Though it would be easy to compose a traditional “narrative of progress” about how my views on writing and reading have changed over the course of the semester, I’d like to avoid that trap because that structure will prevent me from discussing how messy this process has been. I would like to say that, as we started the semester, I had a relatively robust understanding of writing as more than just alphanumeric text on the page, but in reviewing my text from day one (see "ongoing relfection"), I am surprised and appalled to see that this is not the case. Perhaps I’m projecting this view onto myself as a way of compensating for what seem to me to be my shortcomings as an incoming Ph.D. student. I came from a program in which we never discussed writing beyond alphanumeric texts, nor were we expected (or permitted) to compose anything other than alphanumeric texts. I touched on this issue very briefly in my ongoing reflection and a blog post when I wrote about how limited the actual arrangement and presentation of my thesis was: “I had stacks of texts, multiple word documents, PDFs, scraps of paper, videos, songs, etc. from which I pulled as I composed. However, my readers only got flat, linear texts as opposed to YouTube links [or embedded videos] audio, visuals, etc.” Having gone through a semester in Convergence Culture, I now understand how I could have arranged the text differently to better present my ideas, the texts from which I was drawing, and the connections that I was making through my work. Unfortunately, understanding is not the same thing as doing.

 

Technology/ies and Literacy/ies

 

Case in point: Despite my richer understanding of composing as a process of selecting, revising, and arranging pre-existing texts, adding “original” texts, and using appropriate technologies and media to compose and circulate my work, I often find myself relying on the good ol’ Word document filled with alphabetic text. In none of my SRRs did I include images, diagrams or graphs, or links to other texts. I’d like to say that this is partly due to my overbearing concern for meeting guidelines—Dr. Yancey asked for a page, I wanted to write a page, and text seemed to me more important than other modes through which I might convey information or analysis—but it’s also due,  I think, to habit. We often discuss issues of access, but we rarely discuss the role that habit plays in our composing processes our acquisition of new literacies. Brown and Duguid do discuss habit, though not explicitly, when they use the example of Popeye and Sweet Pea to show that “when everything works well, we are all a little like Sweet Pea, most ignorant of what makes us most secure” (7). While my not knowing how to use and manipulate certain platforms—not having technological literacies—definitely played a role in my not using them, my habit of opening a Word document (because it’s always worked well) as a starting place for an assignment inhibited my composing processes just as much. Similarly, my first blog post consists of a Word document that I copied and pasted into the Blogger browser. For my second post, I branched out a little by adding some hyperlinks, but this post was still initially composed in Word. My last blog post is the only one that I actually composed in Blogger, which could account for the greater number of hyperlinks (I could add those when I composed the sentence rather than having to remind myself of what I wanted to link to upon uploading the post) and images.

 

Developing technological literacies and learning to take advantage of their affordances has certainly been a difficult process for me, much like Brown and Duguid describe: “When things go wrong, we are more like Popeye, feeling that the stairs betrayed us, the lamppost attacked us, and that the world would be a better place without such things” (7). This ePortfolio, for example, started out in Weebly, and everything seemed to be going well until I wanted to add images in particular places and add html code for an Issuu document. I panicked as I discovered that I couldn’t get Weebly to do what I wanted, but because of my work in the Digital Studio, I realized that Wix would probably work better. I was also better prepared to use Wix than I was at the beginning of the semester before I had acquired knowledge of how the site works. This process of learning how to use Wix through experience and conversation with more experienced Digital Studio consultants demonstrates both of Jenkins’ definitions of “medium”: a medium is both a “technology that enables communication” and “a set of associated ‘protocols’ or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology” (13-14). In this way, I can now see that developing technological literacies requires that we reflect on habitual composing practices, locate the best medium for one’s composition (likely doing a bit of research depending on one’s experience and knowledge), and acquire knowledge of the medium through engaging with others and learning both how the technology works and what social practices are connected to the medium. I’m not certain, though, how well this process would have worked in a different context; that is, I had the advantage of working in a space and with colleagues who helped me to acquire technological literacies. I’m curious as to what this process might look like in other contexts.

 

Circulation and Knowledge

 

Taking advantage of the affordances of technologies has been just as difficult for me as collaborative writing has been. Prior to starting this program, I only collaboratively authored texts with others a handful of times, and those were typically framing and presenting discussion questions. Working with different people and different groups of people on a number of blog posts has also required that I break with my habits. For instance, I’m accustomed to doing reading and writing on my own before sharing that work with others, but the process of co-authoring blog posts was much different depending on the group of people with whom I was working, as I describe in my introduction to group work. Though group work did not always go smoothly depending on how members circulated ideas, when it worked well, I felt that we collectively produced knowledge that was worth circulating to various publics. For instance, in my collaborative work with Joe on our Wikipedia article, we had to use a variety of media to organize information from our writing assessment course and to add that information to Wikipedia for circulation. As many of my colleagues discussed in class, this process was difficult because we were not acting as knowledge-workers but as information-workers. However, both the collaborative work and the product of that work helped us to make knowledge about the constraints of composing in different genres and media. We had to think differently about our vocabulary, sentence structure, and use of references as we composed a text for wider circulation than either of us are used to. In order to do this, we had to read multiple Wikipedia articles, including those authored by a couple of our colleagues, and get advice from other students who were farther along in their project than we were. This experience has helped me to see that collective intelligence as Jenkins presents it is almost always a part of our composing and knowledge-making processes. Without our colleagues and our critical reading habits, we likely would not have composed an entry as successful as the one that we did.  

Representation and Identity

 

Each of the projects I’ve completed this semester has helped me to better understand the role that media play in reality and representation. When I first read Remediation, I had a more difficult time than I realized in understanding remediation as a process. I got the basic idea that media always remediate others—the tv remediates film, computers remediate books, etc—but I didn’t quite understand how closely this relates to representation and identity. After discussing this point in my second SRR on Bolter and Grusin, I wrote, “This mutual remediation also effects our identities, in so far as ‘we employ media as vehicles for defining both personal and cultural identity’ and ‘we always understand a particular medium in relation to other past and present media’” (232). Theoretically, I knew what this meant. Now, having gone through the process of creating my ePortfolio, I feel like I understand what this means practically as well. As I described earlier, I found that Weebly didn’t do what I wanted it to, and this response to Weebly was guided by my concern with how I am presenting my identity/ies to both you and potential public readers. I had a specific design and layout in mind to represent myself and my work from this semester, and this layout was influenced, in part, by my having seen other ePortfolios. Additionally, though, I had the idea that I wanted my ongoing reflection to be “flippable”—that readers could click the post-its and they would flip up, much like readers could do were they actually holding the paper document. However, due to my limited technological literacies, I was unable to make this happen. Compiling the separate scans of each document into one scrollable document was the closest that I could come. Though I wanted to closely remediate the reading of a paper document, I was not able to fully do so. B&G’s statement and my experience show, again, the role that habit plays in our composing and knowledge-making processes. My experience with paper influenced the remediation of my paper document, and though I was not ultimately able to remediate the document in quite the way that I had hoped, I do think that the alternative I chose represents my current composing practices: I’m attempting to branch out, but I’m not quite there yet.

 

How Writing, Reading, and the Making of Knowledge Have Changed

 

My ePortfolio accurately represents what writing, reading, and the making of knowledge mean to me now. I’ve come to see and have been able to enact writing as more than alphabetic text on a page with very limited circulation. This ePortfolio (and the presentation I made for my final project in Rhetorical Theory) shows how I have learned to incorporate images and hyperlinks into my composing processes, but it also shows that I have somewhat limited technological literacies. Additionally, my taking up the practice of assemblage is apparent in my remediation of the map (see above) that Sarah and I constructed in class. I’m a little hesitant to call this work assemblage, though, as I’m still not completely certain about what constitutes an assemblage and differentiates it from collage. Travis, Josh, and I worked together to define assemblage and remix, and they argued that with assemblage you can see the separate pieces, while remix is seamless. My grasp on each of these terms has been a bit loose this semester, though if I work with the definitions I’ve just cited, then I suppose my map would be an assemblage in that it uses an image of the paper map that I co-constructed along with clips of words from our course texts and syllabus. Dr. Yancey also explained in class that collage is two-dimensional and assemblage is three-dimensional, like the multi-media works of Pablo Picasso. Operating under this logic, I’m more comfortable referring to my map as assemblage because, though it is two-dimensional on the screen, the pieces are layered and come from multiple mediums.

 

I suppose that reading has changed for me in the sense that I now think about the logic behind my reading as being linked to remediation. When I read my students’ ePortfolios, for instance, I typically go through each tab methodically, much like I would do if I were reading a paper portfolio. I now understand that this reading is guided by my experience and habits of reading paper portfolios, which transfers to the screen due to the fact that ePortfolios often remediate the paper documents, especially when they are “print uploaded.” With this in mind, I plan to incorporate a focus next semester on helping students (and myself!) to understand the differences between “print uploaded” and “web sensible” portfolios. I also hope to read more reflectively in different mediums now that I’m more aware of the role that habit and the logic of remediation play in reading processes.

 

Insofar as my understanding of writing and reading have changed, my understanding of how knowledge is made has also changed. I now see the role that collective intelligence often plays in our reading and composing processes, and I also understand that different media and literacies affect the representation and making of knowledge. I had also not thought much before about the role that circulation plays, outside of the “academic discourse as a conversation” metaphor. In other words, I’d never considered the circulation of my own work and the identities I compose in that work. Now that I have this understanding, though, I’m left wondering about the process of breaking habit, developing technological literacies, and branching out in knowledge-making processes in different contexts. How similar is my process to that of others? Will my students have a similar experience with gaining technological literacies if our classroom operates under a studio model? In other words, is it possible to catalyze this process for different people with wildly different technological/literacies and composing and reading habits and practices?