As I read Blythe's article, "Agencies, Ecologies, and The Mundane Artifacts in our Midst," I found myself trying to contextualize his definition of agency within the group presentations given this week in class. For example, Blythe offers the following descriptions of agency, ""a student's control over self-definition and language" (169-70); "a personal thing; a matter of making informed decisions...the ability to 'communicate' and define one's sense of self" (171); "a lack of constraint" (173); and "something we gain...not by being an autonomous individual" (173). As a way to improve one's agency within an institution, Blythe suggested scholars not ignore mundane texts as well as try to conceive of the institution as an ecology.

Thinking about these suggestions in the context of seeing our classrooms as "institutions" within the larger university institution, were our projects or did our projects create the conditions for developing the type of agency that Blythe describes? In our presentation, a podcast would not be considered a mundane text in the way Blythe describes, but we did stress the idea of reception analysis in the production of the podcast which does get at the idea of connectedness/interrelatedness that characterizes an ecology. As far as contributing to a student's control over self-definition and language, we believed (or perhaps assumed) the emphasis we placed on having students reflect on the different types of access involved in the project would help them gain more control over their rhetorical productions. As I'm writing this, I realize we didn't articulate "control" as a goal of the project, but I believe each member of the group intuitively saw the project as helping students gain control over their work, and this raises a question for me in terms of how we (scholars) see the relationship between technology and control. Is control simply a matter of functional access, i.e. I know how to operate this piece of technology? Or, is control something students can achieve when they acquire a sense or understanding of each layer of the access taxonomy? It seems as if critical access would be the driving element in establishing control, but is or has functional access become the default access type (at the expense of the other types) that helps students develop control or agency?

One last thing, Blythe's emphasis on working with mundane texts seems to be a paradox in the computer classroom as it seems like teachers are focused on using what is new, unique, and cutting-edge from a technological standpoint. As such, we could never get to the mundane. Does this make Blythe's suggestions less applicable to the computer classroom? Or, are the technologies we work with mundane to the students since technology has played such a large role in their daily lives? Is it that only us old folks see technology as new, unique, and cutting edge?