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The Internet has fundamentally changed not only the means through which we communicate, but also how we communicate and how we think. It has, in turn, altered what others expect from our writing, what employers look for in applicants, and how we conceive of work that used to be private. One need only look at the blog explosion to see how the ability to disseminate our thoughts cheaply and quickly, and to develop a dialogue with others empowered thousands to believe their voice was/is worth sharing.

Teachers cannot ignore this communication shift. A Kindle is more than a paperless book: it changes how we read, how we define reading, and how we perceive intellectual ownership. As society continues down a path toward ever-increasing mobile communication, our conceptions of how we persuade will also change. I think few Rhetoric instructors would argue with the idea that students should be able to not only consume information, something they’ve been doing their entire lives, but also to produce it. But as it stands now, most rhetoric courses focus strictly on writing, and they limit assignments to the classroom environment – practices that devalue other rhetorical mediums, and the purpose of rhetoric itself. It is with this spirit in mind that I designed my special topics Fall 2009 freshman rhetoric course at the University of Texas at Dallas. I wanted to transform the traditional rhetoric class with its standard textbook into a more relevant, new-media oriented course that focused not only on writing and speaking, but one that also looked at rhetoric in film, photography and music.

To that end, I designed the course to include a live WordPress blog on which students could speak to each other and anyone else in the world who cared to listen. A website containing copies of their larger papers coincided with the blog. This made the assignments more communal in nature and reinforced that writing is meant to be shared. In a more traditional classroom environment, students write only for the teacher, an approach that makes assignments seem less relevant to the students and devalues the very idea of rhetoric. Requiring students to blog, contact people outside their classroom, and post writing on the Internet teaches them to engage with the community, gives their writing more significance, and supports rhetoric – a term that, by definition, implies community.

While this public exposure to their work can be intimidating for some students, it forces them to take more accountability for their words while teaching them the power of communication. If they embrace it, students can develop a sense of freedom and power that resides in someone who feels comfortable with both the tools of communication and also the arenas that currently dominate the conversation. Right now, a majority of the conversations are increasingly happening online. Students must know how to navigate these waters. It is a direction more and more university rhetoric departments are going toward, including Ohio State University, which has some excellent examples of class blogs.

A strictly digital approach is not for everyone. I will always prefer a paper book, believe memorizing grammar rules is essential, and don’t think everyone needs a blog. Nonetheless, these are issues students should be aware of. Creating work in a vacuum delegitimizes it. When the goal of your course is to teach students to persuade, and you don’t include what is now the most influential tool for disseminating your argument, you are crippling your students.
Writing and reading online is different than performing those same tasks on paper. We communicate differently on the Internet, and as more and more people read from their phones and portable e-readers, our understanding of communication will change further still. As technology shifts, so does our means of persuasion; if students do not explore this, they will find their skills quickly out of date. Rhetoric is more than just learning a standard structure for an argument. Students should be asking themselves: “How does what we write and what we think change when we know that in ten minutes we can create a blog and broadcast to the world? How does this change how we see and portray ourselves?” These are the deeper rhetorical questions students need to grapple with. It is this focus that will make them stronger readers, writers, and citizens.

The second media-based aspect of the course was centering the writing assignments around a film that the students would produce. My goal was that this would provide continuity between assignments, while reinforcing one of the fundamental ideas underlying this class: rhetoric is found in a variety of media, not just writing. Many rhetoric programs devote time to “visual rhetoric,” but it is often cursory at best and culminates in a short essay examining a film or piece of art. While I do not object to this method, I was always bothered that writing was still given precedent over the image. We tell students that pictures are a viable means of persuasion, and then we as them to write about it. This hardly reinforces the message. So I thought: “Why not have the students work with the mediums they study, including film?”

I “hired” each student for a position in the “company” based on his skills and interests with the idea that this would not only hold their interest, but also be quite germane to their course of study. Everyone had to apply for their job, writing a cover letter and resume, and having a personal interview with me. Students were never entirely on their own, as the positions were part of large groups: pre-production, post-production, marketing, and web design.

Throughout the semester we discussed the various rhetorical aspects that comprise a film – including text, images, music, and sound effects – focusing on how and why creators made the decisions they did. Always, the emphasis was on these crafts as rhetorical devices. The end result was a website and corresponding film, created by the students and comprised of their work throughout the semester. Overall, I have found it a fun, effective approach.

An added benefit of the film was that it captured the students’ interest, as did broadcasting their work on their website, www.rvuentertainment.com. They became so invested in the film that the writing pertaining to it took on new meaning. The first essay required them to identify an issue in their local community and write about it. From these, the students voted on which would be made into a film. The second major writing assignment was a visual essay in which the students each described how they would make the film, supporting their paper with images they found online or took themselves. In addition to these, smaller assignments were given to each student based on his role in the company, including reports, marketing letters, short essays on artists who inspired them, and storyboards. All students were also required to blog weekly. The students really took to the project and, barring the procrastination that is a given for many college freshman, they handled it well. Weekly student-run meetings in class kept everyone on the same page and let me know where things stood. There were also individual meetings in which I worked one-on-one or in small groups to help them with their respective roles.

I admit, I had my doubts. Coming from a traditional writing background, and considering the departments goals, I felt the focus of the class should remain on writing aptitude, and the one constant question rolling around my head all semester was: “Are you doing the students an injustice? Are you taking time away from writing skills to focus on film, sound, and these “alternate” methods of persuasion?” I think my fears were reasonable, but ultimately the class worked out well. Because so many rhetorical devices remain constant across mediums, teaching students how pacing working in screen cuts or music only reinforces how it could be employed in their writing.

Overall, I think the class was a success. It taught the students to work with a variety of mediums and to always consider their work as something to share. It is this final point that the entire course hinged on: community. The blog, the group film – everything the students – did was about engaging the world, establishing a presence, and utilizing the tools that the rest of the world is operating with, rather than limiting them to traditional print-based technology.

Here is an interview about the project with Barbara.

The hurdle for CC though is often on the Universities side, whether or not the graduate school will allow it. When I filed my dissertation at the University at Albany (in July of 2007), I sort of discretely included a creative commons page, and hoped that no one would notice, hoping to avoid any “official” policy discussions, as I was running up against a deadline and did not have time to make a principled stand. (Side story: I filled the dissertation as movers were packing up our house, and actually had a second set of front matter printed out and ready to swap out in case the CC license didn’t fly with the graduate office.) No one noticed, and thus my dissertation was submitted with a CC license. But, I happen to know someone this semester at Albany who just filled a dissertation. Initially the graduate school rejected the submission for something like “unknown foreign characters” on the title page. I assume they were referring to the CC license images. But after some discussion, the graduate office sent the following in an email:

Good news indeed. Give it up for the University at Albany! (Formerly known as SUNY Albany but that’s a different story all together.) Here’s hoping more schools follow suit.

(For those who are interested, you can read more about the panel I was on about Microblogging over at the HATAC blog.)

Several others have already blogged their MLA experiences, including Alex Reid (who has at least three posts), and Cathy Davidson (who has posts about the Twitter panel, and two separate posts about the Digital Media and Learning Panel). For more general impressions of the MLA from digital scholars you should check out fellow Microblogging panelist Matt Gold’s excellent post about The Rise of the Digital MLA and Chuck Tyron’s reflections on the MLA as he works on a syllabus.

What I wanted to do was add my voice to this series of reflections and musings, perhaps in a series of posts, explaining why I thought the MLA was so productive this year (for me at least) and suggest a few ways this can be even more the case. So, I am going to start with something that might be counter-intutive, and seemingly unrelated to the “digital” but which upon consideration was huge in my experience. The Jobmarket or more precisely the lack there of for me. (Later I’ll talk about some of the panels, or individual meetings I had, but for now . . .)

This was the first year I have attended MLA when I was not interviewing, or serving on an interview committee. Aside from the huge time suckage that interviewing can be, it was also a huge mental relief. If you are interviewing (either side doing the interview, or being interviewed) the process is incredibly mentally demanding and thus really intrudes on your ability to do other things at the conference. This would be fine if the conference was only for interviewing, but its not. So, here is my suggestion:

Schools should stop interviewing at the MLA

Okay I know what you all (or many of you) are thinking, that I must be crazy, and you want a job so people should interview more at the MLA, but just stick with me a moment on this as I explain.

The tradition of interviewing at the MLA (and here I hypothesize I have no real knowledge of this) grows out of a pre-digital world model, when the easiest and most efficient way for schools to interview a large enough pool was to assemble them all in one place, but this is no longer the case. Digital tools can compensate, and provide a better option. Consider for a moment what is the carbon foot print of the MLA, having 8,000+ people travel from all over the US to meet, how many people could we cut from that list if interviewing was not taking place?

What’s the alternative? Simple, video interview. The technology is now good enough, and cheap enough (easily less then the price of one plane ticket for one faculty member of one of the interview committees at any school). I already know of several schools that have gone this route. Now I know what you are thinking, video interview that can’t be as good as in person. Seriously? If you think that having someone sit on a bed in a hotel room and answer questions for half an hour as they try to sneak a peek at their watch making sure they have enough time to sprint half way across down town (or in SF up a hill) to their next interview, gives you an accurate view of the candidate you are kidding yourself.

Consider the advantages:
• How much money would your institution save? If you saved your department the cost of 3 people traveling to another city (flight, hotel, meals) for three days what would you save? Maybe you could even convince your chair to allow you to bring an extra candidate to the on-campus interview? (Which is a far better measure of someone’s fit.)
• How much money would graduate students save? The job market is a ridiculously expensive endeavor, especially if you are a grad student with already paltry income, and have to travel to MLA for two-three interviews, or what is worse make reservations and plans to attend MLA to not get any interviews. Ridiculous.
• Quality Interviews: How much better could the interviews (on both sides) be if you were not cramming them into a tight schedule. If they are done remotely you could do three a day over several days, rather than four or five a day.
• Eliminate the hotel room problem. Seriously folks what kind of profession asks people to interview in a hotel room while sitting on a bed? Want to see something surreal? Go to a MLA hotel, take the elevator up to the rooms, stand in the hallway and watch as ten or fifteen people line up in the hallway and knock on doors at precisely 10:00. Weird!
• Eliminate graduate student stress. I think the whole two to three days to make or break your career/life, is a little much. The jobmarket is already brutal enough (like being audited by the IRS someone once told me) but pulling all these people on the market together and putting them in a couple of hotels just adds to the insanity.
• This makes for a better timeline. You can do the interviews in early December, and notify candidates about campus invites before the holidays.
• But most important this would free up the conference to be about the exchange of academic ideas. Yes sans job market the MLA might be smaller, but people would actually have time to go to panels, talk, converse and meet with each other, without the pressure of interviewing, or worrying about whether or not someone from one of the schools you are interviewing at is at a particular session . . . In short eliminate the interviewing (which is just not efficient), and make the MLA about the ideas.

Never fear poor students . . .the internet has responded and now you can Rent-a-Textbook. This seems to me to be a better option than torrenting, not only because it is legal but because you get the physical copy. (I’ll admit the user interface on a book is pretty good, preferable in many cases. When was the last time your book ran out of batteries?) I am sure the cat and mouse game of textbook publishers and exploits will continue for quite some time, but ultimately this information is going to follow the music model and get really cheap (think iTunes). Let’s just hope the textbook industry learns faster than the RIAA. (Okay, probably won’t happen but here’s hoping.)

(thanks to @dancohen for tweeting about this)

Attending MLA, not to mention being on the job market can be an expensive endeavor, forcing poor underfunded graduate students to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars when all is said and done. While I think much could be done to reduce the cost (hello electronic submission, and don’t ask for a transcript unless you really need it), this is a short term fix. As it stands, according to the email there were two hundred applicants who the MLA was not able to fund with a $300 travel grant to attend the conference. The solution is simple, microfund, if 6,000 tenure track faculty each gave $10 all of the grad students who applied could receive the grant. (A grant which for most would not even cover airfare I might add.) So, please consider clicking this link and helping out some poor job seeking grad student. Do it for the grad student you used to be, or do it just to demonstrate the power of the digital. (And maybe next time they will have a link that doesn’t require you to sign in to give.)

Update: A representative of the MLA commented below, and I was wrong. Non-members can contribute click the link below the login.

Anyway, if you are a graduate student looking to connect your research to those outside your immediate institution, you should check out The Graduate Junction. The Graduate Junction provides opportunities to discover others in academia working on similar projects. Importantly the Graduate Junction is not limited to any particular disciplinary field, enabling cross disciplinary conversations, which are increasingly important in the age of Networked Knowledge.

Yesterday I decided to post the working syllabus for my grad class for the upcoming semester in an attempt to elicit feedback before I make some final choices. I then posted that I had done this twitter. Not surprisingly I received some useful feedback. What I hadn’t anticipated was interest in taking this class from people in my twitter network, mostly grad. students at other universities where a course like this is not offered. So, then I started thinking, why not give the class away for free to those who want it?

Here’s what I am thinking:

The class at UTD (University of Texas at Dallas) is structured like a typical graduate seminar, that is a heavy amount of reading, followed by class discussion/lecture lead by me. It is easy enough for anyone to download the syllabus, and do the reading. The difficult part is coordinating some sort of online discussion section for those who are not at UTD, as I feel a large part of the learning experience is informed by discoursing about the material. What I thought might work is the following:

• Students who want to take this class do the reading as they would with any graduate seminar.
• I record all my grad classes, so the students who want to take this class who are not at UTD could download the recording as a podcast, and listen to it. This clearly is not as good as being in class, but gets closer to the experience.
• Then, sometime later in the week, we (by we I mean me and those who want to take it online) “meet” online somewhere to discuss the reading for say an hour.

This would not be for credit from UTD, the knowledge is free, the degree will cost you money. Grad students who are currently enrolled at another university though could arrange with their home institution to take a directed reading on this material, with a professor at their university signing off on it, perhaps by writing a seminar paper which that professor would evaluate. Of course grad students who just want the knowledge would not have to do any work save reading, listening, and showing up for a discussion. Think of it as a more formalized reading group.

So, I am considering conducting this experiment. Serious, you can just take this class for free, I’ll give away the knowledge. A couple of caveats though. First I am not sure I can do this, I need to find a way to host online discussion, preferably video conferencing. Second, I am only going to do this if I have the right group of people and the right number. I think perhaps between 5-10 committed students. Less than five the discussion is not so productive, more than ten and it can get out of hand. Also I am thinking of limiting this to grad students currently enrolled at other universities. I realize this is rather prejudicial, but if I am going to do this I want to “stack the deck in my favor” by having a group that has a relatively homogenous sense of purpose and educational background, this makes the discussion far more productive (I could be convinced otherwise though).

Thoughts? Issues I haven’t thought of? An idea for how to host a video conference for between 5-10 people? Leave a comment.

Interested in this class? Send me an email, and if I get enough response just maybe I’ll run this experiment in free knowledge. So, pass the word around to grad students who are interested in Emerging Media, but don’t have classes at their schools. You can find information about the class at the course blog.

Update: Nils Peterson asks why not do the “full monte” (i.e. make the class really progressive and refigure even assessment?). Read his post, and my reply at his blog. (Basically I agree with him, but this is just a strategic first step.)

In the middle of many of the papers I saw the presenters screen saver would kick in and they would have to walk over to the computer and jiggle the mouse to get back to the slide they were showing. Now of course the long solution to this is to change your power settings every time before you present, but Caffeine is so much easier. Just launch the application, it adds an icon to your menu bar, and before you begin your presentation simply click the icon which prevents your computer from going to sleep, or from your screen saver kicking in. Now you won’t be interrupted in the middle of your presentation.

If you are on a PC this might do the trick (thanks to Twitter and Johnnie for this).

Bonus: If you want advice on giving an academic paper seek out Tenured Radical.