something like this: teaching digital production in a writing/theory program

I will be giving a presentation on production and the visual at Florida State in April (a chance to see Kathi Yancey and Kris Fleckenstein -- I am looking forward to this, hugely); David Blakesley and I will be there together, playing off each other. David may make a machinima, and I...

Well, I...

I am thinking about the possibilities. I have been needing for a while to write on production. Our latest job search, for someone to teach "critical approaches to media production," put me onto a committee with people who use Word for their scholarly or fun production, and so it became clear early on that definitional differences were the undercurrent. Our attractions to various candidates were very much tied to our differing notions of what production is and how it ought to play out in a program that has some theoretic bent, and we recognized this -- but we had no time for discussion, because it would have required the equivalent of several conference presentation panel ramblings and dinners afterwards.

By looking through a good deep set of applications, applications from people bringing all sorts of backgrounds and worldly engagements into their own work, people whom in the best of all possible worlds we would have hired as a collective, I saw my own teaching differently, and saw where some of my frustrations are. And I realized that, perhaps, we (an amorphous "we") still aren't too much past a discussion from Computers & Writing Gainesville (1998?), about "teaching software versus teaching writing" -- and at that time, even, the discussion was self-aware about being at least 10 years old. (For a crisper update and discussion of this than mine, see Kathie Gossett's take.)

No more do I want to teach classes that are titled along the lines of "Introduction to Multimedia Development" (a title that felt detergent-new and -fresh 10 years ago but now...) or "Introduction to Web Development." Perhaps it is just our school, but people come into such classes with the expectation that the class will be about learning software and nothing else. This past semester I did teach "Introduction to Multimedia Development," in which people did research in local historical archives and then built interactive pieces for helping others learn about local history (and boy did they build some great stuff). On the first day of that class, when I asked about people's expectations about what would happen, the common response was, "We're going to learn Flash!" I said that, yes, they'd be learning something about Flash, just as, back in first and second grades we were all taught how to hold pencils and paper and how to sit so that we could write -- but those were only the first steps toward using the technology to engage with others, toward considering how pencil and paper embed us into certain cultural structures of thinking and interacting, etc. etc. You know how this goes.

Twice during the semester, when we did class evaluations, I asked people in class what most stood out to them in what they had learned, what they thought they could apply most in the future, what helped them understand the ethical and moral dimensions of digital communication. "Flash!"

I clearly underestimate the cultural capital of knowing this software.

And perhaps I should also be pining for *a series of classes* -- working off the analogy of learning software as being like learning pencil and paper -- recognizing that all of what *I* (the selfish teacherly I) want to happen in class cannot possibly happen in one semester and must happen across a layering of classes.

Nonetheless, my sense of responsibility pushes me now toward thinking that the classes I should be teaching should be called, simply, "Public Writing" or "Digital Citizenship" or "Engaging with Digital Communities." Just as in "regular" writing classes, production is assumed. The readings and assignments center on how we engage with and act within different publics and privates, and production is -- as in a "regular" writing class -- a form either of reflection and action (or, as always, both). The "tools" are folded into the learning: you have to learn something about a game engine to build an environment that fosters first-person shibbolething; you have to learn something about Flash to build an argumentative essay about how different technologies enable differing forms of argument; you have to play with Photoshop to remix those characters from SL. Reflexivity about the technology has to be there, but so does placing the technology more into its cultural articulations from the beginning, rather than pulling it out as though it were a neutral little hammer.

The trade-off is that people then only learn the software so much, just enough to make a little argument or two. And this is where I could come back to wondering about the need for series of classes, and for a discussion about the professionalization of technologies: we have, in the past, spent many years of education on the commonly shared technologies of a certain kind of writing, the writing deeply tied to pen and paper -- and now we live in a time of technologies that separate out and that each have their own steep learning curve. All these latter technologies -- and I am thinking here within the bounds of software: Flash, Photoshop, FinalCut, Maya -- also have long learning curves if one is to be fluent. They also have long learning curves for parallel/congruent abilities one has to develop: to become a graphic designer or 3D artist, one has to devote some considerable attention to visual conventions, and so on with film, video, gaming, etc.

With that professionalization -- with that emphasis on professionalization and the taste that develops alongside becoming a professional with a technology -- comes a decrease in wider public participation. If the Photoshop picture you make shows you not to be aware that fuzzy edges are outré, then others will look with disdain (viz the Worth contests). If your Flash piece has code in all the different layers instead of only in the opening screen, well… you show yourself not to know what you are doing. If you are not willing, in other words, to spend the time to learn the software to a level of professional polish, then you can't participate. Feh.

So: teaching software only as a part of the whole process of developing arguments and pieces of cultural questioning would help me teach also about how taste develops, how people get to be recognized as able digital citizens -- or not. Teaching more of a "figure out enough to do what you want and to take control" helps develop confidence in being a non-professional in a world where professionalization is another gate. Teaching more of a "figure out enough to do what you want and to take control" can help shift tastes toward a more generous approach toward texts that look non-professional for all sorts of good reasons, texts that we might otherwise dismiss precisely because they don't look like what we're accustomed to.

Okay.

Hmmm.

I think there is something here toward a presentation on production. But I also want to make something, too, in which to embed this discussion. And it sounds as though it's going to have to be something un-pretty, ungainly, and unprofessional in all the right ways.

But people gotte be making stuff, because that's a non-trivial entry to public participation these days.