Entry 9

          I think Wysocki’s Introduction to “Into Between—On Composition in Mediation” is largely encouraging us to think of writing and our expressiveness, thinking, and ideologies produced by writing as a system that includes our bodies and is enacted upon our bodies, and not an intangible, conceptual, abstract process—similar to the arguments that have been made throughout the semester of technology being material, not just a theoretical cyberspace that exists somewhere beyond the hardware and software we use. The heart of her argument seems to be, “…a tension  between the felt experiences of an interior—being a body that composes, writes, and communicates—and a bodily exterior, of being one person among many, subject to study and impress from above or outside, mattering only because of one’s part in composing the many” (10). “That is, in understanding that we are (to use Wegenstein’s formulations) each a subject—a body perceived through itself, through its own mediations—at the same time we are each also objectified through others’ mediations of us…mass media, while potentially setting up structures that could change our relations with a stultifying past, instead have been set up to deny subjects their own perceptions and any abilities to produce their own media and mediations based on those perceptions” (16).

            Wysocki stresses that we are both a body producing ideas within ourselves, as well as a body with ideas projected upon ourselves by others. I think this is important not only in considering new media and technology, but in the misunderstandings and failed good intentions that come out of those media. While the presence of our physical bodies may not be apparent in cyberspace, the ideas of default cultural characteristics that are associated with race are still projected into cyberspace, and thus bring race and racism into non-physical, non-bodied spaces.

            I think this is the key transition to Banks’s piece, “Oakland, The Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment”. Here, the focus is very much the implications of race in use and access to technology, and how the institutionalization of racism is carried into the institutionalization of technology under a global capitalist market. The idea of embodiment recurs through the piece, and the projection of values (largely racial values) onto Black bodies, as well as the denial or cover-up attempts regarding the presence or absence of Black bodies in proximity to technology, as is clearly stressed in the “Falling Through the Net” reports and the Bush Administration’s denial of the Digital Divide as a social phenomenon. Banks also points out how technology use operates under the assumption of White As Default (p. 34), which immediately instills a racial value in the “cybersphere”, as well as creating an absent Platonic-esque Ideal of the Web user, embodying certain cultural collectives of race/class/gender while denying others (mainly minority/poor/female).

            Overall, this articles attempt to open our eyes both to who we physically are as writers, how our writing is perceived when embodied, and which bodies are participating in which areas. I think these are incredibly important for discussions of technology, which often make the assumption of universal accessibility or neutrality, rather than acknowledging that conversations (through real socioeconomic facts and through embodiment) are actually revolving around certain demographics and access points. 

Entry 8: Hooray Art History

            First off, let me start by saying that I’m getting a little tired of the puns.

            Now that that’s out of my system, I think that O’Gorman used Chapter 3 to bring in issues of the binary (which of course he punned with computer coding) within imagetexts. He begins with the Ramist tradition and its particular situation in pedagogy. To recap, Ramus’s philosophy helped lay the groundwork for the printing press, based on his efforts to move information outside of memory and into a storage container. This shift in internal to external can be documented in the learning flashcards that O’Gorman includes, which rely on subjective mnemonic devices. Under the Ramist tradition, these cards have to be remediated to bring that knowledge outside of the personal and the memory, and into what eventually becomes the textbook, the tool of the Republic of Scholars. As a non-academic side note, his characterization here of the textbook and the ROS made me imagine that cliché scene of the bad guy (the ROS) spinning around, stroking a white cat in his lap (the textbook) while plotting world destruction. I’m not sure if I can explain that by a lack of sleep, a weird imagetext, or being a cat lady…I’ll hope it’s the imagetext one though.

            O’Gorman uses the imagetexts of William Blake to illustrate the problems with the Ramist tradition, and show that it can be rebelled against and possibly overcome if we adopt Blake’s methods in our contemporary pedagogy. I did enjoy the exercise he shared from his own class, where he had students remediate “Nurse’s Song”. His students comment, “It was strange that when told what something is supposed to be, everyone almost automatically adapts their perception to see it that way”(66), I found to be very telling of how we’re trained to look at images. There is the notion that there is one right way to interpret images (and, to a certain degree, I’d argue that while there aren’t advocates for reading a text one way, there is potentially a hierarchy of interpretations for specific texts, ruled by a more favored or famous reading). O’Gorman presents Blake’s work as both resisting the Ramist tradition of his day, as well as offering us methods of resistance for its legacy in the academy and culture at large. Primarily, the resistance of seeing things in polar terms (as Blake does maintain certain binaries, such as good and evil) serves Blake’s imagetexts, while complicating the binary by making them inescapably bound to one another. O’Gorman writes, “Contraries may oppose one another, but they are not to be separated or divided into immutable categories or heading as in, for example, the Ramist dichotomization of knowledge” (62). Ultimately, this serves Blake’s purposes, “involv[ing] a unification of form and content, material production and ideology” (62).

            In this chapter we also, finally, get a (somewhat) clear definition of a hypericonomy. To be honest, I’ve been a little frustrated with O’Gorman’s refusal to give us a definition until this point (and a somewhat shabby one here, at least for me), as it’s made it very difficult to conceptualize any framework of a hypericonomy for me. It’s kind of sounded like “It can be anything!” to me at this point. However, when I read this: “…the process of subject formation in a culture saturated with endlessly repeated broadcast images. Those who engage in hypericonomy are asked to take a more critical look at that mode of subject formation, and have the opportunity to short-circuit it by producing and broadcasting their own schematic set of icons—not for the sake of marketing and sales, however, but for the sake of education” (68-69), I thought this:

            Memes play with images, jokes, and cultural artifacts and make commentary on them, not to replicate images for mass marketing or sales, but to spread (hopefully witty) ideas, thoughts, and observations through these images. One you log enough hours on Memebase, you’ll understand the implied tone/joke/point of the image, and the text will then make sense. And then you’ll cringe later when you see something in real life and think of how you’d meme-ify it. Maybe I totally missed the point of O’Gorman’s attempt at defining hypericonomy here and instead betrayed my own time log on Memebase by bringing this up (I made the front page once!!!!!!!!), but I think this might work. After all, he does say he wants us to take off with the idea of the hypericonomy, so I’m going to run with this for now.

            As for areas where I take issue with O’Gorman, one is in the presentation of etching. While I think the metaphorical value of Blake’s process of the materiality of his etching process matching the ideology of his philosophy and pedagogical beliefs is important and powerful, I think O’Gorman missed what I see as an important bridge between the technology and materiality of etching and his stance on the Republic of Scholars. Etching was developed at the end of the 15^th century, and was used by a range of artists, including Rembrandt and Durer. This technology marks a significant turn in how art is distributed throughout Europe. Most art produced before this point is more akin to how we think of “high art” (canvas painting and sculpture), and because of the materiality required, was usually commissioned by the Church as objects of religious devotion. The Reformation challenged iconography at the same time etching was developed, but nevertheless, a lot of prints depicted religious scenes or teachings. The biggest difference emerges out of the ability to distribute these prints. Because artists could produce one art image and then reproduce it without devoting the original amount of time needed over and over again, art becomes largely accessible to the middle class, rather than either the institution of the Church or the upper-class with the money for patronage (read in O’Gorman terms: The Republic of Scholars). I think that this is an extremely important consideration that needs to be made when evaluating the tradition against replication that Blake (and I think O’Gorman as well) advocate. While the artist’s touch is important, and I understand the resistance to mechanization, I think that the relevance of etching as a shift in cultural proliferation and access to art needs to be considered as a way to challenge the monopoly of the Republic of Scholars. After all, if you bring artist’s images into the home, then you can then think about the meanings of the images on your own terms, in your own private spaces, and either not have to visit "The Institution" to access them, or hear about the art owned and housed by the ROS and reported by them to lower classes.

            I’d like to return to the remediation of Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” as something I really agreed with and enjoyed in this chapter. O’Gorman examines how titles and text project the content we search for in an image. I think this is even more powerfully seen in modern and abstract art. It made one particular work come to mind for me, “Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale” by Max Ernst:

The title of this piece comes from the writing at the bottom of the frame (written in French). This dates to 1924 and is a Dada piece, although I think it’s significant that Surrealism was also “founded” this year (Surrealism, perhaps even more so than Dada, in my opinion, has weird and fascinating interaction between image and text, as O’Gorman describes). In this picture, the text is literally on the image, and works to complicate this piece in frustrating and beautiful ways. The first thing one might notice is the background of this piece: It is simultaneously a pastoral scene and one evoking the antiquity of Rome, with the arch d’triumphe and the Greco-Roman dome silhoutte. However, the subjects in this piece shouldn’t belong in either of these “genres” of painting. The girl on the left is running with a knife, possibly defending herself from or attempting to scare off the nightingale overhead. The other figure has collapsed into a fetal-esque position, but seems distorted and too limp even for a collapsed human. There is a man hunched atop the barn, carrying what appears to be a third child (but Ernst only mentions two, so which figure is really the third?) and reaching for the doorknob that is attached to the picture frame. I think this work epitomizes this complication and opposition between text and image in an imagetext that O’Gorman describes not just in this chapter, but in 1 and 2 as well. How is a nightingale threatening? Who are the two children? What is the man on the barn doing? Why is the figure so distorted and possibly dead? What is the purpose of Classical and Pastoral imagery in the background? The suggestion that Ernst has provided may reference some of the images that a viewer can locate in the piece, but by no means does it explain the piece. However, our inclination is to try to view the piece in the terms he provides, so we impose a relationship between characters that may not have existed without that suggestion—for instance, without the mention of the threatening nightingale, the bird’s silhouette may have just faded into the background as part of the Pastoral scene, as the frame is oddly dominated by the sky.

            I think this piece is perhaps a better examination and example of O’Gorman’s point here. I found that his art references in the piece were a bit lacking (for someone who resents the Republic of Scholars, he uses a lot of terms and name drops that can’t really be understood unless you’ve had some art initiation from the Republic of Scholars, an opposition I find odd), so I hope that this either interests or helps explain this to anyone who isn’t an art nerd and didn’t get some of his references to art.

            Overall, I’m enjoying the integration of art into text (obviously), but feel a bit lost in other areas of O’Gorman’s text. I recall him resisting a linear, traditional layout for his ideas in the book, though, so hopefully as I move further into it, it will become clearer and clearer.  

Entry 7

            The main theme I found in the readings for this week was how the “traditional” (or what the New London Group called “mere literacies”) composition structure limits students’ ability to express themselves through the modes and media they may have the best self-awareness over. Whether it be the visual or the aural, if a student can best express their ideas through conventions other than alphabetic text, then it is most helpful for learning if they can express themselves this way—then, perhaps, they may be able to articulate it more fully in alphabetic text to others, once they come to understand it through the mode that intuitively feels most “right” to them. This also brought up the monopoly of alphabetic text as expression (especially when Selfe describes aural vs. alphabetic cultures) and thus the only path to meaning making.

            In terms of multimodality, this week’s reading actually really helped me see the power it can communicate. I could abstractly understand how it forces students to reevaluate their thinking and expressive choices in ways that writing doesn’t, but I had yet to be moved by a multimodal piece the way I have been moved by writing—although, WSU is the first exposure I’ve had to the concept of multimodality, and before my remediated timeline, the only other projects I’ve done for WSU included drawings, which didn’t really help me express my ideas any better (or effectively) than my words can. When I first read about Selfe’s student Norris’s “Literacy=Identity: Can You See Me?” and the bell ringing and roll call being read, I could see multimodality serving to show a performance piece which highlights identity performance and resistance. Then, seeing in George’s piece the ways her students interpreted mapping colonialism, especially Deirdre Johns’s flag, I had a very powerful reaction. To me, this poetry performance and art work served as a way for me to “get” multimodality, if you will—the same way poetry and art moves me, a non-alphabetic student text can too. Perhaps this makes me sound a bit glib that I haven’t really gotten that so far, but it did really hit me this week how multimodality can be truly effective and not simply alternative or outside-the-box (as I felt when trying to draw cartoons). It made me start thinking about how I could incorporate multimodality into a classroom, especially in relation to visual and aural inundation that students today experience.

            I found the Selfe-Hesse argument to be most interesting not necessarily in what it is our jobs to do for students (to be honest, I feel like I’m seeing this every week in just about every class that approaches pedagogy), but in Selfe’s history of aural and alphabetic cultures. When she writes, “From one perspective, this process can be understood as a kind of cultural and intellectual remediation” (626), I found it to be an absolutely fascinating take on cultural artifacts in composition classrooms, especially when I then reconsidered it in light of the colonialism projects George had her students do.

            I enjoyed the George article the most this week, especially when she quotes Kehl in pointing out that some students are visually, but not necessarily verbally, sensitive (21). This made a great argument for multimodality, in my opinion. If critical thinking is the link between defining what English departments do, and students are better able to move into that critical thinking in a visual rather than verbal medium, then it makes sense to me if we have them work through it visually so that they are more comfortable inhabiting those ideas and get to know them in more detail and more self-awareness, and then make the move to having them put those thoughts, feelings, and reaction on paper.

            Yancey’s article was a bit harder for me to get into because I felt a bit ADD jumping all over the page between marginal notes, pictures, and the text (maybe that means I’m close-minded? Or maybe I shouldn’t have tried to read it before bed?), but I liked her notion that students are writing outside of the classroom, and that this isn’t unique to our generation (I hear a lot about how today’s writers write more than anyone else, and it makes me curious about the criteria they’re including for this comparison). Yancey writes, “Today, we are witnessing a parallel creation, that of a writing public made plural, and in the case of the development of a reading public, it’s taking place largely outside of school—and this in an age of universal education. Moreover, unlike what happens in our classes, no one is forcing this public to write” (300). I thought this worked really well at taking writing outside of the classroom effectively, but one thing I think could have been integrated into this article was a clear focus on how we need to teach students voice in order to work with this public, plural writing. While many people in this country are using email daily, I don’t think that means that students know how to write an email well. I’ve seen plenty of awful emails that, even though they’re writing, they need help in doing it effectively and appropriately. I would have liked to hear how Yancey could incorporate her ideas into the necessity of still needing to be understood, or achieve a certain tone, in writing that isn’t necessarily inherent to the task of writing.

            Overall, these articles were very interesting to me, especially the ones that approached multimodality in different expressive ways than I imagined it being, and the cultural implications of alphabetic texts. 

Entry 6

           I think Jody Shipka’s “Toward a Composition Made Whole” (2011) and The New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures: Designing Social Futures” (1996) have a remarkable amount in common, given that they were published fifteen years apart. Specifically, having recently been introduced to the subject and importance of multimodality, I’m somewhat surprised and confused by the fact that, even though the concept of multimodality has been around for quite some time now (especially with how quickly academic work seems to become dated), scholars are still having to justify its role in the classroom, even to their colleagues in English departments.

Specifically, I think that both of these pieces make arguments for the role of agency in multimodality: For Shipka, a multimodal project can’t be complete or relevant unless students take responsibility over their choices and decisions in the composition process. This connects to many of the texts we have read so far, especially Selfe’s urgency for students to have a critical engagement and awareness of the decisions they make in utilizing technology.

            The New London Group strongly advocates for this level of student involvement as well, making students Designers, a concept I think fits in well with Shipka’s stance on multimodal composition—the strongest connection between the two texts I find is when the New London Group writes, “Furthermore, the primary purpose of metalanguage should be to identify and explain differences between texts, and relate these to the contexts of culture and situation in which they seem to work” (17). I think that the metalanguage argued for in this article could mirror very well the conscious endeavor Shipka advocates for in multimodal composition, especially when it is considered in the “larger context” (for the New London Group, this would occur on the globalized level, for Shipka, I think it would occur in the larger world outside the classroom that students have to engage with in order to make their work relevant for the classroom).

            I think both of these texts are interesting to consider in relation to my timeline as well. I investigated the interaction between remediated technologies entering the space available in the classroom, and how the spaces are further remediated because of the presence of technology (I feel like I need the Xzibit meme as a visual aid on this…). As televisions, computers, cell phones, and the newest gadgets enter the classroom, the relationship between student and teacher changes, and therefore the pedagogy must change with it. The New London Group and Shipka’s work combined seem to address this point, with Shipka investigating more the presence and role of technology in pedagogy, and the New London Group investigating more how to update pedagogy to fit this ever-expansive world and the various cultures (access included) that students bring into the classroom through experience and practice.

            Overall, both of these texts engage very effectively for me with the overall questions we have brought up this semester, as well as the issues of multimodality and how technology should be integrated into the English classroom. 

Entry 5

            I think that the central argument that Bolter and Grusin make throughout “Remediation: Understanding New Media” is that remediation is a process of cultural recycling—maybe even better described through the remediated term “upcycling”. While technology develops within our society, rather than it being an autonomous or organic creation, it is rather an updated version of what we have been using for centuries as media. As the authors state, it is “the formal logic by which new media technologies refashion prior media forms” (273). In other words, it’s technologically upcycled.

Bolter and Grusin use Renaissance art and mathematics fairly often in their introduction to emphasize the idea of linear perspective in relation to remediation, transparency, immediacy, and hypermediation. I liked this analogy a lot in terms of relating their notion that we wish to have technology fade into the landscape (as is what the media literally does when an artist uses linear perspective and vanishing points). I thought this related well to the idea Selfe presented of how once technology becomes pervasive enough, it blends in, and it has to almost be pointed out to us for us to realize it’s there. Because they were writing about this issue at relatively the same time, I’m curious if Selfe, Bolter, and Grusin ever interacted as colleagues and/or peers, or if this topic was just one of the big items in terms of incorporating the digital humanities.

I think that this model could be helpful in the classroom, but I feel less confident about how I might implement it than I have with other proposed pedagogies thus far. For instance, I think that hypermediation could possibly be an answer to Selfe’s urge in making students think about the implications and social constructions of technology. I’m not sure how you could construct a lesson plan or model a course around this goal. Perhaps those of you who have taught already might have a more tangible idea of how this would play out in the classroom. My other thought on how to incorporate the ideas in Remediation is by using it as a platform for the “self-justification” paper that we have been discussing off and on throughout the semester so far. Perhaps by giving students the terms and examples in this book, it will provide them with the vocabulary to create a self-justification in a more lucid way, especially if we are requiring students to use multimodality and manipulate technology to best represent their thesis/goal/purpose in the project. 

Entry 4

            I really enjoyed today’s readings. They got at the heart of one of the main issues I had after the first day of class and getting a crash course in digital literacy, technological pedagogies, etc. (topics I hadn’t had exposure to previously); mainly: what do we do about teaching students to use technology and use it well when it is not as ubiquitous or accessible than the traditional pen and paper method is. I appreciated seeing that this is an issue that Rhet/Comp and Digital Literacy scholars have been considering from the get go (or at least what I imagine was fairly early into the field’s development…this article is from 1999, which in my understand makings sense to thinking seriously about computers and technology being staples in home and at school).

            One of the core issues in the Selfe and Faigley article were, clearly, that technology literacy in the classroom is becoming required at the same time computers themselves are not (let alone affordable or accessible), and that is creating an enormous divide between the educational realities and future prospects of students. And while both Selfe and Faigley are critical of the political underpinnings of digital literacy infiltrating the classroom (Selfe going into more of a political history of technology attitudes in the country, especially under the Clinton administration, and Faigley going into more of an economic history of computer usage, wealth division, and corporate practices and budgets), they both seem to fundamentally agree with the motivations behind those political mandates: Technology will provide teachers new resources, students new ways to learn, and children better opportunities in the job market as adults.

            I thought Selfe’s article did a good job articulating the role of Composition teachers in providing digital literacy, as I wasn’t quite sure where to place them in the grand scheme of things, particularly given the fact that I did grow up with computers at school from the time I was a kindergartner. It seemed a given that you wrote on Word and you used PowerPoint as a visual aid…strange as it may be to admit, it was hard for me to imagine why English teachers had a difficult time trying to figure out where technology placed in their classrooms. The emphasis Selfe gave on teachers making their students think about “who gets to use technology and what does it mean” rather than just “you have to use technology to show what you mean” provided a great model for me to proceed forward with idea about digital pedagogies and computer literacy from. I thought Selfe also did a great breakdown of socioeconomic forces in her paper, given the small amount of space it took up. Faigley also made a great analysis not only of availability but of access when he breaks down internet usage demographics (39-40).

            One thing I was curious about was what I read as a difference in computer literacy among teachers themselves. Selfe opens with a description of the majority of her colleagues being quite uncomfortable with the idea of technology in the classroom, but doesn’t elaborate on if this is because they are unskilled with the equipment themselves, or if they just don’t have ideas about how they’d use it in their pedagogy. I got a different feeling from Faigley though. He didn’t mention teacher apprehension to use technology so much as accessibility to it, or perhaps a resistance to the political nature of it. I was curious if this was a case of different opinions, or if something got lost in my translation of the pieces—even though they are ten years younger than our previous pieces, it’s still somewhat hard for me to place myself in the mindset of those for whom computers were entirely new, probably entirely un-intuitive, and who were having to learn how to use them somewhat independently, instead of playing around on MS Paint on lunch break in first grade. I admit that this culture difference (weird as it is to call it that) could entirely be the cause of my confusion here.

            One of the other seemingly contradictory elements of the readings for me was how a critical awareness might remedy the problems. Yes, I think it’s entirely important for privileged students to be made aware of their privilege and made to think critically about it. The critical thinking Selfe describes is absolutely necessary in my opinion. However, I’m not sure how this will then translate to a solution, as she seems to believe it will. She writes, “In technology-rich communication facilities, students and teachers can develop a more critically-informed sense of technology by actively confronting and addressing technology issues in contexts that matter—contexts that involve real people…engaged in a range of daily practices…within their various lived experiences and in light of their own goals” (433). Here, I wonder if this almost makes the core of the problem Selfe examines worse. By encouraging those who already have technology to use it as voraciously as possible, isn’t it possible that that widens the gap even more? And also, by immersing these students in critical thinking and problem solving, that seems to put them directly in a college-bound path. While obviously these are desirable (and necessary) qualities in K-12 education, the fact remains that it does achieve some of what Selfe criticizes as leading to technological illiteracy in the first place. Is this just a continuum then, or is there a solution? What do we do for the students who deserve this education as well but don’t have the resources? “Give them the resources” is obviously not a real solution when one examines the budgets Selfe outlines on 417-18.

            As far as the guidelines set forth by the CCCC, I think this is a good model to apply in my classroom, albeit a bit vague. In particular, I’m not sure how exactly the CCCC expects me to incorporate Assumption 3 (“include much hands-on use of technologies;”). What is much? To what extent does “hands-on” mean? Does that require me to teach them software, or to go to more in-depth “hands-on” experience, like coding or creating a website? What if my students are at a range in terms of previous experience, and some could really use a crash course in programs like Word, while others are proficient enough to go on to explore means of multimodality at more complex levels? Does that then still fall on me, or does that then extend to other programs at the University? I’m also unsure what “prepare students to be reflective practitioners” entails. Is this the critical awareness and engagement Selfe was describing? Or is there some other metacognitive task I should be assigning to my students?

            Overall, I think these readings did a great job of bringing to the forefront the social elements of technology. I think it’s all too easy for many people to think of technology as cold and distant from the people who create and use it, when in really, it is in many ways both a construct and shaper of society. 

Entry 3

I found I had quite different reactions to the four articles this week. I noticed two major bridges between all of them: Moving towards multimodality in teaching, and the positive outlook on student interaction with technology.

1.) These articles, to different levels, seem to be advocating some level of multimodality in the classroom. 

In Latham’s article, he spends some time elaborating on an interactive critical textbook (for lack of a better term), where the user has control both over how to use it personally and pedagogically, and that includes history, models, etc. (p. 282). While this new multimodal style raises its own set of questions, it does seem to carry the tune of what Latham imagines as the future, especially given his references to Dada and Futurism (Dada being highly multimodal, and Futurism embracing technology as necessary and central to human culture).

In Slatin’s article, while the hypertext all remains within the computer, it can include virtually anything that be can put on a computer—images, charts, music, video, etc. The very potential for hypertext lies in the fact that it can hold so much more (and different types of) data and cross-references than traditional text can, fostering connections: “…things which someone perceives as being related do in fact become related” (881).

In both of the Selfe articles (Selfe & Hawisher, Selfe & Cooper), the authors urge the classroom to become a place of integrating technology. While this, at the time, took place largely in the form of using computer labs and online forums to facilitate traditional in-class discussion, I think an updated form would push for more multimodal models in both teaching and learning, and establishing a classroom dynamic. The various classrooms studied in the Selfe & Hawisher article seem to follow the trend of a mix of technology and traditional—I believe that these articles predate exclusively online school, although there could be a prototype that I have missed.

2.) These articles also all have a positive view on technology in the classroom, to various degrees. 

In Latham’s article in particular, he describes the traditional textbook in a very disparaging way, invoking the idea of a moldy, decrepit artifact that repulses all students who have the misfortune of interacting with it (p.271). However, when he describes the potential for the e-textbook (p.271), prophesizing its invention as “an incredible personalization of learning, a radical democratization of ‘textbooks’, which allows every student to walk an individual pace” (272). 

Slatin doesn’t seem to go into pedagogy as much as the other articles, but he does spend the majority of the article describing how viewers of hypertext can interact with it on their own terms, and how this can increase engagement and learning. While he does describe some flaws of hypertext, they are so brief that they seem of no real or immediate concern to him—at least, not enough for teachers and scholars to shrug off the introduction of hypertext.

In both of the Selfe articles, there is an obvious advocacy for the technology-based classroom as the more successful, progressive one which fosters better teacher-student relationships, with the 1990 Cooper & Selfe article stressing this even more (in my opinion, to a somewhat exaggerated level, and one that demonstrated an online portion of class as far more positive and productive than I have ever seen—I imagine, however, that this will be a popular conversation topic on Tuesday, so I will not digress into it here). In the Hawisher & Selfe article, even though they warn against and analyze the undue readiness of writing teachers to integrate technology in the classroom when it is not necessarily productive, they still advocate for the same model described in the Cooper & Selfe article. Selfe, in particular, seems to be a huge fan of the classroom forum, as it appears as the saving grace to oppressive classrooms and squandered student opinions/agency.

            In some ways, I did find the articles dated, but that was mostly in their examples of technology and their predictions for the future (which I feel is inevitable for any article that’s even a few years old, in certain cases). However, many of their predictions of the issues that would grow around technology did seem to be very spot-on, which I was impressed with. Some of these qualities were what made them feel particularly relevant. Most so, I found Latham’s discussion of intellectual property and copyright issues just as pressing today as it was twenty years ago. I feel these discussions have been background noise throughout my life, ranging from illegally downloading mp3s, torrenting video, and various piracy laws that have been enacted in the past twenty-some years. In many ways, too, I found that Latham’s questions have been unanswered, or expanded upon—ebooks and copyright is the newest issue, one that I think fits in very easily to his essay, were it updated to a 2012 edition. Both of the Selfe articles describe classroom dynamics that I have encountered as an undergrad (classroom forums, particularly), and I am curious about why this isn’t dated, even after over twenty years. In my experience, this has never worked like it did in the article examples. So why is it so enduring?

Lanham, Richard. "The Electric Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution." New Literary History. Vol. 20, No. 2, Technology, Models, and Literary Study (Winter, 1989), pp. 265-290.

Slatin, John. "Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium." College English. Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 870-883.

Cooper, Marilyn M. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." College English, Vol. 52, No. 8 (Dec., 1990), pp. 847-869.

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