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My dear imagined readers,
I imagine you must have been wondering, these long months since my last post, what (if anything) I’ve been up to, since it clearly has not been writing punnily titled essays and posting them here. As it turns out, I’ve been up to quite a lot, for quite some time, and the first of those projects to bear fruit is finally ready for harvest today. I am pleased to announce the official launch of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, a free and open-access online academic journal that has the benefit of combining several of my academic interests, including interactive pedagogy, digitally enhanced learning, and long strings of modifying phrases. The easy-to-remember url? cuny.is/jitp.
The journal’s architecture and mission are the product of an editorial collective that includes faculty, staff, and students (with fully half of our 14 members current PhD students), mostly from CUNY, and mostly either participants in or leaders of the certificate program in interactive technology and pedagogy. Among our goals is to raise the level of the conversation around how tech is used in teaching and learning, recognizing that the tools themselves are neutral: they can harm as well as help, depending on what they’re being used for, so we should examine closely what we want to use them for, and why. The JITP has the support of some top-notch scholars in the DH and TechRhet worlds, and I’m rather excited to see where we can go from here.
My involvement, like the involvement many of the collective members, has been widespread: I’ve helped write and revise guiding documents, both internal and public; I’ve reviewed incoming submissions, and copyedited several of the articles now published. And, with my Co-Editor of Issue Two, Joe Ugoretz, I wrote the now-active Call for Submissions (running now through May 1st!), and will soon be ramping up to even fuller involvement in the crafting of the journal’s contents. But the real motive force behind this entire year-plus worth of effort is our amazing Managing Editor, and Co-Editor (with Kimon Keramidas) for Issue One, Sarah Ruth Jacobs. She is a living testament that grad students can be a powerful force against inertia, and I am extremely grateful to have worked with her thus far, and delighted to continue doing so in the future.
So: check out the journal! Leave comments and extend the conversation! We’re looking forward to hearing from you! No exclamation marks necessary.
In yesterday’s tribute to Rebecca Mlynarczyk on the occasion of her retirement, one repeated point, intended as praise, got me thinking about how composition/rhetoric is (or may be) perceived within academia. “One thing Rebecca taught me,” Karen Pitt said, “is that it’s okay if you fail at something. You can even publish from it.”
Now, I believe I know what she’s saying here — see below — but all the same I heard this with a note of fear, worried about how the audience might interpret her comment. The English department announced last semester that it would not be hiring the two candidates for comp/rhet faculty, both of whom are much beloved by the comp/rhet students in the department; while the full reasons are confidential, and the final decision is still being negotiated, the air was full of insinuation: that ours was not a serious field, or that these were not serious scholars, because where were their academically published single-author books? With that fallout still drifting as background to our event, I couldn’t help but imagine a hostile (or even skeptical) listener’s smug reaction: You see? Comp/rhet is a field in which failure is acceptable. Q.E.D. not serious!
But rather than saying merely that failure is “okay,” I think comp/rhet teaches two related but different things about failure: that it is inevitable, and that it is interesting.
To say that failure is inevitable does not mean it is final: it means that, in most circumstances, the road to success does not lead in a straight line from inception to completion. The observation that “there is a forward-moving action that exists by virtue of a backward-moving action,” as Sondra Perl put it in “Understanding Composing” (364), may have come about as a description of writing process, but it could equally well apply to many endeavors, especially where learning is involved. And in English Studies, where so much learning takes place through writing (as the construction of arguments), set-backs and dead-ends are worth recognizing, and owning, and not being afraid of — or ashamed of. As I have recently argued in a forthcoming paper on metaphor, writer’s block, and the Legend of Zelda, the kinds of “success” we can have without such “failures” are perforce of limited scope: the end-stages of a rather boring game. So perhaps I shouldn’t say that failure is inevitable, but rather that it is normal.
Failure, then, is “okay” not as an end-point, but as a positive sign that you’re still engaged in the process of discovery — and should keep going. Another speaker, Nichole Stanford, highlighted this aspect of Rebecca’s teaching when she pointed out that her generous nurturing nature often manifested itself in rigorous ongoing demands for improvement, to the tune of (in this particular case) eleven drafts of a dissertation proposal.
But even beyond that, I believe that comp/rhet has taught us — and Rebecca in particular has taught me — that failures are in fact desirable, interesting in the scientific sense, as objects of study. Why? Because moments we experience as “failure” are moments of rupture between what we expected would happen and what actually happened: moments, therefore, in which the workings of the world are revealed in surprising ways. In the comment that triggered this essay, the idea that “you can even publish from [failure],” Karen was referring to a moment when an initially horrifying setback — one of Rebecca’s case-study students throwing her journal in the garbage prior to their first follow-up interview — became the starting point for a major re-evaluation of how students, vs. teachers, viewed these journals and what they were for. The new understanding emerging from this crisis became one of the driving forces behind Rebecca’s first book, Conversations of the Mind: The Uses of Journal Writing for Second-Language Learners . (Karen or Rebecca, if you’re reading this, please correct me if I’m getting this reference wrong. But I hold to the principle, regardless, and will continue to see Rebecca as one of the people who has taught me this lesson most clearly.)
So for anyone out there who was saddened or smug to see failure so praised, don’t think failure is weakness. It takes, if anything, rather more strength to look closely at something so potentially fraught with pain, frustration, or guilt. Composition is not the only field in which crises and ruptures and disappointments become grist for the discovery of new insights, but it is characteristic of compositionists to be fascinated with drafts and cuttings and negative spaces — to look at something in-process, and pause, and then look at the process itself. To move, in a word, to the meta.
Works Cited
Perl, Sondra. “Understanding Composing.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (1980): 363-369. http://www.jstor.org/stable/356586
Mlynarczyk, Rebecca. Conversations of the Mind: The Uses of Journal Writing for Second-Language Learners. Psychology Press, 1998. via Google Books
Last week marked the annual cusp between my birthday and my wife’s, a week which often includes Father’s Day – as it did this year – and so I’ve been thinking a fair bit about gifts, both given and received. In particular, I’ve been thinking about gift certificates, as they were out in a particularly abundant crop this year.
I have in the past tried to avoid gift certificates, for two reasons. First, they suggest that I don’t know the person well enough to spend time in selecting the perfect gift for them. Lately, though, the people I’m buying for, especially for Father’s Day, have tended to get for themselves the things they want, and don’t seem to particularly need anything I can offer. So my solution of late has been to offer several possible gifts to spend the certificate on, but ultimately leave it to them to decide what fits best with their own self-perceptions.
The second reason is more intractable. Gift certificates, by naming a dollar amount, strip away the illusion that makes gift-giving work. When gift certificates are traded in both directions, it lays bare the fact that we’re essentially pushing the same bits of money around – or, what’s worse, that we’re pushing money around and getting more or less money in return. In this case, instead of cementing the familiar bonds with our gifts, we could actually be damaging them.
All of this is by way of introduction to a problem in my teaching, a problem of transparency: as with gift-certificate swaps, I fear there may sometimes be too much of it. As a firm believer in the power of metacognition to aid my own learning – a power which I don’t pretend to have discovered on my own; cf. How People Learn for a summary and references – I will frequently pause in the middle of a classroom activity to remind students why I think the activity is useful, what goals I’m hoping it will serve, etc. When I notice that I have less time remaining in the lesson than I’d originally planned for, I have a tendency to think through my options out loud – helping students to see, or so I’ve believed, (a) that there is a thinking process that goes on; that I’m not just following a set script; and (b) what one version of that thinking process might look like, as a model should they ever want to plan their own lessons. I have distinct memories of becoming aware of lessons as planned, some time toward the middle of my college career, and trying to rederive some principles for how to do it, based on what I was seeing.[1]
But there is a problem. In mid-term conferences this summer – during that same gift-laden week, in fact – several of my students expressed discomfort with the transparency of these asides. One student was insightful enough to point out that they wasted time (this after a particularly rough week of “Hmm, so that 10-minute exercise actually needed 35…” moments). If I would just choose, she said, instead of making a whole performance out of the act of choosing, I could regain precious minutes of time. (My words, to be fair. But her idea.) At least two other students confessed that such moments just left them with a squirming sort of discomfort: Wasn’t I the teacher? Shouldn’t teachers already know how to do things? Was this the first time I was teaching this course??
Now, it turns out that it is the first time I’m teaching this particular course, but the behavior isn’t really linked to that; I’ve been teaching first-year composition since 2004, and I reason out my decisions in front of my FYC students all the time. In fact, the longer I’ve been teaching, the more I’ve been doing it.[2] So I explained to my students, even as I conceded that prior faculty evaluations of my teaching have also remarked on the thinking aloud as a possible sign of lapsing confidence. And in response to both students and faculty observers, I’ve been a bit defensive of my behavior: Why should students be shielded from the tools I use to make decisions? Aren’t we trying to train them to be like us (whatever that means, and however problematic some versions of that might be)? Isn’t it a better version of “doing what the teacher wants” if they try to justify their own behaviors using rationales that they’ll know I find convincing? Wasn’t I being a role model here?
Maybe. I’m not sure. I mean, I haven’t exactly stopped mentioning some of the options we’re not pursuing, or providing my reasons for choosing what we are. But the gift certificate situation has gotten me thinking: what if transparency in the classroom, like transparency in gift-giving, destroys an illusion that’s needed for classrooms to work? Maybe what makes my students uncomfortable isn’t the realization that teachers are only human – by the time you hit college, if you’re still idolizing your teachers, you’re either shockingly lucky or shockingly naive – but rather the way in which that realization is being thrust in their faces. We know that gift-giving is, in effect, pushing the same money around; it’s how we know how much to spend on people. (What’d we get from them last year? Okay, then.) But there’s still something gained by pretending otherwise – when we put the time and energy into showing that we care about the specifics of the gift, we can enjoy the relationship-building value of that demonstration, and suppress our awareness of the extent to which it’s “merely” a performance. Something similar could be at work in the teacher-student relationship: by performing authority for students, we enable them to enjoy the role of novice that enables them to learn (cf. Sommers and Saltz). Treating them like equals might lead to disillusionment with the entire power structure, which is problematic not only for us, but for them.
In writing that last sentence, I realize with a bit of a shock that I’m actually arguing against critical pedagogy, and from a very consumerist capitalist place. My inner socialist (descended from socialist ancestors) is feeling kind of appalled. But my inner physicist keeps making metaphors to heat engines and the importance of energy gradients.
As with so many things, I suspect this comes down to a balance, or at least to a dialectic alternation that we wouldn’t want to collapse: at times, maybe even most times, we may need to perform our authority; at others – perhaps at moments of completion? – we may need to perform as still learning. I’m still learning to sense the right moment, the kairos, for each of these crucial behaviors, and I suspect I will always need to learn that, and differently with each different group of students.
But here’s hoping I learn to pretend to know, soon. ;¬)
[1] For me the triggering puzzle was a choir conductor declaring things like “We’re 13 minutes behind!” The specificity was suspicious. Now, though, I think I get it.
[2]I didn’t realize that until just now, as I was writing it. Huh. Does this reflect a simple growth in the number of options I’m aware of, as I accumulate years of experience? Or is it that as I mature as a teacher, I’m less likely to believe that all teachers just “already know how to do things”? Or maybe I’m just afraid that I’ll settle into a rhythm of teaching the same course, semester after semester? (Hasn’t happened yet – in fact, my wife keeps asking when I can finally stop reinventing the course every term, with new readings. Like Gandhi, I keep answering: because this year I know better.)
Long-time followers of this blog will know that, in a previous incarnation, I had listed myself quite simply as Ungooglable. That title was, much like the title of this webspace, suggested by my wife, who pointed out that “Benjamin Miller” was an awfully hard person to find reliable information about. It’s not that there’s no information; it’s the opposite. There’s just too much. From the first page of Google hits alone, you find that Benjamin Miller is a professor of math and logic, a comedian and actor with a background in solid-state physics, a dermatologist and organic chemist, a fairly hackneyed and omphaloskeptic WordPress blogger, a Columbia-affiliated scholar of culture and sanitation in New York City, a Twitter-ing programmer of browser plugins, and an education policy consultant with an Ivy-League undergrad degree and an interest in reforming high-stakes assessment.
None of these are the same person, and none of them are me. So the first observation here is that my Search Engine Optimization could use a lot of work. (Just one reason among several I’m not linking to the aforementioned pages.) Yet what I find most striking about this list is how close so many of them come to sounding like me: I have degrees from Harvard and Columbia; attend grad school in New York City where I study writing pedagogy, and complain about high-stakes assessment, with the goal of becoming a professor; follow interactive tech gurus on Twitter; and write a WordPress blog about subjects that coil in on themselves. When I tell my students that I came to college wanting to study physics, or when I use math analogies to explain punctuation, it must fit right in with the picture they had of me when they Googled their potential teachers before selecting my class. (Does anyone do that?)
It’s kind of a problem.
But more than the mistaken generic identity, which I suppose I must simply get used to, it’s the mistaken identity within specific genres I care about that really has me worried. For example, I am a poet. I have an MFA diploma sitting in a box in my bedroom to prove it! (See left. Sigh.)  More usefully, my work has been published multiple times in respectable journals; I’ve been a finalist for a book prize and a chapbook prize. (Fingers crossed for this year.) And I find it matters to me that when you search for “benjamin miller poet,” “benjamin miller poem,” or “benjamin miller poetry” – as perhaps friends and students will do when they first hear that I write poetry – the first several links they come up with are not only not poems I wrote, they’re poems I wouldn’t want to write: trite rhymes that slap with a monosyllabic flatness into quatrain boxcar regularity (this is the top hit, evidently What the People Want) and then the opposite extreme, an ambient jazz experimentalist. Let me be clear: I do not intend to disparage these people or their work on absolutist grounds, but rather to point out the distance between my aesthetic and theirs. For all I know, they may well be achieving the apotheosis of their musical and syntactical goals, or those of their community – witness, again, the high PageRank these pages achieve. But it unnerves me to think that those I would try to impress, those who I believe do share my own aesthetic, would look me up and think I’d been found.
So what to do, then, with this name, this ungooglable name? Much though it might make life simpler, I don’t think I can sign every poem as benmiller314, and run with that – although a search for that tag does turn up me, and only me, for five full pages. (Well. Five full but, um, repetitive pages. I’m working on it.) While I’ve not yet reached a full conclusion, I believe this blog will play a major role in the taking control of my online identity. You can reach me now at the convenient address of majoringinmeta.net, which I trust will be far more memorable – and pronounceable in conversation – than the full-length CUNY Commons URL. From here, I can link outward to the rest of my work as it exists online. (I guess you can consider that a coming attraction?)
And, as of today at least, a search “majoring in meta” will lead you here. Perhaps it has. And if so – and even if it’s not so – welcome.
Further evidence for Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s titular premise in They Say / I Say: regardless of inspiration (which has not been lacking since my last post), it sometimes takes the provocation of another person’s writing to actually prompt me to dust off my keyboard and wade into the fray. In this case, it’s Mark Sample, whose comments on twitter led me to his full-length post on samplereality.com, entitled “The Modern Language Association Wishes Away Digital Différance.”
The problem Sample addresses is that in the most recent edition (the 7th) of the MLA handbook, the documentation style recommended for online texts – and therefore the style that will be used by automatic bibliography-generating tools like EndNote and Zotero – asks for site title and author, and does not ask for URLs. Sample was especially concerned about the way this ignores different versions of the same document, concerned that the message sent by such a documentation style is that “all that is necessary is to declare ‘Web’ in the citation, and everyone will know exactly which version of which document you’re talking about, not to mention any relevant paratextual material surrounding the document, such as banner ads, comments, pingbacks, and so on.”
As I commented then,
Agreed and agreed again, Mark – and I’ll add, as well, the frustration of trying to cite specific pages within a poorly managed site, wherein all the pages have the same title (i.e., the title of the front page, presumably copied over in the metadata of the template used for new pages). So it’s not just different versions of the same document that are effaced; in this case, it’s entirely different documents that all inconveniently called the same thing. Only the URL distinguishes.
And honestly, if the primary concern is long URLs within scholarly databases, that’s probably a red herring: in many cases, these long citations aren’t persistent URLs at all, but rather search histories that don’t even function once the browser is closed. JStor manages to get their direct links down to only 34 characters, including the http://.
Including mine, Sample’s post has garnered nine comments as of now, all of them worth reading. Of particular interest to me today (if only because I’m about to respond to them) are the “official” response from MLA Executive Director Rosemary Feal and the most recent addition, by Aram Zucker-Scharff of Read, Write, and View.
Feal, although defensive, does not seem to understand the nature of the problem. Although she usefully points out that the MLA guidelines don’t prohibit you from including a URL, and even tell you how to break lines within them if you do, her fundamental defense of the system as written continues to imply that naming the page (by title, such as the one appearing in the browser’s top bar) is sufficient to specify a particular item:
Contrary to Mark Sample, this does not mean the MLA believes “it doesn’t matter what digital archive or website a specific document came from.” Our guidelines call for naming the archive or Web site.
Needless to say, this would not resolve the issue I pointed out in my comment above. I suppose it’s possible that she read Sample’s post without the benefit of my brilliant insights (that’s a joke, people) – but if so, that just highlights the importance of context, and that context can often be erased by RSS feeds, etc (as Patrick Murray-John pointed out with reference to UMW Blogs – also prior to Feal’s comment).
More perniciously, though, Feal goes on to suggest that there is too great a “burden” for most users in “distinguishing permanent URLs from nonpermanent ones,” and that some writers “are not conversant with copying and pasting URLs and so type them, with the attendant risk of typos.” Let’s say it’s true: some people do have difficulty with these tasks. But isn’t that a problem? This is the MLA – if we in English are unwilling to talk about literacy with our students, if we are uninterested in acquiring this kind of literacy for ourselves, who will be?
Those who can’t copy and paste are missing out on the single greatest advantage of digital composing: the ability to easily re-order text. If you’re writing complex scholarly texts and you’re still typing everything out anew every time… well… Let’s just say that URLs are the least of your burdens.
And I will grant that “permanence,” in the sense that a link today will still work three years from now, is difficult to determine. These are the vicissitudes of the modern attention span, and we have no way of predicting that, let alone encoding it within a URL. But that’s not what we should be talking about when we talk about permalinks: we’re talking about the difference between a one-line URL with a clear directory structure (which may even have the word “stable” in it, like www.jstor.org/stable/378908) and a five-line URL with the terms “query” or “search” and multiple question marks. I’ll spare you posting the latter; if you’re looking for some, check the first drafts of your students’ research papers.
I say first drafts, because I think there’s a clear opportunity here to educate the next generation of scholars – yes, and general users, too – to pay attention to such things. They’re going to be out on the web anyway; they should be able to find their way around. The unfortunate thing about the MLA guidelines is that, even when URLs are available, the message sent by making them optional is that they’re tricky, burdensome, and in any case not all that important. Not so, as I and the others cited above have been trying to make clear.
I’ll even go so far as to oppose AramZS’s potentially useful suggestions of linking to cached pages (to get around the page-death issue) and using URL-shorteners (for those whose permalinks actually are several lines long – though I still believe that this will be the exception, not the rule). While these would indeed work for people who actively follow the links, and while cached pages are incredibly useful to have available, both of these options would hide from readers the metadata that URLs can encode. It’s not only that the page itself has informative paratext; it’s also that the URL itself can tell us about the page’s provenance – simply, rapidly. It can help us decide whether the source is likely to be (un)trustworthy; it can help us decide whether we need to connect and see the site itself.
For example: is the information coming from a .com, .net, .edu site? .gov? Is it the main page or in a subdirectory, and if the latter, how does the site categorize this sub-page?Is the trunk of the URL the name of a company that might have a biased stance on the issue being discussed? My desire for this information is the primary reason I prefer my TwitterGadget to twitter.com; the gadget expands the bit.ly et al. for me when I hover my cursor on them.
In conclusion, it seems to me that “any widely used citation style” will, already, “place[] a burden on writers,” to remix some of the concerns above (Feal #comment-3859). MLA has a longstanding policy of asking writers to keep track of page numbers, which can be very difficult to rediscover if you miss them when first taking your notes, as well as the publication information, including the publishing house (the advantage of which information is, to many students, at least as opaque as a URL – albeit as useful to us) and date (which can be a problem for careless photocopiers, since it’s often on the flip side of the title page). The question is whether the burden is useful; whether we learn by having to attend to things like provenance.
It seems clear that we do – and that we have the further burden of helping others see this chance for learning, too. Frankly, it’s a burden I welcome.
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