Clinamen

Some readers of this blog might remember that I posted my notes to Greg Ulmer's book Internet Invention while I taught my Fall "Computers and Writing" class. We used Ulmer's book in that class to work through a genre of writing called mystory. Mystory is an attempt to understand the various images and discourses that shape us as thinkers, readers, writers...as beings.

I never did post anything about how that class went, so I thought I'd post a description of the Mystory projects that students in that class developed. Overall, I was very pleased considering I'd never taught the book before. I'm submitting this project for the CWRL's annual MEME Award. Here's a brief description of the project with some links to student mystories:

Greg Ulmer’s textbook Internet Invention attempts to supplement the writing practices of literacy with those of “electracy.” To get students to develop electrate ways of writing, Ulmer has developed the genre of “mystory” (the term evokes: history, mystery, “my story.”) Mystory asks students to investigate the discourses that shape their bodies and minds (Ulmer breaks these discourses into: career, family, entertainment, and community.) Students attempt to invent their own “wide image”—the guiding image for their thinking processes. To explain the wide image, Ulmer uses the example of a compass Einstein received as a boy. The compass was Einstein’s wide image—it represented a collision between at least two discourses that shaped him. His father (family) gave him a compass that shaped his research (career.) Students are attempting to make sense of similar collisions in their own lives.

Students in my “Computers and Writing” course composed mystories using PBwiki. The Wiki form provided students with a flexible space for composing and revising. I encouraged students to do all writing in the wiki so that I could observe as much of their invention and revision processes as possible. The wiki’s simple markup language allowed students to easily link pages together as they searched for the collisions I mention above. The course’s focus was not on Web design (though, we did discuss design issues), so many of the pages are not necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Yet, the larger point of the assignment was to get students to observe the process of interpellation (Ulmer uses this term, citing Althusser) that shapes their modes of thinking. In this sense, the audience for the mystory is the various “selves” of the author. Yet, mystory is not necessarily expressivist. The overarching goal is to understand our ways of thinking so that we can better grapple with public policy issues.

Student Mystory pages can be found on my RHE 312 page:

http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/jbrown/312_fall07

I would encourage you to browse one mystory in particular—John Mace’s:

http://jmace.pbwiki.com/

John incorporated video (something I did not require) and his mystory is now linked on the companion website for Internet Invention (under the heading “Widesites”):

http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/longman/resources.html

My lecture notes for Internet Invention are also linked on this page (under the heading “Syllabi.”)