I’ve been thinking a lot about Huizinga’s discussion of play and language, which he seems to especially consider in his discussion of poetry: “Poiesis, in fact, is a play-function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it…poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter” (119).

So, if, as he argues, “[a]ll poetry is born of play” (129), I wonder if we can extend this line of thinking to prose and other forms of articulation as well, since it seems to me that the Huizinga’s privileging of poetry here could potentially limit our understanding of how playful other forms of writing and communication might be. How, too, might the intersection of play and language affect the way we teach such things, and how might our understanding of this be complicated by the fact that Huizinga also wonders how this form of play fares in (his) contemporary society: “How far is the play-quality of poetry preserved when civilization grows more complicated?” (129).

I’ve also been thinking about the fact that Huizinga extends this interrogation of the current state of play in the final chapter, since he wonders “how much of the play spirit is still alive in our own day and generation and the world at large” (173). Or, to put this another way, Huizinga posits the following questions: “To what extent does the civilization we live in still develop in play-forms? How far does the play-spirit dominate the lives of those who share that civilization? The 19^th century, we observed, had lost many of the play-elements so characteristic of former ages. Has this leeway been made up or has it increased?” (195).

I know we talked about this a bit last week, but I’m still wondering how play has continued to evolve, especially when we think about how our technologies expand the ways we might engage with play. And, in thinking about the ways we played in class last week when we played Johann Sebastian Joust, I also wonder how technology affects the way we think about the manner in which the body engages in play.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Huizinga calls the “hazy border-line between play and seriousness” (52), and I’ve also been thinking about the fact that Huizinga argues that play, while not exactly the opposite of seriousness, may, at least, be defined as “non-seriousness” (5). I wonder what we might make of the idea that the “contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid” and the manner in which the fluid interplay between seriousness and play might speak to the ways we may use of both in our classrooms (8). What pedagogical role(s) might play have for us?

And then further, does the classroom space itself complicate the notion of play? I ask this because of what Huizinga argues regarding the idea of play as a “voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be but a forcible imitation of it. By this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of the natural process. It is something added there to and spread out over it like a flowering, an ornament, a garment” (7). So, if we integrate play into our classrooms, is it just a “forcible imitation of it”? Is it “play to order”? Is it no longer play?

I don’t really know how I feel about this, and I don’t know that I think that play in the classroom is no longer play. Maybe it’s something else. But if so, what is it? Or, I guess, is there a way to make use of play in the classroom in a way that allows it to still be play?

Rickly posits, “If only a few voices are present, then the classroom becomes hierarchical in nature, with a few creating knowledge for the many” (125). How do we/can we deal with these hierarchies in our classrooms, especially when these hierarchies intersect with technology usage?

At the end of “Why Do Women Feel Ignored? Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Classroom Interactions,” Wolfe concludes by asking the following questions: “Can women learn to respond to oppositions? Can men learn to agree more often and less egotistically? Perhaps, with enough effort, we can develop strategies for interacting online which leave no one feeling ignored” (164). How might we respond to such questions, and how might we begin to develop such strategies?

In “The Gender Gap in Computers and Composition Research: Must Boys Be Boys?”, Rickly wonders, “Do students really participate more consistently and interactively in the synchronous electronic forum than in traditional oral class discussions? And, how is gender a factor in these participation levels?” (124). How have our own classroom experiences spoken to the manner in which we might engage with such questions? How have we seen students’ participation levels play out in oral discussions and/or electronic ones? How do these levels converse with each other, and what conclusions might we draw from this? How have issues of gender come into play in these (oral and electronic) conversations in our classrooms?

Rickly’s interrogation in “The Gender Gap in Computers and Composition Research: Must Boys Be Boys?” of the intersection of gender and technology in the classroom, her asking the questions, “Do students really participate more consistently and interactively in the synchronous electronic forum than in traditional oral class discussions? And, how is gender a factor in these participation levels?” (124), and the manner in which she engages with these questions—by, as she says, looking “beyond standard measures of biological sex, then, to measures of socially constructed gender” in her study (138)—has got me thinking about the social constructedness of all these things and what implications this might have for the ways we model our classrooms.

How do we deal with hierarchies? How do we deal with the fact that “[i]f only a few voices are present, then the classroom becomes hierarchical in nature, with a few creating knowledge for the many” (125)? How can we ensure that our classrooms are spaces in which students feel “free to participate, to contribute to the making of meaning” (124), and, based on Rickly’s results, can interactions with and through computers and conversations mediated by them help to foster more widespread participation and contribution if, as Wolfe posits, “women feel ignored online, not because their contributions go unacknowledged, but because they do not receive the type of conversational feedback that they value” (155)?

And if we shape our classrooms into, as Wolfe puts it, “relatively friendly” settings that allow “women to speak with relative freedom and [help] them to contribute nearly as much to the conversation as their male peers” (162), might this “friendliness” do them a disservice upon their entrance into the much more hostile terrain of online spaces? Or, in other words, how do we create a generative, productive atmosphere in the classroom, one that promotes communal discussion, while, at the same time, preparing students for the hostilities they might face elsewhere?

I’m really fascinated by Sullivan’s discussion of hypertext as a space of feminist praxis, and this discussion also has me thinking a lot about the manner in which hypertext might also challenge the way we think about narrative due to the fact that “hypertext is not a nonlinear form but a multilinear one” (33). And the manner in which this multilinear form converses with a feminist engagement with literature further troubles the boundaries of these conventions: “Feminists and other postmodernists have pointed out that traditional literary conventions privilege the unified text…However, fragmented narratives are being produced by feminists who want to counter the idea that texts are unified and self-containing” (35).

As such, I wonder how the open-endedness, the fragmentation, the multivocality, and the multilinearity of hypertext might allow students to engage with other modes of writing and communication. And I also wonder what other narrative forms we might also consider that might also make use of multilinear processes. I wonder how this all might speak to the types of narratives and writing processes that may be privileged, and I also wonder how expanding our understanding of narrative might allow us to see narrative structures in other spheres or spaces.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what Hocks mentions regarding embodiment in digital spaces and theorists’ ambivalence regarding how we think about the body in such spaces: “This ambivalence about both escaping and reifying our real bodies and identities in relation to virtual environments, I believe, marks a fundamental characteristic of electronic environments and becomes the site where feminist interventions make a difference” (108). I wonder, here, though—can the body ever really be erased? Can we really escape the body in virtual spaces? Do we want to?

I find myself getting hung up on Chapman’s closing remarks in “A Luddite in Cyberland, Or How to Avoid Being Snared by the Web”:

One often hears that the potential for the Web is great. And, I would agree. The Web has the potential to sacrifice the quality of sources used by students in research for the ready availability of Web sources. It has the potential to distract students away form the analysis and reflection at the heart of a college education as they focus on the superficial appearance of documents. It has the potential to squander the precious resource of student time by focusing on the mechanics of Web-site production instead of on the act of writing. We may be able to avoid the Siren call of the Web as we avoided the false promises of televised classes in the 1960s and computer tutorials in the 1970s. With a little luck, the Web may never be able to reach its potential. (252)

I have to say that I don’t really know how I feel about all this. On one hand, as someone who often feels like a Luddite herself, I can kind of empathize with the challenge of keeping up with technology and the feeling that “students too often settle for inferior sources” (249). But it seems that more and more “superior” sources are becoming available digitally (at least, since Chapman wrote this article), although perhaps access to and availability of such sources depends on the institution/university through which students/teachers are operating. The hope, though, that “the Web may never be able to reach its potential” seems a bit limited in its posturing as a cautionary, cynical tale—would it maybe be more helpful to critically engage, instead, with solutions for how we might make use of emerging technologies and digital media in a way that could help our students navigate these terrains more effectively?

I wonder if Aschauer’s “Tinkering with Technological Skill: An Examination of the Gendered Uses of Technological Skill: An Examination of the Gendered Uses of Technologies” might allow us to move in that direction, especially if we consider more fully her pointing out that “rather than arguing for an ahistorical, inner essence of womanhood and rejecting technology, we need to remember that femininity, masculinity, and technology are social constructs, all three of which can be resisted and reconstructed” (14). And perhaps her interrogation of femininity, masculinity, and technology as social constructs through the feminist empiricist approach that highlights the value of lived experience might complicate Chapman’s arguments, especially in that Aschauer argues, “To engage in the kind of empirical research I have suggested requires that we exchange conventional definitions of technology as a monolith for a view of it as a site for lived experience” (17). As such, I wonder if, perhaps, by further problematizing the social constructedness of gender, technology, and the intersection of both, we might continue to complicate these “conventional definitions of technology as a monolith” and unpack the manner in which all this impacts our classroom concerns.

After Tuesday’s conversation with Ashley, Alisha, Sherri, and Dr. Blackmon, during which we considered the example of Neverwinter and the manner in which such a game might be used in the classroom, I am struck by all the different pedagogical applications for such a game. Whether it’s using the game to discuss research practices, or thinking about it as a site of communication and language, or using the game as the catalyst for conversations about things like audience, discourse community, representation, historical/cultural context, etc., it’s fascinating to think about how a video game can be so pedagogically generative. This actually brings to mind a comment made in “Reading between the Code: The Teaching of HTML and the Displacement of Writing Instruction” in which Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner point out that their various uses of technology in their classrooms led them to realize that “no one method is, as yet, the best approach” (416).

I’ve also been thinking about—as Sherri brings up in her post as well—the ideas of struggling and comfort levels in relation to the use of games with students. It seems to me that the conversations around the struggling seem to be helpful as well, for they may allow us to think about why it is that we struggle as well as what sort of implications our struggles might have for the way we think about our interactions with video games. Perhaps this speaks to something Rea and White highlight in “The Changing Nature of Writing: Prose or Code in the Classroom”: “To work effectively within the medium, both instructors and students need to understand the medium itself, because it is not only changing culture, but also the means through which people communicate and share information” (423). And maybe the various methods of engaging with Neverwinter that we all talked about together in our group are all different ways we might begin to “work effectively within the medium” in an effort to think about how we communicate and share information and how video games might mediate such communication.

One of the connective threads weaving through all these readings seems to be this idea of the possibility for collaboration, community, and interactivity in digital spaces. Thomas Derrick details an interactive game for composition students that, he claims, makes use of computers as a means of utilizing the “concept of interactivity” in a way that helps them improve their thinking and writing together (45). Margaret Daisley considers the manner in which play affects the way we think about “computer-mediated communication” (107). Haas and Gardner believe the use of graphical MOOs in composition can be valuable in that it may “provide a better means of communication for students because they incorporate not only a familiar, easy-to-use interface, but also provide a better sense of presence with other users” (356). And finally, Beth Kolko works to complicate our understanding of electronic discourse through her discussion of intellectual property in collaborative virtual spaces.

And as Daisley asserts, something that makes the collaboration that occurs in such spaces worth considering is that this interactivity is characterized by its playfulness, and I wonder how we might unpack this intersection of play and collaborative composition as a potential part of pedagogical practices. Are the types of play discussed in these readings really all that playful? Are there better ways for us to be thinking about how to incorporate games and play into our classes? How do we deal with the potential downsides, the times during which “the ‘fun’ gets out of hand” (Daisley 107)? And what are the stakes for us when thinking about these things?

Indeed, I think that some of Daisley’s questions regarding our roles as teachers in all this bear repeating: “Who makes the playground of language, the game of literacy safe? Or, is ‘safety’ always the ideal to shoot for when it comes to language use?” (116). I wonder how we, as writing instructors, navigate language and play in a way that acknowledges “the very real ways virtual space dissolves the boundaries of authorial self and other and reflect[s] these new perspectives in the definitions we generate” (Kolko 180).

I’ve seen technology used in classrooms in a few different ways and at different levels, whether it’s the bringing in of game consoles to play games that tie into specific conversations we have in class (lookin’ at you, Sam!), or whether it’s, in the opposite direction, the complete rejection of technology as a result of some sort of belief that computers or screens distract from the work. I feel like the latter happens more often with people working within the field of literature (and I’m speaking anecdotally about what I’ve witnessed not just here but in other departments)–people who are deeply entrenched in, perhaps, earlier forms of literature or pedagogy or who are maybe a bit set in their ways.

So as someone working within this field myself, and as someone who wants to incorporate newer technologies into the way we think about narrative, I occasionally find myself facing some resistance to the idea of including the changing technological landscape into our work. And I’m out of time, so I guess I’ll just leave it there!

After parsing through today’s readings, I find myself continuing to think about the implications of the idea of the computer as an entity that seems to operate outside of the writing process, as something for which new processes (such as revision) needed to accommodate, as something that causes people like Kantrov to point out that “what is critical is how teachers choose to employ the technology in their classrooms and computer laboratories” (63).

Indeed, in light of these readings, I find myself preoccupied by similar concerns that have already been posed by others here. Like Sherri, I wonder how far we have really come and if the ways that we think about the intersection of computers and writing processes have really progressed in any meaningful way. And, like Alisha, I too wonder about the writing processes of experienced and inexperienced writers and how we might navigate the challenges we face in working on such processes with students.

And I’m also struck by something that Kantrov argues: “The greater access students have to more appropriately designed tools, the less students and instructors will have to struggle to accommodate the technology to the composition course’s goals” (73). Namely, I wonder, here, how it is that we might realistically help students garner access to such tools and how the idea of access informs the way we think about computers and composition.