Mapping a Digital Tradition

I wonder if alternative paths in composition can be paved through a variety of digital forms (modes, assignments) with specific purposes and a better understanding of audience. When interaction between audience members (peers & instructor) is limited to communication through composition only, then each interaction (post, comment) is a rhetorical opportunity that requires a student to quickly consider and negotiate audience in an unpredictable composition environment where any audience member or members (peers or instructor) can appear in a conversation at any given moment—forcing the student writer into immediate writing choices, which practices and improves their rhetorical skills.

Be Still, Focus Your Eyes, and Type

I have been thinking a lot these days on how digital learning is different from f2f classrooms. Throughout this exploration, I am allowing myself to make some lofty assumptions as I jump down a few rabbit holes. Maybe digital learning bypasses the social interaction in f2f and immediately engages the cognitive. This may make digital learning a more efficient way to learn with more learning opportunities (clicks versus movements) within a given time and space. In a traditional f2f classroom, the student may divide their attention between social interaction and using in-class technology. However, the online student sits solely in front of the computer screen, and is therefore fully engaged in clicking, composing, and metacognition. Rearranging desks and chairs may change the rhetoric of the classroom. However, these options are restricted to movement in a limited space. For instance, movements and positioning between student and teacher when conferencing or collaboration within peer feedback groups construct a reality based on physical interaction. These f2f interactions create cognitive schemas, stereotypes, and judgments that can be hidden or manipulated in a digital environment. This masking of identity changes the use of rhetoric within the online space. With a click, time can be controlled, and perception of audience, purpose, and situation can perhaps be manipulated to create knowledge that produces alternative and hybrid discourses.   

A Digital Laboratory for Learning

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?