Note to readers

This is a blog that I'm required to keep that's full of unedited, near stream-of-consciousness reactions to similarly required and related readings in a graduate course in N.C. State University's Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program. The way these posts are written help me interrogate and understand what's going on in our readings. I'm identifying what's troublesome so that I can give it more thought, but the posts aren't written in a style that's productive for audiences outside of our class to read. That's by design. I start with contestation, then spend heavens only knows how long researching, recutting, and reevaluating so that I can try and see what potentially productive readings I can extract from these source for use in my own work's contributions back to the field. Comments encouraged, but please, you'll likely need a thick skin if your work is quoted here.

Monday, August 25, 2008

"Hybrid" lexicons at best

There are three sections of the "CCCC Statement on Teaching, ..." that concern me a bit. Here they are, in the order that I'm typing them.

Adminstrators with responsibilities for writing programs will
...
2. assure that students off campus, particularly in distance learning situations, have access to the same library resources available to other students


In ENG 532, I think we're to call this an example of presupposition. Can we give off campus students "access to the same library resources available to other students"? Of course not, though the sentence assumes we can. At the same time, there is a presupposition that the library should become something that can be accessed as easily off-site as on. I'm convinced this is not a particularly laudable goal either.

There's a slippery slope to identify behind this wishful thinking. It's too easy to think of digital pedagogy as a cure-all for the relatively static character of printed text. Digital technologies do facilitate giving feedback, sometimes in real time, for composition, but we're still a long ways away from digital techs allowing the same dynamism allowed through face-to-face contact. That is, the interactivity of digital technologies falls between text and actual (legacy?) co-presence. The current state, in praxis, of the mediation inherent in digital communication is too strong for it to be considered anything resembling

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