Response 8 4/4/08

I can't say that I feel in love with this week's Ong article as much as the previous reading. However, he did make me think about the separation between audience and readership in a way I had not before the reading. As a teacher, I focus a lot on audience, encouraging my students to be aware of who is reading their paper and to not just worry about what I, as their teacher will think. What they produce should be something they can be proud of rather than just spitting out words on a page to get the assignment finished or on the other end of the spectrum getting so wrapped up in stating what they think I want to hear that they don't say anything of meaning to them. For myself as a writer, I have to be honest, I really don't think about audience at all. I worry about expressing my thoughts and feelings into words that I can understand, that truly express me, and that I can be happy with. Although, as I'm writing this I know I will go back and edit so that others can also comprehend and respond to my thoughts. So, I guess audience is something that is present in my mind but definitely not on the top of the list. 

"No matter what pitch of frankness, directness, or authenticity he may strive for, the writer's mask and the reader's  are less removable that those of the oral communicator and his hearer. For writing itself is an indirection" (74). Once again Ong had me analyzing the difference between orality and writing, something is both lost and gained once words are recorded. The author also has their own message or agenda that they wish to convey, however once inscribed the power is in the hands of the reader who will interpret the text based on their own thoughts and experiences. What helped me to understand this better was the framework Ong created in referencing Hemingway, Chaucer, and a few others. His citation and explanation of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, pointing out the assumptions the reader has to make out of Hemingway's vagueness, as Ong says his use of demonstratives and articles, that year, this river, the mountains, etc (63). Hemingway, by fictionalizing his audience assumed that they would know what he was writing about or that their needing to know specifics was not important to the overall story. I am very much a Hemingway fan but after reading this article and viewing writing through Ong's eyes I can see why others may not, some need the specificity when others may not.  

What is originality? Does it even exist? Porter's article " Intertexuality and the Discourse Community" immediately brought these questions to mind. I am certainly not the first person nor will I be the last to pose these questions. This is the very idea of intertextuality,that everything comes from something else, ideas are borrowed and therefore are related within their discourse as well as throughout other discourses. That everything we write is influenced by something else already written and that our writing contains "traces" of previously created works. I am one of those, as Porter states who has the "romantic image" of writing, I want my students to produce innovative, thought-provoking works, I will admit this is an incredibly lofty goal but I at least want them to try to be original. But as Porter writes "The creative writer is the creative borrower"(37) despite my romantic view this is the truth and as I process this idea, I am realizing that there is nothing wrong with that. Why not take already brilliant ideas and make them even better? If Jefferson hadn't borrowed from previous documents as Porter says would we have the Declaration of Independence maybe, maybe not. That is an example of course that plays into our sense of patriotism and what we define as the doorway to our freedoms that led to our Constitution and still standing Democracy. Maybe realizing that what we write is not totally original is the writer's doorway to freedom.

I am very much a non-traditionalist when it comes to educating, I believe that students if given the proper tools and guidance will consistently learn more from each other than they ever could from me, alone. One of my main goals, is to teach my students how to be autonomous, to not look at me as the expert but to look at themselves and their classmates as experts too. Basically, I try to teach my students how to use multiple skills and sources to obtain and synthesize the information they need, which is a tool that can be used far beyond the walls of a classroom. A large part of this process is collaborative groups by which students are learning together. As much as I thought I knew about collaborative learning, Bruffee gave me some much needed insight into the history of it. I found it ironic that in the span of two years the CCCC took collaborative learning from the bottom of its list of topics to the top (415) what is unfortunate is that for most secondary and post secondary educators that topic is still on the bottom of the list, if it's even on the list at all. As he discusses, this process can used to engage students in "known" and "unknown" topics but this takes a lot of practice and the guiding hand of the teacher. "Collaborative learning provides the kind of social context, the kind of community, in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers" (424). I think this validation of students as equals, learning and teaching each other is key to making this process effective. We can use this method to teach discussion, literature interpretation, and writing strategies. When we expand the realm of learning beyond the individual student to teacher "traditional" teaching we are opening up a world of new possibilities in which students can think and be productive. 

As Timbur introduced varying schools of thought on collaborative learning and the idea of consensus, I realized that Bruffee is a bit too ideological to really make collaborative learning realistic. What brought me to this realization was Timbur's discussion of consensus that having students come to one solitary agreement may not really be teaching them. Why can't a consensus in a group be agreeing to disagree and explaining their conclusions or negotiating a consensus where all members are active in the decision making  process learning how to compromise. This is much more realistic and representative of what students will face in the real world. I liked Timbur's example of collaborative learning in literature classes, that through these groups students don't have to come up with just one socially accepted interpretation, that within these groups they can ask why certain interpretations are the "norm" Together they can  look through different lenses to interpret literature and as Timbur says make connections between what they have to read at school and what they read for entertainment (474). What a powerful tool this can be to validate students' academic and nonacademic thoughts.

Johnson-Eilola and Selber ask fantastically relevant questions about plagiarism, originality, and assemblage which are very apropos to the changes we are trying to have come to light in modern English classes. We live in a collaborative world, people are influenced now more than ever by myriad of texts and information; email, blogs, books, journals, articles, text messages, poems, music, etc. All of which with a click of  button can be read (or ordered) and definitely all of which come with quality ratings and reviews not from experts but from anyone who has access to the Internet. All of these influence how a student reads and writes about a text before they even sit down to actually do the assignments, this point is also elaborated on by the authors.  For any educator, plagiarism will always be a concern, but we have to get over it. If students are going to cheat, they will try no matter what and personally I'm not going to strike the fear of God in them, in order for them not to have the temptation. They'll do it anyway and I'd rather expend my energy in other ways. 

I was not very familiar with the idea of assemblage or rather that particular term, creating texts from already existing texts (381). Johnson-Eilola and Selber's examples of using assemblage not just for basic texts but in web design, music, and architecture helped me question the idea of what really constitutes plagiarism and originality. As they write, plagiarism is a very academic term (399) but as I have said, one that cannot really be a primary concern. I think the idea of having students borrow from texts, whether it be words, phrases, or ideas to create something new and expressive can be a powerful tool in teaching them how to write about a specific topic or in a specific genre. As well as being a totally new way for them to think about writing and the creative process. 

All of these articles presented various versions of what constitutes collaborative thinking and learning. Discussing the positives and the pitfalls for both students and teachers. Despite a strong movement towards this strategy there are still many educators who fear the collaborative process both with their students and among their colleagues, the fear is that someone will steal a good idea and then take credit for it. I say, who cares? If it is a good idea, share the wealth, impact as many people as possible, an idea is an awfully abstract thing to take ownership of and why should we be tempted to do so?