After a few semesters of planning and learning, my Department is rolling out the sixth and final course in a slate of courses designed to get Illinois teachers ready and credentialed to teach dual-credit English composition courses in their high schools. This has been in partnership with my current institution’s College of Education, the “REAL Academy” and it has been quite a whirlwind road, lots of fun, lots of work, lots of opportunity for me to learn all kinds of new things. Here in the first module of the Summer semester I am running the ENGE/ENGM515 course focused on “Digital Rhetoric.”

We’re barely a week into the seminar here, but already I’ve having quite a bit of fun. We’re hoping to look at som fairly canonical texts—Douglas Eyman’s Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, and Practice, Collin Gifford Brooke’s Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media, and much, much more. I quite like Brooke’s text, especially since it pulls very few punches and still strikes me as incredibly relevant in its overall argument and claim, namely, that those of us working in rhetoric and composition need to attend to the computational/digital infrastructures that allow us to do what it is that we do in the classroom with writing. Case in point, here is Brooke in the “Coda”:

I find it increasingly irresponsible to study rhetoric and writing without accounting in some way for the various impacts of information and communication technologies. Likewise, I do not think that it is possible to understand these technologies without an appreciation of their rhetorical effects, both qua technology and as players in our discursive ecologies. (p. 197)

I couldn’t agree more with such a position—although, for myself, I am wondering just exactly how far down the rabbit hold I want to go in terms of “accounting … for the various impacts of information and communication technologies” when we think about and study rhetoric. This very quickly (and easily?) gets one into questions of literacy. I am, of course, sympathetic to the whole analogy that sees literacy with the digital as being similar to the early days of the automobile. If one was driving an old Model T, it would behoove one to (possibly) know how it worked; over time, I can drive the car without worrying myself too much how exactly an internal combustion engine works. The same could be said for the computer. That said, now that I’ve learned how to code, how to program, how to script things, I can’t really ever imagine how I lived without such knowledge and awareness.

Speaking of analogies, I found Brooke’s use of the “interface” metaphor to be incredibly thought-provoking:

For better of worse, there is no explicit focus in this project on pedagogy, although I believe that there are some obvious classroom implications for many of the examples I offer. One of the equally obvious implications of the increasing trend toward online education is that we have begun to think of our classrooms, whether f2f or online, as interfaces as well, and in that sense, the writing classroom may ultimately take its place among the media I describe in this project. But there are no direct pedagogical consequences to this project other than its attitudes toward rhetoric and technology (pp. 199-200).

I like this idea of trying to think about the classroom as a kind of “interface”—very interesting. Would it help us teachers to incorporate the language of “usability” and “user-testing” when we think about our presence and time in the classroom (especially in terms of courses that are “face-to-face”!) … I like this a lot and will definitely chew on this a bit more, to be sure!

No doubt this assertion is cousin to some of the larger arguments Brooke puts forward with regards to thinking about technologies and how they impact the teaching of writing:

Our tendency has been to treat discursive technologies as if they were simply another specialty among many in our discipline, the province of a handful of experts, one of whom could be hired into a department thereby satisfying that particular “area.” This attitude, another of our legacies inherited from English departments, has left us underprepared for the shift from page to screen; technology is transdisciplinary, cutting across the full range of activities we engage in as professionals, rather than subdisciplinary. The longer we wait to realize this, the harder we will have to struggle for respect and relevance as experts in writing. (p. 5)

My two colleagues (Drs. Beth McDermott and Anna Ioanes) in the English Department have just finished a year-long grant project—generously funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation where they were interested in studying this “digital technology” side of things here at the University of St. Francis. The final report would appear to lend a great deal of credence to Brooke’s argument that we really do have our feet to the fire when it comes to thinking more carefully and intentionally about the technological side of writing instruction. The creation of graduate-level courses in Multimodal Composition and Digital Rhetoric (of course) is a really fantastic start—though I have no doubt that there’s still much more to be done, especially at the undergraduate level.

I am also thinking that I myself need to do a little bit more thinking in terms of this whole “digital” or “data literacy” (Codecademy’s recent offering of a Data Scientist Track in NLP got me thinking about this whole “data literacy” issue) versus having a facility with digital tools and digital making. I can imagine someone having fantastic data literacy but not knowing at all how to make, say, a graph in Python or R with matplotlib or ggplot2. It’s possible one could argue that data literacy is an absolutely necessary thing; knowing how to code and create the graphs might not be all that necessary at the end of the day, sufficient but ultimately not necessary. As usual, one sees how the overall goals and purposes of one’s endeavors have a great deal of significance here—which is, of course, good rhetorical practice in general.

I’ll try to keep this space here on the blog up-to-date as the semester goes along—as always, more to come!