Review of the Focusrite iTrack Solo Audio Interface for the iPad. Just getting started with these tech reviews for the New Media Scholar blog. (Http://www.NewMediaScholar.net). I want to make sure to give a big shout-out to my good friend HARLEY FERRIS for producing the soundbeds at the beginning and end of the show!

Let me know if you've got any tips. Thanks.

Review of the Focusrite iTrack Solo Audio Interface for the iPad

In conceiving of this individual piece of our larger overall text, I knew that I wanted to focus on the messiness, the confusion, the trepidation, and the chaos that were all, at various times, present over the course of each of the DMAC institutes in which I taught or facilitated. For six consecutive summers I had the privilege of encountering a new cohort of scholars and graduate students. That repetition rendered several insights about the sorts of environments and attitudes that foster skilled praxis with digital writing tools. Of course, repeated practice, rhetorical awareness, and patience are what most people learn as the fundamentals of working within a learning environment like CIWIC-DMAC. However, a more subtle, but no less central or necessary element is the messiness holding the chaos together.

Like the other individual pieces of our text, this audio text focuses on themes of openness, messiness, and hospitality. Not only does the text examine these themes as organizing content, but it also directly enacts them as well. As contradictory as it might seem, there is a strong correlation between openness and intimacy. While it is possible that our published text might find a receptive public audience amongst computers and writing scholars, the opening conversation took place in a much more intimate environment. The heavy wood dining room table we gathered around fostered a sense of intimacy and openness about our teaching and writing practices. There was an overt sense of hospitality as we gathered in our colleagues' home, but there were also two other types of hospitality at work. One is the sort of hospitality present for any conversation to work, especially as that conversation gathers more people. To be one conversant among six takes respect and patience, an openness to others' ideas and the hospitality to make room for them, to listen to them, and to respond. But there was another hospitality present, too. Not only was the conversation lively and rich, but each of us knew that we were contributing our voices to an audio recording of the evening. We all agreed that each of us was free to use that recording as source material for our individual texts. The more I reflect on that, the more I've come to realize just how much trust and hospitality that required from each of us.  

When I first started planning for this individual audio text, I expected that our six-person conversation would struggle with a tension between the organization of the format and the chaos of the personalities sitting next to each other. Once I had access to the recorded conversation, I started working to foreground and juxtapose those two polarities. As much as possible, I wanted to emphasize the chaos and messiness of the ideas by breaking the conversation into hundreds of decontextualized sound bites. At the same time, I hoped to balance that cacophony by remixing selections of those soundbites into small, themed sound collages. The audio text that emerged from this process has ended up fitting surprisingly well into our larger text's ecological frame. The collages emphasize the multiplicity of competing and complementary voices coalescing around common concerns and attitudes related to openness, messiness, and hospitality here at our institution. 

TRANSCRIPT

Ames: there's critical mass of people who have been to CIWIC and DMAC

Trauman: putting them into the student's seat at DMAC or CIWIC

Ames: that there's a heritage here; that there's a lineage

Corrine: you weren't judged

Jonn: and i think that just like really let so much pressure out of that room

Corrine: i really didn't have any expertise at all in digital storytelling

Suzanne: it's creating that space where okay we're all in this together 


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman [voiceover narration]: CIWIC and DMAC have a long, storied, and decorated history. The institute’s impact on the field of Computers and Writing is immeasurable. It’s provided the spark for countless articles in Kairos and Computers and Writing, and it’s been one of the major catalysts for relations and collaborations between scholars from all over the country. Six of us, each instructors here at Columbia College Chicago, sat down to discuss the impact that CIWIC-DMAC has had on each of us and on our institution. What follows is a remix of, and commentary on, that two-hour conversation as one particular theme emerged. Anyone who’s actually attended CIWIC or DMAC, or even heard whispers of its failed platforms, minor meltdowns, or secret margarita recipes, knows that one of the fundamental aspects the institute’s power is a semi-controlled chaos. A messiness, if you will. Each of us had to learn not only to accept and embrace that absence of precision, but to find a way to employ it productively in our own careers and at our own institutions. And as you’ll hear, the institute’s directors and instructors reckoned with messiness in a way that allowed it to become a mechanism for a more interactive and productive classroom where students and instructors both contribute and learn from each other. The form of this text as you’re listening to it now emerges from and attempts to capture that chaos that was our conversation and the sort of messiness from which CIWIC-DMAC draws it’s power.


[Sound of page turning.]


Pegeen: messiness

Suzanne: it's gonna make it messy, and isn't that beautiful?

Pegeen: this idea of embracing messiness

Suzanne: how you approach the messiness and how you embrace the messiness

Pegeen: a really spectacular mess

Ames: so the messiness was ridiculous

Jonn: should I try to make a break with what i'd been doing?

Suzanne: I have my own approach

Suzanne: I have messiness and failures

Ames: unbelievable

Pegeen: sometimes it's just a mess

Ames: it was a messiness, and then the product was pretty fucking great

Suzanne: we're kidding ourselves if we believe that teaching print writing has been any less messy

Ames: messiness is related to the process

Suzanne: we all approach the messiness of how it works in different ways

Suzanne: spectacular failures

Ames: nothing that you make is a mess

Pegeen: what kind of mess is productive

Suzanne: it is this way of approaching messiness

Pegeen: where should I try to not make a mess?


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: Messiness is an inevitable part of any composing process. We begin with an idea of what we want to produce. But as students and scholars in the process of learning these processes, our taste almost always outstrips our skill. The space between what we are capable of conceiving and what we are capable of producing is defined by error, experimentation, and learning. Finding some way to embrace this messiness opens up a space for experimentation, for confident mistakes, for productive failures.


[Sound of page turning.]


Pegeen: there's productive mess, and then there's failure

Suzanne: and productive failure

Ames: and so I'm always failing at this stuff

Pegeen: and productive failures

Ames: and because of that, and in that offering, and in that moment, people can relax and let go and try things they would not normally try

Jonn: and i think that just like really let so much pressure out of that room

Ames: there's an aesthetics to my rhetoric; that there is a sensibility that is mine, and that is immature, and that's going to develop

Ames: so therefore, when my students come to the class, and they're immature on the page, i can give them some space with that

Suzanne: and if I have access to play around with it, that's how I want to function 

Ames: so, I was like, Oh, well I'm going to make this piece called chicks with dicks. So I go to the internet, and I find little chicks, and I photoshop them, and then I cut them out. And then I find dicks [laughs]. And then she's showing us how to make... animate... how to tween. And so, I was like "Wow, look! You can make that little packie.." --a packie is an artificial dick that somebody packs in their pants when you're a drag king. Just so you know. And I'm making them crawl across the screen like worms [laughs] And so the little chicks go down and "fwoop, woop!" And then they eat the little worms. So they were chicks with dicks. I was experimenting with this. It was my own thing. I realized that I have a definite composing style that I never saw until I was playing with this. I'm not really sure what that means.

Pegeen: there's this kind of lovely talent of saying, "I don't know what I'm doing, but I can do it anyway." 

Suzanne: all of the stuff I know how to do is just from diving in and figuring out.

Corrine: alright, this is kind of a creative approach to the assignment, but we're gonna let it go

Suzanne: when I was at DMAC, the big thing for me was that I was thinking it's all about the in-between spaces.


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: Experimentation and mistakes are not always easy to accept as a student or encourage as a teacher. Engaging with emerging genres and new composing tools  can often be a source of anxiety or self doubt. One of the essential experiences of CIWIC/DMAC is engaging our own composing processes beyond the limits of our current skills and understanding. 


[Sound of page turning.]


Suzanne: the first day or two, it was just utter fear.

Corrine: this is not okay

Jonn: should I try to make a break with what I'd been doing?

Ames: I don't know how much this is making sense

Corrine: and this really didn't exactly fit the formula

Jonn: was it acceptable

Suzanne: you're putting yourself in the position of a student

Trauman: once you arrive at CIWIC or DMAC, you're in these uncomfortable spots, or discomfortable spots. You're now a student. You're the one without the expertise. 

Suzanne: It's always good for every person who teaches to be in the seat as a student again

Trauman: putting them into the student's seat at DMAC or CIWIC

Suzanne: you need to have an empathy for what it feels like to be asked to compose in a space that is not entirely comfortable for you

Jonn: students who are under a lot of pressure and really don't get to know each other that well

Suzanne: and to be afraid of what you don't know


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: Struggling with and embracing this sort of anxiety allows us to access a certain empathy with our students and fellow colleagues. It serves as an excellent reminder for what it’s like navigate a seemingly challenging, high-risk environment. But that’s not to say that the anxiety is without merit. Composing with digital media IS a complex task that demands new ways of thinking in order to capitalize on new modes of communication afforded by digital media.


[Sound of page turning.]


Suzanne: when you're working in multiple modes, all of the things that you're piecing together and juxtaposing are done in a purposeful way to achieve your rhetorical goals

Ames: thinking about how all of these pieces and parts fit together

Corrine: we were expected to work, we were expected to work hard, we were expected to produce

Jonn: knowing that it's going to be a struggle, but feeling like, you know, I can do this, and I can make it through, so...

Suzanne: we're going to work you really hard

Corrine: I'm actually pushing them really hard

Jonn: I mean it was humbling to be in that situation

Trauman: I try to think of things my students don't know how to do. they won't already have assumptions

Jonn: I think that that's a very useful sort of humbling

Ames: so how difficult it really is to negotiate and think about all the many platforms where you're talking about digital work

Trauman: discomforting their assumptions about what writing is by putting it into a new mode

Jonn: being open to trying a new platform

Ames: you know you've got the back end technical knowledge

Trauman: that idea of discomfort and having to renegotiate these new spaces

Ames: or the front end user knowledge

Suzanne: it's about pushing yourself to compose in this way because it's a reality we can't ignore


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: Learning to compose with digital media involves pushing yourself to learn things you don’t already know. As such, CIWIC/DMAC is in it’s best case scenario, an unsettling, destabilizing experience. Part of the institute’s success lies in its conceit that a productive space of learning requires a balance between risk and safety.


[Sound of page turning.]


Suzanne: opening a space for that discomfort

Corrine: right, I never felt pressured

Suzanne: it's a safe space to leverage that and experiment

Corrine: you weren't judged

Ames: and I was very immature in my "Chicks and Dicks," that's clear. 

Corrine: but there was never any pressure

Suzanne: It's creating that space where, okay, we're all in this together

Trauman: so we all sort of banded together and learned this thing

Jonn: they were telling me things, and helping me figure things out as we were working on these projects


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: Digital writing classrooms aren’t necessarily any more immune to unwieldy power dynamics than traditional classrooms. Insiders and outsiders. Experts and novices. Clearing a space for someone else to inhabit requires a certain amount of, well, privilege. Our conversation touched on some of Derrida’s notions of violence and generosity. A violence of making space, if you will. Most instances of generosity are fraught with a hierarchy stratified between expert and novice. Master and apprentice. Initiated and uninitiated.


[Sound of page turning.]


Corrine: that whole insider-outsider thing

Pegeen: it does assume a kind of power dynamic

Suzanne: sending you to your room until you feel better about it

Corrine: and you can revise and resubmit as many times until you're absolutely sick of me

Pegeen: yeah, I'll accept this project

Jonn: people will ask me about what I'm doing, and I think that makes me feel like I am an insider

Pegeen: you felt like you were part of the family

Corrine: I really didn't have any expertise at all in digital storytelling

Jonn: I guess I just automatically pretend like I know what I'm doing; I pretend like I'm an insider

Ames: that's the first time I know that I was actually a part of this community that you're talking about

Jonn: since I've been doing it now for three years, I think, you know, some of that pretending has sort of taken hold

Pegeen: there are insiders who can extend hospitality and invite you in 

Jonn: you know, I felt like I wasn't an expert by any means, but I felt like I could at least participate in that conversation

Trauman: you're used to being the one with the expertise

Suzanne: there's an underlying assumption that it's not experts teaching novices

Pegeen: you were of the community that could invite other people in

Jonn: now that I feel like maybe I've crossed over, I'm wondering did I cross the right direction? [laughter] Do I really want to be an insider with this?


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: the two stories you'll hear next come from Suzanne Malley and Corrine Calice, respectively. Both share stories about their non-traditional encounters with  students in which they ended up learning as much from their students as their students learned from them. 


[Sound of page turning.]


Suzanne: I asked students to write their literacy narratives, and then turn that into a multimodal composition... and he wrote "I'm going to do to Toys-r-Us and buy a dollhouse." That was his entire proposal. It was supposed to look like... What's your conceptual metaphor? What digital assets to you think you need? How are you going to craft the story in a brief amount of time? I'm like, "Oh my god, spectacular failure!" Also, his written literacy narrative was about two and a half paragraphs long, and I kept pushing him to do more, right? And so he comes in with this spectacular stop motion film of him working with Korean, Japanese, and English. And his way of learning the language was watching Japanese movies and English movies. And he comes home and he has an A on the test. Stop motion dollhouse film! Right? Then he went back and wrote a lovely print narrative. Why? Because he composed in a stop motion film, which was different than my composing process. So what I learned as a teacher is that I now offer either way to do that. You choose the process through which you're going to arrive at these end products.


[Sound of page turning.]


Corrine: I get to class last night, and I'm supposed to be talking about storyboarding, and I'm like, "Shoot, I don't know a frickin' thing about storyboarding." [laughs] And I've gotta walk into class today and have a class on storyboarding. And so I say to my students, "So tell me a little bit about how you storyboard." And all of a sudden, they start pulling out of their bags these documents that they use, these templates and stuff that different departments use to teach their students how to storyboard. I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I don't really know any storyboarding, but they know, and we're co-exploring.


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: One of the fundamental aspects of DMAC, characteristics of the summers I spent there, was the destabilization and upending of traditionally unequal relationships between instructors and students.


[Sound of page turning.]


Suzanne: complicate the idea of expertise

Jonn: opens up this other area where students have expertise that I don't have

Ames: it's not just me giving to students all the time. I sometimes have to accept what it is they've got to give me.

Suzanne: but the way we're conceiving of this hospitality mixed with generosity and DMAC and CIWIC complicates that violence

Ames: I think of CIWIC as having a lot of feminist methodology

Suzanne: because it's a two-way violence

Ames: and it's so queer, I have to tell you, it's a queer space

Suzanne: it is working back and forth so that the provider of the hospitality does not necessarily have all of the power

Ames: it shifts your understanding of what the normative understanding of power would be


[Sound of page turning.]


Trauman: It might just be that CIWIC-DMAC’s effectiveness emerges not from its wielding of power, privilege, and insider status, but from it’s very willingness to relinquish those relationships. To encourage their inversion in ways that keep the institute fresh and vital for each new class of participants. This insight and humility are exactly what ensures the institute’s continual reinvention and the vitality of its ongoing legacy across our discipline.


[Sound of page turning.]


A Mess of Influences

Memory: The Machinist's Son

(My friend Amy recently wrote a story ("What's the word, I forget sometimes") in which she's recognizing a strength blossoming within her new, post-relationship reckoning. It's a beautiful story. This is my response to her...)

"...that kind of vision that diffuses itself."

So let’s say you don’t have a ton of experience incorporating audiovisual elements into your writing classroom assignments. Let’s also say that maybe you are a little intimidated by the prospect not only because it is something new to you and your students, but also because your yourself are not sure what an audiovisual assignment might look like. How do you design an audio assignment where the adoption of new technologies and new practices doesn’t obfuscate the point of the assignment altogether? How do you design an assignment that still seems like a “writing assignment” in line with the traditional expectations that most students bring to a writing classroom, while simultaneously challenging those notions by incorporating alternative modes of composition and distribution? My advice...

Incorporating an Audio Assignment into your Classroom: The PSA

Masters of Text is a podcasting project from Ames Hawkins and Ryan Trauman meant to foster discussion of alternative textual forms of scholarship, and to promote scholarship about alternative modes of textuality. As much as possible, Masters of Text works to focus on fostering textuality and scholarship that combines intelligence, critique, creativity, and beauty. More simply, we’re focused on “critical-creative” approaches to scholarship.

In terms of our larger research and creative agendas, this project brings to bear Ames’s practices as a transgenre writer, educator, and art activist. Her recent work makes contributions to the larger conversations regarding multimodal composing, art activism, collaboration, and queer literary nonfiction. And for Trauman, this project is an extension of his work publishing long-form multimodal scholarship, as well as his creative work with StoryCenter, a non-profit digital storytelling organization rooted in social justice and higher education initiatives.

Masters of Text - Season 1 - Episode 1

A short response to my friend, Daniel, about why I find it so hard to pick up the phone when he calls or respond to emails he sends. A reflection on why I have a hard time, sometimes, of being a good friend.

photo: "Life" by Santosh PhotographY (http://www.flickr.com/photos/santoshy/6222540914/)

Ryan Trauman

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