a retrospective

I reluctantly began this blog almost two months ago.  I was, and still am, somewhat doubtful about the magnificent benefits that web culture has to offer humans, that the internet will inevitably be much more than a distraction and passive entertainment for most.   But I am less so now, than I was before.  This blog was, and still is, an experiment of sorts for me, a chance to just try out what blogging has to offer me as a writer, teacher and thinker.

If I quickly scan my post titles, certain keywords jump out at me: meta-logue, storytelling, narrative, essayistic, humanistic, adjunct, teaching, ending, beginning, research.  I think that, so far, I have been preoccupied with trying to put my luddite self, protective of my human-ness,  into dialogue with the  part of me that is curious about  the intersecting forces of technology, writing and humanity. That sounds sort of dramatic, I guess.  But really, it is so very odd to have our would-be selves so bound up in computers, to invest so much of our time and our selves into them.  I find myself being more rigid and formal in my blog posts than I would like to be.  Anyone, really, might read them.  I discussed this is my post “Ending at the Beginning.”  To be more personal would feel vulnerable.  But to stay formal would make it difficult to feel as though any real human dialogue is actually going on.  Especially since I have no audience, really.  I am still trying to construct a public self.  I feel a peculiar discomfort every time I sit down to write a new post, a different kind of discomfort than I am used to with non-blog writing.  We might be able to get published with ultimate ease, but that doesn’t mean we’ll have an audience.   It’s weird writing to an imagined, public audience.

I’m not sure how I would even feel about having an audience anyways, or how to go about getting one.  I think it might be about finding a niche of other bloggers who are doing something very similar to what I am doing, and inserting myself into their conversation.  I have been reluctant to do this, because, for some reason, posting on a stranger’s blog still seems intrusive, like I am crashing a party.  I think I need another analogy to replace this one, because it might not be a super-productive mindset to have in this context.

I did manage to get into contact with Martin Gruner Larsen,  a blogger that I referenced in “Are Blogs More Essayistic than Essays?“  We emailed back and forth a bit about his MA thesis, and I think I might have convinced him to finish translating an abbreviated version of it into English.  I’d really like to read it, but not enough to learn Norwegian.  We’ll see.   I guess that in itself is pretty cool, being able to get in touch with a Norwegian interested in the theoretical intersections between blogs and essays.   I don’t really know for certain how this blog will look going forward, but I’m sure that it will be essayistic.  If nothing else, then I at least have one more vehicle for my thinking.

storytelling: the humanistic potential of research?

research?

In his essay “The Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin declares that

the art of storytelling is coming to an end.  Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.  More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed.  It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. (362)

As a writing teacher, I am always looking for ways in which students’ personal experience is epistemologically compatible with, and complementary to, the academic work of research.  I do not believe that narrative is an entry-level, second-rate mode of writing, but rather, that it is on par with, and at times superior to, traditional research as a way of coming to know, rather than displaying and/or arguing about knowledge that is already known.  But, I don’t think that we need an either/or approach to narrative and research.  I wonder how experience and academic research might work better in tandem, than they might as separate and discrete modes of meaning-making.  How can writing teachers encourage students to reclaim, and practice, this fundamental human act of exchanging experiences, while doing  academic work?  Benjamin asks

whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way. (377)

Benjamin is arguing for the pragmatic, constructivist power of storytelling.  This reminds me of Joan Didion’s take on storytelling in “The White Album”:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be ‘interesting’ to know which.  We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual existence” (11).

If this is not intellectual work, I am not sure what is.  As a daily practice, storytelling of the sort that Didion describes here is not  a mere relaying of events, of what we already know from personal experience, but the active interpretation and analysis of what we see around us everyday.  My colleague Galin Dent asks his students to treat everything that they encounter, at all times, as a text.  This can include any and all experiences: the party they went to last night, the flourescent disorientation that they experience in the frozen food aisle at Safeway, the sunny day funeral for the aunt that they hardly even knew.  This type of intellectual work  might be just as important, if not more important than, traditional research.  Our students can more readily use interpretive storytelling than they would library research strategies.  But again, it need not be an either/or scenario.  The two might, hopefully, drive each other.  Practicing observation and interpretation might spur students into researching the issues that they find important in life, around them every day.  I am arguing for teaching research as a tool that will help students in the business of living.

I wonder if and how the blog as a form of writing, especially when employed as a sort of public, intellectual diary, might more readily spur students to put themselves, and their academic work together, to construct knowledge in a way that is open and explicit, not only to others, but to themselves as well.

are blogs more essayistic than essays?

Who's your Daddy?

Martin Gruner Larsen titled his Master’s thesis “Text, Thought, Time: The Weblog As Essayistic Process.”  In an abbreviated version of his thesis that he posted to his blog, Larsen names his project as an “attempt to create a conceptual vocabulary for describing the weblog as a literary form”, and points to essay theory as the fulcrum that enabled him to do this.  After reading Montaigne’s Essais, he realized that they had a lot in common with blogs:

the focus on process; the intellectual restlessness; the love of quotation, of other texts, of the randomness of things read coming together and the verbal and intellectual playfulness – these were all superficial qualities shared by blogs and the essay… qualities [that] actually signalled a deeper relationship of methodology, composition and structure which I wanted to explore and use to develop a theoretical vocabulary to describe blogs as literary entities and then use in practice to analyse and criticise some blogs.

These very qualities that Larsen points out are also the qualities that I try to encourage in my students’ writing.  I am drawn to blogs as a pedagogical tool because I think that, by their very nature, they ask students to begin over and over and over again, to “essai” on a certain topic with a series of posts.   Because of this, blogs might push students to write prose that is more essayistic , rather than merely expository.  Students can approach their topic from various diffferent angles, and evolve the topic as they go.  Blogs are not a finished product, but rather a work in progress, which pushes students to think of knowledge as ever-emerging, ever-changing.  And, of course, blogs are a more public form of writing than essays written to a teacher only.

Compositionist J. Elizabeth Clark argues in “The Digital Imperative: Making the case for a 21st Century Pedagogy”, that

“In our nascent digital culture, the traditional essayistic literacy that still dominates composition classes is outmoded and needs to be replaced by an intentional pedagogy of digital rhetoric that emphasizes the civic importance of education, the cultural and social imperative of ‘the now,’ and the ‘cultural software’ that engages students in the interactivity, collaboration, ownership, authority, and malleability of texts.”

While I agree that these aims of a “pedagogy of digital rhetoric” are a good thing, I take issue with the term “traditional essayistic literacy” that Clark uses as a foil for a pedagogy of digital rhetoric.  She does not define what she means by “traditional essayistic literacy,” but instead leaves it up to the reader to fill in that gap for his/herself.  I have seen this term “essayistic litearcy” used before by compositioninsts, to what I believe is ill effect, given the qualities of the essay that I find so epistemologically powerful, which Larsen points out: “the focus on process; the intellectual restlessness; the love of quotation, of other texts, of the randomness of things read coming together and the verbal and intellectual playfulness.”  This is the kind of writing, and habits of thought that I want my students to engage in.

Clark refers elsewhere in her article to Ally, as student who was

“constrained by a rigid understanding of the five-paragraph essay… hamstrung by the form and unable to fully develop her essays” and who instead “attempted to make everything fit into five-paragraphs and ended up with only the shell of what promised to be a much longer essay.  She thought of writing as a performance for the teacher, but not as something that had a significant role in her own life.”

This shows that, by “traditional essayistic literacy,”  Clark might mean writing reminiscent to the five-paragraph essay,  rather than the type of essay that Larsen speaks of.  What seems problematic is that the term “essayistic” is getting conflated with mind-rotting, standardized school writing, rather than the vibrant sort of essayism that Larsen describes as inherent to the blog as a literary form.   I think that compositionists need to take heed not to cross these definitional wires of the essay.  The Essay, as it has traditionally been known since as far back as Montaigne, should be something that we rescue from traditional school writing, rather than simply toss aside in our rush towards the new frontier of a “pedagogy of digital rhetoric.”

Adjunct Blogging

As I am about to graduate, and enter the iffy realm of adjunct life, I was happy to find an article, “Adjunct Incognito:Joining the Blogosphere“, by adjunct blogger Holly Pappas, in FORUM, a newsletter for issues about part time and contingent faculty, published by CCCC.  Lamenting the the adjunct’s lack of opportunity for professional conversation and communication, Pappas began blogging as a way to enter into conversations with peers far and wide.  She now believes that

all academics should blog. After all, they all write, and blogs have many advantages over the more conventional venue of peer-reviewed journals: they are at once more informal, more immediate, and more interactive.

And for those not inclined to create their own blog, she says, even just reading other compositionists blogs offers a

quick, convenient way to gather some new ideas about selecting texts, sequencing assignments, using technology in the classroom (a natural interest for many bloggers), and other topics colleagues might chat about in the hallway if they had time to stop and talk.

The type of adjunct isolation that Pappas discusses has been a concern for my ever-collaborating  grad school cohort.  Perhaps blogs could solve a bit of that seclusion problem that will come with our emergence into the adjunct work force.

Pappas offers some resources, for those just starting out in the comp/adjunct/blogging world:

The Kairosnews list of blogs to start with:

http://kairosnews.org/node/3719

Her own blog,  Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

The group blog she wrote for, Community College English

and the blog she now writes for, Bits, Ideas for Teaching Composition, hosted by Bedford St. Martins, where I also found Gregory Zobel’s blog “Adjunct Advice“.  But, he no longer blogs there, because he is no longer an adjunct, since he is now in a phd program.

It seems that, just as adjunct work status is contingent, so is the adjunct blog.  I will keep an eye out for any more adjunct resources, and if you have any, please let me know, if anyone out there happens to read this!  Speaking of which, I’ll include some more words of advice from Pappas:

Normally all bloggers begin without an audience. Though audience is in some ways the point of this public writing, still I had many private motivations for starting my blog Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing: to have an accessible and secure repository for my reflections, to collect links and responses to articles, to publish my own sonnet if I felt like it (and, once, I did)…

As months went by, I started to develop a (very) small audience, by inviting colleagues to drop by the blog (few came) and by commenting on or linking to other people’s blogs. I began to appreciate audience in a new way, to understand again (as I had years earlier in writing workshops) how an awareness of audience can exert a positive pressure to get me started writing and to keep me writing. The informal-yet-public nature of blogging helped both as a prod and an incentive. It’s an important lesson I wanted my students to understand, and it was something I started to think about in terms of developing those more public audiences for my students.

I think that, to remain a writer, in whatever way possible, is one of the best things that a compositionist can do to remain a student among students.

teaching blogging: narrative research?

I recently read Richard Larson’s “The ‘Research Paper’ in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing“, in which he argues that the “generic” research paper typically taught in English courses, is conceptually meaningless, and misleads students as to the true purpose of research, which is to create and follow a line of inquiry, drawing on an array of sources outside oneself, not confined to just book and print material.  By teaching the “research paper”, we allow students to infer that research is confined to one kind of paper tacked on at the end of the semester, and that once the semester is over, they can forget about research.  Instead, Larson asserts that,

to  function  as  educated,  informed  men  and  women  they  have  to  engage  in  research, from  the  beginning  of  and  throughout  their  work  as  writers.  I  think  that  they should  know what  research  can  embrace,  and I think they  should be  encouraged to  view  research  as broadly,  and conduct  it as  imaginatively,  as  they  can.  I think they  should be held accountable  for their opinions  and should be required to  say, from evidence,  why  they  believe  what they  assert.  I think that they  should be led to  recognize  that data from “research”  will affect  their entire  lives,  and that they should  know  how  to  evaluate  such  data  as  well  as  to  gather  them.  And  I  think they  should  know  their  responsibilities  for  telling  their listeners  and  readers where  their data came  from.

What Larson calls for, I believe, can be accomplished with blogging, which asks for continuous research writing that students will be held accountable for by an audience of their peers.  And, the more informal, public nature of blogging might more successfully introduce students to a type of research that will allow them to consider themselves “educated and informed men and women [who] engage in research”, possibly even after they are done with their formal education.  Students will not likely continue to type up research papers for an audience of one, but they might continue blogging.

And, the goal-oriented nature of research, I think, pairs well with Jill Rettenberg  the nature of narrative blogs that she discusses in “blogging about cancer and the narrativity of blogs”:

Narrative blogs work well when they fit into a familiar narrative scheme, an archetypal narrative if you like. As in most narratives, blogs work well when there’s a clear protagonist (the blogger) trying to achieve a goal. The goal can be many things:

• to lose weight (diet blogs, which Diane Greco once wrote about)
• to reach level 80 in World of Warcraft
• to have a baby (infertility blogs like “A Little Pregnant” – though she’s had her baby now)
• to get a PhD (I wrote that blog for a while!)
• to get a girlfriend (The Date Project)

These goal-oriented blogs work well for the reader because we know how the plotline works, and yet we can enjoy the cumulative suspense of seeing how things go, day by day, in real time. Will the blogger achieve her goal? They work well for the blogger because the act of writing helps to keep you focused on your goal. It’s a way of coping. And there is satisfaction in seeing your life as part of a greater narrative.

A genuine goal, that a writer want to accomplish, marks both good research and good narrative, which makes the two so compatible in  student blogging.  Student bloggers can embed narrative into their research, personalizng it for an audience (and themselves), and at the end of the term, they can analyze the arc of their “research narrative”, as a reflective endpeice to the course.

ending at the beginning

Jill Walker Rettberg, a professor at the University of Bergen, uses her blog jill/txt to research how people tell stories online.   In her post “Rituals of Closure” Rettberg calls upon diary theorist Phillippe Lejeune, and his article “Why Do Diaries End?”:

“as Lejeune writes, the ending of a diary is far more fraught than its beginning: ‘What a contrast between the simplicity of a diary’s beginning and the evanescence of its ending: the multiple forms ending can take (stopping, destroying, indexing are all different, even opposite actions)’.”

But, what about the multiple forms beginning can take?  Clearly, diaries differ from other genres of writing, but I’m not so sure I agree that beginnings are less fraught than endings.  Students oftentimes say that their greatest difficulty in writing is just beginning.  I think that they say this because beginnings are fraught with possibility.  Beginnings bring with them the anxiety of having too much to say, or too little.  Or both, simultaneously.  To say something of consequence is no small feat.  To carve some semblance of meaning out of so many possibilities can be overwhelming.  Kierkegard said that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”   While I don’t agree that freedom causes all anxieties, I do believe that the freedom, (or perhaps in our students’ case, the imperative) to say something of consequence can create a cognitive and creative bottleneck.

I am drawn to the idea of beginnings because I am a writing teacher who has to constantly begin classes, in which I must help many students begin many different writing projects.   A teacher’s business, especially a writing teacher’s, is to help students begin, to create the conditions for students’ beginnings.  Blogging seems like a  way to constantly begin, constantly evolve, not only for writing students, but also for a writing teacher.  This is my third blog post, and I am still revising  my purpose for blogging.  Revising my beginning.  Maybe this is an inherent aspect of blogging; what we write is contingent upon what we have already written, and there is a desire to push past that contingency, to say something new, something of consequence, to evolve that which we have already said.  I began my blog as a way to research blogging: what it is, why it is, how it is. But I know that if I am to persist in my blogging, I will have to constantly revise my purpose for it.  Or I will just stop.
Rettberg continues,

“Unlike paper diaries, blogs are intended to be read not only by our future selves but by others as we write. Does the presence of the actual reader (indicated by statcounters, links and comments) substitute for the presence of the future, or do we still create our blogs partly as little time capsules sent to ourselves? I wonder whether my main target audience might be myself? I reread my blog constantly, especially the most recent posts which are visible whenever I check on it, but also to find specific things I wrote about, or sometimes to see what I was thinking at a particular time.”
I would agree with Jill, that my target audience when I blog is, to a certain extent, myself.  But for me, this is due in part, at least in this beginning stage, to what Michael Wesch terms “Context Collapse”, in his Anthropological introduction to YouTube.   Although I am not in front of a webcam on my blog, I do feel as though I might be observed at any moment by almost anybody, really.   And that is unnerving.  For that reason, I do prefer to think of my future, and hopefully smarter, self as my target audience. Or maybe just my classmates, or just the authors whose work I am synthesizing into my blog posts.

Blogging sets up a sort of panoptic sensation, and it feels sort of vulnerable.  But I think that might be the point.  This sort of voluntary, Foucauldian self-monitoring that blogging sets the stage for, might necessitate another blog post entirely.

Keeping my imagined audience small, or non-existent, makes contributing to a body of knowledge on the web not quite so overwhelming.  Because contributing to this sea of information, setting yourself loose in the midst of it, can be even more overwhelming than trying to find what you want to inside of it.

since this began as a grad school research endeavor…

…I guess this is an academic blog. Through Torill Mortensen’s blog, I found Jill Walker’s blog, jill/txt, which came in handy because her most recent post is titled “What does a great academic blog look like?”. She is trying to re-design her blog, and was asking for advice from other academic bloggers. When I found Jill’s post, I had just picked the theme for my blog after I spent too much time sifting through all hundred and something of the wordpress themes. I had trouble deciding between a fun, interesting theme that allowed for more creative flexibility, and a more clean, minimalist theme. I chose the theme that I chose because I thought that, for me, it would be most important to not get distracted by visual clutter on a blog, especially if I am going there for academic reasons. Maybe I can get more fancy and fun later on.

Anyhow, from that “what a great academic blog looks like” post, and all the comments that people left on it I found out that:

1.  Cluttered blogs are annoying (like I thought)

2. Overly clean and minimalist blogs might limit you from saying lots of stuff.  Not sure why, maybe too much order is confining…

3. Magazine-style blog themes ( which require you have post an image with each blog) are thought of as:

a)stylish

b) outdated

c) possibly impersonal (not sure why)

d) inefficient (if you just wanna get a quick post up)

e) fun and creativity-geared, since the image component forces you to search for something.  I can see how finding an image to pair with your thinking could add a new domension to what it is that you were thinking in the first place, and add to the “essayistic” nature of blogging that I discussed in my previous post.

4. Blog design is not all that important anyways…since most people follow RSS feeds rather than visiting an actual blog, unless they want to comment, in which case they have to visit actual site

5.   People are concerned with how you archive your blogposts.

6. tags are important (i need to figure out how to rig that)

7.  RSS is important (but maybe not for me, cause I don’t anticipate having a real readership for this blog)

8. you want to think about accessibility (cause not everything works on smartphones)

 

This is more of a kind of nuts and bolts assessment of the way academic blogs are configured, but it’s pretty helpful for me considering I am trying to design my blog page at this point.

Elvira and the Meta-Logue

I am graduate student in Composition/Rhetoric at San Francisco State.   I was reading the Charles Tryon article, “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition”, in which he states that he views blogging

“as a form of what Michael Renov (2004) describes as an “essayistic” mode conducive to engaging with the fragmentary or the ephemeral, precisely those aspects of everyday life that often escape careful analysis. The open-endedness of the essay form could also provide a way to talk about how blog writing, and the essayistic in general, is grounded in authors’ experiences”

I am very much interested in open-ended, essayistic writing, the type that Tryon describes here, in whatever form it takes. This set me about looking for more theory about blogging, to see if anyone else had anything to say about the open-ended inquiry style of blogging, but I didn’t find anything, really, except for one article, “Of a Divided Mind: Weblog Literacy”, by Torill Elvira Mortensen, in which she suggests that

“… the weblog may have its roots in the research journal, the ship’s log, the private diary, and the newspapers all at the same time…the weblog is nothing if not adaptive and unique…it is a bastard child of all personal writing, breeding wildly as it meets others of its ilk online…weblogs are, if anything, unfinished business…almost invariably, a blog will at some point contain metareflection. It often happens right at the beginning: ‘I want to write this weblog because…’ “

Even though she is not the true “mistress of the dark”, I was still really excited that her middle name is Elvira. I was also excited to find someone else discussing the ontology, if you will, of the weblog, that is, if a weblog can even have an ontological condition. Is a weblog alive??? Anyhow, she seems to be in agreement with Tryon, even though they didn’t cite one another. They both agree that blogging is pretty personal, and begins with an attempt to work on something, without needing a definite destination. Like a true essay (before the academy got a hold of it) the blog allows its writer to circumambulate, and to be overtly conscious of his or her self, and the role that particular self plays in the writing of said blog (or essay). Mortensen also suggest that

“In the spirit of the metalogue, the most common way to read and learn about research on weblogs is by reading weblogs and, preferably, by keeping one yourself. The nature of weblogs invites metalogues, and the research community keeps this metalogue running through a network of links , exchanges, comments, and notes between the weblogs of participants. The weblog itself is the best tool for researching and learning about weblogs.”

Okay Elvira. Makes sense, really. I definitely dig meta-ness, the idea of researching in a way that embodies the thing I am researching. Learn about blogging by blogging. Not sure why that didn’t occur to me before.  You don’t learn how to dance by reading about dancing, though it may help out some. So, I am attempting to use this blog as a blogging research forum, but I don’t really expect anyone to ever comment on anything I write in it, since I don’t really know what I’m doing, really, just fishing around for other meta-bloggers at this point. If other meta-bloggers somehow find my blog and give me feedback, all the better.