It's a Panopticon!

The title of this entry doesn't have much to do with what I'm going to say, but it is a fun phrase.

As fun as that phrase is, though, I hadn't thought of it in terms of education until just now.

Elizabeth and Ti both mention Bentham's hope that his design for the Panoptic prison/ work/ schoolhouse would be just as good for pedagogical training as for punishment (D&P 206), something that many of us fear about all the Panoptic institutions we can identify in modern life. Granted, part of the trouble in modern life is that everything seems to be a... hold on, have to turn off something.

XBOX SEES ALL

Everything in modern life seems to at least be part of a Panoptic system. I themed a 101 class on Privacy issues last Spring. It was pretty awesome until the second week, when we started talking about all the little ways we are watched and discussed how that watching can change our actions. Then, I hit the wrong button on a classroom computer and turned on the room camera. None of us had noticed the camera before, and that changed the mood of the class until they forgot about it a few weeks later.

I'm coming back to that. Or, I intend to. The fine folks at Vick's might have other plans.

You're welcome for the ad campaign.

Richard Ohmann's "Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital" (College English 47:7) raises the ire of Adam Sprague (note also Jacob's concerns in response to Elizabeth's blog post), and I agree with the primary concerns: in 101, we are expected to teach writing. The expectation might not be from the English department, but (and here's where Foucault re-enters the picture) other departments do expect us to teach the orderly arrangement of words to elicit a planned response. And, thankfully, that's what English scholars study. (Current arrangement of words notwithstanding.)

But, I come back to that camera accidentally turned on last Spring. I come back to the time-stamp on this blog post, woefully behind schedule. And, perhaps most importantly, I come to the greatest advancement and curse that computer technology has brought to writing instruction. Everything is open for viewing and held up to the light (D&P 200-202), possibly carefully scrutinized at any moment.

Supposedly, student texts make for great readings and course material in a writing classroom (Joe Harris' A Teaching Subject, 1996, makes some good recommendations if you're into that sort of thing). However, as Alfie Kohn has noted, the cooperative, collaborative document construction that these tools allow is rarely the product in the classroom. Instead, borne partly out of our testing culture, the final products are always individual. Like Bentham's factory manager or prison warden (because, really, they're all the same job, amirite?), the teacher is ultimately concerned with how well the individual performs on the given task. I'd love to do collaborative portfolios (if only for the reduction in grading), but as a link in this Panoptic chain, the slight chance of upper administration finding out is enough to scare me away from trying the idea out.

The worst part is, I don't even know if there's a rule against it. I just know a collaborative course project worth at least 50% of the final grade is deviant enough from the norm that I don't want to risk it.

Nope. Thoughts aren't quite organized yet.

The far-too-centralized power in any Foucauldian apparatus always relies on the belief that objectivity is possible. That one could look out through the central tower of the Panopticon, observe an individual in one of the outer cells, and know all relevant information (indeed, all information) based solely on behaviors or other external signals. For me, a major hurdle in teaching any sort of ultramedia is breaking with the old notion that group work is somehow practice for the "real" assessment down the road. The rationale for any media alternative to the traditional essay format is always that the job world expects proficiency in so many other modes. But, appealing to the grown-up world of jobs and business necessarily raises the point that Bentham's isolation chambers are not the norm. Group work is hard to teach, but if we're going to teach alternative media and the rhetorical awareness necessary to use it, then we're also going to have to take our hands off the wheel and let the inmates students spread their contagion ideas much more fluidly.

Yeah. That looks better.

Ultramodality

Multimedia, New Media, Hypermedia, Ultramedia. I like "Ultramedia" or "Ultramodal." Lauer's article (linked to Kairos' site, unsure about access) is well done, but Kairos has pretty high standards. Whenever the multimodality discussion bears its head, though, I get wary. Partly, I'm wary of the fact that multimodality gets paired with multimedia, which is just code for "computer things that are more than Word." Like some horrible, lizard monster that seemed OK from afar, but has a tendency to become unnecessarily complicated the closer you get to the pedagogy.

Unfortunately, as Alfie Kohn once observed, teachers can be a bright lot with lots of wonderful, progressive ideas for expanding students' minds, but we have a habit of teaching the way we've been taught. It's true, too. My attempts at getting multimodal primarily involve crayons (to add a stronger visualization to quoting, paraphrasing and "original" thought), Legos (to practice clear diction and explanation) and a rainbow of dry erase markers.

I used to joke with other students here about the word "multimodality," because it implies the existence of "monomodality." But if color and language are both modes, then any text visible on a page is inherently multimodal. Somehow we all knew that multimodality meant there were colors or pictures or sounds or scratch-and-sniff panels, so maybe we just need to hit three or four modes before something crosses into real multimodality. Lauer is right, the naming is a pain to deal with.

So, I want to push for ultramodality, just to say we've met some threshold beyond "2+." Also, Ultramodality sounds like a sweet techno band. Also, continuing to apply new terms to the situation helps to avoid answering the real issue of justification. When I first started teaching, I used as many modes as possible thanks to the complex thesis "Multimodality is good because technology." To give a hint at how well I did it, I'd like to share a question I was asked during my last semester before moving to Pullman:

This is a writing class. Why are we always using the computers?

Sure, the student in question was under the impression that it was a handwriting class (I didn't understand the question until last Fall, when it finally clicked). But, my values weren't being clearly transmitted to the class, and it really wasn't the right setting for ultramodality anyway. In the same class, another student demanded that I stop using Blackboard and switch to Twitter since everyone could do discussion and receive updates on their cell-phones. My modality wasn't ultra enough for that one. Wysocki's "Openings & Justifications" in Writing New Media has some good thoughts (below) to handle that situation, but her claim that "writing classes can easily decontextualize writing such that agency and material structures look independent" (4) could just as easily be paraphrased to say "[pedagogical guides] can easily decontextualize [good pedagogy] such that agency and [student psychologies] look independent." Maybe there's too many brackets there.

Wysocki's sample assignments and lesson plans help contextualize an ultramodal pedagogy. I might just be grumpy here because I'm focused on first-year composition and transitions from high school to college writing. Any time I deviate from the perceived norm of college work (double spaced essays in 12 point, TNR, black ink, etc. that must go to the final line of the page or else you fail FOREVER!), the validity of the assignment is immediately called into question (echoing Wysocki's self citation on page 12), as though I was asking students to learn and practice a skill whose only end was a grade in this single class, and focusing on questioning the value of "traditional" media makes it seem like the class only exists to teach and practice those skills. But, I don't see the Engineering department changing its tune any time soon.

As for issues of ultramodal authoring, Lauer mentions the Herculean effort necessary to get these ideas rolling ("A Technological Journey"). Teaching introductory writing is busy enough without also getting into the intermediate features of Word and Word-clones, let alone the fact that there are Word-clones, let alone the basic features of other authoring programs.

So, maybe the problem is that I'm trying to imagine teaching students how to use a hammer before they understand the need for it. It's easy for me to agree with Lauer that the nomenclature is unwieldy because I get that we're all essentially talking about reflective understandings of what it means to compose a text -- specifically, to understand the rhetorical implications of paper, of a blog, of a video or podcast and to play up the strengths of those choices. It's also easy for me to agree with Wysocki that we have to start at a very basic level of questioning how visuality (and by extension aurality or olfactorality) affects (maybe effects) our understanding and persuadedness.

I knew someone whose business cards all smelled like doughnuts. He got a lot of call-backs.

I feel like there is more to say, but too much of it comes down to "But what do I do on Monday?" Wysocki's plans are great, but at this moment I feel my hands are tied by the need to teach research, academic voice, planning, revision and all those other things that go into the size 12 font, arranged so neatly on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper. Maybe if I could figure out how to teach rhetorical awareness, it would be easier to shoehorn into the syllabus.

Hm. I feel like I should fill more space here. I have other thoughts, but they aren't connected or organized.
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Under "A Technological Journey," Lauer mentions that she made a "mini-wiki" for folks to comment on different elements of the text to better develop their meanings. That's something I don't trust about new technology. So many things are awesome about what a journal like Kairos can do (especially since it doesn't have a comments feature) when it incorporates every mode the average computer can manage, but so many things go wrong when I expect my texts to give me a space to broadcast my response to the world. Even now, I'm trying to form a coherent, reasoned response to this reading, but I haven't had enough time to reflect and digest it. All I did was read that Lauer wants an almost conversational interactivity to her article, and I flew off the handle because it seemed like she wasn't ready to stand by her convictions about what visual/verbal/auditory elements really meant.

In the words of a great thinker, Mr. Horse from Ren and Stimpy, "No sir, I don't like it." I blame Mark Bauerlein's discussion of the millennials and Web 2.0 (The Dumbest Generation) for this line of thinking.
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So here's a weird note. Maybe it's my browser, maybe something else, but when I was reading, the pages wouldn't always start at the top. The top visible line was always the beginning of a paragraph, but it wasn't always the beginning of the section. I have no deeper commentary here, except to note that this is either a pitfall of technology or the coolest way to tell someone they can skip the exposition in each section (which I had to go back and read anyway).
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