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WeekFifteen

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 2 months ago

 

ENC 4931/6421 Rhetoric and Technology

Capstone/Reflection: Infinite Rehearsal

"Civic engagement," the latest instantiation and appellation describing service learning and research designed to bridge "town" and "gown," has been a key theme in USFSP's quest for post-accreditation identity. Finally recognized as an entity of it's own, apart from USF Tampa, our campus has been in the business of re-vision--re-writing by-laws and workload documents, re-tooling gen ed requirements, integrating research and teaching with special programs and strategic planning committees, and tackling our first solo assessment cycle with zeal, if not glee. So who are we?

 

In three sentences, our new campus mission statement provides the most compressed rendering of our campus identity. The second sentence reads,

 

"We conduct wide-ranging, collaborative research to meet society's needs and engage in service projects and partnerships to enhance the university and community's social, economic and intellectual life."

 

We kicked off our semester with a personal version of this technique of self-enquiry:

 

Who are we?

 

Then, we set out in an ethnographic mode, conducting interviews and building our own case studies around two primary tropes/figures:

 

"rhetoric + technology = ?"

 

and

 

"what is community literacy?"

 

Beginning from these questions and notion, many more questions and new formulations emerged.

 

One example that resonates with me is the idea that writing with computers after the desktop era means composing in distributed networks of work and play, but our educational structures are out-of-step with this developments and what they can teach us about learning, teaching, and communication.

 

Collaboration, would seem to and traditionally has presupposed some sort of firm agreement amongst interlocutors, agreement on the basic contours of a single, focused project and goal. This semester, we took the time to consider the effects of approaching networked writing environments in different modes (to explore, in persuade, and, by simply making links, to create positive/negative feedback loops and new patterns of language in response to real-world questions and problems). At first, the wiki was the medium was the message, and from this commons-surface, we scanned, browsed, read, and responded in our own singular styles. At the same time, we noticed that we were growing "distributed rhetorics," and that agents this sort of writing, coordinated by communicative practices that evolve in new media ecologies, can just as easily differentiate and reconnect as emphasize a shared major premise or two. On this last day of class, I think it appropriate to reflect on these reconnections, and consider: do these patterns of writing reframe our projects and goals? If so, how so? We believe this "meshy" approach meshes well with established open source ethic of "tinkering" and with the ways youth are beginning to \"program\" new media ecologies by means of self-directed exploration, play, and community-formation in peer-populated "zones of proximal development" (Vygotsky).

 

we all play a part

 

Next, I want to reflect on and praise our best efforts, with special attention to the ways these efforts informed and were informed by the emerging USFSP-MZHS partnership. At the same time, I also want to emphasize the work to be done. Where are we and what do we hope to accomplish in our future writing lives? I would like each of you to chime in here, and direct our attention again to your projects and what you have learned while growing this wiki together. Pat, I invite you to freely chime in and speak to the needs and the way the Writing Program plans to meet these needs based on our meeting with Dr. Gresham and Dr. McCracken and subsequent planning sessions. We can talk about how our shared writing process unfolded. Obviously, as this brief grant application insists, our idea of audience must include those who stand to be most immediately effected by this narrative. We want this experience of writing with a purpose for all USFSP students.

 

Brian sampled from the theories of Marshall McCluhan (the medium is the message), Noam Chomsky (media imperialism) and his classmates, in particular Kim's early exploratory essay on the pedagogical force of dogma in community structures. Brian integrated his ideas with Kim's to critique the most powerful public pedagogy of our era, mainstream media. Brian found even more resonance when he applied his scholarly inquiry to his initial case study on the Radiant Peace Foundation.

 

Tomeka's project produced an avalanche of discussion, and meshed well with Kim's inquiry into the limits of freedom and control in our networked society, where privacy and anonymity (a word we learned to pronounce!) become displaced and reconfigured in diverse legal and ethical quandaries with no easy solutions. Taken together, these projects resonate as an allegory of The Author, and provide a revelatory lens for closely and directly investigating the complex folds and contours of the global digital commons.

 

Rich's World Rich and Amanda partnered their different cognitive styles to create an inspirational-yet-grounded plea for creative play in our curricula. Rich drew on his experience as a teacher and a researcher to bear on an inquiry into the status of dual language programs, and found even bigger problems his initial, critical, hypothesis hoped to address. All semester long, in different ways, Rich let the connections cluster and made new spaces for discussion in class and on the wiki. Amanda Asneeuw's expansive and connectionist approach is the epitome of research driven by passion and purpose. In a robust ethnographic exploration, she compared and contrasted the resources and atmospheres at Melrose Elementary and Academy Prep. Like chocolate and peanut butter, Amanda and Rich's methodologies mixed as they fearlessly tackled problems that most say just can't be fixed.

 

lupearl, aka Felesha, and

Tiffany, modeled the dynamic turn-about rhetorical capacities of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis when they dropped interesting projects (one idea involved a wii, and Tiff's harborside ethnography showed a community bound by geography and commerce on the threshold of forming of a digital commons) and synced up on a plan to find the most feasible plan for establishing a mentoring program at Mt. Zion. Students in next semester's client-based courses (4260, 4931, 2210) will inherit this learning module and recommendation report and, hopefully, realize this vision for a mentoring program.

 

Patti also grew two projects this semester. Patti taught us a lot in her case study on an emerging robin hood health insurance project. Then, she committed volunteer hours each week and helped write this grant

 

Reflection: Tiff riffs, prompts a remix....

Looking ahead: visions and next-steps

 

*client-based professional and technical writing classes

*youth, literacy, and technology

*mentoring program

*sustainable human services

a vision: in recognition of our increasingly intertwingled! condition as a planetary commons, new technological designs should address the "triple bottom line" emphasized in the green computing ethic. The triple bottom line understands the need for businesses to turn a profit, but insists that profit cannot come at the expensive of people and the planet that sustains us--this "people, planet, profit" mantra expands evaluation criteria to include social, economic, and environmental considerations. This sets the scene for organizations supporting mindfulness on many levels--conservation psychology and ecological education, in an interconnected and informatic biosphere, emerge in the moment, in local contexts that resonate globally

*making a mesh of things

 

the next remix:

 

Go to the main USF website

Click on Research (left hand side)

On the Research main page, look o the right hand side and scroll down to Divisions – click on Sponsored Research

Click on Research Funding Opportunities

Click on Internal Awards Program

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