Adapting to Change

From the very beginning of my teaching career, I have been very interested in introducing students to the visual and textual semiotics connected to cross-culture narrative sharing and cultural remediation. Examining the ghosts of media transmission has been a central part of what I present in my classrooms. Because I began my teaching career instructing English as a second language while also working in non-English speaking environments, making use of cross-culture study and cross-culture media influence makes obvious sense, and it is also why I eventually gravitated toward university-level instruction inside an English department framework.

When released from the narrow confines of reading, interpreting, and debating the fine points of Western canonical literature, English can be an eclectic, extremely interdisciplinary and flexible field of study that touches upon many divergent aspects of communication and language (Bolter). Also, the expertise that English scholarship applies to the creation, revision, and interpretation of narrative structure is vitally important to studing how audiences of all kinds respond to all mediated forms of communication. Finally, the instruction of writing at any level also calls for easy access to and comfort with a wide range of fields of study and therefore a good deal of innovative interdisciplinary work and cross-cultural study inside an English department usually arises from the composition, technical/professional communication, and writing across the curriculum programs (Landow). It is inside these kind of programs where many of us have begun to refine our discussions with students about technologically-enabled transmission of narrative ghosts and energized electronic semiotic exchanges from culture to culture, usually organized under the rubric of studying information architectures, human-computer interface design and the rhetorical aspects of online communication.

While it has been fairly easy and straight-forward to trace the most blatant and prosaic elements of this cross-cultural pollination process through film and prose (resulting in the widespread use of traditional and postmodern literary theory for the use of film critique), many of us (especially those of us with backgrounds in technical communication) have found that with the advent of pervasive computing, the intermixing of images and ideologies from far-flung cultures has become a central component of the practical usability for the operating systems and information structures of many modern communication mediums (Lunenfeld).

As I mention elsewhere in this essay, pervasive computing has now put the tools of technological communicative construction directly into the hands of technology and media users, allowing us to directly manipulate the shape, intention, and symbolic representation of our online and/or computer-enhanced computer interactions. Therefore, like many of us working with the new media or emergent media theory aspects of English and rhetorical study (Landow, Buckingham), I have moved away from exclusively helping students learn how to critique the media artifacts, narratives and cross-cultural symbols that surround them and have instead turned toward helping students learn the praxis of adapting their critiques into the invention and construction of the objects themselves. While teaching about cultural mediation and technological remediation is complicated enough as part of helping students learn methods of prose and visual critique, it can be devilishly complex to integrate into a cohesive pedagogy that makes invention, creation and technology development key components of the process (Goldfarb). Integrating project work directly into a new media rhetoric curriculum means that a number of important and persistent questions immediately arise:

• Can new media development work truly find a home as part of an English department when the course and the students deal with such a wide range of theoretical concerns and with such a wide range of technological practices?

• Do students always need to complete their work? And how does one define "completion" in an interactive, new media design process?

• How do you assess the quality and level of success or failure for the projects that students create, especially when you’re asking students to create something completely new and highly experimental? What do you use as a guide for assessment that makes sense to you as instructor and to your students?

In this section of the essay I will briefly answer these questions in connection to the Lumiere Ghosting Project and the invention and construction process for the CompuObscura. While there are elements of this new media development project that are quite similar to many new media rhetoric, writing and critical theory projects currently underway around the country (Liestol, Hansen, Samsel & Wimberley), my colleagues and I feel that with the Lumiere Ghosting Project, we have stumbled on a useful pedagogy and technological development model that may help inform and possibly improve how a diverse range of new media theory and practice can be combined into one large scale, collaborative production.