There are times over the past few days when I’m kicking myself for having said something stupid, or feeling stupid for not saying something. It’s just the way it is right now. I have to go with the discontinuity. Repeat after me, discontinuity is a good thing.

For my paper in Rhetoric of Emotion, Motives & Affect, I want to talk about blogging and writing across the curriculum. However, there are many times I feel much as Will R. does when he says,

I think it’s harder for people who haven’t gulped the from the Kool-Aid to understand it, and I try in my own mind not to overstate it. It feels so all encompassing sometimes that I feel the need to rein it in, take a deep breath, keep perspective.

The thing is, in my struggle to “rein it in,” I have been paralyzed with fear over overstepping. What has clicked for me is that I realized what I’ve been doing is problematizing before potentializing.

In Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual, he writes, “The reflective critical thinker anchors the discussion in the “no’s” of will not/should not, willing a clampdown on potential in the name of justice. The experimenter in criticality starts from “yes” in the name of sensation and leaves the field while open. The Stelarcian desire is to affirm the conversion, not in order to denigrate the importance of the human justice issues it incontestably raises, but rather to enable them to be re-posed and operated upon in an entirely new problematic, one that may even now be waiting for us around the next node” (132).

Ok, so first things first. First, dream big and go for the potentials. Second, problematize the entire situation…not just the new thing.

Also helpful to me over the past two days, is a new post by Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users: How to Come Up with Breakthrough Ideas. And, also this one on Never Underestimate the Power of Fun is also relevant.

Ok, so WAC already has some existing “sliders:” writing in the disciplines, writing to learn, engaged pedagogy, and convention/tradition. I want to tweak the convention/tradition slider and add sliders for affect and emotion (fun!!). That is, the equalizer for affect includes: bodily sensations, emotion, interaction and intensity.

In a recent article, “The Fast Lane,” in Entrepreneur magazine, by Mark Henricks, he lays out five rules that every entrepreneur has to know. Rule #0 is “Entrepreneurs don’t follow rules–they break them.” See, the way I interpret that and apply it to blogging is that some people see blogging as breaking the rules. It certainly messes with the convention/tradition slider. It may be a type of writing that some academics do, but it certainly isn’t conventional academic discourse and it breaks with tradition. But, let’s face it, that is part of its fun!! Under Rule #5, “You Must Have the Desire,” [...] “Venture capitalist Biddle points out that for most companies to expand rapidly, the founders must have more passion for growth than for control” (67, April 2005). Well, academia is hardly an institution that is poised for rapid change. Change in academia happens at a snail’s pace and as stated by the editors (McLeod, Miraglia, Soven, and Thaiss) of WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs, “WAC as a movement is poised as a counter-balance to these online efforts [such as those by Phoenix Online and University fo Colorado Online], which work from a model of delivery of information and focus on independaent study rather than on the learner as part of a social setting that promotes critical thinking and problem solving.” (8). I find the notion of WAC “poised as a counter-balance to these online efforts” problematic. It is as if WAC feels the need to stand in the middle and prevent unwarranted uses of technology. Why shouldn’t WAC stand in the middle and advocate particular technological use? Why does technology have to be placed counter to “new models of student-teacher and student-student interaction”? (8). See, the thing is, I see blogging as a way to do both: put technology to use and explore new levels of interaction.

While I think it is too soon to know what happens to students texts as a result of blogging, I do want to potentialize what is possible when we experiment with blogging.
What is possible in ways that ideas circulate when affect is noticed/encouraged/supported?
What new sensations, emotions, and interactions are possible?
What could happen to students’ engagement level with emphasis on blogging?
What could happen to professors’ pedagogy when practicing for affect?

Yes. That’s what I want to talk about with the goal of making some affective connections between and among WAC and blogging. Ok, so making some affective connections isn’t very specific. Hell, I don’t know what my goal is. I want to get somewhere productive. I want to finish. I don’t know where I am going to end up. If I say “with the goal of advocating new directions for teaching and learning,” it sounds like a cliche. It’s not radical enough. Hey, fun is radical. How about with the goal of enabling writing to be fun! Yes. Fun!

Donna and I were talking recently that often writing is made out to be so, not, fun. Well, blogging does make writing more fun (IMHO) but blogging is perceived by some to be a radical idea on it’s own and now I am thinking of admiting out loud that we should do it because it’s fun. Oh, yes…I’m sure conventional/traditional academics would love me for saying something like that.

The thing is tho, I agree with Will Richardson when he says:

First, this is the end of teaching as we know it. We’re no longer providing a service to our students as much as we are facilitating their own learning. And that’s now our most important job because for the first time, it can happen that way. That doesn’t mean that we stop teaching altogether, but it does mean that our ideas about teaching have to change whten the tools of content creation have been placed in the hands of the learners themselves.

Ok, how to explain that discontinuity is really affective?

12/6/2005 Update: I just realized I forgot to copy in the links to Will’s post. Sorry about that.