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01/16/2004 Archived Entry: "the book"

Lessee...what shall I write about today? The trip to the Outer Drive campus to pick up a pay check I missed in December? The walls of slush alongside the road (traffic going the other way on Southfield backed up. Someone slid into one of those walls)? This really nice fish dish (in a lentil/carrot/tomato sauce) I just cooked?

Maybe the book!

The Technology chapter gives me problems. The material is there: McLuhan in '63, Engelbart, Nelson, Sutherland...all thinking about writing and computing in ways composition wasn't (composition wasn't thinking about computing at all - with the odd exception of Kitzhaber's strange idea of a teaching machine in Themes).

But the narrative just isn't working. Right now, one section about Engelbart and his vision, one section about Nelson and hypertext, one section about Sutherland and Sketchpad. Mixed in all this is stuff about the '63 CCCC and the '63 American Federation of Information Processing Societies Computer Conferences. And some stuff about ETV and '63 education oriented journals with technology ads. All the stuff composition's 1963 grand narrative leaves out.

All this will lead into Hewlett Packard's vision of Cooltown - so that the problem is HP has the wrong vision of cool and technology. HP, as I'm trying to do overall in this book regarding pedagogy, needs to imagine Cooltown from the position of the rhetoric of cool. But HP isn't, of course. Cooltown is WebCT/Blackboard with "cool" slapped across the package label. So, this is a lesson for education, or otherwise we will create our own version's of HP's Cooltown (which was my WPA talk last summer).

So I have all the material. But I want a different structure to how I'm presenting it. I want the voice. The rewrites of the first few chapters have that voice. Argh. I don't want to start echoing Donald Murray here and talk about "voice!"

So there you go: daily blogging. Back to your daily reading, folks.