MLA Boston (January 2013)

“Weaning Isn’t Everything: Beyond Post-Formalism in Composition” (Slide 1)

We live in an era when information has never been cheaper and education has never been more expensive. If we as educators are not adding value, rigor, and focus to our students’ daily experience of consuming fistfuls of bandwidths of data, we run the risk of merely being old and in the way. If we’re not challenging our students to produce as much as they consume on the web, they can be forgiven for bypassingus as antiquated, full-service toll booth attendants guarding an EZ Pass-enabled digital superhighway. (Slide 2)

As college writing teachers, many of us have slowly begun to wean ourselves and our departments from traditional academic and canonical modes and genres and from one-size-fits-all assessments, textbooks and course management systems. Research papers, readers, rubrics, and rigidly arranged curricula are giving way to new options for consuming, producing, evaluating, and exchanging texts. But it’s no longer enough merely to call for a radical revision or outright rejection of the “forms” that formerly surrounded and proscribed our daily work as writing teachers.

As Vince Lombardy might have put it, “Weaning isn’t everything; it’s only the first thing.” (Slide 3)

Together with our students, who are themselves emerging from an era of unremitting formalism, standardization, and scientism, we have the opportunity to go beyond weaning, to dramatize and pass through at least four distinct but recursive stages in our postmodern, post-formalist first-year writing classrooms. We are entering a new world of aggregation, annotation, reflection, and publication.

At last year’s MLA in Seattle, in a session on the rising cost of textbooks, I asked what happens when we as instructors, alongside our students, wean ourselves from relying on the received wisdom and the monological voicesof other textual curators. I described an early version of a“Creating and Curating”assignment (Slide 4), in which students were asked to aggregate and annotate small, focused, sequenced samples from a vast body of texts. They chose, for example (Slide 5), from among thousands of nineteenth-century patents digitized by the Smithsonian Institution, or thousands of Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information black-and-white negatives from the 1930s and 1940s digitized by the Library of Congress, or hundreds of political advertisements at The Living Room Candidate sponsored by the Museum of the Moving Image, or dozens of reels of 1950s and 1960s TV commercials in the Prelinger Archives, or even just items on the Chronicle’s AL Daily feed, to name just a few of the free, open, and widely available collections. First, through low-stakes assignments like scavenger hunts and brief textual comparisons, students weighed the relative merits of their choices and assessed their various uses as course readings. Later, through a more formal proposal, they were encouraged to reflect on and reform our notion of who gets to choose what texts get read in a composition course.

A variation of this assignment I’ve since developed kick-startsthe process with asomewhat more curated digital anthology, such as the Library of Congress American Memory Project (Slide 6), or the essays responding to the annual question at Edge.org(Slide 7), or the excellent multi-volume collection, Writing Spaces, edited by Charlie Lowe and Pavel Zemlianski (Slide 8), or the Tumblr site accompanying Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede’s new Norton composition textbook, Everyone’s an Author(Slide 9), or my own forthcoming Flat World book, Open for Knowledge(Slide 10), or a DIY collection cribbed from the library’s academic databases that our students are already paying for through their tuition and fees. It doesn’t really matter where you start; it’s where you end up that counts.

The point of the assignment is to avoid the proscription and prescription of an ever-expanding universe of texts and textuality into a bound and determined "collection.” If we are really about teaching digital literacy, we cannot afford to remove an essential piece of an emerging college student's toolkit as a writer and reader: annotative aggregation. Drawing from open, digital learning resources instead of static, print textbooks is a powerfully strategic first step for encouraging first-year writing students to do what they’re always already doing when they’re not acting like students – to aggregate, annotate, and curate vast assortments of digital texts, to reflect on their reading and on the manner in which knowledge is socially constructed. Essentially, agreeing to meet students where they live -- in the fungible, slippery world of socially mediated textuality -- puts their “Tumblr” feed through a necessary academic spin cycle.

We have, of late, begun to move beyond the kind of scavenger hunt I described last year into more sophisticated textual play that is nonetheless inspired by that first, liberating step. I’ve spent another year in my face-to-face and online classrooms watching that weaning process evolve in the absence of a stable, predetermined anthology of readings, and I’m here today to bring back a report from the field.

I’ve learned over the past year that once a collection has been collaboratively established by, with, and for my students, it’s important to share it publicly and digitally. Last year, I had reached the point of at least having students publish their annotated collections to our course wiki (more on that development in a bit), but I had not yet found a way to close the reading loop. In the past year, I’ve been able to road-test a free product, Classroom Salon, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, to do just that. Here (Slide 11) you cansee what a class of students can do with Salon’s powerful tools for social annotation, and what I can do with the analytics Salon provides me. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I’ve had the most success using Salon in my distance education classes, where students report a much higher sense of connectedness as they are able to see exactly which passages in a given text their classmates find the most interesting. Naturally, I have a nearly panoptical view of my students’ reading processes, the likes of which I’d never have had in a traditional classroom, unless I had asked students to turn in their anthologies at the door so I could inspect their marginalia (which sounds vaguely obscene anyway). Now I’m able to zero in on the most vexing passages based on what the analytics (Slide 12) are telling me, as I conduct flipped, follow-up discussions online instead of posting prefab lectures or study guides. It’s not quite a MOOC, since we’re talking about only twenty students, but it’s most certainly not a “MOTE” (to borrow Cathy Davidson’s playful acronym for MOOCs’ obverse: “Massively Outdated Traditional Education”).

Doing something as simple as moving from a traditional, top-down “course management system” to a ground-up course wiki can also kick start this process. Regardless of the platform (Wiki Spaces, PB Wiki, Weebly, Google Sites, or whatever), a wiki allows you to subject your course documents to frequent revision in collaboration with your students, and more important, it invites a space for your students to publish their work. This practice of using a wiki began for me as a strategy for creating a user-friendly platform for students to publish their annotated mini-anthologies, but it has now evolved into the default medium for submission of student work. My students no longer submit any of their essays directly to me; they publish them to collaboratively designed pages on the wiki we’ve come to call weblications.

In these examples, you’ll see how the idea developed over the last couple of semesters. Central to the concept is the “editorial board session” where we collectively agree on the voice, audience, message, tone, attitude, intended reception, and overall design for the particular issue of the weblication (Slide 13). Students are then expected to write individual essays that can find a comfortable home in the collective weblication, to create a page on the wiki for their essay, to write a fifty-word blurb advertising it, and then to link from the main weblication page to their essay. Some weblications have been more tightly focused than others – everything from a collection of web presence analyses by an imaginary company (as in “Webremedy” (Slide 14) or “Turnaround” (Slide 15)) to a special issue of a general interest student magazine (which we called “Web 2.0 Decade 2.0” (Slides 16-17)).(Some of the blurbs students composed for their essays appear here and in the hand-out). It’s interesting to note that despite their digital structure, weblications seem particularly well suited to a face-to-face environment, because of the value of the rhetorical haggling that goes on in that editorial board session.

So what do these strategies for annotation, aggregation, reflection and publication in the wake of weaning have in common? What apple carts are they upsetting? Student selection and curation of textual artifacts certainly flies in the face of the received, pre-chewed, and digested “essay canon” described by Lynn Z. Bloom in a 1999 College English article. Annotations of the type encouraged by Sheridan Blau a decade ago in The Literature Workshop, in his version produced with pens and kept in notebooks, but now publicly and digitally shared and socially constructed on Classroom Salon, challenge the traditional anthology’s top-down apparatus of glosses, headnotes, and lectures from experts. Student publication of essays on a shared, collaboratively designed web space, actually a sort of return to the heyday of the “classroom newspaper” era of the 1970sand ‘80s, subverts the “submission” model of the Turnitin.com and Digital Dropbox culture that transfers control and ownership of student texts to instructors and institutions. Above all, these strategies requireoriginal digital production from students accustomed to recycled digital consumption, giving them good reason to stop by our full-servicerhetorical toll booths after all (Slide 18).

Resources (in order of appearance) (Slide 19)

Smithsonian Patents:

(Search Term: Patents)

Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Negatives:

1952-2012 Presidential Political Ads:

Prelinger Archives:

Arts & Letters Daily:

American Memory Project:

Edge Annual Questions:

Writing Spaces: An Open Textbook Project

Companion Tumblr Site to Everyone’s An Author

Open for Knowledge: The Flat World Knowledge Reader for Writers

Classroom Salon

PB Works