Thinking about New Media

Thinking about New media
Training, ENGL 1050, Fall 2008
Joyce R. walker


I’d like to begin the discussion of how ENGL 1050 instructors might apply and adapt New Media principles to our writing instruction practices with the following quote from Anne Wysocki:

Because I believe we ought to strive to be alert to the varied materialities of our texts – to the particular materials we choose as we build concrete texts as well as to the wide range of structures Horner lists and suggest and in which the texts we make circulate and have wight – I desire to define (finally) new media differently from how the term has been defined in other places. I think we should call “new media texts” those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality: Such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text – like its composers and readers – doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly as possible the value they embody (15).

Wysocki makes explicit the idea that considerations of New Media do not apply solely to the use of digital technologies for composition, but to any writing practices in which the boundaries of material production can be made visible to authors and to reader/consumer/viewers. (so essentially, she is removing the idea of “new media” a applying to digital technologies because they are new, and arguing that “new” media texts are those in which the materials and tools of production are used in “new” ways – maybe digital, maybe not). For scholars in the field, this is an exciting definition for two reasons: (1) It just gives us more room to thinking both about non-digital productions, but also to think about the interaction of digital and non-digital tools; and (2) It allows us to focus on writing as an activity that encompasses many tools, not get stuck thinking only about binaries like visual/textual or print/digital.

For our program here at WMU, this new perspective on New Media means that the study and use of composition tools and materials is deeply embedded in the writing-as-ongoing-activity perspective we are attempting to promote and make visible for our students. Therefore, for our program, the use of technology as an end in itself, or merely as a way to engage students in currently relevant composition practices (as the folks in the MS article advocate), cannot be our core motivation. Rather, for our program, the use of all types of writing technologies, tools, and media become part of our larger consideration of the intricately layered interactions, intentions, and processes (both temporal and physical) of production.

Our approach to technology, put simply, can’t be something like, “Hey, let’s have them make web pages. It will be cool.” Or “we need to write digitally, because that’s what kids are doing today.” Not only do these kinds of attitudes not help us address our primary learning outcomes (the use of digital technology in composition – as a primary goal -- is not one of our learning outcomes), it risks moving us away from teaching practices that ask student to become more adept at making their own choices about the genres and writing situations they encounter, and to consider the kinds of tools and material practices they might use to make meaning in different situations and genres.

On the other hand, we do not want to dismiss technologies (especially digital composing spaces) as irrelevant to our composition practices – nor do we want to ignore the fact that many of the composing situations our students will encounter (as both members of the academy and civic participants) will require competence with a range of digital writing technologies. Therefore, our goal as instructors (and this can be particularly difficult because many of us do not feel as if our own digital literacy skills are very advanced) is to find ways to construct classroom situations (writing projects, discussions, and activities) that open the door to consideration of the materialities and tools that can be used in various kinds of writing projects, and the way these tools impact the trajectory (or trajectories) of a particular literate act.

A slight digression:

For me, this effort fits into a metaphor (thinking carefully about Phil Eubanks discussion of metaphor in his article “Poetics and Narrativity” ) is that as a teacher, my goal is to create, with students a conceptual space comprised of a giant pile of stuff – made up of all kinds of tools, and concepts, and materials, and relationships that can be used to produce, understand, and interact with texts. I Imagine this room as finite, but with an infinite circumference, entirely made up of doors. The doors all open onto spaces in the world where writing is happening. My job, as I see it, is to fling open as many doors as possible. As a group, we all sift through the pile, taking note of what we’ve brought along that might be flung upon the pile. We examine the objects, and create (as Bruno Latour might say) chains of reference, connecting the objects to the kinds of writing tasks they can be used to accomplish, and considering the greater or lesser importance of tools or concepts to a broad range of writing tasks. The key to this metaphor is that I believe that one we create the room, and once students know the room is there, they can always return to the room – they can come back, in-and-out, through many doors and bring new tools to the pile. They can pick things up and take them out, and ask other people how to use them. They can invent new trajectories for tools and genres. Although it’s true that it’s difficult sometimes to tell (as a teacher) who is in the room and who is not (and who might be sitting over in the corner refusing to look at all the cool stuff being piled up), that doesn’t change (for me) the nature of my job as a writing instructor.

The question remains: what are the practices through which we can consider, make use of, and highlight the range of tools and materialities; and how can we show our students how to see the ways such tools make boundaries and borders visible. The Writing New Media text (from which I’ve drawn the Wysocki quote) does a good job of presenting some clear assignments and activities that can be used to open up these discussions in the classroom. However, I think one of the most important things we can do (as instructors) is think carefully about how to embed these discussions in our writing projects – so that (like our discussion of teaching grammar and style conventions) students can see the choices available to them as writers, rather understanding technology or other composition tools as only as black-boxed items that pull into their writing at need, but which don’t have a significant impact on their production. One of the simplest of the ideas that the Writing with New Media text suggests is on page 27. It suggest giving students a short writing assignment, and then asking them to complete the assignment using crayons on any paper. I mention this assignment, because it helps me to illustrate how simple making the importance of tools and materials can be. To complicate things a bit, what about giving the students a topic, and then giving different groups of students different kinds of materials: some using pen-and-ink on ruled paper, some using charcoal pencil and an artist’s sketch pad, some using a computer, some using a typewriting (if you can find one!) some using crayons and construction paper – and perhaps some using magazines to create image-only collages. A follow-up to this kind of activity might be to then take the topic and move it into different genres (a science-fiction narrative, an article in the Enquirer, a five-paragraph essay, a poem, word puzzle), kind of like Meghann Meussen’s “genre juxtaposition” activity, which is not the ENGL 1050 website.

Another key issue that technologies can address (in terms of the trajectories of texts) is where writing goes in the world. Several words or icons chiseled into a stone have a different trajectory than a paper created on a computer for an history class, or a flyer about an event placed under car windshields, or a report that gets posted on the internet, or an item on a Facebook page. Asking students to explore these kinds of differences as part of class activities could help them to consider (and re-consider) the choices they make as they produce texts for class (and for classes outside of ENGL 1050).

In closing, I want to address a common issue related to the more active consideration of multiple materialities and tools in the composition classroom – and that is the idea that such a consideration takes time away from the production of more conventional texts (for example, in high school, the Five-paragraph essay or timed writing ). In many of the discussion that instructors of 1050 have had, we’ve considered this issue (echoing the thousands of writing instructors nationwide who have also struggled with it). My own belief, based on the “pile-of-stuff-and-a-bunch-of-doors” metaphor is that while attention to sentence-level written conventions is a key part of my efforts as a writing instructor (these conventions make up many of the best and most useful objects in the pile), I also consider attempts to practice and manipulate texts, genres, tools, and materials, to be a key practice (in other words, to be just as important – or rather, more important – than the production and re-production of a narrowly defined genre). However, activities can be designed that combine the tasks of “considering sentence level-prose conventions, working in specifically defined genres, and considering (and producing and experimenting with) boundaries. For example, students in high school could work to produce a single 5-paragraph essay, and then work in a different genre that requires a different approach to organization and thesis statement. Students can then consider carefully, and experiment with the differences. They could then take the same topic and experiment with different genres (as described above), looking at the way thesis statements are organized and used in different genres. The key, perhaps, to these kinds of activities is to make sure that “doing and experimenting” and “reading and thinking” and “reflecting and crititiquing” are all balanced parts of the work. Activities that combine these areas are most likely to achieve the learning outcomes for our program, and hopefully are also more likely to help students learn writing skills in a ways that are adaptable to a range of writing activities.