I was dismayed to see that Charlie characterized my response yesterday to his and Clancy’s posts as “fisking”, since my intent was only to say that (1) I don’t like the “party line” approach which suggests, as Charlie and Clancy do, that those who fail to use open-source software aren’t doing enough to support the open source movement, and (2) I think the finger-pointing that Charlie and Clancy have done is counterproductive, in that — as Cindy points out in her comment — it’ll alienate those who are already on your side, without gaining any converts. I intended towards Charlie and Clancy none of the hostility characteristic of fisking, since I like and admire both of them a lot and am ideologically in agreement with them on the positive points of the open-source movement. My post yesterday expressed disagreement only with the “party line” position that I saw Charlie and Clancy as taking in their finger-pointing, rather than the point-by-point deconstruction characteristic of fisking. And I completely agree with Charlie’s point “that copyfighters use of open source software could be better represented than it is”: in fact, this seems to me to be practically a given, which is why I didn’t engage with it.

Furthermore, I’ll completely agree with Charlie that individual rhetorical practice contributes to building one’s ethos as a teacher, and am happy to say, with Charlie, “Open source software use should be better represented in the copyfighters’ area of the blogosphere. Use provides positive example to others.”
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I don’t buy the analogy Charlie poses, where we ought to “Imagine if all the active members of Greenpeace drove Ford Expeditions and Chevy Tahoes and failed to recycle any of their paper, plastic, and aluminum goods”: for one thing, the “all” in that quotation is a nifty little argumentative slip. Charlie also supposes in his example that all of the goals of Greenpeace members are identical (again, the party line), yet I wonder how he’d feel about a hypothetical Icelandic head of state who drove an SUV and refused to recycle yet passed legislation permanently outlawing the hunting of Minke whales. Political positions are not all-or-nothing.
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The wiki died, and I don’t know why. I think I might have misconfigured the directories.

You know what’s most intimidating about installing these things? The documentation is absolute crap, and I went with OddMuse because it seemed the easiest of the bunch. Programmers need to learn how to write. I don’t know what went wrong, or I’d rewrite the documentation. But John and Chris — thanks for contributing. I’ll do my best to get it up and running again as soon as I can.

Dammit. Maybe Perl and Unix are easy for some, but I’m not that skilled. That’s a lot of brain-work gone.

Hey! I got it up and running, all by myself!

The ‘it’ in question is the wiki I was talking about here and here, as a means to start exploring the ways open source practices might work in the first year composition classroom. So the wiki, which I’ve rather pompously titled the Open Writing Classroom, is at http://scripta.vitia.org/cgi-bin/wiki. Right now, content is negligible — I was happy just to figure out how to make it work — and so I’ll be trying to add to it over the next few days. I hope you’ll feel free to dive in and play around and make whatever changes, additions, or improvements you like, if you’re so inclined. I was serious with that suggestion about trying to have one product of this project be a collaboratively-authored essay detailing any conclusions at which we might arrive, to be submitted to an academic journal.

I started typing this up as a response to the kind writers who responded to my call for collaboration, but it’s become sufficiently involved that it merits a post of its own. Here goes.

First off, Derek really pushes my thinking further in his first paragraph, to the point where I’m like: yes, this can work; let’s see how far we can take this. The only real experience with anything similar to what I’m suggesting has been much like John’s, in a creative writing seminar where part of the class, exhilaratingly, co-created a story via e-mail; a story where even the failed attempts, questions, and asides were incorporated and rewritten into the action. But in this sense, what I’m proposing goes far beyond the universal syllabus John suggests, and while first year composition tends (like pornography) to be fairly recognizable when one sees it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t vary widely from institution to institution: in fact, both the syllabus and the texts produced at the institution where I got my MFA differed radically from the syllabus and the texts produced at my current institution.
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