[Teaching_Composition] New Module

[J.Rice]

>
>  The kinds of
>   sophisticated commentary, analysis, research, and
>   other information we expect students to access as
>   part of their academic work is often better found in
>   the digital libraries of the 21sth century than in
>   random searches on Google or quick dives into
>   Wikipedia. 

Another way to phrase the issue is to ask: how are we looking at information storage, organization, and delivery from a perspective not aligned with current practices (30 million weblogs written largely be people not asked to blog and pedagogy still trying to teach blogging as if it were merely a replication of the placement exam prompt)? 

The Wikipedia straw man is problematic for a number of reasons, one being that it is an encyclopedia and was never meant to stand for a new research methodology. Even its founder stresses that point. It is not representative of what we might call a new media logic; it has only updated slightly a previous model.

Google, too, poses interesting questions, particularly since its power and methods have extended outward from: type in word to find, hit search.

So another way to phrase such questions might be: How might the search described in the introduction to this module (and then it was almost let go of...) be representative of an emerging (though not settled) kind of information "literacy" academia is slow to respond to?

Or: The question of how one becomes "literate" in this environment may not resemble the "prior pedagogical practices" and, of course, "assumptions" associated with prior conceptions of literacy. 

To ask that is also to ask if the field of rhet/comp has or has not updated its understandings of literacy, research, arrangement and organization in such a way as to understand the Web and its associated logics (online or not online). "Useless junk" is not necessarily useless. And the suggestion sometimes (though not necessarily here) is that "useless" is, in fact, an identifiable moment ("you don't need that"), as opposed to its often preferred cousin, "purpose" which is portrayed as an obvious awareness ("I know what I'm doing before I do it"). On the other hand, useless may be the focal point of a practice of association, collection, and juxtaposition that new media logics foreground.

For me, and the work I do, I'm much more skeptical about a variety of already established practices, many of them codified in "print" matter like the endless stream of textbooks published each year or some of our own scholarship, housed in, of all places, the physical - and non-digital - library (not that I don't like libraries - I do - but the binary is a bit flat).

Which is to say I hope this module expands as I'm interested in these matters. Thanks for exploring this issue here.

Jeff





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J.Rice
Assistant Professor of English
Wayne State University
http://www.english.wayne.edu/People/faculty/ricej/index2.html
http://www.ydog.net/



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