Possibly the most obvious application that geoblogging offers a composition course is to serve as a form of evidence that students analyze when testing and constructing academic claims. In other words, the geoblog might initially appear most recognizable as an archive—and writing through it might be prompted in a number of different ways. For one, the “captures” (e.g., photos, videos, and audio files) that compose the “content” of the geoblog can be “read” as a collection of narratives that are then organized according to the totalizing representations of a map, the borders of which the captures effectively outline. It is relatively easy to imagine assignment prompts which instruct students to critically engage this virtual space by identifying the political narratives or ideological structures that circulate through the collection as it stands, isolating its assumptions and investments, its repetitions and its exclusions. Always boldly announcing its status as a “construction,” the virtual university already articulates a theory of space that recognizes the purposeful logic of representation—one that practically begs for a cultural studies critique.

But were the engagement to end there, writing through the geoblog would simply reinforce one of the sanctioned conventions of writing pedagogy: replication as mastery. Here, the geoblog becomes yet another object upon which students can perform some analytic task that supposedly illustrates their simultaneous proficiency as writers and critics. However, the “geoblog as archive” model opens up a new set of possibilities by way of its accessibility and flexibility. Constructed in an open-ended digital landscape, the Virtual University Geoblogging Project begins with the lived space of the university itself as a potentially endless archive, an ever-expanding collection of reading material that is always open to challenges and additions. Through the ongoing project of geolocating the virtual university, analysis not only speaks of the archive, but the archive can be used to “speak back” to the analysis in an exchange that is only limited by the imaginative bounds of the curriculum. As such, students do not simply explore the possibilities for making themselves heard through various modes of academic critique. They can learn to make their presence felt in the compilation of archives (and not just texts), bringing their lived spaces into an academic context and making these spaces matter in the work that they produce.

This complex engagement asks students to become active in constructing the archive itself—contributing their own perspectives as a response to the collection of narratives (academic or otherwise) that has preceded it. For instance, consider the following captures from the category, “Red Square,” in the Geoblogging Project:

 

Through writing prompts such as Example Writing Prompt 2: “Capturing Evidence,” composition students could be asked to capture spaces like Red Square, which are well known at the University of Washington. This particular prompt asks that students carefully analyze each capture, without necessarily making an argument for any or all of them. This way, engagements with lived campus spaces, rather than complex academic theory, become the starting point for composition. That is, the prompt doesn’t have a “theoretical container” that the students must go fill in through evidence and writing. As a pedagogical tool, the virtual university allows for multiple approaches, perspectives, and media in order to document what individual students see as relevant to campus life. Of course, what is and is not a part of “campus life” is not defined solely by a single student. It is subject to feedback and revision from others. And in order to see what emerges from such feedback and revision, students can be asked to document, categorize, and locate their evidence on the class geoblog. In a subsequent prompt (Example Writing Prompt 3: “What’s Missing?”), students can share their responses to “Writing Prompt 2: Capturing Evidence” in order to examine the ramifications of their peers’ and their own contributions to the class archive. The map over at the Geoblogging Project gives us an idea of what students might be looking at when beginning “Writing Prompt 3: What’s Missing?”:

The map itself is color-coded into zones, which are designated by pins. Composition instructors might find it productive to also designate zones using a similar system. If we take a look at a particular zone on the Geoblogging Project map, say, “Red Square” (marked by purple pins), then we might notice that the archive does not include captures of student activities, such as rallies, skateboarding, and protests, that are common to the public space. Additionally, the captures are primarily photographs. In other words, what’s also missing is a sufficient amount of sounds and video of Red Square. Accordingly, the student has the option (among others) to approach “What’s Missing?” from the vantage of “what” (e.g., student activities) or “how” (e.g., choice of medium). Of course, the important thing is that the student actually does add to the archive. Geolocation technologies and the virtual university allow for active participation in and the piling of “encounter-possibilities” (Sirc, 2001, p. 15) in and outside of the composition classroom.

Prompts like Examples 2 and 3 indicate that “analysis” is not the end-point of engagement and, in this way, the geoblog stages the writing process through what N. Katherine Hayles (2005) has referred to as a complex “feedback loop” (p. 15) between exploratory interactions with evidence and the analysis that generates new lines of inquiry. With geoblogging, at one level of feedback, students participate in recursive interactions with technologies. Technologies help them feed back into the class archive, while also opening their own evidence-gathering up to peer response. At another level of feedback, traditional, classroom-based approaches to composition can be joined with field work and “capturing” outside of the classroom. Consequently, students can begin to consider how composition is applicable to both their academic and everyday lives, as well as how the academy and the everyday need not be two distinct, isolated spheres.

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References:

Hayles, Katherine. N. (2005). My mother was a computer: Digital subjects and literary texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sirc, Geoffrey. (2001). Virtual urbanism. Computers and Composition, 18(1), 11-19.