Logie, John. Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2006.

Logie addresses through rhetorical historicism five terms used to describe sharing in the peer-to-peer debates (hacking, theft, piracy, sharing, and war), arguing that in order to understand the basis of the arguments on both sides of the debate, we must throughly investigate the language through which those arguments are being made. He believes that current copyright restrictions, including DMCA and the TEACH Act, are limiting the potential of people to create new culture and ideas. Logie argues that the composition classroom, where students are taught about the social nature of composition, plagiarism, individual authorship, and intellectual property, is an important place to talk with students about the rhetoric, language, and arguments behind these debates and to teach them how they might argue for a copyright law that allows for the creative potential the Internet promises.

Quotable Quotes

“And while the stakes of intellectual property debates ultimately devolve to who gets paid how much and when, the mechanism for assuring fair compensation—a limited monopoly right—has profound consequences for the circulation and availability of cultural artifacts.”(8)

“Digital media offer opportunities to efficiently archive and access the bulk of artistic and intellectual work created since the dawn of humanity.

This is not an overstatement. The potential intellectual and social utility of these now-hypothetical archives is staggering. Our challenge is to engage in a principled argument about how best to achieve this goal. ” (21)

“[RIAA and other big media corporations] had persuaded most Americans that the act of downloading copyrighted material from the Internet—whatever the context and purpose—was illegal. This victory was achieved in large part because of the successful rhetorical strategies of the content industries. And once these industries had persuaded Americans that downloading was criminal, the logical next step was to ensure that it was perceived as

violent crime.” (66)

“The past decade’s major legislative amendments to copyright—in particular the Copyright Term Extension Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Theft Act, and the TEACH Act—collectively constitute a disastrous appropriation of rights, privileges, and opportunities formerly understood to belong to the public at large. At the very moment that the most powerful cultural tool in human history—the networked personal computer—has become both widely available and largely affordable, the U.S. is busily drafting laws that reinforce a copyright model optimized long ago for the circulation of print-based media.” (141)

Notable Notes

how ethos and pathos play into both sides of the debate, Burkean identification

no statistical significance on the economic effect of P2P sharing on record companies…Napster failed to show how most of its activity was not the theft of protected commercial property, but rather sharing of free culture for the public good

piracy = theft by force, kidnapping, murdering, violence

Napster, P2P file sharers aren’t targetted for downloading but for uploading – for distribution

sound quality of MP3 and CD – two different purposes

limits ability of cut and pasting with purchased Adobe e-books

Yancey, Kathleen. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” CCC 56.2 (Dec 2004) 297-328.

This is Yancey’s 2004 CCCC Chair’s address, which was billed more as a multimedia, multivocal “performance” because, in conjunction with her speech, she had a slideshow that displayed images and quotes that did not directly illustrate her speech but rather interpreted her thoughts in a new way.

Her address asks compositionists to reimagine the content, structure, and location of the field of rhetoric and composition. Pointing out that digital technology has created a writing public in the same way a reading public was created in the late 19th century, she argues for changing composition curriculum that more accurately reflects the kinds of writing students are already doing on their own, the kinds of writing that are requried for 21st century lives. In order to teach students how to write and develop multimedia, multigenre literacies, a vertical undergraduate major must be developed, one in which courses focus on the intertextual, dialogic circulation of composition, the interrelatedness of the canons of rhetoric, and the effect and the deicity of technology on literacy. Finially, this “new key” of composition requires faculty to be willing to change their curriculum structure and embrace this new literacy space to live and work in.

Quotable Qutotes

“Composition in this school context, and in direct contrast to the world context, remains chiefly focused on the writer qua writer, sequestered from the means of production” (309) – solitary, tutorial model vs. social, productive model.

“Never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside. Never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres” (298)

“Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change” (298)

Notable Notes

problem….training teachers

Apostel, Shawn and Moe Folk. First Phase Information Literacy on a Fourth Generation Website: An Argument for a New Approach to Website Evaluation Criteria. Computers and Composition (Spring 2005).

Writing instructors need to change how they teach students to evaluate online sources both to account for students’ own “insider” knowledge of online sources and to account for the shift from alphabetic, text-centered criteria to integrated, multimodal digital design. Their article explains the current shift to incorporate visual literacies into the teaching of composition and gives an overview (with examples) of the four generations of web site design. Old standards for online site evalutions favored objectivity and centralization, ignoring a multitude of rich, subjective sources in blogs, forums, and multimedia. The digital world is rapidly evolving – we have to keep up, change our standards, and teach our students to use it well.

Quotable Quotes

“as websites evolve from their text-only beginnings, the book-derived criteria for evaluating credible sources are becoming increasingly archaic.”

“Here we see that teaching students to evaluate websites based on alphabetic skills may no longer be a sufficient way to equip students to critique and create rhetoric. As websites move into future generations of development, they will—if the current trends continue—incorporate more digital images, video and audio files, and animated images into their designs. If these communication devices are going to be used to orient our way of seeing the relation and display of information, then we need to empower our students with the ability to negotiate these sources so they can critique the information being presented.”

“Before dismissing our students’ current habits, then, we might look at how they are “making do” and how their strategies can be utilized and/or improved to impact our current ideas of website value in the classroom.”

Notable Notes

4 generations: 1. heavy text dump, no formatting 2. introduce tiled backgrounds, tables, frames, animated GIFs 3. thoughtful multimedia design (CDROM technology) 4. all of #3 plus non-CDROM technology like online shopping, IM, broadcasting live

student ways to evaluate sites: who links to this site? where did the original content come from? what does this site feel like? (“technological ethos”) where else is this information found?

opening up subjective possibilities in blogs gives students a whole new range of potential sources to enrich their research.

lots of Kress, Selfe

language isn’t the only semiotic system

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Machine Visions: Toward a Poetics of Artificial Intelligence.” electronic book review 6 (November 1997)http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/6kirschenbaum/6kirsch.htm

In this hypertext, Kirschenbaum reviews three non-canonical webtexts: Throwing Apples at the Sun, which is an interactive CD-ROM by Elliott Peter Earls, Johanna Drucker’s artists’ book Simulant Portrait, and Darick Chamberlin’s artists’ book Cigarette Boy. Kirschenbaum argues through his analysis of these three digital texts that they are poststructural examples of new digital media, media that is self-reflexive and aware of its materiality, dependent on a dialogue between the human and the computer (“artificial intelligence”), and cannot be read outside of the digital form. He advocates for 1. a broader understanding and appreciation of the possibilities of digital texts – to move beyond things hailed in Wired and to push for experimental work in post-alphabetic graphic and digital design – and 2. a realization that the computer is more than a word processor; it has multiple design tools and options that can be used by writers and designers to create texts that push the limits of their audiences. This integration of the visual and the verbal is in the tradition of William Morris, William Blake, and the Book of Kells.

Quotable Quotes

on the computer: “It is an instrument for crafting writing environments.”

“The poetics of artificial intelligence are aestheticized instances of the digital wor(l)d and its virtual subjectivities, realized in the form of an incarnate and embodied text – whether than text be codex or electronic in form.” – its more than just computer-generated text

These complex, embedded, multi-vocal texts cannot be “read abstracted from [their] presentation”

Erikson, et al. “A Web We Can Weave: Considering Open Source Technologies in Our Classrooms.” Comupters and Composition. (Spring 2009)

This collaborative article, written by Erikson and his graduate studetns, investigates different Web 2.o interfaces and technologies the authors (who took a grad seminar class with Erikson) used in the seminar and also in their teaching. Erikson argues that it’s important for those in composition and rhetoric to become familiar with and be able to use the many Web 2.0 technologies students are using, the technologies that are part of their everyday litearcy activities. Drawing on Selber’s three-part literacy framework, Erikson advocates for more productive, rhetorically literate assignments and classroom teaching practices to make composition more relevant and answerable to the multiliteracy needs of today’s students. The graduate students each wrote a section about a different technology – YackPack, Facebook, GoogleDocs & GoogleGroups, podcasting, and wikis.

Quotable Quotes

“the use of Google and many other tools of the digital age are an integral part of the history of literacy in Western culture; to ignore this fact and to bridge the gap between students as digital natives and faculty as digital immigrants certainly calls the question about which group is truly more ignorant and less literate”

Questions teachers need to ask before adopting a Web 2.0 technology: 

What are my course goals for using this technology?
What goals can this technology help me accomplish?
What do I want my students to do with technology?
What are the ethical questions to consider when implementing any new media technology into the writing classroom?
How can I expect my student population to respond to new media?
Are there issues of access, funding, literacy, time, or space that I need to examine beforehand?

“the constant reminder that these tools were the ones in use by our students, and lest we consider those irrelevant to the concerns of English studies in general and Rhetoric and Composition in particular, we can only turn to the current national election process to see the role of tools like YouTube in the candidate debates, blogs in disseminating political views by pundits and citizens alike, and how can one forget Barack Obama’s early morning text message to his supporters about his Vice Presidential choice. Because these tools are ones in the hands of today’s students, defined as digital natives (Prensky, 2001), they should be ones worthy of functional, critical, and particularly rhetorical literacy education within graduate programs in Rhetoric and Composition, not only to transform the undergraduate writing curriculum but also to change the presumption that all academic discourse is print in nature, particularly in light of concerns by the Modern Language Association (2006) about the crisis in scholarly publishing and the impact on print production processes as well as on the academic reward system for faculty caught within the paradigm shift between the print and the digital.”

Notable Notes

see what the students are using and use that – don’t just rely on Blackboard because it’s safe and easy

great YouTube video by Michael Wesch at Kansas State University

Fisher, William, et al. “The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age.” Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. 9 August 2006. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2006/The_Digital_Learning_Challenge.

This white paper explores how educational initiatives that use digital technology have been hampered or shut down due to copyright restrictions and common, usually conservative attitudes about  copyright regulations. After explaining some of the many challenges to using copyrighted digital technology in the classroom (TEACH Act restrictions, DRM technology, unclear fair use laws, costly rights or licenses, and cautious gatekeepers), they show how these challenges have specifically held up four different educational initiatives that they treat as case studies. The white paper concludes with some suggestions for reform, including opening up technology restrictions and access, developing educator best-practice guidelines that interpret fair use, and legal reform. The white paper is the end product of a year-long study with scholars, librarians, lawyers, and educators who investigated the relationship between education and copyright law.

Notable Notes

DRM – digital rights management (also TPM – technological protection measures) – technological encypting that allows manufacturers, publishers to control how their digital data is used, reproduced

case studies – 1. network for new history teachers to share lessons & materials (problem with the copyrighted works used in the creation of those lessons) 2. DRM technology interfering with how professors of film studies can use and select scenes from DVDs to screen in their classrooms 3. the creation of a database of American music (New World Records), subscribed to by libraries, meant to increase access and 4. new ways of distributing for public broadcasting stations don’t jive with their copyright allowances, which give them greater freedom to broadcast on TV

for digital technology to transform education, copyright law needs to be revisited.

different zones of the globe have different DRM encryptions so DVDs can’t be watched in other countries, allowing for movies to be released on DVD and in the theaters at the same time in different places.

Kolko, Beth E. “Intellectual Property in Synchronous and Collaborative Virtual Space.” Computers and Composition 15 (1998): 163-183.

Kolko discusses the challenges of citing conversations from MOOs (like chat rooms.) These conversations are inherently responsive and recursive (making it impossible to pull one comment out of context), sit on the border between the private and the public (making it questionable whether the person is publishing their words to the whole world, and thus whether or not you can use it), are a hybrid of writing and speaking (also making it difficult to know how and if to cite this material), and have no stable author (use of pseudonyms.) Kolko tries to define how to cite MOOs (which she does in her paper) and what can be used for research through the framework of copyright law, but then, at the end  of her piece, argues that we need to stop using copyright law to determine how we treat these sources, instead looking at the nature of digital MOO collaborative conversations first.

Quotable Quotes

“Definitions of ownership and property fracture when we rethink the relationship of an individual contribution to a larger social space” (164).

Notable Notes

conflation of copyright and plagiarism. Asks two questions: 1. how do we assign rights/ownership to digital Internet conversations (often anonymous/pseudonymous) and 2. how do we cite these conversations – can we?

internet researchers don’t have to go through the same loops as in-person researchers, they can stalk these MOOs and pull off comments and conversations like a fly on the wall, not having to go through all the work

what kind of space is the MOO?

uses feminist theory to talk about the blurring of private and public spaces, collaborative ownership and authorship

Reyman, Jessica. “Copyright, Distance Education, and the TEACH Act: Implications for Teaching Writing.” CCC 58.1 (Sept 2006): 30-45.

Reyman argues that the TEACH Act (2002) limits the pedagogical possbilities of digital distance education by restricting access to copyrighted materials in a way that mimics the needs of a face-to-face, lecture-style, module-oriented, teacher-directed classroom. Writing teachers use digital spaces differently than content-driven lecture courses and need more flexibility in how they can allow their students to share and access copyrighted material for educational purposes. Also, since the TEACH Act places the responsibility for following copyright restrictions on the institution (not the individual teacher), the writing teacher loses some of her autonomy and academic freedom. Compositionists, Reyman argues, need to advocate for the rights of distance education students to a quality education, an education, due to the technological constraints, might look differently than the traditional classroom. Instead of fearing the openness of digital technology, educational copyright restrictions need to embrace the possibilities inherent in that technology for enriching education.

Notable Notes

TEACH Act is not designed to restrict fair use, but it doesn’t open it up to the realities of the digital learning environment

distance education is online courses and courses that use digital tools like Blackboard

restrictions like taking down copyrighted material so students can’t access it later, restricting access to the site to students, making sure the teacher moderates the use of the copyrighted material, material for class activities (not individuals) only

Technolgy, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002

Kane, Gordon. “Internet and Open-Access Publishing in Physics Research.” In Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism. Eds. Eisner and Vicinus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. 48-52.

Gordon explains how open-access digital publishing, which has now become the norm in physics (esp. theoretical physics), has changed the nature of the field: physicists now publish at an accelerated rate with short articles that function more as a dialogue between scholars. Their online publication (print journals are now used as archives) has opened up access to a wider range of scholars and students.

Hawk, Byron. A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodoligies of Complexity. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2007.

Hawk argues that in modern composition, vitalism (equated with romanticism) is seen in opposition to rhetoric, especially in terms of how composition scholars and teacher talk about and teach invention. He centers on 1980 as a pivotal year, analyzing three articles published that year (Richard Young, James Berlin, and Paul Kameen) to show how they positioned the field to take an oppositional approach to vitalism. He argues that vitalism is a powerful, important philosophy with roots in Aristotle and developed in science and philosophy over centuries. It is at the root of complexity theory, which is an increasingly relevant and important theory today, as digital technologies are rapidly changing the cultural context, showing the inadequacy of methods and techniques rooted only in mind-driven logic. He argues for vitalism to take a central role in reconfiguring composition and rhetoric scholarship and pedagogy, because only through vitalism is the body and experience brought together in concert with the mind. Vitalism also prevents teachers from having a set agenda, a set desire for their students to fulfill, placing instead the onus on the students to develop and find their own relations and metaphors, drawing on all possible means and resources in our complex, dynamic, and ever-changing ecology.

Quotable Quotes

“Composition theorists should be striving to develop methods for situating bodies within ecological contexts in ways that reveal the potential for invention, especially the invention of new techniques, that in turn reveal new models for action within those specific rhetorical ecologies” (206).

“An ethical goal for pedagogy, then, would be to design occassions in which students are more likely to create compositions rather than decompositions. A pedagogical act would be evaluated based upon the relationships it fosters and the relationships it serves – on its ability to increase rather than decrease a student’s agency, power, or capacity to produce new productive relations” (256).

“To desire an outcome for them [students] is to commit a certain violence to them” (257).

“Heuristics do not function in a vacuum; they function within complex and specific rhetorical situations. Importantly, the body is the critical, epistemological link between situation and invention. It is the interface.” (120)

Notable Notes

a counterhistory (drawing on Feyerabend) – “a counter-history is an additive paratactic aggregate rather than a recuperative manuever” (123)

distinguishes between 3 forms of vitalism: oppositional (electronmagnetic forces); investigative (scales of influence and organization); complex (events, cooperation)

dissoi logoi – new ways to group texts and to read them

Young – concerned with disciplinarity, so rejects vitalism

Berlin – concerned with his own political Marxist agenda and can’t see anything else, and so rejects vitalism

all the work in comp/rhet on vitalism seems to stem from one dissertation, Hal Rivers Weidner “Three Models of Rhetoric: Traditional, Mechanical, and Vital” (2)

vitalism became the scapegoat term