Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
This is kind of irritating: the Google blogroll feature stopped working, for why I don’t know. I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that it will start working again sooner than later, but I kind of wish it was working last night during my English 516 class.
Perhaps I’m relying a bit too heavily on a completely free service here. I mean, if Google just turned this service off, I’d have a bit of a problem, now wouldn’t I?
Both Alex Reid and Will Richardson recently wrote about the difficulty of keeping a blog going after so much time and so many entries. I would work harder at trying to summarize them now, but instead I’ll just point out that the main reason I am linking to this is because I am going to have to start working on a chapter/presentation on “infrequent blogging” or ending blogging altogether for the “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project. Anyway, I think that both Richardson and Reid have good points, both introspective and theoretical, and I will hopefully remember to come back to them once I get on the stick again with that project.
Speaking only for myself (though probably also for others in academia, judging from my blogroll), I haven’t been writing much of anything lately because of an insanely busy couple of weeks at work. I might go into some details about this particular project eventually here, but suffice it to say that I have been super-duper busy with one of the many things faculty have to do that inevitably take time away from teaching or scholarship. These kind of duties are obvious to me now; after all, I have been a college professor someplace since 1996. But I remember vividly at the end of my first semester of my first job at Southern Oregon University (the toughest semester of my life, by the way) how surprised by and unprepared for I was by all of the other stuff that faculty do, stuff that does not fit well into a CV, and that stuff that confirms for me that academia really is a “job.”
Don’t get me wrong; it isn’t quite like the too-close-to-home comedy of The Office or Dilbert. And I’m also really REALLY happy to be engaging in this latest project that falls somewhere between “service” and “other.” But at the same time, it’ll be nice to remind myself that what I am supposed to be spending most of my time on is teaching and scholarship. With a little bit of blogging squeezed in here and there.
And it’s not even mine.
The Online Photographer: The Worst Photograph Ever Made, which I found via Kottke.org.
2008 began with weird and ugly school politics.
We had Mardi Gras around here (probably will do that again in 2009, too).
Even back in February, I knew Barack Obama was my new bicycle (among many other things).
I dunno, I just like the SpongeBob cast’s sense of humor here.
Will and I went to Alabama, and had fun.
I still like caffeine free diet pepsi and/coke.
I learned more about plagiarism.
I turned 42 (and it was good!)
Will and I went to a baseball game.
I made a strange trip to Jacksonville, FL.
Will “graduates” 5th grade, leaves public schools (the most commented on post of the year by far)
I did push-ups, though poorly.
My wife wrote me a lovely poem.
I had a very stupid customer service experience (and won).
Teaching full-time with no administrative release is a lot of work.
We went to Ave Maria while in Florida.
And a happy new year was had by one and all….
I am so rarely tagged to do any sort of blogging game/meme I feel kind of obligated to respond to Rik “Canned Goods” Hunter’s invitation to post the title of each blog post for the month. So here it goes:
Kinda interesting to go back through the old posts– if I have time, I’ll try to do another post about blog entries that tell more the story of 2008 around here.
Anyway, trying to tag others here, I’ll start with a couple locals:
And a couple of friends further afield:
The Chronicle of Higher Education blog has a couple of posts about MLA on it tonight. The first one I read was “MLA 2008: Market Realities in San Francisco.” Apparently, the MLA has discovered both teaching and the internets. A couple of quotes:
Does the ailing economy have anything to do with a pragmatic streak evident in some of the panels this year? Maybe not, but you could say the timing is good. Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, picked “The Way We Teach Now” as the topic of his presidential forum. At the session, some of the profession’s marquee names tackled questions of how literary theory works (or doesn’t) in the classroom and how senior scholars could do a better job of helping their graduate students acclimate to “the culture of the profession, whatever that means,” as Michael Berube put it.
And:
Richard E. Miller, a professor of English at Rutgers University, made the idea of theory in the classroom look almost quaint with a talk—make that show—on reading and writing in a 2.0 world. The Web has not only changed the way we compose, it has become the material of composition, he said, citing the work of Jonathan Harris as a prime example.
“We are living at the moment of the greatest change in human communication” the world has ever seen, he said—more important than the moment our ancestors crawled out of the muck, more revolutionary than the invention of the printing press. If you want revolution, he seemed to be saying, it’s already here.
And then there’s this: “MLA Meeting Designed for Broader Appeal.” Here’s a quote from this:
She [Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA’s executive director] said that the group wants to close a perceived chasm between different constituencies—language-and-lit professors at research universities and those at community colleges, for instance. The association hasn’t been known to lavish attention on the latter group. “Too often, community college colleagues suppose that the MLA does not provide enough of what they need to justify being members,” Ms. Feal wrote on her blog.
To help remedy that, the MLA held a workshop this year on “the central move of academic writing” for community-college members. It was well-attended, with more than 60 participants. “We really are in this together,” Ms. Feal told The Chronicle.
Now, I may be a bit cynical and even defensive as a comp/rhet-type. But this sure sounds like too little and too late to me.
Basically, composition and rhetoric as a field originated in English departments among traditional literature faculty who actually took an interest in teaching writing and that purgatory called first year composition, and nowhere is the burden of teaching more acute than in community colleges. The mark of a good appointment in literature has traditionally been one with a low teaching load consisting of upper-level undergraduate literature courses, a grad seminar, and no freshman comp. This allows for plenty of time to worry about what’s really important, whatever that might be.
Over the years, this division of labor has evolved into deeper lines between literary studies and writing studies. Rita Felski, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, refers to this as “disciplinary Balkanization,” but from my point of view, this is simply the evolution of the field. Once upon a time, speech and English were typically the same department. But eventually English and speech/communications began to take on their own disciplinary identities; and nowadays, we’ve got English departments and communications departments. I think that this is what’s happening between literary studies and writing studies. In my view, it is less about the traditional political tensions between literature and comp-rhet and more about the increasing distance between what our different fields define as scholarship, teaching, and the other practices that define academic disciplines. This is why there are more and more Writing departments and programs completely separate from Literature and/or English departments, and this is certainly a trend that is going to continue.
Anyway, I’m not buying it. It just seems a little disingenuous to me to believe the MLA is all now most interested in teaching, writing, technology, and community colleges.
I gotta get to work cleaning up my basement/office/man-cave space, but before I do, here are three links I came across while browsing through my blog reader feed:
Okay, time to get busy….
I was checking some Google analytics stuff this morning (mostly as a way of procrastinating on actually doing the mountain of work I pretty much absolutely and positively finish in the next 48 hours or so) and that including perusing the hits on my (defunct, free, and/or web-based) textbook project, The Process of Research Writing. Two little fun-facts: In the last year, my textbook site has had about 1200 or so “visits,” and in the last month, six of them have been from Tehran, Iran.
This was on my mind a bit at the gym in part because I learned the other day that I will indeed be presenting about this at the upcoming Computers and Writing Conference in Davis “right next to wine country” California in late June 2009. (Actually, I’ll be giving two presentations: the other one is going to be about “ending” and/or giving up on blogging.) This is the panel on alternatives to traditional publishing that I originally proposed for the CCCCs and that I wrote about some time ago here, and my spiel is going to be about my “do it yourself” approach with this project.
At the end of my McGraw-Hill experience in 2006, when it was officially “dead” to them and when they didn’t want to give me back the rights, I kind of felt like my book was being packed away into a crate to be deposited into that same warehouse that’s at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark: gone forever, and I wasn’t exactly expecting a sequel (ala Crystal Skull) to change the situation. So, my theory was that in publishing the project online, I would automatically receive some version of an audience, certainly more than if I had just shelved it entirely. And this has turned out to be very true.
Now, 1200 visits in a year is not a lot– this blog received ten times that many in the same time-frame, and technorati ranks this site 278,352– and I don’t have a lot of evidence as to what those 1200 or so visitors did with the site. But that is about 1200 more people doing something with this project– even if it is just glancing at the main page– than would have seen it otherwise. And I’m pretty sure that no one in Tehran would have thought about it much.
When I was at the gym this morning, I was reading Clay Shirky’s book and the chapter “Publish, then Filter,” and one of the point he makes in there is about the difference between an “audience” and “friends.” I don’t quite agree with what he’s getting at there, but he is kind of saying something that a lot of other theorist have said about audience and internet technologies: you don’t have to have a big audience to be a “success.” I’m thinking here in particular to something that Chris “The Long Tail” Anderson said in an interview someplace about how an audience of 100 is a good thing if it is the right 100 people. For me, it turns out that at least a few of them are in Iran.
Now, it’s easy for Shirky and Anderson to say these things of course, especially when they are saying them in books that have reached very large audience and which have undoubtedly made each of them a lot of money. In fact, the cynic in me says that this is all part of some twisted con, kind of like one of those “get rich” books where the advice really ought to be to write a book about getting rich quick, only the pitch here is a little different: “Buy my book about how big audiences or big organizations don’t matter, and pay no attention to the fact that you are joining a big audience and contributing dollars to a big organization.”
Still, it’s pretty cool that by forgoing dead tree print and the money that could have come from it (had I been able to convince McGraw-Hill, of course), I’ve been able to produce a resource that is at least kind of interesting to someone somewhere. That doesn’t pay the bills, but it is satisfying in a small way.
This is one of those entries that falls into the category of “probably only useful to me/reminder:” “Thomson Reuters vs. George Mason University (or EndNote vs. Zotero): the Business End of Citation Management Software.” The short version is that EndNote (which is a citation software that costs money) is suing Zotero (which is free) claiming trademark infringement and the like.
I include this here because I think it would be worthwhile to introduce this stuff into the discussion in English 516 this coming winter, though this prompts two other thoughts for now. First, I really gotta get on the stick and figure out what I’m doing in that course in a couple of months. Second, perhaps I should make some use of these kinds of resources. I am more or less “old school” when it comes to this stuff, preferring instead to just keep track of stuff in MS Word files or Scrivener or something. What I don’t like particularly about EndNote or Zotero is that they aren’t portable. Perhaps more useful for me would be to revive my citeulike account, and since there is a “group” function with this site, maybe it’d be a good route to take in 516 for the research project. Or English 121 for that matter….
Just some more blog reading/clean-up: Most popular top 10’s of 2008 on LifeHacker, which is my favorite part of the site anyway.