My time in Ann Arbor #cwcon

Unlike my time in Atlanta, I attended as many sessions as I could. I also made a conscious effort to attend sessions beyond present research interests. As a result, concurrent sessions G and H made for some very tough attending decisions.

Conference session summaries and commentary, which may be inaccurate and/or inconsequential, follow. Speakers are identified by their Twitter accounts when possible.

----

A07 - Traversing Multimodality: Temporal, Spatial & Embodied Approaches to Researching & Theorizing Complex Writing Acts

Jennifer Sano-Franchini (@jennyploop) discussed time as a rhetorical construct and mixtapes as evidence of the decision-making process involved in multimodal composing. Using think-aloud protocols to acquire data, Sano-Franchini summarized findings, such as how one's composing purpose relies on spatiotemporality and emotion, and related, choice quotes, such as "happy songs are for summer." There's an element of active reflection during this kind of writing act, too, according to Sano-Franchini, who concluded with thoughts on the legal implications of her study as well as its future.

Stacey Pigg (@pidoubleg) introduced an idea of how movement through time spent writing is itself a multimodal text. In looking at past and future writing experiences and situations, we see evidence of rhetorical habits and thereby how systems are enacted. There's an interplay between "getting things done" and "being stuck" and she walked through a specific process in which a student was "drawing out what I want to write." Pigg also touched on how persistent is the view of only writing when we're putting words down on the page or screen.

B02 - Networked Publics

Jim Brown (@jamesjbrownjr) talked about how writing moves and circulates via examples of digital poetry. Brown noted historical precursors to digital poetry and how machine- and self-imposed constraints and thus the available moves an author could make were often hidden from readers. From this, he gathered that codes + constraints = publics and nodded to Annette Vee's notion of proceduracy and the importance of becoming procedurate. Brown also observed how often it is now that we are reading and writing now with machines alongside us and ruminated on the subject of procedural authorship.

Byron Hawk discussed how a public forms through digital media with evidence gathered from music culture. Hawk drew on Fuller's inventory of parts and Brooke's levels of scale to put forth an idea of culture before narrowing his focus to Ned Durrett and Reverb Nation as examples of publics formation.

Geoffrey V. Carter and Cortney Smethurst closed by offering both definition and examples of a meme, further explaining it as a sort of performative method for overcoming compassion fatigue, a way to engage, and an illustrative example of how to embody critique. Their accompanying 6-minute video, which was a compilation of past and present memes, worked well as a refresher in meme education.

C03 - Private/Public Tweets

Manuel Senna, Amber Buck, and Carl Whithaus (@carl_whithaus) all presented on Twitter, but each was guided by a different area of interest or concern. For Senna, Twitter was an opportunity for ESL students to not only practice a kind of writing not done in academia but to also share cultural knowledge about being ESL. For Buck, Twitter was a way to see how, if, and when graduate students represented themselves via social media. For Whithaus, Twitter provided comparisons of official corporate and keyword tweets, showing in part the futility of trying to control a corporate image via social media. Throughout each talk, there was discussion of the importance of evidence of actual use of Twitter (@'s, RT's, etc.) as well as the idea that one tweet is a single utterance but also part of a chain.

D02 - Digital mission-making: An exploration of privacy, posthumanism, and embodiment

Christa Teston, Amanda Hurch, and Drew Kopp all presented on developing their writing department's web presence and the resistances they encountered. Their dominant focus concerned faculty reactions and reservations to being digitally recorded for the web presence. Because we are "seamlessly articulating with machines" in recorded audio and video, these are iterations of ourselves over wich we have very little control, though one's acuity and familiarity with technology tends to correlate with their degree of discomfort regarding digital recording.

E13 - Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other

Bradley Dilger, one of the roundtable's speakers, posted a solid summary of what I thought was the most interesting and lively session at #cwcon. I'll just include my tweets during the session and leave it at that.

TH-02 - Town Hall II - Are You a Digital Humanist?

"The most durable thing about #cwcon is a t-shirt, and I love that." - Alex Reid (@digitaldigs)

G06 - Workstreaming: Building work histories by observing writing behavior

Bill Hart-Davidson, Michael McLeod, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, and others presented on workstreaming as a research platform focused on the ambient data often produced when people are working/writing. The writing itself is not the focal activity in this regard, more the activities that happen around the writing, and the collection of written discourse that indexes social action. The end goal is to increase situational awareness among participants about their work. A demonstration of Ridestream provided a working example. The implications of workstreaming could be huge and do much to shape the future focus of computers and writing studies.

H10 - Gaming the Classroom

Alex Reid (@digitaldigs) discussed object-oriented rhetoric in relation to gaming composition, voicing his reservations about gamification as it focuses on extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation. As Reid has since posted the full text of his talk on his blog, I'll let him speak for himself.

Richard Parent and Anastasia Salter both had more positive views of gamification in the composition classroom, with Parent stating that "there's something in us that wants to play" and stressing movement toward a dynamic of playfulness and Salter extolling the possibility of "superherofication" in education.

----

I furrowed my brow and grumbled a lot during this session, but remained silent. Roger Austin (@Roger_Austin), one of two MA in English students attending #cwcon (Jensie Simkins (@derbybeaver) being the other), noticed this and later inquired about my reservations, so I'll attempt a recall here: I'm still waiting on a good example of gamification. With gamification apologists and defenders aplenty, I'm often reminded of undergrad discussions about the virtues of communism and how the USSR and China aren't/weren't real communism. I'm also just not optimistic about what I see as a deceptive, manipulative strategy hawked most by gurus and marketers. And why make for ourselves another questionable reward system when we already have grades? Furthermore, why do we need to be superheroes when we have service learning? All this time and attention paid to gamification would be better spent on service-learning pedagogy. I say this because gamification appears to both cloud and oversimplify reality. First-year composition is not Chore Wars. Just because gamification might work for simple tasks reveals next to nothing about how it might work for the actual complexities involved with writing.

----

K13 - The Promises and Challenges of Creating TechnoPedagogic Community in an Age of CMS Ubiquity

Nick Carbone and Michael Salvo discussed the possibility of a CMS as a complementary writing pedagogy, as an intermediary for both computers and writing vanguards and those just now starting out with discussion boards. Carbone shared some early results of a writing teacher survey he conducted (a white paper should be available late summer/early fall) and Salvo provided a demonstration of the CMS, "Writing @ Purdue."

TH 03 - Town Hall III - The Future(s) of Computers and Writing

A number of futures were offered here, including how we should "behave as if the law were sensible" in relation to copyright, how information architecture shouldn't be left to readymade algorithms, how peer review in academic publishing should be seen and valued as real work, how the coming ubiquity of music will lead to Departments of Sound, how movement away from human-centered research reveals our object-oriented relationships, how we might value difference more, how we might get more students talking for themselves, how we need more discussion of teaching writing via online/distance, and how libraries are our allies and deserve our attention and recognition.

----

Who I met, re-met, or at least shook hands with: (@phredchicago), Dennis Jerz (@DennisJerz), Derek Mueller (@derekmueller), Brian McNely (@bmcnely), Alex Reid (@digitaldigs), Quinn Warnick (@warnick), Ryan Trauman (@trauman), Mark Crane (@craniac), Casey McCardle (@crmcardle), Tim Lockridge (@timlockridge), Jenn Stewart (@JennLStewart) Christa Teston (@christateston), Julie Platt (@plattitude), Michael Faris (@sisypheantask), Jentery Sayers (@jenterysayers), Doug Eyman (@eymand), Harley Ferris (@harleyferris), Jim Brown (@jamesjbrownjr), Annette Vee (@anetv)

And it was great to have my first Five Guys burger with Quinn Warnick, Ryan Trauman, Daniel Anderson, Tim Lockridge, Harley Ferris, and Casey McCardle (who has a spot-on Walken impression). It was also great to have lunch with Jim Brown, Annette Vee, and Quinn Warnick the next day.

Beer recommendation: Arbor Brewing Company's Brasserie Blonde
Food recommendation: Frita Batidos

6 responses

Great point about H10, James. I, too, would appreciate more tangible examples of gamification when it comes up. I don't identify myself with game studies, exactly (i.e., I don't count it a scholarly or pedagogical focus), but I do recognize how gamification seems to have risen as an easy and shared target. But who, exactly, says they are gamifying things? Who has adopted this term? In what contexts? I feel as though it's often being invoked hazily, as an abstract evil against which other turns to gaming can be approved by comparison.

— Derek

Thanks for your comment, @derekmueller. I think there's an increasing variety of gamification adopters, including educators. That @ibogost had to address a question about it at #4C11 in part prompted him to write this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php Most of the discourse about making X more "like a game" tends to invoke the rhetoric of gamification: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/04/gamification-purpose-marketing.html

I have to wonder if it's "often being invoked hazily" because those pushing it have a very limited understanding of what a game is.

— James Schirmer

I appreciate the links. The "gamification=marketers trying to sneak their wires into our brains" is familiar, and I'd read Bogost's suggestion that exploitationware is a more appropriate name for this trend. I'm a little bit surprised, though, by the apparent territorializing the term (e.g., the move to games was established first by x). But I admit, I understand games first not through the gaming industry, but through 1) basketball and 2) parenting. Now, I realize these realms of activity are not exactly registering in the context of this debate (or, if they are, I'm not immersed enough in the conversation to know...which is probably more likely the case). For instance, we used to practice shooting against Reggie Miller (or pick some other proficient shooter...MJ, Larry Bird). Our shooting workouts (these were gym rat workouts outside the formal practices) consisted of trying to score 21 points in made shots before imagined-Reggie Miller scored the same on our misses. That is, a two-point make meant I got two points; a two-point miss meant Bird did. It was fun, challenging. Could be said that we were gamifying? Or proceduralizing an otherwise laborious activity (programming ourselves with exploitationware)? I don't know. But all of this is to say that I'm still uncertain about what is gained and lost in the negative characterization of "gamification." This probably means I should be attending more panels on games, yeah?

As a member of the gamification panel, I do think it's worth noting that this term is just the latest fad in a series of attempts to fuse education and games (edutainment stands out as the worst, as it places the binary of "education" and "entertainment" uncomfortably at the forefront.) In all these arenas, the goals of educators differ dramatically from those of the business and marketing types that seem to control the lingo. I think there is more value in recognizing where things are "game-like" to begin with and how the ideas of game design can improve an experience. Of course, I also agree with James: game-designers are rarely involved in these conversations, and thus the results tend to be decidedly uninteresting so far.

(Also, a word about adding those much-debated reward systems from the grading perspective--in hybrid / online spaces such things can to some extent be automated, which offers the advantage of more immediate concrete feedback for quantity if not quality of participation in such environments.)

— Anastasia Salter

I don't know how immersed I am in the conversation either, Derek. I have misgivings and reservations about gamification, but, as evidenced by the earlier furrowed brow and the mini-rant stuck near the bottom of the entry, I have trouble voicing said concerns. So, it's difficult for me to say whether or not your example is a gamifying one. The reward comes later during the actual game, when all that practice, motivated by Reggie Miller or not, pays off, right? Because your example's part of a larger/longer procedure (or process?), I can't pass judgment.

I have to admit that "gamification" is still a perplexing term for me. I appreciate how it often begins with an admission of how our present systems and their subsequent rewards are problematic. However, I'm disappointed that it often continues with a simple reinforcement of those systems by renaming the rewards. And I'm only more confused when I hear about whole courses being run as games and writers claim them as examples of gamification.

Muddying The Waters +10 points

Thanks for your comment, Anastasia. If memory serves, you mentioned this connection between edutainment and gamification in your talk. You also make a good point in your comment above about who controls the lingo, which is something else I find a bit confusing. Maybe we educators don't know any better and are just as beholden to marketing as the rest of humanity, but why attempt adopting "gamification" for ourselves if it's a term that has this negative characterization?