So why is the course online? It's all related to what I call cooltown (which I borrow from Hewlett Packard's project) - the image we are working in digital environments when, in fact, we are replicating the very print worlds we are accustomed to. Now I don't know Joe Moxley (other than his professional affiliation), and have nothing against him. But I find some serious problems here with how writing is being placed online in this model.
And related to what Jenny wrote about yesterday is yet one more problem: what happens when the DIY ethic merely replicates the very thing it was supposed to replace (i.e. WebCT or Blackboard)? We get cooltown, but we also get what I call Hackerism as well (yet another unwritten article which must be finished). Hacker's rules of writing (A Writer's Reference) have come to signify the standardization of writing instruction much in the way the hacker spirit (DIY) gets quickly standardized in examples like Moxley's.
Replies: 8 comments
"the real template content in this example is the safe stuff"
Which is how I see my critique evolving. If you are going to do the same stuff you did without being online, why be online in the first place? What do you need a blog for if the assignments you created - and thus the writing created - was the same without blogs?
McLuhan called this practice nostalgia - making the new do the work of the old. And I agree.
Posted by j @ 06/18/2004 12:03 PM EST
At CCCC Moxley showed off some stuff using Wiki that was considerably more funky than this example. As you might expect, part of the issue was crossing the "DIY" line and encouraging students to push the borders of Wiki-as-template.
I've critiqued the use of templates before, and I'm tempted to see these problems as another example of the ways they can be less than constructive. How different can you make a weblog or a wiki, really, if you don't understand the internals at some level? And part of the issue is that they are designed to erase the need to understand the internals.
But of course the real template content in this example is the safe stuff, from "what we've always done in composition." When that content is inserted into a template based online form, the result is predictable.
Posted by cbd @ 06/18/2004 10:25 AM EST
Hey Derek
Why Queen? Don't know. Just came to me...
Posted by j @ 06/17/2004 09:21 AM EST
It's all about being seen, and also wanting to generate a homogenous, assessable experience for the customer. Same thing happens with required texts and offline courses. I don't see how they are saving money with 20 students per TA, which is usually a motivator for these kinds of projects.
Posted by crane @ 06/17/2004 06:40 AM EST
Status is a key distinction. I jumped on it for a number of reasons, not the least of which was knowing that it would roll on with or without me. And now that I'm holding it up, I can move the mountain granule by granule.
Hey, and what's the Queen ref? Have you been reading Spellmeyer's latest? I read Cooper's review of his call for an overhaul of the humanities today on the jet ride. When I got to the line about "the sickness of critique," I thought, that's eerily close to Dr. Rice's allusion. If not, the turbulence explains it.
Posted by D @ 06/17/2004 01:13 AM EST
Coolness is inevitable. Blogging is catching on like wildfire, and its purpose and usefullness dont begin and end with academia.
I'm still a student with not as much exposure. What would you do to change the problem you've pointed out? No disrespect intended.
Posted by Neha @ 06/16/2004 10:35 PM EST
All good points. But you were not in charge of the program - as you note. Moxley, and so many others who hold power, is. And while each of us contributes to the problems we encounter in education in some way, if I were to point the finger in your situation (and I'm not saying I am) I would point to the program which does not invest in tenure track folk from the field (let's say rhet/comp) to design the program.
That being said, even that is no solution - thus my critique of USF. The problems are more complex and the issues go deeper. I see this is a nexus of labor/cultural capital/paradigm shift. Little, if any, of these areas are being adequately addressed for all kinds of reasons, some you note above.
Posted by j @ 06/16/2004 01:42 PM EST
Care if I confess a few guilts about my own stint as an online course developer?
I don't know Moxley, either, and I haven't spent a whole lot of time critiquing the USF online curriculum. I thought the idea of a single class with 120 students (staffed by six TAs, right?) was odd. And I gathered that many of the students were local, perhaps even residential students in and around Tampa. Where I teach currently, students (mostly U.S. military) are all over the place--Iceland, Germany, Uzbekistan, Japan, Columbus, Ohio.
Perhaps because I'm not a full-timer like Moxley, I've felt a whole bunch of pressures to concoct a *safe* online writing course. The first-year writing curriculum here at the U. is my creation. And it's a (deplorably) safe/bland/tasteless brand of composition--Hacker and all (well, Hacker and _Ways of Reading_, basically). Now that I've posted it online for all to see, I worry that it casts me as a reinforcer of lots that doesn't work--or that fails to take advantage of the medium--with the passive adoption of print models that simply shrug off the rich potentials of digitext. So, while I'm in no position to defend Moxley's crack at the online curriculum done his way, I can imagine a whole set of very real, unfortunate pressures (interim post, lots of eyes watching from above, late shake-ups, lit-tisking about engaging the controversial) encroaching on the design that berm up around its edges, forcing it to what it is--for now. Slow revolutions. Slow revolutions.
Posted by Derek @ 06/16/2004 12:54 PM EST
