Yep. Another one. This is for the UMass conference. Once again, I’m exactly at the upper word limit.

Presentation Title: “Accumulating, Connecting and Using: Sorting Out Judgment in the Digital Age”

As I explore the ways in which composition is evolving in the 21st century, I find it increasingly difficult to discuss the notion of “judgment” within established academic framework. My students and I often don’t find ourselves ranking, evaluating and liking composition(s) in the ways that Peter Elbow described only a dozen years ago, and except in academic settings, the world around us doesn’t seem to, either. For example, we frequently alternate between the roles of reader/judge and composer/self-judge when using the internet, and therefore employ more active forms of judgment: we accumulate documents, bookmarks, links and tags; we connect these compositions with each other when we find them relevant; and we use our accumulated resources by putting them “in the mix” with our own words and thoughts.

As a result of the changing nature of composition, my role as evaluator and my students’ roles as self-evaluators are growing more entwined, and consequently more sophisticated. We’re beginning to develop classroom structures that better accommodate these new roles (and that often function independently of traditional academic notions of “objectivity” and “standardization”). This is what I would like to share with you: how the reorientation of composition within new media has profoundly changed the way we look at judgment; how I’ve shown my students ways to refine their judgments through active engagement with text(s); and how my students and I have found ways to reconcile our “ways of judging” with the still-dominant structural values of ranking, evaluating and liking in our university.