#post-process

New Blog Post: Words Mean Things, Apparently - #Deduplication Myths Explored #SFD9 #VMware #VSAN

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet?

We might all agree that this is most definitely the case, but in the technology industry we have a problem, and it was highlighted across a number of the sessions we attended at Storage Field Day 9 this week.

Specifically, the use of certain terms to describe technology features, when the specific implementations are very different, and have…

There's so much more to see than the casinos!

"A whole new world, a dazzling place I never knew."

"if we reduce writing to either a product or a procedure, we must teach it as a device or tool for doing something that is distinct from the doer, the human agent who gives it design, whose being writing expresses. We need to move both composition theory and pedagogy beyond the dualistic device paradigm that separates our acts from ourselves and begin to understand and teach writing as a design" (31)

  "Writing is both will and action, internal agency and external product" (31). Yes? Sure? I mean, it's more than that, and more complex, but that's not the worst way of expressing it...

  Huh. Couture aligns Shaughnessy with the beginning of the process movement. I'm not sure what to make of that. I mean, she is, kind of, and she displays important process ideals, but... yeah, not what I originally thought.

  Moffett is the key theoretical figure here. He's a consummate teacher, but he's also hyper-aware of the personal and spiritual dimensions of writing.

  She also discusses Elbow's processes of growing ("letting one's writing expand, mature, and change into something else"), cooking ("letting one's words and ideas percolate, bubble, or ferment and mix, so that one an draw relationships between them") (37). She points out that these are roles that writers take on.

She points out the separations between Elbow's theory (embracing contraries, a multiplicity of writing processes, dwelling in the "irresolution") and how he's frequently put into practice--that these practices aren't extended to the people who do them.

Couture is rebelling against the skills model of writing instruction--that teaching writing should make students better people. I have a hard time with that, because its inverse is that students without writing instruction (writing ability?) are worse people. I appreciate the human approach to writing, but at the same time... yeah.

Term: the device paradigm. Basically that writing is a tool that can be taught simply and used as a commodity. This is the wrong approach.

Things that have addressed this: feminist criticism (including "women's ways of knowing"), Thomas Kent (and others') work with complex genre theory.

So we should teach students to emulate writers' identities, rather than trying to model product.

She's doing very interesting things with the concept of style, suggesting that it's a kind of "psychic fingerprint" (my term) for the person behind it. She takes Elbow as an example, and while it's true that many writers have excellent writing that sounds distinctly like that writer (somehow, and here I'm thinking of Lanham, Shaughnessy, McLuhan--even Bolter has a distinctive style, must though I hate his theories). But... can we say that? It smells bullshitty to me.

I think I smell the vague positivity of "a better person" without any real definition or theoretical weight behind it. Because being a better Nietzschean person is a very different thing than being a better Augustinian person, which is also fairly different than being a better Platonic person.

I like that he starts by saying that he tried to get NCTE to change their language from "the writing process" to "writing processes" (though it didn't work). Yeah, Russell! Yeah!

  "In this exploratory essay, I want to ask how we can understand the relation between school writing (processes) and the writing processes beyond school and perhaps the relations between them" (81).

  Term: activity system "collectives (often organizations) of people who, over an indefinite period of time, share common purposes (objects and motives) and certain tools used in certain ways--among these tools-in-use certain kinds of writing done in certain ways or processes" (81).

Genres create networks between these activity systems.

This line could be good to integrate into the 4Cs talk: 'To understand students' writing, we need to trace its comings and goings, its circulation in social networks (activity systems), in and out of, around and through schools." (84).

The problem with process writing, according to Russell, is that it tends to commodify writing without installing it within a network. ...but writing is always a commodity within the networks in which is circulates. It's a constantly traded, constantly reappropriated and remixed commodity.

No, actually, Russell agrees with that. He wants post-process pedagogy to commodify writing, and to do it in the various networks and discourse communities (or activity systems) in which writing is always embedded. He wants, essentially, more focus on the ways in which writing is exchanged and networked. This whole article is essentially arguing for a move from the definite article ("the writing process") to the indefinite ("a writing process"). Though Russell would prefer the plural: "("writing processes").