Blogging Pedagogy - community

Hacking (Our) Community

Beck Wise — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Author:

Beck Wise

Image Credit:

Beck Wise

This semester, I'm teaching 'Rhetoric of Hacking', an intermediate writing/composition class. The course title is something of a vexed topic; it was chosen to comply with the usual pattern of writing course names at UT, but it started off as 'Hacking Rhetoric', a name designed to imply that we would not just be discussing rhetoric about hacking, but also hacking rhetoric itself, transforming our own work and that of other people. I ask students to engage with the usual range of public discourse and create some of their own but, on the basis that you can't really learn without doing, I also ask them to engage in various hacking practices over the course of the semester. Not only does this give them practical insight into the idea that hacking is itself a rhetorical practice, it offers students a way to understand and experience hacking from a position of some power -- instead of viewing themselves as passive (potential) victims of hacking, they can live out some of the risks and rewards that drive hackers.

We start small and safe: use a technique from Lifehacker for a week; play around with Popcorn Maker, a tool for remixing web videos, and Hackasaurus, a tool that allows you to mirror and hack websites; complete a few lessons on Hack This Site; be a Wikipedia editor for the day (I think the most compelling takeaway lesson from that was 'Don't sign up with your real, full name if your plan is just to deface pages').

And then we go big: hack your peers.

Every student in the class has an account on the course blog, which they've been using all semester to post weekly reflections or compositions, as well as artist statements for their more out-there compositions--and when mid-October rolled around, each student was randomly assigned to hack one other student's account, then compose some kind of rhetorical intervention and replace an existing blog post with their new text. Everyone followed up with a Hacker Artist Statement, discussing their hacking process and the rhetorical effect attempted by their hack, and then a shorter Reflection, discussing the experience of being hacked; both pieces were to be posted publicly on the course blog.

When I dreamt up this assignment, it simultaneously thrilled and terrified me. On the one hand, it guaranteed everyone in the class would be able to think about hacking from a perspective of 'real' 'victimhood'; it also meant that everyone would get to undertake the kind of anonymous, public hacking that exists in the real world, where most of our previous exercises had been personal and private.

On the other ... it was tough to think of a better or faster way to destroy a classroom community and create student paranoia than by setting them all against each other, tasked with anonymously interfering with the work they've spent the semester producing.

The results were more than a little surprising. With my own paranoia about creating paranoia in full swing, I'd scheduled this month-long project quite late in the semester, hoping to establish a strong sense of trust amongst my students before beginning the blog hack. In line with my commitment to student-centred learning, I also offered the students control over the assignment parameters, while sketching out broad strokes ('everyone will hack someone, everyone will write an artist statement and a reflection, nobody will set out to hurt anyone, this is the timeline') and establishing the expectation that this assignment should not be comfortable, but neither should it be terrifying; rather, we should all feel productively uncomfortable. Everything beyond that was up for grabs and the students spent a class session establishing password guidelines, rules for preserving content, adding a deadline to offer their anonymous hackers hints. The results of that discussion -- the final assignment prompt -- are publicly available on the course website.

That session marked a turning point in the classroom environment -- and, surprisingly for me, the start of a very positive shift in the class dynamic. Students leapt to debate the pros and cons of various ideas, including students I hadn't heard a peep out of all semester. They left the class chattering keenly. When I walked into the room for the next class -- and, indeed, when I have walked in for every class since -- people have been talking, where once they were sitting quietly, absorbed in their phones or laptops. After requesting that we eliminate required comments from the course blog because they felt 'forced' and unnecessary, students started having conversations in the comments section. And classroom discussion has been amped up considerably.

Some of this, I'm sure, comes from trying to tease out the information they need to complete their hacks; one of my students wrote precisely that in his artist statement, saying:

As we were leaving class, I struck up a conversation with him regarding the absurdity of some of the password requirements we were assigned. Specifically, I noted that “there are at most 5 unique high school mascots in the entire state of Texas, those would be crazy easy to guess”, an observation with a bit of truth (it made football games in my highschool awkward when it was the bulldogs vs. the bulldogs for the 5th time in a season). As I had anticipated, Sean responded with (to paraphrase): “Yeah, there are like 10 schools with the same mascot as mine, the Wildcats”. Paydirt!

But most of the conversation I witnessed didn't turn on those very specific pieces of information that would allow the hacker access to their target's blog. Instead, students had conversations about campus events, political developments, favourite foods, their looming assignments ... community wasn't destroyed. It was created.

As my students are posting their artist statements and starting to finish their own reflections, I find myself reading and re-reading them, and thinking about my class design for next semester. Do I trust this assignment to build community again, rather than undermine it? To what extent was community there to start with? (I'm honestly aghast at the number of artist statements that lead with 'I had no idea who ... was', in a class of 18 that meets twice a week, in which I go out of my way to address people by name.) How can I administer this project differently? Can I make it MORE student-centred? MORE experiential? How can I extend that (very) productive discomfort to the semester as a whole? The only thing I know right now is -- hell yes, I am keeping this terrifying and terrific assignment.

Community and the Rhetoric Classroom

Eric Detweiler — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:02:08 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Culture Mass

Jeff Winger is Socrates’ worst nightmare. As an former lawyer disbarred for having a phony bachelor’s degree, and whose central skill on the NBC sitcom Community is manipulating others’ emotions with his words, Jeff bears out almost all of the concerns Socrates expresses in the Phaedrus and Gorgias about what can happen when training and skill in rhetoric is divorced from a strong moral code.

Quick context before I get back to talking about Jeff’s sophistic wiles (and, eventually, pedagogy—I promise): Community is a show about the increasingly unrealistic/delightful adventures of a community-college study group, and Jeff is one of the show’s and group’s central characters. He’s back in school to replace the fake degree mentioned above, and is usually—though not always—a raging narcissist.

As a narcissist, he frequently uses his abilities in judicial speech to make his own life easier: talking his groupmates into giving him extra help on class projects or tests, talking the dean into giving him credit for made-up courses. And his groupmates, ever more aware of his proclivity, venture observations about Jeff that sound strikingly similar to the observations ventured by the Greek sophists’ contemporaries. Jeff “always [knows] what to say and always [knows] when to slap the table” (“Contemporary American Poultry”); thus—like Gorgias’ audiences—his listeners are “willing but not forcibly made slaves” by his words (Plato, Philebus 58a). When he finds it difficult to compose a wedding toast, his friend Annie is skeptical, observing, “You once convinced [someone] that turtlenecks were made of turtles’ necks.” Jeff concurs, noting, “My superpower is being able to assume any position that suits my purpose” (“Urban Matrimony”). Jeff Winger: 21^st-century master of the dissoi logoi.

And then there’s Britta. Another member of the study group, she alternates between playing Jeff’s antagonist, love interest, and conscience. If Jeff’s superpower is speaking well in support of whatever position serves his purposes, Britta’s is being dubbed “the worst” as she alienates friends and strangers alike with her frequently off-putting commitment to social causes (consider montage #1).

In one episode, as the other characters talk excitedly about the delicious nature of their college cafeteria’s chicken fingers, she proudly declares, “I wouldn’t know. I’m a vegetarian. And if you guys knew how they treated the animals you’re eating, you would eat then even faster just to put the out of their misery. And then you would throw up” (“Contemporary”). By the time her speech shifts gears into a pathetic—and not in the classical sense—lament over her pet cat’s health problems, the rest of the group has gone from rolling their eyes to literally sprinting for the door, dashing toward the promise of a coveted chicken finger. In short, Britta Perry is a supremely ineffective rhetor. But—perhaps not coincidentally—Britta is also the moral center of the show.

Why, you might ask, is this relevant to a blog that is not (yet) a Community fanblog? Because, for me, Jeff and Britta serve as frequent reminders of the diversity of students and student attitudes I am likely to encounter as a rhetoric instructor. There are Jeffs, who might see a rhetoric course as an easy “A,” a chance to show off skills they already possess on the way to the meaningless, bureaucratic credential of a college degree. And there are Brittas, who might actually be better at empathizing with and considering the perspectives of the marginalized, but aren’t skilled at considering their peers’ perspectives in a way that will persuade said peers to take seriously the plights of the marginalized. (And, of course, there are Abeds, Annies, Changs, Pierces, Shirleys, and Troys, but this is a blog post—not a dissertation chapter [yet].) Strong persuasive skills with little ethical support, strong ethical character with little rhetorical savvy, and all point in between.

As a teacher of rhetoric, my tendency is often to valorize the Brittas and dread the Jeffs, feeling—like Socrates—that effective rhetorical instruction without an explicit focus on ethical content risks creating narcissistic manipulators. Despite the excess of credit such a worry likely grants to a one-semester first-year rhetoric course, it’s a worry that pesters me every time a student offers an inadvertently xenophobic comment in a class discussion.

My inclination with such comments is often to jump in with a brief counter-declamation, one that demonstrates—for instance—why men aren’t innately superior to women as college professors. But, in my more reflective moments, I wonder if I’m giving the student-communities I facilitate too little credit. After all, it’s rarely the teachers on Community who effect change in the study-group characters—the students effect change in each other. When Jeff gives persuasive speeches intended to prevent the group’s fragmentation, he doesn’t do so because he’s received in-class ethical instruction. It’s because the sense of community engendered by the group has fostered in him a sense of ethical responsibility for its members’ well-being (cue montage #2).

And beginning to understand her groupmates is one thing that helps Britta better communicate the import of social causes.

Obviously Community is artificial (but hey, so are Plato’s dialogues), so its merit as a ground for reflecting on one’s teaching practices might be doubtful. At the very least, however, I do find it helpful as a reminder of how potent a persuasive influence students can have on each other, and a check on my occasional urges to assume ethical caveats in the classroom must come from the teacher. Perhaps I instead need to leave more time for my students to respond to and complicate each other’s perspectives, myself learning to ask questions that effectively open spaces for ethical inter-student communities, rather than tending towards Socratic monologues that seek to impose morality from above.

Works Cited

"Contemporary American Poultry." Community: The Complete First Season. Sony, 2010. DVD.

Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1987. Print.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995. Print.

Plato. Philebus. The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamund Kent Sprague. 1972. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001. 39. Print.

"Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts." Community. Hulu. 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.

Mapping Community

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:38:54 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Augustus Koch

In my RHE 309S: Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing course at UT Austin, my students are spending the semester studying communities of their choice. The first paper asked students to "map" their community, charting the people, places, events, social practices, and issues that help the community define and organize itself while also examining arguments made about the community. This assignment resembles one of our main first-year writing assignments which asks students to map the arguments made in response to a specific critical situation or issue. Focusing on communities, however, students might examine multiple relevant issues and also texts that aren't primarily argumentative.

One of the main challenges of the paper was arrangement: how can students demonstrate the ways that the constiuent elements of a community shape and respond to one another and the ways that arguments circulate within and around the community, further affecting its contours? Stasis theory was helpful in terms of organizing the arguments made about the community, and we also spent time in class creating mind maps to conceptually organize the various aspects of our communities (the Digital Writing and Research Lab has several lesson plans outlining specific mind mapping activities and assignments). These tools were helpful but abstract, and students ultimately found another component of the assignment more helpful in terms of getting a sense for the organization and development of their communities in time and space.

In addition to the written analysis of texts by and about the community in the paper, this assignment also asked students to produce a map or a timeline using Google Maps or Dipity (you can find the assignment description here). Google allows you to overlay content onto its maps, marking locations of interest and adding annotations, links, and embedded media, and Dipity's timelines offer similar opportunities for composing multimedia texts. These digital writing environments allowed students to engage their communities and relevant texts in new and often more productive ways. Many students felt that, after working on their maps and timelines, they were better prepared to map the broader contours of their communities in prose.

For example, one of our most challenging concepts for this assignment was kairos, attending to shifting contexts over time. Students could develop a sense for ways that an argument might respond to a recent event, but beyond this, kairos was difficult to wrap our heads around. The timeline activity proved particularly helpful here, as students were able to create representations that captured how their communities had changed over time. In a quick glance, we could see how different events and developments led to shifts in a community's priorities, its place in the public sphere, its sense of stability and cohesiveness, and its broader orientation toward the world.

Looking at some of these projects in greater depth gives a sense for the opportunities made available by mapping community in multimedia spaces. A student considering the remix artist community charted a history of recording technologies, the rise of the DJ, and the spread of dance halls going back to the phonograph. What would have taken up too much time and been too broad for the perspective of the paper became an insightful overview that placed remix artists in a long tradition of social practices organized around recorded sound. A student focusing on human trafficking explored global responses to this human rights violation by attaching policies to specific locations. In her paper, this student produced the most sophisticated analysis in the class, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the relationship between specific groups within the community, their mode of response, and place, an understanding facilitated by her ability to map these relationships on a map. A student looking at the community invested in nanotechnologies traced relevant advancements back to the use of Damascus steel in swords, a practice whose techniques "created carbon nanotube fibers within the blades, giving the swords unparalleled strength and flexibility."

Maps and timelines offer students different logics and processes of engagement, translating communities from static entities to assemblages unfolding in time and space.