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Thinking Through Worlds Fair: Evolutionary Rhetoric

M. A. Syverson

Conclusion. This project has taught me a great deal about the integration of imagination, rhetoric, aesthetics, hardware, software, networks, pedagogy, and design architecture. The ongoing, open-ended development process is unlike anything I've attempted in conventional publication. There are few limits to therange of the project. For example, in the past year I've added new javascripts for the moving stars on the opening screen, sound effects, and theme music for the title sequence. When Swatch introduced the concept of "internet time," which divides the day into 1000 numbered units that determine the time all over the world without regard to time zones, I added an "@time" clock to the classified documents. When articles on quantum computing began appearing in the science news, it was a simple matter to incorporate a reference to the concepts into the mathematician's memo to the President.

Students' responses to the project have been very positive; they become seriously engaged in the discussions and the exhibits, and the project has recently received an Innovations in Instructional Technology award from UT. Still, real challenges remain: for example, I have not had enough time to encourage outside participation, which would contribute to the scope and depth of the project. As the project scales up, we need to continue to work to keep it coherent and navigable for readers. I have not yet been able to give serious attention to accessibility issues. Still, I am pleased with the steady emergence of the core concepts of Worlds Fair, and it continues to spark my imagination. How will it develop next? I'm thinking seriously about layers, interactive behaviors, databases, and other features that can enrich and expand the experience of participants and visitors.

Bruno Latour calls this process "thinking with the eyes and hands", suggesting that our technological applications are no longer simply tools that we use to implement our ideas, but become the very media of thought itself. And the major challenge for those of us who want to incorporate visual rhetoric into our composition courses is how to convey this model of "thinking with" the media, rather than depending on a model of thinking first and then representing our "ideas" in the media. This necessary transformation in our thinking is nowhere more apparent than in Edwin Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild . His description of the coordination of tasks, cognitive artifacts, perception, knowledge, and action in navigation is a model of a cognitive ecology in which it is clear that the cognitive processes are distributed throughout the system. The activity of navigation is a process of thinking through the tools, charts, records, and social structures, not a simple question of applying them.

We might also be well-served by concepts drawn from architecture, which has a long tradition of coordinating materials, concepts, aesthetics, technical knowledge, and social interaction. Christopher Alexander, for example, describes architecture not in terms of elements such as doors and walls but as a set of "pattern languages" which are based on relationships that support "recurring patterns of activity" . This is a very apt description which applies equally to online compositions and to our pedagogical environments as well.

We are guided in our teaching by pattern languages (for example, workshops on drafts, message forums, or class email lists) that support recurring patterns of activity (such as interaction and conversation between students, ongoing improvements in a piece of writing, and so on). These pattern languages are both cultural and personal; they give shape to learning environments even in new and unfamiliar media. We can learn a great deal about "thinking through" these media if we are willing to pay attention to our own composing processes. Visual rhetoric, too, has its pattern languages, which we can discover not only through formal training, but through our own inquiry and experimentation. In this way we can continue to expand our capacity to develop teaching and learning environments that push well beyond our original training and expertise.