Epistemographer

Vie Alex Pang…

I so want one.

I’ve been starting to put together a list of places where one can learn how to teach writing at the undergraduate level for a friend of mine who’s looking into grad school. So, I figured I might throw the question out to anyone who might be reading this…cast the net wider, so to speak.

Right now, the vast majority of my experience has been with Writing in the Disciplines programs, in particular the Knight Institute at Cornell. To be concise, Writing in the Disciplines (or Writing Across the Curriculum, or any of a number of other titles) yanks writing instruction out of the first-year english composition courses to which is has traditionally been relegated and situates in classes throughout the disciplines. The goal of a WID/WAC program (love those acronyms) is to establish that writing is something that happens everywhere, not just in composition classes, as well as to teach students the conventions and norms of writing in a given discipline.

It seems that most WID/WAC courses rely wither on faculty converts who drink the Kool-Aid and become converts to this way of teaching within their discipline, or by finding graduate students who teach either pre-defined courses or create their own. Hence, my own experiences teaching Science and Media and the forthcoming Writing as Technology seminars at Cornell.

A list of WAC/WID programs can be found here, but I’ll mention a few that I know a little more personally. I’ve met the people in charge of Princeton’s Writing in the Disciplines program, and they seem exceptionally committed to WAC/WID pedagogy (including offering some sweet fellowships not just to Princeton graduate students but also to visiting postdocs!). Duke University also has a great program, also with good support for students and postdocs. I met Jim Slevin of Georgetown’s program earlier this year, and they seem another interesting place, as do George Mason, NYU, University of New Hampshire, and MIT .

The thing here is that pretty much all of these programs are places where you learn to import WAC/WID into your “real” work – the pedagogical training is a corollary to your main graduate work in a discipline. From what I can tell, at none of these programs would one begin school already knowing that one would be teaching writing, nor would one even be guaranteed training in this pedagogy. It’s kind of a bonus, one which in my case has dramatically changed the way I think of teaching.

So, here’s my question – where does someone (like my friend) who knows she’s interested in teaching writing, not necessarily within any specific disciplinary framework, go for a graduate degree? Are there any MFA programs that’re particularly strong in pedagogical training/opportunities? How about composition programs (which I’ll admit that I know embarassingly little about)?

And let it be said that I’m including a link to Invisible Adjunct’s site here, which is the best gateway available into the network of articles, blogs, and other commentary on the darker side of higher education and graduate education…plus, this piece by Thomas Benton sums things up nicely.

Went to an interesting panel discussion tonight on Media and Religion, hosted by the Media Ecology Association (in honor of its 5th birthday – happy birthday, MEA!). Came away from the evening with my mental gears a-crankin’:

Something that none of the panelists touched explicitly on is the fact that religion has been defined by many scholars as an institution through which people come to terms with the experience of the “numinous” (a term from Otto that roughly means a sense of awe and humility inspired by that which is unknowable or not understandable by humans, kind of like that feeling you get when you look into the night sky and are overwhelmed by the immensity of the universe), where the “holy” or “sacred” (via Eliade) is the space which is marked off for the mysterium tremendum that constitutes the numinous.

So, it seems to me that one of the interesting points at which media scholars might engage with the study of religion is with this idea of the numinous, which is something that fundamentally cannot be represented. If religion relies in part on something that by its nature can’t be represented, then interesting questions can be raised about the role of religion in an increasingly mediated society that is moving toward an “all media, all the time” experience. Are the two in opposition, the media which strive to represent everything and the religion that relies in part on something being unrepresentable? Ot is the nature of religion itself shifting, becoming less about the numinous and more about identity and community?

Douglas Rushkoff pointed toward this in his remarks tonight, indicating that for him religion is a wonderful thing, embodying the ideals of transparency, literacy and community which he’d hoped to find in the new media culture of the early 1990’s – at least, it’s a wonderful thing until it becomes a religion. In other words, according to Rushkoff, religion is great until it engages with the numinous or the holy, at which point it loses some of its luster.

The interesting thing is that several of the other panelists tonight seemed to fundamentally disagree, from Paul Levinson who believed that our experience of the numinous could drive our society to push the frontiers of outer space exploration in ways that business or nationalistic imperatives couldn’t, to Read Mercer Schuchardt’s defense of religion (and the humility before the numinous which it brings) as a safer and less destructive means to organize society than secular politics.

In the end, it was a rich discussion, though far too short to delve as deeply into the material as I’d have liked, and without any real resolution on these issues (much less on how they might connect to the media ecological approach to the study of technology and social institutions like religion). Lots of possibilities for future thought, which I suppose is the ideal way to celebrate the birthday of an academic organization just growing out of its toddler years.

One of the things I love about my current project is reading projections of the future and corporate announcements from decades ago. Just ran across this one, from the Sept/Oct 1978 issue of The Videophile’s Newsletter:

“[The] Economist Magazine, from England, reports that Phillips is working on a flat-screen TV that will project a 3-D picture, hopes to market same by 1981. A mini-computer is said to control the picture and no special glasses are needed to view it.”

As I’m piecing together the first chapter of my dissertation (on enthusiastic hobbyists and the user communities that they formed around the VCR and other technologies in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s), I’m struck by how much easier it is to get ahold of information from certain sources than others. With a DSL line, a computer and a Cornell network ID, I have at my fingertips access to essentially every newspaper/magazine article published in the past two decades (via Lexis/Nexis), and articles from many academic journals from the same time period.

Of course, note that I said “…the past two decades.” Earlier today, for example, I wanted to quickly grab an article published in 1972. No dice.

I’ve run up against this before – a consequence of doing a lot of research on the 1970’s and 1980’s is that my work sits right on the threshhold of when things started to be digitized, meaning that sometimes it’s really easy for me to find things online, and sometimes I need to hit the archives. While that’s not so much of a logistical problem (so long as I’m near a convenient library that will let me use their collections), I’ve got to admit that digitized sources are much more user-friendly. Think of the cost in time and effort of that trip into the archives, wading through paper indices or, even worse, having to scan through months of a given newspaper on microfiche just to find one article.

Now, as historians are trained more and more in the use of digital archives, it seems likely that the accessibility of sources is going to become more and more of a factor in their research. That’s not to say that the next generation of historians will be “sloppy” or “lazy”…rather, I’m thinking that historians may increasingly be trained in the use of certain tools, and that fact that some sources aren’t accessible via those tools will change the kind of history that is done, sort of a “digital divide” within the literature (both primary and secondary).

Right now, this divide is just an issue for those of us who are working on recent history, but considering the number of initiatives I’ve seen in digital archiving, it may become more and more relevant.

UPDATE: So that my advisors don’t panic… (more…)

…click here.

It’s nice to know what it is I’m studying/practicing, exactly.

By Ruben Bolling, via Tom Tomorrow: