Month: October 2005

Coursecasting, Teaching Online, and figuring out Podcasting on the cheap (sorta)

I noticed this morning that the CHE has an article in the online portion called “Lectures on the Go: As more colleges use ‘coursecasting,’ professors are split on its place in teaching.” I don’t subscribe to the CHE, so I’ll try to see if I can snag this article from the copy in the English department (unless someone wants to email this to me– wink-wink, nod-nod….)

It’s funny how these things work. My CCCC’s proposal this year is tentatively titled “Broadcast Composition: Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and back in April, it seemed like a pretty original idea. I suppose it still is, relatively speaking. But now it’s “mainstream” enough to be in the CHE, and I mentioned an article that appeared in the Ann Arbor News about podcasting in the U of M dental school a while back.

In a way, this is starting to remind me of one of my first big conference presentations at NCTE in 1994. Like the CCCCs, NCTE (this was the conference they hold in November) proposals are due almost a year in advance. A grad school buddy of mine, John Clark, and I had a presentation proposal accepted about how to use Gopher in the classroom. Remember Gopher? Yeah, those were the days…. Anyway, we had heard of this new-fangled “World Wide Web” thing, but in early 1994, there literally wasn’t anything there yet. But by the time the NCTE rolled around, nobody was interested in Gopher anymore.

Anyway, I’m not sure if podcasting will be everywhere by next March or not. I have been using audio files to supplement my notes for some reading materials for my online class, and I think it has worked out quite well. But they aren’t “podcasts” per se; they’re just audio files that are loaded on the CMS shell. Actually, eCollege would support streaming audio, but it’s easier for me to just record the audio and upload it myself.

I did figure out how to do a “low-fi” version of podcasting, though. I’m not going to go into it right now, but a blogger account, a few cellphone calls to audioblogger, an RSS 2.0 set-up from feedburner, and a visit to iTunes and I’ve got a podcast. Even if it is just me saying “testing testing, testing again, testing 1-2-3” so far…

Sunday morning (now afternoon) links

Instead of reading the paper this morning, I decided to read through my RSS feed to see what’s interesting. I guess I was indirectly thinking about teaching in the winter term because I found a bunch of links that will probably come up in my computers and writing class.

Will, the next Pele?

Well, the Hawkeyes (and, in my opinion, the referees) pissed away a game against the most evil Michigan Wolverines, but at least Will’s soccer team won. Not that they keep statistics on 8 year-olds playing soccer, but that puts his team at 2-2, with one more game for the year.

Soccer has turned out to be a fun sport for Will to play and it is a lot more fun than basketball for Annette and I to watch. For one thing, Will is better at soccer than he is at basketball– actually, all the kids are better at soccer than they were at basketball. For another, I think the fellow parents and such are a lot more fun than was the case in basketball, quite a bit more pleasant, too.

A couple more pictures of the action:

Will taking the kick

Here’s Will taking an out of bounds kick.

Will coming off defense

And here’s Will coming off of defense– he’s kind of in the background there. Note that it is impossible to escape the presence of the U of Michigan football colors, even at a kiddie soccer game.


Can The Elements of Style: The Movie be far behind?

Via a New York Times article called “Style Gets New Elements,” I discovered this morning that Penguin Press has come out with a version of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style which (or is it that? perhaps I should look that up) includes illustrations by the artist Maria Kalman.

What did she illustrate, you ask? As the article reports:

In the new clothbound edition, Ms. Kalman’s whimsical paintings are sprinkled through the text, often responding to the wry or quirky examples the authors chose to enliven what might otherwise have been a dry discussion of grammatical rules. On the topic of pronoun cases, they offer: “Polly loves cake more than she loves me.” On the uses of the dash: “His first thought on getting out of bed – if he had any thought at all – was to get back in again.” Ms. Kalman had no shortage of material.

I routinely teach The Elements of Style in an advanced writing class I teach called “Writing, Style, and Technology.” I won’t belabor it now, but my goal in teaching the book is to problematize it because, while I think Strunk and White offer a lot of good advice, I also think they offer a fair amount of bad or just plain “wrong” advice, too. And, along the way, they have a lot of kind of strange examples– thus the illustrations, which are a hoot.

The illustrations aren’t designed to explain the rules at all; rather, they are pieces of art that take their inspiration from the rules themselves. The result is some very funny and charming pictures, and I think it has this effect on the original that I can’t quite put my finger on yet. But basically, I think the illustrations change the book from being a bunch of pretty static and straight-forward rules into a kind of strange and surrealist “art” piece.

But wait– there’s more. According to The NYT:

…the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought “Elements of Style” song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight at 8 in a highly unusual, if oddly appropriate, concert setting: the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library.

Oh, and at the end of the article, they quote a letter White wrote in 1981 that mentions a ballet based on The Elements of Style.

At some point in the (hopefully) near future, I think I’d like to/need to write some sort of review or article about this thing. I don’t know who would publish it, but….

Misc. Post

I’ve been meaning to post about a variety of different things lately, but I’ve gotten a bit behind with school things (though I am about to come ’round the corner, too– I can sense it). So what I’m doing to do instead is post a few quick comments and links and such and let the chips where they may.

  • On the way home yesterday, I thought about what would happen if (for next year) I abandoned the eCollege software for teaching online and tried to do the whole thing myself with Moodle or Drupal or something. What would be lost? What would be gained? Would the powers-that-be at EMU be annoyed with me? Hmmm….
  • My routine has been thrown off by fund-raising time at public radio. Don’t get me wrong– I understand why they need to do it, and I am indeed a member of my favorite public radio station, WEMU. But I just find it annoying. So please, if you listen, give what you can so they can get back on with it.
  • Johndan observes that Apple computer controls are for lefties. He blames this on the mac, but aren’t the common short-cut commands for the PC (alt-x, alt-v, alt-c) all on the left too? Having this, I must say he might have a point. The touchpad on my laptop has been a problem for a while now, so I’ve been using a mouse, and the USB port is… on the left. But since I’m left-handed, this is totally okay with me.
  • Via Weblogg-ed cmes this article, “Web logs go to school” on C|Net News. com. It’d be interesting to share this piece side-by-side with the bad press that things like Xanga have been getting in high schools lately.
  • Speaking of which, via an email that Rich Rice sent to Tech-Rhet, I’ve learned that at least one school, Santa Clara University, is using the student blog angle in order to help market itself. Granted, Santa Clara U is a tad different from, say, EMU (SCU bills itself as “The Jesuit University of Silicon Valley”), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
  • Jenny Edbauer wrote about two interesting and free applications. First, there is a blog software called Blogsome, which gives users Word Press-like features. It’s worth thinking about instead of Blogger, that’s for sure (btw, now even Blogger is having spam problems! Is Word Press the last blogging software that seems to not have significant issues with this stuff?). Second, there’s Jot, which is another free wiki software. I’d like to compare it with PBwiki before using it, but I suspect that Wikis will play a role in my Writing for the World Wide Web class next time around.

Okay, enough catch-up with the blog. Time to catch up with the other things in life.

Beer Pong: Next Olympic sport?

I bought The New York Times this last Sunday, and believe it or not, right there on the front page (a story beneath the fold, but on the front page nonetheless) about a drinking game craze called “beer pong.”

Basically, you play in teams on either end of a long table. Each team has a group of beer glasses on their side of the table in a triangle formation kind of like bowling pins. The object of the game is one team tries to bounce a ping-pong ball into one of the cups of the on the other end of the table. If the ball ends up in the cup, a member of that team drinks and the cup is taken off the table. The team that has cups left on the table wins.

Now, I was never that much of a fan of drinking games to begin with, but as far as I can tell, this seems like a new version of quarters, and an improved version at that. Anyway, drinking games themselves seem to me to be pretty eternal. But the thing I found kind of amusing is there is apparently a minor industry involved in the “sport” of beer pong.

Witness, for example, the “Bing Bong” web site, which is for a company selling (swear to God) “lightweight tournament grade beverage drinking game tables.” There’s some video on the web site showing the tables at work, but I couldn’t get it to load on my Mac.

Now, I don’t want to be a grumpy old man here, but couldn’t the kids today play their drinking game on, I dunno, a table?!

BlackCT versus the world (though where's eCollege in the mix?)

Inside Higher Ed has an analysis of the impact of the merger of WebCT and Blackboard, which is already being dubbed “BlackCT.” Hee… hee… the dark-side of CMS products….

Personally, I have always thought that both Blackboard and WebCT sucked (though I have more experience with WebCT and think that it really sucks), so I am at a loss as to how these two companies are going to be able to “join forces” to make a product that is less than painful. So, the argument goes, the competition is going to be Open Source:

While Blackboard may dwarf all the open source alternatives, two of them — Moodle and Sakai — have strong support, and Sakai is attracting the participation of a number of institutions that are influential in higher education generally and in technology specifically.

That may very well be true, but, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m reasonably happy with the software I’m using for my online class, eCollege. I’d hate to see them go out of business because, knowing EMU, they’d buy into a product like BlackCT.

Regardless of the product I use though, I think the most important aspect of any CMS is local support. Really, this is the best part of eCollege: I email and/or call the local tech guys and they respond within hours or less. With that support, just about anything will work out.

Visual Rhetoric(s) and connections to McCloud (or, duh, use Google)

It’s funny how I have managed to do a lot of stuff different in my teaching from the way I’ve done then in the past, and I’m just now realizing it mid-way through the semester. For example, while I’m not completely sold on what seems to me to be the current/recent emphasis on so-called “Visual Rhetoric,” I decided to have students in my English 328 class do a project on it. Among other reasons, I decided to include this in the class because Scott McCloud is going to be on campus in the Winter as the EMU McAndless Professor. We’re reading/discussing Understanding Comics of course, but I’m trying to find one or two other readings to supplement this. Oh, and I need to come up with a writing assignment, too.

Can you see how carefully this is all planned? Jeesh.

Anyway, a colleague of mine recommended the first chapter of Claude Gandelman’s Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, but I don’t think that’s going to be right. Gandelman is coming at the issue as an art critic, and while this chapter is really interesting (it’s about the connection between “touch” and “vision,” and argues that the eye physically does not take all of an image at once), I don’t think my students will get the connection with McCloud. Derek’s comments on Bolter’s essay in the collection Elloquent Images makes me want to take a look at that book, but the EMU library doesn’t have it and someone has it checked out of the U of Michigan library. I think Richard Lanham’s essay “The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge” will work well as a sort of “bridge” text between this unit and the next ones, but it is slightly dated, originally published in 1994.

Of course, when all else fails, I do what my students do: I just Google something obvious, like “Visual Rhetoric.” Among many other things, this turned up The Visual Rhetoric Portal, a handy bibliography of materials on visual rhetoric, these resources at the University of Iowa, this David Blakesley course, etc., etc.

Sometimes the obvious yeilds surprising results.