Clinamen

I'm teaching a course entitled "Anthologics" this semester. This is a word that I kind of made up. I say "kind of" for a couple of reason. For one, no one makes up a word...it's all a matter of citation. But also, as I was writing my course description I stumbled into a post by Derek that mentions this word (Derek? You out there? Did I steal your word?) Anyway, students are creating their own anthologies based on a topic of their choice. They're compiling sources, designing a book jacket using InDesign, and writing a book proposal (crafted for a particular publisher).

A lot of the class has focused on how we join existing and, in Burke's words, "infinite" conversations. How do we enter an ongoing conversation, figure out what's going on, and then join? Yesterday, we talked about how narration can be a useful way of doing research. Find a particular case of the thing you want to talk about and narrate it. This is a good "way in"...a good process of invention.

I decided to use the House of Representatives "discussion" about the bailout bill as an example of something we might narrate. So, I created a wiki called What Happened in the House. It was essentially a blank page. I told students to start researching, provide sources, and turned them loose. If you look at the page, you'll see it's a real mess. This is often how wikis work. They create a mess. Then someone (an editor, a gatekeeper, etc.) comes in and cleans things up. But it was much more of a mess during class, and this was because students kept overwriting their classmates' edits. In pbwiki, if someone else is editing a page you want to edit, you can "steal the lock" from them and begin editing the page. This essentially meant that nothing was getting done. Everyone just kept stealing the lock from one another.

After letting this go on for a while, I stopped things down and asked this question: Why were students acting like they weren't in the same room with each other? It was as if they were not in the same physical space? Why not take advantage of the fact that you can turn to the person next to you and say: "Can you let me know when you're done?" I had not planned this intervention, but the phenomenon was too interesting. I had to point it out. After I did, students talked to one another and came up with an information filtering system. They posted comments to the page, and one student took responsibility for copy/pasting content into the page. This still made for a messy "narration," but it at least stopped the process of overwriting.

Considering the "anthological" method we're developing in class, this experience was a really useful demonstration of how messy conversations really are. How do we figure out a way to sort through the mess, the muck, the noise? In this class, we sort it out by creating our own conversation. We pick and choose from the various possible arguments being made, we mash them together, and we figure out why this created conversation is useful or interesting.

But this whole thing brings me back to the question that's been bugging me for the past couple of months - the question of quickness. The anthological method is just one way of approaching this problem. With anthologics, we can slow things down a bit and construct a conversation. But this is just one approach, and it only works in certain rhetorical situations. What are the other approaches? This question continues to nag me...