China's Young Inventors

The focus of the current study is the individual and environmental attributes of inventiveness among children and adolescents. Research was conducted on the young inventors who were part of a nation-wide inventive ideation contest for children and adolescents in P. R. China. A total of 621 (303 boys, 318 girls, Mage = 13.9, SD = 2.5) 4th to 12th grade students from 112 schools all over China participated in the study. Among them, 38 (20 boys, 18 girls, Mage = 14.9, SD = 3.3) reported holding one or more patents. Independent t-test showed, compared to their lower-level counterparts, higher-level young inventors were more intrinsically motivated for inventive endeavours and were more open to new experiences. They also reported more encouragement and resources for invention from their schools. Logistic regression showed that school encouragement made the major contribution in discriminating these two groups. 2×3 MANONA revealed a significant main effect of gender and age group but no significant interaction between the two factors. Results of the univariate tests challenged the stereotyped view against the inventive ability of girls. Girls scored higher in Openness and lower in executive thinking style. The aesthetic appeal of their inventive products was also rated higher by experts. Albeit this superiority, girls, however, reported less encouragement from their parents to make inventions. Results of the cross-sectional study of the different age groups did not support a hypothesized growth of inventiveness from the lower to the higher grades. Instead, an uneven developmental pattern in inventiveness and the relevant domains were revealed, which was on the large part attributed to the influence of the educational environment. Taken together, the results of the current study highlight the important role the environmental factors play in fostering or hindering the development of inventiveness among children and adolescents

Invention through Textual Reuse: Toward Pedagogies of Critical-Creative Tinkering

This project investigates the many ways in which writers reuse preexisting texts in new writing. I introduce the umbrella term textual reuse to identify any practice of incorporating “old” text in a “new” composition. With this broad term, I expand and enrich the field of derivative writing beyond the two most prominent practices discussed in composition studies: remix and plagiarism. More than affirming that reuse is valuable or interesting altogether, I indicate what makes some instances of reuse more inventive than others. I ask how we can both recognize and produce inventive works of reuse. To investigate these questions, I examine a range of example texts, from sentence-level reuse in poetry and writing exercises, to larger-scale compilation in textual collections such as miscellanies and anthologies. In drawing on many instructional texts from the eighteenth century to today, I demonstrate how textual reuse has contributed to the teaching of reading and writing throughout the history of modern English studies and propose how it might continue to do so. I extract from these materials some key strategies for inventive reuse, including rearrangement, combination, substitution, addition, deletion, and reformatting. These strategies form the foundation for a pedagogical practice that I call critical-creative tinkering, a mode of engaging with a text by rewriting it. I argue that manipulating a source text in this way can prompt critical insight into it while also generating new writing, making it a broadly creative activity. Critical-creative tinkering is a writing pedagogy that also teaches active close reading and thus appeals broadly to the teaching of reading and writing. It is a practice with consequences for the text being reused and revised, as well as for the tinkerer, who gains facility with language and an enhanced understanding of how texts work. I theorize and advocate for critical-creative tinkering by explicating successful examples from literary works, the Internet and popular culture, professional writing, and student writing. I argue that tinkering can help to bridge courses across the different branches of English studies and outline classroom and curricular conditions that will support its wide integration

Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric

Paul Butler applauds the emerging interest in the study of style among compositionists, arguing that the loss of stylistics from composition in recent decades left it alive only in the popular imagination as a set of grammar conventions. Butler\u27s goal in Out of Style is to articulate style as a vital and productive source of invention, and to redefine its importance for current research, theory, and pedagogy. In so doing, he offers an important revisionist history of the field by reading it specifically through the canon of style. In addition, Butler argues that it is through style that scholars in the field can find a needed entry into public discussions about writing. Scholars in composition know that the ideas about writing most common in the discourse of public intellectuals are egregiously backward. Without a vital approach to stylistics, Butler argues, writing studies will never dislodge the controlling fantasies of self-authorized pundits in the nation\u27s intellectual press. Composition must answer with a public discourse that is responsive to readers\u27 ongoing interest in style but is also grounded in composition theory.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1161/thumbnail.jp

Disrupting Conventions: When and Why Writers Take Up Innovation

Genre scholars have exposed the ideological nature of genres by examining how they promote and normalize certain values, epistemologies, and power relations. Recently, scholars have extended this work to uptake--the ways in which writers take up others' actions, texts, and genres. Doing so has revealed how uptakes become normalized and, thus, conventional, yet less attention has been given to how conventional uptakes can be disrupted through critical interventions. Given that composition pedagogies often seek to disrupt reading and writing practices to encourage critical awareness, a stronger understanding of when and why writers innovate or use convention is necessary and timely. This dissertation explores theoretically when and why writers innovate or follow conventions and also performs a qualitative research study that tests "a pedagogy of uptake awareness and disruption." By doing so, it theoretically contributes to uptake studies and it argues for conventionalizing alternative uptakes in the composition classroom to encourage rhetorical agency

The Limits of International Copyright Exceptions for Developing Countries

The relationship between intellectual property (IP) protection and economic development is not better understood today than it was five decades ago at the height of the independence era in the Global South. Development indicators in many developing and least-developed countries reflect poorly in precisely the areas that are most closely associated with copyright law\u27s objectives, such as promoting democratic governance, facilitating a robust marketplace of ideas, fostering domestic markets in cultural goods, and improving access to knowledge. Moreover, evidence suggests that copyright law has not been critical to the business models of the creative sectors in leading emerging markets. These outcomes indicate that the current configuration of limitations and exceptions (L&Es) in international copyright law has not advanced the human welfare goals that animate its leading justifications in developing countries. This Article argues that development interests require radically different kinds of limitations and exceptions to the copyright bargain than are reflected in international copyright law. The Article considers the design of the international copyright system in light of what economists have learned about the conditions necessary for economic development and examines what changes to international copyright L&Es those insights demand. It concludes that a more realistic dialogue about the relationship between copyright and economic development compels new types of L&Es, thus underscoring where developing and least-developed countries should sensibly invest their limited economic and political capital when engaging with the international copyright framework

Chiasmic Rhetoric: Alan Turing Between Bodies and Words

This Dissertation analyzes the life and writing of inventor and scientist Alan Turing in order to identify and theorize chiasmic relations between bodies and texts. Chiasmic rhetoric, as I develop throughout the Dissertation, is the dynamic processes between materials and discourses that interact to construct powerful rhetorical effect, shape bodies, and also compose new knowledges. My research here extends our knowledge of the rhetoric of science by demonstrating the ways that Alan Turing\u27s embodied experiences shape his rhetoric. Turing is an unusual figure for research on bodily rhetoric and embodied knowledge. He is often associated with disembodied knowledge and as his inventions are said to move intelligence towards greater abstraction and away from human bodies. However, this Dissertation exposes the many ways that bodies are active in shaping and producing knowledge even within Turing\u27s scientific and technical writing. I identify how, in every text that Turing produces, chiasmic interactions between bodies and texts actively compose Turing\u27s scientific knowledge and technical innovations towards digital computation and artificial intelligence. His knowledge, thus, is not composed out of abstract logic, or neutral technological advances. Rather, his knowledge and invention are composed and in through discourses and embodied experiences. Given that bodies and discourses are also composed within social and political power dynamics, then the political, social, and personal embodied experiences that compose Turing\u27s life and his embodiment also compose his texts, rhetoric, inventions, and science. Throughout the Dissertation, I develop chiasmic rhetoric as it develops in the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, as intersecting bodies and discourse, dynamic and productive, and potentially destabilizing. I conclude by proposing a pedagogy of care and disorientation that are attuned to the complex embodiment of students interacting with texts in our technical writing and composition classrooms

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books