Exploring Electronic Textuality

Since one of our big questions involved the theme of American identity, I decided to isolate the word "American" to see what kind of context I would find if I were to read those lines together. It was fairly easy to do; I just clicked "keyword in context" and typed in "American." The new version of the poem looks something like this:

LEAVES OF GRASS [1855]

... The	American	poets are to enclose ...
... and of all free	American	workmen and workwomen . . . . ...
... the expression of the	American	poet is to be ...
... The	American	bards shall be marked ...
... of himself. The	American	bard shall delineate no ...
... shall learn the faithful	American	lesson. Liberty is ...
... easier realize the true	American	character but do not ...
... unmatched beauty . . . . the	American	circles and large harmonies ...
... and large. . . . . . . . . These	American	states strong and healthy ...
... on a lot of	American	soil owned, and ...
... language befriends the grand	American	expression . . . . it is ...
... and passionate instinct of	American	standards. Whether or ...
... answers for me an	American	must answer for any ...
... Walt Whitman, an	American	, one of the ...
... not nothing . . . . the	American	aborigines are not nothing ...
... . . . . the European and	American	are hand in hand ...

It seems like this tool would be especially helpful for students who are having a difficult time with some of Whitman's themes and the length of the poem.


I also tried to play with the electronic text as I thought about Whitman's preservation of the individual in the context of recognizing the community. I wanted to remove the individual as completely as possible, changing Whitman's "I" to "we," "my" to "our," "me" to "us," and "myself" to "ourselves." As a result, the first few lines of the poem look like this:

Leaves of Grass.

we CELEBRATE ourselves,
And what we assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to us
as good belongs to you.
we loafe and invite our soul,
we lean and loafe at our ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
we breathe the fragrance ourselves, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate us also, but we shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is odorless,

Personally, I think this version of the poem is a little frightening -- especially the line that starts "And what we assume, you shall assume." For some reason it reminds me of brainwashing. Either way, the collective group seems to be more authoritative, more imposing than the original speaker.

Exploring the archive helped me realize that online texts are more manipulable than I thought, so I'm now more aware of some of the advantages to reading or researching an electronic text:

Linguistically, TokenX is helpful because it counts the number of times a word is used and sorts its occurrences by edition. Rather than spending days flipping through different editions, we can find the number of instances immediately (provided that TokenX isn't lagging too much).

Even if we had the time to flip through different editions, we probably wouldn't have the resources; with digitalized archives, this problem vanishes. One of the greatest advantages to using new media over the traditional text is the accessibility. When I buy an anthology for a class, I'm stuck with the one version of a text; if I'm lucky, I'll get a picture of the original manuscript next to the one to two pages of biographical information. Even if an archive's page is a little sparse, I can easily google the author and be directed to an entire site that specializes in the author's biographical information.

Biography aside, the online archives expose us to more context than books often do, providing us with manuscripts, well-preserved letters, and other information usually excluded in traditional print. Even if an anthology contains a copy of the original manuscript, the digital text still presents us with more information because of its manipulability, often allowing us to enlarge the text, exposing every minute detail in ways that paper and a magnifying glass simply can't.

I think digital textuality also encourages collaboration in ways that printed text simply can't. From commenting on a literary critic's blog to reading fanfiction, new media allows us to get in contact and collaborate with complete strangers. In its perfect form, diigo also allows us to share out interpretations and annotations with other people. We can even show exact images, giving our audience a clear visual representation of what we're working with, by capturing a screen shot of the text and annotations or our reworking of the text. In fact, I think I'll end the blog here with a picture of the nifty block version of the poem:

Archive Reviews

Labor Movement Archive
The portal design includes some interesting images, but I would say it's still text-based. Maybe I'm just technologically inept, but I found the search tools deceivingly complicated. I assumed all I had to do was click on the link titled "collections list/finding aids," not realizing that they're essentially the same thing. So, after spending quite a bit of time (and labor har har har) trying to bypass the finding aids and see the actual collections, I gave up, returned to the portal, and realized that there was a large link in the middle of the page that then took me directly to the online archives. Oops. I must admit that the finding aids provided rich descriptions of the primary sources inside the library and would be helpful for anyone close enough to access them, but that doesn't help the majority of online users, especially the inexperienced ones. Returning to the actual online exhibits, I thought they included plenty of context but were not very manipulable; I could choose to either click on the thumbnails or view the images as a slide show.

Victorian Women Writers Project
Let me first say that I appreciated how easy it was to navigate this site. All I had to do was click on the not-so-misleading link titled "Proceed to the Victorian Women Writers Collection" and I was taken to an alphabetized list of the works, all of which linked to the primary sources: transcriptions. While the tools are definitely easy enough for anyone to use, the archive is a little boring because it lacks both images and context, discouraging exploration. However, those who are interested in Victorian literature by female writers will find the archive valuable.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Unlike the other two portal pages, this site is image-based and includes a large slide show, encouraging just about anybody to explore it. Although I clicked on the slide show to see different collections, I could've also used a separate set of links at the bottom of the page, so I would say the site is fairly flexible. The site includes a couple of features that are particularly inviting: watching videos using iTunes and following the portal page on twitter. Unlike the other two archives, the primary sources here are both manipulable and contextualized. My only qualm with the archive is that certain exhibitions are only available to Duke students, but maybe there's a way to subscribe to these, not that I'm willing to pay a fee for it.

Backward Design from a Student's Perspective

As a student who has taken a countless number of classes, lessons which often fell into the category of Wiggins's and McTighe's "twin sins": either "hands-on without being minds-on" or "coverage," I think the idea of backward design is not only refreshing but also frustrating. While it seems logical to start creating a lesson plan by deciding what students need to know -- isn't that the purpose of teaching after all? -- backward design really is counterintuitive. I have never taught a class, but it seems like the process of backward design would be too time consuming to use every day, especially after examining those design templates. Aside from the amount of work involved, another challenge I found was actually creating what I wanted to students to know, an obstacle which also happens to be ultimate goal of teaching. How do we decide what students will find enduring or not? Beyond that, how can we possibly assess it? We can assign projects/exams/papers to gauge the students' understanding, but how is that different from forward design? How do we know students will continue to use these desired results in later classes when we only have them for a semester?

While these questions are hard to answer, I think as educators (or future educators) we need to continue to consider them because undergraduate students aren't leaving San Francisco State with enough enduring, transferable skills. In an orientation I had a few weeks ago, I learned that the WAC/WID (Writing Across the Curriculum / Writing in the Disciplines) programs will be eventually replacing the JEPET -- in part because Bay Area companies were complaining that the SFSU graduates they hired couldn't write effectively. While these students had passed the JEPET, a test that is supposed to assess their ability to write academically, they weren't able to transfer their knowledge from the classroom into performance at work. It seems like the purpose of WAC and WID is to give students the context they need to apply writing skills to their areas of interest and hopefully their future jobs. While I'm glad these programs are being implemented, I can't help but wonder how English classes, not only composition but also literature, can assist students in acquiring more of these transferable skills, preventing a large-scale problem like this from happening again.

The Ups and Downs of CMS/LMS

Based on the mock iLearn forum and my previous experience, I feel like learning in CMS/LMS is difficult because the format doesn't encourage collaboration -- something that's essential in a discussion forum. I would say learning here feels forced. Who would be eager to contribute to such a dull, uncompromising forum when we have customizable alternatives like blogs? I haven't seen a sample of Palace, but it seems like the "distractions" mentioned in Coopman's article -- the text, audio, images -- could only promote and improve the interaction on iLearn. I accept that iLearn will never seem as engaging to me as an actual class because it doesn't have the face-to-face interaction I enjoy. We are no longer discussing literature in the way I am accustomed to: in the classroom, surrounded by other students and a teacher. In fact, the instructor seems to be missing entirely from our mock iLearn. Having experienced previous semesters of being forced to post an arbitrary number of comments on discussion forums, I have noticed that a majority of the instructors rarely post any feedback. So far, I have only noticed one instructor who ever posted on a forum, but he/she stopped before the middle of the semester.

I must agree, though, that CMS/LMS can potentially promote a more horizontal relationship between the instructor and the students. I enjoyed reading the feedback from my former professor, which also seemed to indicate that he/she was involved not only in teaching but in learning. Both Coopman and Kotkamp imply, however, that the hierarchal power structure of CMS prevents more of a horizontal relationship between teachers and students because instructors have little control over the interface compared to people like designers, administrative workers, marketers. As Kotkamp states, ". . . a teacher who is seen as a guide and coach in a flexible learning process should have the ability to alter the design of the course throughout the course to ensure this flexibility" (70). As a result, the students, who are ironically the lowest on the totem poll, are more restricted than anybody else.

Because students are limited to adding a new discussion topic or commenting on other discussions, they reluctantly involve themselves in the forums. So far, I haven't met a single student who enjoys posting on forums (although I haven't asked a vast number of people about it). I've noticed that many students participate to simply satisfy a number of posts required by the instructor, so the quantity may be there, but the quality is missing. In an extreme example, I remember a student in an undergrad class didn't even glance at the iLearn forum until the end of semester, at which point he proceeded to post five responses at once. How is that conducive to learning? How could this student possibly experience the continuity mentioned in Kotkamp's article when he probably skipped reading what other students had to say? As we discovered during last week's discussion, we feel like we need to be able to connect in order to learn, whether it's to other students or previous ideas; this connection, I would argue, is being disrupted by the lifeless format of iLearn and the way that some instructors assign participation.

At the same time, however, iLearn does attempt to create an open space where students should be able to connect with each other. While I prefer classroom discussions, some students may have an easier time with iLearn's forums because they may be more comfortable expressing their thoughts over the internet. We also have the luxury of proof-reading our assertions when we hold our discussions online, and because the discussion is asynchronous, we can choose to join the discussion whenever we have the time and motivation. Perhaps if iLearn were more customizable for both the students and instructors, we would be more eager to get involved.

Using RSS in the Classroom

Using RSS is a completely new experience for me, so I'm sure I have a lot more to learn about it, but I think it could potentially be a good tool for engaging inexperienced learners in the research process. It seems as though reading an RSS feed would be less intimidating to a growing population of tech-savvy students who have never used an article database or even a card catalog (do they even have those in libraries anymore?) for research. Instead of continually searching for sources every time a new paper is due, they could think of the RSS feed as an investment; once the sites have been added to the reader, the feeds will always present students with the information. Although this is no substitute for the more traditional research methods and students will still have to sift through the information to find what is relevant for each assignment, using the RSS feed could be a good first step to get students thinking about research.

Another challenge would be ensuring that students are using appropriate sources. To accomplish this, I would suggest that the teacher provide a few examples of reliable sources (scholarly websites, blogs, etc.) and then ask each student to add one or two new sources to his or her reader. If the students have blogger accounts, they could post their findings there, so the teacher can check their work and other students can benefit from seeing these additional sources, promoting collaborative learning.

Novice researchers aren't the only people who can benefit from the RSS feed. Since several professors blog, more experienced students can use the RSS for quick and convenient access to the newest findings in a certain academic field. Once again, I'm not suggesting that RSS could ever substitute more traditional types of research, but I think it could be both a good supplement for more experienced students and a good starting point for beginners.

My First Blog

Hi everybody. This will be my first blog for English 790. It's early in the morning, so I hope I'm coherent.

Reading Humanities 2.0, I found the idea of the new digital economy particularly interesting. This new economy exemplifies the stark contrast between the traditional and digital way of approaching information since the copy is now worth more than the original. Even in a library, one of the easiest places to access information, the original work is worth considerably more than the copy. If the library does have an original print, for example, it will certainly be under a glass case for protection, or it won't even be on display. We receive the copy as a safer alternative to the original print because it is worth far less.

While the copies in the digital economy are more valuable, they also present a different challenge to the pursuit of knowledge. The Bass and Rosenzweig article states that using the internet teaches students a necessary skill: being "critical consumers." Even though finding and accessing copies of information is much easier on the internet, we face the threat of accepting sources that are unreliable, information that is inaccurate. Rather than worrying about the "correct interpretation," we should be concerned with the accuracy of the source itself. Take that, Stephen James Joyce.