Writing Ecology

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Writing and Writing Technologies: "Entwined"

“Seriously, how much writing actually occurs without a computer or phone anymore?” – me, in my head, 20 seconds ago

My first mistake is assuming that most writing today is done on a computer or other electronic device. Here is some writing I do:

On electronic devices

Facebook posts

Twitter posts

Emails

Text messages

Blogging

Amazon.com orders

Signing for the UPS guy

Searching for library books

Googling stupid questions

Academic writing

Comments on my students’ papers

On paper or other materials

Grocery lists

Signing bills at restaurants

Leaving notes for my office mates

Note taking in classes—both as a student and teacher

Comments on my students’ papers

Writing a letter to a friend (I did this once. Took me two hours to write three pages.)

Post-it note to-do lists

Writing funny quotes on napkins at bars

How I teach using/not using technologies                         

1.     Hand-written notes on hw and essays

2.     Free writes in class on paper

3.     Plagiarism = death

4.     Privileging academic writing and critical thinking

5.     Writing info on the board

6.     Handouts

How I could (am) teach(ing) w/ these technologies

1.     Annotations in Word or a PDF

2.     Composing with a keyboard or phone keypad

3.     Plagiarism = reflecting the social sharing culture of the internet

4.     Privileging writing done out of academia

5.     Emailing info

6.     Powerpoints, Prezis, D2L, attachments in emails

What strikes me about these [incomplete] categories is that most of my paper writing could—and can be—be done electronically. Three weeks ago at the farmer’s market, I signed a receipt on the vendor’s smartphone with the pad of my finger and he emailed me the receipt. Our portable computers (our phones!) allow us to do almost anything anywhere. This changes writing because it alters the composing process. I worry that because we are living it that we won’t take the time to process how it is changing the way we communicate and the way we write.

Most of my paper writing consists of notes or lists, nothing that forces me to slow down and critically consider the order of what I’m writing and how it will effect the whole piece. The letter writing was a mistake I’ll never make again—why compose in such a permanent place at a slow pace when I could compose on the computer screen that allows me to write and edit more quickly than pen and paper?

We gain time, but what do we lose by transferring our words and composing movements to screens? The composing process is already difficult to study; how do these new devices complicate the process? (I couldn’t even begin to tell you what happens in my head when I respond to an email using my Blackberry. The keys are sososososososo small….but my fingers just do it. Learning to type was a slow process in 5^th grade 1990s but learning to text a few years later didn’t seem so daunting. Why?)

I’m still tied up with the concept that our writing and composition processes change each time we are introduced to a new technology. To think of how this concept can be positioned socially, I’d like to call on Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture. In “Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture” Jenkins et. al. state, “Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support” (8). Jenkins argues that the technological environment of the net generation has led to new life skills that include multitasking, a collective intelligence, and performance (4). (These three are among eight others.) Technologies and social practices are creating a new type of writing and sharing.

The reason I find this relevant is because the characteristics that partially define the net generation’s writing is not always valued in the [composition] classroom. Rhetorical concepts change when the writing space changes. For example, writing almost anything that is posted on the internet automatically makes the audience unknown. You can have an intended audience and privacy features, but you will never know who exactly is reading what you wrote.

I worry that the technologies used by students do not reflect what they are being asked to do. For example, when I took the ACT (years ago, so it’s probably changed) the writing portion was done in little blue books. That’s not how I was composing in English class or how I was composing my social writing so I thought it was an unfair assessment of my writing abilities.

What assignments do we assign today that don’t reflect how writing technologies have shaped the way students write?

Reflection on my Blog Post

I was supposed to write about my “understandings of how writing and writing technologies entwine” but revealing my “understanding” has just led to me realize how much I don’t understand. And then there are also the limitations of my understanding that stem from my class, education, nationality, values, and privilege.

So I don’t know how technologies and writing entwine, other than believing writing technologies make it faster and easier to communicate to more people. I also know that the way they have changed my writing process is permanent—if my computer or cell phone blew up, I would not be able to compose this blog post on paper as well or as comfortably.

Works Cited

Jenkins, Henry, et al. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Digital Media and Learning. The John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2006. Web. 24 May 2012.

Goals for 854

Reasons I’m looking forward to this class:

I am Generation Y

I am part of the generation that grew up with a home phone and now can’t imagine having one. I am part of the generation that is known for understanding and adapting new technologies quickly. These technologies contribute to my personal, social, and academic lifestyles. Therefore I believe that they should be studied.

Ivory tower = Bad

Ignoring these technologies and changes in the classroom is ignoring reality out of the classroom. I hope during this semester we can (quite specifically) answer why teachers should be teaching with technology.

My goals for our class:

Include all disciplines and use outside of academia

While our focus is most obviously English composition classrooms, I hope we can include theories and practices from multiple disciplines to see how other scholars and teachers are attempting to answer the same questions that we are.

Grapple with the goals of teaching

I hope we can address the following questions: are we teaching for marketability or are we teaching to encourage critical thinking and writing? (One could argue either, both, or neither depending on their teaching philosophy and goals.) What do students need to learn? How does this need relate to our teaching, their writing, digitality, and technology?

My individual goals:

To understand

I see it as a disservice to students to not include technology while teaching composition, but I would like to ground my reasons first theoretically and second by the experiences and research of others.

To argue

I would like to argue (quite thoroughly) why we should or should not teach with technology by examining what practices are proven to be effective in the classroom in order to help students become engaged, learned, critical, and prepared individuals.

To learn

I hope this class, our readings, and my classmates can

• further help me learn about technologies and how they have been used socially and academically
• lead to a historical understanding of the creation and use of such technologies in culture
• lead to “rigorous play” (as Dr. Wysocki suggestsin the course blog) to learn by experimentation and through experience.

In Attempt to Define Writing

Writing …

… is an activity that makes me eat, specifically carbohydrates.

… is a verb or noun.

… is [partly] a transfer of thoughts (noises and sounds in our heads) into a series of symbols, marks, and/or characters.

“…because, to paraphrase Bakhtin, words carry with them the places where they have been" (535). – Lester Faigley, on why humans might understand texts more easily than computers

… is a creation of meaning and communication.

… can always be placed in a context, has a purpose, and is written to express something to an audience.

… is forming symbols, characters, or marks in a particular way to communicate according to the conventions of a specific genre. And sometimes writing is knowing these conventions and being able to break them on purpose.

… makes one feel inadequate if others can “do” it better.

“We’re not supposed to write like published authors. We’re supposed to write like….idiots.” – Erin Brady, as quoted by Garrison Gondek, on graduate student writing

… does not have to make sense. 

… is creating a tone based on the words, punctuation, and organization chosen.

… is the act that makes someone an author.

… is valued in different ways by every person. Different conventions are valued for different types of writing. For example, Twitter seems like a writing space that would allow lax grammar, slang, and even “text speak,” but not everyone agrees:

A screenshot of Twitter after searching the word "grammar."

… seems to be very similar to this definition of composition, although writing is only one part of composition.  

… is creating. A new understanding of writing is developing from culture’s use of computers, smartphones, and other technologies to communicate. 

"Writing" to this author means choosing more than words to communicate.

Writing has the ability to take on many definitions depending on what it is—a verb, a noun, an act, a process, a creation. If I had to define it in one sentence—what I should be doing, yet struggle to understand how—it would be this:

Writing is making physical marks—as Walter Ong says, a “residue” (11)—as a way to communicate; a writing is physical markings that communicate.

Works Cited

Faigley, Lester. "Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal." College English 48.6     (1986): 527-42. Print.

Garrison Gondek (GarrisonGondek). "'We're not supposed to write like published authors. We're supposed to write like... idiots.' - @erinbradyy." 16 Nov 2011, 1:28 p.m. Tweet.

"#15 First World Problems II." Memegenerator.net. Web. 11 Sept. 2012.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. 3rd ed. Toylor & Francis Group, 2005. Print.