Computers and Composition 25 (2008) 61–78

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Portable Composition: iTunes University andNetworked Pedagogies

Alex Reid

Department of English, SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY 13045, USA

Abstract

The development of mobile, convergent media networks is altering the context of professional, edu-cational, and everyday communication. This essay examines the incorporation of iTunes Universityinto writing and new media composition instruction, including institutional and technological con-texts and faculty and student responses. This examination suggests the value of studying networkedcomposition by following the expanding web of local interactions that link the conventional scene ofcomposition—the student at the computer—with other events, such as college policy decisions, tech-nology design choices, and the multitude of other compositional events behind the media availableto students across the Internet. As these mobile networks become more powerful and pervasive, theywill have a greater impact on compositional practices and will require a shift in habitual, disciplinaryapproaches to authorship and to the relationship between the more formal discourses of academics andthe informal communications on mobile networks.© 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Keywords: Convergent media; iTunes University; Mobile technology; Actor-network theory; New media compo-sition

Students carrying iPods are a common sight on the contemporary campus: jogging aroundthe track, on the campus bus, drinking coffee in the student center, studying in the library, andperhaps even sitting in class. The sight is nearly as common as that other ubiquitous handhelddevice, the mobile phone. According to Apple (2007), over 100 million iPods have beensold since the device first debuted in October 2001. The International TelecommunicationsUnion (2006) reported that there were 2.17 billion mobile phone subscribers in 2006. With theexpansion of 3G (third generation) networks from Asia and Europe into the United States, weare beginning to see the convergence of media players, mobile phones, and Internet devices.Educational groups have begun to recognize that this wave of technological innovation willsweep up the classroom as well. EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium, two such non-profit organizations, co-write an annual Horizons Report (2007), which identifies emerging

∗ Email address: reida@cortland.edu.

8755-4615/$ – see front matter © 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2007.09.003

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technologies that will impact higher education. The 2007 report indicated that one can alreadyfind mobile phones at work in higher education, and they predicted what they term “broadadoption” within the next two to three years. Of course, mobile phones and iPods do notexist in a vacuum; they are only as valuable as the network to which they are connected.The emergence of “Web 2.0” applications and practices (e.g., blogging, photo and videosharing, audio and video podcasts, and social networking), along with the availability ofprofessional and mainstream media, make these portable devices far more valuable. Now oneis not only listening to one’s personal music collection or phoning or texting friends or family;one is part of an elaborate, participatory, mobile network of convergent media. These mobile,convergent media networks have already begun to shift compositional practices throughout ourculture by changing our connections with information and media and redefining the traditionalrelationship between authors and audiences.

The term “convergent media” is generally applied in two related contexts. The first deals withtrends in hardware development toward interoperability, such as attempts to make all-in-onemedia devices for the home or the pocket or to deliver all media through a single network (e.g.fiber optics bringing voice, Web, and television to the home or mobile broadband for voice,Web, and video). The second common use of convergent media is related to cross-mediastrategies, as media properties are developed across television, movies, video games, the Web,books, and so on. As such, one could say that in the first case convergent media addresses theinteroperation of media devices and in the second case deals with the interoperation of mediaforms. Henry Jenkins (2006) offered a different perspective, arguing, “Convergence does notoccur through media appliances, however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurswithin the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others” (p.3). Following upon his work studying fan culture, Jenkins explored how everyday users makeuse of networks to discuss media properties, expand stories, and engage in civic discourses,which result in “ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture” (p. 243). While Jenkins’ use of convergent media is quite differentfrom the first two, it also might be understood as exploring interoperability: the interoperationof corporate media and participatory culture.

Rhetoric and composition might draw on both of these definitions and view convergencemore broadly as the interoperability of networked actors (human and non-human) in com-positional practices. That is, under the aegis of convergence, one might study a network ofinteractions between humans, devices, policies, institutions, and so on as they mediate composi-tional processes. Undoubtedly, such a definition of convergence is not a strictly “technological”one, but then again neither is Jenkins’ definition. Arguably, one could say that composition hasalways been a socially networked process, that common language, grammar, genre, and dis-course communities all represent interoperable elements of a composition network. However,technology does play a salient role here; convergent media networks intensify the potential forinteroperability through technologies that facilitate information sharing and through a partic-ipatory, networked culture that offers compositional practices that differ from the traditionaleducational emphasis on composition as an individual act.

Inasmuch as convergent media networks alter composition practices, they clearly have animpact on rhetoric and composition. Stuart Selber (2004) observed that rhetoric and composi-tion has responded to the emergence of the Web and networked communication by developing

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a critical technological literacy. Selber explained that this critical literacy was created “in partbecause the agenda of technology education often amounts to little more than indoctrinationinto the value systems of the dominant computer culture” (p. 471). In the context of this dis-ciplinary perspective on technology, teaching students the functional literacy to compose inconvergent media networks becomes conflated with ideological indoctrination. However, asSelber argued, “students need both functional and critical literacies (as well as other types ofliteracies like the rhetorical and visual literacies involved in Web site design and production)”(p. 472). Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how one could develop a critical perspective oncompositions without understanding how they function.

This intersection of functional and critical literacies has been examined through an analysisof the material-technological contexts of composition (e.g., Hawisher & Selfe, 2004; Johnson-Eilola, 1997; Selfe, 1999a, 1999b; Ulmer, 1994, 2003). Bill Hart-Davidson, Cushman, Grabill,DeVoss, and Porter (2005) wrote, “the context in which we teach matters, perhaps more thanever before. Attention to context requires attention to details, affordances, and infrastructuralpossibilities—possibilities anchored to and existent within and across physical networks (e.g.,classes and communities) and digital spaces.” Anne Frances Wysocki (2004) similarly argued,“what is important is that whoever produces the text and whoever consumes it understand. . .

that the various materialities of a text contribute to how it, like its producers and consumers,is read and understood” (p. 15). This emphasis on material contexts, including virtual ordigital contexts, requires an ability to see beyond the immediate practices of composition toincorporate mediated practices as well. By approaching these material contexts in terms ofconvergence, in terms of the interoperability of actors, one begins to think about how differentelements link as networks in compositional process.

As I will detail here, in examining the material contexts of mobile, convergent medianetworks in higher education, one can chart a wide and disparate constellation of actors atwork. These include corporate entities (such as Apple or Microsoft), legal and marketplaceforces (such as Digital Rights Management or DRM), technological-material mechanisms (thefunctionality of the iPod or the operation of media production software), college-institutionalpractices (from curriculum policies to technical support), and faculty and student attitudes andpractices. In addition, none of the examples above can be considered simply as singular. Thatis, whether one were to take up the role of the iPod or “student attitudes,” each would openinto a continuing field of networked connections. In charting the interoperation of relationsintersecting the composition of convergent media, each of these elements might be understoodas what Bruno Latour termed a mediator: “mediators transform, translate, distort, and modifythe meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry. . . No matter how apparently simplea mediator may look, it may become complex; it may lead in multiple directions which willmodify all the contradictory accounts attributed to its role” (2005, p. 39). In short, none ofthese elements can be understood as transmitting, unaltered, some spectral ideological forceor functional literacy or will to technology. Neither can they be reduced to tools operatingsolely in the service of individual wills or local interactions. Traditional composition is quitecomfortable with the local, focusing on the practices of individualized subjects. Conversely,cultural studies offer tools to situate the local in a global, ideological panorama. Latour’s actor-network theory looks in-between these perspectives, following the network of connectionsfrom one local scene or event to the next. As such it is well suited to a study of convergence.

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This article takes up three different perspectives on mediators within mobile, convergentmedia networks that are unmistakably overlapping. I begin by examining the institutionalaspects of our local project to bring iTunes University to campus: from the committees wherethe project was formulated, through the curricular structures established for the pilot courses,to support staff and college policies that intersected classroom practices. I then move to anexamination of the technological-material dimensions of mobile convergent media. Eachpiece of hardware and each application have built-in possibilities and limitations that are inturn shaped by their users, the material contexts in which they are put to work and the rhetoricalsituation driving the events of composition. Finally, I address the faculty-student or user com-ponent. Here I consider how composition’s intersection with media networks leads to shiftsin habits, particularly our habitual understanding of authorship. Media networks create condi-tions that estrange students from their conventional compositional practices and present themwith the experience of composition as a networked, rather than an atomized, series of events.

1. The Pursuit of iTunes University

iTunes University is an Internet service offered by Apple, Inc. that allows colleges anduniversities to share media files among students and faculty, as well as with the general public,through a customized, institution-specific version of the familiar iTunes Music Store interface.A college’s iTunes University site is accessed online through the use of Apple’s cross-platformmedia player, iTunes. Combined with the iPod, iTunes University becomes a mechanism fora mobile, multimedia, educational network. As Henry Jenkins noted, the video iPod “seemsemblematic of the new convergence culture—not because everyone believes the small screen ofthe iPod is the ideal vehicle for watching broadcast content but because the ability to downloadreruns on demand represents a major shift in the relationship between consumers and mediacontent” (2006, p. 253). The same holds true for educational content. Few would suggest thatplaying a video or audio recording of a lecture on an iPod is the ideal way to engage that content,but the ability to engage that content on demand in a mobile context represents a major shift inthe relationship between students and educational media. Furthermore, the ability to composemedia and contribute it to a mobile network that includes a constellation of participatory sitesindicates a permanent shift in the compositional practices and rhetorical relationships that havestructured higher education to this point. As Richard Lanham (2006) explained, colleges areno longer the sequestered environments they were once imagined to be. Now even the near-ceremonial spaces of the lecture hall or seminar room are continually interpenetrated withnetworks of personal-private and social-public communication and media. Communicationflows in and out: students send and receive personal text messages, keep up on global news,upload mobile phone videos of sleeping students or professors losing their tempers, and recordlectures to share in coursecasts. Negotiating these different networked contexts and findingways to link formal classroom discourse with informal network discourses will not be an easytask.

In 2006, my college, the State University of New York College at Cortland (SUNY Cort-land), joined the ranks of institutions using iTunes University. Though the primary story told inthe media about iTunes University focuses on the coursecast, SUNY Cortland’s motivation for

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pursuing a relationship with Apple had little or nothing to do with offering our students down-loads of lectures. Instead, we viewed iTunes University as an economically viable solution toan ongoing technical problem. Since 2000, the college had seen the development of severaltechnology-intensive programs including Professional Writing, New Communication Media,New Media Design, Sport Management, and Geographic Information Systems. In addition,there were increasing pressures for technology instruction in our Education programs (Cort-land is the ninth largest producer of teachers in the nation). As part of a Title III grant thataddressed these issues, Cortland created a Center for the Advancement of Technology in Edu-cation (CATE), which is overseen by a faculty director and committee. That committee meetsregularly with a group of Information Resources staff and administrators. The IR contingentis comprised of technology experts from the library, campus networking and telecommuni-cations, and academic computing and is headed by the Associate Provost for InformationResources. At these meetings, faculty repeatedly brought up the emerging difficulties of shar-ing large media files. There were a number of technological, budgetary, and support issuessurrounding this challenge. iTunes University solved many of our problems by offering freeserver space and a familiar and easy-to-use interface for uploading and downloading files.

It is particularly relevant that our iTunes University initiative emerged from the network ofcommunications established by this committee. The project could not have been pursued with-out faculty who would pilot iTunes University in their courses, IR technical staff who wouldintegrate it with our existing enterprise systems, support staff willing to be trained and thentrain others, and high-level administrators who could provide budgetary support and championthe proposal through the various stages of institutional approval. The faculty and staff whoauthored our iTunes University application were part of the committee and then became theinitial members of the pilot project. In the fall, I worked with faculty from Art and Communica-tions who had expertise in digital imaging and video in a first-year learning community. Thenin the spring I piloted iTunes University in a stand-alone online professional writing coursecalled “Writing in Cyberspace.” In both semesters the focus was on sharing student-producedmedia rather than the delivery of faculty-produced media or other professional, digital mate-rials. While this approach reflected our original motivation in pursuing iTunes University andthe particular interests of the faculty and programs involved in the pilot, it is not the modelcommonly pursued by other schools. For example, Stanford University was one of the firstinstitutions to make use of iTunes University. Stanford piloted the program in large, lecture-driven Introduction to Humanities courses (Apple, 2006a). This decision clearly emphasizedthe functional ability of iTunes University to serve as a repository for digital course materialsfrom recorded lectures to supporting materials, which faculty had previously made available onother sites. Similarly, UC Berkeley already had a practice of recording and webcasting coursematerial and events on campus before initiating their iTunes University project. They begantheir project with 30 courses. Within a week of going live with their public, university-brandedsite, they had 250,000 downloads and 7,000 subscribers (Apple, 2006b). Obviously SUNYCortland is not like Stanford or Berkeley. Cortland is not going to attract the kind of brandattention that drives thousands of casual subscribers to these sites, nor does it have the alumnibase of these large universities. Cortland offers very few of the large undergraduate sections(with more than 100 students) that one commonly finds at research universities, such as theIntroduction to Humanities course in which Stanford piloted its program. In short, Cortland’s

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size and basic identity as a comprehensive state college had a significant impact on how weimagined using iTunes University.

In moving from the committee that applied for entry into iTunes University to establishinga pilot program, nearly every academic officer from department chairs to the provost wasinvolved in some aspect of the decision-making process. This bureaucratic labyrinth, onewould have to imagine, is intentionally designed to make institutional change difficult and isnot particularly unique to Cortland or even to higher education. For example, we wanted toinclude my “Writing in Cyberspace” in our learning community. It was perfect for the focusof our community, except that because it was a writing intensive course (one of its generaleducation designations), it had first-year composition as a prerequisite, which obviously wouldmake it difficult for most first-year students to take (unless they entered with AP credit or thelike). It was simply impossible for there to be a one-time exception to this course’s curricular-bureaucratic identity. In addition, for reasons that are still unclear to me, the admissions andadvising staff advertised our class only to students who had declared a major in ProfessionalWriting, New Communication Media, or New Media Design, rather than to the entire enteringclass. Though we had hoped to create a learning community that would have been attractiveto any or all first-year students entering Cortland (i.e., a community that would have satisfiedseveral of the college’s general education requirements), various bureaucratic decisions basedon existing policies made this impossible. As a result, the learning community was about halfthe size it might have been.

Obviously a college cannot simply rubber-stamp proposals or ignore its own policies, even ifit sometimes wants to. As Lanham (2006) has suggested, one of the greatest challenges highereducation will face in its efforts to keep up with technology will be the task of retooling itsadministrative functions to be responsive to the flexibility technological innovation will require,while still maintaining a critical, evaluative perspective. Though a public college like SUNYCortland is ostensibly comprised of a highly structured hierarchy of offices, departments,and committees and an elaborate bureaucracy of forms and policies, in practice, the regularoperation of any such institution cannot function that way. Undoubtedly, our ability to move ourpilot project forward was founded on existing working relationships between faculty across thecampus and information resources staff. Such relationships are necessary for moving beyondconversations where standards and procedures are cited and forms are demanded. Workingrelationships also allow one to dispense with the typical narratives that organize faculty-staffrelations and their attitudes about technology. On the other hand, as relative outsiders toother functions, we struggled with creating curricular structures that would make our coursesaccessible and practical in the context of students’ programs, as well as with getting the wordout to our colleagues about what we might offer. These relative institutional successes andfailures had a significant impact on the shape of the mobile, convergent media network webuilt on our campus that first semester.

As Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill (2005) have discussed, itis not always easy for writing faculty to develop the relationships necessary for implementingtechnology-intensive curriculum: “Too often, because of institutional and disciplinary trends,writing teachers are absent from the histories and development of [technology] standards. . ..Standards—scripted as policies or regulations—often emerge from technology committeesand information-system offices. Participating in and perhaps rescripting standards to support

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new-media writing is an ongoing process” (p. 26). DeVoss et al. situate these administrativeissues as part of a larger concern regarding what they term “infrastructure,” which includeseverything from the computer lab and campus policies to mass media discussions about tech-nology and literacy and accreditation standards. From this they recognize “it is no longerpossible for us to look at a product of new media without wondering what kinds of materialand social realities made it possible. We also have become aware of the need to reach beyondthe frameworks that we typically rely upon to understand composing processes and spacesof composing” (p. 36). I would take this a little further in two directions. First, one mightsuggest that this recognition is not limited to new media and that one might investigate the“material and social realities” that make any composition possible. Second, one might considerthat the challenge of understanding composing lies not simply with moving beyond existing“frameworks” but addressing the practice of framing itself. Latour noted, “when you put somelocal site ‘inside’ a larger framework, you are forced to jump. There is now a yawning breakbetween what encloses and what is enclosed, between the more local and more global” (2005,p. 173). In examining the act of composition, the impulse might be to jump from the immediatescene of the student at the word processor to global frameworks such as disciplinary frames(e.g., the writing process, academic discourse), broader cultural frames regarding authorship(e.g., originality, copyright, plagiarism), and social-critical frames (e.g., the role of gender,race, class, and other ideological forces). Rather than situating the writer immediately (thatis, literally, without mediation) within these frameworks, one might follow the connectionsthat mediate these relationships. In the case of composing podcasts or other non-print media,one might offer a similar caution about jumping from the site of composition to the frame-work of functional literacy as an over-determining ideology. That is, to return to DeVosset al.’s realization, as one becomes involved in the infrastructural processes and networksin which composition is situated, it becomes increasingly difficult to connect compositionalpractices directly to ideological values such as those that come under critique as “functionalliteracy.”

2. The Event of Composition

On the other hand, however, one can equally make the error of overvaluing the local.It is easy enough to write a narrative about our implementation of iTunes University thatfocuses on the collaboration of individuals in, through, and around institutional bureaucracy.We are all familiar with the heroic pedagogy narrative. Even more familiar is the narrativeof local authorship and creation. It might be easy to presume that if one argues that localevents are not situated within larger frameworks those events can be understood largely interms of the immediate individuals involved in them. However, not surprisingly, I am going tosuggest another alternative here. As the previous section focused on the institutional aspects ofthis project, here I want to focus on the material-technological aspects by examining specificcompositional practices where technologies were used. In doing so, I will outline an alternativeto this global-local binary. Put simply, this section explores how even in the most seeminglyimmediate and local acts of composition, one can easily uncover a network of technologies,media, and cognitive processes. While none of these can be said to have determined the

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composition, it is equally true that the composition can not be said to have been determinedsolely by local acts (even though ultimately we hold the local actor, the student, responsible).

Video and audio composition requires the use of a range of technologies. On some projectsin our learning community, students worked with fairly expensive prosumer cameras. Thesedevices have functionality that is quite different from the consumer-grade mini-DV videocameras with which most of us are familiar, which in turn are different from the quality ofvideo one might capture on a mobile phone. Along with their cameras, the students had tonegotiate other technologies from tripods to sound and lighting. Once the students had producedtheir video, they then had to manage and edit the material they had recorded. As a general rule,an hour of mini-DV tape will generate close to 15 GB of data. As such, the sheer amount ofdata involved in video production can lead to pedagogic challenges (a problem DeVoss et al.also encountered). For simpler projects, students could work with iMovie, which was availableon Macintosh computers in an open lab in the campus library. However, for more advancedprojects they needed to work with Final Cut, which was only available to them in a classroomlab to which they had limited access.

In the continuum of events comprising the compositional process, one might examine,for example, the site of the computer lab where a group of students gather around a singlecomputer to transfer video from their camera and begin editing the footage. It is, ostensibly,a “local” event in which the composition is shaped by social interactions among the groupmembers and by their collective skill with the technologies at hand. Yet the technology withwhich they are working is not simply local. Obviously it is designed, produced, and assembledthrough a global network of companies and factories. The technology is not designed specif-ically for local campus purposes but rather in response to a wide range of conditions fromindustry standards to marketplace forces to design innovations. The technocultural context thatproduces the machines on which the students work does not provide a neutral backdrop forindependent social decisions to be made by the group. Lev Manovich (2001) explained, “thenumerical coding of media and the modular structure of a media object allow for the automa-tion of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. Thus humanintentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part” (p. 32). For exam-ple, video-editing software includes a range of built-in effects that students might employ.In using these effects, the students necessarily hand over some of the creative process anddecision-making responsibilities of authorship to the computer. Decisions made about the useof such features are also shaped by considerations about file size and processing speed: in someinstances, deciding to try to use one of the effects could mean investing a significant amount oftime.

In addition to the network informing the production of technology at the site of composition,one must also consider the network of media in which these compositions are situated. iTunesUniversity is not a compositional tool but rather a mechanism for sharing media files. However,this does not mean that it does not have a role to play in composing. For example, iTunes onlyaccepts certain common forms of media files: MP3 or AAC encoded audio files and MPEG-4 or H.264 encoded video files. The process of compressing and exporting files into theseformats is not transparent. A podcast or video that looks and sounds great in iMovie or GarageBand can result in a poor-quality exported file if the compression is mishandled. Equally, ifa file is not compressed enough, the resulting file can be too large to be of practical use. In

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short, file compression is an integral part of media composition that has very little to do withthe traditional role of the author.

Along with iTunes University, we employ several avenues of networked composition, whichresults in a workflow that shapes compositional events. For my spring course, I developed aworkflow that operated roughly in the following fashion. Students had content of some kindto consider: a course text, a video, a podcast, other student work, etc. They wrote a personalresponse to this content on their own blog. That blog served a function similar to a publicjournal of their course experiences. The students were asked to keep up with each other’s blogs,though they weren’t required to read everyone’s. Then there was a course blog, which was thecentral hub of ongoing course discussion. There, we posted questions and held discussions.Working in groups, each week the students identified key terms or concepts for which theythen created wiki pages. Following each major section of the course, the students producedaudio podcasts, either in groups or individually. The students also produced short videos insmall groups and wrote two magazine articles on course-related topics for a student-producedweb magazine, NeoVox (for more on the magazine see Alexander Reid, 2003). Looking backat any one of the compositional events that would make up the production of a video, one caneasily step from that local event into this recursive network of blogs, wikis, and podcasts. Thatnetwork offered a record of discussions over course material, F.A.Q’s, technology-related tips,workshop feedback, and so on. In the case of the wiki, the record extends into earlier semestersand outward toward other courses using the wiki. Finally, one cannot ignore the constellationsof media available generally over the Web and through other access points. One needs to lookno farther than the choices students made for background music for their videos. Rarely didthey compose their own music, and our contract with iTunes University severely limited theirability to use copyrighted music. However there is a great deal of music that is in the publicdomain or is available for use through a Creative Commons license.

What does all this mean? As Latour explained, “what has been designated by the term‘local interaction’ is the assemblage of all the other local interactions distributed elsewhere intime and space, which have been brought to bear on the scene through the relays of variousnon-human actors” (2006, p. 194). Again, returning to the “local” site of a group of studentsediting video footage, one can see that decisions made “there” reflect an assemblage of otherlocal interactions carried out elsewhere on the network. Decisions made among softwareengineers at Apple or marketing executives at Canon (makers of one brand of video cameraswe use) or musicians uploading their compositions into the public domain and so on do notcreate a framework for the decisions my students make but rather participate in an unfoldingassemblage of information, in which the students’ video compositions will be one modestnode. Recognizing this condition does not obviate the students of the responsibility for makingdecisions. However it does create a different context from one that might imagine students asfully-independent authors, separate from any media network, or conversely, as interpellatedsubjects locked into an ideological framework that largely restricts or even eliminates anypossibility for agency.

For example, in one learning community assignment students created enhanced podcasts.Enhanced podcasts combine a slideshow of images with an audio track. To compose thesepodcasts, students needed to build a collection of images using digital cameras, borrowing fromthe Web and the library’s image databases and drawing from their personal image collection.

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At the same time, students were also composing the audio portion of the assignment. Whilescripting the talk was a possibility, the community had decided from listening to earlier podcastscreated by their classmates that the better performances were composed from outlines. Thesubject matter of the podcasts varied but tended to combine personal experience with generalinformation. Some combined stories of vacations with information about the place visited.Clearly this was a choice informed by the fact that the students had available photographsof their vacations. One student, who had self-published a novel, podcasted about his writingprocess, the book he had written, and the one he was working on. Another student’s podcastdiscussed the NFL and used sports journalism photography for its imagery. Fortunately forthis student, while the college and iTunes University were being especially strict about the useof copyrighted audio, they seemed unconcerned about the use of copyrighted images (thoughin my view, the project fell under fair use guidelines).

When one examines these enhanced podcasts, one must begin with recognizing that theyare an unintended effect of the ability in iTunes to create chapters in a single audio file (forthe purposes of audio books), combined with the ability to assign thumbnail images to thosechapters. Essentially the idea was to make it easy for users to navigate through chapters in anaudio file by identifying chapter images. Given this original intention, there were limits onhow many images one could add to an enhanced podcast, which despite having images wasstill an AAC audio file. More complex use of images requires iMovie or something similar,which would ultimately produce a video file. Apple’s Garage Band 3 made building enhancedpodcasts quite simple, though at the time of the course, it was not possible for the everydayuser to make one on a Windows PC. In short, while one might examine these podcasts andcritique class identities that permit island vacations or the romantic idea of the author or theinfluence of sports media culture as ideological forces shaping these compositions, they werealso certainly shaped by technical restrictions, access to images, institutional interpretationsof copyright, and related conditions of the network (as well as by the conditions of my assign-ment). Only through an investigation of these (and other) interoperable elements in the networkcould one begin to develop an understanding of the rhetorical, compositional practices atwork.

Of course conducting such an investigation is not easy in our discipline; as Jeff Rice(2006) explained, “a more complete understanding regarding how information connects inways traditional English studies does not yet account for—the contradictory, overlapping,open, closed, and fluctuating systems of exchanges that networks create—is a challenge tothe disciplinary identity of English as a field and to the identities that teachers and schol-ars in English embrace and request students to take on in their classrooms” (p. 131). Thatis, as a discipline, we are comfortable with student-writers as atomized, independent cre-ators. We scrupulously scan their texts for signs of plagiarism; we regularly ask them toincorporate their own views or discover their own voices. In the same vein, we demand “orig-inal” research from our colleagues and ourselves. On the other hand, in our research, we areequally comfortable with critiquing the ideological and cultural frameworks or forces shap-ing a text. However, this network approach does not participate in this either/or debate aboutauthorial agency and cultural-ideological forces. Instead, it charts how local interactions linktogether to produce events. As pointless as it would be to tell a writer s/he has no agency inan “always already” interpellated scene of composition, it can be equally debilitating to lead

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a writer to imagine s/he is the originating fount of creativity rather than a node in a networkof circulating information and media. Though the network offers us neither the comfort ofthe independent control of the author nor the totalizing panorama of a global framework, itpermits composers to investigate how local interactions intersect with networked events inmedia production. One might see the study of networked practices as a long-standing partof rhetoric and composition, that, in a sense, Burke’s parlor identified at least a slice of thisnetwork, and that our familiar “discourse communities” might be understood as networksif one resists the impulse to view them as encompassing frameworks. That said, emergingtechnological networks have made these connections more obvious and more material. Theexistence of course blogs, wikis, and so on make it easier to trace back through some ofthese networked interactions. In addition, the ease with which one can copy, edit, and com-bine existing media and information with local media compositions intensifies the experienceof networked media production. As such, the continuing development of mobile, convergentmedia networks will only increase the importance of our discipline, meeting the challenge Ricediscussed.

3. User Habits

Recognizing and operating within a media network is not simply a challenge for Englishor disciplinary stalwarts, it is a direct challenge for students as well. Though there are severalways one might slice up the disciplinary identities to which Rice referred, in the context ofmedia networks the most relevant identity may be that of the author. Clearly “the author” hashad a difficult time in literary analysis since Barthes and Foucault, perhaps since the New Criti-cal intentional fallacy. However, in terms of media composition, authors have maintained theirtraditional role. Students author classroom assignments (and receive grades). Doctoral can-didates author dissertations (and receive degrees). Professors author scholarship (and receivetenure). In these respects, English’s view of authorship largely reflects the mainstream. Author-ship may be an ideological fiction as critical theory might argue. However, it’s a fiction thatis reenacted in strings of local interactions: in my office where I work “as an author,” in theoffices and meeting rooms of editors and reviewers who name me as the author of a text, inthe library where someone reads a text I’ve authored, in future research where hopefully I amcited, and in personnel committees where my scholarship is evaluated. This is to say nothingof all the informal contexts at conferences, on blogs, or in hallway conversations where I mightrespond to the question of “what have you been doing lately?” by saying “I wrote this article.”Authorship, with its qualities of copyright and intellectual property, is a socially expedientway to make the labor of composition fungible and to assign it value within the marketplace.That value may come in terms of money, grades, or reputation in a community (such as beinga “Top 100 Reviewer” on Amazon.com or a noted scholar in a discipline).

While authorship is desirable for market purposes, it is restrictive in terms of compositionpractices. Authorial ethos, for example, would restrict me from plagiarism or copyright vio-lation. For authors, these acts are forbidden. As such, inasmuch as I wish to be the author ofthis text, I am prevented from engaging in a wide range of compositional processes that aretechnically available to me. For composers, however, copying media and mixing it together is

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more than possible. One could argue that the functionality of networks and computers almostdemands that we compose in this fashion. As the investigation of compositional networks inthis text demonstrates, even when one acts within the apparent boundaries of authorship, com-positional processes are shaped by a network of interactions that lie beyond the scope of theconventional authorial narrative. While this claim is hardly unfamiliar in the disciplinary con-text of post-process composition, cultural studies, and critical theory, facing the implicationsof networked composition in terms of our (or our students’) actual compositional practiceswill require giving up some disciplinary habits in the way we view formal composition. Atthe same time, in composition practices that lie outside the realm of formal communicationwe already engage in very different habits. We do not habitually cite our sources in a hallwayconversation or even in a classroom lecture. Teachers regularly share assignments: do we citeone another then? When faced with teaching a new course, who has not searched the Web tosee other syllabi? How many times does one sit through PowerPoint presentations or visit acolleague’s web site with images that have been copied off the Web and displayed withoutcitation (let alone copyright permission)? Outside of disciplinary practices and in mobile net-works of convergent media there are many more examples of compositional habits that do notreflect the habits of formally-authored composition: copying, sampling, mashing, retelling,etc. In higher education and most other professional venues, formal and informal communi-cations have generally been kept separate from one another, with their intersections carefullymonitored. However, the emergence of mobile, convergent media networks has led to an oftendisorienting overlapping of these practices. Here authorship must be explored as an attributearrived at through the compositional network itself and the habits produced by operating inthat network.

Manuel DeLanda (2006) examined the role habits play in the development of a “pragmaticsubject” based upon associations of causes and effects and choices based on the pursuit ofdesired ends (p. 49). These habits may mutate as a result of breakdowns in the associationsbetween cause and effect or through the acquisition of new abilities: “When a young childlearns to swim or ride a bicycle, for example, a new world suddenly opens up for experience,filled with new impressions and ideas. . . New skills, in short, increase one’s capacities toaffect and be affected, or to put it differently, increase one’s capacities to enter into novelassemblages” (p. 50). At least on the surface this should be recognizable to any educator:Students learn new skills and grow as individuals as a result. To this one might add that ourability “to enter into novel assemblages” is further managed with the purpose of ensuring astudent’s growth in certain directions rather than others. For example, the child on her bikeis permitted to ride “around the block” but not downtown. That said, not all of the outcomesare predictable or manageable. Furthermore, they do not all fall neatly within an ideologicalframework. As I have been arguing, one instead must chart these ideological forces in termsof local interactions connected across a network. The marketplace interests of selling mobilephones, the technocultural drive to develop 3G networks, and youth culture’s adoption ofmobile, convergent media from texting to posting mobile phone videos on YouTube likely willnot coincide with the pedagogic goals of the conventional classroom. But this will not stopstudents from using their phones in lecture halls.

In the student as a single author and student as a networked communicator, one uncoverstwo very different compositional functions and student roles observable in the classroom. The

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latter “backchannel” or “underlife” communication has long been a feature of the classroom.However, as Derk Mueller (2006) has noted, while in the past we have focused on individualwriters resisting institutional identities through unofficial communications, “in the networkedquality of a digital underlife, we encounter clustered social activity prone to drift throughmultiple institutions.” Research into mobile phone use (Ling & Yttri, 2002; Matsuda, 2005;Tamaru & Ueno, 2006), particularly in youth culture, has indicated that users primarily employtexting to stay in continual contact with a small group of intimates (3–5 individuals on average).This focus on maintaining this tight social network perhaps comes at the cost of ignoringtraditional sociality, like that of the lecture hall. As much as most professors desire to keep thesocial network of texting out of the classroom, students want to keep institutional discoursesseparate from the social world of their MySpace networks and texting circles. That said,our students are moving toward a post-graduate world where those divisions will no longerexist. Their online identities will become important for professional networking, and they maycome to regret the content of their MySpace or Facebook sites. Similarly, our graduates canexpect their mobile phones to become extensions of their offices. As mobile, convergent medianetworks are brought into higher education, there will be more points of connection betweenofficial and unofficial communications. Information flows both ways, to the discomfort of bothspaces. A text message from one’s boss is likely as welcome as a text message from one’sprofessor. Similarly, it may take some time for faculty to adjust to being available to studentsvia texting or instant messaging.

However, our change in habits will not be restricted to accepting new, networked connectionswith more or less formal discourses. Our situation within these networks will alter the relationsbetween students and faculty in existing spaces as well. Typically, a single professor is theauthor of a course. S/he creates the syllabus, orders the books, gives the lectures, and makes theassignments. S/he is the course’s sole authority and controls the flow of information into thecourse. Students may author texts but only within the scope of course assignments, and eventhen their authority falls under the purview of the professor who grades the text. The courseoccurs over a 15-week (or so) semester and meets three hours a week (usually). The content ofthe course has been determined months in advance (even years in advance as professors repeatcourses and lectures year after year). As hard-wired as the professor’s lecture hall habits maybe, the habits of student behavior are equally entrenched. These habits have also developedfrom relations within a network. Latour (2006) noted that the lecture hall “has been made tobe a place by some other locus through the now silent mediation of drawings, specifications,wood, concrete, steel, varnish, and paint; through the work of many workers and artisans whohave now deserted the scene because they let objects carry their action in absentia; throughthe agency of alumni whose generous deeds might be rewarded by some bronze plaque”(195). While this network has not determined the traditional lecture that the professor offersin this lecture hall, this network (of which Latour offered only a partial accounting) shapesthe conditions of lecturing. As education moves to a different network, the old habits willno longer function. In a mobile, convergent media network, the professor cannot control theflow of information into the course community and hence cannot operate as an unquestionedauthority. That’s not to say that professors cannot and will not stamp their feet and insist ontheir authority. Nor is it to suggest that professors suddenly know less or that students suddenlyknow more. It is simply that authority no longer functions by the same terms. Just as our habits

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in the physical classroom shift so will the habits we have already begun to develop in onlinecourse management systems (CMS). The conventional CMS (e.g., Blackboard or WebCT)reproduces the traditional authority of faculty by significantly limiting the roles students canplay in a course. As the term “management” suggests, the purpose is primarily to regulatestudent behaviors. No one would be surprised if higher education sought to enact similarcontrols over the campus use of mobile, convergent media networks. Undoubtedly, on anycampus one will find a continuum of media networks that run from tightly controlled andsecure (such as databases dealing with student and employee personal information) to openand unofficial (such as a course wiki). For composition faculty the task will be to understandhow these various networks intersect and shape compositional practices. While faculty havebecome familiar with controlled, hierarchical online environments like a CMS, new habits willneed to develop as curriculum becomes connected to the more horizontal and participatoryenvironments that typify emerging network practices.

The same issues are arising in the corporate world. As noted in a recent Business Week articleon corporate wikis, “Employees can be frustrated that somebody else edited their work,” saysJeff Moriarty, collaboration technical architect of Intel’s information technology group, “it’s adisruptive capability—it shakes things up.’“Still, in less than a year Intelpedia, Intel’s corporatewiki, has grown to 5,000 pages and 13.5 million page views. Frustrations notwithstanding,wikis at Intel and elsewhere are on the rise. Moriarity’s comment on the discomfort withgroup editing connects back to a general anxiety stemming from our habitual understanding ofauthorship and authority. In the informal networks of texting, e-mail, IM and so on we regularlycopy and pass on messages, intersperse our comments in someone’s text, and combine “smalltalk” with other matters in ways we would never do in formal communications where authorshipand authority (often determined by institutional-hierarchical relationships) dominate. As aresult, in an intermediary space like a corporate or class wiki, one might experience discomfortin determining how to go about editing a professor’s or supervisor’s wiki content, particularlywhen in many cases the “author” of content on a wiki is difficult to determine as pagesgo through multiple iterations. I am not suggesting that formal communications should beinformal or visa versa. However, if one wishes to understand how composition occurs, onemust recognize that it occurs in a network of traditionally formal and informal spaces as wellas in the emerging intermediary spaces of blogs, wikis, and the like.

iTunes University functions as one of these intermediary networks. At times, it is the for-mal content of professors’ lectures or student assignments. At other times, it might be moreinformal podcasts: a professor’s response to a student question or comment on an assign-ment or a recording of a student group discussing a course reading. Podcasts can be producedfrom scripts with prosumer cameras and specialized editing software or ad-libbed with anattachment to an iPod while driving to campus. In some cases, iTunes University contentmight be screened in a lecture hall; in other cases, it’s heard on an iPod or mobile phoneon a bus or a treadmill. Regardless, iTunes University serves as a connection point wheremedia passes back and forth between formal and informal communications, between tradi-tionally public and private spaces, between pedagogical and social discourses. In our learningcommunity nexus of audio podcasts, videos, wikis, and personal and course blogs, both stu-dents and faculty found themselves in ongoing negotiation over the status of authorship andcomposition and the rhetorical habits with which they might be associated. Is an audio pod-

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cast a formal presentation? Should one write out and read one’s podcast or work from anoutline? How important is it for a blog post or comment to be well edited? What responsi-bilities for citation does one have in a wiki? Is a professor’s podcast the same as a courselecture? Is a professor’s comment on a student’s blog the same as a comment on a student’spaper?

Working in this mobile, convergent media network has led students to rethink their compo-sitional practices by asking them to make decisions about the appropriate media and networkin which to communicate specific messages. That is, they must make choices about how,when, and where to compose messages as well as receive them. In composing podcasts, thestudents in my spring course needed to determine how to incorporate this new medium into acourse community. They could not simply rely on their well-ingrained habits for composinganother essay. They were adapting fairly well to blogging, which was not so very differentfrom posting in a CMS discussion list, but they needed to discover how to compose pod-casts, how to listen to the others’ compositions, and then what to make of the experience.One genre that emerged was the book review. We read several books for the course and dis-cussed those books on the course blog and wiki. The podcast became a place to reflect on thebooks as a whole. Though the podcasts were only distributed within the course, the studentstypically imagined a more general readership, much as a conventional book review might. Asecond genre developed from dialogue and roundtable discussions, which become opportu-nities for students to engage in the kind of face-to-face conversation that was not a formalpart of the online course. These conversations not only built stronger relationships betweenthe participants in the podcast, but also helped to develop a larger sense of cohesion withinthe class community. Finally, toward the latter half of the course, students began producingpodcasts that reflected on their own learning experiences. This turn toward reflection thenmoved into the personal blogs and course blogs. However, there was a definite rhetoricalpower to the audio podcasts as the students discussed frankly what worked well (or not) forthem.

From discussing the matter with students in the class (often through IM, which became thebest way to converse with students individually in the online course), it struck me that the iPodintensified the personal nature of many of the podcasts. The difference the iPod makes is easyto imagine. First one can imagine sitting in class, listening to the podcasts, while the studentswho recorded the podcast sit nearby: a fairly dull and somewhat uncomfortable propositionat best. Alternatively, and somewhat better, one might listen to the podcasts on a computer inone’s bedroom or in the library with headphones. Here one controls the playback of the mediabut remains tied to the computer. Compared to these the iPod offers mobility and privacy oflistening on one’s own terms, on the move, in the landscape of one’s life. The podcasts are nolonger a destination, an assignment of time and space, but an integration, having been madeinteroperable with the rest of the student’s life. No doubt there are reasons to lament this shift,the loss of the imagined “undivided attention” the professor might still fantasize having in thelecture hall. Personally, I welcomed the opportunity to listen to student podcasts on my owniPod while walking my dog, cleaning my house, driving to campus, and so on. Listening tothese podcasts while performing these mundane tasks did not detract from the attention I gavethem but rather situated the students’ work within the rest of the media network in which Ioperate.

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4. Conclusion

In the context of the average college writing classroom, mobile, convergent media networksremain tertiary concerns. As Stuart Selber (2004) identified, instruction related to these tech-nologies is often viewed in terms of “functional literacy” that is at odds with the purportedcritical-liberatory agenda of composition pedagogy. This functional literacy is deemed to func-tion in the service of a techno-capitalist ideology, which is translated immediately from thenon-place where ideology is produced into every classroom interaction. As this article demon-strates, however, leaping from the classroom into this nebulous ideological framework ignoresthe significant connections and mediations that shape technology instruction. That said, thecritical-ideological perspective seems reasonable if the only other option is to locate agencysolely within individuals and immediate social interactions. Fortunately, one is not relegatedto either the local or the global: one can follow a network of interactions through institutions,across material contexts, along technological networks, and elsewhere. Indeed, convergentmedia requires us to consider the interoperability of actors in a compositional network. Inundertaking this task, one comes to recognize that “functional literacy” cannot be separatedfrom the complex social networks in which compositional practices occur, that functionalliteracy is “essentially a social problem, one that involves values, interpretation, contingency,communication, deliberation, and more” (Selber, p. 498).

In an odd juxtaposition to this alleged seamless ideology of functional literacy, the othercommon category of complaints about networks stems from the informal, disruptive, digitalunderlife of activities such as texting during a lecture, using IM-code in essays, and using theInternet for research (plagiarized or otherwise). Apparently, where technology is not operatingas disparagingly “functional,” it is operating as dysfunctional, as an interruption in classroomdiscourse, though presumably not as the kind of “critical” disruption of the classroom oftenvalorized in composition pedagogy. Interestingly, though, the intersection of these two dis-courses is no less uncomfortable for the students, who would be as discomforted by textmessages from their professors as professors are by students receiving text messages in theclassroom. It will be necessary to develop new rhetorical and compositional habits as wenegotiate the “novel assemblages” (to use DeLanda’s phrase) that result from our connectionto emerging media networks. Clearly we will all continue to operate in a variety of separatediscourses and communities, but the emergence of mobile, convergent media networks willmean that these discourses will not be separated by device. That is, the iPod is no longer simplya repository for entertainment; we receive curriculum through it as well. No doubt soon wewill say the same thing for mobile phones. In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, my collegeand many others are asking students to supply cell phone numbers to use in case of emergency.How long will it be before other uses are devised as well? In many professional spaces, mobiledevices like the Blackberry and social software applications like wikis and blogs are alreadyat work. Education’s implementations of mobile networks will likely lie somewhere betweenthe social functions one finds in youth culture and the professional functions of the workplace.

As this investigation into the development of iTunes University at one college indicates, theimplementation of mobile networks will need to be understood through tracing a network oflocal interactions. If one wishes to understand how larger cultural-ideological forces come toplay in such scenes or investigate the local compositional practices of students, one will need

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to follow this network. To engage in this study, it will be necessary to abandon many habitsas one enters into novel assemblages, particularly our habits regarding authorship. There is noreason to believe that the role of the author as producer of copyrighted material or as avatar in areputation economy will disappear soon. However, many of the conventional authorial habitsof formal communication are mutating around these new, networked conditions. Cynthia Selfeput the matter succinctly: “to make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand afull range of literacies—emerging, competing, and fading—English composition teachers havegot to be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional boundsof the alphabetic” (2004, p. 54). Selfe’s focus on moving beyond the alphabetic emphasizes themovement into other media: image, sound, video, and so on. In addition, composition mightmove beyond its existing habits of framing compositional processes in certain ways. Thatis, it will not be enough to think about the composing of sound or the composing of image,though I suppose that might be a start. Mobile, convergent media networks will require us tothink about composition and learning itself in very different ways. iTunes University is only astart.

Alex Reid is an associate professor and director of Professional Writing at SUNY Cort-land where he teaches new media composition and researches writing in networked mediaenvironments. His work appears in Kairos, Theory & Event, Culture Machine, and else-where. His book The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition is available from ParlorPress.

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