Infrastructures and technology

I've read an interesting article by MSU faculty members Danielle DeVoss, Ellen Cushman and Jeff Grabill entitled "Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New Media," which examines infrastructures and how they relate to digital writing environments and pedagogy. What I like best about this article is that it takes a pretty invisible concept and sheds some serious critical light on it - which I think is important for us as teachers.

The article looks at the sort of built-in structures that dictate, limit and shape the types of compositions that go on in a college writing classroom. Part of the article traces a course in Multimedia Writing that was taught by Professor Ellen Cushman sometime ago. Using this anecdote as a backdrop, the article looks at what sort of institutional, political, and curricular structures limit and shape the types of composing that goes on.

Obviously, when talking about new media writing, there are material infrastructures that limit and shape the types of composing that occurs: computer networks, softwares, etc. But what makes this article interesting is the focus on the "when" of new media composing, which they argue largely dictates what counts as writing and determines what affordances are granted for those acts. They argue that tools are not artifacts but, instead, get their utility from use at a particular time.

In the case of Prof. Cushman's class, her students were at first limited by the amount of space they were granted on the university server which went a long way in determining the type of work they were doing - in this case video. Because the University had certain policies in place, her students were not able to fully engage in that particular writing process, which meant that Prof. Cushman had to climb the bureaucratic ladder just to assure her students would be able to create the work for the class, going so far as asking the Vice Provost of Libraries for more space on the server.

This is a pretty upfront example of infrastructures that dictate processes, but the article reveals others which are worth noting when we talk about teaching and technology. Take for instance a software interface. Pretty innocuous. But even a software interface has prescribed notions of what writing looks like and should be - pre-determined settings that, at the very least, nudge the writer toward a form for their final work. As an example, there may be a predetermined aspect ratio for a video that has to be manually (and thoughtfully) changed before beginning.

I think this article brings to light a number of important issues and calls for teachers to think critically about how infrastructures are exerting their will on the types of work students are doing. In some cases -- as was the case with Prof. Cushman -- this can be a call to action, a call to question and destabilize the existing infrastructure, yielding growth and new possibilities for our students. Because these relationships are not simple and are ever-changing, we need to be continually on guard and curious about the infrastructures - material, political and otherwise - around us.