Appearing on a Shelf Near You

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Culture Shock and the Practice of ProfessionIt's always kind of fun to see your name in print, particularly when it doesn't require any additional work on your part. Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition (Amazon) has finally been released, and lucky chapter #13 was written by myself and Paul Bender, with a fairly expository title: "Isolation, Adoption, Diffusion: Mapping the Relationship Between Technology and Graduate Programs in Rhetoric and Composition." Hmmm....I wonder what it's about....

Seriously, we wrote the essay at a time when Nardi and O'Day's Information Ecologies was just hitting people's radar screens, and we were trying to articulate a model for measuring programs that involved more than just "How new are your computers?" or "How many do you have?" We came up with three spectra along which programs might locate themselves--Responsibility, Representation, and Role (demonstrating once more my alliteration fetish). We argue that if you were to map these spectra as axes on a three-dimensional graph (and yes, I actually drew such a graph for the article), and then plot our various programs, that we'd end up with something like a bell curve rotated along its horizontal axis. Isolation, adoption, and diffusion are our terms for the low end, middle, and high end of that 3-D bell curve. Finally, we close with some concrete recommendations for moving from one end of the graph to the other.

It's not the most ambitious piece of writing I've ever undertaken, but it stands up well enough considering that I worked on it with Paul when I first got to Syracuse a few years ago. It's not as elaborate as, say, the recent piece in CCC on new media infrastructure, but in fact, it's not a bad complement to that essay. Our essay takes a more generalist tack, and a generous read of it would say that what we do is to try and establish some vocabulary that might be used in describing what DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill call infrastructure.

And hey, I'm in a generous mood. I'm proudest, though, of the fact that it's hard to write technology essays that hold up for more than a year or two, and I think ours does. That's not bad.

Also, just by way of observation, there are 2 chapters in the book co-written by professors and graduate students at Syracuse. So, 4 authors, 2 chapters, including me and mine, and of the four of us, I'm the only one who's still at Syracuse.

And p.s., Alex has a chapter in it, too...

2 Comments

Kudos; I taught selections from the Nardi & O'Day book recently, and I'd love to see your take on the issues they raise.

Very cool, Collin. Congrats! I wanna read it...

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This page contains a single entry by cgbrooke published on October 31, 2005 9:04 AM.

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