Time to Shop for Sun Block

Its unofficially official: I have accepted a position with the University of South Florida. The job focuses on teaching the history of rhetoric at the graduate level and will also involve undergraduate courses on contemporary rhetorical theory, visual rhetoric, professional writing, advanced composition, and (eventually) new media. Initially, I'm slated to teach the History of Rhetoric every year- but I'll be looking to create a Contemporary Rhetorical Theory course at the Ph.D level and offer them in alternating years. Sweet.

I was fortunate enough to have two tempting offers- my other offer focused on teaching new media at the undergraduate level. In the end, South Florida presented an intriguing opportunity to contribute to the development of both a graduate program in rhetoric and an undergraduate program in professional writing (which is currently under revision and is beginning very much to reflect what I've contributed to at Purdue). Also, South Florida reunites me with my original tech-mentor, Meredith: not only won't I be the sole Boiler, but also I won't be the only tech person.

After doing so many campus visits, I have only general thing to say: many English departments are going to wake up one day and realize its the 21st century. Our students, our citizens, are communicating in very different ways than they did even 25 years ago. If English instruction is to remain vibrant and meaningful, then it had better start adapting to the ways that citizens communicate everyday. The essay is "dead"- but many of its values appear in blogs. The research paper is dead, too- but wikis present a new way of thinking about and purposing knowledge. Let me say it this way: the research paper is dead, but the act of researching (the process) has never been more popular. While a number of schools I visited understood this, a number didn't. Go ask philosophy (or, before that, rhetoric) how a discipline fairs once it stops being meaningful to the general public. And the public's importance will increase even more in a digital age.

Enough ranting, perhaps I'll write about the job search a bit more in a few weeks, when I've been able to digest it a bit more. Thanks to everyone who helped and supported me through this grueling process. Now its time to go by some sun block (not for me, for Meg- have you ever seen an Irish person in the sun?)

Life (or Something Like It)

Finally. I'm back.

My laptop's hard drive died three weeks ago (a couple days after my last post). Stone dead. I had to send if off to the nice people at On Track Data Recovery and pay their extortion reasonable fee of #$%@ dollars to get my data back. Silly me hadn't backed up his files for a few months. Translation: I would have lost half my dissertation, a draft of an article, a ton of reading notes, and all my job search files. For anyone who hasn't gone through a Ph.D. job search, the latter really hurt (especially since I track what I've sent where in spread sheets...). But now, I've got my data back. And Apple gave me a brand new laptop. Yay.

Being laptop-less for almost a month taught me how much I rely on this sleek, black machine. Actually, that's too negative a spin: it taught me how much more productive this machine allows me to be (better, right mrxk?). At times I felt useless without my laptop. I've been about as productive in the five days I've had it back as the three weeks I went without it...

As far as this blog: posts should begin to pick up again. My job search process is quieting down a bit--I've only got about five more applications to send out. Besides that, its a few phone interviews and then MLA. Which means that I'll actually be able to return my focus to my disseration. Which means I'll have some material to publish to a blog. To get started, I've been reading a lot of interviews with Derrida from later in his life. Here's a nice selection on how Derrida imagines audience (and the ethical implications of imagining that one can control writing and its reception):

Derridean Method from "There is No One Narcissism" pp. 199-201

Q.: [ ... ] you have often repeated that deconstruction is not a method, that there is no "Derridean method." How, then, is one to take account of your work? How do you evaluate its effects? To whom is your work addressed and, finally, who reads you?

J.D.: By definition, I do not know to whom it is addressed. Or rather yes I do! I have a certain knowledge on this subject, some anticipations, some images, but there is a point at which, no more than anyone who publishes or speaks, I am not assured of the destination. Even if one tried to regulate what one says by one or more possible addressees, using typical profiles, even if one wanted to do that it would not be possible. And I hold that one ought not to try to master this destination.

Reputation as Ethos for the Responsible Netizen

I picked up the quizercise from Karl Stolley (who, I am pretty sure, just adapted Janice Lauer's "writing opportunity"): every Monday, before we begin discussing the week's readings, I ask students some kind of question that calls on them to connect the reading to the larger goals of the class. This week, I opened with a discussion of the importance of MLA citation (since I had caught a few students liberally borrowing material without proper citation). We had read from Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs for class that day, and I asked them the following: focusing on a specific passage or idea from Smart Mobs, explain why an English teacher might discuss the importance of MLA citation before discussing Smart Mobs. Circular? You betcha! But I like giving them these kinds of meta-questions, just to see how well they are beginning to understand my underlying aspirations for the course.

Often, I write answers to my own quiz questions--though I give myself some liberties to stray off-topic (I give my students the same liberties, essentially they have ten minutes to prove to me that they have done the reading!). Here's what I wrote in response to my own question:

In Smart Mobs, author Howard Rheingold suggests that the most productive social networks develop "bottom-up" measures for establishing authority and filtering out free riders. He writes:

Self-monitoring is part of successful grassroots collaboration, a kind of many-to-many surveillance by mutual consent. If governance is to be democratic rather than Hobbesian, maintenance of social order requires technologies of mutual control."

We can think of citation as a kind of surveillance system constructed by the mutual consent of scholars and researchers. Through citation, scholars pay respect to the intellectual work of others, acknowledging contributions even as they criticize oversights. And, although MLA standards might at times come off as Hobbesian, we should remember that these standards change in response to new technologies through grass-roots practice (right?)

The digital world makes it quite easy to bypass such grassroot intellectual systems. As such, many Universities and academic institutions are turning to more top-down, rigid structures to ensure reputation (such Turnitin.com) or outlawing the use of digital environments altogether (such as the movement away from Wikipedia and digital sources).

I strive for a different solution. Rather than ignoring the pitfalls digital technologies engender, I seek to face them heads-on, discussing the epistemological and ethical challenges digital environments place on our intellectual traditions. Specifically, I believe that citation of web sources encourages students to be responsible, reputable net-i-zens.

End response. That's been sitting in a text-edit file on my desktop for a few days now, I figured rather than saving it to a corner of my hard-drive, I'd just shoot it out on the interweb. I've got to write my letter of application for my job market group this weekend, so perhaps I can revisit some of those ideas...(the current draft I have, which is terrible, discusses my dissertation, approach to new media, and approach to teaching in terms of fostering cohabitation and linking classical and contemporary theory to practice).