Speed of Infrastructure

The internet is made up of a series of tubes. No. Really. It is. The tubes carry the data from server to server and sometimes it gets more involved in that. Someone feel free to jump in any time and let me know how it really work because that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge on this topic.

What I do know rather well is what to do when my computer breaks. I call one of my computer geek friends. I don’t even have to be PC about that. They are all very comfortable with being geeks. And the vicious cycle continues. One day I might end up like that old lady in Georgia who accidentally broke all the internet cables going into Armenia with a garden spade.

But neither DeVoss, Cushman and Grabill’s 2005 article, “Infrastructure and Composing,” nor Daniel Anderson’s “The Low Bridge to High Benefits” insist that students know how the internet works in order to change their compositions into multimedia projects. What they do insist on is our pre-thinking about the infrastructures involved in what we ask our students to do. Pair that with Rudolfo and DeVoss’s 2009 Kairos page about ‘Rhetorical Velocity,’ and we’ve got a group of infrastructures that are quite important to know how to operate.

A lot has changed since DeVoss, Cushman and Grabill wrote about the server issue at MSU. Now, instead of worrying about student space on hard drive, I worry about whether or not my students can organize their files. I tell them to save their work in several places and to make sure it all works AND there’s a backup before a multimedia presentation. It’s even in the syllabus. But still somehow most of them think I’m kidding. Or probably that it won’t happen to them. And by ‘it’ I mean a non-functioning product on presentation day, of course.

I know that for a lot of them, their computer files look like their backpacks: no folders, papers thrown any old place, stuff from two semesters ago shoved in with stuff I gave them last week.

Yes, that is Rizzo the Rat

 

Do any of us ever teach how to manage files? Do we talk about how to organize our images, our videos and our text files when we ask them to build multimedia products? It seems like this should be something we talk about talking about.

But we’ve talked about the digital native before. Times have changed and students are expected to come to college already understanding how to deal with their own infrastructures. Some of them do… but most of them have no idea what their university H: drive is, or how it works.

How important is knowing how stuff works these days, anyway? Do we NEED to know how the internet works to be able to use it? Do you know how your car works so you can drive it?

It’s hard to answer that in a blog post, so I’m not going to.

But I will leave you with a nice little story about infrastructure, speed, and what something called a Super Computer can do for us in the future.

Why Is This Supercomputer So Superfast?

 

The Digital Divide and Gadgets

This week’s readings are an interesting mix of ideas involving techno-literacies (or New literacies) and arguments about the divide between the connected and the un-connected.

Selber gives us very useful (if a little outdated) information on ‘functional literacies’ – which involves students understanding not only the uses of the technology, but also its limitations. I can’t express how often I get students blindly trusting their grammar checker to fill in a thousand semi-colons because the student suffered from an incurable bought of comma-splice-itis.

Further, Cynthia Selfe (in her 1999 article “The Perils of Not Paying Attention [an article many of us got familiar with in Harker’s course]), give us a bunch of statistics from the Clinton era, that were very startling when they came out. I remember hearing a lot of it in the news.

Grabill‘s essay then, (and he used to be a GSU prof, for those of you who didn’t know) looks even deeper into the issue of the digital divide among class, race, and gender, and gets us into the idea that the interface we are so familiar with may be a little… culturally idealistic.

In the interest of bringing everyone in the Computers and Composition course this semester more up to speed with what has been happening very recently, I will be showing you a few ‘new literacies’ that I have picked up just in the past few months. I will use twitter, storify, and a few other ‘tricks’ to illustrate how there is no such thing as a digital native, and that there is, in fact, quite a divide in what our young writers are bringing to the composition classroom. After the presentation, I will post the storify for all of you to look at more closely. It will have a bunch of links you can follow, if you are interested in pursuing this topic further.
For now, I leave you with a few, more up to date, statistics in a friendly form.

Below is an infographic from the Pew Institution (the information for the site was sent to me through Helen [thank you!]) showing what percentage of adults own internet-capable gadgets, separated out by several factors: age, income, education, and race & ethnicity

While this infographic is certainly interesting, it’s not the whole picture. Pew has a bunch of other stats and interesting facts, which I encourage you to surf around in this weekend.

http://pewinternet.org/