This is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now and that has come up in a couple of different places recently: is blogging, well, “over?”
No, but I do think it’s different than it was.
Because I have a blog, I too get to chime in on Bérubé v. Dean Dad
There’s a bit of an intellectual food fight going on about every academic’s favorite workplace debate, the value (or lack thereof) of tenure. The short version is that Dean Dad at Confessions of a Community College Dean is against it, while Michael Bérubé at his blog (now called American Airspace, I guess?) is for it. Also in a very basic sense, Dean Dad and Bérubé are simply playing out the logical roles based on their place and status within the academy: that is, DD is an administrator and wants to get rid of tenure because of the “economic reality” that tenure is not sustainable, and Bérubé is a professor and wants to protect tenure for all kinds of reasons, both noble and self-serving. Since I too am a professor (not to mentioned a tenured one) and not a dean, I freely admit that I think Bérubé is right and DD is wrong. Basically.
Anyway, a few observations on their dispute and tenure before I get to grading and wrapping stuff up so we can get out of town for Thanksgiving:
- There is a difference between a community college and a bachelor degree granting college or university, not to mention a university that grants graduate degrees. Not to take anything away from community colleges, but it takes greater skill sets and qualifications in your faculty to teach those advanced courses. At places like EMU, we graduate the kinds of students who DD turns around and hires to teach at his community college. So I think this is one of the reasons why DD’s take on this seems to be it’d be no big deal to just hire people on contract– and at a community college, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But you show me a university that grants graduate degrees that does not tenure its faculty and I’ll show you a graduate school that is difficult to take seriously.
- Tenure and its definitions vary widely. Here at EMU, we hire people with the presumption that we’ll tenure them, and in my dozen years in the department, we’ve never not tenured someone. At that quaint liberal arts college in Ann Arbor, tenure is quite a bit more contentious and uncertain. Here at EMU, tenure and promotion is largely a union issue; at many (most?) other universities, it is frequently a mysterious, “behind closed doors” sort of affair. Also, while the numbers have moved around a bit, my guess is we have about as many faculty now at EMU as we did when the faculty organized, plus or minus 30 or so.
- There’s a big difference between a “part-timer” (someone who is hired to teach on a semester to semester basis) and a “professor” on the tenure track, at least at a university. Our part-timers (and we have some great ones, btw) do zero service, advising, or any of the other work beyond teaching, and they have little investment in the long-term value of the institution. And why should they? We pay them a wage that is probably just north of what they could be making at Starbucks. In contrast, tenure-track faculty do lots of service and advising beyond teaching, and, because they’re tenured, they inherently have a long-term stake in the institution.
- Which reminds me: given the amount of stuff faculty do that is beyond teaching and the amount of stuff we do that is described generally as “administrative creep,” it seems to me that DD ought to be careful what he wishes for. I mean, good luck getting your part-timers to participate in the bureaucracy of program review and accreditation!
- I think the amount of “dead wood” among the ranks of the tenured is highly exaggerated. Sure, in my department of 40 or so tenured faculty, I can think of five or six who are kind of in that category. But most of those folks aren’t so much “dead wood” as they are “looking forward to retirement.” Most of my colleagues, even the ones who have been tenured for 30 or more years, are still quite active. They might not do much scholarship anymore, but they still teach a lot and do lots of service. And it ain’t the “dead wood” faculty who are causing troubles for administrators and everyone else.
- DD keeps suggesting that the solution to the tenure problem is long term (say five years) and renewable contracts. I think he is either being naive or this is a red herring because, in practice, there is no real difference between a “long term contract” and “tenure.” I mean, does he have any idea how hard it is to not renew a contract and/or fire someone in any like of work? Especially from what is essentially a “government job?”We have lecturers at EMU who work on year to year contracts, and as far as I can tell, the only way we can “release” these folks is if they do something horribly wrong or if there is some horrible financial crisis. In a sense then, these folks might as well be “tenured.” And along these lines, tenured faculty can (and have been) fired for doing horrible things and as a result of horrible financial crisis within an institution. So….
- … I don’t think that DD’s objections to the tenure system has anything to do with economics at all. The “Great Recession” has already forced cost-cutting measures at many universities, including pay cuts and increased teaching loads. No, at the risk of reading “too much into this,” I think DD is really objecting to:
- Unions, specifically the AAUP, and
- Particular tenured faculty who are pain in his ass.
I have some sympathy with both of DD’s problems– some, not a lot. EMU has a faculty union (the AAUP), and while I often feel like the union does some dumb stuff and can be rather shrill, I would much rather be in a union than not. And it is very true that some tenured faculty can be assholes, and tenure has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing and even rewarding that behavior. But hey, all you have to do is read Dilbert to realize that dealing with workers who are a pain in the ass are just another part of the world.
Sorta like dealing with pointy-haired bosses/deans.
“Downloading Optimism” (and btw, what’s new with electronic books?)
I know that the image there is going to be too small to read, but go ahead and click on it to read it. This comes from Lucy Knisley who seems to be a bit of a Renaissance woman of sorts with comics, journal writings, illustrations, crafts, etc., etc.
Really REALLY smart stuff about a group of old school comics folks lamenting the falling of print, which was written and drawn by a comic artist who is obviously enthusiastic about digital books. As she points out, there was a point in the past where these codex book things were weird (where’s the scroll?), and of course there was a time where print itself was weird, too (why are all the letters so neat and orderly?), not to mention stuff like page numbers, etc. And, as she writes here, “I’d just rather not expend all my energy worrying over how my words are delivered, and instead concentrate on the quality and content of the words.” Exactly, and the problem with journalism and traditional publishers is that they keep thinking that they are in the bottle business instead of the wine business.
Anyway, this also jarred in me the question again about “e-readers” or electronic books or whatever you want to call them. Knisley talks in this comic about reading stuff on her iPod/iPhone, but I don’t know if I could/would be willing to do that. I don’t mind reading blogs or email or similarly “short” sort of things on my iPod, but I don’t know if I’d want to read a book-length work on my phone. Too little of a window for me.
The Kindle is still problematic for my own reading tastes, as far as I can tell. I don’t really like the way that the device is locked down/locked into amazon.com only content (remember that infamous 1984 issue?), it apparently doesn’t handle PDF files well, and it doesn’t allow for easy annotations. I’ve heard good things about Barnes and Noble’s Nook, but I’d certainly want to play around with it. For me, the ability to handle the PDFs from academic journals and the things I assign students to read in various classes. I don’t need one of these things to “just read” novels or magazines or whatever, which perhaps makes me a reader who is not in the marking plan for companies like amazon.com or B&N.
Anyway, must reading for 516 and/or 444, probably for 328 too.
A couple of blog talks
I’m giving a couple of talks today about blogging as part of a “Technovations” Forum sponsored by the Faculty Development Center:
- Blogging: An Introduction (PDF), which is a bit of a general primer to define blogging (sorta) and to introduce some blogging tools.
- Teaching with Blogs (PDF), which is more specifically about four basic ways to use blogging in teaching.
I’m not entirely sure how many people are going to be at these talks or if what I’m intending to talk about is going to be useful or not, but I thought I’d put these up here to share with the world, so to speak. And to help me remember what I did with these files later on….
The remains of the weekend
There’s actually a longer post embedded in some of these items, but for now, I thought I’d just get some of these down here. After all, I had intended on doing so last night but went to bed instead….
- Cheryl Ball posted on Tech-Rhet asking about a Mac organizing software from a company (or maybe that’s the software) called Circus Ponies. It’s an organizational tool, which might be useful, though I find that my problems with organization and/or “getting things done” are not software-related.
- Talking/working with Derek on a panel, and two ideas I want to get down before I forget: 1) it sure seems like a lot of people (including me) aren’t blogging at the same rate they used to blog (that’s a post one of these days, btw), and 2) while Facebook and Twitter are kinda cool, they aren’t a very good replacement for blogs.
- Where have blogs gone? Well, one theory I have is as newspapers and other print journalism go online, they are pressing into the space that was once occupied more by individuals. This is not to say that individual blogs are going to go away, but why read (or even write) on your own individual blog if there is going to be a big newspaper out there willing and able to host your posts and comments?
- Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff notes some of the writing on the backs of desk chairs of classrooms where she is doing evaluations.
- Alex Reid has a nice post about learning to write and how it impacts how we should and shouldn’t teach classes like first year writing. I’ll need to come back to this. I never actually took first year writing– I tested out of it. I even was videotaped giving the speech I gave to get out of it, and I believe they took me and the other people who tested out to a lunch. Thinking back on it briefly now, I believe we were an informal focus group.
- Fine writing advice, he gist of which I give all the time and which I have to work very hard at myself to follow (and I frequently fail at that).
- I kind of feel like I been a teleworker/web worker/distance worker/whatever for a long time, but that’s because I teach a fair amount online, and also because tenure-track faculty tend to have the luxury of working wherever they want. Of course, the problem with “decentralized” work in general and defining “the work” of a college professor in particular is that I’m always working, in an office or not.
- What’s the big trend now? Nowism. Actually, it’s more interesting than it sounds. I like the list of “now applications” that are down the page a ways, and I like the term “Liquid Modernity” which comes from Zygmunt Bauman.
- “The lost chicken hatcheries of Iowa City, IA.” Of course I have to note that, even though I am not all that crazy about chickens in Ypsilanti (I have yet to spot a coop in my neighborhood).
danah boyd at U of M
I’m at danah boyd’s talk at the John Seely Brown Symposium at the University of Michigan this afternoon. There was a pretty productive and interesting twitter feed on all this: see http://wthashtag.com/Danahjsb A few thoughts as it went on and now slightly edited over coffee at the Food Whole (which explains some of the mixing of tenses and other mixes between notes at the moment and something slightly more thought out):
- This is in the Ross School of Business. Whoa, you talk about seeing how the other half lives. I came from cramped and smelly Pray-Harrold where I was showing a movie to my 121 students with a laptop and a projector with crappy sound. And then I walk into this place. This auditorium (I’m sitting in the balcony) had freakin’ leather seats. They probably spent more money on this room than EMU is going to spend on the interior fixtures in the Pray-Harrold remodeling. I think they spent more money on the lobby of this building than they are going to spend on the entire project. There was some group talking with students in the lobby about tailored suits. The ten miles between EMU’s campus and U of M’s campus is long indeed.
- I showed up kind of late, but I don’t feel like I’ve missed much. A lot of stuff I’ve heard before– I like the idea of “collapsed contexts” (which is also what Wesch talks about with YouTube) as being like a wedding: a bunch of people come together who normally wouldn’t and the situation is more or less mediated by alcohol. The problem is there is no alcohol like that online (says her…).
- Now she’s talking about her argument/blog argument about her MySpace being “ghetto,” which was indeed problematic, as I recall. Here she seems to be talking about the experience of writing in public a bit, but I think she is going back to defend her claim. I think my problem is that all of her evidence seems to be based on the sort of unsubstantiated claims of her teens, and I don’t think cherry picking the gut feelings of teenagers really represents “evidence.” In other words, I suppose it’s fine to say that teens perceive this to be the case, but it’d be a lot more interesting to me if she tried to peel away at that to figure out why they think this.
- Or thought this– the split between Facebook and Myspace in terms of class I think used to be true, but probably not anymore. As someone said in the twitter discussion, MySpace has kind of become the defacto place for indie bands. Or I guess to the extent that this split is still true, it is perhaps less so than it used to be. Or maybe just another way of putting it: online spaces tend to replicate face to face world interactions, which is certainly something people have talked about for a long time.
- How do we teach this stuff? How does this work for learning? boyd argues that one of the best uses of this media is for various “flex time” to help students learn about learning– I guess to make those connections beyond the classroom experience? She sorta skips that there has always been lots of technology, but she’s right that a lot of students don’t know about technologies like delicious and a lot of students don’t seem to think about a lot about wikipedia. They aren’t critical users. Of course, most of what she seems to mean by students/young people is high school kids.
- She makes also a reference to mashup culture and how a lot of students don’t seem to know much about that either– also true, I think. I just came from teaching my 121 class (why I was late), where I am showing them the first part of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, and while it’s difficult for me to get a clear sense about what they thought about it today (didn’t have time to talk about it yet), I could tell that it was something different to them. This “youth culture” of raves, remixes, mashups, internet culture, copyleft, etc. is probably a lot more tied to class and race than the proponents would like to admit and/or recognize.
- “Is it the technology you’re against, or is it the things you are seeing that you are against?” I agree with that too….
- She told a story at the end that I thought was kind of interesting about how one group of Christian students she interviewed who thought that MySpace was a Christian web site. boyd, obviously confused, asked why they thought that, and the students showed her that everyone they know had Christian stuff on their web site. That seems to me to undercut part of her argument a bit in that what it suggests it that users can take this giant world like MySpace and completely misinterpret it to match up with their own world views.
- Cliff Lampe offered a pretty good response to a lot of boyd’s points; I’ll need to look him up on this. Lampe suggests that students are using Facebook to collaborate a lot, while professors are not a part of that. I think it’s not so much that professors are not involved in student collaboration as much as they are left out. Or maybe a better way of putting it is students and professors both kind of need their own space, so if my students are using Facebook to collaborate with each other and are leaving me out of it, I think that’s awesome.
- Libby Hemphill talked mostly about the problems of getting data on this, which I think is very true….
- Ed Vielmenti Vielmetti talked a bit about the way that the migration from one service to another is often a lot more about particular histories (a server broke, etc.) personalities (people have fights and split up groups), a whole group just moves from a mailing list, etc. I don’t disagree with this, but that doesn’t discount completely boyd’s argument either.
- To be honest, I got sort of distracted during John Seely Brown’s remarks by a really useful twitter post with this: “@misterkrot: Interesting that the panel on youth use of social media has nobody under 30 on it.”
And then they kinda chatted. One thing that I thought was interesting at the end: boyd talked about how she started blogging because she wanted to take an independent study from a Religion professor who moved away and she wanted to post those texts online.
All in all, a pretty good talk and event. I do think though that it is weird to have a talk about youth, class and social networks in this very fancy palace of an ivory tower and with (mostly) kind of old, rich, white people.
digital_nation looks like a cool resource; on the other hand…
Via this post on Henry Jenkins’ blog (who is moving his blog to his new digs at USC– hopefully this address will stay the same with no problems) comes information and a recommendation for “digital_nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” from PBS’ Frontline. It looks cool; I’m not sure if it’s aired yet or not, but there are some interesting video clips. It could be good for 516, and even for the first year writing class I’m teaching right now where there are some students working on social networks for their research projects.
On the other hand, I have to say that I’m not entirely a fan of some of the people featured here. For example, I personally have yet to be convinced that danah boyd’s work youth culture online is based on anything beyond common sense, her own gut feeling, and some experiences talking with kids. Maybe her talk at U of M in a couple of weeks will change my mind. And I think that Marc Prensky’s idea of “digital natives” is pretty much wrong in all sorts of ways. But hey, these are the folks that PBS is talking to, and these are the folks who are leading, for better or worse. And even if I think they’re wrong, they’re still interesting.
Wanting to check out “A Better Pencil,” though with some irony and a smidge of bitterness
I just heard via my colleague Linda AK and the WPA-L mailing list that Dennis Baron is interviewed here in the most recent Inside Higher Ed about his new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. I’m mostly interested in this because I’ve been teaching Baron’s “From Pencils to Pixels” for years, I’ve been teaching an assignment like the one Baron describes in the article where students have to write with something other than traditional tools, and I’ve done some scholarship on the general area of writing tools and pedagogy– an article on chalkboards, presentations on paper, pens, and a couple other things like this I’m forgetting now.
But I’m also interested in seeing this book to see what could have been. Maybe.
Several years ago (maybe close to 10 years ago now), when I was working more earnestly on some of these articles and presentations about writing technologies, I put together a research leave proposal to work on a book. Basically, I wanted to trace the connection between a rising awareness of writing instruction and the accompanying writing technologies. So I went through the process of writing the proposal, outlining the various technologies I planned on writing and researching about, and I thought I had a pretty decent and compelling idea. It was recommended by the department, and was ranked reasonably high in the college of arts and sciences process, too. But when it got to the final committee at the graduate college (or the university as a whole– I’m not sure which– but a committee which I believe had no one from my department on it), my proposal was ranked dead last. I mean like out of like 40 proposals, number 40.
Now, there are a number of different reasons for this of course; the process here tends to weigh toward the sciences or projects tied to grants, and I am sure that my original proposal had any number of problems and limitations. I’m sure I didn’t deserve the award and I’m not saying I was “cheated.” But I do remember some of the comments that came back to me from the committee were rather dismissive of the whole idea. Someone wondered what qualifications I had to research this kind of history; another said the idea of researching writing technology seemed more like an article in a place like Harper’s Magazine rather than a book-length project.
Obviously, I can’t blame this rejection for my lack of follow-through on this project; my not finishing pressing ahead with a book project on this is my own fault and my fault alone. Still, it wasn’t exactly a confidence boost to be told that my scholarly interests seemed mostly fit for curious feature article in a genteel albeit liberal monthly magazine. So I have moved on to other projects, projects where I’m also managing a lack of follow-through, but that is a slightly different story.
Anyway, I’m interested in seeing Dennis’ book and I’ll probably order it today. There’s a part of me that is interested in seeing/imagining “what could have been,” but that’s a very small part since I realize that is a kind of dumb reaction to Baron’s book on my part, and, based on the Inside Higher Ed interview and a peek at the table of contents on the Oxford UP site, there’s probably room for the kind of book-length project on writing technology and pedagogy I have in mind. I’m mostly interested in it because I am interested in the subject matter– like Baron, I’ve been fascinated with various communication technologies for a long time– and there may very well be elements of it that figure into my teaching sooner than later.
But I’ve got to say, I’m also interested in it for a bit of the “I told you so” aspect. I have no way of knowing who on that university committee nearly a decade ago said the history of writing technology was just not worthy of a book, and it is water under the bridge at this point. Still, I wouldn’t mind sending this person/these people a copy. You know, just to point out that there was one press (and a pretty good one, too) that thought the general idea might be worth a book.
A few thoughts on Obama, education, indoctrination, and immediacy
The latest crazy far right Obama worries about his “back to school” speech is symptomatic of lots and lots of different things. I think part of it is about race because the crowd who is afraid to have their children exposed to the president while in school is (basically) the same ones who are worried about Obama’s death committees, who don’t believe Obama was born in the United States, and, back in the campaign, the same ones who said that Obama was an Arab Muslim and dangerous man. But I also think these folks would say crazy stuff about Obama’s plans if he was a white guy, too. Part of it all is rooted in legitimate concerns and differences of opinion, though anyone who thinks that Obama’s plan is somehow like the Nazis and who fears the impact of the government being involved in health care in this country doesn’t know anything about the Nazis and they are unaware of the extent to which the government is already involved in health care via Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP program, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Besides all that, I think this stuff is an example of my dissertation work, which was about the ways in which rhetorical situations become problematized as the result of technology. Basically, I argued that communication technologies– radio and television immediately come to mind given this example, but I focused more on internet technologies like email and the web– skew previous notions of both “rhetorical situation” and kairos. I used the term “immediacy,” because things that are “immediate” lack clear boundaries and are close together, and “immediate” has both connotations of quickness and confusion, of intimacy and chaos.
A simple example: last night, on the NBC news, they had a story about Obama’s indoctrination message stay in school speech that featured a snippet of video of a couple who were terribly afraid of what the president might say to their children about gay marriage. It was only a few seconds, but in those few seconds, those parents– who were both crazy and wrong– were given an enormous platform to play the part of the rhetor, and were thus able to either change or confuse the message for a large segment of the audience.
Now, NBC was showing these people in the name of “objectivity” and “fairness” in that journalistic tradition of showing “both sides” and they did follow up the few seconds with these parents to quote from Obama’s speech, which, in a sense, discredited them. This of course presumes it is even possible for journalism to be purely “objective” and “fair,” and it is also presumes a reasonable method for approaching objectivity on a topic is to simply present “both sides,” even if one of the sides is completely and utterly wrong (in this case, parents afraid Obama will talk to their children about gay marriage). But let’s just table that for the moment.
In a conventional rhetorical situation, these fringe elements would not have the opportunity to voice their arguments at all. But in a rhetorical situation heavily mediated by technology, rhetorical situation become immediate and fraught with challenges. The Rush Limbaugh-types on the radio, the Bill O’Reily-types on the television, and the thousands of bloggers, emailers, and other (inter)network communicators flatten the dimensions of a rhetorical situation to allow a chaotic mish-mosh where the definitions between rhetors, audiences, purposes, and messages themselves all exchange roles. Health care reform becomes about death panels, and a president talking about kids staying in school becomes a socialist indoctrination favoring gay marriage.
Now, it’s not as if rhetorical situations were ever that clear; in the classic “egg versus chicken” debate that is Bitzer and Vatz, it seems clear to me that rhetorical situations both occur and thus demand discourse to fill them (Bitzer notes the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but I would also add the speech atop the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11 by George W. Bush) and are created by the rhetor with discourse (Vatz notes the Viet Nam war, and I would add the war/debacle in Iraq). But what the Internet, talk radio, and the 24/7 cable news cycle has done is sped all this up, making already potentially dangerous and chaotic moments even more ripe for miscommunications and misunderstandings.
And in my own narrow way of looking at things, this is all the more reason why I ought to think about going back to that dissertation project and maybe writing something about it.
Student writing is getting worse– or wait, it’s getting better!
Ladies and gentlemen: It is time for the main event, the forever battle over students getting worse and worse as time goes on. Let’s get ready to
RRRRUUUUUUMMMMMMBBBBBBBLLLLLLLEEEEEEEE!!!
Representing the world champion, the “going to hell in a hand-basket,” the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach?” on his New York Times “blog.” Judging by the many comments here that repeat “oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be,” he’s clearly the champ and the crowd favorite. And why wouldn’t he be? Isn’t it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth? After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both “better” than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today’s grown-ups) were also better than the current youth (“When I was their age, we learned this stuff. But now…”).
In the challenger’s corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article “The New Literacy,” in which he argues that “it’s not that today’s students can’t write. It’s that they’re doing it in different places and in different ways.” Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle. Let’s see how this works out.
(Ding-ding-ding!)
Fish opens with what he even admits is a pretty old attack: the problem is that composition classes in college don’t teach the craft of writing, and they instead teach something– well, something else. Political stuff. Saving the world. Not writing and grammar and rhetoric. “As I learned more about the world of composition studies,” Fish writes, “I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.” Those bastards in composition!!
Thompson’s opening anticipates and parries this old attack: “As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?” Right. Oh wait, the idea that the kids can’t write isn’t right? Perhaps we will read on….
Fish argues that his position now has “received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.” What could possibly be wrong with these folks?
Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure college and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.
Ouch. Having a right-wing group supporting your position on education is always a little, um, uncomfortable. What have you got, Thompson?
Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
Ah-HA! One of those evil compositionalists! Of course she is saying this! The problem is though that Lunsford actually uses this stuff that academics like Fish and Cheney are supposed to respect, this stuff– oh, what’s it called? right! Actual research with actual student writers.
I think the thing that Fish gets most wrong is to assume that somehow, it is even possible to teach “grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.” Grammar and rhetoric are always about something; you can’t just teach rules are about how to persuade and not have some kind of content. And I think where Thompson and the Stanford study get it most right is to recognize that students (and everyone else) need to write with some kind of purpose and for some kind of audience, and they do this often in out of school settings, like Facebook and blogs and Twitter:
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
This fight ends sort of like the first Rocky, I am sure: the upstart still loses. But who knows? Maybe after a dozen sequels, we’ll finally get a round where the good guys win.