Vee Kennedy

What an interesting summer we’ve had, eh? I had thought that my favorite part of reflecting on this course would be that while I’ve spent so much time preparing materials for ENC 3375: Rhetoric in Pop Culture (Anime), the more interesting developments of this summer would be things like the First-Year Composition Program at UCF getting rid of our “Information Literacy” learning outcome (because this literacy is supposedly tacitly implied by other outcomes – bad move, if you ask me) and then, bam, the Conference on College Composition and Communication met its death by the hand of its parent organization, the National Council of Teachers of English. Will we get to watch the fun festivities of a Rhetoric & Composition and English divorce happen on a larger scale? That remains to be seen, of course. I am greatly excited for what comes next for us Rhetoricians, and eagerly awaiting the inevitable “Collapse of the Conference on College Composition & Communication,” edited Collection that will yield us that fifth (and sixth) “C” we’ve been waiting for.

As for this course, and this ePortfolio, it’s often been difficult for me to determine where the work “stopped” and “started” between ENG 6813 and the separate NEH+Digital Humanities Learning Community Activities. They’ve often gone hand in hand, but I’ve tried to keep them meaningfully different where I could. This ePortfolio contains a draft teaching philosophy, syllabus for ENC 3375, and signature assignment for 3375. The result is something not quite as cohesive as it should be, as my teaching statement focuses a bit more on Composition and while ENC 3375 is a Rhetoric & Composition-based course, it was intended to be less composition-y and more rhetoric-y. This is, I suppose, something that comes with the territory of the “dappled discipline,” we’ve been talking about since the 1980’s – Rhetoric & Composition is a little bit of everything, while trying to be its own thing.

I’ve often felt Digital Humanities to have a handful of similarities, and that came up most in this semester’s readings (that I was perpetually behind on). Of course, not new to me were the mentions of Universal Design for Accessibility (although the Houshayr blog post was new to me) or Ethan Mollick’s blog, although each of these re-reads gave me an opportunity to re-think and re-see some of the discussion that’s been progressing or changing around these topics. Mollick’s 2023 post on the different approaches he’s taken to requiring AI use in his courses (and how this differs between undergraduate and graduate courses) reminds me of departmental discussions we’ve been having in DWR about AI Literacy and what students should be held accountable for learning and executing in terms of AI literacy at which junctures of their educations. Much to my dismay, this occasionally means that I catch word that some of what I’m encouraging my First-Year College students to learn and do (like disclose AI use in specifics as part of their writing process) is something that peers feel is “beyond” the capabilities of upper-level undergraduates or graduate students in Writing & Rhetoric. To me it seems quite plainly obvious that one doesn’t need to consider themselves a digital humanist or a digital rhetorician to see how acknowledging how these tools are changing writing at all phases is important for student writers today, but I guess, this is part of the problem we as scholars have about naming and being cognizant of our tools and situations. I don’t know if I was ever asked in Junior High or High School, for example, to really reflect on how different writing was for me with pen and paper versus typing an essay after writing it on paper, versus a few years later writing with a tool that would add auto-suggestions as I typed, versus prompting alongside a tool like an LLM and then revising. It’s true that the digital is everywhere today, but reflecting on our use of tools as technology means acknowledging that pen and paper are also a sort of technology, an interface. I doubt I’m the first to make that argument.

The Locke piece on Digital Humanities pedagogy from 2017 was both at times depressing and affirming. I assign the same version of the American Libraries Association’s Framework for Information Literacy In Higher Education every semester in ENC 1102; a revised draft is out now for a new 2026 version that covers GenAI in broader depth, but I haven’t taken a look at it yet. I’ve found that the 2015 framework aged decently well, all-given. The depressing part of this piece from Locke is that the “digital humanities,” part primarily discusses the challenge of getting students and faculty peers on board with understanding the digital as an important literacy in study areas that don’t feel directly “digital,” because we engage with digital tools for just about everything these days - and I feel as though many of the concluding points he argues for in 2017 are very similar arguments I still see myself and other scholars making now, both about GenAI and other technologies. Rushkoff’s “Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age,” is cited here– but, I digress, and this was meant to be 1000 words.

For me, this was another semester of using AI - and quite funnily, another semester of creating a sort of portfolio for myself (or a few of them, by the end). I reflect on that first semester in Texts & Technology when, from the command line using a static site on github, I created this first, rudimentary ePortfolio in my Introduction to Texts and Technology class. According to GitHub, this site took 139 commits. All of them were me, by hand, with the help of online guides to HTML and CSS. It took a great many hours over several weeks to tweak, with me often taking the “more difficult” route of over-personalizing items that needed not be personalized for the assignment while helping my peers to get accustomed to the GitHub workflow. This portfolio in ENG 6813 came together in just four commits - five, once I add this text - and Claude managed virtually all of the coding work for me, and even revised where I told it I didn’t like something - all from just a handful of documents I provided of coursework. I added a “Disclosure” page to this website to share some of what that prompting process looked like (and, seeing as I ask students to do it, it feels unfair not to). The whole process took less than five hours, including writing this, and that’s likely an estimate on the high end - much less time than that ePortfolio from 2022, and with an output that’s much more professional-looking, to boot. I don’t know. I sort of miss the tedium of being forced to re-think my broken code for hours on end. I suppose this is more efficient, but I do wonder if something human wasn’t lost in that element of frustration leaving the process.