Abstract

Our proposed study will systematically explore the technological, civic, pedagogical, and rhetorical dimensions that adhere in the implementation of Linux-based networks at USF St. Petersburg and in Pinellas County public schools. The purpose of this project is to provide an open-source alternative to existing computing technologies, create a transferable knowledge base and learning module for this alternative at USFSP, and then duplicate the program at local secondary and elementary schools. This network of laboratories will be integrated with a new Writing Major at USFSP. Our collaborative effort will provide USF faculty and students with resources and opportunities to directly investigate digital culture, foster experience and guide inquiry into trends and policies in educational technology, and help build a commitment to community outreach in our program.

 

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: (left justified 12 pt. type with 1" margins, not to exceed 5 double-spaced pages. See Guidelines for Proposals, p. iii, for details.)

MUST HACK THIS DOWN CONSIDERABLY!!

 

In Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, Cynthia Selfe implores her readers to become responsibly aware of the increasing omnipresence of technologies resulting from the top-down initiatives stemming from Clinton and Gore’s Technology Literacy Challenge. Citing Harvey Graff, Brian Street, and other literacy scholars, Selfe’s case study places the Technology Literacy Challenge in a sorry history of large-scale literacy agendas that manifest the values of dominant and privileged socioeconomic sectors in particular ways in hopes of stimulating certain markets, agendas that also “reproduce stereotypical patterns of responding or failing to respond to individuals from nondominant groups” (19). Selfe demonstrates how “technology” has become synonymous with the “personal computer” in the United States, and how, via a trope of “personal investment,” technology has become politically, economically, and ideologically linked with literacy, and one’s potential for personal success. At the same time, “computers continue to be distributed differentially along the related axes of race and socioeconomic status,” because the Technology Literacy Challenge relies heavily on private sector investment and expansion. Selfe’s arguments and many others like it resonate strongly research in writing instruction, a discipline with a long history but one that has only recently grappled with its place in political struggle over policies that affect whether participation in democratic processes—including those processes that drive our technological future—will be extended to all or withheld for a few.

 

The benefits of an inexpensive data processing network that can run a modern graphic user interface and perform the vast majority of academic computing functions using antiquated hardware are difficult to overstate in the political climate described by Selfe, especially now, as this year's budget cuts reverberate throughout the state school system, at all levels. Any technology that can sidestep the expensive site licenses and constant hardware upgrades that dominate IT budgets ought to be explored. In select cases, Linux Terminal Server projects and similar open-source solutions have recently enfranchised a technologically underprivileged demographic of students in districts and schools that simply cannot afford new equipment every time Microsoft or Intel releases a new toy.

 

Most of these success stories are on a small scale, but the case of the Atlanta Public School system demonstrates tremendous scalability. APS, an urban school system with nearly 100 school campuses, took its cue from two parents of students at Morris Brandon Elementary who installed a small Linux Terminal Server lab with little effort. At the gmane.org.user-groups listsrev, Daniel Howard, who instigated the Linux migration at Brandon, makes claims for the immediate, measurable impact technologies can have for young learners. According to Howard, Brandon Elementary's standardized test scores improved dramatically “compared to 3 other similar schools (in demographics, parent income/education level, and PTA funding) in the APS district, Brandon's math scores were the highest in every grade except 4th, and sometimes significantly so...in grades 1-3, Brandon was the top scorer in all subjects except 3rd Grade Reading, and was only 1 point behind the top scorer there. Adding the total number of points above the Exceeds Expectations level on the mean scaled score for all subject scores and all grades” furthermore demonstrates that “Brandon surpassed the other high performing schools in the district by about 50% in how much they exceeded expectations” ((http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.ale/44438/ ). Noticing this, APS implemented a large scale pilot K12LTSP for use by K12 students for the 2006-2007 school year. Even though this project reached 4400 students using 2200 thin clients across 233 classrooms, only 31 dual core, dual processor AMD Opteron servers were required—each school utilized between 1 and 5 of these servers, which can maintain between 70-120 computers. Significantly reduced desktop maintenance will cut costs, and the culture of learning will improve as teachers wrest hardware and software options from the major vendors, and students are introduced to an operating system closely articulated with a community of active and supportive users committed to open source, instead of operating systems tethered to legal and business agreements and expensive “bloat ware.”

However, this appeal to economic rationality, standardized test results, and immediate outreach is not the whole basis of this proposal. Indeed, in the long run, by removing the need for expensive commercial software and turning back the clock on the hardware arms race, functional computing solutions can be placed into the hands of people that would otherwise lack the means to stay abreast of the tech curve. Anita Chan (2004) documents the the Law for the Use of Free Software in Government Agencies, or Proposition 1609, a bill that “added Peru to a growing list of countries pursuing legal measures for the adoption of free software by government,” a list that includes Brazil, Argentina, France, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Vietnam. Proposition 1609 attracted global attention when it's proponents resisted Microsoft's efforts to maintain a monopoly on Peru's technology by making a case propelled, as Chan notes, “less by ideals of users' technological freedoms, than by notions of citizens' political rights. Such an interpretation of the imperatives for free software was indeed distinct from that within the general free software movement, where discourse focused explicitly on software users' rights to access, understand, and rework code.” Likewise, delivering a similar computing alternatives to students in their elementary and secondary educational settings at an early enough age to generate a thorough understanding of what's at stake in questions concerning technology will inculcate functional skills and cultivate the vision required for leadership, both being essential prerequisites for economic empowerment in an environment where both are desperately needed.

 

At the same time, far from resting on the premise that technology itself is panacea for social imbalance, this proposal is motivated by the belief that free software will open doors to already thriving knowledge practices in our communities and schools. In Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday L,ife Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu and Alicia Headlam Hines explain that "when we limit our discussions of technology simply to computer hardware and software, we see only a 'digital divide' that leave people of color behind" (5). Many people falling through the rift of the so-called "digital divide" already have valuable skills, technological and otherwise, but no resources for developing them into life-long learning practices in technological contexts. Therefore, this grant proposes to systematically examine the role of distributed technology and emergent rhetorical strategies of community-building already percolating in Pinellas schools. In other words, the local exigencies of each lab context and culture will be of primary interest to USFSP students of digital culture.

 

Of course, the project director and CO-PIs must first investigate feasibility of design, implementation, and maintenance of small wireless networks, including the negotiation of the precise long-term relationships between USFSP faculty and students and the students and teachers learning everyday at community lab sites. By the end of Spring semester 2008. with the the connections of this social and rhetorical “software” in place, the spectrum of potential outcomes broadens considerably. Each faculty co-PI will design, an, in Fall 2008, teach outcomes-based, writing-intensive multimedia composition courses that will provide students with the opportunity to directly investigate the capacities of connected computers as a technology of community-formation and communicative performance. Students enrolled in these writing courses will learn how to initialize small thin-client labs at local schools, where they will then collaborate with students, teachers, and administrators, host workshops, organize colloquia, and design research methodologies that address the political, technological, and pedagogical dimensions of the cultural shift, now underway, from vendor-supplied to open-source software. Indeed, in order to participate in and help generate such a paradigm shift in the way K-12 institutions handle IT, a generation of educators must be trained to be conversant with the relevant technologies and their implementation. This proposal is a step towards USFSP's role in that larger goal. This project accompanies a shift in pedagogical values from consumption to production. In such an environment, educators and English majors will learn the necessary skills to effectively be their own network administrator, allowing them to take the lead in introducing similar programs in their own environments as they begin their careers.

 

In summary, a brief a review of the methods and outcomes described in this narrative:

 

METHODS & OUTCOMES

 

Building on existing research and implementation already conducted by Conner and Havasi, all CO-PIs will orchestrate assignments and exercises enjoining USF students in an effort to pilot a model lab at USF, with technical documentation and proposals for duplication. Havasi will present findings at the Undergraduate Research Symposium here at USFSP and help Conner, Gresham, and McCracken select qualified research assistants before he leaves the project in August of 2008.

 

These pilot experiments and user-tests will provide a space for CO-PIs Conner, Gresham, and McCracken to share and revise plans and data concerning the revision of the Writing Major at USFSP. Three aspects of this larger project will come under consideration by means of this lab work:

 

1. the potential role and specific potentials/constraints of community outreach and civic engagement

in the new curriculum.

 

2. the potential role and specific potentials/constraints of open source technology on the USFSP campus.

 

3. the potential for scaling the pilot lab up into a larger multi-platform and multi-purpose communications laboratory which would be opened to the College of Arts and Sciences and other interested Colleges on our campus.

 

In May 2008, CO-PIs Conner, Gresham, and McCracken will share narratives and data pertaining to this project at the Computers & Writing Conference in Athens, Georgia, “Open Source as a Technology and a Concept” (http://www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw2008/). Because the conference is attended by writing professors and will take open source as it's theme, the CO-PIs expect to garner feedback of immediate value to the outreach phase of the project (Fall semester 2008).

 

In the Fall semester of 2008, CO-PIs Conner, Gresham, and McCracken will teach courses on a client-based model: students in these courses will establish duplicate laboratories at 3 local Pinellas County schools, and produce research instruments and narratives documenting the specifics of each case.

 

By this conclusion of this final phase in the funding period, we will

 

*know more about how technology factors in the communicative performances of the next generation of students, and submit our findings to flagship journals in our field.

*work with liaisons and focus groups to collate data concerning computer literacy and the multimedia practices of teachers and administrators in the school system.

*create technical documentation and learning modules for the maintenance of Linux Terminal server projects.

*incorporate feedback and research in efforts to pilot and culture open source technology for a planned college-wide communications laboratory.

*use collected data to develop community-based writing course focused on teaching with technology.

*open up avenues for further community outreach and continuity in the culture of student-researcher assistantships in our program.

 

NewInvestigatorGrantBibliography

 

 

Lab Language: fodder and appeals for revision

 

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/dell-to-offer-ubuntu

 

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/1353237

 

The Next Leap for Linux NY Times, October 4

 

I am encouraged by Dell’s recent decision to partner with Ubuntu and Canonical (http://www.ubuntu.com/news/dell-to-offer-ubuntu) to propose that folks in IT and folks in LLW get together to talk about how these and similar trends could effect life on our campus. Although many in the Linux community decry the Dell-Ubuntu partnership, I think most in higher education will be compelled to understand Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth's interpretation of this move: linux OSs are not competing with Microsoft; rather, they offer a different set of tools altogether. Because USF has a partnership with Dell already, it seems such a simple step for USF St. Petersburg, in the long-run, to actively affirm this partnership, as well.

 

These trends in business and technology are also part of the "scene of writing" today, and this scene is also a primary site of our research into/with multimedia/multi-modal composition. Indeed, my colleagues and collaborators in the division of Languages, Literature, and Writing have made multimodal outcomes an important part of our curricular development efforts and grant projects. If we were to participate in an a Dell-Ubuntu or Edubuntu initiative on our campus, then, LLW professors and undergraduates could collaborate with Campus Computing to create opportunities for students to experience, learn about, and compose in Windows, Mac, and Linux environments on campus.

 

For starters: a small off-the-USF-grid wireless vpn network on the thin-client model], a space for the students to tinker with and learn about these trends. I think it would be a fantastic learning experience for all involved, and I think our campus is well-suited for an LSTP pilot that could entrain undergraduate research with community outreach in Pinellas county. Success stories abound here: http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/SuccessStories

 

 

In "Commons on the Wires" Lessig weaves a narrative of innovation and regulation rife with intrigue and populated by memorable characters. Lessig concedes that the Hush-a-Phone posed no real threat to AT&T's service, but this border-case emphatically defines the connection between innovation and control that forms this story's arc. "For much of the twentieth century, it was essentially illegal to experiment with a telephone system," and FCC "regulations forbade any foreign attachments without AT&T's permission. AT&T had not given Hush-a-Phone was history...the real purpose of the foreign attachments rule was...to protect the system from dirty technology. A bad telephone or misbehaving computer attached to the telephone system could, AT&T warned, bring down the system for the whole region" (Future of Ideas 30). Lessig, a professor of law, wants to emphasize the different "layers" of code that enable a cyberspace that would be common to all. Narratives can be nested, and embedded within other narratives, depending on the perspective and purpose of the writer or community (re)spinning the yarn; indeed, the AT&T saga, Paul Baran, e2e, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, the open source movement, DARPA, the Internet protocol and the all the characters, and elements introduced here would nestle differently in a history of computer science, or hacking.

 

How does this story inform our understanding of digital culture? Of developing efficacious means for learning and teaching each other and young people how to communicate with each other in writing, or, better, how to form communities by/with/through writing? Find an interesting twist in the plot. What is the "rhetorical" layer of code at this juncture?

 

The story gets interesting when Paul Baran "secures" a copy of AT&T's blueprints "from sources unnamed" (31). Here we get an interesting definition and idea for distributivity: effective redundancy. Discrete, discontinuous, or "digital" ideas had been circulating for a while in science and technology (quantum mechanics, etc), but Baran envisioned "packet switching" as a security solution long before the Internet, before the digital ecologies which nowadays appear, to many, as one big security problem.

 

Lessig deliberately points out an interesting gap in his own diagram for us on page 35:

 

 

Rhetorics of technology emerge to "patch" and describe this discursive gap. Here, a pedagogy grappling with the stakes and responding to the effects of the disjunction between policy and telecommunication architecture becomes possible and necessary.

 

As a specific and parallel example of the loci of such "rhetorical layers" of code in distributed/effective-redundant/networked architectures, we can connect the history of open source programming to music via a narrative that describes the filesharing, sampling, and mixing tools that comprise the space between content and expression in these communities of knowledge production, “gaps” where discussion falls “off topic.” These discursive fault lines and fragments lay bare the "rhetorical softwares" that fit writing, coding, and music to each other in a way that suggest that these rhetorical communities form via musical and other Dionysian techniques of rhythm (commons-formation) as much as they might connect by means of "communication." These “gaps” and “off topic” moments at times create awkward silences or allow noise into the mix, and therefore enjoin our participation by creating openings for extra-linguistic response, allowing for new mixtures of consciousness to emerge. In the mix, rhythms emerge and dissolve according to the patterns created by the distributed participants, which determine the ratio of "plasticity" and regulatory activity.

 

 

In "Commons, Wireless" we learn that the radio spectrum was free...until the Titanic sank? Arguing that noise in the spectrum caused the Titanic to sink, naval analysts provided the impetus for governmental attention and, eventually, regulation in the form of the Radio Act of 1912, and then, in the Radio Act of 1927, even more restrictions (no broadcasting on certain large swatches of bandwidth without a license). So while "radio at its start looked a lot like the Internet at its start," by the mid-1930s, NBC and CBS dominated the airwaves. (74) The FRC became, the FCC, who proceeded to with regulating the spectrum.

 

Lessig figures economist Ronald Coase into his narrative, because Coase countered FCC philosophy with a market/property-rights approach, which would allocate spectrum to the highest bidder. Again, this is Lessig's focus: the debate between regulatory forces, between "two regimes for controlling access to a resource" (75). And again, Lessig pitches this debate as a way to test and define the expanded concept of a commons

According to the fragments of code managed by economists interested enough in these definitions to police the wikipedia page dedicated to transaction costs, information infrastructure reduces transaction costs simply by reducing license management, and computation costs attributable to oversight. However, stakeholder in an existing proprietary-based infrastructure can argue that the costs of implementing new information technology can override benefits gained from reducing transaction costs by turning to free and open source software solutions. One need not wander far to find examples, as the these arguments are used to justify and maintain vendor relationships in higher education.

 

Lessig is sure to note that AT&T put billions of dollars into R&D and business strategies over a period of decades to grow physical layer of code, and this code includes the material substrate of and the technological blueprint for US telecommunications . But the "AT&T network was burdened by the intelligence built into it. A simpler design could beat the sophisticated design, at leas along the dimension of innovation and change" (38). Of course, the TCP/IP protocol is a code of a different sort, the metaphor here is the stupid network, the "information superhighway" metaphor of our road systems. However, now, "smart grids" and "smart roads" are possible, "control is feasible" (39). Lessig poses the real question: is it always better? Certainly not when Comcast interrupts and hangs up your connection, but more often that not it is uncertainty that breeds logistics and rationales for security ad infinitum. However, "When the future uses of a technology cannot be predicted...leaving the technology uncontrolled is a better way of...finding...innovation. Plasticity--the ability of a system to evolve in a number of ways--is optimal" (39). Networked writing depends on a real potential for "multiple and coordinated unplanned uses" and digital ecologies offer potential for learning and innovation only when the architecture/regulatory mechanism allows the freedom to respond to and dwell in uncertainty. However, in spectrum politics, when networked writing (distributed communication and commons-formation) becomes perceived de facto as chaotic spectrum, and as an intrinsically messy, costly ("transaction costs") problem demanding more control, then "stupid receiver" models are allowed to stand without challenge from-the-ground-up alternatives. Where will teachers of tomorrow tinker?

 

 

Dewayne Hendricks split for the Kingdom of Tonga, where, free of FCC regulations, he could explore the large swatch of spectrum allocated for free use. "Rather than fight with the skeptics over whether the system would work in theory, Hendricks decided to prove it would work by simply building it" (81). To follow this thread further, we'll have to leap out of Lessig's frame, here. Lessig limits his scope to the US, for the most part. It's interesting replay some of the ideas that emerge in this story on the global stage. For example, the same business strategies that found foothold in education and industry in the United States, aren't working overseas. Just this week, The European Court of First Instance ruled that Microsoft must share software information with rivals and pay a record $690 million in fines for quashing competition from smaller companies. Outside and beyond the US the International Telecommunications Union , a specialized agency of the United Nations, allocates the radio spectrum. They are also developing a Digital Opportunity Index--a tool for describing information society via information and communications technology indicators; the ITU asks "who to measure the the digital divide?" and make available the user's guide to the DOI. Can we connect this story to the IBM-OpenOffice stories Ellen found yesterday in class? What does it mean when

IBM announces a free, but not open, office suite and IBM and OpenOffice forge new business connections?

 

Ok, I will say more about this in class, but for now, a let me say a little bit how I want to transition to the next step in our distributed learning project:

In our readings these past two weeks, Lessig uses the metaphor of code [connect to Rotman, Nietzche and xenomoney) to structure his stories, define his central concept , the "commons," evaluate networks, business models, protocols, and policies, and to propose a range of responses, ranging from attitudes to actions. Bearing in mind that Lessig's narrative can be embedded in other stories, and allowing for the myriad readings and "remixes" available to readers at each transition , I invite you to consider that perhaps these 3 chapters finds a pivot point and bumper sticker slogan in the EEF founder's dictum "architecture is politics," and to "fold" this line, or reading, into the architecture and politics of your classroom, your site, your narrative, and your project. How can this "in-formation" inform our pedagogies?

 

Time to: build an assignment, tune up an "instrument," measure a response, test a premise, pilot a pedagogy.

 

To get warmed up, reflect on "Gorgias and Magic" and the stellar set of responses (tag 'em!) on our wiki, and try this exercise:

exercise: write a script/spell/charm

source texts: Gorgias and Magic

 

1. Examine your own intuitions and feelings about connectivity, and note the kind/degree of technology (if any) involved. Sample a formalism, or "formula" or "template," from the "code of another layer," ala Lessig, to articulate and make sharable this intuition.

2. now, take this sharable version, and transform it into a pedagogy. In other words, make another formalism for a specific audience of learners: make up a unit assignment, design an exercise or sequence of exercises, plan a colloquium, information-gathering session, or gathering, or otherwise "script" a scene of learning, structure a space of learning.

 

i.e. translate a story, a theory, an argument, an epistemological or ontological map, or a concept, into a specific pedagogical "application"

 

3. finally, reflect on this process, and in some way connect your pedagogical gambit to an authoritative testimony (an outside source), for support and for future "unpacking" for an audience of peers and researchers. Anticipate phase 2 or 3.

 

for example, consider the concept "coordination of multiple unplanned uses." Essential for the Internet, and therefore essential for a commons-spectrum.

 

For my part, after all this codemeshing, I would like us to try an assignment that will ask us to use wiki to "hop media" and focus our attention on sound, together. Building on our in-class discussion about cellular phones, let's try this: http://distributedlearningproject.pbwiki.com/Tone-Rings

 

Web trope: the free expert

Tuesday, September 4

 

the last mile and the relationship between bandwidth, information, and noise

 

Community Network Integration is a term that does not yet have an entry at Wikipedia, so this might be a good group-writing project for this week. In the only response to the Muniwireless article about earthlink's decisions to back out of an agreement with St. Pete, a member of local CNI group called ProjectSafety provides analysis and interpretation. Here, Larry Korinsky, the local spokesperson for this busnisess model and application, says,

 

"In a conversation I had with Peter Marcotullio, Director of Business Development for Stanford Research University, he said that SRI projects that the local wireless Internet will be many times larger in use than today’s current Internet. Municipal wireless networks are really just the local wireless Internet and we are just now beginning to scratch the surface of the potential uses and benefits of these network services."

 

Consider this "DIY"-styled appeal as you peruse this long and winding thread at Slashdot consider the implications of The Community Broadband Act of 2007.

 

The Community Broadband Act of 2007: here's an article with a link to the the bill, which defines The term ‘‘advanced communications capability or services’’ as "a capability that enables, or services that enable, users to originate or receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, video or other communications using any broadband technology"

 

ad hoc, daisy chaining and  wireless cooperatives? also http://syn.cs.pdx.edu/~jsnow/bootlegether.net/ and   this mesh network howto

 

 

David and I met at my place to do further analysis on the salvaged equipment (for a complete list of what we have, so far, click here). The plan: get one of these salvaged computer to actually turn on, so that we could see what was really happening inside....what follows are notes from the session, which led to our first query posted to the ubuntu community forum.

 

machine: we named the machine "slaxer" because Slax is the first distribution we found capable of running on this machine's specifications.

 

specs: pentium 200, 32 megs RAM, integrated ATI graphics card

 

opened box. First we disconnected the modem, as we won't have any use for that,

then, we started the machine and determined that the computer was not recognizing the hard drive.

The hard drive should be removed and examined and mounted to a different machine to test functionality. But the hard drive doesn't really matter for Live Cd installation, so we decided to go ahead and try an ubuntu live CD. Surprisingly, it took, and started to work! (Later, it didn't like the dyne Live disc)

 

take 2: troubleshooting, changing one thing at a time, controlling for variables:

 

on the second take,

 

387 is the name of the floating point process of the intel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_unit

 

the command "no387" is actually a boot method that tells the liveCD that this machine has a broken/non

 

boot: live no387

 

 

The installation failed when ubuntu tried to install network components; here, we found an error message that exceeds our knowledge.

 

low memory mode is coming up because we are doing a Live exercise where the LiveCD is not even recognizing the hard drive

but still,

we need RAM

we have room for 2 sticks of RAM.

 

nic-modules-2.6.12-9-386-di

nic-modules-2.6.12-9-386-di

 

So we asked...

 

Research on pressing and immediate technological issues and projects inevitably takes us into web forums, which are also great tools for figuring out what an audience values. With a sense of an audience's values, revulsions and boredom vectors, you can at the very least learn how to avoid wasting time. In this thread composed by the ubuntu community we have a remarkable example of a common trope of the Web: the free expert. Because of the scale of the Internet, it is likely that one can find an expert on almost any subject, posting slightly akimbo to their main expertise. This is extremely valuable information that corporations often spend millions of dollars procuring and securing, available on an web forum in the form of: copyright law. At the same time, it's not always easy to discern the actual qualifications of any such expert--hence there is no substitute for closely following a thread and seeing how well the poster's arguments solutions seem to stand up or strike a chord in others, or if the posters' collective solutions will work. Web Forums frequently break out in flame wars for precisely this reason: reputation, that currency of Ebay, is constantly subject to manipulation and contestation, and some posters respond to this with something like panic. But flamers often self scorch: if you read in a web forum long enough to inhabit and post in it, you will learn that such antics generally provoke silence among most other posters, and flame wars are sustained only by like minds, and ignored by most. And even extremely valuable expertise can be ignored due to disinterest. Why would anybody working in education be interested in ubuntu? Why would an ubuntu forum be interested in alternative distros? If we watch this thread, and perhaps even jump in with a query or a fact, we might find out. At the very least, just by watching this thread, we will very likely find patterns that teach us about new differentials of audience.

 

When we cite the free expert, we are citing a commons. The art and science of narrative teaches us how. Most interesting threads feature "off topic" interruptions and zig-zag directionalities, and so unfold as narratives.

 

This week, I would like each of us to find, explore, and join a community forum or listserv germane to technology, connectivity, web 2.0, or education. Cite a thread that either directly addresses one of your concerns, or one that surprised you with new ideas as it veered "off topic." By monitoring and participating in a forum and sharing items of interest on your wiki page each week, we can help each other refine and find audience for our projects.

---

September 1

instrument: bass

effect: delay

mode/mood: praxis bold as love

current earworm: Axis Bold As Love

 

 

I'm off to Jacksonville to visit my grandmother...if she has internet connection, I will be on the wiki tonight. If she doesn't, I will make the connection, and be up and around our fair land of Wikidelia by tomorrow.

 

I want to set up my responses and narratives for this week by reflecting a little bit on our list, uploading as I go and whenever I can. For starters, hey, how about all those computers in 253. Notes towards a symbiotic relationship with them....

 

In Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, Cynthia Selfe implores her readers to become responsibly aware of the increasing omnipresence of technologies resulting from the top-down initiatives stemming from Clinton and Gore’s Technology Literacy Challenge. Citing Harvey Graff, Brian Street, and other literacy scholars, Selfe’s case study places the Technology Literacy Challenge in a sorry history of large-scale literacy agendas that manifest “national and social values” (read: the values of the dominant class) in particular ways in hopes of stimulating certain markets, agendas that also “reproduce stereotypical patterns of responding or failing to respond to individuals from nondominant groups” (19). Selfe demonstrates how “technology” has become synonymous with “personal computer” in the United States, and how, via a trope of “personal investment,” technology has become politically, economically, and ideologically linked with literacy, and one’s potential for personal success. At the same time, “computers continue to be distributed differentially along the related axes of race and socioeconomic status,” because the Technology Literacy Challenge relies heavily on private sector investment and expansion. Selfe’s arguments and many others like it resonate strongly in rhetoric and composition, a discipline with a long history but one that has only recently grappled with its place in political struggle over policies that affect whether participation in democratic processes—including those processes that drive our technological future will be extended to all or withheld for a few.

In the 1990s, Rhetoric and composition revised the previous decade’s focus on epistemics, the production of knowledge, to a more political and ideological project that critiques knowledge-power relations, and Selfe’s argument emerges from this shift towards political and ideological research frames. Crucially, Selfe places our educational system within, not beyond the matrix of business, industry, technology, and literacy. However, now, when control over work is just as distributed as ownership, educators need to articulate new maps for this "deterritorialized territory" and find new starting points for inquiry, rather than echo commonplace calls for redistributive justice.

Because however effective these maps for redistribution may be, rhetoric and composition still needs to build responses that interrogate the very idea of the personal computer, regardless of whether monetary investment and policy making involving these computers be public or private. Because these computers are more accurately described as networked. Furthermore, these networked computers are here, there, in our educational systems and beyond--we are on the same mesh. An immediate problem faces writing instructors in computer-mediated classrooms: how do we take the “personal” out “personal computer,” and create ethics, rhetorics, and pedagogies that participate in networking these computers, so they we can find ways to use them to engage in, participate in, and teach the distributed forms of writing and living that shape networked computer ecologies?

Selfe is one of many of our colleagues in rhetoric and composition who study the changing relationships between literacy and technology, and I am strongly persuaded by the efforts of this discourse community, one motivated to intervene on what Selfe calls the “differential axes” of access to technologies of writing. The project I propose, here, shares this political goal of resource redistribution, but will ground this dream in an intervention that begins by comparing and contrasting the definitions of writing and authorship working in rhetoric and composition with the practice and performance of “file sharing” compositional work long emergent in musical practice and software development, and rapidly expanding its force and impact in many other cultures of writing, as well (http://creativecommons.org/). Rather than modify existing calls for redistributive justice on the terrain of technology, the distributed learning project proposes to directly and heuristically deploy pedagogical gambits towards solutions that will allow these computers, which are already “distributed” if by this we were simply acknowledging that they saturate the field of education, work, and play, to operate in a more distributed and networked manner in their use, and development.

 

http://www.ltsp.org/ Linux Server Terminal Project homepage. accessed November 13, 2007.

 

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.ale/44438/

Morris Brandon Elementary Technology Initiative member Daniel Howard provides statistics correlating improved standardized test scores and the implementation of a K12LTSP at Brandon.

 

Pogson, Robert. “Edubuntu, Linux Terminal Server and thin clients: magic on your lan” http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/linux_terminal_server

accessed November 13, 2007.

 

Selfe, C. L. (1999). Technology and literacy in the twenty-first century. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southernuthern Illinois University Press.

 

Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu and Alicia Headlam Hines

 

British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta). "Open Source Technology in Schools: A Case Report, May 2005.

http://publications.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=25908 accessed November 13, 2007.

 

http://www.osef.org/

 

British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta). "Using Open Source Software (OSS) in Schools"

 

 

http://morrisbrandon.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=41

Morris Brandon Elementary School technology website

harbors preliminary recommendations and post-migration evaluations of the Brandon Technology Initiative

 

K12LTSP Server and Client Configuration Requirements for Brandon Elementary

 

Schoolforge from the mission statement "SchoolForge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. SchoolForge is intended to empower member organizations to make open educational resources more effective, efficient, and ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and increasing the transparency of development. SchoolForge members advocate the use of open source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the advancement of education and the betterment of humankind"

 

"The Next Leap for Linux” By LARRY MAGID

Published: October 4, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/circuits/04basics.html?ex=1349150400&en=f1e147767abb91ac&ei=5124&partner=digg&exprod=digg

 

schoolforge uk

 

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