Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change. Even inside of school, never before have writing and composing generated such diver- sity in definition. What do our references to writing mean? Do they mean print only? That's definitely what writing is if we look at national as- sessments, assuming that the assessment includes writing at all and is not strictly a test of grammar and usage. According to these assessments-an alphabet soup of assessments, the SAT, the NEAP, the ACT-writing IS "words on paper," com- posed on the page with a pen or pencil by students who write words on paper, yes- but who also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards-and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes.
So we need a new vocabulary, one that opens instead of constrains, that describes this network, this expansion.
At the same time, when re- viewed, our own practices suggest that we have already committed to a theory of communication that is both/and: print and digital. Given the way weproduce print--sooner or later inside a word processor-we are digital already, at least in process. Given the course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT, we have committed to the screen for administrative purposes at least. Given the oral communication context of peer review, our teaching requires that students participate in mixed communicative modes. Given the digi- tal portfolios coming into their own, even the move by CCCC to provide LCD's and Internet connects to panel- ists upon request and for free, we teach- ers and students seem to have moved already-to communication modes assuming digital literacy. And thinking about our own presentations here: when we consider how these presenta- tions will morph into other talks, into articles for print and online journals, into books, indeed into our classrooms,it becomes pretty clear that we already inhabit a model of communica- tion practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school. This is composition.
To begin thinking about a revised curriculum for composition, we might note the most significant change that has occurred in composi- tion over the last thirty years: the process movement. Although not ev- eryone agrees that the process movement radically altered the teaching of composition (see Crowley; Matsuda), most do think that process-as we defined it in the research of scholars like Janet Emig and Linda Flower and as brought into the classroom by teachers like us-did revolution- ize the teaching of writing. We had a new vocabulary, some of it-like invention--ancient, some of it-writing process and rewriting and freewriting-new. We developed pedagogy anew: peer review, redraft- ing, portfolio assessment. But nothing stays still, and process approaches have given way to other emphases. Recently, we have seen several ap- proaches seeking to update that work, some on the left in the form of cultural studies and post-process; some more interested in psychologi- cal approaches like those located in felt sense; others more interested in the connections composition can forge with like-minded educational initiatives such as service learning and first-year experience programs.
Richard Lanham, of course, has argued that with the addition of the digital to the set of media in which we compose, delivery takes on a critical role, and I think that's so. But much more specifically, what a shift in the means of delivery does is bring invention and arrangement into a new relationship with each other. The writer of the page has fundamentally different opportuni- ties than the creator of a hypertext. Anne Wysocki is right about the interface of the page-that is, it has one, and it's worth paying attention to-but even so, as we read the pages of an article, we typically do so line by line, left to right, as you do now: page one before page two. This is the fixed default arrangement. The writer invented through such a text is a func- tion of that arrangement. In other words, you can only invent inside what an arrangement permits-and different media permit different ar- rangements. By contrast, the creator of a hypertext can create a text that, like the page, moves forward. In addition, however, hypertext com- posers can create other arrangements, almost as in three rather than two dimensions. You can move horizontally, right branching; you can then left branch. The writer invented in a medium permitting these ar- rangements is quite different-a difference of kind, not degree.
My third and final expression is the deicity of technology. Deixis, linguistically, refers to words like now and then, words whose "meanings change quickly depending on the time or space in which they are uttered" (Leu et al.) or read. The word Now when I wrote this text is one time.
And let me provide another example. For the last several years, I have worked with graduate students in architecture, and one of their prac- tices is meeting monthly to talk about how their projects and theses are developing. Now, given that it's architecture, they do more than talk: they show-in pin up's on the walls, in a one-page handout, and in a set of PowerPoint slides. Something that grabbed my attention almost im- mediately was how those slides were being used: not for presentation of a finished idea, as the design of them would have it-and as the name, presentation software, suggests-but, rather, for a different purpose: for exploration, in fact as a new space for drafting ideas. Since then, in several different classes, I've used PowerPoint in just this way, as a site for a rough draft, shared with a real audience.
Electronic writing is by nature adaptable, malleable, nonlinear. While Walter Ong argues that the word is dead once it enters the page, electronic writing is an active process.
Cyborg theory bridges theories of receiver and receving.
The Cyborg is the fusion of contradictions, differences, dependencies and as such subverts our stereotypes and predijuces of what it means to be human.
In this view, texts will tend toward the nonhierarchical, nonlinear, anti-linear, malleable, manipulable, multivocalic, de-centerable, re-centerable, multi-centerable, dynamic, democra- tized, anarchic, fragmentary, reticulate, malleable, and multivocal. In addition, the written text - printed out on paper or ftp-ed around the Net - is not simply an artifact affected by technology: it is simultaneously the realization of a set of wider, constantly shifting social relations, including those imbued with class, race, gen- der, ethnicity, political and cultural concerns (Giroux, 1992, 1990, p. 121).
One effect of electronic literacy and the electronic classroom-without-walls is the end of the distinction between personal and private realms.
This perspective suggests that the unstable, shifting, state of postmodern literacy is not something to be avoided. The destabilized text is not something to fear; rather, it is desirable.
Space is not passive or empty.
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