I have been a Weezer fan since the first time I heard "Undone" in 1994. With the exception of their most recent album called Make Believe, I think Weezer's stuff still has something to offer. (Make Believe struck me as an attempt to reach a younger demographic. If so, then maybe it wasn't "bad." Maybe it just that it wasn't "my" Weezer.)

The new album will be self-titled but it will be called The Red Album (in the tradition of The Blue Album and The Green Album), and it will be released in June. The first single is called "Pork and Beans" and sounds promising. But in the meantime, front man Rivers Cuomo has been using YouTube to pull together his minions in a collaborative song-writing effort. I've included the video for steps 1 and 2 below, but you can watch all the steps of the compositional process at Rivers' YouTube page.

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Girl Talk is a DJ/Mashup Artist from Pittsburgh who mixes A LOT of songs to make crazy tracks. I saw him last night at FunFunFun Fest here in Austin (and I saw him last Spring at SXSW). Last night, he kept saying "Let's move together." It seemed like his goal was to build an organism that bounced, waved, and grooved together. He was looking to compose both a track and a scene. He succeeded. There was a mob of people up on stage with him. It was pretty fucking awesome, and I took a clip of it with my phone (you can kind of see him...he's the white orb at the center bouncing up and down).

If you're not familiar with his work, check out his "Night Ripper" album. My favorite track - "Minute By Minute" - mixes the following songs:

* 0:10 (13:15) Ying Yang Twins ft. Mike Jones and Mr. Collipark - "Badd"
* 0:28 (13:33) LL Cool J - "Around the Way Girl"
* 0:44 (13:49) Michael McDonald - "I Keep Forgettin" / Warren G ft. Nate Dogg - "Regulate"
* 0:56 (14:01) Missy Elliott - "On & On"
* 1:04 (14:09) Neutral Milk Hotel - "Holland, 1945"
* 1:14 (14:19) Jefferson Airplane - "White Rabbit"
* 1:14 (14:19) Juelz Santana - "There It Go (The Whistle Song)"
* 1:32 (14:37) Steely Dan - "Black Cow" / Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz - "Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)"
* 2:06 (15:11) Bruce Hornsby - "The Way It Is"
* 2:11 (15:16) Sophie B. Hawkins - "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover"
* 2:18 (15:23) Panjabi MC - "Mundian To Bach Ke"
* 2:27 (15:32) The Game, 50 Cent - "Hate It or Love It"
* 2:45 (15:50) Better Than Ezra - "Good"
* 2:47 (15:52) Pixies - "Debaser"

Source: Wikipedia

Martha Groom, a professor at University of Washington Bothell used Wikipedia to rethink the research paper. She had students either create or revise an article, and she built some other assignments around it (pre-writing, a reflective essay, etc.)

It seems to have gone over well. Only one student over two semesters reported a "negative" experience (not too many details here...), and there were some minor issues with "rudeness" on the part of Wikipedians. This isn't too surprising. Others have reported this in the past - some Wikipedians guard their territory very aggressively. Some of the articles were deleted and others were incorporated into existing articles.

Overall, this seems like a well-designed assignment. Students participated in a tutorial and were tasked with learning how the community worked prior to writing anything. One student remarked about how "real" the experience seemed (this quote is included in Groom's PowerPoint presentation):

“This assignment felt so Real! I had not thought that anything I wrote was worth others reading before, but now I think what I contributed was useful, and I’m glad other people can gain from my research.”

While this is a great response, it signals to me that we really have cut off writing from "the wild" (as Ed Hutchins might say). Why is the "school paper" so "unReal" and not worth reading. What purpose does student writing serve if they envision it as having an audience of one (teacher)?

These are issues I've been trying to work through in a dissertation chapter on Intellectual Property. How does this notion of the "school paper" as insignificant work when modes of delivery are changing? How are particular modes of delivery linked with ideas of intellectual property? Most would acknowledge that our notions of intellectual property are changing (or are should be changing), but have we considered enough how much the fifth canon needs to change? There has been a good bit of research in rhet/comp. on delivery recently, and I'm thinking through this resurgence of the fifth canon in terms of intellectual property and what Cynthia Haynes has called (in a comment on the Blogora) the "platform" of delivery. In oral delivery, this platform is (seemingly) simple. Here "I" am...I am delivering this speech. I am present. If the authors of electronic texts cannot rest on being/essence, then they are not delivering from a platform. Instead, they are participating in an ongoing process of circulation - something John Trimbur worked through in CCC article a few years back. If circulation is the "new delivery," how are we to rethink both delivery and intellectual property? If we are re-circulating (remixing, remaking) texts, intellectual property needs to be redefined and so does delivery.

Groom's assignment is a great example of students who stepped into a process of circulation. Even those who created new articles were joining an existing conversation, and those who were editing articles were even moreso joining the circulatory system of Wikipedia. This seems to be much more useful than asking/forcing students to create from scratch. Even if we teach them that they're not starting from scratch - that they are patching together other texts, citing other sources, synthesizing information - they still think that "writing" is something they create, from scratch, ex nihilo. Electronic environments offer us some ways make it clear to students that writers never ever create something from nothing.

School starts today. I didn't do nearly as much writing as I would have liked to over the summer, but I did a fair amount of reading. Among the books I read were Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject and Jeff Rice's The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. I initially decided to read these two books because they were new contributions to Rhetoric and Composition, but it turns out that they had some interesting overlaps.

Rickert's project is an intriguing one. He begins the book with a dilemma that would make just about any rhetoric and writing teacher take a step back. Toward the end of the 1990s, Rickert started to notice something strange about his composition students:

"My students were becoming adept at picking apart ads and identifying their most pernicious features: the inducement to buy unnecessary, expensive items; the achievement of identity and modes of being through products; the reification of unjust class, race, and gender roles; and so forth. I faced little resistance from them, James Berlin and Company to the contrary. Or perhaps I should say their resistance appeared indirectly, in odd, hard to recognize, even symptomatic forms. Their adeptness led them to write competent, even excellent papers, but that was the extent of it. If there was any real change, it was in growing cynicism: 'Yeah, I know I don't need these seventy-five-dollar designer blue jeans, but...' [spending ensues]. Where was the connection between what they were learning and their actual lives?" (1-2)

Rickert's framing of the problem is clear and elegant, and it made me immediately question my own teaching practices. How might we make sense of the "fault line between knowledge and action" (2)? Rickert turns to Slavoj Zizek and theories of enjoyment, fantasy, and jouissance to understand the limits of a cultural studies approach to teaching rhetoric and writing. He takes us through detailed engagements with the "big shots" of the field (Jim Berlin especially) and moves toward a theory of the "act" - something that would move beyond mere "critique":

"The Act is interested in rupturing the day, in transforming the entire discursive field that determines what is proper and valued. The Act refuses accommodation in favor of radical transformation despite the risk of total loss. Ultimately, this is what most pedagogies refuse to do: they do not teach 'risk' ('Godless' 561). Even the most radical pedagogies, which would wage war on capital itself, betray the servitude that underwrites their success: 'ifyou do this, then this will happen; if you plan ahead, you will save time; if you are critical of power, you will be empowered'" (194).

Rickert's question is a powerful one: How do we move beyond a cultural studies approach that does little upset things? He admits that his answer - a pedagogy of the Act - is not specific one, but he is not looking to institute a program. Instead, he is looking for rhetoric and composition to rethink the very assumptions of pedagogy.

What I have provided here is a very brief sketch of Rickert's argument, but it feeds nicely into Rice's book. Rice may very well perform something close to what Rickert calls for.

Rice's The Rhetoric of Cool continues Gregory Ulmer's project of inventing electracy, a project that Ulmer has worked through in numerous texts including Applied Grammatology, Tele-Theory, Internet Invention, and Electronic Monuments. A student of Ulmer's (the book begins with a Foreword by Ulmer), Rice works very much in his mentor's mode by excavating the ground beneath the term "cool." Thus, Rice is not necessarily trying to make composition "cool," but is instead searching the term for it's various, disparate meanings. This search allows him a way into a conversation about new media and composition studies.

Rice returns to 1963 and the birth of composition studies to recover some of the paths not taken by our discipline. Thus, he asks why when theorists like Albert Kitzhaber were "inventing" modern composition studies certain artists and musicians were left out of the conversation. Why not consider artists such as Warhol or authors such as Burroughs when developing theories of composition? Rice argues that these figures have been left out of the conversation as composition has put together a grand narrative of the discipline. That grand narrative is mostly concerned with civic literacy and democracy, and (on some level) it depends upon the exclusion of certain theories.

Rice asks the discipline to abandon this grand narrative and to consider what has been left out. Further, he asks the sub-discipline of computers and writing to reconsider its goals. Instead of nuts-and-bolts considerations of technology, Rice wants inventions (and reinventions) of whole new ways of thinking (whole new "electracies.") Instead of asking how we can use a tool like Photoshop in a writing classroom, Rice encourages us to think about teaching students to write with images. This would be beyond writing about images - it would be an expansion of the definition of Writing to include various media. Film making is writing. Podcasting is writing. Hyperlinking is writing.

Here might be where Rice's project answers Rickert's. Rice calls for rhetoric and composition to move beyond the literate enterprise toward an electrate one. This will require (and here is where he most echoes Ulmer) invention, but not invention in the way Aristotle uses the term and certainly not invention in the way that "inventors" use the term (i.e. creating something from scratch.) Instead, Rice wants in in(ter)vention that produces new ways of reading and writing. This would mean teaching students how to appropriate texts, how to see various shades of meaning, and how to make remake meaning.

It seems that Rice, like Rickert, is frustrated with any pedagogy that stops at mere critique and stops at the boundaries of literate practice. Maybe these two books are an indication of some future strands of rhetoric and composition scholarship - strands that will ask how we can think about the next phase of our research and pedagogy.

The Guardian Unlimited has a story about an International Relations professor who has seen the light on Wikipedia. She's assigning students Wikipedia entries on Middle Eastern politics and having them contribute to the discussion:

Nicola Pratt, a lecturer in international relations, said she used to be "one of the disgruntled crown of academics who berate students for using Wikipedia in their essays" but is now convinced it can be a great opportunity for students to see at first hand how knowledge is produced.

As this professor notes, Wikipedia is a useful site of knowledge production. If we read it merely as a site of knowledge consumption we are 1) ignoring that all knowledge is produced by reader/writers; 2) chopping off half of what Wikipedia does and limiting its usefulness.