Social networking and Identity

Unlike other spacious settings such as halls or classrooms , social networking provides us with a framework in which written language projects our identities. The relationship between language and identity is a constitutive one. The latter does not represent the former, but constitutes it by "bringing into it life through the process of signification". Not only does language constitute identity, but also form other social practices that contribute to it. So, language as part of the ideological, social forces, the cultural, the political, and the economical are articulated together to form the 'I', 'you', and 'he'.
What makes this articulation vivid and works in this way and not the other is power. And by power here I mean either coercion or hegemony. Well then, it's power that fixes the meaning in this articulation process and render it contingent. Take the white male discourse as an example. It is this discourse that is powerful in the United States and determines the meaning of gender and race and all the other elements. It is this discourse that creates gender bias and discrimination, for example.
We should not also forget that the contingency element on which the powerful discourse is built is "antagonism"- a term used to describe any other discourse that raises up to oppose the controlling one. Antagonism's importance lies in the fact that it can disarticulate and re-articulate the dominant discourse by refixing its meaning. An example of an antagonistic discourse is feminism which appeared to disarticulate and articulate the White male discourse in the US in a historical period. It could oppose the male discourse to fix a new meaning of women.
What does this do with social networking? Social networking such as Twitter and Facebook drives its users to "sustain a narrative about themselves. This includes the capacity to build up a consistent feeling of biographical continuity". The users, then, will fill in their profiles by answering questions such as "what to do?, "how to do?" and "who to be?" Moreover, Facebook and Twitter constitute discourses that are articulated in the same way as it has been mentioned above. Power and antagonism will work jarringly to rearticulate and fix meanings in a contingent way.

Constructing meaning

I do agree with Gee on the idea that video games can create the environment in which children and students can critically think about what surrounds them. I think what gives these games this advantage is the ‘fun’ element. When both children and students get involved in these games, they do not feel the formality of classrooms. On the contrary these games will be “serio-ludic” activities which can motivate them to learn.

In addition, these games present input not as direct assignments that tease students’ minds, but as semiotic images and sounds that stir their thinking.

I have already experienced the use of visual rhetoric in classrooms. My experience was with a video I created in order to prove how meaning would be culturally constructed. I presented this video to fulfill the research paper requirement for 515 class. The purpose of presenting this video is to show how Gee’s principles from 1 to 7 can work.

First see the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AttelKBKHAE

I constructed this video depending on Stuart Hall’s idea of representation, which means the way objects are arranged in order to convey meaning. My video has been made to lead the viewers to understand some of natural signifiers that have particular significance in the Arab world such as mountains and rivers. “These signifiers were organized in such a way that they expressed the three stages of being a student: the stage of applying to the graduate school, the stage of being admitted and the stage of starting studying; the signifiers that represent these stages are: the children and the buildings, the greens and the trickle, the sea and the wharf, the river and the green mountain. All these signifiers represent blankness, purity and the quest, pleasure and knowledge, a new, long academic life, pleasure mixed with difficulties, respectively.

If you see the video and try to explain it, you will find yourself indulged in learning about the first seven principles that Gee made. Please see the video and signifiers and try to get the meaning. Give it a try.

Online Discussions

Doubtless synchronous discussions are used as an alternative for face-to-face discussions in education. The tenet of these discussions is based on the fact that students can form an online community in which they can elaborate on the materials they have already taken in class. Originally synchronous discussions were created to enable unavailable teachers to communicate with their students. Later on, the idea was so attractive because teachers who already practiced it found out that all students actively participated, even those considered as introverts. Our online discussion yesterday was a good example of them. Although our experience was “a disaster” as Dr. Arola put it, it will be unfair to generalize its results to this type of educational practices.

I think that one of the positive things about our yesterday discussions is that they motivated less “talkative” students to show up and take turns. I am one of them. Since I am a foreign language learner, I sometimes find it difficult to call in appropriate vocabularies or complex syntactical structures. The case was like our lagging yesterday. There had to be a silent interval between what we wrote and its appearance on the board. I can attribute this memory lagging on my part to our traditional teaching back home. We used to communicate in English in classrooms by using writing and reading skills. In the case of other less talkative students, I think they found it a good opportunity in that sea of various ideas to cast their opinions. It was easy for them to draw one opinion and comment on it. The nature of online discussions was also helpful for them since they were not required to write in depth.

What I saw as negative about our discussion was the absence of organized ideas. And here two reasons are at play. First, most students responded at the same time since there were no instructions to tell them when to respond. Second, it took all of us one or two minutes to think, write and post, which made responses appear random and irrelevant.

I think that the use of online discussions requires some instructions. First, teachers should prepare their prompts or ask students to do that. Then, they should let students answer each prompt. Students, then, should read their comments and respond to one another by using the phrase @.... so that everyone knows which comment goes with which response. And they do the same with other prompts.

Distance Learning

Distance learning is one of the promising forms of education which is the result of the technological advancements in our time. Like classroom based teaching and learning, this new educational tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. Peterson’s the Debate about Online Learning and Brandy’s Fault Lines in the Terrain of Distance Education clearly addressed the success and failure that some students and teachers faced when they got involved in these academic spaces their institutions created. Both articles focused on and blamed the base (economical practices) for being the real source of difficulty raising in distance learning classes. The major problem for teachers and students alike was their inability to get access to technology because they could not pay fees for Internet Service provider or buy computers.

Although I believe that economy plays a significant role in our life and constitutes the backbone of education, I agree with Brady that there must be other causes. Brady argues that

distance education recreates different kinds of material and social access chasms even as it promises to bridge gaps of time and space. We need to reconceive our and students’ roles in the work of education, especially if we are to understand the implications, possibilities, and power of technology and use it strategically (356).

In this paragraph, Brandy points to the role other social practices and forces might play in distance learning classes. Take cultural practices as an example. Students coming from other societies which confirm gender differences might find it difficult having on-line classes since such societies put constraints on privacy and male-female relationships. The idea of exchanging emails with teachers and students from the other sex infringe these social codes as they believe. The same holds true for gay and lesbian students who usually prefer to contact their peers.

Copyright and Plageriasm

Both copyright and plagiarism are one of the controversial issues that face intellectuals in universities, especially teachers of 101 courses. The problem is that publishers put restrictions on the amount of material researchers can use, which constitutes a source of difficulty and challenge for students who are always required to do research and make response papers for the material they take in their classes. These students will also be confronted with the fact that they should sift other sources to build their arguments and provide a sophisticated discourse that meets the requirements of academic standards, as they believe. DeVoss and Rosati argue that

they feel that assembling sources, citations, and quotes is the primary goal of writing a paper—and that their original ideas are secondary…Students may stumble toward plagiarism when they fail to cite properly because they don’t entirely understand the point or argument of a primary work, or in a struggle to define what “common knowledge” means, they struggle to identify which information merits a citation.

In spite of all what was said in the readings and in spite of the fact that writing occurs in a discourse the elements of which are articulated in a way that makes it possible that each element affects it, I do believe that out teaching practices inside classrooms exacerbate plagiarism and copyright problems that our students encounter.

As teachers, we always confuse our students with the myth of academic discourse vs. home discourse. We always tell them that they should use a sophisticated language, one that they do not use in their daily home discourse. This split, in my point of view, drives students to believe that their lexical repertory and rhetorical power are vulgar and feeble and that they should go through other sources to ameliorate their writing. In so doing, students will fall victims of a cut/paste process by borrowing phrases, sentences and sometimes paragraphs to meet the requirements. In fact, composition teachers should understand that in both discourses (home and academic) students can engage in conversations by posing arguments and counterarguments and providing evidences.

In addition, the type of assignments that we give to our students may negatively contribute to the problem. Although writing is a creative process in which people unleash their imagination and ideas, teachers tend to ask students to write papers by answering one or two questions, which, I think, restrict students’ imaginative and speculative abilities. Reluctantly students will try to visit websites and other sources to do the assignments, which will make them commit the same mistake (plagiarism and violating copyright laws) It will be more practical for teachers to engage students in symbolic-analytic work which should push students to sort and synthesize information(Johnson-Eilola).

Finally, since our teaching practices are part of writing, we need to change them to cope with our postmodern era and our technological advancement. As teachers of composition, we should criticize and correct ourselves before we blame our economical and ideological practices.

Power and Education

A Response to Selfe

In her article the Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing, Selfe argues that “the relationship between aurality ( visual modality) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodel rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning”(616). I totally support her contention for two reasons. First, instructors should use the best possible means that will help them convey their meanings and that will push their students to receive these meanings as precisely and clearly as possible. Second, Speaking and writing are both productive skills in which one person encodes a signal and two or more people decode them. So, the only difference between the two skills is in the form of the encoding/decoding process. In writing people encode and decode letters and make use of punctuation marks while, in speaking, they send sounds and harness acoustic features such as rhythm and intonation.

The most important question is: does this difference matter in Composition ? The answer is no, of course. It only does in Semantics and Phonology. But, rhetorically speaking, I do not see any difference between the two skills when it comes to Composition. In both skills, people can pose arguments and support or refute them with evidences. They can also think, analyze and pass judgments. And this is what should matter the most in Writing classes. And this is what we should center our attention on. As rhetoricians and Composition teachers, we need to do our best to find a way by which we can interweave both skills in a comprehensive writing syllabus.

However, in spite of my support for the implementation of aural and visual activities in our classrooms, they are two-edged weapons. It is not a secret that we need to use these activities in order to communicate particular messages (meanings) to our students and that the arrival of these messages at the destination without any change or distortion is far reaching. Meaning is socially constructed.“ The collective mind of a society will determine its goals and its position in this world, which will be reflected on its behavior, thinking and its way of dealing with others and push it to create its own distinctive identity and frame it as ideologies” ( Anwr Adam, from a response essay prepared for 511). The implication of this quotation in multi-cultural Composition classrooms is that we may use aural or visual activities that carry specific meanings students from different cultures can not grasp. And this will hinder the learning process for which these activities have been used.