Pish Posh. That is what I used to say about online classes. You know. Those fake classes, not the real ones where you have to get out of bed, shower, and gather at the agora to toil over the ideas. Online learning. Pish Posh. Then I had a hybrid online class and realized there is some rhetoric floating in these little boxes on the computer screen filled with composition. Maybe this seemingly artificial classroom is the perfect laboratory to create a new discourse.
I wonder if the intersection of ideas in a digital environment—a space void of physical materials where ideas are being born into a type of blank slate space—can create new alternative discourse. Context is essential to rhetoric and composition. Rhetoric applies knowledge of audience, purpose, and writing situations to create the framework that makes an argument or message a reality. This framework is crafted from knowledge of an audience: their values, beliefs, and background. Composition also relies heavily on knowledge of identity and situatedness. In order to more accurately assess and teach students, they can be individually and locally assessed. Multilingualism, writing experiences, homelife, lifestyle, heritage, and literacy profiles of students are understood through complex interactions with a physical being in relation to classroom space, materials, teacher, parents, community, culture of a geographic region. How do online spaces prohibit or impair students and instructors within those spaces from acquiring knowledge of each other? Moreover, how can this impairment of identity and lack of context be negotiated, even manipulated in a digital environment, so traditional knowledge-making created in mainstream classroom environments are subverted through new alternative discourse created online?
I like what you say about this type of venue for words is crafted with a knowledge of audience. However, sometimes these spaces don't have an audience. It's the one you create as you read what you wrote aloud. That's where I get stuck on blogging and journaling. Who is my audience? Am I my audience, if so then this creation is for myself? I need an audience, I need face to face. I look forward to following your blog!! :)
ReplyDeleteThe idea that stuck out to me, Yvonne, was also the question of audience. We might start the conversation with Walter Ong's article "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." https://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/MakingReaders/Readings/Ong%20Writer%27s%20Audience.pdf
ReplyDeleteOf course, one of the paradoxes that the question of audience brings up for me is that most common of critiques of online instruction, that there's no give and take, no feedback, no conversation. That stuff goes on in f2f classes, right? How do we do that in online classes?
What resonates with me is that when we think about these f2f values, one thing we're suggesting is that in a f2f class we have a better idea of our audience because we see them every day. (Yeah, I think, what about those three guys who sit on the back row and spend their time comparing selfies on their IPads while I'm trying to talk, or that girl who sits by herself in the corner and never looks up?)
Then, I think about how we put a class together, design the assignments, write a syllabus, gather readings. All of those are done with no direct knowledge of audience, just a vague idea based on what we remember from when we taught that class three years ago.
Now I'm wondering how much of college teaching makes no allowances for audience at all? Some of my colleagues who lecture like to use those clickers. Is that the best we can do?
Good questions, Matt!
Mark and Yvonne, you are both inside my head. The trajectory of my question and research has me yearning to design an online space that will, hopefully, bring a digital audience into focus, and maybe less imagined. "The Writer is Always Fiction" was personally insightful to my creative writing and into how an imagined audience is easily constructed in composition. With oral communication discussed as more direct with less masking, I understand more how a digital audience may be more layered in masks. With that in mind, I do think we can do a better job knowing, assessing, and interacting in rhetorically effective ways in both f2f and digital spaces. You make an excellent point about not necessarily knowing f2f students any more than those digital ones. I never thought of that. I see challenges in finding a real audience with both the oral and written tradition here.
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