With Pen in Hand Presentation

From WolfWikis

What is a Wiki?

Definition

Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word “wiki wiki,” which means “quick,” dubbed by Ward Cunningham who created the first wiki in 1995. A wiki is a collaborative website that allows users to modify content through a web browser. Authors can add, remove, edit, or create content. Entered text is translated from a simple mark-up language into HTML through the wiki software. A wiki can be an individual webpage that contains multiple linked wikis pages as part of an individual wiki, or it may contain several separate community wikis.

Example

• Wikipedia
• Free Rhetoric and Composition Textbook (ongoing)
• Handout

Please write any questions that may arise for you during this presentation at the bottom of your handout. There will be some time allotted at the end in order to address your concerns.

Wikis in Composition

• Matt Barton's Wiki
• MC Morgan's Wiki
• Wikis in Education

Wikis in Composition: The Rhetorics of Audience, Author, and Authority

Rhetoric shapes out lives and drives our interactions in all forms of communication (both oral and written) and the communication process. It is in this multifaceted rhetorical environment that wikis take shape for our students. Some important issues in rhetorical theory with which teachers should be pedagogically familiar when implementing wikis in writing instruction include the challenges wikis present to traditional notions of audience, author, and authority. This presentation will discuss some of the ways in which wikis create new avenues for exploration in this area and provid simple and direct challenges to the very framework underlying these rhetorical concepts and how these concepts can affect student literacy.

Rhetoric of Audience

• The audience to and for which members of the wiki community write, presents a fluid dynamic of interchanging and interpersonal definitions of what it means to be an audience member and what it means to be an author.

• James Herrick notes three audience types that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca name as important in The New Rhetoric.
  • Universal Audience
  • Audience of One
  • Author or Self as Audience

• We will further examine five separate categories for the exploration of audience in a wiki:

1) Single-member audience
2) Limited audience
3) Undefined audience
4) Fictional audience (Walter Ong’s conception)
5) Audience addressed/audience invoked (Ede and Lunsford’s conception)

• All of these audience categories, as Lloyd F. Bitzer defines in “The Rhetorical Situation,” “consists of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, 221).

1)The single-member audience could represent:

• Teacher-grader figure
• Author-authority figure
• Self-author figure.

Wikis makes the author, as a single entity, less visible.

• The self-author figure has the potential for the closest examination of the argument and will more likely hold the most weight for the individual author, and thus be the audience member whose mediation enacts the widest change in the attitude or opinions of the author.

2)Limited Audience:

• Wiki Community
  • Class Members(s) [Students]
• Larger Community
• Academic Community

• The academic/scholarly community participates in the discourse of the community and whose action or mediation of change through the community knowledge argument is needed in order to enact community-wide transformations.

3)Undefined or Multiple Audience

• Imagined or Cyber Audience

• This continuum of audience as self to known to mass unknown has been criticized for failing to recognize the nuances inherent in the audience structure.

4)Fictional Audience (Walter Ong)

• Audience constructed in the imagination of the writer, cast in a particular role which must "correspondingly fictionalize itself" (60).

• The wiki author is related to all other community authors and knows what those authors contributed to community knowledge and thus conjures up the audiences needed to continue the conversation.

5)Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked (Ede and Lunsford)

• Audience Addressed - the "actual or real-life people who read a discourse"
• Audience Invoked - "the audience called up or imagined by the writer"

• The audience in a wiki interplays in a relationship that is not dichotomous, but interrelated. As the members change, so do the authors’ notions of that audience change and the “vision” “conjured” by the authors “by using all the resources of language available to them to establish a broad, and ideally coherent, range of cues for the reader” is then “shared” by that wiki audience (167).

• The concept of audience is thus challenged in the wiki because students have now to consider the identity of the audience on a much larger scale, since students have the ability to “publish” materials in a virtual world.

• Students’ conceptions of audience are challenged though the immediacy of the audience and its impact on the physical (or digital) text.

The audience is an amalgamation of 1) the single-member audience
2) the limited audience
3) the undefined audience
4) the fictional audience
5) audience addressed/audience invoked

Rhetoric of Author

1) Single-Author Texts

Consequently, this use of the wiki, exclusively, denies the true collaborative nature of the technology, but represents an option for teachers newly moving into the technology, unsure of its potential application for their classroom pedagogy.

2) Multiple-Author Texts

• Wiki authors begin as wiki audience members or “consumers.”

• The rights of the wiki author are subsumed into the rights of the “other” authors and more importantly, the community.

Rhetoric of Authority

• Power is not limited to who attains it, keeps it, and what ideology it affords, but also the power of rhetoric itself and the relationship it provokes between discourse, authority, and access.

• Power in the modern rhetorical tradition is something created and enabled by the social constructions of our culture.

Authority derives its “power” from society with its arbitrary, ideological system of hegemonic cultural productions” (Payne, 484).

• Community is constructed by the discourse, and it is constructed around a communal knowledge base (Foucault). Here, the discourse derived from that base provides the community with power, specifically the power of persuasion, both to new members and old ones.

• Ideologies with which to be aware:

1) Teacher
2) Student
3) Ideological Diversity
The only thing judged is the power of their arguments.
4) Technological Ideology
Technology, wikis included, is not necessarily a neutral conduit for ideas.

Conclusion

The rhetorics of audience, author, and authority in the wiki environment play a unique role in facilitating student knowledge and understanding of the relationships inherent in their writing. Without this understanding, our students will be blind to the affects of rhetoric on their lives and their writing. Teachers must be prepared to offer an effective pedagogy to encounter and explore student writing.

Question and Answer

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