My digital essay “Who’s Afraid of the Pen” is an exploration into adolescents’ habits, beliefs and predispositions about writing through a close analysis of three students’ responses to interview questions. It occurred to me as an interesting topic as we first brainstormed the blogs, and I quickly found that it was a topic about which I wanted to write more than a measly 400 words. Several of my posts neared one thousand before I had hardly scratched the surface of the topic for that week.

It seemed intuitive then, to continue that work, and to transform it in a way that would carry some of the interpretive work I had done in the blog, but to rework it such that it was in a format that was meant to be assessed (accessed?) in a few number of sittings, and that wasn’t supposed to have the overt temporal that a blog has , at least to me.

this is the kind of calculated idiocy I used to manipulate the tone of my essay

Relatedly, I really enjoyed trying to mesh different forms of media together. It would have been exceedingly tedious of me to have to transcribe dozens of minutes of student interview. With this format, I didn’t have to. I could let the students speak for themselves and to each other, while I sat back and drew connections, made commentary. Although I feel that I did some serious intellectual work here, writing in such a context made me feel more free to play with the tone of my own writing, such that I think I manage to come off as a a voice with authority (somewhat) that can poke fun at itself as well as the pseudoscience of trying to make claims about students every where, or even all across Durham, by studying three students in the same school. I felt very few constraints in the wordpress medium. It was intuitive enough for me to use technically, and the added affordances felt like opportunities, not hurdles to be leapt or obstacles overcome.

The post I’d like to focus on centers around an ideological shift in classrooms as a result of digital culture. “ Digital culture has already started affecting dominant cultural epistemology by shifting some focus away from experts and giving it to participants.” We’ve talked in many ways how this is not a new idea, (the author, too, makes a Wild Wild West metaphor) but the author of this journal frames it around the students, writing, “Students in the digital environment, whether in a hybrid or fully online classroom, carry more responsibility for their own progress. To succeed, they have to monitor their own progress more directly, engage with the insights of their peers, and ponder the external relevance of their work. A revolution is growing online that takes this trend to an extreme — digital citizens are building educational communities without institutions. “Learning” no longer means, or needs to mean, “going to school.” It can just mean developing good observation and critical thinking skills.”

Educators have an excellent opportunity before them: build the new generation to be open to sharing ideas publicly and thereby intentionally adding content that can be perused and compared to the “experts’”. In this way we can connect students with other students, with incumbent and emerging leaders in a field, with people around the world. The trick is for educators to abandon (or at least greatly diminish) the “follow the leader” ideology that permeates public schools today. Instead of being repeatedly and incredibly prescriptive in what students can and/or cannot do. we should encourage, not hinder, the kind of independent thinking and increased responsibility that would thrive in the Wild West and will be a boon in the digital future.

Sophie’s blog, Novel Terrain, has been excellent fodder for her obvious talents as a writer. She has re-imagined historical moments, uncovered layers from some classic works of literature and made them accesible to modern readers, and most importantly, made us excited to read these works. One example in particular from her post, “Have an Adventure!”, makes me remember how fiendishly I awaited moments when I could dive between the covers of my bed and the covers of some girthy tome:

“There are few other novels in the world that paint as vivid a picture for our imaginations as The Hobbit does.  The details are as clear as peering through a microscope at the brush stokes on a van Eyck painting. Rivendell, the center of elf-land, gushes with waterfalls and oozes with magic. And Smaug’s treasure gleans at us from under his heaving belly.  The characters too, and not just their surroundings, are depicted with rich detail: Gollum’s pathetic insanity is so real you can almost smell it, and Bilbo’s sensible and good-natured heart is at hand through all the novel’s terrain.”

In those few sentences I am transported. “Rivendell, the center of elf-land, gushes with waterfalls and oozes with magic. And Smaug’s treasure gleams at us from under his heaving belly,” she writes, and I am ten again; would that I could travel with our heroes, and that more writers had a flair as imaginative as Sophie’s.

I had the pleasure of reading this post on Carburrito from Kristin in class one day when we were workshopping, and for the entire time I couldn’t stop smiling. You might think, “Hey, and stupe with a keyboard can write a blog about a burrito and catch your interst, Parker.” And yeah, you’d be right, but, Kristen’s prose in this post made me forget the food she was describing (and the succulent pictures that accompanied the descriptions) because I so enjoyed what she said and how she said it. She was relatable, informed and clearly, clearly biased towards tasty tasty cuisine; her passion was contagious:

“Apparently, I love burritos, or at least I love burrito places.

There is nothing like Carrburritos on a Saturday night before going to see The Artist to make you feel like the hippest kid in Carrboro. I didn’t actually get a burrito though, I got a sweet potato quesadilla, which sounds like a typo but isn’t.

[...] Above, the meal is shown. It was delicious. As we waited for our double order of quesadillas, we snacked on guacamole, chips and salsa. The guac was divine, but if you haven’t noticed, I have a strong desire to eat guacamole for every meal, so I may be overzealous. Lies. I’m not overzealous because Carrburritos is delicious and so is their guacamole.”

She finished that post with arguably the best slideshow outro in the history of photography. “Please enjoy” she declares with little ado, but obvious bliss, “a slideshow of nom.”

Boom.

Format and Materials: Im not entirely sure, yet, what the final form of my essay will be. I intend for it to be text heavy; I will spend much of my time theorizing and exploring, complicating and problematizing my own, students’ and established writers’ perspectives on and beliefs about writing. Within and between this text, I will splice and supplement with the video of students interviews themselves, audio and audio (if accessible and applicable) from other writers, as well as links to or copies of my own writing (if hubris swells large enough, that is).

Questions: Someone who knows the internet: please (read: pleeeeeezz) tell me what format might serve me best. That was more of a demand, I know. for a real question, I have but one: do you think this will be worth reading? Following that: I know I will enjoy writing about writing, and even more than that, thinking about thinking about writing about writing (meta meta writing; win.), but who would my readership be, if they even exist? Is that as valid a question when writing a digital essay as when brainstorming a blog?

This distinction is a curious one for me, particularly in lgiht of recent Supreme Court rulings that uphold hte idea that a corporation is somehow, essentially a person. This makes a bit more sense with the lens of internet money-making tactics. If corporations are  basically organized groups of people, then why look at their methods/means as any different from those of an individual with a wide array of resources?

Victoria pointed to a few ways in which individuals strategies are not so different from those of corporations, and I’d like to offer a possible answer to her essential question: We feel safer when one person wants our money, and we think that his/her resources are not so vast that he/she might take advantage of us to get it. There is an ideology of fairness that we seem to feel these giant corporations are violating, I think. Ultimately, one of two things will happen: we will grow accustomed to their intrusiveness as business-as-usual, or some hella liberal supreme court will say that what they’re doing is wrong, and, the commodification of the internet will return to simple banner ads chosen by the creator of a blogger page.

This goes for any subject, and particularly English/ Language Arts. Critical thinking, critical reading skills, reasoning, compare/contrast analysis will always be skills requisite not only for academia, but for overall life-preparedness. Furthermore, I think that they are extremely transferable. If you can assess  a sound argument in print, you can do it in type; if you can calculate the interest on your credit card bill by hand, you can certainly get a calculator to do it for you; if you patiently observe the change in amphibian population in your local pond over time, an online population simulator might augment your experience, but  would not replace its value, nor, surely, its meaning.   The examples are proliferate.

Ultimately, while Prensky’s suggestion for a curricular change may come to take favor among policy-makers, it will not come to pass for a few years at least. Similarly, most schools have abouta 15-1 student-to-computer ratio, at best. I’ve literally broken up near-fistfights between teachers squabbling over the last available slot in April to sign up for 15 seven year old lap-tops with missing keys. I say we kick it old-school, and teach thinking however we can, as best we can.

Oh, and Microsoft Word’s spell-check is breaking writing. 9th graders today look at me like I’m nuts when I advise them to “sound it out”.

“Elitis,” I posted, “is the pathological condition of attributing superhuman attributes (and or Super Bowl MVP trophies) to an above-average quarterback.”

I think it works because mainly because of its phonetic structure. “Eli” and the suffix “-itis” share a vowel-sound (obviously) which allows them to be combined without any of the stumble-inducing phonetics of some of Microstyle‘s poorer examples. Similarly, the phonetics of the word liken it, at least to a creator who would gladly see his cleverness quotient approach infinity, to the word “elided”, which reminds me again that Eliphiles overlook his recurring, glaring deficiencies (which are too numerous to address adequately in this context.) Finally, symbolically, it is not too much of a stretch to comprehend; even if a reader didn’t know exactly where I was going with “Elitis”, he or she might quickly recognize that suffix and compute that somehow, I was going to spurn Eli and/or his supporters. I really hope it appears in the comments section, because I think it could spur plenty of debate.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, #hailtotheredskins.

We are, indeed, incorporating writing into our daily lives in a multitude of formats, but I initially want to resist the claim that this kind of writing, this documentation of minutiae, is new. at least it isnt to me. My notebooks and purchased texts, clean of doodles and drawings, o’erspill with people-watching haiku and itchy-scalp tanka, band camp limericks and sneezy quattrains. I have been “life-writing”, if I may be so punny, all my life. Maybe it the formatting that makes a difference in these authors’ minds. Perhaps it is not simply enough to document the state of my hangover ad nauseum (once ya’ pop the puns dont stop), but to publish this informaton.  I will agree: writing is now more interpersonal; I don’t need a publishing contract to get my writing exposed to the world, just a blogspot and a loud mouth. Check annnd check. But something about even this still doesn’t seem to jive, and so I wonder: How can my life’s writing possibly be more like “life writing”? This brings me, of course, to Twitter.

tweet from @sdhiggins at 3:36: When i was little and i had the chicken pox, it wasliterally the worst week of my life. Having them is THE ABSOLUTE WORST #itchy

tweet from @palexandermoney: @sdhiggins lol #tough. how does that even happen?

tweets from @sdhiggins:

@PAlexanderMoney according to the doctor, if your immune system gets low enough, the chicken pox can be reactivated in the nerves
@PAlexanderMoney it’s very uncommon in people under 50, but somehow I was either stressed enough or sick enough for it to happen to me lol