Research -- Abram Anders

RESEARCH AGENDA

My current research explores collaborative learning and open source production processes in contemporary pedagogical and professional communication contexts. Whether through crowd-sourcing, open source organization, social networking, or real-time revolutions, emerging information economies and technologies increasingly produce value by leveraging large scale aggregations of relatively disparate and fragmented actors and actions. Furthermore, these transformations are also salient and instructive for the micro-physics of team work, localized projects, and even for the growth of individual learners in composition and communication courses. Whether at the level of the individual or a community of learners, knowledge is produced through reshaping of our common spaces and re-articulating of our common interfaces for composing ourselves, each other, and the world.

DISSERTATION

"Rhetoric for Becoming Otherwise: Life, Literature, Genealogy, Flight."
Abstract: "Rhetoric for Becoming Otherwise" explores what Friedrich Nietzsche's 'transvaluation of all values' might mean for the rhetorical practices and studies of today and tomorrow. Nietzsche framed the task of the future as a continually renewed choice between reactive forces which seek to constrain the possibilities of life and affirmative forces which seek to multiply them through capacities to become otherwise. Each chapter rehearses a different expression, context, and dilemma in which we encounter this choice. It arrives variously as an improbable feat of rhetoric, an unavoidable risk of health, an incongruous eruption of possibility, an insoluble dilemma of ethics, and an impossible task of learning. Primary thinkers engaged include Kenneth Burke, Carlos Castaneda, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, Isocrates, William James, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

PUBLICATIONS

Whalen, D. Joel, Abram Anders, et al. "Selections From the ABC 2010 Annual Convention, Chicago, IL." Business Communications Quarterly. 74.3 (2011): 356-372.
Abstract: "Building Better Resumes the Open Source Way": My favorite assignment applies open source production strategies and crowd sourcing principles to the task of creating better bullet points and skills descriptions for resumes and job applications. My assignment not only provides a novel and engaging interface for student learners, but also overcomes a traditional pedagogical challenge. Students often recognize the difference between "good" and "bad" examples, but struggle bridging the gap between the two in their own writing. By crowd sourcing the invention and revision processes the "open source way" interrupts single author inertia and helps students realize a wider range and more refined applications of the available means of persuasion.
Anders, Abram. "Pragmatisms by Incongruity: 'Equipment for Living' from Kenneth Burke to Gilles Deleuze." KB Journal. 7.2 (2011): n. pg. Web. http://www.kbjournal.org/
Abstract: Kenneth Burke's sociological criticism of literature as "equipment for living" situates the work of art as a response to a situation that is essentially social; literature serves a therapeutic role insofar as it diagnoses and dissolves maladaptive social categories and orientations. Burke's complementary notion of "perspective by incongruity" describes the way in which artists push a system of belief or interpretive scheme to its limits by deliberating creating effects which escape its means of formalization. In the work of Gilles Deleuze, we encounter similarly the artist of literature and discourse who assumes the role of a physician of culture and seeks to produce new possibilities for life by multiplying available perspectives for action. In judging whether the rhetorical appeals and interpretive schemes they offer are medicine or poison, our criteria shall be whether they constrain, narrow, or otherwise limit life (gridlock), or whether they provide new possibilities, experiences, and configurations of knowledge for living (counter-gridlock). Through the incongruous imbrication of Burke and Deleuze, we discover a resonant pragmatism in which art, literature, and ethics become something more than tools for refining the ways in which we currently experience the world. Rather, they offer means for a way out of the orientations which configure and constrain our capacity to actualize potentials for a better tomorrow.
"Castaneda's Ecstatic Pedagogy: The Teachings of Don Juan." Configurations. 16.2 (2009): 245-266.
Abstract: Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of don Juan" fails before the question: what does it mean? What it does is to demand a different kind of reading -- to be read as a recipe. Castaneda's text denies the regime of signification (by eliding the question of its own authenticity), casting its readers out along a line of flight of passional apprenticeship. Through a deployment of Deleuze and Guattari's notions of regimes of sign and the refrain, I argue that The Teachings can be profitably read as both an example of insurrectionist psychedelic science and as a self-referential ecstatic pedagogy.

PRESENTATIONS

"Zen and the Art of New Media Communications." 76th Annual Association of Business Communication Convention. Montreal, Quebec (CA). October 2011.
New media means new modes, objects, and artifacts of communication; it means engaging markets and audiences that are globalized and culturally diverse and yet also increasingly fractured, specialized, and niche-oriented. New media emphasizes interactivity and social-networking, yet configures the individual as an isolated end-user as often as it supports spaces for innovation, participation, and community. In the age of new media, the task of communication is continually rediscovered in the multiple and ever-shifting contexts of applications, interfaces, mobile technologies; diverse audiences and cross-functional collaborators; changing roles, workplace environments, and career paths.

The paradoxes and challenges of new media environments inevitably require successful business communicators to learn, to live, and to thrive in conditions of continually renewed beginner's mind. Yet, this need not be a bad thing; as Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki instructs us, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." The centuries-old practices of Zen Buddhism provide ready tools for clarifying the challenges, resolving the paradoxes, and successfully traversing the boundaries of our contemporary experiences and creative processes in new media contexts. Specific principles will address and connect contemporary theories of productivity and sustainable innovation with relevant industry examples and classroom applications.
"Collaborative Writing Practices for Cooperative Learning." National Forum on Improving Undergraduate Education Through Active Learning Spaces. Minneapolis, MN. August 2011.
Abstract: Real-time collaborative writing platforms are an exciting, new technological opportunity available for undergraduate education. Whether using Google Docs, Etherpad, or host of other applications, students can now write together in real-time with embedded chat, versioning histories, and instructor oversight. Collaborative writing not only adds interest, excitement, and novelty to writing practice, but also addresses a wide range of challenges for effective composition, communications, and writing instruction.

Collaborative writing helps students overcome first person, single author inertia at the planning, revision, and editing stages of composition. Real-time collaborative invention allows individual learners to experience a wide range of approaches, styles, and strategies for achieving the goals of each assignment. As a tool for revision, collaborative writing helps students gain the ability to view their own writing from a third person perspective. When applied to editing, collaborative writing takes advantage of open source efficiency for discovering and fixing "bugs" or errors. Beyond these practical or tactical strengths, collaborative writing exercises contribute to more cooperative, active, and student-centered learning in general.
"Employment Communications: Social Media Contexts, Multimodal Composition, and Iterative Design Process." 75th Annual Association of Business Communication Convention. Chicago, IL. October 2010.
Abstract: Recent studies show that growing numbers of employers are using Social Media services like LinkedIN and Facebook to recruit and evaluate job candidates. While this shift produces new challenges for students and teachers, it also presents an opportunity to improve and re-envision our pedagogical approaches to employment communications. The traditional challenge of teaching employment communications has been to help students see the resume as a malleable presentation of themselves and to bring a sense of rhetorical purpose and flexibility to their design process. Congruently, students often resist extended processes of revision preferring a draft to polished version cycle as the most efficient use of their time.

As a response to these traditional pedagogical challenges of employment communications and as an attempt to better prepare students for social media contexts, I offer a pedagogical approach which translates traditional print-based job applications into a series of professional self-presentations across a variety of media and audience contexts: a general resume and elevator pitch for a job fair, a targeted resume with cover letter for an internship, rehearsed S/TARs examples for mock interviews, invitation letters and follow-up emails to mock interviewers, and finally, in the capstone assignment an "about me" statement, electronic resume, profile photo, and video resume for web site or LinkedIN account.

Though the multimodal composition process of translating their professional narratives and self-presentations into these various genres, media, and audience situations, students gain valuable rhetorical experience and content flexibility. Additionally, the process of revisiting their self-descriptions and narratives at intervals across the course allows students to benefit from the principles of iterative development. At each stage of the process students develop new content, receive multiple forms of feedback, and practice new skills. Sustained reflection and continued practice facilitates steady improvement leading to rhetorically sophisticated and professionally polished final products.
"My Favorite Assignment Session: Building Better Bullet Points the Open Source Way." 75th Annual Association of Business Communication Convention. Chicago, IL. October 2010.
Abstract: My favorite assignment applies open source production strategies and crowd sourcing principles to the task of creating better bullet points and skills descriptions for resumes and job applications. My assignment not only provides a novel and engaging interface for student learners, but also overcomes a traditional pedagogical challenge. Students often recognize the difference between "good" and "bad" examples, but struggle bridging the gap between the two in their own writing. By crowd sourcing the invention and revision processes the "open source way" interrupts single author inertia and helps students realize a wider range and more refined applications of the available means of persuasion.
"Collaborative Learning Spaces: Methods, Ethics, Tools, Design." Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing Conference. North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND. October 2010.
Abstract: Our contemporary spaces of collaborative learning and writing are increasingly produced through and in negotiation with emergent technological tools, trends, and values. Yet, for many educators, incorporating technology into course design as something other than a discrete set of tools, as something more along the lines of an ecological context or course infrastructure, can seem challenging, overwhelming, even impossible. After all, technology and course design processes are necessarily discontinuous, fragmentary, and resistant to centralizing models and systematizing efforts; as with technology use in general, successful technological adaptation is not only highly contextual, situated affair but also aims for a continually moving target. The challenge is to sustainably develop and improve collaborative technological spaces while also remaining flexible enough to meet unique instructor, course, and student needs, capacities, and goals.

Toward this end, I offer an open-ended methodology for the production of collaborative learning spaces: 1) formulate an Ethics: identify stakeholder goals, values, and formulate outcomes; 2) choose appropriate Tools: consider institutional/contextual affordances, consider issues of usability and integration; 3) outline a Design: strategically integrate writing, technology, and collaboration knowledge and skill sets, employ scaffolding, regular reinforcement, and achievable expectations; 4) review, revise, Redesign: always try something new, expect to improve, iteration is the key. As a means of exploring these issues and fleshing out this design heuristic, I will provide a case study of my current course design including the evolution, process of development, and future trajectory of its unique collaborative learning space.
"Twitter as Heraclitean War Machine: Real-time Revolutions and Aggregating Utopian Flows." 14th Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference. Minneapolis, MN. May 2010.
Abstract: In the last year, the micro-blogging and social networking service Twitter emerged from relative obscurity to become a major force in the development and evolution of online communication and rhetorical practices. Twitter is revolutionary in multiple senses: first, it provides the infrastructure for an entire new ecosystem of communication as a proliferation of ancillary services and applications extend and benefit from its unique capacities; second, Twitter has helped inaugurate the newly emerging, 'real-time web' in which everything occurs live, on demand--asynchronously and instantaneously; finally and most emblematically, in the summer of 2009, Twitter became an effective tool for Iranian counter-political organization and protest.

Via Heraclitean and Deleuzian theoretical motifs, this paper explores a curious paradox of our contemporary real-time revolutions: the division, decentralization, and privatization of power may weaken the historical form of the individual agent, yet may also make collective and discontinuous forms of protest, opinion, and aggregating desire increasingly relevant and effective forces for social change. Our lives, online and off, have become so many flows which can be aggregated, redirected, and redeployed in a multiplicity of increasingly easy-to-use ways. As a war machine of rhetorical practice, Twitter cuts into, divides, and fragments the narratives of our lives into increments, 140 characters or less. However, it also provides a means for discovering new possibilities for living which traverse and interrupt traditional terms and lines of organization. Ultimately, Twitter is revolutionary, Utopian, and effective precisely because of the superficial and distributed forms of agency and communication it affords.
"Computer-Mediated Careers: Social Networking, Digital Exposures, and the Composition of Professional Identities." Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing Conference. St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN. October 2009.
Abstract: A recent study found that over 45% of employers research potential employees' activities on social networking sites. While some candidates impress their audiences, others lose out on opportunities through poor planning and a lack of online profile management. Most technologically inclined approaches to teaching students about applying for jobs focus on developing electronic portfolios; however, as students increasingly develop online identities on their own and across a variety of social networks, managing identities as brands and limiting negative exposures has become an increasingly crucial task. In exploring these issues, this presentation considers the necessities and realities of social networking, the perils and liabilities of digital exposure, and, finally, will seek to provide a set of best practices and guidelines for the production of online professional identities. Ultimately, I seek to frame a pedagogy for the computer-mediated career.
"Technology and Composition: Access, Ethics, Interface." Rhetorics and Technologies. Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. July 2007.
Abstract: We are all now becoming familiar with the idea that technology, for better or worse, is changing the way work and teach in academia. Concomitantly, technology is also changing the type of students we encounter and the nature of their futures in the global marketplace. Many scholars cite the explosion of information as a primary feature of contemporary technological transformations. Variously figured as the infosphere, infolanche, and even the datacloud, these emergent visions foreground the digital, networked, seemingly infinite, dimensions of the unfolding information age.

Regardless of what it is called, it has meant a shift in the demands of workers in the global marketplace. Rapidly proliferating, information overload has produced a strong demand for employees who can sift, cull, and massage complex data sets. Such tasks often require coordinating multiple data streams, technological platforms, interfaces, purposes, and audiences. Multimedia literacies, rhetorical training, and information management skills are prerequisites for this kind of work. Most importantly, these "data workers" must be able to learn, adapt, and incorporate emerging technologies and skill sets throughout their lives and careers. Of course, all of this presents novel challenges for us as educators. How will we address these needs and support student development in the context of an as yet unfolding information age? My essay responds to this question across three primary areas of investigation: access, ethics, interface, design.
"Goodbye Blue Monday: Hacker Utopianism Meets Open-Source Capitalism." Computers and Writing 2007. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. May 2007.
Abstract: Open source is pretty much everywhere these days. Whether it is innovative applications like open source biology, open source cell phones, or the progressive politics of attempts to provide open source software for developing nations, open source seems, well, revolutionary. Yet, even while we might be drawn to the political, pedagogical, ethical potential of the open source hacker war machine, to the utopian impulse it envelopes, there are reasons to be wary. Across a variety of industries, open source is beginning to be considered a viable business strategy. In the software industry, even giants and avowed open source enemies like Microsoft are beginning to see the light. While its still too early to tell the ultimate legacy of open source, it is perhaps a good time to consider its conditions of its emergence and attempt to account for the ways that it figures in the contestations of today. Ultimately, I will argue that while the open source movement is susceptible to reterritorializations by capital (insofar as it can been seen as intensification of, rather than resistant to, contemporary corporate strategies of downsizing, outsourcing, flattening hierarchical structures), it should also be recognized as attempt to build ethical spaces within it. In our contemporary context of increasing economic and cultural privatization, the kind of commons produced by open source projects must also be recognized as increasingly important sites of ethical and critical engagement.