I'm a Tangenteer

When I get rolling -- speaking or writing -- when my thoughts are flowing and my ideas clicking, I go on a lot of tangents. My pal Gita and I dubbed ourselves "tangenteers" in high school. I made sense of things and marshaled arguments by seeing relationships among separate things, and I represented my ideas through associations, tangents.

For my Advanced Comp class, I'm reading Steven Johnson's first book Interface Culture along with my students, and blogging in response to my own blog prompts. Johnson writes about the hyperlink as a revolution in reading, but I see it as a revolution in writing. Let me explain.

Since the Enlightenment, linear argument has been the gold standard of academic and intellectual expression. Associative argument has been characterized as less rigorous and even more primitive in intelligence. Associative argument relies on links, in the world of print, we might think of the informative footnote as an associative link, as something that you want to convey to your reader but that breaks up the linear flow of the argument. Hypertext frees us from that; we can construct our arguments "in a more three-dimensional format--as an array of possible combinations rather than a unified piece" (Johnson 127).

To some, this may sound disorganized and emblematic of lack of thought. I dissent from that view. Writing arguments using links allows me to present multiple dimensions of a point I want to make. I can have the first level text read like a traditional linear argument, with links peppering my text, links that readers can choose to read over or click on. If a reader wants to simply to plow through the linear argument, she can. If, however, she hits an idea in the linear argument that is not clear to her or that she wants to read more about, she can click on the word (if I, the writer, have made it a link). She may then get taken to a two or three page extended definition and history of the idea or concept. Within that two or three page definition, I will have placed six or seven other links to some of my related ideas and to documents written by others who have commented upon the topic. It is like a common place book of old, organized three-dimensionally through links. For a more concrete example of a hypertext argument, you can read a book review that I wrote for the online journal Kairos

Absolute(ly not) PowerPoint

My students have created their blogs this week, and now we are poised to blog together, as it were. In other words, I have asked all of them to respond to a common prompt on their blogs. In the spirit of the late Jim Corder, I will try responding to my own assignments alongside my students. This will either make me look brilliant or stupid; I'm willing to take that risk.

So, this week, I asked them to respond to a nifty little essay called "Absolute PowerPoint" by Ian Parker (it appeared in The New Yorker several years ago); you can find it all over the Internet; here's one link http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/group/powerpt.html

I hadn't read this essay in a few years; the most vivid memory I had of it was a Stanford Professor saying that he did not assign his students Steven Johnson's Interface Culture because he could not PowerPoint it (note the I am using "PowerPoint" as a verb here - ugh!). The memory of that incident has made me abhor that professor and PowerPoint as an educational medium ever since (I have actually never put anything into PowerPoint because of that vivid story).

When I went back a re-read the article, I found a passage that I could really get behind, that I could "believe in," as we have been saying in class, and that encapsulated my distaste for PowerPoint in academia (please note that I am limiting my argument to its use as a teaching tool in higher ed):

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion-an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion-about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize,
how to look at the world.

When Malcolm McLuhan claimed that "the medium is the message" he was arguing that media, especially new media, can influence the ways in which we think about and use information. PowerPoint strikes me as a perfect example. It is not that the medium of PowerPoint is more important than the content of a particular presentation, it is that the medium itself has shaped how we communicate with each other. We even use it as a verb to describe commnication practices (see my comment above). Parker states that PowerPoint "makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world." The medium has impacted the kinds of messages we choose to create. PowerPoint does not accommodate discursivity. Professor Nass eliminated Johnson's book because it was not linear enough!

In higher education, we cannot let the glitzy appeal of PowerPoint force us to give up the instructive tangent and the non-linear text! Parker says the PowerPoint "edits thoughts" by limiting the kinds of arguments that will "fit" into the PowerPoint mold. I don't want the medium editing the thoughts; I want the students editing the thoughts -- their own, mine, and the thoughts of the authors we read.

I'm going to step back now and explicate my own post by describing my writing process and doing a bit of rhetorical analysis of my own text (in an effort to model for my students).

As I was reading the essay, I copied passages that really hit me (positively or negatively) into a Word file. When I finished reading, I went to my file and selected the passage above. Upon re-reading it, it thought of McLuhan's claim. To demonstrate how my "belief" in this passage was shaped, I called upon two other sources: McLuhan's claim (which we talked about earlier this semester) and another passage in Parker's essay about the professor dropping Interface Culture from his syllabus.

I then showed how these three passages connected and made sense for me. I directly quoted one passage from Parker; I summarized the passage about Professor Nass, and I paraphrased McLuhan. In addition to showing readers how I see these ideas connecting, I stuck my neck out and made a mini-argument (PowerPoint has no place in academic instruction).

Now I just need to figure out how to fix the alignment in this post . . .

A Poem for Public Mourners

Well, I feel compelled to post something on 9-11 before midnight strikes. All day, I've been thinking about 9-11 and Katrina (and other well-publicized mass death events), and I've been tinkering with a poem dedicated to the mourners who lost loved ones in such events (and those of you who know me well know that I consider myself among that group). Those of you who know me well know that I also do not consider myself a poet -- I've written about 3 poems in the last decade!

Hard to Mourn

Hard to mourn

in front of a TV camera

Hard to mourn

with every newspaper reporting the death of your loved one in a list, a long, impersonal list

Hard to mourn

when your personal tragedy is part of a public catastrophe

Hard to mourn

when well-meaning people--at a loss for something to say--tell you that it is "God's will"

Hard to mourn

watching armchair psychologists on TV talk shows urging you to come to "closure" when all you want to do is wail.

Darwin's Eyes

In class yesterday, I asked my students how many of them had printed out the 22 page reading assignment and how many of them had read it online. Not surprisingly, most printed it out, but some had read it online.

I told them that I cannot read long texts online because my eyes wig out. I then laid on them my totally non-scientific (but slick sounding) prediction that as online texts become more prevalent, our eyes will physiologically adapt so that we become more adept at online reading.

What think you, neo-Darwinists?

The New Class, the First Week

I set out to use this blog as a place to record my thoughts about teaching the class "Advanced Composition: Writing in Electronic Environments." What I find, though, is that I am a bit reluctant to post my reactions to the first week because my students can access this public writing space.

I'll be brave, I guess . . .

Let me start by saying that I have given my students some big, unanswerable questions, and I am impressed by the fact that several students have stuck their necks out and used the class discussion board as a place to explore unfinished ideas, new thoughts. I know that I am apprehensive about posting my ideas here, so I identify with the students who have done that.

Some students, though, are still getting accustomed to taking a writing class - a class in which their own writing is at the center of the course (at my university, many English majors skip first-year composition and are automatically waived from sophomore composition). So, these bright students are only used to English classes in which they consume text and talk about their roles as readers rather than classes in which they produce texts and talk about their roles as producers.

Symptomatic of this pattern of studenthood, a few students gently resisted putting their own writing at the center of this class. For example, on the second day of class, I shared (without names) some excerpts from the first day's in-class writing. I meant to show the class how smart their thinking was, but one student commented that it was unfair that I shared their writing without warning and out of context. I was genuinely surprised. I made the assumption that they would expect their writing to always be shared in a writing class, but, again, they are still learning to trust the notion of a "writing" class. Also on that second day, I asked the students to post their emerging thoughts on the big question "What is 'text'"? One student quoted Ezra Pound as an answer. While I was certainly impressed with this student's recall of Pound's poetry, I was caught of guard by a student choosing to use the words of a literary figure instead of her/his own. This incident struck me as another example of the students not quite knowing what a writing class is -- not quite understanding that quoting poetry has no real cache in an advanced composition class, at least not nearly as much cache as trying out one's own writing as a heuristic.

I'm hoping to win them over since it is still early in the term. By "win them over," I mean that I hope to co-create an environment where they will want to put their own writing out there, as the object of study. I am hoping to get them to trust themselves as beings who can think through writing.