Look Closer.

[One of the best tag lines of any film (American Beauty) ever...]

I love this stuff. This friendly "debate" (if it's even that) over old vs. new media reminds me of the battles over Cultural Studies (I, for one, happen to think the two are actually related). Katie's quip (though I take her point--and I know she's a fellow traveller) about the drawing of a puppy being used for as a substitution for argument reminded me of something Harold Bloom says in The Western Canon:

What are now called departments of English will be renamed departments of 'Cultural Studies' where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens.

I actually love Bloom's work (and Chaucer's, and Milton's, and Wordsworth's, and especially Shakespeare's and Wallace Stevens') but I also love Batman: Year One, movies, and rock (I've never been to a Mormon theme park), and I also happen to think that these phenomena have pedagogical value, the same way the first professors who fought to include literature in the academy thought that it had value. I find Bloom's The Invention of the Human to be one of the best books written on the corpus of Shakespeare (even though I disagree with probably about 75% of what he says in it), and in general I think he's absolutely brilliant. But his prophecies of doom are overwrought and, if one looks back at the history of English departments, just a little spurious. The key word in Bloom's assessment is "replace": no one that I take seriously is talking about replacing anything, but rather just continuing the "principle of addition" that English departments have engaged in since their inception. The book which I relied heavily on for that presentation on the history of English departments in 8005--Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History--lays out nicely how arbitrary the make-up of English departments is, and this includes the material that we value and teach. These things have histories, histories bound up with issues of class, race, gender, all the things we say we want to decenter and denaturalize.

One might say, then, "Physician, heal thyself"--let's turn that critical lens back on ourselves and the practices and forms that we privilege. Take Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, which traces the literary practices, sociocultural conditions, and changing attitudes that gave rise to the novel as a dominant literary form (and we all know how before it was legitimated, it was considered pulp); or the radical work of Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, which argues that English literature (and to large extent the English canon) was introduced into colonial India as a hegemonic tool--the literary text stood in as a surrogate Englishman, inculcating the values of the ruling class and legitimizing colonial rule. The point is that these forms didn't just spring Athena-like from the head of someone like Harold Bloom--people fought long and hard to include certain forms and not others, certain poets and not others, certain values and not others. This battle continues--the English department has been at the forefront of the so-called "Culture Wars"" for some time now, and that's part of an even larger fight that's been going on, in my opinion, for at least the better part of three centuries. In "Space, Knowledge, and Power," Foucault offers what could be said to be his main project--one that's very relevant to what I think is central here:

I think that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century, has been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question, "What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?" One should remain as close to this question as possible, keeping in mind that it is extremely difficult to resolve.

When you "unpack" that, you find much of what concerns us in English departments, in my opinion (beyond the belles lettres approach to studying literature), and, in many ways, this discussion of new media might just be commentary on a new front.

As for a generational divide that Katie, Leta, Jenn, Irina, Darren and Joe all address each in their own way, the conference I attended last week was actually all about that. I'm continuing to add to a blog post here, if any one's interested in a fuller account, but some of the salient points are that the powers-that-be at this institution (Chancellor Brady Deaton; the Dean of Arts and Science Ted Tarkow; our old friend George Justice) and institutions across the country see things in very much those terms. The conference was titled “Reaching and Teaching the Digital Native.” The phrase is taken from work done by Marc Prensky on the generational gap that’s been created between those who have grown up immersed in digital culture and who “speak” technology as a native language and those who are “immigrants,” who must learn it as a second language. So as Katie says, her generation, the generation of most of you (because I'm *sooooo* much older) is indeed on the cusp of something new, and at least according to the big wigs at the conference, this is a growth industry. They strongly believe that the wave hasn't crested, but rather that it's just starting to roll: one of the big themes of the conference, in fact, is how much innovation is "coming down the pipe." Dr. Jim Wolfgang, one of the speakers at the conference, cites work that’s being done at the middle school level right now that goes beyond what’s being done in colleges and universities.

Using technology for technology’s sake is not the goal, of course--like everyone, it seems, I think one needs a healthy dose of skepticism, but that one should also be open-minded (a pretty good formula, in general). My concern, at this point, is to do everything I can to try to catch up and then keep up. Dean Brian Brookes of the School of Journalism was the facilitator of the conference and the first time he spoke he conceded that not all faculty will get on board for implementing new technology. His solution? "Forget ‘em"... they’re “not worth the effort." They’ll either conform or retire. It sounds harsh, but it's one competing meme for what the future of the university will look like. (A related concern in terms of marketability and career advancement is how this top-down implementation will be encouraged--the general consensus here is that there will increasingly be reward systems created on campuses which will integrate the use of technology as a category in assessments of faculty). Dean Brookes said the best thing to do is to find those who are enthusiastic about adopting new technologies and help them make it happen—give them the resources and the support to modernize the curriculum.

As for finding what works, there was a lot of talk about increasingly using what’s been proven to work already to reach students, such as finding ways to use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace that students use any way, like in the assignment that Liz saw in the Writing Lab. Conferences like this are designed to introduce new ideas about using techonology--you take those ideas (kind of like we are with the readings for this class), you try them out and refine methods, you launch pilot programs and if they're successful, you take the results back to your dean or whoever and secure increased funding for more technology. According to everyone here, this is the future of higher education. (Speaking of futures, I have a a collection of essays on the "future of the book" if any one's interested--it's a little dated, but still interesting; I happen to believe that there's a fetish quality assoicated with being able to hold a book in one's own hands, a tactile and visual connection much like Nick Hornby describes in relation to albums in High Fidelity).

One thing that I find most interesting about the technology I saw at the conference is its seeming ability to level the roles of students and teachers a la the critical pedagogy of Freire and hooks. According to the presenters at this conference, the technology has proven itself capable of doing just that. It increasingly has led to a leveling of disciplines, as well; Dean Brookes finds that there is much more interdisciplinary activity at MU than ever before. It’s just exploded in recent years and it's all due to the ways in which technological innovations have facilitated interconnectivity. Furthermore, I do think that, as I've said before (as Katie mentions), we can do ourselves a great service by meeting students half-way. I don't want to eliminate teaching the traditional essay or research paper in Composition. Rather, just like the Oakland School Board tried to facilitate mutual learning between standard English speakers and AAVE speakers in order to help the latter learn the standard English skills they need to thrive, I want to use alternate media to reach students in order to teach them the traditional forms that are still privileged, as well as the new forms that are increasingly gaining acceptance.

In terms of the visusal argument assignment, I first want to defer to what I think is some of the most amazing work being done in any classroom right now. Dr. Joseph Squier is a Professor of Comparative Media at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Maria Lovett is a doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies there. Together they developed and teach a course called "Writing with Video"--here's the course description:

This course engages students in a comprehensive exploration of video as a rhetorical narrative medium, with emphasis on the actual production of video work. Directed writing is integrated into all aspects of the production process — brainstorming and conceptualization, drafting and storyboarding, revision, and critique. Writing is positioned as an integral part of the process of thinking, problem solving, and creating.

Electronic media play an increasingly important role in today’s communication landscape. Consider, for example, the role that time-based visualization now plays in many areas of scientific research, or how video is used in popular culture to inform and persuade. Students who understand visual, time-based communication and have robust writing skills will have a competitive advantage in the coming decades. The leaders of the next generation will possess sophisticated, multi-dimensional communication skills — the type of skills taught in this course.

Do me a big favor--go to the site and click on the link for "projects" at the top and just look at some of the stuff these kids have done--and look at the assignment descriptions, too--like this one for "Visual Argument":

Your challenge for this project is to create a video that seeks to persuade and convince. You are being challenged to take a position, adopt a point of view on a timely and politically engaged social issue, and then create a piece that argues in favor of this view.

This will require you to spend some time considering the medium of video from a rhetorical perspective.

Once you've selected a topic -- hopefully something that you truly have strong opinons about and can find a personal stake in -- you will need to do some background research and fact-finding. Next you'll need to begin building a framework for your argument.

This will provide you an opportunity to compare and contrast writing as a rhetorical form, and video as a rhetorical form. We ask that much of this exploration take place in your Pages documents. You should be writing out your research findings, beliefs, and arguments. This will then become the basis for your video production.

In addition to your production notes and the finished video, we also require that the finished Pages document conclude with a self-reflection and analysis of what you learned about written arguments versus visual arguments. Also, please provide a reflection and assessment of the strengths and weaknesses that you see in the finished video.

purpose
-->To provide a counter-point to the previous project, where you were asked to assume (or attempt at assuming) a position of objectivity. Now you are being asked to make your subjective belief or viewpoint explicit, convincing, persuasive.
-->To explore rhetoric in a new form.

Look at the other assignments and examples of past work and I think (I hope!) you'll see why I'm excited about the possibilities (the "Representing Others" examples they showed at the conference were phenomenal). Like others have expressed, I don't want to spend inordinate amounts of class time teaching how to use the technology itself, but everyone at this conference is convinced that 1) successive generations of incoming freshmen will increasingly know how to use these technologies already; and 2) there are increasingly user-friendly programs that have "nice learning inclines" which will not take long at all for digital natives to learn. Again, I'm skeptical myself (I consider myself to be a digital exile), but the possibilities just blow my mind. In terms of next year, of course, I'm not as ambitious. Like everyone else, I'll be using non-traditional media only as a means of engaging students and facilitating their interest and appreciation of the benefits of learning traditional forms of rhetoric and composition.

In the meantime, Tim inspired me to share my visual argument. I'll refrain from explaining it further than saying that I got the idea from a comment I heard about the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse the other day, and to give due credit by explaing that I borrowed from works by José Clemente Orozco (Gods of the Modern World, 1932), Francis Bacon (Head VI, , 1949), Raymond Saunders (Jack Johnson, 1964) and an unknown Ghanan artist: