Among the students who participated in the Stanford Study of Writing, which followed 189 Stanford undergrads through five years, were a number of computer science students, and I had a chance to interview several of these students multiple times.  One student in particular made the case, over and over, that computer coding was a form of writing; in fact, this student spoke at a CCCC meeting about how the two are related.  That was over a decade ago, and the years since have seen a concerted “learn to code” or “coding for all” movement in the United States, and I’ve been thinking about what this movement may mean for teachers of writing everywhere.  Annette Vee, who teaches in the rhetoric and composition program at Pittsburgh and is a leader in the CCCC Caucus on Intellectual Property, has written extensively about the relationship among coding, writing, and literacy (see her article “Understanding Computer Programming as a Literacy”). She has also written a book, Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing the Terms of Writing, which is, I think, forthcoming from MIT Press. Vee reviews the history of the “learn to code” movement and connects that history to major studies in literacy and its history, arguing that understanding and exploring the history and practices of writing and reading can be of help in understanding computer coding (or programming) today. Viewing literacy in this new way, she argues, makes literacy a much broader concept and adds to the range of communication practices available to students. I found Vee’s arguments provocative and engaging and even-handed, especially in recognizing that literacy (and computer programming) have both liberatory and repressive potential.  (In other words, she is no starry-eyed enthusiast, either for writing or coding; rather, she seeks to contextualize both in ways that will be mutually illuminating.)  Yet she is persuasive in arguing that the ability to code gives access to a crucial form of literacy, and she understands what is at issue in that concept of access. Just as access to traditional literacy was long denied to certain groups of people, so access to the potentialities of coding are denied (directly or indirectly) to many, including women and people of color.  (Adam Banks examines issues of access in his Race, Rhetoric, and Technology). I have only the most minimal, rudimentary ability to program--one reason I am so interested in Vee’s work and want to understand what it means to include coding in what we label “literacy” today.  I agree with Vee that “We need to understand how programming shapes our composition and communication environments.”  She goes on to say that These are powerful and important questions, and we need robust answers to them.  That will mean, I think, that writing teachers everywhere now need to understand how programming works and be at least minimally able to program themselves—so that we can make sure that all of our students have access to such abilities.  As Vee says, “Because programming is intertwining itself with writing in our composition environments . . . it appears to be changing what it means to be literate in the 21 st century.”  During my 50 years in the field, I have watched our understanding of “literacy” expand and shift, and it is certainly doing so again.  I have also, more than once (!), had to start at ground zero in learning new material and new skills.  In fact, it seems to me that teachers of writing have had to make such leaps to acquire new knowledge much more than teachers of other disciplines. So I have confidence that we can and will make this latest leap:  in fact, many writing teachers have already done so and they serve as an inspiration for me.  In the meantime, I am grateful for scholars like Annette Vee for leading the way. ... View more

Just to take a break from politics for a moment—deep breath now—I thought I'd return to a popular cultural subject that looks to be completely meaningless, but isn't. And if the subject isn't particularly compelling, the point is that in teaching popular cultural semiotics, it behooves us to show just how significant the most trivial things can be. So without more ado, let me return to a subject I tackled a few years ago on the Bits blog site: running shoes. At that time I focused on what was then a new fad in the industry: the minimalist running shoe. Minimalist shoes sought to recreate the sensation of running barefoot, the attraction of which was that barefoot running forces a runner to land on his or her forefoot when running, rather than heel striking. The idea was that with less material (especially less cushioning) built into the shoe, a runner would avoid landing on that unprotected heel and toe strike instead. The advantage of this is that toe striking puts much less strain on the knee than heel striking does, and thus can help avoid the almost inevitable knee injuries that not only hobble runners but eventually become so serious that they have to quit running for good. On top of this, the minimalist shoes were celebrated for the fine feel of the ground they afforded, thus helping avoid falls and promoting trail running stability. What struck me at the time was that I was already a toe striker and I certainly didn't need to buy a special product to get myself to run in a biomechanically sensible manner. Minimalist shoes were not only unnecessary, they were a bad buy because they not only do not provide the kind of protection that a middle-aged runner really needs, they also wear out very quickly due to their rather flimsy construction. This mattered because, as the latest sneeze in running technology, minimalist shoes were very expensive. Thinking as a semiotician, however, rather than as a runner, I realized that the minimalist running shoe fad is a signifier of a consumer society, a sign of the way that rather than disciplining themselves, Americans tend to choose consumer goods to perform the discipline for them. Consumption über alles. But that was then, as they say, and this is now. And I am looking at the brand new Spring 2016 edition of the RoadRunner Sports catalog. And guess what? There is page after page of shoes promising to "Crank your cushion way up!" And "Attack daily runs in plush support." And "Get effortless, cruise control, cushion and support." And "Get out the door more in awesome cushion!" And "Get hooked on cutting-edge cushion!" Get the picture? Clearly running shoes have done a 180, going from minimalist to maximalist. The minimalist shoes are now mostly all on clearance, making way for the running shoe equivalent of a trampoline. The game changer here is the Hoka One One ™ line of running shoes. Originally designed for older runners, the Hoka shoes are massively cushioned, providing the kind of support that aging legs need. All the major brands are making them now, and they look like just the sort of thing for me. Except that there's a hitch. Because when I "test drove" a pair of Hokas I found that while they have a lot of cushioning all right, they have so much, and in all the wrong places, that I can't toe strike with such contraptions at all. Rocking my feet backward towards the heel, they at once force heel striking while perching me so far off the ground on a mound of "plush" that they practically guarantee that I will twist my ankles on rocky mountain trails. So if I bought a pair, it would only be a question of which injury struck first: a disastrous ankle sprain, or wrecked knees from heel striking. OK, enough with the running shoe review and on to the semiotics. What has happened here is once again a signifier of a consumer society. The whole thing is like planned obsolescence, or the annual changes in the fashion industry: the new product is designed to make consumers think that what they have isn't good enough and they must run out and buy the new fashion. So you get these pendulum swings—in this case from minimalist to maximalist running shoes. But wait, it's not just running shoes. Haute couture's glamorous runways this year are filled with baggy, even tent-like replacements for the skinny jeans of not-so-yore, a pendulum swing that has already reached the masses by way of such Spring fashions as J. Jill's new line of "Chino Full Leg" pants. Goodbye skinny, hello baggy . . .once again. The solution to the situation is simple: ignore the fads and go with what works for you. And buy it on sale. ... View more

In my last post I highlighted a legal conflict related to technology in the standoff between Apple and the FBI regarding iPhone security.  In this post, I thought I would highlight more of the readings in Emerging useful for discussing technology, especially the many new ones we’ve added. It’s a particular challenge to include readings about technology in a textbook simply because technology changes fast and textbooks don’t. It’s not a problem with a ready solution, though our approach all along in assembling Emerging has been to select readings with ideas since those are more likely to persist as technology evolves. For this edition, in addition to the readings about video and photography I discussed in Emerging 3.0: Thinking about Photography,  we have four new readings that discuss some of the issues around technology in our world today.  Chuck Klosterman’s “Electric Funeral,” for example, examines the inexorable pull of futurity in relation to notions of villainy, specifically examining two controversial figures, Kim Dotcom and Julian Assange. Klosterman is a wonderfully engaging writer who draws from his work as the ethicist for The New York Times Magazine. The reading is very approachable while prompting students to unpack the notion of “villainy” in relation to technology. Maria Konnikova’s “How Many Friends Can We Have?” is similarly approachable, with some good concepts and ideas that students can test through their own lives. Konnikova investigates the applicability of the Dunbar number to social media. The Dunbar number, proposed by anthropologist and psychologist Robin Dunbar, suggests that there are very particular limits to the numbers of friends we can have, a fact challenged (or perhaps confirmed) by social media.  I love the way Konnikova applies this concept to technology, and love, too, that students can perform their own evaluation of the continued relevance of this concept by browsing through their friends lists on social media. Hanna Rosin, in “Why Kids Sext,” similarly examines the intersections of technology and youth culture but with a darker twist. Rosin explores a recent teen sexting scandal from Virginia to highlight not simply the challenges of growing up in today’s world but also the startling ways in which our laws have not kept pace with either technology or culture.  Finally, Graeme Wood’s “Reinventing College” is a great essay for students as well, as it examines one possible future for higher education: the online university. As with Konnikova and Rosin, Wood’s essay offers a great entry point for students since, as students, they can speak to higher education from very grounded experience. These essays join others from previous editions, including not only Peter Singer but also Bill Wasik and Richard Restak to offer you a number of ways to help students think critically about technology in the world and in their lives.  I hope you will check them out. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

I had a hard time deciding on the title for this piece. Most of the ideas that came to me seemed a bit too bitter: Making Students Read the Directions I'm Tired of Searching for Student Work There for a Reason: Please Use the Rubric No, Really, You Should Follow the Instructions These alternatives definitely communicate my frustration. No matter what I try, I cannot seem to communicate assignment requirement to students effectively. Either because I’m doing something wrong or they aren’t paying attention, students end up missing key aspects of their assignments. The Problem of Missing Information and Materials Let me give you an example. I require reflection comments with the major projects that students submit. The comments are like those that might appear in a draft letter. They tell me about the audience and purpose, anything the student wants me to notice or comment on, and so forth. The reflection comments are meant to give me some framing information on the project before I grade it and to ask the student to do some self-assessment and reflection. I have tried everything to get students to all include these comments: I have told them that they help me grade their work by giving me useful information. I have tried to frame it from their perspective by telling them that it's their chance to help me understand their writing choices and strategies. I have explained that the comments are worth 10 points of their grade on the project. I have said, “You are throwing easy points away if you skip this part of the assignment.” I have added big pull-quotations in the assignment and submission instructions to remind them to add them (shown in the image above). Recently, it feels like the only thing I haven’t tried is interpretive dance. Nothing is 100% effective. There are always a few students who don’t include the comments. I suppose I could live with that situation. If students cannot read and follow directions, they should get lower grades. The problem is that I have similar problems with the required elements listed in writing assignments and rubrics, too. Currently, students are working on WordPress portfolio sites, and they are required to include some specific content on their sites (e.g., an About page, two blog posts, two writing samples). The details on these requirements are included in the assignment, demonstrated in class, part of the peer review activities, and listed in the rubric. Despite all that, there are students who fail to include all of the elements. Even when I provide submission checksheets, portions are still missing for some students. Restructuring Student Submissions As I was setting up submission for the project last week, I decided something had to change. In the last month, I read somewhere about the value of asking students to fill out the rubric for their own work before submitting it. I’ve forgotten the source, but the idea is that students reflect on the work and assess it themselves. The teacher then uses each student’s rubric to frame the comments and grade on the work. I like that idea, but logistically I haven’t found a way for students to fill out the rubric for their own work in Canvas, our CMS. After some thinking and experimenting, I decided to try something completely different. In the case of these WordPress portfolios, I previously used the Assignment tool in Canvas and asked students to give me (1) the link to the homepage of the portfolio, and (2) their reflection comments. I can only ask for those two things because of the limitations of the tool. I realized that I needed something that let me ask a series of questions and that would still let students upload files if needed. I decided that the Quiz tool in Canvas might be the solution. I took the rubric for the WordPress Portfolios and converted each requirement into a question in the quiz. In the case of this project, there are a lot of elements that students need to include on their sites, so I asked students to provide me the direct URL to each element. Not only does this process force them to check that they have the required elements on their sites, but it should also simplify the grading process for me since I won’t have to look for the elements or guess what they intend each page to count as. To help students, I created a WordPress Portfolio Worksheet with all the submission questions, so that they can gather their answers before opening the Quiz tool in Canvas. I haven’t had a chance to get much feedback on this new system from students. They may hate it. First impressions seemed good though. When I went over the system in class, there was a lot of nodding, more than normal. Maybe I’m on to something. I will have to let you know once I have a chance to grade their work and ask them their opinions. How do you use rubrics and checklists to ensure students meet all the requirements for an assignment? What works for you? How do you get around the limitations of your CMS? Share your strategies in the comments below. I would love to hear from you. ... View more

Today's guest blogger is Amanda Gaddam (see end of post for bio). Social media represents a large percentage of the reading and writing that first-year students do outside of the classroom, so it makes sense to acknowledge and even take advantage of it inside of the classroom. In my DePaul WRD 102 Basic Writing course, we use Instagram throughout the quarter to document various stages of their writing processes in unique and interesting ways, to provide a centerpiece of an in-depth rhetorical analysis project in the middle of the term, to facilitate conversations about audience, context, and purpose, and to create a multimodal final reflective essay with their course ePortfolios.  For basic writers in particular, using Instagram to create a gallery of their writing successes and challenges throughout the quarter has proved especially beneficial in boosting the amount of evidence and analysis final reflections. Background reading The following handbook sections provide useful questions for not only writing a final reflection for an online platform such as Digication, but also for selecting content and captions for photos taken throughout the quarter: Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: Ch.3a: Plan online assignments The Everyday Writer: Ch.24: Communicating in Other Media The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 18: Communicating in Other Media Writing in Action: Ch. 4: A Writer’s Choices EasyWriter: Ch. 1c-1g in A Writer's Choices The Assignment: We Did It for the ‘Gram 1. I ask students to create an Instagram account (if they don’t already have one) and post at least five pictures with a hashtag unique to our class.  Most students have an Instagram account prior to my class, and those who don’t are able to sign up in less than two minutes.  Some students choose to create second Instagram accounts rather than post school-centered images to their personal or private accounts. I try not to give too many instructions about the content of their pictures; rather, I encourage students to think about their own writing processes—their challenges, habits, strategies, and resources—in order to take photos that reveal new or tacit knowledge about how they approach writing tasks. And, in the interest of fairness, I post photos to Instagram using the hashtag, too. 2. I engage the class in informal reflections and discussions in class about their rhetorical choices for composition, content, and editing.  By midterm week, students are required to have at least two photos posted to their Instagram accounts so that we have something to reflect on and talk about in class (weekly reminders to take pictures help students remember and meet this deadline). I ask students to bring in their photos, either in print or digitally, for a free write about rhetorical choices—why they chose to capture that particular moment, as well as the intended rhetorical effects of chosen filters, compositions, editing, and captions.  The results of the free writing jumpstart a discussion about cultivating personas, audience, and exigence.  3. I introduce the final reflection assignment about two weeks before the end of the quarter. As far as final reflection assignments go, my reflective essay prompt is fairly standard—I ask students to think about new strategies that they tried throughout the quarter, the challenges they faced as writers, and progress toward personal goals or course learning outcomes. I encourage them to use the Instagram photos they have taken over the quarter as evidence of the activities or processes they discuss in their essays because as we’ve no doubt discussed by this point in the term, evidence is crucial to support their claims.  4. I use a reflection worksheet to help students connect the actions or strategies depicted in the pictures to the course learning outcomes and their ongoing development as writers and students. Effective reflective writing is challenging; asking students to talk about the past often elicits simple reports of tasks they’ve accomplished rather than in-depth discussions on how they accomplished those tasks and what they’ll take away from the experiences.  To help students think about past, present, and future in their reflections, I ask them to complete the following worksheet in class: What you did How you did it Learning outcome Future applications I have students fill out the two columns on their own and talk to a partner to discover learning outcomes that the experiences can map onto and future applications for the knowledge or skills they have acquired.  5. Students write and present final reflections and their Instagram galleries to showcase the writing strategies they employed throughout the quarter. Digication ePortfolios are required of all students in every first-year writing course at DePaul, so students have the means and opportunity to create a multimodal reflective essay that informs the rest of their showcased work.  Most students choose to use the photo gallery function available on Digication, which allows viewers to scroll through the photos and read accompanying captions. Students' Images Below are some examples of photos taken by my students (and me). View more images on Instagram with #depaulwrd102. Reflection This assignment is an easy way to start talking about multimodality in the classroom because the platform is free and most students are experts walking into the classroom, which means they have a lot to say from the very beginning! Analyses of Instagram photos come naturally to most students, and they have very little trouble understanding how images can be read as texts. Finally, as a result of this assignment and the associated class activities, I have received some truly introspective and evidence-based reflections that were mostly free of report-like language and superficial appeals to my vanity as a teacher. Asking students to use their own images to reflect on their writing gets them thinking about how writing and media can complement, inform, and even complicate each other. Guest blogger Amanda Gaddam is an adjunct instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the School for New Learning at DePaul University. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Literary Studies and a M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with a concentration in Teaching Writing and Language from DePaul, and her research interests include first-year composition, adult and non-traditional students, and writing center pedagogies. ... View more

This post originally published in Bedford Bits in 2013. The fundamental principle of popular cultural semiotics is that everything can bear some sort of social significance.  And that means everything.  Yes, even running shoes. Take the current barefoot/minimalist running shoe fad (I'm not sure if it is sufficiently entrenched to be called a trend yet).  The fad in question involves the explosively popular shoes that either look like some sort of foot glove (with a separate compartment for each toe), or which appear to be more or less conventional in looks but use much less cushioning and other material than ordinary running shoes.  The former variety includes the Vibram FiveFingers shoe, while the latter includes the Merrell Sonic Glove Barefoot runner.  The whole thing really got started with the publication of a book called Born to Run (2009), which focused on the barefoot running prowess of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, and you can learn a good deal about it all at http://runningshoes.com/barefoot-running. Now, on the face of it the barefoot running phenomenon would seem to have a purely functional significance, based upon the fact that the Tarahumara Indians are apparently able to run effortlessly for hundreds of miles barefoot and without injury. Furthermore, after decades of running shoe technology developments that have enhanced the cushioning and support of conventional running shoes, recent research suggests that all that cushioning and support causes runners to run in such a way that their heels strike the ground first in their running stride (this is called "heel striking"), and that this kind of stride puts great stress on the knee and ankle joints, causing injuries.  The "barefoot" technology shoes, on the other hand, are designed to force a toe-striking stride, which may be a less injury-prone running style. But there's more to all this than simply the physiology of running and the functionality of shoes, for looked at semiotically these new shoes are signs as much as they are athletic gear. First, then, there is what we can call the "Noble Savage" angle.  Since the eighteenth-century romanticization of the aboriginal peoples contacted in the age of European exploration, the "Noble Savage" has been an emblem, for such writers as Rousseau, of a prelapsarian innocence that European civilization has lost.  Reflecting more of a European mythology than a human reality, the "Noble Savage" is a construct not unrelated to such gestures as Marie Antoinette's donning of simple peasant clothing.  The Tarahumara Indians serve as "Noble Savages" in this sense, conferring upon running shoes their aura of a prelapsarian innocence. A corollary to the "Noble Savage" significance of barefoot running shoes is their "green" appeal.  Using less material than a conventional running shoe, barefoot/minimalist runners would appear to use fewer resources and thus be more sustainable than the ordinary, beefed up variety. Now, I'm all for green technology, and I am no cheerleader for European-style civilization, but as a runner and a semiotician I know that there is something a little funny about all this. First of all, the "Noble Savage" bit has always been condescending, and it is no less so today with the barefoot running movement's use of the Tarahumara Indians.  Living in primitive conditions for generations, they have developed the kind of hardened feet that can run without protection not because they are purer but because they have historically had no other options.  They also run on natural trails without glass and nails and other foot-cutting stuff (this is why few "barefoot" runners in the U.S. actually run barefoot: minimalist running shoes are supposed to protect the foot from such things).  One wonders how the Tarahumara would perform if they had modern running shoes to run with. Beyond this is the fact (which I know from personal experience) that there are barefoot running-specific injuries that occur when one strikes too far up on one's toes—which is what running barefoot running shoes are designed to compel.  Painful calf injuries often result, contradicting the claim that barefoot running is all good. As for the possible claim that minimalist running shoes are more ecologically friendly, well, not quite.  Using less material they wear out much faster than conventional running shoes, and must be replaced every few months if heavily used, leading to the consumption of more resources in the long run (pun intended), not less. And finally there is a particularly American consumerist angle to all this.  For the fact is, as I know from my own experience, that you can discipline yourself to run in such a way that your foot strikes the ground in an optimum fashion without requiring any special sort of shoe.  Indeed, the best balance for aging knees and ankles like mine is a nicely cushioned and supportive shoe combined with a foot strike that lands between the arch and the ball of the foot.  I do not need to buy a special shoe to force me to run this way—indeed, a minimalist shoe would force me to strike too high up on my toes and really mess up my calf muscles in no time (I know: I've tried barefoot running). So here is the point: the barefoot/minimalist running shoe fad signifies within the context of a larger consumer system whereby Americans tend to prefer products and gimmicks that promise to do their work for them, rather than making an effort on their own.  Whether it is the "toning shoe" (also originally based on a kind of back-to-nature claim) that claims to exercise your body even when you are not really exercising, or the endless weight loss programs and pills that promise slim bodies without effort or discomfort, Americans like to buy results in the consumer marketplace rather work for them.  Purchasing an expensive barefoot running shoe (they are priced at a premium) rather than training yourself to run with a healthier stride is a part of this phenomenon.  No one is really being more natural or green or aboriginal by choosing one shoe over another, and unless you have a nice smooth turf to run on, it isn't very healthy to run barefoot.  The aura of naturalness and health associated with minimalist running shoes is a matter of image, not function, a sign rather than a substance. ... 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Assignment instructions for Living Burkean Activity for a Social Sciences Writing Unit. For more, see Roy Stamper​'s post Low-Stakes Kinesthetic Activities for the First-Year Writing Classroom. ... View more

Assignment instructions for HIIT Activity for a Business Writing Unit. For more, see Roy Stamper​'s post Low-Stakes Kinesthetic Activities for the First-Year Writing Classroom. ... View more

Assignment instructions for Paper Airplanes Activity for a Sciences Writing Unit. For more, see Roy Stamper​'s post Low-Stakes Kinesthetic Activities for the First-Year Writing Classroom. ... View more

Assignment instructions for Rhetorical Infomercial Activity for a Humanities Writing Unit. For more, see Roy Stamper​'s post Low-Stakes Kinesthetic Activities for the First-Year Writing Classroom. ... View more

Recently I had an opportunity to speak to a group of two-year college writing teachers in Texas. The topic very much on their minds: guns in their classrooms.  As I learned, the Texas legislature has passed a new law, which takes effect this coming August.  Here’s what it says: (You can read more at http://www.armedcampuses.org/texas/.  This site also has a petition to keep guns off campuses.) The teachers I talked with are enormously concerned about this new law and what it will mean for their teaching and for their students’ learning.  More than a few of them described “training” they are taking to help them prepare for and deal with the new law:  they are warned to “be very careful” not to introduce topics that might upset students.  And if a shooter appears in their classes, they are to face the shooter and shield their students.  Of course we talked about other things—primarily about how to help all of our students develop into confident and competent writers. But these conversations about guns in classrooms are what have stuck in my mind.  Every. Single. Day.  Many teachers I spoke with seemed fearful but resigned:  “This is Texas,” they said.  Maybe so, but I came away thinking about the havoc this new law can have:  we all know that college students are at a vulnerable time in their lives, that many of them are suffering from anxiety and depression. Research also shows that college-age students’ brains have not fully developed, especially in the area controlling split-second decisions.  These facts make having guns in classrooms seem counterproductive, at the very best. In addition, this law is almost certainly going to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and on one of the foundations of higher education:  the opportunity to encounter ideas across the spectrum, including those that may be difficult to understand or accept.  I am fortunate to have taught at a university without guns, and I hope that will continue to be the case.  What I would like to do, though, is join a national movement of teachers, especially those who teach on campuses where guns are allowed in class, to declare that we will not teach in an atmosphere of grave danger. Arriving at the Bush International Airport in Houston on my journey home, I was met by a large red sign on the outside door:  Would I meet a person carrying a concealed licensed firearm?  In fact, I did not—at least not that I know of—but I was more cautious than usual.  It was a long day, and I hated concentrating on people with guns rather than thinking about students and their learning. ... View more

I wanted to take a quick break from our tour of the third edition of Emerging to discuss how to teach the current controversy between Apple and the FBI.  As I write this post, the standoff between the two continues, with the FBI attempting to force Apple into helping them to gain access to the iPhone belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook, whose shooting spree killed over a dozen people in San Benardino, and Apple resolutely refusing to cooperate. To provide students some background on the issues involved, you might ask them to read the letter from Apple CEO Tim Cook, which stakes out Apple’s position and its perception of what’s at stake, as well as the statement from FBI Director James Comey, which presents the FBI’s position on the matter.  These two documents are useful texts for analysis in and of themselves, played out as they are on national media stages.  And it’s also useful for students to consider the ways in which the specific positions of each side have been managed, marketed, repackaged, and flattened into simplistic questions of privacy and security. Emerging does offer a fantastic reading to help students explore this issue: Peter Singer’s “Visible Man; Ethics in a World without Secrets.” Singer’s essay has a bit of theoretical weight to it, opening with Bentham’s notion of the Panopticon and invoking the concept of “sousveillance” as well.  At the heart of Singer’s essay, though, is the question of privacy in relation to changing technology and questions of security—the very questions at the heart of the Apple v. FBI debate.  For Singer, the solution to some of these issues is for the watched to watch the watchers.  WikiLeaks is his example in that case.  And while that probably isn’t a solution in this current case, Singer’s thinking nevertheless foregrounds these vital issues and offers students tools to think through the complexities. Give it a try.  I think you’ll find it works great. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Last week, I discussed The Logistics of Online Discussions, how I set up discussions and why I use the techniques that I do, in response to a question from a colleague in South Carolina. Even the most perfect technology and logistics fail if you do not ask the right questions, though. That’s why this week I turn my focus to the prompts I use for online discussions. Using the Discussions for Introductions I usually begin each course with an assignment that asks students to write biographical profiles. Students post their work in the online forum so that everyone in the class can read everyone else’s profile. One of my underlying goals for the Professional Bio Assignment Professional Bio Assignmentis to help students build community. Without this activity, students only see one another’s names in the discussion forum. I hope they will learn a bit more about each other, and they can look back to read more details later as they discuss other topics. Using the Discussions for Peer Review I ask students to post their rough drafts for their major projects in the discussion forum as well. Canvas has a slick feature that assigns partners for peer review, so I can automatically arrange peer review with little effort on my part. Before Virginia Tech adopted Canvas, I used a strategy that Bedford/St. Martin's Nick Carbone Nick Carbonetaught me: I instruct students to look through the forum and provide feedback to one student whom no one has replied to and a reply to another student who has received only one response. Responses from me don’t count. This process works smoothly, too. The additional benefit of having the peer review work done in the online forum is that all the students in the course have access to all of the drafts that have been turned in. Seeing how 21 other people have completed an assignment helps students think about new strategies they can try and new content they can add. Further, I can point students to one another’s drafts to demonstrate strengths. If one student is struggling with using specific details, I can ask her to read the draft of another and look for how details are used. This practice allows me to share an authentic model while also praising the author of the model. In cases where several students in the class are working on the same issue, I have shared a student sample with everyone in the class by pointing to the draft in the online forum. Using Discussions to Explore Issues and Ethics Finally, I use the discussion forum to carry on the discussion of issues and strategies that are typical for the writing classroom. For the forum prompts, I borrow from the textbook when I can. I'll take an exercise from the end of a chapter and turn it into a discussion prompt that students will respond to. While I copy over the question from the e-text (and usually edit it), I do not copy over the sample work that sometimes accompanies it. Instead I ask students to look it up in their copy of the textbook. I also have forum questions that share links to related writing advice and examples of texts that are similar to what they are writing, and I ask them to discuss what they see and what they can take away. For instance, for the bio assignment I mentioned above, I give students links to the biography pages of local businesses and various campus groups to analyze: In addition to discussion of examples and writing strategies, I ask students to consider a series of ethics situations, which I wrote about last year (). I ask students first to indicate how they would respond to the situation and then to explain their position. The situations lead to some lively conversations, since every student has an opinion and there is no clear right or wrong answer. Suggestions? If you use online forums in your class, whether it’s face-to-face, hybrid, or online, please tell me about the strategies that you use in the comments below. What discussion prompts have worked best for you? Have you had prompts that bombed? Let me hear from you! [Photo: Yuppie? by JeffK, on Flickr] ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio).  This post was guest edited by students David Hanberry, Matthew Harlos, and Jordan Jackson. My mini-theme this semester, both in teaching and writing, has been the idea of  comfort zones (Multimodal Mondays: Finding Our Comfort Zones in the New Year...and maybe even breaking out of them!)Multimodal Mondays: Finding Our Comfort Zones in the New Year...and maybe even breaking out of them!.  Too often, those of us who practice digital pedagogy in writing studies take up our pom-poms and cheer loudly for every new tool that comes across our radar.  We loudly proclaim the multiple benefits of digital tools, sometimes at the expense of our students and colleagues, who may not share our unabashed endorsements.  When we get to the crux of the matter, however, those tools are just that – utensils that we employ. How we work with our students and colleagues to develop shared production of knowledge(s) is, I think, more important than the tools we use to initiate the invention in the first place.  What follows is a reflective assignment that might shine a light on meaningful, multimodal re/mixes of research and writing, produced with an old school tech tool, our good friend the BLOG.  By looking backwards in our multimodal composing practice, I think we can encourage colleagues to experiment with tools within their own comfort zones. Context for Assignment My technical communications majors and I are currently working on primary research that begins in the archives.  So far, we have discussed situating ourselves as writers within discourses, beginning with our home communities. Our first major writing task was to research artifacts from a personal archive, which we defined as any depository of artifacts from an identified community with which we ourselves are connected. Measurable Learning Objectives for the Assignment Combine visual and textual elements to tell the story of your personal archive Synthesize content-meaning through collaborative, dialogic review Create shared-meaning in digital writing spaces for specific audiences Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed helpful text from Lunsford handbooks. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: “At a Glance: Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” The Everyday Writer: Ch.24: “Communicating in Other Media” The St. Martin’s Handbook: Ch. 18: “Communicating in Other Media” Writing in Action: Ch. 4: “A Writer’s Choices” EasyWriter: Sections 1c-1g in Ch.1, “A Writer’s Choices” Assignment Guidelines We crowd-sourced the following task list.  We would encourage other instructors and students to do the same to make your project unique to your class. In a whole group discussion, students examine their roles as researchers and writers in various communities. Students choose a specific community (family, school, social, etc.) and investigate various customs and their associated artifacts within that community. Select one artifact based on individual or group research. Break-down sensory rhetorics, such as visuality and tactility for the artifact, providing a rich description and backstory. Tell (narrate) the artifact’s story based on experiences within a specific community that students self-identified for the assignment. Re/mix the story in a digital environment using meaningful digital tools.  We used blogs, but others might find wikis, forums, e-books, or even social media platforms relevant. Publish the text for audiences both in and outside of the classroom and reflect on comments received by individual writers as a contemplative group activity. Reflections on the Assignment from Our Group Click on the hyperlinks to go to the blog posts for each writer’s archive Jordan's Personal Archive: I researched unmasking ceremonies among Pan-Hellenic Greek Councils.  As a member of the Greek community, I was interested in discovering artifacts and the backstories behind specific fraternity chapters’ traditions regarding these masks.  The method I used to create this project was definitely an in-depth research process. It allowed me to open my eyes a lot more to the often-overlooked traditions that create community among social groups like fraternities. Having been able to locate the conceptualized mask within my specific chapter has only driven me to go out and view other masks, with the hopes of gaining insight to those who wore them. Matthew’s Personal Archive: When writing this project I was forced to look at my possessions in a much different light. I had to see that the objects that I once only considered curiosities or trinkets were in fact histories of myself. The object that I chose for the project was a 1943 silver half-dollar that was given to me by my grandfather. He had carried the coin for years when he was in the military during the 1950’s, stationed in Alaska in defense of any attempted Soviet aggression. So while this coin doesn’t have much historical or monetary value, it does have great symbolic value to me as a connection to my grandfather, and therefore, to my family as a whole. David's Personal Archive: The process behind this project was a very enlightening experience for me as a writer. Through the research of my family’s archive I found an 18th-century tome describing the history of Geneva from the early 1700s. As it turned out, this book happened to be gifted to my grandfather by Pope John Paul II at an International gathering of religious leaders. It’s interesting to think that so much history was just sitting alone in a dusty basement at my parents’ house. Bohannon's Reflection on Doing the Assignment: As English and Writing Departments navigate the digital wave that has defined our growth for at least a decade (see McGrath: Negotiating Access to New Media), we need to keep in mind that our students' voices should count in decisions regarding how we work through digital invention heuristics and collaboratively – democratically –  make meaning in our texts. Researching and writing for multimodal environments using personal experience as invention creates meaningful opportunities for student-scholars to grow their rhetorical prowess.  This type of assignment also gives them the power to write their personal stories and share them with digital publics, providing a value that students want others to enjoy. From our group: "We invite instructors and students to modify assignment instructions, tag us in the Macmillan Community, and let us know how your project goes!" Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth through authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies, democratic pedagogies, and New Media practices, while growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org   ... View more

In my last blog (Some Popular Cultural Critical Thinking Flash Cards) I sketched out three critical thinking "flashcards," with suggestions for exploring the semiotic implications of the outsized importance of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the El Niño Deluge (that still isn't), and the endless parades of celebrity gowns on red carpets during pop culture awards season.  So I thought that this time, in the spirit of the Sunday Times Crossword puzzles, I would give the "answers" to these flashcards, interpretive analyses that can lead us beyond the superficial play of ordinary experience into the more profound regions of human and cultural being. So let's start with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries.  There were three questions on that flashcard.  To wit: 1. Why do candidates running for their party's presidential nomination make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire in the first place?  2. Why do the mass media make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire?  And, 3. Why do consumers of the mass media continue to read, watch, or click on news stories about Iowa and New Hampshire? To these questions I added a few clues: consider the innate human desire to know the future now, thus making any sort of tea leaf reading an irresistible draw.  Consider also the inertial power of sheer tradition in presidential politics.  And, finally, consider what could be done to disrupt this tradition.  So, the answer to number 1 is, quite simply, candidates make such a big deal about Iowa and New Hampshire because those events are given enormous amounts of media attention, attention that includes a certain ritualistic mythology that claims that these two electoral occasions have some sort of magical power to winnow the field and even determine the nominee. This answer explains numbers 2 and 3 simultaneously.  That is, the mass media make such a big deal out of Iowa and New Hampshire because they know the draw of that mythology, the innate human curiosity to see whether the magic will happen again.  To put this another way, there is a fundamental human desire to know the future.  This desire goes beyond mere curiosity into the deep need human beings have for a sense of security, and the magical promise of fortune telling, of seeing the future, is an ancient expression of that need.  So, with the desire for tea leaves (augury) and the power of tradition (ritual) driving audience behavior, the media can be sure that people will pay attention to their onslaught of Iowa/New Hampshire stories, and thus, that there will be a large audience (market) for the advertisers and data miners that pay the bills and provide the profits.  You might say that it is all a matter of profisy. Now to the weather. There too I proposed three questions: 1. What is this mass of high pressure doing here for such a long time at this time of year?  2. With global warming throwing both the atmosphere and atmospheric science completely out of whack, is a reliance on past El Niño performances quite justified? And, 3. What does the deluge of news reports about deluges—and their absence—have in common with the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon?  The answers, of course, are pretty straightforward. Questions number 1 and 2 share the implication that it is time to realize that the old weather certainties, hard won through years of meteorological research, are crumbling in the face of a complete changing of the game through rapid climate change. Always an uncertain activity, predicting the weather has become more uncertain than ever before.  Global warming doesn't mean hot weather everywhere at the same time: it means unprecedented and unpredictable extremes of heat, cold, drought, and deluge.  But the mass media don't like to talk about that unpredictability much, partly through fear of conservative backlash (it is still a tricky business to even talk about global warming: I once moderated a science-oriented website wherein the conservatives who ran the place would not allow anyone to discuss global warming), and partly because it is more profitable to pretend that the tea leaves are still in play, that the weather's fortune still can be told.  And thus, the answer to number 3: the whole matter has a lot in common with the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon.  Weather related fortune telling attracts readers, which itself attracts advertising and marketing dollars—especially if the tea leaves auger death and destruction in vast floods (Watch out! Here comes El Niño!—we're still getting a lot of that here in Southern California, complete with pathetic fallacy and infantile personification).  In short, more profisy. And finally, celebrity gowns on red carpets.   There too, I proposed three questions:  1. Why, we can ask, is this happening?  2. What can we learn about ourselves by thinking critically about it?  And 3. What does all the attention paid to celebrity gowns on red carpets have in common both with El Niño reporting and the Iowa/New Hampshire phenomenon?   And the answers are: it is profitable for both celebrities and the mass media alike to stage and broadcast this ritual because audiences respond to it, thus attracting advertising and marketing dollars.  What we learn about ourselves is that, while we think of ourselves as a democratic and egalitarian nation, we are fascinated by wealth and privilege, and pay lavish homage to it.  Some watch the red carpet parade vicariously, and dream of being on the red carpet themselves, or at least of having a dress like that (haute couture usually makes its way to the department stores eventually).  Others watch simply to ogle the ever-more-exposed bodies of the women (it is virtually always only women who are featured on the red carpet), and sex, of course, is perhaps the deepest instinctive driver of them all.  And so the red carpet report has something in common with the weather and with Iowa and New Hampshire after all: not as profisy but in the way that the mass media profit by playing upon our deepest (and often most primitive) fantasies and desires. Altogether, our three flashcards point to signs not of hyperreality but of hypercapitalism: of a society that runs on the profit motive, even to the point of contradicting proclaimed values and broadcasting misleading information.  The interesting thing about this is that it is an historically unprecedented form of hegemony, because the subjects of that hegemony don't have to participate.  The whole show—profisy, money worshipping voyeurism—would end if the audience refused to watch.  In the sixties a popular slogan was "what if they gave a war and no one came?"  We could (more realistically) ask today, "what if they staged a red carpet fashion show and no one cared?"  Or an Iowa/New Hampshire election, and no one tuned in?  Or ran a screamingly headlined weather story that no one read? I'll leave the answers to those questions to you. ... View more