Category: Academia

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Post WIDE-EMU (#1)

Enough puns about Emus already:  the on-the-fly/on-the-cheap (un)conference of sorts that Derek, Bill HD and I set up, the WIDE-EMU, went off with pretty much no problems on Saturday.  It was all rather amazing to see, frankly, though my pictures and video of the day are all pretty lame, mostly people sitting around and listening.  I’ll have to work on that for next time around.  And I will try to put up the video of keynote session up online later today or so, too.

Where did this thing come from in the first place? My recollection was that germ of the idea emerged during a long car ride back from the CCCCs in Atlanta and a conversation about how so much that we value in conference is the face to face interaction and exchange over the standing and delivering of papers.  And we also wondered about the costs of conferences which has always struck me as too high.  Long story short, we kept talking about this stuff over the spring and summer, and the WIDE-EMU was born.

There’s lots of stuff at the web site— links to “phase 2″ proposals, an agenda of the day, a robust twitter stream represented on Storify, and (eventually) there will be the video of the plenary session with Troy Hicks, Danielle DeVoss, and a distant (via Skype) Elyse Eidman.  We had around 40 people registered, though I am certain there were many who didn’t get around to registering since we didn’t have people do it at all until they were on site and we didn’t really require it.

I’m obviously biased and we’re still waiting for some survey data to return, but I thought it turned out to be fantastic event, and not just because of the localness/”proof of concept” point I’ll get to in a moment.  I thought there were some legitimately great conversations/presentations.  A big part of it is we just so happen to be geographically located within an easy day’s drive of a lot of places where the idea of studying digital writing is being taken seriously.  But I also think our process helped.  Basically, we asked anyone and everyone to start by submitting a title in one of three different types of presentations, “talk,” “make,” “do.”  Lots of people came up with ideas.  But then we asked people in phase 2 to submit something more.  It didn’t have to be a lot or particularly complicated, but it had to be something– a few paragraphs, some slides, a short video, a web site, etc.  So since people had to come up with something before the conference actually began, people came to the conference prepared.  And I think that showed.  The stuff I saw was just as good as what I typically see at overpriced, oversized national conferences.

But again, I go back to the proof of concept issue:  I think what we demonstrated here is that if you have a “free” meeting space, if you use “free” electronic tools, and if you eliminate other elements that cost something (notably food and fancy speakers), you can do these kinds of conferences with only a modest amount of organizational labor and with no charge to participants.  And for me, this begs the question about what is it that we are paying for when we go to Computers and Writing or the CCCCs.

Obviously, size matters.  We had about 30 individuals/groups giving the equivalent of presentations, and these were more or less “self-vetted” in that the people who went through the process of proposing something for phase 2 got on the program.  And again, I think that worked.  If we had a lot more people proposing and we needed to make some real choices about who is in and who is out, then it would have been more complicated and labor intensive, probably.  Still, I’ve reviewed proposals for both C&W and the CCCCs and as far as I can tell, no one gets paid for that service.

And size matters in terms of the number of participants.  I think we could have easily handled twice as many attendees, but if we had become 200 people, then I suspect we would have been forced to contend with some more complex organizational issues– for example, I’m not sure we could have gotten away with telling that size of a group that they were simply “on their own” for food, beverages, nametags, programs, etc.

I also think cost matters in interesting and paradoxical ways.  In the “DIY” spirit of things, we didn’t charge anyone for this, but one of the possible implications of this was that the conference wasn’t seen by some as having “value.”  I talked with folks about this in the last session of the day, and Tammy Conrad-Salvo told a story about a dairy farm that used to offer free tours and had virtually no customers, but then started charging for the tours and they had many more customers.  That’s entirely possible with something like this too:  had we charged a modest fee– say $20 or less a person– we might have had more attendees who saw the conference as a “serious” and “real” thing.  On the other hand, charging money would have meant significantly more labor for the organizers.  We would have had to have done something to actually collect money (not always the easiest thing in the world at a public university), and people would have expected some basic stuff for that fee– a program, nametag, coffee and doughnuts, etc.  In other words, still more labor.

There are a lot of other issues here too that I’m still wrapping my head around.  I guess what I’m left with though is I wondering about the “major conferences” in our field.  Don’t get me wrong; I like the “working vacation” of the CCCCs or C&W or whatever as much as anyone, and I realize that these kind of conferences have to pay for space.  Still, I wonder if there aren’t ways to do these things differently.  Maybe we need a lot more smaller events like this.  Maybe the bigger events need to do a better job of using easily available electronic tools to crowdsource conference organization and planning.  Maybe we need to cut costs a bit by getting rid of some of the doo-dads that aren’t really that necessary.  And maybe if the CCCCs and NCTE (for example) are using their conferences for financing their existence as organizations, maybe they need to rethink that, too.

 

 

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The rise of the web as the source of knowledge– in a book to be released soon

I went to the JSB Symposium with Derek on Monday over at the University of Michigan, which was an event that featured David Weinberger as the speaker.  Weinberger is the author of books like The Cluetrain Manifesto, the excellent Everything is Miscellaneous, and a forthcoming book that was more or less the topic of his talk, Too Big to Know.  It was an interesting talk, though not as provoking (for me) or as popular as the last one of these I went to in 2009 with danah boyd.  But I digress.

Weinberger talked about a lot of things, but I think it’s fair to say that his new work continues in the same vein as what he talked about before, and how, in a digital age, knowledge is no longer expensive, rare, logical, and locked into books, and that the problem with books is they as objects freeze knowledge at the point of printing.  And he talked through Darwin quite a bit as a pretty good example of how knowledge used to work and how it works now, how nowadays Darwin would probably have a blog.

A lot of what he was talking about here reminded me of an article on Prof Hacker I had been meaning to blog about here for quite some time, “Do ‘the Risky Thing’ in Digital Humanities” by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is the “director of scholarly communication” for MLA.  Basically, Fitzpatrick is offering encouragement to dissertation writers to “be bold” by producing dissertations that distinguish themselves potentially in form if not also content.  For example, she writes:

Writing a standard dissertation that meets everyone’s expectations for what a dissertation should look like, how it should argue, and what it should say is the safe path to a completed degree. But having taken that path—the path to a book—the candidate is likely to find herself on the job market with dozens of other Ph.D. holders with prospective books. Getting her work out of the pile is helped enormously by having done something more than what was expected. That is not to push experimentation for experimentation’s sake, but it is to say that reining in a project a graduate student really wants to do to conform with a traditional structure is counterproductive, deflating both the student’s passion and the thing that makes her work distinctive.

On the one hand, I don’t disagree with either Weinberger or Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald is pretty much praised in the comment section on ProfHacker.  I’m all for “breaking the rules” in terms of scholarship, my dissertation has been online now almost as long as it has existed in print, and I’m proud of the fact that I’ve published lots of stuff online.

On the other hand, let’s check in with reality.  By definition, taking the experimental/alternative path is a risk, and I don’t know if a dissertation is a good place to take that risk.  There are a lot of variables here, of course.  When I was dissertating 15 years ago, there was no “taking a risk” in that dissertations were double-spaced and bound chunks of text by definition.  My assumption that much of this has changed nowadays with electronic publishing possibilities and it is more normal for even traditional dissertations to reference web-based content.  But if someone doing a dissertation on the use of multimedia in the teaching of writing and then produced it only as a web-based chunk of video, then I think that person would probably have a difficult time having that work taken seriously by scholars or the job market.  The cautionary tale that already Alexandra Juhasz tells about her multimedia work/book on YouTube “A Truly New Genre” outlines the problems for an established scholar in publishing this kind of work; freshly minted PhDs just entering the profession would have an even bigger challenges.

Hey, I don’t make the rules.  I’m just telling you what they are.

As for Weinberger:  well, he’s telling us about the powers of the web and its transformations of what constitutes knowledge based on a book.  He isn’t working at Harvard and hasn’t been invited to the University of Michigan to give a speech (one that he has and will surly repeat at other similar venues) because he keeps a blog.  I don’t know how much money Weinberger makes from his books, but I guarantee you that in direct and indirect ways, he makes a lot more from them then he does from his blog.

So, while it is true that we technically don’t need books anymore (though there is something to be said about the permanence and unalterability of print as well) and we might not even be buying books like we used to, books have far more capital in an information economy than anything in the blogosphere.

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CCCCs in St. Louis: I’ve been accepted and it’s not even September; what’s wrong with these people?!?

My tongue is firmly packed into my gift-horse mouth with this post, but go figure!  First comes news that my proposal for the CCCCs in St. Louis was accepted.  It’s a talk (or something?  I might make a lot of video for this one) called “Amateur Auteurs:  The Problems of Teaching and Assessing Multimedia in Writing Classes.”  I’m interested in the things I say I’m going to talk about in this talk quite a bit because I have been interested lately in a variety of different ways with the dilema of writing professionals teaching and producing what can only be described as “amateurish” multimedia work.  I have a couple of examples in mind, and most of them are my own.

But it was a proposal I put together pretty quickly because– oh, I don’t know, I’m not all that interested in going to St. Louis and because I’m kinda all filled up on conference presentations.  As I was discussing with someone today, reworking/updating my web-based CV made me think that at this stage of my career (e.g., a full professor at an institution where I’m happy and where I’m likely to stay put) I don’t really need to do anything, let alone spending tons of money to go to lots of conferences all over the place. So go figure that my rather ambivalent proposal gets in.

And it is in at a good time, 9:30 am on the Friday of the conference.  AND notice was sent out to folks way WAY earlier than usual!  I don’t know if this a result of snafus in the process last year or what, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard one way or the other about this conference this early.  Again, go figure!

Now if you will excuse me while I figure out what it is I am going to do for this thing….

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Readings and thoughts for the coming school year

We don’t start the fall term here at EMU for another two weeks, but I have a very specific sense of “the summer is over” this morning.  Annette and I are back from “Grownup Camp 2011,” our time up north while Will is at camp, and now it is time I face the to-do list associated with the new school term.

I am not alone in this feeling.  Lots of stuff showed up in my web reading this last week about education in some fashion or another; for example:

  • In Doonsebury, a discussion between a university president and a dean about what exactly it is higher education is supposed to do.
  • Via Aaaron “One Flew East” Barlow comes this interesting infographic about how students love technology.  There is some “truthiness” to this, but there are also some bullshitty claims here too.  I know plenty of students of all ages who definitely are not even in “like” with technology.
  • Pitched to the typical college student, Lifehacker has a bunch of tips for getting it ready for school.
  • Or not– why not opt for the UnCollege approach?  This is all fine and good I guess, but the main problem I have with such things is it confuses the abstract and philosophical concept of “education” with the bureaucratic and pragmatic goal of a “credential,” e.g., a college degree.  Hopefully a credential will lead to an education, but no amount of educating one’s self will lead to a credential, and I am cynical enough to recognize that universities are in the credentialing business first.
  • And there’s some secondary ed stuff out there too worth checking out.  The  LA Times has an op-ed column “The myth of the extraordinary teacher” by Ellie Herman, who is herself a secondary school teacher, explains in stark terms the conditions that she’s working with.  It’s probably not surprising for anyone who actually works in the schools, but it might be a bit surprising for all those folks out there who have made teachers– particularly secondary school teachers– out to be the lazy bad guys.
  • There’s also a great piece in the September 2011 Harper’s about the experience fo going back into secondary school teaching called “Getting Schooled” by Garret Keizer.  No link I’m afraid, but it might be worth buying the print version.

I could go on, but that’s enough.  I’m not sure what to think of all of this vexing over schooling as of late.  My default position to such “hell in a handbasket” kinds of critiques is generally we’ve always been going down hill, ever since at least the ancient Greeks and probably before that.  Still, it does seem a little different to me as of late, perhaps because I’m getting too old.

In any event, I still haven’t come up with any new school year resolutions of note yet.  I want to continue my too slow and too inconsistent readings and reviews of journal articles because it seems to me like not many other people out there read them.  I am prepping for two new classes.  I am trying to concentrate on not eating white food and/or low carbing it.  Etc.  One way or the other, time for not getting stuff done is over.

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This WIDE-EMU thing might just work

I’ve posted about this on Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus and the like, but I’ll post about it here too:  the deadline for proposals for the WIDE-EMU is tomorrow. This started as one of those things people talk about on a long car trip– specifically, me, Derek, and Bill HD on the way back from the CCCCs in Atlanta– that might or might not amount to anything.  And it’s too early to tell if it will ultimately amount to much.

Still, I think we’ve seen enough interest here to make this fly, meaning that I feel past that fear of what happens if you have a party and no one comes.  There’s enough “there there” for us to make a go of this, I think.

I’m interested in seeing what comes of this first proposal phase and the next pre-(un)conference phase of course, not to mention the actually f2f meeting in October. But at this moment, I’m mostly interested in seeing if it is possible for the free and quasi-impromptu (un)conference to succeed.  Remember:  this is costing us and participants (in theory) nothing, which puts into stark relief those many conferences out there that cost lots and lots of money.  And that also seem to be the same old conference.

So like I said, stay tuned.  But in the meantime, submit a proposal if you are in the SE Michigan neighborhood.

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Teaching and the shifting definition of technology

I read Steven J. Corbett’s “Technology and Teaching” in Inside Higher Ed this morning mainly because I was quoted in it and that doesn’t happen too often.  I show up in the beginning of the piece:

Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?

In a flurry of recent exchanges (subject “Writing horse-shoe-of-horse-heading-east Technology”) on the Writing Program Administration (WPA) listserv, scholars in writing studies have argued these points in some theoretical and practical depth. Maja Wilson, from the University of Maine, sums up the argument nicely: “Steve [Krause, of Eastern Michigan University], and others were arguing that to teach writing, you need to teach the tools available now and not teach or allow the tools on their way out (pen, pencil), because if you aren’t teaching the tools, you aren’t teaching writing. Rich [Haswell, professor emeritus from Texas A&M University], and others argued that, while teaching the use of all those tools can be a good thing, it isn’t necessary to teach writing: writing itself transcends the particular tools, so while teaching the tools can be involved in teaching writing, it isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

Corbett then goes on to explain the “pros” and “cons” of teaching with “technology” in a fairly user-friendly and pro-technology sort of way, making points that would not surprise anyone who does even a hint of scholarship in teaching with technology.  A lot of what he’s suggesting here as new has been standard practice for lots of folks like me for years and years.  But that’s not really a criticism though because I don’t think that is Corbett’s audience.

Anyway, I largely agree with what he’s saying here, though I thought I would gently raise two issues.  First and foremost, Corbett doesn’t define technology, simply assuming it means “computer stuff we all don’t take for granted nowadays.”  I raise this as an issue in part because that was one of the points I was trying to make in that email exchange on the WPA mailing list he’s quoting.  Writing is inherently tied to tools and technologies, and literacy itself (as Ong talked about tons of times a long tine ago) is a technology.  Try writing something without a tool and see how it goes and you’ll see what I mean.

But I also think the issue of defining technology is more than philosophical hair-splitting because I think far too many people teaching writing– especially those who throw up any resistance to “technology” in the writing classroom– use their short memories as a way to resist new things.  Corbett doesn’t mention word processing, email, or even computers as technology per se because those things have been naturalized to the point that they fit into that “stuff we all take for granted” category.  This is understandable:  I haven’t seen an essay from a student written with anything other than a word processor in at least 15 years, maybe more.  Everyone has an email account nowadays, and I can count on one hand the number of students I had last year who didn’t own a computer.  But a) this doesn’t mean that there still aren’t problems with “taken for granted” technologies that writing teachers ought to discuss (I can’t tell you how many students don’t know how to do things like paginate, indent, double-space, and similar such things on something like MS Word), and b) let’s be aware that today’s new-fangled and cutting edge technology is likely to be “taken for granted” tool of tomorrow, and maybe, just maybe, teachers shouldn’t be so paranoid about trying something new.

So for me, one of the main ways I am trying to convince, cajole, con, or otherwise persuade the reluctant to consider current technologies for teaching writing is by trying to remind them that they have always been using technology to teach writing, and a lot of those “stuff we all take for granted” technologies were once resisted.  The current fears of “technology” (e.g., social media, laptops, cloud computing, etc.) all existed with “stuff we take for granted” (e.g., word processors, spell checkers, email, etc., and if you go back far enough, ballpoint pens, typewriters, pencils, etc.).

The other issue I have is pretty petty, but I’ll mention it anyway.  Corbett writes:

And the issue of students being distracted by social networks like Facebook is a valid concern for any techie teacher. A recent Inside Higher Ed article suggests just how distracting the thrall and temptation to visit online social networking environments in classrooms can be for students. But the article also suggests (and I would agree) that a vigilant teacher can stay on top of the problem of the compulsive web-surfer often simply by watching students’ eye movements and gestures. By circulating the room frequently, and training ourselves to be aware of the subtle and not-so-subtle eye and hand movements that can belie a Facebook frequenter, we can take steady steps toward keeping students attentive and on task.

I see his point and I’ve certainly experienced in my own teaching.  But as someone who frequently multitasks myself (meaning I have a FB window and G+ window open right now, I’m listening to the radio, etc., etc.), I think that teachers need to get over the whole “I must be the complete center of attention” thing a bit.  Or they need to be more interesting.

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On Rice and Gallagher on Assessment Scholarship

I was looking at it this morning, and I realized that I haven’t posted any “Scholarship Reviews” since way back in March and in response to Marilyn Cooper’s essay in the February College Composition and Communication. Talk about falling off the wagon/giving up on a resolution!  Well, I have various excuses, including pesky distractions from teaching, conferences, and life.  But I wanted to get back to it with a couple brief and belated reviews of articles on assessment.

What I’m thinking about here is Jeff Rice’s “Networked Assessment” in Computers and Composition March 2011, and Chris Gallagher’s “Being There:  (Re)Making the Assessment Scene,” which was in CCC from February 2011.  As a preface here, let me come clean and admit that I have kind of a bad attitude about assessment.  I understand formal assessment procedures are important for both internal self-reflection and external justifications and/or approval, etc., etc., but I generally find this part of my job and this kind of scholarship kind of, well, boring.  And I especially don’t like performing assessment in response to some external threat call, but more on that in a bit.

Both Gallagher and Rice use the word “network” in their articles, but they use those terms in very different ways, as Jeff discussed on his blog way back when.  Gallagher is using the term network more or less as synonymous with “relationships,” and he also references Burke’s darmatism as a way of explaining the relationship between various stakeholders (I hate that word– I’m not saying that Gallagher is making heavy use of it, just saying I hate that word) in the assessment process.  He includes various charts, including one that (idealistically?) includes students at the center (467).  Rice is referencing “network” as Latour uses it, which (to be simplistic and brief about it) is about the trace and dialog between all sorts of constituents/stakeholders.   Think very detailed ethnographies, tracings that go beyond just a “thick notebook” to show all of the sorts complexities involved in the workings of the assessed (31-32).  Rice argues on his blog that Gallagher misapplies network theory; I think that it’s more that Gallagher simply does not have Latour and “network theory” in mind when he employs the word “network.”

For Gallagher, assessment (as he discusses it, especially in relationship to “neoliberalism”) is an external phenomenon:  that is, some administrator or accrediting body asks for evidence that you are doing something right.  The network he’s talking about navigating is between teachers, students, administrators (I assume both WPAs and what I refer to around EMU as “the suits”) and what he describes on his chart as a “policy/corporate/technical/elite.”  This can mean all sorts of groups, but more or less entities demanding accountability.  So while Gallagher is suggesting we understand these relationships as existing as a network that is more complex than a simple hierarchy, he is still assuming the motivation for assessment in the first place comes from outside and (more or less) higher up.

Rice’s focus is assessment as a self-motivated and guided process.  I think he makes an extremely compelling argument that most conventional notions of assessment are designed to generate answers that the assessors (and the assessed) want.  For example, NCATE asks EMU (and other universities that certify school teachers) to prove X, Y, Z and– guess what?!– it turns out that the answers EMU gives proves X, Y, and Z.   That isn’t a truth-seeking or discovery activity.  Instead, what Rice is proposing ala Latour is more a mapping/descriptive activity, assessment as a way of figuring out what is actually being done and describing that network.

Both of these articles have strengths and weaknesses.  I think Gallagher is describing an approach for negotiating assessments that can often be an “us” versus “them” landscape.  But I tend to agree more with Rice’s take and purposes for assessment, though one of the problems is he doesn’t really have a chance to follow through on his plan.  He ended up moving from his position as the WPA at the University of Missouri to a new gig at the University of Kentucky.   What he’s suggesting here seems like a good idea though.

Two last thoughts:  first, when I was originally reading these pieces back in March and April, they sure seemed a lot more important.  Long story short, we have had at EMU an institutional assessment process that is/was complete pointless bullshit, and just as I was going to have to start thinking about this earnestly as the program coordinator, the provost quit and/or was fired.  So as of right now, there is a collective “what’s the point” sentiment on campus.

Second, I’d like to see some kind of administrator– a department head, a dean, whatever– ask faculty to do a self-assessment where they describe three things they think they do well, three weaknesses, and three strategies for minimizing the weaknesses and maximizing the strengths.  And I’d like to see these be less than three pages.

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The Happy Academic returns and answers the question “Should I get an undergraduate degree?”

The idea that college is a waste of time and money is not exactly new.  I’m not sure if it was this 1975 essay by Caroline Bird or not, but I recall teaching something like it in a first year composition class when I first started teaching in college in 1988.  But it sure seems like there have been a rash of articles lately once again raising questions about college, about how college grads can’t get jobs (as reported here in the New York Times) or that majoring in something in the liberal arts is foolish because it doesn’t prepare people for jobs, as Kim Brooks writes in her Salon.com piece “Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?”

As the short (7.5 week) spring semester come crashing to an end here (I finished the grading for one class yesterday and my other class today), these things are on my mind.  Way back when, in previous blog incarnations, I attempted to answer the questions “Should I get a PhD?” (probably not), “Should I get a Masters degree?” (there are good reasons for this), and “Should I get a graduate degree in creative writing?” (sure, just as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into).  So I might as well round things out and talk about the undergrad experience as well.

Let me start with some things that I think are obviously true, though I am not sure these truths are as obvious to everyone:

  • The bigger issue is that every able adult in this country ought to have the equivalent of a high school diploma and ought to be functionally literate. We’re not there yet.  It turns out that those 47% of Detroit adults are illiterate stuff that was reported back in April/May is probably wrong, but still, the high school graduation rates in Detroit and similar metropolitan/poor people areas are not good.  So to me, before we go around talking about the pros and cons of a college degree, let’s be clear that we have a ways to go to cover the high school problem first.  Further, a lot of the problem with too many students going to college instead of seeking some other trade stem from policies in secondary schools.
  • A college degree has replaced a high school degree as an entry into the middle-class/white collar world. A generation or two ago, you could take a high school degree and get a job as a bank clerk, insurance sales apprentice, office manager, etc., etc.  Now that entry point is a college degree.  Does that mean these sort of general and entry-level white collar office jobs require that level of education?  No, but that’s the way that it is, and this is one of the problems I have with the whole “college isn’t worth it” crowd.  It is all fine and good to say that a college degree shouldn’t be necessary for these kinds of jobs, but in the real world where real people are actually trying to apply for jobs, it is.  Which leads me to my next point:
  • Seeking work in a “trade” or in “manufacturing” isn’t much of an option nowadays. We don’t really make things in this country anymore– or rather, we don’t make enough things to provide decent paying manufacturing or trade jobs, certainly not enough money to motivate people to think about that kind of work as a first rather than a third or fourth option.  Should it be this way?  Of course not, but it is what it is.  And let’s be clear that manufacturing work isn’t necessarily “livin’ the dream.” I’ve had several students over the years in classes who worked in factories of one sort or another (mostly involving automobiles), and the consensus from all of those students was that the work sucked, which is why they were going to college in the first place.  And speaking of this, there’s another issue that Brooks and others who point to places like Europe and their strong support of technical and trade training:
  • In the U.S., we believe in a “everyone should have the chance to be whatever they want to be no matter what” system of higher education. Instead of a system where students are more or less “tracked” into future career possibilities in their early teens through testing and the like (thus pointing some students toward some kind of trade school and others toward college prep), we have a secondary school system that more or less pushes everyone towards college, and also a system of institutions that can extend that opportunity to just about anyone who is able to graduate from high school.  Have lots of money and/or fantastic grades and test scores?  We’ve got an elite university for you!  Somewhere between pretty good and kinda mediocre with some money to work with?  There’s a “public,” state-sanctioned university near you!  Barely graduated from high school, don’t have any money, and/or just not so sure about this “school thing?”  Community college and you’re set!  And if none of those things seem appealing, there just might be a proprietary school where you can spend lots and lots of  money on a potentially worthless degree.  Given the American myth ideal of “opportunity” for one and all, I can’t imagine this changing.  And while I like promoting opportunity as much as any other American, there are some problems with this I’ll get to later.
  • People with college degrees are better off than people without college degrees in all kinds of different ways. This gets lost in the whole “college is a waste of time and money” argument, but that just doesn’t match up with the on the ground and current economic realities.  This MSNBC Money article does a good job of summing this up:  for example, college grads make 60% more than high school grads, and the current unemployment rate for people with undergrad degrees is 5%.  And along these lines:
  • Every article I have seen arguing that college is somehow a waste of time and money has been written by someone who went to college. Which to me means that a lot of these writers are some combination of bitter, forgetful, snarky, and/or ironic.

Anyway, given all that, the answer to the question to me is pretty obvious:  yes, you should try to get a college degree.  There are, of course, many caveats to this.

Continue reading “The Happy Academic returns and answers the question “Should I get an undergraduate degree?””

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On 8th Grade, now and then

Will in the crowdWill graduated from completed eighth grade yesterday, and Greenhills had a lovely little ceremony celebrating the occasion.  Here’s a link to a few more pictures.

Unlike his “graduation” from 5th grade from Estabrook a few years ago, Will isn’t leaving so much as he is moving to a different level and a different part of the building.  Greenhills is somewhere around 500 or students 6th through 12th grade, which I believe actually makes the entire school smaller than his elementary school.  He will have new teachers and classmates of course, but he has already had some teachers who are teaching both middle and high school, and all but a dozen of his classmates from this year will be around next.

I’m about 90% sure we’re making the right choice in sticking with Greenhills.  We decided to go the private school route beginning with sixth grade because we weren’t going to be able to sell our house to move out of the Ypsilanti public school district and we knew that Greenhills had a great reputation.  A few minor issues aside, the ‘hills has lived up to the expectations, and Annette and I decided back then that if we were going to do this, we were “all in,” so to speak.

Will has had a bunch of great teachers– Mr. Wilson was his favorite, and I’m glad he got a chance to be in his class because he’s off to Emerson next year, but honestly, they’ve all been what I can only describe as “shinny pennies,” just some of the best and brightest.  He’s got great classmates, and while Greenhills isn’t as “diverse” as the Ypsi schools and Will is certainly not one of the “rich” kids in the group, it isn’t all a bunch of white trust fund babies either.  The school’s reputation as extremely solid college prep is well-established.  It’s been great so far and I expect high school to just continue that greatness.

Then why 90%?  Well, there are alternatives that cost considerably less.  A couple of Will’s friends are leaving Greenhills to public or other alternative schools, and one friend is going to the Washtenaw International High School.  I’ll be curious to hear more about that because it could be great– it’s free, and it promises rigorous academic standards and it is trying to be a part of the International Baccalaureate tradition of schools– or it could be not so great because it is simply the unknown.  And after all, there are lots of public school alternatives that might have been a good fit for Will, including Ypsi High.  We’ll just not know, thus 10% of lingering doubt.

But I’ll take that amount of doubt. Not too many things in life I’m 100% on, frankly.

Anyway, Will’s graduation completion made me think back on my own middle school experience so long ago.  The head of school/principal, Peter Fayroian, gave a nice talk about the transition from eighth to ninth grade (aka high school) where he described eighth grade as the worst year he remembered as a student.  Which made me think back to my eighth grade and how little I could remember of it.  I was a pretty geeky and modestly picked upon child whose interests in science and math were in the process of being crushed by my inability to keep up with that work.  I remember I hated hated hated my English class.  I had a “mentor” of sorts in an art teacher named Ron Streed who let me borrow some camera equipment for making goofy little stop-animation super-8s (by the way, I did a search for him and learned he passed away this past March– rest in peace).

Oh, and I don’t recall a completion ceremony, either.  Nothing for grade school for that matter.

But that’s about it.  Maybe that’s because my eighth grade was actually the middle of my junior high that went grades seventh through ninth, or maybe because the interesting stuff didn’t happen until much later.  Someday I’ll have to ask Will what he remembers of all this.

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The conference that was #cwcon 2011

Technically, the conference is still going on:  in fact, as I (at least start to) write this, some of my colleagues from EMU (and others, of course) are presenting at the ever-popular first thing Sunday morning time-slot, which of course comes after Saturday night’s conference-sponsored bowling and Karaoke night.  But for me, things have wrapped up at C&W, and after this (or perhaps at different times of the day while writing this), I need to get back to spring term teaching, stuff around the yard, etc.

A few thoughts in no particular order:

  • In the end, I thought the folks at the University of Michigan Sweetland Writing Center pulled off an excellent conference.  I know there were some hiccups early on in the process and I’m still not a big fan of the conference web site, but these criticisms are trivial at best.  The facilities (mostly the North Quad, but also the UM art museum and the UM union) were fantastic, the food was great, things were well-scheduled and timely, the keynotes were provocative/interesting/sentimental (in a good way)/engaging (more on that below), and it is of course great that it was in Ann Arbor.  I’m hard-pressed to recall a better Computers and Writing conference experience– maybe when it was at UC-Davis, but that also was because of the side-trip to Napa.
  • Going to a conference that is this close to home has advantages and disadvantages.  It’s nice to sleep in my own bed and to save a little money on lodging, and it’s also really nice to know the town and the campus.  I enjoyed my quasi-tour guide role.  But it was also kind of a pain in the butt to have split roles in my life– doing things at the conference, while being expected/needed to do things around the house.  If I had been staying at the conference, either at one of the nearby hotels or the dorms, rolling out of bed for those morning sessions (including my own) would have been a little easier.  And I might have also been tempted to stay out later, though that perhaps would have been a bad idea.
  • I saw some great sessions, and as an aside, I think it turned out to be pretty smart for the Michigan folks to limit submissions to one per person and to have a space for folks to post materials online. I hope that web site hangs around for a while.  I learned a lot at the B02 session on “participatory publics,” especially some theoretical writers I don’t know at all (note to self– email Brown to get a copy of that essay).  I was going to go to Derek’s presentation, but the room was too crowded, so I went to the Dan Anderson and other UNC folks’ presentation about “peersourcing.” Cool stuff, and one of the things I took away from the conference overall was the growing interest in software aided peer review.   And I was really happy to see a presentation by some of my colleagues and students from EMU about ePortfolios:  they did good stuff, and I know that for a couple of them, it was their first conference presentation.  C&W was my first conference presentation back in 1994– ah, memories…. Anyway, congratulations to them!
  • As far as the keynotes go:  I’d say 2 out of 3 were good.  Tim Wu was generally a “miss” for me, not because he was wrong about what he was saying, but because he was being a little simplistic about it.  He concluded his talk by suggesting (basically– I didn’t take any notes or anything) we can either have a future internet where everything is open or everything is closed, and that’s it, and he pulled out the clichéd and incorrect argument about the “closed” system of the Apple store, the “lack of production” iPad device, etc.  Well, as Joyce Walker put it to me when we were chatting about this, had Wu made this kind of point at the beginning of his speech and then gone on to problematize that claim a bit, it would have been much better.  And Wu basically didn’t answer any questions.
  • As much as anything, Hawisher’s presentation was a trip down memory lane, but you know what?  She deserves that for everything she’s done for this community.  Congrats to her on all she’s done!
  • And I thought Kate Hayles’ talk was great.  I’m not sure I agree with all this cognitive science stuff as an explanation for how or why people read things like books, but I do find it quite fascinating.  She probably sold me a book, assuming it’s available on a kindle or other eReader.
  • I collected my plaque certificate for the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award, which was very nice, albeit a little embarrassing.  Getting awards/recognition always makes me simultaneously egotistical and self-deprecating, and as lots of people (many who I don’t really know even in the “folks I see at conferences” category of things) said nice things to me about my blog and such, that just went on.  Anyway, thanks again.
  • And then there was our 3 minute per person roundtable, “Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other.”  I’m obviously quite biased, but I thought that was great.  Honestly, I think this lots of people/three minute per person opener/lots of time and motivation for discussion is the way more of these things ought to go.  I liked how the conversation circled around the various terms and definitions, even to the point of trying to define what it is we mean by “dead,” and I learned a number of cool things– about storify, for example.  Denniz Jerz (among others, I suspect) put together all the backchannel tweets from that session in a storify space. I might figure out a way to lift this (and/or do something similar myself) and to then set up a space/place for presenters to share their thoughts on those tweets.  Stay tuned.
  • Oh, and last but not least, the unconference goes on (I hope).  The piece I submitted, “Is There a There There,” comes out of a “suspended” video project that will hopefully find a new home in the next few months.  I haven’t received a lot of feedback on it yet, but what I have heard has been pretty positive.  So if more people take a look at it, that’d be cool.
  • Funniest moment for me:  “Dude, a laptop is a computer.” Had to be there, I guess.

Anyway, that’s a wrap for me.  Now it’s on to (and/or to continue with) the home front and thinking about possibilities for next year.  Thanks again, #cwcon!