I have been loving my book, but I’m way slow. I like to think it’s because I have embraced the slow food movement even though I’ll still eat fast food sometimes! I read about the slow food movement in the Smithsonian a few years ago and thought it was a brilliant thing to do–I try to always shop locally for produce and meat, so this works. And, well, I’m overscheduled for the summer. I’m calling my slow book review a new thing. This is my stand against frenzied last-minute writing that I would normally create even if I’ve been reading and thinking for two weeks.
Part 1 of my fight against fast writing.
For the book reading and reviewing portion of our ride this summer, I chose to read Technological Ecologies & Sustainability by eds. Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi A. McKee, and Richard (Dickie) Selfe. It’s a book that I found through the WAC Clearinghouse that is a collaborative publishing effort by Utah State University Press and Computers and Composition Digital Press. (Collaboration: nice.) And it’s open. The .pdf is on my phone, my laptop, and my iPad.
This book is a collection of essays that range from classroom practices to writing program administration to community programs to scholarship–all with a sense of the sustainable. This isn’t about thinking “green” (or even blue) in the sense that we need to recycle cans or plastic, and yet, these things are connected. Here is what the editors write:
“An overarching framework is, of course, evident in the title of this collection, Technological Ecologies and Sustainability. The term technological is meant to signal our focus on computers and computer networks, although the authors in this volume cover a wide range of digital environments: from personal computers in local classroom contexts to more extended networked environments that affect, and are affected by, institutional and global concerns. The terms ecologies and
sustainability are meant to suggest the important task of maintaining the richly textured technological environments in which composition teachers and students learn, study, and communicate.”
The editors, rightly, write of their concerns over these terms and the troubling ways that words from one discipline can be co-opted and used by other disciplines, muddying the waters for everyone. Such a term is open, as we’ve seen. I use “open” a lot to mean: a thing is in the public domain; a thing licensed as some variation through Creative Commons; a thing is without cost to the user; a thing is copyleft; a thing is open access or open source. I throw around the terms a little indiscriminately and uncomfortably for purists, but I know that detailed understanding of all the permutations of “open” can only come with substantial reading and thinking and learning–what we’re doing in this class–but also what happens over time to any learner. And before deep clarity happens, I think “open” is a fine way to describe every “thing” I mean that I can get my hands on guilt-free.
For the editors of (and authors of the articles in) this collection, the mashing up of terms from several fields that have multiple meanings is something risky in some ways, but an important mash up, as they argue. What I like about their introduction is that they situate what they mean and wrap it around the subsequent essays in ways that are far-reaching and gave me a solid base from which to read about issues and ideas I was often unfamiliar with. For instance, I’ve never read anything by Bruno Latour, a French sociologist and anthropologist. So their use of his work to build a base to ascend from was useful to me, a wise rhetorical move on the part of the editors to be so WAC that I couldn’t help myself but fall in love in the introduction. I still don’t entirely understand Latour, and won’t unless I decide to read him myself, but their take on him is something like this (and please understand I am distilling their distillation of his many, many works: ripping and remixing way down the line of thinking):
He writes about social things, not social as in a friendly cocktail party, but Social as in a “moments of social… connection in the process of constant re-creation of ‘reassemblage.'”
Whoa, Nellie. Yes. I didn’t even need to read on to think: that’s us. That is all about us: creativity and collaboration, standing on the shoulders of giants, ripping, remixing, reusing, sharing, open. We are doing reassembly: making connections between and among, writers, eras, disciplines, selves, texts, blogs, web sites, ideas. And everything is uncertain. We are blowing transformers at the speed of earthquakes. I can hear the explosions from here. It’s all new and weird and wired and revealing. And it’s uncomfortable sometimes–uncertain. Because we are crossing boundaries and lines that we haven’t crossed much. We are making connections and weaving tapestries from threads in biology, music, geography, math, art, history, literature, philosophy, film, education. The tapestry is HUGE and it’s blowing our minds. That is one of the core ideas they get at through Latour, that he describes uncertainties “in connection with the study of social networks.” I’m interpreting this to include our social network and the social network of the university, of the loosely defined university made up of discreet colleges and even more discreet departments. What we risk when we go across the borders, or using terms “created” in other disciplines, is being shot. Or metaphorically so. (Notice I put quotation marks around “created”–oh, and again just now!)
WAC tries to subvert in some ways the often very rigid boundaries of thinking and writing–or I think that ideal is at the core of WAC–that not only is writing a part of every discipline, taught by those disciplinary experts, but writing is the vehicle for collaborative teaching and learning endeavors. It is “writing” across the curriculum. It is writing “across” the curriculum. It is writing across the “curriculum.” Everyone talking and learning and thinking together to change the way we create the future. (It’s a little Star Trek when I put it that way, but, hey, this is a blog and that’s what I think.)
The editors embrace that notion of uncertainty with a boldness I love:
“Uncertainties abound; as editors, however, we have chosen to add yet another mode of uncertainty by increasing the tempo of the interaction between the writers and readers of this collection. We did this by choosing to publish the collection in a new digital space: the Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP). The CCDP is an open-access press built to accommodate digital book-length works and multimodal projects. By publishing this volume as open access and online, our hope is that the social networking functions of current Web 2.0 technologies will allow the collection to take on a discursive life of its own.”
(Are they talking about rhetorical velocity? Yep, they are. And I hope this text has it.)
They go on to talk about a cyclical and interactive creation process that includes these steps (from Latour–his are one of the sets of shoulders the editors stand upon–I stand upon theirs):
- Gathering the Collective
- Conducting Civil Discussion
- Rank Order the Propositions
- Start All Over Again
Even without defining these, you can get a sense of a commons process, can’t you? It’s as if we said, yes, we’ll work like this and then got the name of what we were doing AFTER we started.
I did read their definition and it reminds me of another development process I use for nearly everything I do (at least it’s in the background directing what is often a chaotic exterior!): ADDIE. This is extremely social. No one can do it alone. This is a generic procedure, meaning, it can be used for anything, really, but it was meant for instructional systems designers to improve human performances through training programs. (“Oh, you mean, like higher education?” “Why, yes, I do mean like that. But I have rarely heard of this process applied to higher education in the Humanities.”)
- Analyze
- Design
- Develop
- Implement
- Evaluation
Both these models include formative and summative assessment measures and include the opportunity to begin again. (Formative meaning, each step is assessed and influences change to that step of the process or the next step; summative meaning the overall assessment that might include starting over again–I think of these assessment terms as formative is the grades one gets along the way, summative is the grade for the whole course.)
Both models need to be flexible and nimble enough to accommodate as yet unforeseen factors of our lives and technology. (I love the term nimble that the editors use–it evokes a certain feeling of special flexibility, a kind of ability to adapt to leaps of faith that goes beyond the ordinary flexible, a kind of Jack-be-nimble-Jack-be-quick sort of flexibility that is so Web 2.0, so rhetorically sound and wiggly at the same time.)
Both are about creating a commons in a way: with goals for “our intellectual community” that can include “a progressive composition of a common world, a world… worth sustaining.”
And that’s really just a very quick overview of the introduction. The rest of the book is broken down into four sections:
- Part I: Sustaining Instructors, Students, and Classroom Practices
- Part II: Sustaining Writing Programs
- Part III: Sustaining Writing Centers, Research Centers, and Community Programs
- Part IV: Sustaining Scholarship and the Environment
Part 2 of my fight against fast writing will be added as a separate blog and cover a couple of my favorite essays from this collection which I have enjoyed reading slowly and which I have to enjoy writing about slowly. (I just can’t finish writing this now–so I’ll slowly finish over the next few days.)
Do you want to create a slow writing movement that includes the use of pencils and paper? Wouldn’t that be a harkening back to a slower time, a way to preserve traditional methods of writing? In fact, I think we need to get the calligraphers/artists/scirbes on board who do the most amazing things with illumination and manuscripts these days. Have you seen the St. John’s Bible project? If you haven’t, you must. You won’t be sorry you checked it out. It’s gorgeous and modern and ancient and stunning and remarkable, and regardless of your belief system, this is an homage to human striving.
I’m not going that far with this book review, but I do want to respect the book and have fun wandering around and through ideas as the need arises, slowly, and not in a panicked, breathless rush. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)
write across this_________ 