From WHY to HOW: Dickie Selfe's "Techno-Pedagogical Explorations: Toward Sustainable Technology-Rich Instruction

I've been trying to determine what it is that sets Dickie Self's study "Techno-Pedagogical Explorations: Towards Sustainable Technology-Rich Instruction" apart from a large majority of the work done on the intersections between technology and composition. I think I've hit on it: while other scholars expend considerable energy explaining WHY composition instructors should consider implementing more technology in their classrooms and assignments, and offering example assignments as a second-thought, Selfe begins his study by acknowledging his audience has already accepted this pedagogical need. Whether or not this warrant is successful is difficult to say, but Selfe does offer a great deal of extremely interesting and practical suggestions for putting the theory into practice. In short, Selfe tells us HOW to approach "technology-rich" curricula in very specific and thorough terms.

The study is full of helpful material; but i'm most interested in Selfe's discussion of the experimental nature of "techno-pedagogy" and his realization of the need for "sustainability."

"All Technology-Rich Pedagogy
Is Experimental"

Selfe warns us about the "experimental" nature of "technology-rich pedagogy" by exhaustively listing the multitude of dynamic factors involved:

The fact is that the interface or interfaces that we use, students' lives, access levels, the underlying networks, people's placements on the technological learning curve, the material conditions that surround, the class and students, the curriculum, and everyone's expectations are all unstable and change term by term, sometimes even class session by class session. (18)

Composition teachers, Selfe asserts, must be constantly aware that teaching with technology will always be "experimental" on some level and shape their pedagogy and classroom practices accordingly, often by involving students into the dialogue of the experiment.

"Commit Yourself to Developing
Locally Sustainable Teaching Practices"

This student involvement is inherently connected to Self's suggestion that composition teachers "commit yourself to developing locally sustainable teaching practices" (20). Such sustainability emerges from a public awareness of objective (either specific assignment objective or course objective) shared between student and instructor. Sustainability can be realized, then, by instructors who "apply a structured use of the technology to that objective, watch how the community of students reacts to your approach, and let them help you redesign the approach to better accomplish the objective next time" (20).

I'm attracted to the apparent ease with which Selfe is able to experiment with his classes and empower students to help him revise curricula that is ineffectual. The application of such a pedagogical attitude is also enormously comforting to those faced with incorporating technology-rich media and assignments into an English course for the first time. That this type of instruction can be experimental and is always evolving to meet students' needs and course objectives takes some of the pressure off.

At the same time, as a relatively inexperienced composition instructor, I get the feeling that "experimental" equates "unprepared." I do modify the curricula and schedule of a course I'm teaching based on student feedback at times, but not nearly enough to call it an "experiment." Anyone else feeling this? I also wonder how status and experience enable teachers to be more experimental?

(DE)Compose: Disrupting the Essay

“There’s something increasingly untenable,” writes Geoffrey Sirc, “about the integrated coherence of college essayist prose, in which easy falseness of a unified resolution gets prized over the richer, more difficult, de facto text the world presents itself as” (123). Sirc’s “Box-Logic,” an article published alongside Wysocki’s definitional work on new media, represents his own response to the stranglehold of the academic essay as form and a recommendation of nonlinear, non-coherent, and unconventional methods of composition within material frameworks. Much of Sirc’s inspiration for such pedagogy comes from Joseph Cornell, American artist famous for his box assemblages.



Cornell’s boxes were essentially containers of found objects, random assemblages of materials which challenged, in Sirc’s opinion, “notions of articulate coherence, conventional organization, and extensive development” (115). Because they remain completely abstract, these types of assemblage lead the viewer to ponder placement and meaning, to attempt to find pattern among the unpredictability, and to acquire attentive modes of observation.

An emphasis on similar methods, modes and genres in the composition classroom, argues Sirc, allows the student to consider everyday materials and objects from an equally new perspective. Furthermore, this attention to the quotidian becomes liberating to the student who is not versed in traditional / linear academic-compositional skill sets (128).

Sirc’s study is important to understanding Wysocki’s definition of new media primarily because his praxis does not depend upon technology. For Sirc, new media is not necessarily even “new”—we might find models in the surrealism and avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. His application, however, is postmodern rathern than modern, and this is what I’m most interested in exploring. Sirc’s pedagogy further de-emphasizes product in the classroom in favor of a kind of postmodern, pastiche-there’s no other word for it-play.

My initial response is: Yes! Why not make composition more fun, and in the process, more meaningful for the student who struggles to acquire linear academic skills. But just immediately after that, the pedantic and cynic in me enters and has a few questions and doubts:

1) Where do we draw the line between language composition and artistic compostion?
2) If we replace traditional forms and structures including but not limited to the essay with more fluid / open forms like the box, what do we lose? and
3) Are there essential forms that students need to know?

Practicing New Media Analysis

While Wysocki provides a conceptual framework in which to define new media, other scholars are exploring possible rhetorical systems in which new media might be described, understood and critiqued. In their webtext "Re-Inventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media," Cheryl Ball and Ryan Moeller seek to demonstrate "that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers" (abstract).


What sets Ball and Moeller apart from other new media / composition scholars is their insistence on the creation of particulr rhetorical terms to practice rhetorical analysis of new media texts. The authors employ two Greek concepts to create these rhetorical terms: topoi, "designerly strategies for meaning making or persuasion;" and commonplaces, "points where readers of a text come together and negotiate agreement among their readings." Types of topoi include genre, sequence, designer, link and audience. Context, reader, element, emotion, juxtaposition and proximity all serve as types of commonplaces (New Media Topoi, New Media Commonplaces).

While Ball and Moeller further demonstrate how these terms might be applied by analyzing and discussing two student compositions, they don't apply their terms to a new media text that we might consider professional or expert. Their own "webtext," in fact, accomplishes very few of the topoi or commonplaces a new media text might employ and could be almost as effective as a "letterate" text.


To satisfy my own curiosity, in part, and to test the applicability of Ball and Moeller's terms, I decided to experiment with an application of topoi and commonplaces to one of the most successful new media texts I could think of, a website/game/humanitarian project freerice.com. Freerice, a "a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Programme" was designed to accomplish two goals: to "provide education to everyone for free" and to "help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free" (About). The "text" accomplishes these goals through rhetorical usage of numerous topoi and commonplaces throughout. Audience and link topoi are perhaps the the most interesting / effective, although the text utilized the other types as well. Additionaly, the commonplaces proximity and pathos are also exceptionally effective.

In line with Ball and Moeller's definition of audience (see New Media Topoi), the designation of the audience's participation in freerice is participatory and empowering. The player or contributor of freerice creates rice donations by interacting with the trivia game: "For each answer you get right, we donate 10 grams of rice through the World Food Programme to end World Hunger" (Index). This transaction is made possible by the presence of advertisements.

Such participation is ultimately rewarding for the audience and extremely effective rhetoric because of the explicit link, the "direct connection to elements within or outside of a text used to inform a reader in support of a designer’s claim" (New Media Topoi), between the fun of game-play and the pleasure of humanitarianism. On Freerice, giving is not only "free," it's fun.



Such topoi are major contributors to the text's multimodal system of rhetoric, but commonplaces play enormous persuasive roles as well. The text's use of emotion or pathos, which is most evident in a proximate link to view videos of rice distribution, demonstrates tangible results and thus encourages more playtime among users/readers.

Furthermore, the text's proximate display of social network links (twitter, facebook) to the main module (the quiz game) allows users to broadcast their smart and charitable identities, thus reinforcing their own identification and connection with the text and further encouraging more game play.

The application of a few of Ball and Moeller's rhetorical terms demonstrates, I think, the efficacy of their critical system. Furthermore, applying this system to new media texts which are unconnected to new media studies is an especially important task for two reasons. First, such a task demonstrates the unbiased capability of new media critical vocabularies to analyze current new media texts. Secondly, the online and thus public presence of these critiques serves to further disseminate knowledge the utility of new media studies as analytic tool.

Ball, Cheryl and Ryan Moeller. “Re-inventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media” The Fiberculture Journal 10 (2007). http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/ball_moeller/index.html

Breen, John. Freerice. United Nations World Food Programme, 2007. Web. 18 Jan. 2011.

What Makes Media "New Media"?: Materiality, Agency and the Composition Pedagogue

Despite the growing ubiquity of new forms of communication and media (foursquare, googletv, diaspora) and the monolithic status of those that have become household names, much of academia remains unaware or indifferent to the significant connection between English /Composition studies and these new forms. Anne Francis Wysocki offers up some alleviation of this disconnect by defining not only the term "new media" but the relationship between these forms and the composition pedagogue. New media, Wysocki asserts, must be seen within the context of materiality, which she identifies as including a range of circumstances which influence and are influenced by the act of composition. Wysocki names these circumstances by referencing Bruce Horner, who locates materiality not only in the local manifestations of technology (paper/screen) but in broader spaces and conditions of "publishing," "social relations" and "socioeconomic conditions" (3). New media depends upon such materiality just as "old" media. Writing, like composing, does not occur apart from local or global material conditions but shapes and is shaped by those conditions. It is within this context that Wysocki defines "new media texts" as those that are created with the knowledge of their materiality, "that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality" (15). Such a definition posits the composer in terms of his/her agency. Thus, "new media" is not limited to forms which new technologies make available but can be any composition that is created with the knowledge of the full range of possibilities of form and structure that technologies (old and new) allow. Furthermore, this knowledge, and the decisions that go into composing a new media text, should be informed by and utilize the most rhetorically effective combination of mediums: "I am trying to get at a definition that encourages us to stay alert to how and why we make these combinations of materials, not simply that we do it" (19). Ultimately, Wysocki's positioning of "new media" as a concept which can and should be "opened to writing" reveals her broader argument that it is composotion studies / english studies that is qualified/and accountable for bringing media literacy into academia. It is the writing teacher who, already adept at understanding rhetoric involved in alphabetic /old / written media, can learn and teach not only how to both "read" and "write" new media in the most effective /rhetorical ways. Ultimately, Wysocki's exposition of the materiality and agency of new media, as illuminating as it is, serves a specific purpose: it is a proposal for the encompassing of (new) media literacy into English departments across academia.


Wysocki, Anne F. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004. Print.

Welcome to (E)Compose:

a blog intended to examine the opportunities provided by new media and technology within Rhetoric and Composition, and more broadly, English Studies. I am Matt Vetter, student and teaching assistant at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. My current research is focused on an application of theories surrounding the study of aporetics to composition studies: how doubt, perplexity, and cognitive blockage hinder and inform the student writing process. I hope to further such research and that this blog may provide a space in which aporias within writing processes which occur on-screen/on-line/or apart from traditional methods and medias might be discovered and analyzed. This blog is also a requirement of English 792, Computers and Composition, taught by Dr. Rouzie and will reflect the readings and issues raises by that course.