This will be my final post for this blog as today is the last day my EGL 614 class will meet.  I’m writing this mostly for myself, but I hope someone might come across this post who had as much of a struggle in this class as I did.  Fortunately, the struggle paid off since I created something I am proud of, namely my website about a mash-up image that put together the Care Bears and Hellraiser franchises.  I also created a website that discussed the process of creating this website.  Both together stretched my composition abilities far beyond anything I ever wrote before because I had to write in a medium that provided different pathways to information presentation and a potentially heterogeneous audience that could theoretically respond back.  I even emailed the creator of the image and am waiting for a response.  If I get one, I’d actually have to update the website, meaning unlike a regular term paper, it is less a snapshot of my understanding, knowledge, and synthesis of ideas at a particular point in time and more a sustained rumination on a particular topic.

I’ve had time to think about my project and during that time, my friend Kra3zy Mike (the “3” is silent) sent me this article through Facebook.  It’s an article that is somewhat “clickbaity” that shows a professor dealing with annoying students by making himself into popular memes.  He does this because he wants to communicate to his students in a way they will readily understand (and probably because he’s a snarky fellow and it’s always fun to break out a fresh can of snark).  This article reminded me of something I have always discussed with other educational professionals, namely that we have to be where the students are in order to reach them.  My students are the main reason I have multiple social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr.  I have a Snapchat account I can barely use but, in the past, students have used it to communicate with me.  (As an aside, I love Pinterest and found it to be very relaxing, and have found Facebook to be a weight I wish I could slough off.)  As technology provides us with various ways to communicate, we also find that it allows us to find new ways to compose and present information that can expand the definition of what a “term paper” actually is.

Would you pick on Linus? Maybe technopobes need the same consideration, especially if we expect them to embrace new ways of teaching rhetoric. Image found at http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lose-the-Blanket-Linus!/Charles-M-Schulz/Peanuts/9781481441292

In a previous post, I poked fun at Sherry Turkle’s TED Talk, “Connected, but alone?”, by posting a riffed short about the family dinner from the popular comedy show, Mystery Science Theater 3000.  But then, in a post about skeuomorphs that I wrote, I said that if we want more people to accept technology and its benefits, we needed to stop making people feel bad about holding on to old tech, like card catalogs, because in the face of all this change, being a Lucy who yells at Linus to get rid of his security blanket just makes people want to hold on to their skeuomorphs more.

I think that technology has been a major disruptor in many areas, in many ways no one could ever dream.  I know from recent experience that if one is given an opportunity to explore and make meaningful scaffolds to past experience, one can move from paralysis and fear to acceptance and maybe even actual enthusiasm.  For instance, before taking EGL 614, I had no idea what cyberfeminism or post-humanism were.  I still can’t explain them like an expert but I wrote about one of my favorite fictional characters as an example of a cyberfeminist representation in fiction.  With this start, with this leap, I now a foothold on the subject and learn more about it.

This is why we teach our students to write.  It’s not just about the product at the end, but how the process of writing itself not only synthesizes existing ideas, but gives students new ones as well.  The creative process itself is one of invention, and we learn while creating.  In doing my own project, I came across many surprises.  I found that form and content created a feedback loop that changed each as I wrote.  I brought together a lot of eclectic information to discuss a subject that seemed like fluff, but discovered that mash-ups, when done well, can reveal a lot about both the component franchises and our thoughts on the dichotomies they symbolize (seriously, I had no clue that Care Bears and Cenobites are almost exact mirror images of each other in a way much deeper than one is cute and the other is dark).  And I discovered that by writing about content and process at the same time, I had to find a way to do this that would have made no sense at all if I didn’t have access to hypertext.

As educators, we want new opportunities for our students.  Teaching composition in digital rhetoric is exactly that, but it is also a new opportunity for us to learn that writing is not a static thing.  I remember an interview that Raymond Carver gave in 1983 to The Paris Review in which he talked about this new invention he call the word processor.  He said it changed the entire way he wrote because now he could write out his stories, give the copy to his secretary, and by the end of the day have a new draft to work on.  Before, he had to retype each new draft, which probably lengthened his revision process.  Considering Raymond Carver’s love of rewriting, he probably saw it as an improvement.  The technology we employ changes our writing and what we write about just as much as any other factor, social, political, or economic.  I think we need to accept change, but with forethought and mindfulness, and gentle nudge, not push, those who are wary of that change.

I think people should also write things out.  That always helps clear my head when I’m trying to discover my attitudes.

I think I’ll close this post the way I closed my project, namely with the best closing credits sequence of all time.  Without technology, I would never have realized this dream come true for my writing.