Very simply, the Internet is not the world.

Maybe not your world, Lester.

Faigley's almost-throwaway line in "Literacy After the Revolution," his CCCC Chair's address in 1996 (CCC 48:1), hurts me. Even though it was the present for him, the sepia light that he casts the late 90s in also hurts me. Really, this was just a painful article all around. And I'm not even going to talk about the "glory days" of adjuncts making up only 35% of faculty (34).

No, just one soul-crushing rhetorician at a time, thank you.

How does it pain me? Let me count the ways.

Faigley, in 1996, when Power Point's staggering array of slide transitions blew my mind, noted that "many of [his students'] personal home pages [were] little more than self-advertisements" -- hello, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Friendster -- "the students who made them have experience producing and publishing multimedia forms of literacy" (39). As much as I love the CACC folks, this claim feels the same as putting "web design" on my CV because I made a Google Site to hold 101 syllabi and materials. Although the statement is true, it's not entirely honest.

But it only feels that way. I remember making websites on Angelfire, back a'fore Web 2.0 came and gave all these young'uns delusions of design. If I could have made a single page in those sites in the combined time it's taken me to make all these blog posts (including time spent doodling in GIMP), I'd've been a happy camper. Although I haven't seen any of these student web pages (conveniently, Faigley provides no way to track them down!), I wouldn't doubt the man too much because I agree with his observation about visual media, that "after years of attempting to teach students to analyze images, they learn much more quickly when they create images of their own" (41). Again, I'm thinking about the software available in the mid-90s to manipulate images. Both processes, unless you had access to professional tools, were long and arduous. I hate to sound like a grumpy old man, but literacy (here meant just as the means to decipher and create material) was earned because they couldn't just drag images from a Google Image search into an empty space on a blog, attach a witty comment and keep going. If you were going to put in the work to insert an image, a link, a change in color, a change in font or any other deviation from the text you were already writing in, you'd better either be a master at HTML tags or really think the change in modality was worth it.

I don't care what my CV says. I'm not a graphic designer.

And, I'm probably oversimplifying Web 2.0 -- I only know it as the collection of sites, services and technologies that allows powerful text, media, and code editors to exist in browsers. I also know it from news articles and op-eds that I'm conveniently not going to provide links to as the thing that killed design. Sure, I could really get in to tweaking my blog's layout, background, and all sorts of stuff, but I'm not going to. Not until spinning GIFs come back.

Wheeee! And you wondered why this page wouldn't load.

Maybe I'm just bitter for the same reason H.G. Wells was when widespread literacy became a thing along with the rise of a popular press. It was just too easy to do things we struggled for in the past, and all of a sudden kids these days are off reading Marie Corelli (perish the thought) instead of Dunsany. Or, more aptly, kids these days are just uploading every aspect of their lives into Tumblr feeds and Twitter feeds and Facebook feeds and linking and retweeting and I suddenly sound like my grandpa's imitation of old people. Anyway, without the challenge involved in creation, understanding is a little more difficult to come by.

Which is why I liked Cynthia Selfe's CCCC Chair's address the next year (CCC 50:3). I sense a little remorse when she says "computers are rapidly becoming invisible, which is how we like our technology to be. When we don't have to pay attention to machines, we remain free to focus on the theory and practice of language, the stuff of real intellectual and social concern" (413), but I really would like our technology to be invisible. Unfortunately, it's invisible like the pictures hidden in Magic Eye books -- yeah, I can't see the firetruck but I know it's there and we have to talk about it and I'm pretty sure this was a Seinfeld episode.

Sooner or later, all discussions involving rhetoric come back to Seinfeld.
Also, these things lose a lot of value on a computer screen.

In the abstract, I don't mind if this is a "dangerously shortsighted" view (414). I don't like computers to operate in the middle space they're in now -- some students can make brilliant webpages, others can compose fantastic music with a synth program and Audacity, and the other 90%, well, many of them can open Word without getting WordPad by mistake. In every conversation about technology, I lose someone. But, in every class that's devoted to technology (U of I has a Microsoft Office course for freshman, but I don't know if WSU does), the mechanics of software is the content, rather than the potential. Aside from English 300 at WSU, students don't often get a "here's a copy of Photoshop, a pile of copyright-free images, and an hour; go nuts." Faigley's students that created such nice websites had the time, energy and motivation to poke around their respective web-design programs. They probably made some terrible sites before the products Faigley saw. I'd love to "pay attention to technology" (415), and I've tried in the past, but it all comes down to finding something students find useful.

As a fun note, you won't find many students who appreciate things like 750words.com, even though it basically guarantees they won't lose their work.

Maybe it's because I can't collect an all-electronic portfolio. Maybe it's because students really need a composition course based solely on rhetoric (and the many means of persuasion) and another composition course based solely on doing research. Neither of those is innately all-electronic or all-paper, but it would free up a lot of time to really address doing these things well, rather than talking about visual rhetoric for a day or two in class, then assigning a five page analysis of one 4chan meme.

DISCLAIMER:

Don't send your students to 4chan.

Ever.

Fast forward to the less past and the five assumptions that NCTE makes about "courses that engage student in writing digitally"

First assumption? Yes. Moar please. However, there's an epistemological bias here -- ask a group of 18 year olds whether knowledge is "constructed." I'll introduce them. I'll try to get them to reflect on it. But, unless I can shake them of any other epistemological beliefs they've already got, we're going nowhere fast.

Assumption the second? In 2012, that's almost a "duh." But, as Adam Sprague and others have noted, teachers in other fields are asking that we just teach students how to write a paragraph. I'd bet we could teach them to write an effective paragraph while applying digital technologies (meme creation is a good start), but I also think we might be biting off more than we can chew in a 16-week course.

Dritten assumenieren? I don't think you can do the second without it. Unless you have a Photoshop day, then never speak of it again. ... No, wait. I think I did that once. In my defense: 16 weeks!

Fourthly, I think we're already supposed to be addressing information literacy independent of computers. Also, the Wikipedia lesson has gotten so old that when I say the W-word in class, the first response is (chanted in unison by most of the class) "we can use it so long as it isn't our primary resource." We can still get a discussion as to why it shouldn't be a primary resource, but they've already got the gist much of the time. Dealing with news reports (especially "New study reveals that..." reports) is another matter and one I try to tackle.

And, for the Milla Jovovich of these assumptions: I don't think this should be a new assumption for courses that engage students in writing digitally. This is an assumption for courses that teach students writing. No, actually, it's an assumption for courses that teach students.

So, I guess I'm still in some kind of disagreement with Selfe. What we do with computers is what we should be doing all around. The pencil, the typewriter, the computer, and the laser-cannon-for-writing-on-the-moon (in development) all bring different strengths and weaknesses to the table. That fifth assumption is probably the most important -- when should I use which technology? Will my professor appreciate a snarky line pasted onto an image that's related to my topic? What size font is really necessary to make sure everyone remembers I truly am the greatest villain of all time?

Rhetoric.