Thursday, February 25, 2010
Technology and Our Old Friend Foucault
It was wonderful having Dr. Burns in class and getting to stay late for our informal QA. One of the most interesting issues that we discussed last night was the use of technology. With the exception of word processing and PowerPoint, I had not thought much of the use of technology in the composition classroom. The introduction of blogging and web 2.0 platforms has introduced complications into the classroom. Emily's presentation regarding the audience of these kinds of platforms brought up an important issue. In his essay on free writing, Ken Macrorie writes about "Engfish," stilted academic English students believe professors want. It may seem that using Blackboard or another similar system that is patterned after a blog or social network would minimize this issues. Students are primarily interacting and writing for each other, so it is possible that they would write more naturally. I am not sure that this is the case. Even though the students may be directing responses and comments to their peers, they are still writing in an academic setting with the knowledge that their instructor is lurking. This set up calls Faucault's Panopticon in mind. Cynthia Selfe also draws this conclusion, stating that "although panoptic space differs from electronic bulletin boards...those who have conversed over computers will recognize how eavesdropping and watching are made easy through the architecture of electronic network." (42) Thus, even though we can replicate the casual style of social networking, students will still be writing for the illusive instructor who may or may not be watching.
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This means YOU Dr. Souder! :-)
ReplyDeleteBut this is a good point. Who reads our stuff? I know I have no other followers on my blog other than those in this or last semester's class. Does this mean we are contributing to the canon or are we just bouncing ideas back and forth between each other?
I think you could make a case for all three. Because these blogs are written for academic credit, we consider Dr. Souder a primary part of our audience and write less conversationally them we would if there was not a chance could read them. At the same time, because we know that the primary function of these blogs is to engage with our peers, we do address comments directly to each other. It is worth noting that while most of us quote sources in our primary posts, a smaller percentage of us do so in our comments. This can be seen as a prioritization of audience. In our primary posts, we see Dr. Souder as a primary audience so we write in more formal, academic terms. In our comments, however, we are making our peers are primary audience and are using much more informal language.
ReplyDeleteHm... an interesting idea. How do you write more conversationally when all our academic careers we have been taught something different? It is really hard. Maybe early in education students should be taught to write more informally. But, then that goes back to the "crawl before you walk" debate. Is this why we debate stuff, because there is no straight answer?
ReplyDeleteThis may be that we are working on posts with issues of audience and questions of who follows are blogs. Yes Dr. Souder is the primary audience that we think about but I do think of all of the rest of the class as well. Well who else is out there? Hard to know.
ReplyDeleteDr. Souder's Panoptic Eye! It's a true point you're making though. We've been warned against the anecdotal and we are going for an academic tilt on these blogs. I think this illustrates how online interactions create divided spaces as much as united spaces. Online communications extend "real life" communications and that does not necessarily mean that traditional boundaries are removed, rather just moved around.
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