Final 625 Post

I enjoyed everyone's presentations last week: so many interesting topics that show what we have been learning all year, that technology is complex and multifaceted. And just like older technologies that now are nearly unnoticed in our lives, the internet (email, open source software, blogs, websites, and Facebook like you all discussed) is neither an evil to be overtly rejected nor a panacea to be blindly accepted. Through this class, I've begun to understand the importance of critical and rhetorical literacy for us and for our students. Beyond understanding the basic steps to using technology, we also need to critically evaluate technology and how we and others are using it.

Furthermore, I appreciate what I've gleaned from reading blogs about in/fertility. Thanks to all of you IFers who share so honestly about your struggles and successes (both physical and emotional). Through you, I have caught a glimpse into the into the issue of infertility, into the complexity of human emotion, and into your strength.

And it may be that writing about infertility without having experienced it is something like writing about the Holocaust without having been there. I'm sorry if that's true. But overall, through looking at your blogs, I have been focusing less on infertility itself as a disease and more on your reactions and responses to the experience. That may be even more important.


Well, goodbye 625ers. It's been fun. Good luck in your future studies and careers and in your critical literacy of future inventions we can't even imagine. Of course, remember that technology "is not the boss of me!"

What I Will Do Differently

I am excited to teach the multi-modal assignment the next time I teach composition. However, a few questions I asked myself during the process of writing and creating my own persuasive document prompted me to change some aspects of my assignment.

Why are there blank pages in my document?

I realized toward the end of my document creation that there were blank pages in my booklet. It took me quite some time to realize that a booklet like mine must be printed in multiples of four, which made sense after I thought about it mathematically. My students may have similar questions, so now I am more prepared to help them plan how many pages they will be using.

Do I have to have a rhetorical reason for everything?

I asked myself this question as I made some of my choices, and I decided that I will not hammer this point too hard with my students. While I do want them to think hard about why they are making these choices, not every choice must correspond with a very specific rhetorical purpose. For example, the choice of border design might not relate thematically to the content, but if it is chosen to attract the reader, it will make the document more rhetorically effective. In other words, some of students’ design decisions might relate to broader principles of attraction and readability, if not specifically to the ideas in their issue essays.

How do I choose a picture to illustrate this theme?

Because my issue essay was about very abstract concepts like ideology and language, I had a very difficult time finding any pictures to illustrate my essay, to rhetorically strengthen it by adding visual correspondence. Eventually, I found the man on the soapbox, but was the only picture I used. Hopefully, my students’ topics will be more concrete than mine, and it will be easier for them to find effective illustrations. If not, I need to think hard about what kinds of pictures can be used for abstract concepts.

When I teach this assignment, my students are likely to have many more questions than I did. Publisher may be new for some, and some may not even have used Word. I simply need to remember to be patient and to give them plenty of time to practice in the computer lab. But I look forward to seeing their creativity and what they learn about visual rhetoric!

Multi-Modal Process Reflection

Writing a sample for the Multi-Modal assignment truly went well for me. It certainly confirmed some of the hypotheses in my Rationale. Even though I have created a few non-MLA documents this semester, I think this particular one significantly increased my functional, critical, and rhetorical literacy.

For one thing, I learned more about how Publisher works and the tasks involved in creating a visually effective document out of a block of text. I tried to follow my own instructions, just experimenting with various aspects, like page size and font. I felt that, with computer lab time and a little help from me, my students would have little difficulty creating their own interesting documents with Publisher. It did take me a while to print my document correctly, so I may need to help my students with those kinds of issues.

On the whole, I found it interesting to try to design my document in such a way that it was more interesting and more persuasive for my readers. It made me feel like I want to make all of my future papers more visually effective, but I do not know if other professors will think differing from the standard is acceptable. But even I, who am very strict and detail-oriented about MLA and other kinds of format, can see the benefits of letting (encouraging!) students to look beyond the abstract content of their texts. Honestly, I think my students might do a little better job because I am normally not very creative. I like that this assignment leaves room for many different ideas and approaches to designing their rhetorical documents. 

Provocative Suggestions from Yancey

Kathleen Blake Yancey in "Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work" makes some bold claims about portfolios and how they affect students' learning and identities.

One of the most important quotes in the article says that "through practice, we compose identity, task by rhetorical task, moment by reflective moment" (757). In other words, the kinds of assignments and strategies we create and use affect both our knowledge and our identity. This claim is essentially a practical portfolio-related application of Kenneth Burke. He says that we used to think that social context did not change what we learned, just how we learned it. Now, we understand that most knowledge depends to a great extent on context--or is created by context.

Most notably, Yancey says, "What we ask students to do is who we ask them to be" (738). To some extent, that statement is frightening because it makes it sound like we teachers have more power than I like to think we do. However, her claim has value, especially in thinking about structuring portfolios. As Mikhail Bakhtin says, a writer's identity is not a solid characteristic but an expression of a person's basic, continuous line of social orientation, crystallized for that context. Put differently, a student does not write straight from a concrete identity, or even an identity that is concrete at that particular point in time; rather, he or she creates a context-appropriate identity for that particular task. D. Diane Davis notes that sometimes we talk as if the writer can transcend senses and the situation to reach "disembodied, rational thoughts." But we are not completely in control, and context affects how we say things.

For these reasons, it makes sense to think even more deeply about how we construct our students' portfolio assignments because those decisions will affect how our students construct their identities, for that particular undertaking, anyway.

To all who read my blog for "fun" . . .

Okay, friends and family--the two of you who actually visit this site--here's my fair warning:

You might want to give up reading this blog until at least June.

1. I have not been posting very much (too busy).

2. What I have been posting has probably not been very interesting (unless of course you like to think about multi-modal assignments in your free time).

Check back for more interesting updates after/if I graduate.