One of the more useful concepts that Mike Palmquist and I have toyed
with recently is to speak about WAC/CAC as an academic concept, the
value of which scales from its common form as a center for adjunct
writing tutoring and instruction as well as assessment for an academic
community, to that of an institutional unit for outreach to faculty in
other disciplines for the purposes of fostering writing instruction in
those distinct disciplines, to a laboratory where new experiments on
writing and thinking within disciplines, across disciplines, across
academic institutions and even across academic cultures might find an
amiable home, to a center for the development of instructional
technologies to foster all of the above.
Its becomes obvious why those of us interested in the role of computer
technologies in WAC/CAC have stumbled upon this concept of scaling,
because we are in the position to influence every level within the range
of activities from the most nuts and bolts practices to seemingly the
most abstract theoretical modeling of the role of writing and thinking
in academic life. Less obvious is how these various levels of activity
impinge upon each other. More specifically, we should not only concern
ourselves with how theory comes to influence the design and use of
technology, but how practice opens portals to new kinds of theorizing.
Even less obvious is how the forms of technology that we experiment
become, as Bruno Latour might put it, actors or agents in their own
right: practitioners of WAC/CAC engaging with new technology stumble
upon new forms of instructional activities, which in turn require some
improvisational theorizing, which then leads to an entirely new level of
sophistication and complexity by which WAC/CAC activities may become
enacted. Two examples come to mind:
Tyanna Herrington and Kenneth Knoespel's experimental linkage of
language and technical communication classes at Georgia Tech, European
University in St. Petersburg Russia, and Chinese University, Hong Kong
seems on the surface to be an extremely sophisticated model of
Web-linked CAC. Many experiments similar to this have been done before
within the United States at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
But here we find something quite daunting: Chinese, Russian and English
language students work with technical communication students in these
three countries in order to learn not only how to engage in technical
communication, but how to do so when scientific and technical practices
don't always translate across cultural boundaries. Here we are talking
not only about language barriers, but barriers between the quite
different social rules constituting the identity of scientific and
technical practices in those distinct cultures. Professor Knoespel's
long-standing connections with the Russian scientific community in
particular (his scholarship focuses on early modern dissemination of
scientific knowledge between Sweden and Russia),will eventually enable
the "structural coupling" of scientists from a range of disciplines in
the former Soviet Union and the United States, who have been otherwise
functioning in isolation from each other. Thus, we see practice
influencing theory which in turn leads to new kinds of practices. The
initial exploration of cultural as well as linguistic differences in
Tyanna Herrington's classes will lead to an emergence of an
electronically enabled "consensual domain," whereby scientists from a
variety of cultures will learn how to integrate their practices as well
as discourses, and raise issues of global ethical concern. Herrington's
initial vision of a global classroom, triggered by her own intital
experiences teaching online by means of the Internet through email, MOOs
and the WWW through platforms like WebBoard, have enabled cross-cultural
instructional experiences which raises other questions, leading to
theorizing and then practices that had not been conceived of previously.
Another example came to my attention when giving a series of talks at
the Universidade de Sao Paolo, one of which was on the role of cognition
in both instructional design and in the envisioning of policy governing
distance education (with special attention to the Third World). There I
met Maria F. De Mello, of the Escolo do Futura (the School of the
Future), a unit supported by the Brazilian government and UNESCO as well
as the USP. In my second visit, this time for a symposium on
Trans-disciplinarity sponsored by the Escolo do Futura, Ms. De Mello
informed me of a project to which the Escolo do Futura had recently
committed: the linking of public schools in a number (I think it was six
to begin with) of disparate regions of Brazil. Escolo do Futura is now
in partnership with the Telemar Corporation to expand this project as
rapidly as possible. As the President of Telemar Manoel Horacio
Francisco da Silva states, in a pamphlet recently mailed to me: "Brazil
has already been described, on account of the magnitude of its
dimensions and regional inequalities, as a cultural archipelago, made up
of incommunicable, isolated communities. The target of the Telemar
Educational Project is contributing to reducing of this isolation and
ushering the country into a global world through schooling and
education." Now involving sixteen schools in sixteen separate
governmental units throughout Brazil, over the next five years, Telemar
and the Escolo do Futura will link close to a thousand separate areas,
involving seven hundred thousand students and nearly twenty five
thousand teachers. Its hard not to see the "actancy" of the various
forms of technology in making what was even today scarcely conceivable
just a question of time. What kinds of questions might be asked of the
practitioners within this project concerning communication and education
across such prohibitive cultural barriers as found in Brazil that might
be useful to us?
When we contemplate such ambitious projects enabled by global internet
technology we begin to understand that we are finding ourselves
organized perhaps even in spite of ourselves in larger and more complex
systems. That's why, for my last example, I would like to mention a pet
project of my own: the envisioning of WAC/CAC as a place, within the
academic community, where we can engage an entire new level of literacy
for our students. For the past twenty years I have been educating
myself and writing about the emergent field of systems theory, as that
field has influenced not only the fields of physics and cognitive
science, but the range of human sciences and artistic practices as
well. I think it is time to think of systems thinking as a form of
literacy necessary for students to own in order to function in a
post-industrial world. Furthermore, since system is a concept that many
disciplines use (albeit in different ways), the concept provides a
perfect place for such a transdisciplinary domain to emerge, not only in
technical fields but in liberal arts as well. The fact that the concept
also requires those utilizing it to force issues to the foreground that
might otherwise become relegated to the cubby hole called ethics (and
can do so without even mentioning the term) is icing on the cake.
Systems thinking is both theoretical and concrete and instrumental. It
can be applied to metal-bashing engineering and the history of
aesthetics, computer science and macro-economics, literary theory and
non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Trans-disciplinary education, sometimes referred to as interdisciplinary
or cross-disciplinary studies, is something people refer to as the arena
where people learn to think "outside the box." But not many have found
a way to practice in such an arena so that those normally identifying
with a single discipline will recognize and appreciate. Despite the
success of such hybrid disciplines as cognitive science, individual
disciplines have the weight of inertia in the structure of large
academic institutions, and it is hard to find ways to experiment with
new forms of hybrid knowledges and practices. With an existing academic
unit responsible for WAC/CAC within a university, experimentation with
the pedagogical usefulness of such a trans-disciplinary domain as
"systems" might be possible. Furthermore, the employment of a WAC/CAC
unit to foster cooperation among the disparate disciplines influenced by
systems theory, would make WAC/CAC the center of a consensual domain
enacted to foster communication amongst these otherwise distinct,
isolated entities within the academic archipelago. This might be as
valuable as the knowledge of systems itself. To borrow a term from the
historian of science and MacArthur grant recipient Peter Galison,
technologies that enable linkages across academic, institutional and
geographical boundaries also enable the formation of a "trading zone,"
which like Maturana and Varela's notion of a consensual domain, enables
distinct disciplines, institutions and cultures to preserve their
autonomy while at the same time allowing for the emergence of new kinds
of knowledge, practices and theories.
It seems to me that if WAC/CAC retains its usefulness within the
contemporary academy, it might have to become more ambitious, not less.
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