It is painful to read as it is, so why make it any more difficult? If this were poetry, I would be forgiving — poetry is condensed meaning. This is not poetry. It is a mockery of poetry and creativity to have a scholarly article make pretense of creativity. Bluntly, the blocks serve no purpose in this text. They do not move me emotionally, they merely annoy me as a reader of a dense text. If you want to be poetic be poetic, but this is not even prosaic. It's silliness. 3) I a...