Procrastadabbler

The past year has been a frustrating one professionally in that I’ve gotten nothing published and I felt as if I was spinning my wheels with my research. It felt as if the world just kept saying “no” to me.

Then just recently things seem to be shifting.

I came up with an idea for furthering my research that gets me back to my original interest. I realized I had drifted away from that, and that is why I wasn’t going anywhere with my research. There’s a lot that I have to do to make my research happen, but I’ve got a clearer idea of my agenda. And this time I’m doing it not because I have to, but because I want to. It’s something that has long interested me.

The problem, however, was finding a research site. In that I am at a teaching institution, it’s hard to manage research sites. I don’t have grad students to collect data or a team to analyze data. I have to be self sufficient. I know what I want to do, but wasn’t sure if I was able to do it. But an opportunity appeared and it looks as if it’s a go, so I think I have my site and my participants.

A chapter that has long been languishing is no going forward into publication.

I’m moving slowly ahead on my book (I do need to speed up on that one though).

But I’m not feeling discouraged anymore. I’m not feeling trapped anymore.

Call it the universe, the gods, God, or serendipity, but I’ve been thrown a bone and I’m happy and grateful and feeling as if I’m in a good place right now.

And the best part is, I’m doing it out of my passion – not because I have to.

Or Being Stupid in America

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I’m not a big fan of stage theory, but I’ve been thinking about the stages of technology adoption. The literature I’ve seen on it focuses on individuals. There are a lot of models of stages of technology adoption among individuals or types of individuals (like teachers), and all of them move from an awareness level to an expert user level. None of them (that I’ve found at least) mention a giddy experimental overuse period.

What I’m thinking about is how a society adopts and adapts to technology. This is based just on casual observation – not on systematic data collection and analysis.

It seems to me that technology adoption moves awareness, experimentation, giddy overuse and obsession, then stable use integrated with every day life, or for some people, abandonment when the next cool tool comes along.

This model seems to fit individuals and groups from early adopters to laggards/luddites, but it also seems to fit larger society. I’ve watched as people engage with first instant messaging, then texting, blogging, facebook/myspace, and now twitter.

When the technology has been taken up by a highly visible group of people (such as youth) who move into the obsession stage, then out comes the fears of addiction, predation, the downfall of the language, etc. But then the large group moves to the next stage and those fears subside, or the large group moves on to the next technology, becomes obsessed again, and the fears are renewed.

I didn’t write this weekend. I am buried under student papers and actually took the day off on Saturday to go skiing.

But, on the upside, I began to develop an idea for where I’d like my research to go. I’m struggling with the current chapter of my book. I’m not quite sure where I want it to go. I have some ideas that I need to follow through on.

The kicker is that ideas are one thing = I have lots of those. It’s implementing those ideas. That’s where the hard work is.

These two terms appear on occasion in literacy research.

Interstices are the spaces between. It is a biological term that has been taken up both others. It indicates the space between cells. It has been taken up in the internet world to mean those advertisements that appear before you get to the webpage you want. Interstices are also used in literature sich as the chapters in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath that step away from the story and develop metaphorical perspectives of the issues being explored.

Liminal space is the blurry boundary zone between two spaces or segments of time. Dusk and dawn are are liminal. In postmodern theories which eschew binaries, liminality identifies the blurring of boundaries between concepts such as black/white (in terms of racial identity) or male/female (in terms of gender identity). In literacy theory, the dichotomy between in-school and out-of-school literacies is contentious. So a liminal literacy might be one that blurs the boundaries between in-school and out-of-school.

I’m fascinated by these terms lately because they seem to come up fairly often in the literature, but people don’t really explore what they mean. I’m also interested in how these terms are quite similar in that they are concerned with boundaries, but different in how they construct the boundary. Liminal space is an overlapping of the space or time. Thus the blurring. Interstices assume clear boundaries between spaces and thus the existence of the space between. Liminal space and interstitial space are thus quite different.

So what does this all mean in terms of literacy? What does it serve us to identify something as in -school or out-of-school?

Part of the reason why this dichotomy exists is because of the nature of tne New Literacy Studies. The NLS holds that literacy is context specific. How we use text, how we make sense of text, and even what counts as text is determined by context and that context is ideologically informed. So context, place, space, and time is important. What liminality provides us with is a way of thinking about texts that exist at the blurring of those spaces. But why does that matter. What do liminal texts tell us? Is it about how people negotiate their identities within and without the walls of school? It is how people negotiate the tensions between multiple spaces/contexts?

And interstitial space. The space between. Is that a third space (as in Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson)? Or is it yet again something different? When thinking about the in/out of school dichotomy (which some argue is a false dichotomy), what exists in the interstices? Is there even interstitial space in this case? Or is it more liminal?

A random thought – hallways and passing time are interstitial to teachers, but are classes interstitial to students? Teaching life happens during class time and passing time is the space between. Yet, does the real life of students actually happen in the hallways and classes are the spaces between? Not sure where I’m going with that one. It just occurred to me.