Composing Spaces

Last night my colleague, Tara Timberman, texted me, telling me to go to CNN and watch Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the NAACP. I’m glad I did. The speech is excellent—a multimodal text that yokes together cultural critique, linguistics, learning theory, music theory, and classification theory. (The coverage of the speech as it was re-aired on CNN was atrocious. CNN cut away to commercial, it seemed, at exactly the points in the speech where cohesion was an asset, where cutting and distraction took away from the overall effect and affect.  CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was horrific, doltish, a deer caught in headlights, clearly unsure of how to respond to the speech’s academic grounding, and pedantically labeling the speech at one point "entertaining" as he jumped over the text and language and ideas to tautological discussions of the effects on Obama’s campaign.)

Below in three parts is the speech, uploaded to YouTube by someone who was recording their TV via video camera. The part that most interests me about the speech is this:

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as somehow being deficient. Christians saw Jews as being deficient. Catholics saw Protestants as being deficient. Presbyterians saw Pentecostals as being deficient.

Folks who like to holler in worship saw folk who like to be quiet as deficient. And vice versa.

Whites saw black as being deficient. It was none other than Rudyard Kipling who saw the "White Man’s Burden" as a mandate to lift brown, black, yellow people up to the level of white people as if whites were the norm and black, brown and yellow people were abnormal subspecies on a lower level or deficient.

Europeans saw Africans as deficient. Lovers of George Friedrich Handel and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart saw lovers of B.B. King and Frankie Beverly and Maze as deficient. Lovers of Marian Anderson saw lovers of Lady Day and Anita Baker as deficient. Lovers of European cantatas—Comfort ye in the glory, the glory of the Lord—Lovers of European cantatas saw lovers of common meter—I love the Lord, He heard my cry — they saw them as deficient.

In the past, we were taught to see others who are different as being deficient. We established arbitrary norms and then determined that anybody not like us was abnormal. But a change is coming because we no longer see others who are different as being deficient. We just see them as different. Over the past 50 years, thanks to the scholarship of dozens of expert in many different disciplines, we have come to see just how skewed, prejudiced and dangerous our miseducation has been.

Miseducation. Miseducation incidentally is not a Jeremiah Wright term. It’s a word coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson over 80 years ago. Sounds like he talked a hate speech, doesn’t it? Now, analyze that. Two brilliant scholars and two beautiful sisters, both of whom hail from Detroit in the fields of education and linguistics, Dr. Janice Hale right here at Wayne State University, founder of the Institute for the study of the African-American child. and Dr. Geneva Smitherman formerly of Wayne State University now at Michigan State University in Lansing. Hail in education and Smitherman in linguistics. Both demonstrated 40 years ago that different does not mean deficient. Somebody is going to miss that.

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale’s first book, "Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style." Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin.

Here, Wright is touching on the the primary tenants of classification theory: that how we classify structures how we compose and act in the worlds around us. Bowker and Star (1999) in their important book, Sorting Things Out, define "classification is a spatial, temporal, or spacio-temporal segmentation of the world. A "classification system" is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production" (p. 10). Wright’s list of perceived deficiencies of the Other and his discussion of US education pedagogy showcases real-world examples of how our perceptions of the Other shapes now only how we view them, but the policies we create. Labels such as EMH, and diseases such as ADD, are social constructs, boxes in which we locate those who do not conform to some pre-set standard that is often based on faulty, if not overtly racist, classist, ageist, and sexist assumptions.

In Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact Fleck (1939) points out that classification studies are studies in the history of ideas (facts are ideas). His unit of analysis is the concept of syphilis—a term for an illness that is essentially a socially constructed idea that has evolved over time. Similar studies have looked at the social construction of HIV/AIDS. The US is currently engaged in discussions of the concept of marriage. Wright’s attempt to redefine as "different" how we interact with those once perceived as "deficient" is significant because he is asking us to embrace each other by embracing our differences—and differences historically situated are not classifications.

My initial reaction to this video (sent to me by a colleague at Rowan) was a loud, sharp, guffaw. After recovering from seeing Obama as Rocky doing one handed pushups, I began to realize that there is quite a bit of masterful visual rhetoric going on in here taking off from the boxing conceit afforded by the movie. A semiotic reading of the video would, I suspect, reveal a host of modes, discourses, and meanings.

Via Ewan McIntosh, introducing Animoto, an application that mashes together the images you upload with music you select to create a unique video production. The folks at Animoto—"a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out"—have developed "Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film." Way cool, I think. The below video contains their 60 info bit as well as an extended introduction to the application and its features.

Due to popularity in education, Animoto (like Voicethread) has created an Educators site. The possibilities for video compositions are growing rapidly. I can’t wait to take advantage of this in the near future.

I have been helping a colleague design her first Voicethread, and while I was on the site I came across a series of book reports by children that seem to be in the fourth grade. I have embedded one below and I don’t think I need to write why, though I will. Many of my students have been posting on their blogs about reading, my undergrads (who are primarily elementary education majors) most likely because March 2 was Read Across American Day and Dr. Suess’ birthday. Two posts were on the subject of reading difficulties. One student points to a very cool program called Reading Assistance Education Dogs, or R.E.A.D., in which dogs are trained to sit and listen to children with reading difficulties read aloud. Another describes, with great hilarity, what she calls "blue addiction"—the uncontrollable urge to click on blue links in hypertext fiction without care for the text in which a link appears.

The beauty of the below Voicethread is how wonderful it is to see an elementary school teacher use a multimodal social technology to provide a space for her students to articulate what they have read, what they think about it, and how it impacted their learning. They even composed their own avatars. Spectacular, really.

I was reading the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine this morning and found an article called "Aerosol Art" which details a fascinating new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery called RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture (runs through October 26, 2008). The exhibit includes portraits and paintings of Hip Hop artists, film, poetry, and the one medium that really caught my attention: the graffiti art of taggers Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp. Jobyl Boone, the exhibit’s guest curator, argues that

graffiti tags function as self-portraits. "We want to present the notion that individuality and portraiture might not be someone’s face or body," she says. Conlon agrees: "Graffiti is based on choosing a name and making it as prolific as possible."

Two of Conlon and Hupp’s tags:

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Marshall at Read/Write Web has a useful new post “Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche.” The real discovery for me has been the Ask.com Blog Search. For the last hour I’ve been looking at the results of a search for “education“—the link to Weblogs in Higher Education was worth the time. This will be a fixed reading for all courses where blogs are assigned, something I am doing more frequently as I try to better understand the relationships among multiple Web 2.0 writing spaces.

Richard Miller (at about 1:35 in) to the Rutgers Board of Governors (1/24/08): “It goes without saying that we are living at the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history.”

On 18 January 2008 I presented a workshop entitled, "Preparing Writers for the Future of Information Systems," with Diane Penrod at the 4th International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society in Boston. The workshop was planned thinking that we had an hour: 15 minutes for me, 30 minutes of workshop and exploratory discussion, and 15 minutes for Diane. On the way to the conference location I realized that we actually had 30 minutes. So, we had to revise the session on the spot, removing the workshop portion and drastically cutting the talks down. Though it felt quite rushed, the presentation went well, overall. I present the talk I was to give in full here as I think it better showcases what I have been thinking about than what I was able to discuss at the conference. I welcome all comments and suggestions.

"Preparing Writers for the Future of Information Systems"

Several weeks ago my sister gave me a Wii as a combined holiday and birthday present. Ten years younger than I and a graduate student at Columbia living in Manhattan it has been rare in the past several years that she had been able to afford to buy me a gift of any kind. To help support tuition payments that student loans do not come close to covering she has been working at Planet Hollywood, waiting tables, running orders, exhausting herself on weekends. However, now that she is in her third year she is only required to register for one course. This, combined with a weak dollar that brought many tourists over the holidays to New York City and to the tables of Planet Hollywood created a kind of a tip-infused cash-windfall the likes of which my sister has never seen (and will probably never see again). When the stores were out of Wiis, she bought it on eBay-a palpitating thrill as she won her first eBay auction. It arrived in a box that once held a Sharper Image 1x/5x Mirror with Variable Lighting for Daylight, Office, and Evening.

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Its the first day of classes here at Rowan and Blackboard is giving me issues posting Web links, so here are the videos we are going to show in Introduction to Writing Arts:

Updated 12/8/07, 9:48am. The New York Times continues its tradition of mapping traumatic spaces in its remediation of the shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, where Robert A. Hawkins killed eight people with an assault rifle.

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