The Virtual University Geoblogging Project was initially created as a way of documenting and mapping what Geoffrey Sirc (2001) has called “encounter-possibilities” (p. 15) as part of a writing curriculum. For Sirc, the need to open up these “encounter-possibilities” stems from the dull and rigid academic forms that exclude—or at least trivialize—students’ everyday interests and activities. Among other things, we take Sirc’s term as a challenge to understand student writing as inherently conversational (hyper-referential, if you will) and consisting equally of active participation and passive repetition. Rather than embracing some ideal form, writing as an “encounter” means working through the drama of compositions as they emerge from unpredictable contexts. Therefore, instead of asking students to consume and simply rehearse traditional academic forms (the pedagogy that Sirc’s “Virtual Urbanism” critiqued), the Geoblogging Project uses mobile learning, collaborative freeware, and geolocation to re-imagine routine campus practices as “encounter-possibilities.” As an alternative to the abstract conditions of the “scholarly unreal” (Sirc, 2001, p. 12), geoblogging offers concrete articulations between the lived spaces that people construct and the sanctioned forms that they use in various settings, academic and otherwise.

These concrete articulations are the subject of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), in which he insisted, amongst other things, that any theory of production must include an account of consumers as active producers in their own right (pp. xiv-xxiv). The everyday is important for de Certeau because consumer practices—or the diverse, improbable, and even artistic ways that people “use” built environments—are inherent critiques of the primacy of static forms. For our purposes, the utility of this model is that it recognizes the power of officially rendered structures while never assuming that those structures fully contain the immense possibilities of any given encounter. As Sirc’s “virtual urbanism” (2001, p. 12) argued for composition as a piling on of encounters, a collection of “field notes” (p. 17) assembled in the “colorful, human scaled street scene” (p. 17), we see the Geoblogging Project as a way of collectively mapping those field notes within and against the built environments of a college campus. Geolocation, then, is the means of articulating the “you are here” of composition. As a strategy, it avoids the pitfalls of expressivism, since it is grounded in material contexts. Meanwhile, it also sidesteps functionalistic approaches in that it privileges the intersections of critical exploration, collaborative documentation, rhetorical situation, and emergent writing. What materializes from these intersections (and here, we do mean “materializes”) is a “virtual university.”

Ultimately, through the virtual university, the Geoblogging Project attempts to mobilize students’ lived experiences while writing through, and not necessarily replicating, complex academic arguments. In this webtext, we are not eschewing critical reading and academic spheres of discourse so much as re-positioning them. The next question is, of course, where are they being positioned? While, with Sirc, we agree that approaches to writing need to operate through modes of exploration, as opposed to totalizing logics of function, we also argue that academic discourse is still a practice through which this very exploration can take place, provided that it is not an end in itself and that student writing is not reduced to theoretical mimicry. For example, texts such as Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” or Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space could be used in a course to augment, without determining, other ways of reading space. “Academic voice” is a part of this multi-modal conversation, yet there are other voices worth hearing, too.

Thus, rather than understanding the university as “built,” or conversely, as pure fiction, the “virtual university” is a representational space that is always “being built,” never complete and always in need of re-mapping. Through this shared space, students self-consciously play the role of both consumer and producer in a type of writing curriculum that seeks to contend with and employ both the “sanctioned” and “lived” spaces of the academy. What a geolocation curriculum expects of student writing is precisely a polyvocal and polyvalent awareness of textual production, one which is situational, not situated. Learning is a matter of navigating and plotting trajectories, asking what is next and where writing is going. These questions lead to convergent spaces where the academic and the everyday meet and reterritorialize. Our role as instructors is, then, to begin imagining what these new territorializations demand of our curricula.

In this webtext, we map several strategies for utilizing geolocation technologies by identifying a few of our own trajectories, which needn’t be read in any particular order. These pathways overlap, follow each other, and diverge in various ways, but they are united in their attempt to open up a college campus to the encounter-possibilities that students bring to our curricular environments.

The trajectories:

The Feedback Loop Trajectory

The Emergent Writing Trajectory

The Social Production Trajectory

The Mobile Learning Trajectory

The Situational Writing Trajectory

 

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References:

Certeau, Michel de. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

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