Devoss, Danielle Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. “Infrastructure and Composing: The When
of New-Media Writing.” College Composition and Communication 57.1(2005): 14-44.

Design (infrastructure) as tacit, restrictive tool; perhaps the tool is no longer useful in certain moments and contexts (particular “whens” of digital composing and/or institutional development/growth)

In an effort to bridge a gap in composition scholarship focusing on new media composing spaces, DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill offer an infrastructural analysis and framework for understanding spaces for new media composition processes and practices (the “what” of new media composing infrastructures). This infrastructural framework makes visible institutional policies, standards, practices of and spaces for composing that affect composition curricula and its ability to recognize and address new-media writing. Once visible and mapped, “access points for discursive agency and change-making” within institutions are revealed (19). Equally important to this mapping and visibility is a consideration of the “when” of an infrastructure as it develops for specific individuals in a specific moment, its classification and consideration as a tool coming out of a tangible collective need. This dynamic characterization of infrastructures, illustrated in great detail through a case study of Cushman’s multimedia writing class, demonstrates that new media composing is highly situated, dependent upon and at times constrained by material, technical, discursive, institutional and cultural systems.

The detailed account of both the students’ and instructor’s issues with composing with multiple media is fascinating, and I found myself woefully naïve of my institutions’ file management protocol, as well as the general structure of each campus’ computing protocol. The majority of my conversations about the lab computers’ capabilities occur with students, most often when I’ve attempted to embed a file into our notes that the system restricts or forbids, or ask students to use a program that requires them to download an .exe file, which neither of us have permission to do. Both my students and I are constrained by an inability to access and edit control panel settings, and though I am constantly inundated with emails from our IT department concerning system and software updates, I rarely (if ever) experience any advanced functionalities or utility. It seems that the college wants to protect students and instructors in equal measure, but what messages do these restrictions communicate to students about the value of their work and how they conceive of what work belongs to them? In these moments of restriction and denial of access, the class becomes an autonomous collective: students generally pull out their individual laptops, place them on the lab tables in front of the school’s gatekeeper desktops, use their cell phones as mobile hotspots to connect to their own networks (depending upon their individual data plans, they may take turns setting up a series of hotspots for the entire class to use instead of each using their own), and proceed with the assignment uninhibited by what they view as unnecessary restrictions. I am grateful to teach students who have reliable and consistent access to their own resources, but I feel as if I should be able to explain—maybe justify to us all—why these restrictions exist, that they’re safer because of their enforcement, and that we should all dutifully abide.  Then again, there’s something much more powerful and poetic about the way these students continuously collaborate,
coming together twice a week to (re)-create their own network.

(edits in process) The New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." http://wwwstatic.kern.org/filer/blogWrite44ManilaWebsite/paul/articles/A_Pedagogy_of_Multiliteracies_Designing_Social_Futures.htm

• Pedagogy as design of learning processes
• curriculum as design for social futures
• Design as situated practice
• Learning as product of design of structures of systems of people, environments, technology, beliefs, and texts
  

The New London Group & DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill seem to be getting at the same thing with regard to the situatedness of learning, composing processes, and design; Design is prescriptive and restrictive if it isn’t (or, by design, can’t be) dynamic and capable of continual adjustment and available/visible for reflection by all users/participants.

Bishop-Clark, Cathy and Beth Dietz-Uhler. Chapters 1-4. Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus 2012. Print. 

SoTL: Design as productive; curricular design produces student learning and faculty research

• Is SoTL a discipline? 
• "For example, McKinney (2009) reports that students involve in SoTL on her campus describe being more connected to their courses, to their discipline, and to others. They also report being more engaged in their discipline and having more learner autonomy" (6-7)
• Could SoTL research provide a way for PT and contingent faculty to feel more connected to students and the college? 

• Thinking specifically about community college faculty and students: community college as a place students and faculty move through, but the college must prepare them for the next step, whatever that may be; must be dynamic to be effective