The "Gameplay" article

Last Christmas my fourteen-year old son received an X-box "live" program so he could use his X-box 360 online and chat with other players in realtime audio through a headset that plugs into his console. There are many weekend nights that my son will stay up until three or four in the morning to play his favorite game "Call to Action." My assumption was that it was just a game and that it was okay to indulge him as long as it didn't interfere with school work or other social activities, after all, I know very well how addictive computer games can become.

What I wasn't prepared for was that he forgot to turn off the exterior sound to his headset one day while he was playing online. As I sat in the family room listening to the chat that was being discussed from who knows where, I was appalled at the amount of explicatives and politically incorrect language that I heard. Much of the language came from what sounded to be people who were much older than my fourteen-year old. I really wasn't sure how to react to the situation and admonished him for participating in an activity that allowed the use of such language.

The "Gameplay" article disturbs me on many fronts. The most disturbing of all is that there is already X rated games being promoted to adults as a sort of a "fantasy sex world." While it may be great for Carlos and consenting adults to explore their sexual identities in an online environment, is it really necessary for my son to be exposed to such propositions at his age? He is just at the age where he is exploring sex and sexual boundaries (he has a girlfriend) and I would prefer that his judgement and values concerning sexual matters be guided by me and his mother and not by an online gaming environment. What a spooky thought that is!

Plagiarism and the Web

Plagiarism is a tricky business. Devoss and Rosatti would suggest that it is fairly straightforward about how plagiarism occurs in the classroom, but I would say that they are somewhat misguided. There are several key factors that play into plagiarism and figuring out what constitutes plagiarism is a challenge for students and teachers as well.

In the work force, people often work on projects that require collaboration as well as existing material (Web material, research, work that has been done prior to the current project) without formally citing such sources. It is done all the time in the corporate world but is rarely accepted in academia. Discerning what is common knowledge from an original idea is hard enough, but to decide when credit should be given to a particular source in a particular situation is something that teachers and students have a hard time grappling with.

It is easy enough to understand that students who copy and paste papers that are clearly not their own constitutes plagiarism. But when does "crossing the line" become truly, "crossing the line?" Students can easily reword something that they have read on the Web to make it sound like an original piece. How this differs from scholars who write papers under the assumption that their readers have common knowledge about tenets that were established by other scholars but may not be widely known is hard to discern. Most scholars, of course, have a transparency in their writing that clearly delineates their ideas from others. Plagiarism is a hard subject to tackle and I think that Web learning exponentially increases the problem.

Multimodal Assignment

When we got this assignment I was somewhat excited about it. It's been a long time since I got to play around with new software and be creative with computer technology. But with that said, I've been pulling my hair out trying to get everything to work right. Getting everything formatted right is the hardest part.

My son has a Kodak digital camera that is pretty good at taking video captures. The trouble with Kodak is that they download everything in the format that they choose, and Windows really doesn't want to play nice. So, I've spent most of my day trying to reconfigure file formats so Windows will accept the media that I have recorded. I finally figured it out, but there is a learning curve.

Another problem I've had is getting around copyright laws to show pictures and video that I have downloaded. Granted, I understand copyright laws very well and would never consider stealing someone's intellectual property, but in a couple of instances I have paid for the privilege to use the material only to find out that it is encoded with a security tag that Windows Movie Maker will not accept. How fair is that? I PAID FOR IT!

What I found out is that, "Where there's will, there's a way." It takes some creativity and time to get photos and video to work, but there is always a way--although it can sometimes be cumbersome and archaic. As a result, I find myself using SnagIt and taking video shots of my computer screen with my son's camera. It's not the greatest method in the world but it gets the job done.

Students may be better equipped than I am for handling these types of problems. I can usually muddle my way through almost anything, but I wonder how many students who are behind the technology curve will stick it out to get the job done. It can be an overwhelming task for some students who have a vision of what they want to produce, like me, and actually getting to their final goal. I know it's been a bigger task for me than I ever dreamed.

How far do we go?

There are several issues that will ethically need to be addressed in online learning courses that I have yet to uncover in very much of the existing research. Here are a couple of scenarios: You are rushed to the hospital with a life threatening appendix that has ruptured, and you find out that your surgeon has gained his medical license online. How will you react? Or, as has been discussed in class, the fact that universities loathe the idea of online courses in some respects because the class sizes must be smaller and less revenue is generated while more resources are being used. What if they alleviated the problem by running advertisements from businesses and corporations within the framework of the course being taught? After all, corporations would love to get their word out to a captive, target audience and would be willing to pay for that privilege.

If anyone thinks that these two scenarios are impossible, think again. I have an acquaintance who recently earned his nursing license online. He took the coursework online, and then he had to do a three-day, real-life practicum--that he failed the first time around--but he eventually received his license and is now working at a local hospital. In many ways I find it unsettling.

Should we treat an online composition class with any less diligence or ethical consideration? In the field of technical writing there is a whole branch of studies that deal with nothing but ethics. There are many benefits to learning with technology, but I see some problems coming down the road that very few people have paid much attention to. We make a big deal out of plagiarism in the physical university and then tell students to collaborate on projects using the WWW (which stands for "the Wild, Wild, West). We know the difference but students seldom do.

Other considerations are how we deal with students who are struggling with composition in the virtual world. Do we take their money and leave them "flapping in the wind" when they struggle to keep up? It somehow becomes easier to do that in cyberspace. One study I read, states that the rate of students who do not finish an online course is much higher than in a face-to-face course. Much of this may be blamed on students who are not self-disciplined enough to follow online instruction, but I somehow feel that the mode instruction, along with the instructor's diligence, plays a role.

Thirty years ago there was no such field as bioethics in medicine. In the future I see a field of technology pedagogical practice ethics emerging. We have only scratched the surface with current research.

Writing in the twenty-first century

This may sound strange coming from someone who is a technical writer, but the greatest thing about the English language is its ability to be ambiguous. I can't speak for other languages, such as Chinese, because I am not fluent in any other language. Although it may seem like I'm speaking a foreign language in this blog, I'll try to be as "un-ambiguous" as possible.

Let me start by saying that I fell in love with English because of its ambiguity. For example: If you read a novel, the author may give very good descriptions of setting, character, and action, but it's up to your imagination to supply the images the text represents. The protagonist in the novel develops as a picture in your mind and you feel a connection because the image in your mind is one you created. But what if the author described the protagonist in perfect detail and you had a picture of someone like Mel Gibson , but instead the author provided an actual picture of his or her vision and it looked more like Rodney Dangerfield? This sort of creates a disconnect or a conundrum because it would be hard to believe that someone who looks like Dangerfield could be a great lover of young women, totes a shotgun, and saves the world from all the evil people who look like fashion models--pictures supplied by the author. Unless this novel is meant to be a comedy it really ruins it because the pictures are supplied. I'm no longer left with the intimacy that the text could provide through my own imagination.

So what's my point? I find that there is a pendulum that swings in extreme directions in writing with technology. On one hand, we have graphics, sound, animation, and video feeds that leave very little room for an intimate imagination. On the other hand, we have email, text messaging, Twitter etc. that allows us to be so ambiguous that we can only guess at the tone, context, and spirit of the message the author intended. For the latter, if our imagination runs awry we can be caught in a serious violation of misinterpretation that was never intended by the author.

Through the history of the written word there was a certain amount of ambiguity that was built in. The ambiguity is what makes poets so interesting and can lead scholars to a lifetime of effort at interpretation based on their values and what they bring to the text. But this does not necessarily mean that they are right. A well crafted poem will often explicitly defy meaning on anything but an individual level. I can imagine Walt Whitman with his words, "what I assume, you shall assume" conveying his message on Facebook complete with pictures and diagrams of what he is exactly talking about. It would leave little to the imagination and good old Walt would soon find himself being listed as a "cyber pervert." Think about all of the creative texts that you have ever read and then think about how ruinous it would be for you if the author had supplied graphics and sound. The authors allow us the creative discretion to formulate mental images and interpretations on our own.

There is something to be said about ambiguity: It often creates a greater understanding about ourselves and the world around us than anything that can be explicitly shown. The type of ambiguity I'm talking about cannot even start to take shape within 140 characters. Imagine how chaotic the world would be if we talked in acronyms or limited each sentence that we spoke to 140 characters. What kind of discourse can we have when we are so transparent that we include pictures of our thoughts or we are limited to talking in acronyms?

I see the use of writing with computers, but I'm sorry; I am a traditionalist. We can gain a lot by learning how to use technology in a writing classroom, but I don't think we will ever have a canon of writers like we have had in the past; at least not in the sense that we view the canon of great literary works now. Being "wired" is either making us too vague or too transparent How we find a middle ground in the sea of technology to create the next great canon is the key. My only hope is that the next great canon does not contain LOL, OMG, or clips from YouTube.

Ebay and Me: The Things We Learn That We Didn't Mean to Learn

This is an anecdote about how much we learn by doing things on the computer that we did not intend to learn. Let me digress here just a little and tell you that every time I use the word anecdote I'm reminded of the Ron White joke that goes: "If I knew the difference between anecdote and antidote my best friend, Billy, would still be alive. Billy was bitten by a poisonous snake and I thought the best thing for him was to use an anecdote. I was reading sections out of Reader's Digest and Billy, as he was dying, kept yelling, 'Read faster, Read faster'"

So my anecdote is this: Before I returned to school--for the third time--I was an antique dealer for 15 years. My early years in the antiques business were in the mid 80's. I had colleagues in the business; people I bought from, sold to, or traded with that told me about the "bazillions" of dollars that they were making on a site called Ebay. They told me that rich buyers on the West and East coast were buying up antiques at prices that "us hicks," here in the Ozarks would find ridiculous. It peaked my interest.

The first time I tried to sell anything on Ebay, I learned that there was a learning curve to it. I'm not talking about a minor curve, but a MAJOR curve existed in order for me to post anything. In those days there was no such thing as Web authoring tools. If you wanted to post an item on Ebay you had to code your ad by hand using their template, but everything else was pure html coding. I have to give Ebay credit, they had an outstanding tutorial for how to code a posting and make it look attractive. But still, it had to be coded the hard way and if you messed up by missing one key stroke such as misplacing an opening or end tag (for those of you who have used code, you know what I'm talking about), then nothing would appear right. Pictures, text, and headings had to be placed without the benefit of WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get." It was strictly html code.

It's amazing to think that Ebay survived at all. An entire nation was jumping on the Ebay wagon, and at the same time learning how to do html code. People who had never owned a computer before were jumping into the deep end of the pool and doing html coding! Me included.

Coding is a lot like learning Spanish. If your immersed in it everyday then it comes natural to you. You can learn the basics, just enough to get you by, but the minute you no longer need it then it slips from your mind and is replaced by other data. My coding experiences have started to erode, and I wish they wouldn't.

As I prepare to give a presentation on PBWiki, I am reminded of the fact that we learn from the software we use, and at the same time are limited by the functions that are presented to us. The nice thing about the old Ebay environment was that it taught me something useful, and at the same time taught me that there were no limits to what I could do. With the new Web authoring tools that we have, we are strictly limited to what the Web authors have decided we can do. They may be easier to fly, but the sky is no longer the limit.

Selber, rhetoric, and the way we use computers

Okay, I'm running a little behind on my blogging. It's not that I have procrastinated, but somehow life gets in the way and I had more on my plate than I could handle. It's a long story and one I won't bore you with, but it's a perfect transition to rhetorical theories in technology.

The ideas that Selber has about "human interface" (chapter 4 "Rhetorical Literacy) with computers seems to me to coincide with what we do every day of our lives. Although Selber uses the term "Human-Computer Interaction," when you think about it, it's what we do with our friends, colleagues, and people we deal with everyday. We speak to people and every word that we use is persuasive in some way or another. What is the alternative? We are deemed fakes or liars if we fail. Should it be any different for electronic media? Absolutely not. I know it sounds radical, but technology and people now seem to meld together so seamlessly that they are difficult to compartmentalize in our minds.

To give you a good example, I was interupted while I was creating this blog--somewhere after the line in the first paragraph that says "It's a long story..."--by some friends who I hadn't seen in a while. I couldn't be rude and say, "Oh by the way, you are interupting me in my endeavors to catch up on my school work. I don't have time to socialize right now." Instead, I put my best face forward and was a hospitable guest. But there is always an icon in my brain that says, "finish and save, finish and save." The icon can't be turned off. My friends who came over started looking like Web sites that take too long to download. All I wanted to do was Refresh or Delete. So here I am hours later trying to piece together thoughts that probably don't make any sense at all, but somehow they did before I was interupted.

The point I'm trying to make is that we somehow forget which world we are living in. We can no longer ignore that we have a foot in a digital world and a foot in the real world, and keeping a clear delineation between these two worlds can be difficult. If you think I'm overstating my case, let me give you a quote from Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who, like Selber, teaches the psychology behind technology. (By the way, I would have liked to have posted this as a PDF but it's much too difficult with Blogger).

"We live in a culture of simulation. Our games, our economic and political systems, and the ways architects design buildings, chemists evisage molecules, and surgeons perform operations all use simulation technology. In 10 years the degree to which simulations are ebedded in every area of life will have increased exponentially. We need to develop a new form of media literacy: readership for the culture of simulation.

We come to written text with habits of readership based on centuries of civilization. At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Who wrote these, what is their message, why were they written, and how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially? A central project for higher education during the next 10 years should be creating programs in information technology literacy, with the goal of teaching students to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit, challenging their built-in assumptions" (885-86).

Turkle's argument is that we live in such a simulated world that computers only recognize success or failure. Success or failure is determined by the programmer who made the program and gray areas where discourse might occur are omitted. Selber's argument runs along the same lines, except that he sees technology to promote discourse instead of disouraging it. My opinion is that it depends on the program you are using. Teaching students the difference is the key.

I guess the point I'm trying to make with this blog is this: Turkle is exactly right when she suggests we question the software we are using and what its function is. There is more to it than we explicitly see. What is implicitly being sold? If we can't answer these questions for ourselves and our students then we need to hit Refresh or Delete. We are still humans and there is no getting around that. If I could Delete my friends when they show up at unexpected times, Delete my problems when they cropped up, and Refresh my memory after all the hooplah, life would just be grand, but it just doesn't work that way does it?

Turkle, Sherry. "How Computers Change the Way We Think." The McGraw Hill Reader. Ed.
Gilbert H. Muller. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008. 881-886.