Blogs vs. Research Papers vs. NYTimes vs. Cathy Davidson

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Steve Krause

Cathy Davidson of Duke and HASTAC fame is one smart cookie and last week she had this interesting post/response to this New York Times article, “Blogs Vs. Term Papers” by Matt Ritchtel.  I came across this one kind of backwards, via Davidson first, though it works as well IMO to read her first and Ritchtel second as it would to work it in the original order.  It’s interesting stuff as much because of the reporting and response on display here as much as the subject matter itself, so I’d encourage to read both of those on your own first.  The order is up to you.

A few thoughts in response (to the response or the original?):

  • I completely understand Davidson’s take on being misquoted at best and misrepresented at worse in Ritchtel’s article.  I’ve been interviewed by reporters for different things over the last decade or so 2 or 3 times and I have learned to be extremely careful about what I say.  Because let’s face it:  Ritchtel knew the story he wanted to tell and then he went out and found people to talk to confirm that story and when they didn’t, he told his story anyway.  I don’t think that this was a “I’m just going to observe the world and report the truth” sort of piece, and I frankly think true “reporting” is rather rare in journalism nowadays.  Feel free to call me cynical.
  • Having said that, while Davidson might be misquoted and feel used and abused here, Ritchtel does come around to talk about the problem of the false dichotomy of blogs versus term papers.  Sort of.  He writes:

    “As Professor [Andrea] Lunsford illustrates, choosing to educate using either blogs or term papers is something of a false opposition. Teachers can use both. And blogs, a platform that seems to encourage rambling exercises in personal expression, can also be well crafted and meticulously researched. At the same time, the debate is not a false one: while some educators fear that informal communication styles are increasing duress on traditional training, others find the actual paper fundamentally anachronistic.”

    I’ll get to some of the problems there about his definition of blogs as “rambling exercises” in a second.

  • Davidson tells a compelling story of giving up on research paper writing assignments in her first year composition class at Michigan State back in the 1980s. Instead, her student wrote resumes and letters of application and she turned her class into what she describes as a mini employment agency of sorts.  She also says she got in trouble for this.  I don’t disagree with this approach entirely, but what Davidson has done here (and I suspect she realizes this but doesn’t weigh in on the matter) is stumble into one of the long-standing and unsettled arguments about the purpose of first year composition:  is it for students to write “for life” and beyond the classroom, or is it to write “for school” and for upcoming classes in these students’ academic experiences?  The simple answer is both, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to abandon research and academic writing entirely.  Maybe her students were able to get some kind of job for the summer, but how’d they do writing research-oriented essays in their other classes in the next year or two?  Oh, and as someone who has been a WPA off and on a few times, I have a lot of sympathy with the person who had to tell Davidson to get with the program.
  • There is no debate between “research papers or blogs” much in the same way there is no debate between peanut butter and jelly, and everybody– even Richtel sort of– admits that.  But what exactly do these people mean by “blog?”  Richtel suggests that the definition of blog is based on content– the blog as genre approach– but even that’s inconsistent because while he says blogs can “also be well crafted and researched,” he suggests it is more often a form that is “rambling,” focused on personal response, and anarchistic.  Davidson more positively characterizes the genre blogging/blog writing as context specific, urgent, compelling, and interactive.

    I’ve written and presented about all this in many other places, but I think the short answer is blogging is perhaps best understood as a publishing platform much in the same way that paper books are (maybe were) platforms, and what one publishes in both depends a lot on your purposes, intending audience, etc.  It seems pretty clear to me that Davidson is not asking her students to blog about whatever they want– personal and anarchistic writing is likely not encouraged.  That’s great, but it seems to me they don’t really agree on what blogging even is.
  • Davidson points out that she’s working with an exceptional group of students at Duke, young people who I think likely fall into that top 1% in all kinds of ways and who are eager to take what sounds like a pretty cool class, “This is Your Brain on the Internet.”  I’d like to suggest that this is what makes her students’ writing compelling, not blogging per se.  To paraphrase myself from “When Blogging Goes Bad” for a moment, just because you give students the opportunity to write in a powerful and public space like a blog doesn’t mean they will automatically write.  Students (and everyone else, I suppose) needs a reason to write, be that reason personal or an assignment in a class.  I’ve assigned blog writing in many different ways in classes where I was probably not as compelling an instructor as Davidson and where the students were significantly less motivated and/or academically inclined, and I can assure you that the  platform/genre of blogging did not magically translate into success.
  • Finally, Davidson will get no argument from me or most contemporary comp/rhet scholars that there isn’t much point to assigning traditional research papers, meaning the “go out and write a research paper” assignment with no discussion of audience, purpose, apparatus for supporting process, etc.  This might be the difference between teaching composition now and teaching it 30 years ago.  But I am increasingly convinced that the reason why students write more effectively with new web tools (blogs, wikis, Google docs, and before that, web 1.0 web sites, newsgroups, and before that, MOOs/MUDs, email mailing lists, etc.) is largely the novelty of it all.  And blogs can certainly can become stale busywork when students get assigned blogs again and again and when they are used poorly.  In fact, at this point, the most novel thing a good teacher like Davidson might be able to do is to restrict students to writing a paper-based five paragraph essay.  Heck, require it to be typed with a typewriter– it’d be a history lesson for students.
Posted in Blogging about blogging, Teaching | 1 Comment

The MLA’s discovery of “digital scholarship”

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Steve Krause

Let me first explain why I have such a big chip on my shoulder about all this.  In summary:

  • I’ve had some kind of web site where I’ve published various scholarly and non-scholarly things since about 1994.
  • I can’t remember if this was in 1995 or 1996, but somewhere in there, I was one of the first members of the editorial board of Kairos, one of the first if not the first completely web-based and multimedia-oriented “journals” for work on computers and writing.
  • I published my dissertation online (along with the more traditional paper format, of course), also in 1996.  That site has been visited thousands and thousands of times, and while I am quite sure most people stumble across it and leave, I do get an email once in a while about it, folks at conferences tell me they’ve read parts of it once in a while, it gets cited here and there, etc.
  • In 2001, I gave a presentation– at the MLA convention in New Orleans no less!– titled “Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Value of Self-Published and Maintained Web Sites.”  This was part of a panel on digital scholarship put together by Todd Taylor and that featured myself, Bump Halbritter, and (the clear “headliner”) Gary Olson.  We had quite a large crowd as I recall, though I will confess it was the only thing I went to that year at the conference– the French Quarter was too close.
  • In 2002, I published an essay version of this in the then brand-new CCC Online.  A few years after that, I was disappeared by NCTE, a result of sloppy handling of online scholarship by NCTE, a practice that is, IMO, continuing (but that’s a different post, really). In any event, in 2007, I published  “’Where Do I List This on My CV?’ Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites, Version 2.0” in Kairos.
  • Also in 2007, I went ahead and self-published my failed ultimately rejected by the publisher textbook project, The Process of Research Writing.  And one of these days, I’m going to create a “new edition” based on this one and try to market it myself, but that too is a different post.

So I have experienced a few things about digital scholarship first-hand.  In fact (and I realize this is rather egotistical of me to even admit), the first thing that irritated me about the special section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” in the MLA’s Profession 2011 was the fact that no one cited me let alone barely anyone in composition and rhetoric in general or computers and writing particular, two fields/disciplines/groups  that a) have been working on issues of digital publishing for decades, and b) I  thought were areas of interest in English studies and thus MLA.  Though maybe not.

I agree fully with Cheryl Ball’s editorial in Kairos on much of this, and I am sure Cheryl has read and thought about this special issue more carefully than I am likely to anytime soon.  From what I have read at this point, the articles here are pretty good and potentially useful for edifying the clueless those who haven’t contemplated the changing patterns in scholarly publishing in English studies.  I do find it insulting that the introduction pretty much lumps my entire field into “other” as far as MLA is concerned, and there is also for me a bit of a helplessly haughty tone, kind of like the asleep at the wheel captain of that ship that crashed in Italy who has suddenly realized there might be some kind of “sinking problem.”  But this isn’t exactly new.

(Not that NCTE or Kairos has all of this digital/multimedia scholarship stuff completely figured out either, I should point out.  But that too is a different post, and probably the ultimate topic of my CCCCs presentation in St. Louis.  Stay tuned).

I did want to bring up two other issues that are different from what Cheryl and others have brought up.  First, at no point in time (at least as far as I can tell) is there any questioning of what exactly it typically takes (in terms of scholarship) to get tenure.  The assumption seems to be that to get tenure, professors in literature (and other “English” related fields) need to publish a book, that this is a universal standard, and that this is more or less the way it should be.  Thus the crisis in evaluating digital scholarship:  how can we make sure this stuff is as rigorous as a book?  Second, the assumption here seems to be that academic “books” (and their related counterpart, academic “journals”) are going to disappear completely and in the very near future, everything is going to be hyper-this and multimedia-that.

Both of these assumptions are ridiculous.

I’ve been a graduate student or faculty person at four different universities since 1988, and while none of these places have been particularly “prestigious” or “important,” I can name dozens of tenured faculty at these places who have not published a book or much of anything else.  I can point to many other institutions where this is also the case.  To quote myself from version 2 of the “Where do I list this on my CV?” piece:

Perhaps this is so obvious that it goes without saying, although perhaps this is something that is not said enough. I don’t think the variable nature of scholarship (and teaching and service, for that matter) is made clear enough to Ph.D. students as they prepare for academic careers; it certainly wasn’t made very clear to me. I recall the horror stories of the publish-or-perish phenomenon, of assistant professors who had books published by good presses and were still denied tenure. The picture that was painted by my advisors made me think that tenure at most schools was a fifty-fifty proposition, at best.

The fact of the matter is that this happens almost exclusively at Carnegie Classification Research I or Research II institutions, or it happens in situations that probably have more to do with complicated politics and personalities than it does with publications. The vast majority of community colleges, colleges, and universities in this country are not research institutions and do not have the same notions about what does or doesn’t count as scholarship for the purposes of tenure, review, and promotion. Yet this reality is routinely ignored in documents that offer advice and guidelines for tenure, promotion, and review.

And, as a slight tangent to that, because a lot of places like EMU consider lots and lots of different things as “scholarship,” I would argue it is these more common and less prestigious institutions that are ironically on the “cutting edge” when it comes to digital scholarly work.

As to the demise of books and journals:  paper is going away, not books and journals.  I don’t think I’m going out on much of a limb in predicting that it will not be long before there is no point in the paper version of academic journals when the PDFs are available through various databases, and when the vast majority of books will be read on kindles, iPads, and other devices.  (And I wait anxiously for Apple’s “GarageBand for Textbooks” announcement, too. That has the potential to shake up this whole “book” thing even more– or not.)

But so what?  The shift from scroll to codex didn’t end books– just changed them.  The same with the advent of print and paper as a medium.  Or let me put it this way:  I will believe this grand transition to something truly different when scholars stop turning to electronic (albeit refereed) journals like Kairos in favor of self-published web sites (especially for the purposes of tenure and review), when people like David Weinberger are invited to speak at a symposium at U of M based on his blog and not his book, and when Kathleen Fitzpatrick (and others) encourage PhD students take risks in a series of tweets or write about the end of publishing in academia on a wiki and not a book.

I do not believe this grand transition is going to happen, and, I have come to believe, it shouldn’t and it can’t happen.  I don’t have time to go into all this now, but I think there is an intrinsic value to a finished, uneditable or commentable and “object-like” (even if it is an electronic one) state of a text.  Not everything should be “in progress” and “in discussion” all the time.  And I am also convinced that all rhetorical situations– like so many other things– must come to some kind of end, and I think that end is print.  Or, in an electronic age, “print.”

 

 

Posted in Academia, Scholarship, Technology | 1 Comment

The year that was 2011

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Steve Krause

As I look back at past blog posts from this year, it occurs to me that 2011 has been a year that has taken me further away from a lot of blogging, writing, and reading activities. And it occurs to me that I’ve done a lot of other quasi-administrative and otherwise not writing/reading/blogging things this year– being on the search for the department head for example, not to mention all of the things I mention in this post.

So while there were plenty of highlights from the last year, not as many of them seem to have made them to the blog this year.  Among those posts and events I’ll remember though:

I’m leaving stuff out, of course.  I was kind of surprised to see it, but it doesn’t look like I blogged at all about our travels through the UP to Minnesota or to Glen Arbor, for example.  But you get the idea.

I don’t usually have New Year’s resolutions since I always think of the “year” starting when school begins in August, but I do have a few resolutions I’m hoping to work on starting this January:

  • No mornings at EMU.  And as a related resolution, not be up at school quite as much.  I was there almost every day/all day this fall and, as I think about it, close to that much last winter.  A lot of that had to do with teaching an overload and “ramping up” as I was stepping into the writing program coordinator job, but now that the dust has settled, I can settle in a bit too.  I already have things on my calendar that will break this “no mornings at school” resolution, but still, a boy can try.
  • Get serious about the “immediacy” book thing.  The most satisfying writing experiences I had this past fall was practicing what I was preaching in ENGL 621 and “touching it every day,” and by “it,” I mean going back to my dissertation in an effort to revive that project into a book, something I should have done literally a decade ago.  I don’t know if I’ll get there or not, but it is worth a try.
  • School myself on HTML 5 (which I’m teaching this term) and PHP/MySQL.  We’ll see how that goes.
  • And the usual eating right/losing weight/exercise thing.  I have more thoughts on that, but I don’t want to jinx myself here, so let’s just say I have some goals and plans I’ll keep to myself for now.
Posted in Academia, Blogging about blogging, Life, Scholarship, The Happy Academic | Leave a comment

On Harry Potter-land

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Steve Krause

A picture of Annette taking a pictueLet me first begin with a couple of disclaimers and/or other contextualizing moves regarding my relationship to the whole Harry Potter thing and also to theme parks generally. I like Harry Potter just fine.  I read the first three books, enjoyed them– thoroughly enjoyed the third one– but then I got bogged down in the fourth book and just stuck to the movies after that, some of which make more sense to me than others.  As for theme parks:  it’s complicated, but while I am okay with your typical shopping, shows, and some theme park rides (including motion-oriented ones), I do not enjoy roller coasters one little bit and would generally prefer to do something else.

On the other hand, I am married to a woman who developed a very popular course at EMU on Harry Potter, who has done scholarship on it, and who was even quoted in an eOnline story about the series. And while our son Will hasn’t gotten around to reading them yet, he too is a big ol’ fan of them, having had the books read to him by Annette when he was much younger.  And she is also a fan of roller coasters and he is trying to be more of a fan of them.  So given this, it was just a matter of time before we were going to be visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando on a holiday trip to the in-laws.

Here’s a link to the flickr set of pictures of the trip, most of which was to Harry Potter-land.  A few scattered thoughts about it all:

  • This is one of the “lands” in the large Universal Studios complex of “lands” that included The Simpsons-oriented “Krustyland” (fun ride, btw), a sort of Americana-land, New York-land, Hollywood-land, Marvel comics-land featuring the also fun Spiderman ride and the “no way I’m getting on that thing” Incredible Hulk roller coaster, etc.  So a lot to offer, but it was very clear where everyone was going.  We arrived at the park by 8:30 am and the line for the big HP ride was already 135 minutes long.  So we decided to take in the other things first– Jurassic Park-land, for example.  It was all a ghost town compared to Potterville.  And the rest of Universal was fun and all, but not worth it without Harry Potter.  I have to wonder why a) Warner Brothers didn’t build their own HP-themed park, and b) why Disney didn’t try to get in on that action.
  • In summary, the “Wizarding World” is a very convincing set of the town of Hogsmeade with Zonko’s and Honeydukes (“jokes” and candy, all one big store), the cafeteria-style “inn” of The Three Broomsticks, the wand shop (too much of a mob scene to even contemplate going into), a small and a large roller coaster (Will and Annette rode the smaller one), and the big enchilada, “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey,” aka the Hogwarts ride, aka the castle.  Honestly, if it weren’t for all the damn tourists and palm trees in the distance, you’d think they’d done some of the filming there.
  • Like I said, I like Harry Potter things (and I might get back to the other books after this), but I’m not a fanatic. But I have to say one the coolest things about this place was seeing the hardcore fans interacting with it all. There were a number of kids in Hogwarts robes, for example.
  • Among the many features catering specifically to the HP fan was “butter beer,” which was available “regular” or “frozen” (like margaritas) and which sort of tasted like a super-sweet cream soda with hints of butterscotch.  They also had real beer and pretty decent food– actually, I was surprised all-around at the less than crappy food, though maybe my expectations had been pretty low.
  • As for the big ride itself:  first off, the wait was not nearly as long as advertised out front– more like an hour or 75 minutes rather than two.  Without giving anything away, it is essentially a “motion ride” with some real motion thrown in.  You’re strapped into these seats that move around in many different tilting directions to give you real motion and you watch simulated motion being projected around you. For me after the ride, there was very much a sense of “I don’t really know how they did that.”  It’s pretty intense, but not roller coaster unpleasant, and I enjoyed it, though I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been worried that my keys had fallen out of my pockets during one of the many twists and turns.
  • In a way, the wait wasn’t long enough because they take you through a series of rooms in the “castle” that show lots of very cool Harry Potter geeky things and I kind of felt like we were being rushed by them in the name of getting on the damn ride.  Oh, and it empties out into what is one of the most claustrophobic gift shops I’ve ever been in, albeit one that sells lots of neat HP geekware.
  • So definitely thumbs up.  If I were to do this again (and if they make expansions to the attraction, I assume there will be a next time), I’d do it all in one day instead of two, and I’d do whatever I could to not go right after Christmas, the busiest week of the year for these places.  The crowd got pretty intense a couple of times, but I suppose this is going to stay pretty popular and crowded for years to come.

 

Posted in Family and Friends, Travel | Leave a comment

Bloom, Iowa, and academic locales: a few thoughts

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Steve Krause

I read about Stephen Bloom’s Atlantic article about Iowa not first in InsideHigerEd but in an email my father sent around to family.  Bloom, who is a journalism professor at the University of Iowa (this will matter in a moment), wrote a piece about Iowa as a primer for people wanting to learn more about the Republican caucuses that will be happening in a couple of weeks.  I suppose he was trying to be tongue in cheek funny, but he missed. Pretty badly.  For example:

In this land, deep within America, on Friday nights it’s not unusual to take a date to a Tractor Pull or to a Combine Demolition Derby (“First they were thrashin’, now they’re CRASHIN’!”). There are few billboards along the washboard-bumpy, blacktop roads that slice through the countryside, only hand-drawn signs advertising sweet corn, cattle, lemonade, or boar semen.

Now, I grew up in suburban Iowa– Cedar Falls/Waterloo, which probably has about 100,000 or so people in the area– and I lived for four years in the decidedly college town of Iowa City, IA.  This is not the country area that Bloom is presumably describing, and as this critique of Bloom points out (and there are many critiques of Bloom out there), most of Iowa isn’t this area either. “Just 6.3 percent of Iowans are ‘farm operators,’ and in the last decade Iowa’s metropolitan population grew by 9.1 percent while its rural population decreased by 7.4 percent.”

Anyway, I never went to a tractor pull in Iowa and I didn’t go to one when I lived in Bowling Green, Ohio as a PhD student, the home of the national tractor pull championships. And yes, I missed the combine demolition derby too, though I won’t comment on the boar semen remark.

Then there’s this:

But relatively few rural Iowans are employed in the business of wind energy. The bulk of jobs here are low-income ones most Iowans don’t want. Many have simply packed up and left the state (which helps keep the unemployment rate statewide low). Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”

Almost every sentence here is obviously not true. And in another part of his commentary that really bothers me, he even gets corn wrong.  Corn does not, as Bloom suggests,  ”crackle” as it grows, and no, most of the corn planted in Iowa is not meant just for pigs; it’s meant for the many byproducts of corn (plastics, food products, syrup, paper, cardboard, ethanol, etc., etc.) that are in pretty much anything you buy in a grocery store anyplace in the western world. And if I had a dollar right now for every east coast/west coast self-satisfied Atlantic subscriber who read that passage about crackling corn and who then said to some fellow quasi-elitest bastard “Hey, guess what?  Corn crackles when it grows!” I’d have have enough money to buy all the meth in Iowa.

I came to Nate Kreuter’s “Go Native, Be Happy” after the original Bloom and his critics.  Kreuter’s take is on the problems of certain academic locales and he argues that Bloom’s problem is that he has failed to embrace the “challenges” of his college town.  Here’s a quote from that:

Do you imagine that you’ll secure a tenure-track appointment in San Francisco or New York, despite all the evidence to the contrary? If so, statistically speaking, you’re delusional. San Francisco and New York are wonderful cities, and I love to visit them, but wonderful as well are Fargo and Roanoke and Pittsburgh. Wonderful as well are the truly rural areas of the country (yes, all of them), where your college may be the largest community for very many miles around. There are a lot of great places to live in this country, and not only the metropolitan cities or quaint college towns. In some parts of the country, and depending upon your own interests and personality, you may have to work harder to find the things and people you’ll connect with, but every locale has things and people to recommend it.

I find myself here indirectly agreeing with Bloom in theory but Kreuter in practice.  What I mean is this: there is no doubt that a lot of great colleges are in kind of shitty towns.  I earned my PhD at Bowling Green State University, which was a great school but in the remarkably icky town of Bowling Green, Ohio.  There are lots of places like this, great schools in less than great towns. So while it is true that there are plenty of “wonderful” places not on either coast (and I think Fargo, Roanoke, and Pittsburgh would all be fine places to live and work), there are places in this country I am simply unwilling to live, and some places where I do not think the locale does have recommendable characteristics.

But Bloom’s whining about the problems of Iowa and (indirectly) the academic locale of Iowa City proves he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  Iowa City is a nice town, a great town, actually.  I can’t speak with a lot of authority here since I moved away from there almost 24 years ago and I know that downtown isn’t quite as vibrant as it once was because of malls and suburban sprawl, but basically, Iowa City is both a classic college town and a cultural oasis in terms of restaurants, shopping, movies, etc.  Bowling Green it ain’t, which makes the Bloom piece all the more puzzling.

Incidentally, my father sent me another editorial from the Waterloo Courier, ”U of I president disagrees with Bloom’s observations.” It recounts the widely circulated rejection of Bloom’s points by current U of Iowa president Sally Mason.  And then the editorial ends with this:

Bloom is on one year of leave from Iowa as he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Considering that, we would also be interested to see what Mary Sue Coleman has to say about the article. Coleman, the University of Iowa president from 1995-2002, is now at the helm at Michigan.

Perhaps she might have a stake as well.

If exaggerations and stereotypes – and we believe some inaccuracies – about Iowans are what Bloom comes up with after two full decades of living in this state, who knows what an article titled “Observations from Just 1 Year of Michigan Life,” could entail.

I do wonder if Coleman will weigh in on this….

 

Posted in Academia, Life, The Happy Academic, Ypsi-Arbor | 4 Comments

Misc. reflections on the close of Fall 2011

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Steve Krause

In no particular order (other than as they came to me while I was typing):

  • I did a lot this semester.   A LOT.  I am teaching an extra class, which was in some ways a good idea and many ways not.  Two of my classes were basically new, one brand “never been taught before by anyone” new and the other one might as well be new. I was a reviewer (although not an attendee) at HASTAC 2011– well, unless you count going out with folks I knew who were here.  I wrote up one (maybe two?  I can’t remember) external tenure reviews.  I started a blog on iPads (for a month) and did a talk about it.  I did the finishing touches and signed off on a book chapter (though note to self, I have more to do on that, it turns out).  I’m chairing a search.  I have (unwittingly and unintentionally) annoyed people.  And this is the stuff I’m just willing to mention in a list.
  • Oh, I helped run a conference that went really well.  More on that soon enough I am sure– we are very late in generating a summary report on all that.  Oh, and we moved back into Pray-Harrold, which had its own set of issues (though it’s mostly a lot nicer than it was before).  And just as part of my every day work, I’m still the program coordinator, which means paperwork, advising, running meetings, scheduling, etc.
  • In any event, I mention all of this stuff in those two previous bullet points to remind myself that there’s a reason why I am feeling a little overwhelmed/overworked right now, and I need to try to remember this as something to studiously avoid in the winter 2012 term.
  • For the most part, my students do not seem to like Google Docs much– or rather, I don’t think they like handing things in for me to comment on/evaluate with Google Docs.  I like it because I can see a history of what changes have been made, but as far as I can tell, many of my students don’t like it because they can’t control the formatting in a way that they’re used to doing.  Or maybe they just don’t like it (well, many, not all) because it’s doing something different from what they’re used to with MS Word.
  • I think the point in time where my English 354 class started to “come together” was with the last assignment.  In fact, when/if I teach this class again, I think I’ll start with this assignment first in order to establish the need in a class like this for students to “play” with the tools and try to re-think and re-visualize the way they use things like word processors.  I mentioned this to students yesterday and they thought this was a good idea too.  And while I’m on the topic, I think an online version of this class would be a good idea….
  • I don’t think I was at my best in English 328 this semester, and I kind of feel like the general sentiment is that this is a course in need of a major overhaul.  That’s a faculty group project coming up this winter.
  • I haven’t seen class evaluations and I haven’t yet read their projects or the take-home final, but I’ve heard indirectly good things and I’ve had pretty good feelings about the way that English 621 went.  Honestly, at this stage, I don’t think I will do a whole lot different in that class when I teach it next fall though a lot of what was great about it this semester was a group of students who will (hopefully soon) be getting on with finishing up their degrees and on with their post-EMU lives.
  • I am very much looking forward to next term where I am not teaching an overload and where I am teaching online and in a hybrid format.  Oh, I’ll still be busy and coming into work plenty for meetings and advising and the like, but I am quite certain I will not be around as much as I was this term.  And while I would like to spend my time right now planning for next term and getting on with some other projects, I need to first worry about actually ending this term.  So back to that.
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“Blogging month” is over; what have we learned here?

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Steve Krause

Just over a month ago, I set up academicipad as a web site/blog where I would post regularly for a month, kind of in honor of National Novel Writing Month, which also happens to be (coincidence?  I think not) National Blog Writing Month.  How’d it go?  Eh, so-so.  What did I learn?  A few things, I think:

  • For an academic-type, November is a terrible month for any sort of “here’s something a little extra for you to do every day” month kind of event.  November and April are the busiest months on the academic calendar, at least in my experience, and November is made all the more busy in my life by Thanksgiving, which is more or less a holiday of obligation for seeing extended family.  I think the only thing I might be able to attempt to do in November like this again is grow a beard, but a) I think the holiday of obligation (which also requires pictures) would cut that effort short, and b) beards are itchy.  I have a good friend who did NaNoWriMo on his own in January once, and that seems a better time for me, too.  Maybe next year– or really, the year after.
  • I had what I thought was a surprisingly difficult time writing on a regular basis in the form of blog posts about iPads.  It might have been the subject matter, because really, how much could I say about the iPad that is interesting, especially when my focus is on the academic?  I found myself just not all that motivated to get up in the morning to write about how I use the iPad to mark up readings or take notes or whatever.
  • The other thing I learned I thought was interesting was I was much more interested in getting up every morning and writing for 30 or 40 or so minutes on what might (maybe, someday) become a book in the form of my old dissertation.  I don’t know if this is because of the subject matter or what, but it seems to me that blogging is one of those things where I spend an hour (or so) writing a post and then that’s that.  They are sprints– maybe ones that can generate better and longer ideas later, but still short and quick pieces that are not meant to be sustained over a month or more.
  • On the positive side, I did manage to get academicipad off the ground with 17 posts and 11 pages about iPad (mostly academic) stuff, and it did find some traffic– 358 visits from the time I set it up, according to the WordPress “Jet Pack” plugin that follows these things.  That’s obviously not a lot– I get about that many hits here a week, usually more than that many hits every day at emutalk– but it’s something.  In fact, from an advertising point of view, it might be better because I think more of the traffic coming to academicipad is a result of some sort of search for iPad related info, whereas most of the traffic coming to this blog or emutalk is the same people over and over.
  • I did a little talk yesterday in the art department about iPads in academia, and while the talk was scheduled before I set up the blog, I was able to use that site in my talk.  So that was nice, too.
  • So we’ll see.  I think I’ll keep that site up and running and indeed iPad-centric with a few related (for example, iPhones in academia) kinds of things, and I think I’m going to try to set up some Google ads on the space to see what comes if it.  It was definitely worth the experiment for a month, though I’m also looking forward to getting back to the immediacy/electronic/digital situation project, too.
Posted in Academia, Blogging about blogging, iPad | 1 Comment

On Occupy UC Davis and its memes

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Steve Krause

Jeff Rice posted just the other day about the well-publicized UC-Davis pepper-spraying incident November 18, part of their Occupy protest on that campus.  More accurately, Jeff wrote about this photo. I’m linking here to the YouTube video, in part because I think it shows a little more nuance in terms of the event.  But the photo and its remixes are also important, as I’ll get to in a moment.

Jeff wrote (among other things, of course):

With the spraying photo, we immediately “know”  that someone should be fired because of this immediacy of emotional response. Barthes might call this response the arrogance of affirmation. Regardless, and as many note regarding the sense of immediacy or involvement digital dissemination allows for, we believe we know. We believe we know many things, but as the Occupy movement continues to demand attention, we believe we know this moment. We know based on a single image of a man pepper spraying kneeling protesters.

These are rhetorical questions and not value based questions. And they deserve some meta attention as well: The blog response, too, participates in such immediacy. I immediately blog in response to the photograph. My emotional response is different than what is publicly expressed regarding the photography, but it is still immediate (a focus of Internet critique – we don’t think through our ideas). Overall, then, I’m intrigued by immediacy in ways others are as well – via the blog or the photo. Immediacy is central to digital expression and understanding. We may not entirely understand that point yet.

Now, I assume he isn’t referring to my dissertation about this, but that word “immediacy” was/is an important one for me.  In my diss (this is a archive version– I think there is some kind of server problem as I write this), I write about immediate situations as being ones where digital media transform analog rhetorical situations.  In my dissertation, the examples were from the earlier, mid-90s version of the internets– email and basic web sites, for example.  As I wrote about it and as I still think about it now (I’ve been slowly going back to revising my diss since I have finally comes to terms to the whole process), immediacy has complicated connotations.  Rhetorical situations/events that are immediate are simultaneously very close to us and also very sudden, so they are thus intimate and chaotic.

The entire Occupy Wall Street situation (which I wrote about here earlier) is the larger and/or source situation for this most recent event, and that could lead to an entirely different discussion that I’m not going to go into now about what exactly constitutes a “rhetorical situation?”  Is it possible that a few years from now that we will think of the UC Davis protest as being unique relative to the Occupy Wall Street protests, sort of like the way the shootings at Kent State in 1970 have come to be seen as its own event and not inherently a part of the larger protests against war in Viet Nam and southeast Asia.

Regardless, I think this qualifies as a particularly immediate event in that it is transmitted to most of us (other than those who were there, of course) electronically and virally via YouTube.  On the one hand, there is a context that is missing here, including warnings before the spraying about the need to move or else.  But the casualness and brutality of the spraying here is hard to miss, and despite the bizarre interpretation of the event that took place on Fox (it’s just a vegetable), there doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground here.  This was just bad.

Which maybe why the meme parodies began so quickly, notably at the tumblr site Pepper Spraying Cop.  Jenny Edbauer (Rice’s) “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” probably speaks to this sort of meme/viral media event, and one of these days, I want to go back and read that essay again.  Maybe one of these days soon.  But I think that one of the reasons why the parody/humor here works is because the event itself– again, because of the proximity we have to it via digital media– is so obviously one-sided and indefensible that it lends itself to parody.  And the way the image itself functions in relation to readily available Photoshop-like technology also is at play here:  contemporary digital media and technology makes it possible for those who would previously be restricted to an audience role to themselves become rhetors/speakers in this particular situation.

It’s hard to say to what effect.  I suppose it is possible that the hundreds (thousands?) meme parodies of Lt. Pike’s casual pepper spray could create a distance from the actual horrible event itself.  We don’t want to forget that all this fun has a pretty nasty origin point.  Then again, maybe it is preciously the meme that keeps this (and the entire point of the Occupy movement) on the publics’ minds.

Posted in Academia, Scholarship, Social Networks, Technology | Leave a comment

Not much about “iPads” or “Learning” at yesterday’s “Workshop”

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Steve Krause

Yesterday afternoon, I went to an event sponsored by Apple Education Seminar thing featuring Apple-sponsored speakers and employees that was called an “iPad Learning Workshop.” I’m going to emphasize the positive aspects of it over on my slowly growing academiciPad site, but frankly, I thought it was pretty awful.

It began with an Apple-employed speaker/PR/marketing wonk whose talk was stuff anyone who had heard of the iPad would have been able to figure out and that was about it.  ”You can install apps!  You can check your email!  You can watch movies!”  This and she showed not one but two short videos/commercials that were essentially animated text with Apple-like piano music and a few pictures of iPads.  At some point, someone interrupted and asked what I think is a completely reasonable question: given that our students are coming to classes with laptops, what’s the point of an iPad? What is unique about the iPad? And you know what? She didn’t really have an answer to this question.

Really. Really?

This was followed by one of Apple’s teaching experts.  He had some interesting things to say, but it was all about secondary school, not the target audience for this group even if most of the people there were in the College of Education.  Most of what he had to talk about had nothing to do with iPads in particular but more about technology in secondary schools– and specifically, this guy talked about private and religious secondary school he works at in Holland, Michigan, a school which, judging from the pictures, is a completely different world from any public school in the area, not to mention EMU.

It was really striking.  I left that thing thinking a) maybe there is an audience for my month (maybe longer) web site experiment about iPads, and b) I ought to try to go into the educational technology consulting business.

But the other take-away was about universal access.  To the extent that the Apple marketer had anything interesting to say about iPads in teaching, it all assumed that students had these devices in their hands.  The guy from the private school in Holland talked about the enormous initiative at his school to get laptops into the hands of all students and staff and to even remodel/rebuild the school building to provide spaces for folks to collaborate together with those laptops.

So it seems to me that the iPad initiative that I’m a part of this year is completely backwards in that we shouldn’t be giving these things to a few select faculty, but rather, we should be finding a way to get these things into the hands of as many students as possible.  And I am reminded once again that the smartest thing that EMU could do is to push into the late 20th century and require all students to have a laptop computer that meets certain basic benchmarks in terms of processing, software, etc.

Posted in Academia, Apple, EMU, iPad, The Happy Academic | 1 Comment

iPad and daily blogging goes so-so

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Steve Krause

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been taking the inspiration of National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month to start a new blog/web site of sorts, Academic iPad.  And I’m also doing this because a) as a part of this EMU eFellows program, and b) I’m giving a very informal talk at the end of this month about iPads and art/academia for a forum in the Art Department here.

So far, I’ve noticed three things:

  • I’m not particularly inspired about blogging daily about iPad things, I suppose because I’m not sure what else I can say about using iPads that I haven’t said or that don’t strike me as pretty obvious.  Use the iPad for reading; use it for writing; use it for everyday internet stuff (e.g., email, light web browsing, searching); use it for some notes; use it for fun.  I suppose there are “fine points” to be made about all of these things, but I’m not sure how interesting those finer points really are for anyone.
  • I have been motivated to monkey around more with my iPad(s) and try some new tricks, which I suppose is also a good thing and/or good unintended consequence of this little project.
  • Between the iPad thing, this blog, and EMUTalk.org, I pretty much blog every day anyway.  So I’m not sure it’s much of a challenge for me.

Anyway, we’ll see how it pans out.  I’m not going to be giving up on this little experiment mainly because of I still feel like I owe something to the eFellows and the Art department crowds, but I am also not assuming that this is going to turn into a regular and ongoing site after this month.

Posted in Blogging about blogging, iPad | 2 Comments