Writing, Reading, and Teaching Science Fiction, the first collection that I have contributed to, has been handed over to McFarland for publication. You can find my chapter “Revealing Critical Theory’s Real-Life Potential to Our Students, the Digital Nomads” in the first section on Teaching Science Fiction. The publisher doesn’t have a page up for orders yet, but they have given permission for us to post the abstracts, which you may find below. There is some additional information available on editor Karen Hellekson’s website here. I will give a link to the official McFarland page once it goes live.

Writing, Reading, and Teaching Science Fiction

Edited by Karen Hellekson, Craig Jacobsen, Patrick Sharp, and Lisa Yaszek

McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010

Part 1—Teaching

1. Teaching with Science Fiction

Section edited by Craig Jacobsen

2. Grokking Rhetoric through Science Fiction: A Practical Examination of Course Construction

Jen Gunnels

Traditional teaching methods and materials for core curriculum all too often leave the student disengaged, or worse, confused. A text’s placement in the Western canon does not automatically make it accessible or engaging. It can leave the students bored and unconnected, and it can give them an inaccurate perception of rhetorical thought and the writing process. That is not to say that the canon is not important—it is—but often undergraduate core courses, especially mass courses such as rhetoric and composition, fall back on the same few texts. A reliance on canonical material—canonical to the instructor, but often unfamiliar to undergraduates—splits student focus between understanding the materials used to illustrate the concepts and the concepts themselves. A more accessible literature has the potential to free the student to concentrate on the new, often complicated, ideas being presented, and science fiction in particular can engage students who are studying core subjects by providing exemplar texts that clearly and compellingly illustrate major fundamental points. Here, I examine the use of science fiction in teaching basic undergraduate rhetoric and composition, and I reenvision its implementation. I include basic rhetorical elements that a course should cover, and I analyze a sample assignment, a brief rhetorical analysis of Tom Godwin’s 1954 story “The Cold Equations,” to illustrate basic rhetorical tools and wider arguments affecting rhetorical choices.

3. Incorporating Science Fiction into a Scientific Rhetoric Course

Michael J. Klein

Many of the scientific and technological achievements of the past century were prefigured by writers of speculative or science fiction. The scientific and technological achievements we view as commonplace (e.g., the Internet, wireless communication, advances in reproduction) were often discussed by literary authors decades before their “discovery.” Conversely, advances in science and technology drove authors to further their speculations and logically extend the discoveries of the day in their writing. In that spirit, I decided to expand the traditional canon of works I used in a scientific rhetoric course to include works of science fiction. The students in the course compared and contrasted the representation of science and scientists in fictional and factual accounts, examined the ways in which texts become important to a culture and a discourse community, and identified the means by which science informed science fiction, and vice versa, during the past century. I found that for undergraduates, the addition of literature made the concepts of scientific rhetoric more accessible and fostered greater conversation between students studying different subjects. The students in the humanities and social sciences used the literary works as a stepping stone to understanding the discourse within the scientific community. Conversely, students in the sciences and engineering recognized and appreciated the humanistic elements of science by seeing parallels in the works of fiction. These results speak to the benefits of increased dialogue among disciplines that address the concepts of science and technology.

4. Revealing Critical Theory’s Real-Life Potential to Our Students, the Digital Nomads

Jason W. Ellis

I propose a reading of Mike Resnick’s science fiction novel, Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future (2007), that engages critical poststructuralist theory and postcolonial theory for the purpose of providing a way to advance these theories in relation to the here and now of college undergraduate students. Ivory simultaneously promotes and challenges the practices of Orientalism, but my purpose is to engender further discussion regarding potential solutions to the problem of Orientalism presented in the text. Nomadology and rhizomatic resistance may provide a means to solve the problem represented in the novel. Ivory represents these concerns by showing how the fictional problem and its solution in fact epitomize our everyday digitalized and online existence. The novel explores models and provides examples of the online technologies that digital nomad students may use for self-empowerment and personal protection from the encroachment on their lives by the state and by global capital.

Part 2—Reading

5. Reading and Writing SF

Section edited by Patrick Sharp

6. Reading/Writing Martians: Seeing Techn{emacr} and Poi{emacr}sis in The War of the Worlds

Charles Harding

From its opening lines, The War of the Worlds is concerned with seeing, or comprehending, through reading and writing. Wells’s novel emerges from a cultural environment in which a lack of foresight and illiteracy mark future-war stories and scientific discourse. Wells interrogates this cultural blindness and fosters competency by presenting his narrator as a scientific—that is, a knowing—spectator of the Martian invasion. The narrator strives to distinguish himself from those who exhibit nescience in relation to the attack. His insight proceeds from his ability to read—to comprehend and translate—what emerges from the Martian cylinders. The Martians figure as a prevision of a technologized future, and the narrator’s scrutiny of their features and annihilative machinery reveals a potentially dangerous element in humanity’s relationship to technology. This danger manifests in the Martians’ degenerate techn{emacr}, their transformation of the world into a totally mechanized and depersonalized system. Despite the forbidding nature of this futuristic world, the possibility remains that it may be averted. This possibility lies in poi{emacr}sis, or artistic producing, which in The War of the Worlds culminates in the narrator’s rewriting of the invasion. According to Heidegger, poi{emacr}sis constitutes a space for an essential reflection on the danger for humanity in technology. Wells’s novel offers an opportunity for reflection on future humankind, embodied in the Martians, and its relationship to advanced technology by inviting readers to see alongside the narrator as he scrutinizes the Martians and their techn{emacr}. With The War of the Worlds, Wells suggests that science fiction must be knowing fiction.

7. The Creation of Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory”

Ed Wysocki

Robert Heinlein’s short story “Solution Unsatisfactory,” which appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction in May 1941 under the pen name Anson MacDonald, is well known for its presentation of a precarious world situation after the development of a nuclear weapon. This story appeared well before the establishment of the Manhattan Project for the development of an atomic bomb. Knowledge of the state of nuclear physics in the time before the story’s creation is presented to show that its concept grew from an uncertainty regarding the means by which an atomic bomb could be constructed. The source of basic premise of the story, the use of radioactive dust rather than a bomb, is identified as Astounding’s editor, John W. Campbell Jr. Development of the story, while retaining the basic weapon concept, was then taken by Heinlein in a different direction than had been originally suggested to him. Possible sources of technical information available to Heinlein are then considered, and a connection shown to a friend of Heinlein who had just received his PhD in the field of nuclear physics, Robert Cornog. The dust idea presented in the story occurred shortly before the same idea appeared in a report developed to suggest possible military applications of atomic fission. Although the close timing between the work of fiction and the report has been noted previously in the literature, no effort had apparently been made to establish a connection. In this essay, I propose a definite connection.

8. Entropy, Entertainment, and Creative Energy in Ben Bova

Donald M. Hassler

Even though Ben Bova is discounted by some as an “easy” writer or, perhaps, even because of this fact, his usefulness as a representative of the genre has impressed me. Further, I like his storytelling both for its ease and for its consistency. So this essay is one of several I have written attempting to account for genre effects in SF. I discuss several recent Bova novels, each dealing with the extrapolation of what we know of one of the planets in our system; and I find, in fact, some rich resonance of what I call “genre effects” in these books. I write in part as a fan, as well as an academic who hopes to set enthusiasm into the larger context of literary study. Many of Bova’s storytelling techniques seem outdated because they appear in the same milieux as postmodern experimentation, and I evoke the family romance metaphor from Freud—we tend to seek out and to feel comfortable with the “generation” of our fathers. Much of my point, then, about Bova’s effects is captured in what I label in the title as “the entropy” of reading and genre. I argue that the vigorous generation, or family sense, in these science stories allows us to see beyond.

Part 3—Media

9. Media and Science Fiction

Section edited by Karen Hellekson

10. Investigating the Postmodern Memory Crisis on the Small Screen

Susan A. George

In this analysis of the importance and reliability of memory in the context of postmodern SF, I use close readings of two exemplar episodes ( “Adam” and “Sleeper”) of the television program Torchwood (2006–9) to explore the fundamental nature of humanity. Torchwood asserts that some essential qualities escape quantification. These qualities define the human and separate the human from the nonhuman. Memory is the locus of these qualities, not some metaphysical or religious construct called the human soul.

11. Text’s Resistance to Being Interpreted: Unconventional Relationship between Text and Reader in Watchmen

Ho-Rim Song

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen (1986–87) experiments with postmodern literary devices, forms, and style to problematize the conventional concept of interpretation. In particular, the text deconstructs the conventional relationship between text and readers as the interpreted and the interpreter, and by doing so, it calls into question readers’ perception of their own reality as well as that of the text. Watchmen ultimately claims that interpretation, or the act of finding truth or meaning, is meaningless for our postmodern reality.

12. ”Breathe, baby, breathe!” Ecodystopia in Brazilian Science Fiction Film

Alfredo Suppia

This analysis of four ecodystopian Brazilian SF films—Claudin{ecirc} Perina Camargo’s 93{deg} Tunnel (1972), José de Anchieta’s Stop 88 (1978), Roberto Pires’s Nuclear Shelter (1981), and Marcos Bertoni’s Armadillo Blood (1986)—demonstrates that ecodystopia is one of the most structured and long-lasting manifestations of science fiction in Brazilian cinema, offering critical and speculative visions at the crossroads of social, political, and environmental issues that continue to remain strikingly relevant today. These films shed light on Brazilian anxieties regarding modernization in the atomic era that reflect greater world ecological concerns that are only becoming more compelling.

Part 4—Women

13. Women and Writing

Section edited by Lisa Yaszek

14. Hail the Conquering Campbellian S/Hero: Joanna Russ’s Alyx

Eileen Donaldson

For many theorists, both feminist and not, the figure of an archetypal, active female warrior hero has been problematic. Many feminists believe it is gender stereotyping to suggest that women are unable to possess the force of the archetypal warrior hero and that this archetype is ultimately available to both men and women. I briefly define the nature of the archetypal hero and an argument is made for the active female s/hero who possesses the “masculine” powers of the hero and thus allows the archetypal power of the active warrior hero to pass to women. Joseph Campbell’s work on the archetypal hero of myth is drawn on extensively. One of the genres that allow an exploration of the s/hero is SF. I explore the s/hero in SF, particularly as she is evoked in Joanna Russ’s Alyx stories, published as short stories first and then collected in 1983 and published as The Adventures of Alyx.

15. Essentialism and Constructionism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling

Kristen Lillvis

Although critics have argued that science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler confines her heroines to biologically determined sex and gender roles, in this article, I look beyond genetic predispositions and explore the influence of social and material conditions on her characters’ beliefs and actions. I use Butler’s final novel, Fledgling (2005), to investigate acts of sexual violence, demands of heterosexual sexual practices, and traditional notions of maternal roles as they affect the novel’s human and vampire species as well as Butler’s protagonist, a genetically engineered being whose biology aligns her with both species but whose amnesia frees her from a socially constructed consciousness. I posit that although biological tendencies may exist in the novel, Butler uses her heroine’s atypical beliefs about and responses to female behavioral norms to demonstrate that sex-specific characteristics become unavoidable truths only for the individuals and societies that choose to accept them as such.

16. Joanna Russ and the Murder of the Female Child: We Who Are About To{3.}

Rebekah Sheldon

In this essay, I investigate the violation of the rescue of the female child theme in Joanna Russ’s 1977 novel We Who Are About To{3.}. In stories like “The Second Inquisition” (1970), Russ positions the reader as the double of the child in the plot and rescues both by engendering the story as a hero. I assert that We Who Are About To{3.} rends open this closed loop through its refusal of proper narrative structure and its murder of the female child. I interpret this murder as an interrogation of the metaphysics of presence implicit in the rescue thematic, a move to a deconstructive writing practice and a liberation of the child from service as the site of future redemption.

17. Learning to Listen, Listening to Learn: The Taoist Way in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling

James Thrall

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling (2000) is more than simply a novel steeped in Taoism. It is, in fact, an attempt to make a political point by imagining a novel in a Taoist mode. Her protagonist moves beyond merely studying the Telling, a way of life modeled on Taoism, to becoming a practitioner herself. Le Guin contrasts her construction of the Telling’s grassroots system of communicating life wisdom through story with hierarchical systems of domination and control. By emphasizing the importance of properly engaged listening, which she sees as a key aspect of both Taoism’s and the Telling’s feminist principle, Le Guin advocates an alternative politics that embraces “peaceful anarchy” rooted in cooperation and discernment rather than conflict.

I began blogging about my experiences in academia and as a science fiction scholar in the Fall of 2006, but I moved my early work over to WordPress.com in March 2007 where I have been hosting dynamicsubspace.net ever since. This is my 500th blog post since I began, so I thought I dig through my site logs and share some surprising statistics with you.

DynamicSubspace.net had a very tentative beginning with only 3,772 visits during 2007. However, things really took off after I wrote more content and that content was indexed by Google. So, in 2008, my total number of site visits leapt to 27,878, and so far in 2009, I have 29,924 visits. In the screen grab above, you can see these numbers spread out by month, which generates a nice roller coaster graph of site activity.

I have written 224,109 words, including tags, on DynamicSubspace.net, which includes my earlier mac.com posts before the transition. That’s two regular-sized novels or nearly one mega-sized novel like Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Over the past three years, these have been the five most popular pages on Dynamicsubspace.net:

1. On Forced Deep Throat in Aliens vs. Predator Requiem (10,230 visits)
2. The Cigarette Smoking Man and Ms. Yutani in AVP2 Requiem (1,995 visits)
3. 1080p Trouble with Windows 7, Nvidia, and Samsung LCD HDTV (1,120 visits)
4. Apple Favors the MacBook Pro With 64bit Kernel (896 visits)
5. Fandom, Otaku, and Home Guys in Taiwan (789 visits)

These are the top five search terms on DynamicSubspace.net. It should be noted that I don’t mean to misrepresent. I do talk about these things, but I don’t think that I talk about them all necessarily in the way that many of these readers want.

1. predator (13,533)
2. vagina dentata (588)
3. forced deep throat (537)
4. forced deepthroat (527)
5. sunshine review (338)

I plan to write more about science fiction scholarship for 500 more posts and beyond–time and energy permitting, but I should consider putting my writing down for other purposes like writing a book.

Thanks to NASA’s Speakers Bureau, Professor Jay Reynolds of Cleveland State University and the Glenn Research Station agreed to visit my two intro writing classes today to talk about America’s return to the Moon, current research on Mars, and investigations of asteroids and protoplanets, which is what Prof. Reynolds is at the present involved in with the DAWN mission to observe Vesta and Ceres.

I asked Prof. Reynolds to speak to my classes about some of the things taking place right now at NASA, particularly in relation to NE Ohio, where the majority of my students are from, and to give some context to the work that NASA does. He did an excellent job of this in his two presentations today for my students. Based on the subjects that he covered, I believe that he filled in many gaps that I either didn’t have the time to cover or those things that didn’t occur to me at the time as my classes worked their way through Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars as part of the “Space Exploration and Your Future” theme of my intro writing classes.

Prof. Reynolds demonstrated his depth of knowledge about NASA and its missions while also engaging broader economic and political interests in response to questions put to him by my students. He displayed a contagious abundance of energy and excitement about his work and the work taking place at NASA that I believe carried over to some of my students in the two classes.

At the beginning of his presentation, he began simply by asking my students what they thought of the unauthorized, yet mission making, Apollo 8 picture of the gibbous Earth next to the lunar surface [find it here] and the Apollo 17 image of the fully illuminated Earth [find it here]. What he stressed with these images was that our missions to the Moon turned into missions about the Earth. Our going out there gave us, meaning humanity, a new perspective on our planet and ourselves as co-inhabitants of what Carl Sagan termed a pale blue dot.

He discussed the Space Shuttle, Saturn V, and Ares I and V launch vehicles [see my Lego versions here] in detail, which elicited many questions between the two classes. Other questions included: How safe are the launch vehicles? Why did we go to the Moon? Does anyone own the Moon? What do you do with Helium-3?

Prof. Reynolds’ presentation ended with a discussion of asteroids and the importance of locating and tracking those objects which cross or may eventually cross the orbit of the Earth. This is related to the work that he does for NASA with the help of undergraduate and graduate students from Cleveland State University in conjunction with the DAWN mission [some related info here].

I am thankful that NASA can make a special event like this possible, and I am especially grateful to Prof. Reynolds for taking the time and energy to drive down to Kent and spend the afternoon with my students. It was a terrific occasion to close out the Fall 2009 semester for my students.

The books are (by author, title, and ISBN):

1. Wysocki/Lunch The DK Handbook 0558164102
2. Kent Writing Prog. Guide for College Writing I & II 978-0-7380-3511-6
3. Robinson, Kim Stanley Red Mars 978-0553560732 Spectra
4. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey 978-0451457998 Tor

I am currently recreating the syllabus for our class, so I will post it when it is available.  In the meantime, it suffices to say that our class will have a theme of “space exploration and your future,” and it will involve intensive online writing exercises that culminate in a final portfolio of your revised major essays in the class.

I look forward to seeing you all in class!

I can confidently say that packing and preparing for a long drive is a lot worse than any other aspect of conferencing (including programming).  That’s saying a lot, because I still have to whittle my 31 page monster from the deep essay on how World of Warcraft creates cosmopolitan subjects to 8 pages.  I feel good about the impending revision, but I’m afraid that it will take most of Tuesday with me sitting some place comfy with a steady supply of coffee.

I called the Midtown Hotel tonight, and they said that they only offer wired Internet access (at almost $10/day).  I know there are some places nearby that may have Internet access, but I don’t know what my connection will be like (if at all).  I did want to blog from the conference, but my updates to DynamicSubspace.net may come in fits and spurts.  If I cannot get a reliable connection, I will save my posts and run them all at once the following week.

To Atlanta!

Well, it took me a long damn time, but I did cut my paper down while retaining its overall argument.  Initially, I focused on eliminating the lengthier examples that I could mention rather than embellish during my presentation.  If anyone wants to know more about Saint Augustine, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, and Philip K. Dick, you can ask me during the Q&A.  The greater amount of time went into actually rewriting a good portion of the paper to be more concise while eliminating unnecessary repetition.  

I hope the paper holds up well tomorrow, and I wish that I had the opportunity to add in the research suggestions that I got from ICFA and the Blogging Brown Bag discussion last week.  Unfortunately, it is the end of the semester and I have too many other things to focus on right now (African-American lit research paper, SFRA 2009 program manager duties, Pakistaniaat layouts, and The Postnational Fantasy book project deadline is coming up).

Lundin’s article is a great introduction to educators about the potential and promise of using wikis in the composition classroom.  In fact, I was jazzed about one day using a wiki in my own classes in the future after reading her essay.  I may be somewhat biased in my eagerness to use wikis in the classroom, because I am a contributor to Wikipedia, and I know how to install MediaWiki on a Mac OS X box.  However, I think that Lundin makes some persuasive points about the power of wikis in the composition classroom, so let me go into some of those in more detail.

She begins by talking about a networked pedagogy (I’m thinking Foucault’s biopolitics) comprised of ”writing as a networked activity,” and “teaching as a networked activity” (432).  These ideas of shared, distributed, and interconnected means of learning and teaching should be facilitated by technologies that reinforce those network oriented goals, such as wikis.

Wikis are excellent examples of a collaborative writing and composing technology that obviously engages network culture, come close to embodying the original vision of hypertext, and the unique features of wikis including editability and page histories reinforce compositional goals of revision and collaboration.

Lundin’s essay emphasizes how wikis challenge assumptions about the traditional composition classroom (i.e., individual authorship, workshopping papers, teacher facilitated discussion, etc.).  She demonstrates that wikis challenge these assumptions in four key ways:  

1) New media composition in a wiki requires little if any expertise beyond the use of a word processor and the open design of wikis promise to unbound student creativity and expression by embracing multimodality.  

2) Collaborative writing made possible by wikis breaks down the single author paradigm by allowing all wiki participants to write, edit, and comment on any wiki pages including those of other students and those created by the teacher.  Furthermore, the transparency, as Carr et. al. describe it, of wikis through page histories facilitates reflection on the individual’s writing as well as the group collaborative process.

3) Critical interaction by a real audience of a student’s peers along withfeedback from the teacher should enable a more authentic engagement of students’ work.  Instead of writing for the teacher, students will write for one another, and give criticism to one another.  I think that this aspect holds a lot of promise, but as Lundin admits this is one of the more difficult aspects to engage students with when she discusses her creation of a “class of lurkers” (441). Additionally, she notes problems with flame wars between students.  This part of her essay particularly intreged me, due to my own work on trolls and flame wars in academic discussion lists.

4) Online authority, particularly on wikis, is decentralized and virtually anonymous.  Instead of merely subverting authority, Lundin makes a valid argument that instead authority in the traditional teacher-student sense is complicated by wiki work.  This could serve to undermine what power the teacher may hold over the classroom dialog and guiding of student work, but the very nature of wikis does empower all users, teacher and student alike, through page histories and what Will Richardson calls soft security, or participant policing of the wiki.  Additionally, student anonymity could help some students contribute in writing through the wiki when they are hesitant to contribute verbally in the classroom.

Concluding, she indicates that wikis, through their social and networked interaction, promote student social context awareness, because despite the appearance of anonymity, they are engaging one another as social writers.

I find Lundin’s essay compelling, and I plan on considering ways in which I can implement wikis in future classes.  I like how wikis will make writing regularly so much easier, and most wikis will pragmatically make teacher evaluation of writing easier by selecting to view all contributions by a particular writer/student. As Lundin noted, some teachers would be reticent to have a fully open wiki, and I would fall into this category as well for the simple fact that it might be better for all parties concerned not to allow for too much tomfoolery.  However, a little tomfoolery might be a good thing, and turn into a teachable moment.  I will have to think more on this point as I figure out how to design my class around a wiki/network paradigm.  Also, I am concerned about the flame war aspect of online communication for the composition classroom.  This will inevitably happen, and my primary concern is potential alienation of some students as a result of one or some students non-reflective acts.  Again, this is something that I will have to think further about.  

If you are a teacher, I definitely recommend you find this article (details listed above), and read it–my notes do not do it justice!

In other classes, my teachers commented very positively about my writing, and my grades reflected my growing skill in written communication.  My Latin teacher, Magistra Metz, gave me kudos for a paper that I wrote on the Roman pecuniary system–not only on the substance, but on the way that I wrote it.  However, a particularly poor evaluation didn’t make me fully doubt my writing ability, but it did make me shut down in the classroom when I should have maintained my focus prior to going on to Georgia Tech.

In psychology class, the teacher (her name is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t recall it right now–I can see her face and I remember where her room was on the side of the wing nearest the library) gave us a research paper assignment.  We had to research some aspect of psychology on our own and write at minimum a 5 page paper on that topic.  It’s important to remember that there was no Internet access when I was in high school–at best, you could search CD-ROM databases for information.  Though, I didn’t have any problem picking my topic.  Independently of class, I was reading Roger Penrose’s (he’s a well established and respected mathematician and theoretical physicist–more on wikipedia here) latest book, The Emperor’s New Mind (available on Google Books here).  His thoughts on the quantum hypothesis of human consciousness excited me.  It combined two fields that I still enjoy reading about–physics and neurophysiology.  I was so jazzed by the assignment’s possibilities that I began writing and citing with gusto.  Before I realized it, I had a 21 page paper on my hands–the longest essay that I had ever written.  I was beaming with pride when I gave it to my teacher for evaluation and grading.

A week or two passed, and she handed back our papers.  I got an A- for some spelling and grammatical errors.  At first, I was a little put off that she concentrated on grammar and spelling when the ideas were so much more significant and above the bar for a high school psychology class.  But what threw me for a loop was my seeing a cheerleader in the row next to me receiving a big “A+, Terrific Paper” on a four page pamphlet on sports psychology.  Even though I got a respectable grade, I believed that I deserved a higher grade for doing a greater amount of research, critical thinking, and writing than my peer.  I was so incensed that I didn’t talk to the teacher or participate in the class for the remainder of the semester.  This means that I didn’t take tests or hand in any more work.  I thought that if my teacher devalued my work in such a pedantic way, I didn’t have the energy or desire to give her the satisfaction of my attention and time.

This took place just prior to graduation.  I was warned by other faculty that I should do something to mitigate my eventual “F” in the course, because it would lower my class rank.  I told them I wasn’t that concerned about it–mathematically I knew I would be bumped down a slot and remain in the top five.

I don’t want this to happen in my classes.  I don’t want to shut down a student, because I focused on the wrong things in their papers.  Students are writers, and as writers, they have something to say, and it’s part of my job to listen to what that is.  By listening, I can help guide them to revising their work so that it’s even stronger, and in so doing, they become stronger writers.  The “tip of the iceberg” stuff (form) will follow the “under the surface stuff” (function).  Form follows function (Shuy will back me up on this).  And more importantly, I want students to own their work, be proud of it, and not stop writing.  Therefore, I have to do my best not to do something boneheaded that might shut them down or feel that they need to shutup.

Multimodal composition is the use of media other than paper and pencil for rhetorical communication and composition.  For example, blogs, Powerpoint presentations, Youtube videos, Podcasts, brochures etc. are other ways to make persuasive arguments and enter critical discourse.  In multimodal composition, the printed essay does not reign supreme.

There seems to be a push in writing programs, which are increasingly influenced by the growth of rhetoric programs to the detriment of literature programs, to teach students to compose by any means available.  This means that students should be encouraged to create arguments, whether it be with audio essays or videos for example, with the tools at hand in order to increase their own involvement in the increasingly technologized mediums of communication.

I like this idea, on the surface, because students should be aware of the ways they do and may be called upon to communicate in the twenty-first century.  Also, I engage in these practices in my own personal and professional lives with this blog, YouTube, and Flickr.  However, I first understood the basics of writing practices and composition before or in analog with my additionally technologized communication practices.

My belief is that a grounding in traditional writing practices and composition empowers the individual to translate and apply those to other means and mediums of communication.  In the introductory writing classes, I feel that I not be meeting my students needs if I didn’t guide them towards an increased proficiency in writing before allowing them to use multimodal composition practices in the classroom.  Analogously, a pilot must earn a single engine pilots license prior to earning a license in larger and multiple engine aircraft.  Our students should safely pull out of a stall on a small Cesna before experiencing an F-15 flame out.  Therefore, I assert that students are better prepared communicators if they build on tried-and-true translatable communicative practices before using expressive, yet not as directly translatable, modes of communication.

So what does this have to do with Vernor Vinge’s postsingularlity SF novel, Rainbows End (now available for free online here)?  In the novel, Robert Gu, a former great poet in the last throws of a slow Alzheimer’s death, is resurrected through regenerative medical technologies.  However, his disease has left a mark on his mind, and he has to relearn how to be a poet as well as learn about the changes in technologically mediated communicative practices.  Toward this end, he enrolls in a high school where he works with a teenage student, Juan Orozco, to create a multimodal final project in “shop class” that involves dance, music, holographic projection, and poetry.  There’s an exchange of ideas between the two characters–Gu introduces Juan to poetry and the power of the written word, and Orozco shows Gu the potential of story telling and art with the advances in technology during Gu’s illness.

For all of the good things in Vinge’s novel, his writing about the multimodal compositions fell flat for me.  In fact, I cringed at the possibility that we’d move away from reading and writing within such a short time.  With the rapid advances in technology, and technology’s relationship and impact on the classroom, it seems like there is not enough reflection taking place on its long term and post-graduation effects on our students.  It’s one thing to write about how great this brave new world will be, but I question if that will be so.

Granted, I haven’t been in the classroom yet, and I know that a large part of my own developing ideas on teaching practices are borrowed from the ways that I was taught, but m greatest rebellious response during the past couple of weeks in Brian’s class has been in regard to multimodal composition.  I don’t think it has a place in my introductory writing class, and I question to what extent I might employ it in higher level courses where students can demonstrate their ability to communicate effectively with the written word.

A final issue that I have with multimodal composition is the technical instruction aspect of it.  I don’t do fucking tech support.  In my previous life, prior to fully engaging my research interests in graduate school, I built more computers than I can count, I’ve repaired more Macs than I can imagine, and I gave phone, teletype, and email assistance to innumerable customers at the late, great Mindspring in Atlanta, Georgia.  I didn’t sign on to pursue research and college teaching to help students learn how to use iMovie, much less the poorly designed Microsoft Movie Maker.  I love technology, and it’s an integral part of my life, including  two World of Warcraft accounts, a 30″ Apple Cinema Display and Mac Book Pro, iPhone, building a Media Center PC, blogging, and keeping my girlfriend’s ailing Sony Vaio alive while she studies for her comps, but I strongly insist on keeping that separate from my goal of enriching the lives of my students by challenging them to think deeply, imagine new possibilities, and effectively communicate through writing before moving up to multimodal composition practices.

1. Course work:  Teaching College Writing with Professor Brian Huot.  I’m taking a class in preparation of teaching the introductory college writing course in the Fall at Kent State University.  I received an appointment beginning in the Fall that pays for my classes and gives me a stipend in exchange of carrying a 2-1 teaching load.  This Fall will be my first college teaching experience, and I’m feeling a mixed bag of excitement and trepidation.  However, the excitement is taking over as this course progresses and I learn more pedagogical theory and nuts-and-bolts teaching practices.
2. Writing:  I’m preparing my much traveled conference paper, “Michael Bay’s Transformers, the Global War on Terror, and the New Post-9/11 SF Narrative” for publication.  I promised this to Sherryl Vint, co-editor of Science Fiction Film and Television, at IAFA 2008 in March.  My plan is to send this off in the next two weeks.
3. Writing and Conferencing:  I’m turning my paper, “We are All Nomads:  Computers, Orientalism, and Nomadology in Mike Resnick’s Ivory” into a conference length work.  I’m presenting this at SFRA 2008 in July (on my birthday).  This will require a lot of elbow grease, but I’m confident that it’ll come together before I begin the long drive out West (yes, I want to go on a road trip after I finish my Teaching College Writing course over Summer I).
4. Writing and Conferencing:  Andrew Pilsch emailed me on Facebook awhile back about doing another panel at SLSA 2008 in the Fall.  Last year, Chris Van Acker, Andrew, and I were on a panel together, and it was a blast.  Andrew has some kickass ideas for a new panel, and an even more knock-dead paper idea.  I just sent him a draft for our panel proposal along with an abstract of my publishable-length paper, “Transsexual Technology:  The Political Potential of Gender Shifting Technologies.”  That’s another paper that needs a significant reduction, but I’m looking forward to getting some comments and questions on it.

UPDATE

My CRS kicked in and I forgot to mention this:

5.  Reviewing:  I’m looking forward to reviewing Sonja Fritzsche’s Science Fiction Literature in East Germany for German Quarterly!