Turkle, Sherry. Simulation and Its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2009.

September 5, 2011 under DigiRhet

What does simulation want? It demands immersion.

 

Turkle’s book “gives voice to how scientists, engineers, and designers have responded to simulation and visualization technologies as those became central to their work over the past 25 years” (xii). It includes 4 case studies that demonstrate how simulation technology functions as extensions of the human self and forces negotiation between human beings and with machines.

 

In the 1980s, a 70 million dollar gift was given to MIT from IBM to facilitate the integration of computerization on campus. Turkle documents here the way that different faculty responded to the resulting systems and to other simulations meant to enhance or simplify the work of their fields.

Architects wanted to protect the “scared space” of drawing, with many complaining that the computer-generated designs defeated creativity because of the temptation to choose the preprogrammed defaults. Additionally, in contrast to painstakingly wrought hand drawings, designs made on the computer seemed “finished” before they had really been thought out.

 

Turkle also explores the relationship of physicists, biologists, chemists, and nuclear weapons specialists to simulations in their work. Over time, simulation software became increasingly BLACK BOXED: “the term engineers use to describe something that is no longer open to understanding” (26). Overwhelmingly, although younger practitioners tended to accept the increasing opacity of digital tools more readily than their senior colleagues, the prevailing feeling was that “scientists should never abdicate authority to instruments they did not fully understand” (61).

 

Indeed, “from both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety that in simulation, something important slips away” (7). “Screen versions of reality will always leave something out, yet [they] may come to seem like reality itself” (17).

 

However, by many, “from the time it was introduced, simulation was taken as the way of the future” (12). Increasingly, our work and our lives are conducted “on, through, with, and between… screens” (150). What does simulation want? Turkle concludes by reiterating the idea that “simulation seems to want, through our immersion, to propose itself as a proxy for the real” (80). Keeping tabs on “who we are” in relation to the software and apps that we use thus becomes a difficult and slippery question.

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Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc. 2009.

April 28, 2011 under DigiRhet

Links to others’ discussions of this book

Sawyer
Spinuzzi
Bailie
Lewis
Boyle – great interactive overview
Crandall
Brown

My stuff forthcoming.

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Papp, James. “Gleaning in Academe: Personal Decisions for Adjuncts and Graduate Students.” College English 64.6 (2002): 696-709. Print.

April 6, 2011 under TAtraining

If there is one message that sounds loud and clear from this piece, it is: Do Not Accept Adjunct Work. Using data from a 1999 survey conducted by the MLA, which asked all of the departments of English and foreign languages in its database (5,245 in all) to provide information about tenure-track and non-tenure-track instructors, Papp works through all the reasons why non-tenure track, part time college teaching positions should be avoided at all costs. Most compelling are the income statistics he mentions: those with professional degrees stand to make an average of $93,714; PhDs, $79,346; MAs, $52,771; BAs, $40,695; AAs, $29,749; and HS grads, $21,680. In order for part time college instructors to eek out a living that is barely higher than that made by someone with an associate’s degree is ludicrous to Papp, who opines that:

The jobs that compensate employees in proportion to the talent and work they have put into advanced degree work are not part-time or full-time adjunct positions but tenure-track faculty and administrative positions inside academe, and business, government, and nonprofit positions outside academe. (707)

He demonstrates that he has put into practice what he preaches by recounting his own path after graduate school; failing to obtain a tenure-track position after graduation, he left for the Peace Corps and taught overseas. Upon returning, he spent four unsuccessful years on the market before “happily accept[ing] an interesting job as an administrator outside the academy instead of continuing to look for a tenure-track professorship. The ten-year search with diminishing chance of success was not for me” (705). He explains that “only half of those who go into non-tenure-track positions after the PhD obtain tenure-track positions within ten years, and the overwhelming majority of those who do have done so by their third year out” (705).

 

Instead of succumbing to the “unspoken bargain among administrators, tenured faculties, disciplines, students, and taxpayers to allow the proliferation of part-time piecework” (707) which benefits everyone but the overworked and underpaid adjuncts they rely on, part-time faculty need to “accept their complicity in the bargain, and the compromises they are making to their careers, their potential, their quality of life, and their peace of mind, before they can improve their situations. The bottom line is that all of our calls for more morality and better treatment when it comes to adjuncts have not been heeded, and would-be adjuncts need to consider this very carefully before accepting such a position.

 

Papp, James. “Gleaning in Academe: Personal Decisions for Adjuncts and Graduate Students.”College English 64.6 (2002): 696-709. Print.

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Lee, Jenny J. et al. “Tangles in the Tapestry: Cultural Barriers to Graduate Student Unionization.” The Journal of Higher Education 75.3 (2004): 340-361. Print.

April 6, 2011 under TAtraining

The authors begin by acknowledging Nathan Glazer’s statement that “‘In the end, it is rather easier to change the world than the university” (341). Chronicling the relatively brief history of graduate student unionization, the article proceeds to introduce its purpose in identifying and better understanding the cultural barriers to this practice. It does so by examining the qualitative data gathered in 34 interviews with graduate students, administrators, and staff through several theoretical frameworks concerning culture and identifying the implications of their findings for faculty, administrators, and graduate students. The study took place at UCLA

Pains are taken to examine competing definitions of culture, which when taking the different levels of interpretation by “individuals, departments, institutions, and so forth… may be viewed as an interconnected web that is understood by recognizing both the underlying structure and the participants’ actions and interpretations (Geertz, 1973)” (345). Relying on Schein’s model of culture, which focuses on artifacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions to make sense of how cultures operate, they examine these elements as they exist within subcultures of graduate students, faculty, and administration.

 

Graduate Students Their findings revealed that while most graduate students did not oppose efforts to unionize, many did not participate. Reasons for not participating were captured in the interviews, most of which boiled down to the idea that “we should get our work done and get out of here” (351). Because of the temporal nature of graduate school, many viewed the effort it would take to organize a union as too great a burden on their time and ultimately as a barrier to graduating. Some identified the stigma of unions and mentioned that unions were for “blue collar workers,” which the researchers claim point to the entrenchment of the intellectual ideal in academe. The interviews indicate that there is “an underlying assumption linked to [graduate students'] temporary… status: a sense that being overworked and underpaid is to be expected” (351).

 

Faculty Interestingly, while Lee et. al. claim that faculty is usually in support of efforts of graduate students to unionize in theory, in the interviews, some faculty expressed disdain for the “rules” that would be imposed upon them as a result and even indicated that nothing would really change as a result of a union contract.

‘The contract won’t be followed closely. People may pay lip service to it, but things won’t change. This contract could limit everyone’s flexibility. We’re in academia. We should have the autonomy to make our own decisions without having to follow all these rules and criteria.’ (353)

 

Administration Administrators, who often see themselves as the “caretakers” of the university, voiced concerns ans misgivings over unionization that the authors identify at times as “paternal.” It is the administration that most often presents the most difficult barriers to unionization, and as such the authors emphasize that administrators should be educated about the history of this movement and potential benefits to adopting it.

 

Lee, Jenny J. et al. “Tangles in the Tapestry: Cultural Barriers to Graduate Student Unionization.” The Journal of Higher Education 75.3 (2004): 340-361. Print.

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Duffey, Suellynn et al. “Conflict, Collaboration, and Authority: Graduate Students and Writing Program Administration.” Rhetoric Review 21.1 (2002): 79-87. Print.

April 6, 2011 under TAtraining

This article offers a narrative of the struggles faced by eight graduate student who were charged with the task of facilitating peer groups of writing instructors in the first year writing program at The Ohio State University under program director Suellynn Duffey. Desiring a collaborative approach, the writers chronicle the challenges to implementing strategies which adhere to the principle of decentering authority but which are still meaningful and productive.

Like Sullivan et. al., who disagree with Crowley’s argument that FYC should be abolished because of its historically disadvantaged institutional position, Duffey et. al. acknowledge that all intellectual activity in the university must take place within its own bureaucratic structure. They point to the need to resist their own “inner-bureaucrat” while fostering collaborative, rather than hierarchal, teaching methods and pedagogies. They write:

Our collaboration as writing program administrators did not and could not escape hierarchy, but our experience does suggest that faculty members and graduate students can, if they choose, engage in collaborative practices. Such an engagement allows for a transformation of, rather than a resistance to, our inner bureaucrats. (85)

The refusal to submit to their inner-bureaucrats, who demanded clear authority, and immediately identifiable results was borne of a realization by the TA facilitators that they had to model the kind of “collaborative, critical pedagogy that [they] espoused… [and] resist adopting the directive authority that many TAs believed they needed” (83).

 

Duffey, Suellynn et al. “Conflict, Collaboration, and Authority: Graduate Students and Writing Program Administration.” Rhetoric Review 21.1 (2002): 79-87. Print.

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