unit 1 labor log
2019/10/01 at 3:41
the problem with educational technology is a combination of a lack of *understanding* of technology and its potentials and with that, money, really. there's the quote about "how humans got turned into machines"... maybe my own experience is tied to a lack of understanding? i am working at a snail's pace so this is probably going to cut off at some point. as "technology" is a synecdoche for "computers" or even for "programmed systems", this feels very much in line with the conversion of "users" to "people" (i mean, is everyone on facebook actually your friend?) but another Problem With Educational Technology is ....... this.
2019/10/01 at ????
another AB. I have gotten literally about 4 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours (grief and all that you put off because of it is crazy! but also kind of not kidding - maybe only half kidding - when I say I hate my life ;___; ) and listened to so many hours worth of podcasts while sealed up inside of my apartment (I live alone) that people's voices sound wonky in my head, but I read another article by Katherine DeLuca, "'Can we block these political thingys? I just want to get f*cking recipes:' Women, Rhetoric, and Politics on Pinterest".
DeLuca, Katherine. (2015). "Can we block these political thingys? I just want to get f*cking recipes." Women, rhetoric, and politics on Pinterest. Kairos, 19(3). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/19.3/topoi/deluca/conclusions.html
(I will preface this by admitting that I have a Chrome extension that blocks Pinterest links/images from showing up in Google searches.) DeLuca's work here is really delightful - the Pinterest-esque format adds a bit of an immersive element to it, and for readers unfamiliar with Pinterest and its culture, it additionally gives readers a vantage point from which they can understand/likely infer certain things about the platform and its demographics. "Pinterest mom", for instance, is its own whole thing, and the specificity of "mom" is linked to the largely-female userbase that the site has. DeLuca explores the rhetorics around these specific types of "female spaces" - not explicitly *feminist* spaces, just female spaces - online through a look at the Pinterest content (and reactions to said content) posted by Jane Wang during Barack Obama's 2012 campaign, and finds a (maybe?) surprising "why does everyone have to take things so seriously?" insistence on the site/among its community members being a sort of apolitical space. ("Pinterest mom" feels parallel to "Facebook mom", here?) There was an element that felt like it needed more analysis/more careful consideration here, though -- and even in this entry I realized that I was doing some categorizing (with the term "pinterest mom") that could be disputed if there was more info - what are the more specific demographics in terms of the women in Pinterest's userbase? How might these things be signaled or codified when not explicitly stated? Racial/economic differences can probably be linked to the attitudes described in the article (as they often can be in real life!) and I was hoping to see/read more about how those things surface on the platform.
2019/09/26 at around 4 PM
I think that the first thing that came to mind for me was Google Docs, which is pretty standard -- maybe the one thing was that we used Docs to "submit" weekly assignments, as in we added said assignments to a shared Drive folder for each week/each specific thing that we had to do. The larger assignments/everything that wasn't a draft would be submitted to d2l. I... liked this format/method a lot? Like, as compared to d2l for Everything.
unit 1 make-up labor log entries (this currently isn't everything... and there are still placeholders. I'll be finished by 9/30) (10/01 update, nevermind i hate my life):
due to some really frustrating and stupid, painful circumstances, I found myself falling behind. the worst thing about falling behind is that no matter how badly you want to catch up the actual act of/work in catching up is ridiculously anxiety-inducing, and then there's Everything Else you have to do on top of it. I want to say a good half of this stuff was done in frantic multi-hour bursts of energy from September 26th to the early morning hours of October 1st, and the other half/in a similar manner the week before.
for 9/5
... I had actually added my podcast to the list on time, but didn't add to my labor log for it, so I'll note that here.
for 9/3
an AB - Olia Lialina's "Turing Complete User"
Lialina, Olia. "Turing Complete User." Contemporary Home Computing (2012). http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/
"Turing Complete User" is a text that I consider very important - Lialina is one of the first Internet artists, a huge part of the "net.art" movement, and a really vital figure in the field of Internet research and archival - she and her partner Dragan Espenschied have contributed (and maintain) a lot of work on the concept of "digital folklore", utilizing the Geocities archive and studies of the "vernacular" (pre-social-media) Internet. This is a text about technology and literacy, in specific - maybe specifically a more general "technological literacy". The "invisible user", focusing on "people" instead of "users", is probably one of the most pervasive rhetorics embraced in UX design, for one thing, but it's also a concept that a lot of users have internalized, or find themselves readily accepting of. There is now an app for everything, I suppose, but there is maybe an additional necessity in making sure that students are not limited to apps - or maybe if they are limited to apps, that they know exactly how. In the context of something like discussion of social media use in the classroom or for assignments, and maybe even discussion of "social media" in general - I feel like it's really easy to "naturalize" social media as a tool (and the "effects of social media", in discussions about it) in this way... I am very interested in how educators can contextualize their work and assignments, both for themselves and for students, and the general importance of just knowing exactly why learning and teaching happens the way that it does, or why it occurs in the spaces that it does feels like a big pull for me. In the context of learning with technology, the "space" of the Internet and the sort of "transfer" into user-dom that entering that space entails is worth examining- this feels like a component that contributes to some of my thinking in regard to the nonspecific space of the "online classroom" and how students might conceptualize the confines of online courses/teaching in general.
for 9/10
an AB - "Shared Passions, Shared Compositions: Online Fandom Communities and Affinity Groups as Sites for Public Writing Pedagogy"
DeLuca, Katherine. "Shared passions, shared compositions: Online fandom communities and affinity groups as sites for public writing pedagogy." Computers and Composition 47 (2018): 75-92.
A lot of my own interest in composition studies is connected to my interest in what Olia Lialina terms "the vernacular web", which is a term that she uses to describe a lot of the spaces of the early Internet; "amateur" websites and the like. Thinking and moving past the "vernacular web" brings to mind the platforms (and fill-in-the-blank profiles) that we associate with Web 2.0. The spirit and culture of fandom communities tends to make the Internet a good place for these cultures and affinity groups to grow, and ideas around "locating new publics" in public writing and these alternate modes of composition feel like they have very strong ties to these classifications and why they exist. DeLuca looks at fandom spaces (specifically at the community around Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire) on Tumblr and LiveJournal, which I find are two really excellent examples of different "generations" of blogs/blogging – she refers to LiveJournal as more "legacy" as opposed to Tumblr being "current", and very efficiently codifies some of the literacy practices around fandom – with special care to note that this likely does not apply to all fandoms - and community building/participation in fandom/affinity groups, which possess collective, shared ethos. There is a strong focus on how participation in fandom is effectively a "labor of love", and the amount of learning and effort that goes into it is a point of intrigue when considering how educators can have students import skills from this sort of participation and apply them to their own public writing practices...
on the "anatomy of a podcast"...
thinking about this without the context of having been in class for an introduction/knowing what everyone else was thinking was interesting. I clicked on the link in the syllabus and was incredibly confused at first, but looking at other labor logs seemed to be a bit of clarification! I guess that I've already talked about how I think of podcasts as being similar to talk shows on TV, or even talk radio (well, I don't know too much about the latter, I guess), and how most of the podcasts that I think are good have this vibe .. the hosts, I think, are the most important element in terms of figuring out why and how they even exist/thrive. One host needs to be charismatic enough to carry the whole thing alone. Or they have to be a good storyteller. If you can't do that, then I'm sure that *sometimes* a nice-sounding voice can be all you need... if there's more than one host, what becomes important is a likeable (or just entertaining!) dynamic. Even if the podcast is not About the hosts themselves - and I'm thinking about podcasts like Reply All - the fact that they are the constants/most consistent feature in every episode means that there has to be *something* about or between said host(s) has to keep listeners engaged... for the sake of not boring people to death, but also to make up for lackluster or boring or hard-to-follow topics/content in individual episodes. This in the context of ~education~ podcasts feels... a bit difficult (sorry!)
for 9/12 and 9/17
my second experience with literacies/technology
I think that this was actually an experience that pre-dates the first one I'd written about, and it's set on the Internet again. Similar circumstances: I was about 7 or 8 years old or so and obsessed with online MMOs/"virtual world" games. The one that I was most obsessed with was Disney's Toontown Online, where I was an incredibly active user. (Sometimes I search my old username on the ToonTown Central forums, now-defunct, I'm pretty sure, just to look back at what I was thinking back then.) TTC was obviously populated with other children, all sharing the same or similar interests. Almost everyone on the site was enamored with the idea of making their *own* ToonTown or Club Penguin (or something along the lines of that...). And we were lucky to all share that desire at the time, because MIT's programming language Scratch had just launched publicly, and someone had shared it on the forums. It was a Java-based language that utilized "blocks" instead of actual typed code. You could make calculators. Lots of us just drew pictures and shared them as static projects. But everyone wanted to make games, really. Scratch is more powerful/capable now than it was back then, probably, but there was some really amazing mind-blowing stuff on the site to 8-year-old me, whose username was "rgames" and whose first project was "My Little Town", which was... really not that good. The Media Lab people that were working on Scratch could probably deduce that I was 8 years old just by looking at it... but with that, I remember getting a message asking if "My Little Town" could be included as a "sample project" in future versions of Scratch. Of course I said yes - who wouldn't? - and then I experienced my first brush with some sort of minor website/platform-specific e-fame, which is something that you realize when taking in the sheer volume of comments on and the number of remakes, remixes... 
... "fixes", and interactions with something you make. Something about it was totally enthralling, and I was really optimistic about interactions with people online (and inclined to remember, always, that other users are People) ever since. I am also realizing that this is probably linked to some knowledge of my "audience", as in the other users on the site couldn't have been very much older than me...
and another AB -"Digital Social Media and Aggression: Memetic Rhetoric in 4chan’s Collective Identity"
Sparby, Erika M. "Digital social media and aggression: Memetic rhetoric in 4chan’s collective identity." Computers and Composition 45 (2017): 85-97.
This is another look at online communities, and one that feels intriguing because reading it provides an urge to "compare-and-contrast" the dynamics and rhetorics here to those of other Internet communities. But another point of interest here is likely the sense of... difficulty, in terms of its subject - Sparby presents a snapshot of /b/ and its context with as much background information as she possibly can, but there's a clear sense that things are constantly changing or in flux - which of course is the nature of content on an imageboard, and this particular imageboard's reputation. Each board on 4chan has its own board culture, which is of course influenced by the overarching culture of the website itself as well as its users, which change over time. Sparby's emphasis on students learning how to recognize instances of collective identity formation is very important - and an analysis of /b/, a space with users that seem to understand exactly where they are - feels like a good tool/example. The (never smooth) "transfer" of one's "offline identity" to the Internet/more clearly-defined social networking platforms like Twitter seems like it can make the recognition of these collective identities harder for some users, especially those more familiar with non-anonymous/semi-pseudonymous platforms.
2019/09/24 at 2 PM
Things have been very hard. I am still in the process of making up the work that I missed (a lot), but I know that I can be done by the end of this week. I think that the past two months have been a series of terrible days for me, all terrible in different ways, but Sunday was perfect, and Monday was okay, which is enough motivation. I'm still very sorry about all that I have missed in the process of things. But here is today's AB:
Sullivan, Laura L. "Cyberbabes:(Self-) representation of women and the virtual male gaze."
Computers and Composition 14.2 (1997): 189-204.
Laura A. Sullivan's "Cyberbabes: (Self-) representation of women and the virtual male gaze" is older than I am - it was published in 1997, but with that, felt intriguing in its prescience. Sullivan describes experiences with men and the male gaze on the Internet; the "new characteristics" of objectification and its internalization (192) that accompany women (and images of women) and their presences on the Web. The article's age obviously makes some of the language feel a bit dated - it can be funny to observe the affinity that academics in the "early stages" of Internet research had for the "cyber-" prefix, but it feels like there's important groundwork here in terms of finding the sort of language and perspective for thinking about the gendered (specifically male-coded, and with that, heterosexual-male-coded) nature of "computer culture", an idea that still feels pervasive in terms of thinking about the even-broader "geek"/"nerd" (etc.) culture. The real point of interest feels like Sullivan's description of how this paper came about. In creating a highly personal digital/hypertext project centered on anxieties about beauty and predation, examining the subject of Ted Bundy, who had a "victim profile" that Sullivan fell under - long, brunette, center-parted hair - Sullivan's intention was that her work and its audience would be confined to the classroom; to fellow academics. This was obviously not the case: she was inundated with emails from men, many who had stated that they'd found her page through a fetish website focused on long hair and hair cutting. Her professor's response to the initial emails contained a key sentence: "in principle e-writing must abandon finally all concerns about intention. that is the gist/gest of the economy of gift, in place of contract (communication)" (190). There are a lot of thoughts that this provokes, and many are explored in the paper, but it presented a sort of teaching question for me, in considering practices surrounding writing assignments/project that involve this kind of "public" publishing of work - it's probably a lot more common now than it was in 1995, and social media sites (Twitter and YouTube, I find most often) are littered with throwaway accounts for class projects and videos, faces and names attached, comments still on, and viewer counts still rising. Sullivan handled this disconcerting discovery well, and wrote about it so that others may learn from it - but she also talks about the implications that episodes like this have for electronic pedagogy - how "the boundaries of the classroom shift spatially and temporally, as “inside” and “outside” are no longer clear-cut and the “beginning” and “end” of a text, and of the course itself, may be blurred". (202)
I feel like I can connect some of the themes that this article had me thinking about to an idea that seemed to appear on the vision boards pretty often - that of "adaptation". There's adaptation to spaces and contexts where the rules are maybe a lot more definitively outlined: academia and academic writing. But I also think that there's a necessity in adaptation to (or deepening understandings of?) the space or spaces that one may already occupy as a writer and furthermore, as a user... outside of the insular/insulated spaces of the classroom, of course, but maybe even past that - outside of the bubble that consists of the people one follows on Twitter or Instagram, and then even past *that*, the spaces that are Instagram and Twitter in general, as platforms, and their confines. (I use platforms like Neocities for a reason!) I'm thinking a lot about this work by Olia Lialina, one of my favorite artists and Internet researchers, on UX, the "user", and rhetoric around "technology": Turing Complete User, which I cited in this piece that I wrote two years ago for Real Life magazine (a great magazine, about... well, living with technology) - Immaterial Girls. Part of teaching this kind of "adaptation" is teaching an understanding of "where" they are, how the contexts they are in operate, and with that, questions about the sort of "community responsibility" and other influencing factors as described by Sullivan arise...
2019/09/19 at 4 PM
something on the 9/17 boards that was probably more of a joke in passing than anything did get me thinking - it was vaguely about keeping up-to-date with what's "in with young people, or something along the lines. I have a feeling that I would *want* to be "in touch" with The Youth as a composition/writing instructor, but I also think that there has to be a way to do that without being too "how do you do, fellow kids?". I know that it sounds kind of topical. but I think that it's a facet of a bigger, over-arching need to show students that I understand the contexts that they are in - pop culture is one level, and so often it can be tied to other necessary social/cultural understandings. I think it also can help students feel more confident that they're being understood, In General.
also I commented on Kade, Jay, and John's literacy stories. I tried to join the vision board but haven't been accepted/allowed to add to it yet?
2019/09/12 (makeup)
a literacy story:
I think that some of my first "writing and technology" experiences - if not my first, then maybe just early, memorable ones - took place when I was literally around 8 or 9. I was obsessed with "virtual world" games and MMOs - Club Penguin, Toontown, and so many more. when they weren't online MMOs, they were things like Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum or Animal Crossing on the DS, which were games that did have very new (or new for the time) wi-fi features that let players connect with each other, sometimes just in very specific spaces. but it was still a lot of fun, considering that if you had an Internet conncection in general, you could easily get in touch with massive communities dedicated to these things - forums, blogs, wikis, and more. I participated in pretty much all of these things. but I think a really formative thing was starting my own Wordpress blog dedicated to the games that I was really into after finding one that was made by another 9-year old girl (it got a lot of traffic because it had a lot of "cheats" and information about secret locations in a now-defunct game called Dizzywood.) we became friends through her comment section and later, emails, and would visit each other in Animal Crossing, posting a whole lot about it. the sites got a lot of traffic because of those "cheats" pages, but a majority of our posts consisted of us communicating with each other by talking with (at) each other online. that wasn't actually one of my first online friendships, come to think about it, but it was one really important to me - I made a lot of other friends through it, and though nearly all of the games that we played at the time are now pretty much dead, I do remember how *easy* it felt to grow connected and attached to the ones I made, and in general how much you can bond with relative strangers online through text (or weird in-game gestures!) alone... I still make friends online easily, I mean, and I'm glad. I stumbled onto Yhuna's blog again after randomly remembering it pretty recently and was very surprised to find this (really very touching!) message, which really made my day.
how-to-podcast materials...
make-up labor log entries are going here, don't mind me
2019/09/10 at 4 PM
"Predict what will happen in the story." this is hard. I'm interpreting it as "look at the contents/conclusions and expand on future implications", for the sake of things. DeLuca (2017) writes about online fandom sites/groups as sites for public writing pedagogy, with a focus on "new publics" for public writing... there's a wide range of practices involved in these sites, and there's quite a bit of optimism about incorporating online communities - these fandom spaces as an example of broader "online communities" - and their practices into the classroom. Not in the sense of say, incorporating fandom practices in the most Proper Sense, but using these practices as a framework/place for understanding how students can teach and share and communicate about topics they're passionate about...
make-up labor log entries are going here, don't mind me
2019/08/31 at maybe 11 AM?
snapped awake to remember that I had some work to do over the weekend and that I have friends coming over later, on top of that. I put a lot into cleaning my entire apartment because they’ve never been here before and because it’s the only thing that I can could manage to do (brain-wise) at the moment. about 5 hours later I manage to spit out another annotated bibliography entry, though I keep kicking myself for taking to long to do it in general (and for writing it in the Notes app. Google Docs is weird about copying and pasting from there).
2019/08/29 at 4:43 pm (so..the end of class)
this entry is a WORK IN PROGRESS!!!!
2019/08/29 at roughly 1:30
all of yesterday and this morning were full of distractions... and I procrastinated, oops - Lots Of Things
are really hard for me right now, but I got my work done… I chose the Bolter & Grusin text to annotate,
first, because I liked it the most. and I spent way too much time working on this very vintage labor log setup.
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