Category: Scholarship

Posted on

The myth of online predators (and a gramar tangent)

I’m posting this here to remind me that it’s something I need to include in some readings for ENGL 516 about social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook and the like: “Questioning the Notion of Online Predators” from PBS Teachers, though it has been available in a lot of other places too. I heard an interview with the study mentioned in this post; basically, the researchers found (via what I assume was an examination of the records of sex crimes involving the internet and sex crimes prior to it) is that this idea of a bunch of dirty old men posing as teenagers online just isn’t so, that there is a slight decrease in these sorts of pedaphile crimes relative to the past, etc., etc.– in short, that this stuff is basically a media myth.

And yet, it persists, the same as the myth about razor blades in apples and pins in candy bars at Halloween, and the same as static grammar instruction as being the key to the teaching of writing. Why is that? Well, part of it, it seems to me, is one of the potential weaknesses of empirical research over perceptions and fears, especially when those perceptions and fears are red by things like popular media or personal nostalgia, and I guess what people might consider to be a gut feeling or “common sense.” It would make sense, for example, that in order to write well and grammatically, you must have to know the rules, and there is a lot of (largely inaccurate, I suspect) memories among folks of seemingly every generation that they learned grammar and usage rules in school, and, dangit, their kids should too. So often, data loses to perceptions (or hopes or feelings or whatever), and it is very difficult to change ideologies with facts.

But I digress.

The point is that this new and crazy interets are not out to get our kids, much in the same way that the rock n’ roll of my parents’ generation didn’t get them either. It makes me wonder what my bogey man is going to be when Will is a teenager.

Posted on

Blogged.com launches

From the site Webware, this info/review on a new blog directory and review service, Blogged.com. I dunno, this may or may not be useful. I will probably play around with it as a means of coming up with “quasi-random” blogs to solicit for my BAWS survey and I will admit that I don’t think there’s a very good service that does this now. Still, is it necessary?

Posted on

Oscar night link shout-outs

While watching the Oscars tonight, I’m sorting through my RSS Feed Reader.

  • CCE gave my The Process of Research Writing a shout-out. I haven’t really had a lot of time to do much with this since I put it up on line last year and it’s not exactly a site that is just burnin’ up the Internets, but I do know that hundreds people have at least looked at this thing, which is hundreds more than would have looked at it had I left it as it was with my previous publisher.
  • Via jill/txt, girls apparently blog more than boys. A potentially interesting link to follow through on for teaching, but since my BAWS project specifically skips the under 18 year old crowd, not so much for my research.
  • Blackboard wins patent case. I have to be honest, I don’t really quite know what this means in terms of what other CMS tools or open source tools or what-have-you, but it sounds like it could be significant. I suppose one option is to just not use Blackboard at all, which I’ve happily managed to do so far.
  • 12 Screencasting Tools for Creating Video Tutorials, which is from a site I think I’m going to subscribe to called mashable.com. Personally, I am very partial to iShowU, but there are a couple of other Mac options that look pretty interesting, too.
Posted on

The fuzzy line between cognitive psychology and rhetoric with PowerPoint advice as an example

One of the many MANY things I need to think about dealing with on my lengthy “to do” list is to start getting my presentation for this conference I’m going to in mid-April. It’s a little early to start planning, but my intention is to put together an elaborate PowerPoint presentation with lots of cute and clever slides so that it can move at a fast pace, etc. I’ve done this sort of thing before; I’m not as good as Lessig is at it, but it’s fun to do nonetheless.

Anyway, this crossed my mind again today because I came across this (via boing boing), “How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations,” via a blog called i09. It is a summary of some of the work of cognitive psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn and his book Clear and to the Point, which is about psychological principles and PowerPoint. Go read the blog post, but basically, the four rules discussed here are The Goldilocks Rule (the “just right” amount of information on a slide), The Rudolph Rule (make important things on a slide stand out), The Rule of Four (no more than four pieces of information on a slide), and the Birds of a Feather Rule (if you want things to be identified as being together, group them in terms of colors and proximity and the like).

Now, this is all fine and good, and I realize that I am only looking at a very brief summary of some principles that, for all I know, might be a lot more complicated than this. But I have to wonder: is this psychology or is this rhetoric? I’ve wondered this before about things like “usability design” for web sites. As far as I can tell, a lot of the usability folks out in industry see this as something that is (in terms of an academic pursuit) about psychology, but from my point of view, this stuff is clearly about texts, literacies, and rhetorics. So what’s the scoop?

Maybe in my next academic life/pursuit, I’ll try to study up on psychology and have a better answer to these questions.

Posted on

Congrats to the waiter

“The Waiter” at waiterrant.net has a book coming out. waiterrant.net is a very well-written blog that is just that, a waiter ranting (and in other ways discussing) the life of waiting tables at a nice restaurant in NYC. What I’d really like is if this guy would agree to be a case study subject for my BAWS project, but so far, the folks who have signed on for either the survey or the case study haven’t had the level of success of this guy with their blogs. I certainly haven’t been able to talk with anyone yet whose blog writing translated into a book deal.

Anyway, congrats to him, and check out waiterrant if you haven’t done so before.

Posted on

Not the greatest blog article ever, but…

… not a bad summary of blogging in general: “Blogs,” by Sarah Boxer in the New York Review of Books. I don’t agree with all of it for all kinds of different reasons, and I think it is an example of the classic mistake that the popular press always seems to make when talking about blogs– that is, they try to define them in some kind of relationship with journalism, and it is usually defined in negative terms. But it would probably be a good introductory reading to assign to get the “what are these blog things, anyway?” conversation going.

Posted on

Sabbatical Lite– it ain’t over yet

Loyal readers of my official blog will recall that I was on what I referred to as “Sabbatical Lite” last term, an arrangement in which I was taking one semester sabbatical and splitting it up over two semesters. It had its ups and downs in the winter term, it was beginning to feel like it was slipping away from me this term, and my conclusion was that doing this was basically a bad idea.

But I’m starting to rethink this, at least a bit. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but it might not have been a bad idea, either.

For example, I am starting to get into a routine this term where I am able to devote much more time to research stuff for four or five days of the week (including weekends, of course). Not that I’ve been incredibly productive as of late, but I’m still probably doing more on the BAWS project than I would have been able to do under normal teaching load circumstances.

Example #2: roadtrip.

Since I am teaching but one class online and since the administrative stuff has kind of settled down for the time-being, Will and I are embarking an epic journey to see my parents, who stay this time of year on the gulf coast of Alabama. The way I figure it, I will have pretty robust Internet access the whole time, meaning I can still teach and do most of my administrative duties. And as far as the canceled office hours go: well, that’s part of the release I get for being on sabbatical lite.

Annette, since she is not enjoying the pleasures of sabbatical lite, is staying home. She’ll have to work obviously, but I’m sure she’ll get her own “vacation” of sorts from Will and I.

Expect some photos and videos from the road, btw.

Posted on

Isn’t “Open Source” academic publishing kind of a moot point?

As I finish up sorting through my RSS feed, I have to note posts from Alex, Jeff, and (via Jeff) Anne regarding Dana Boyd’s call for academics to boycott closed/”locked down” journals. It’s all kind of interesting in an, um, academic way; but is this dust-up really all that relevant?

Boyd seems to be kinda steamed because her article in the journal Convergence is not just “out there” on the Internets for one and all to grab for free/as an open source document. Without getting into the pros and cons of all this (though I think I agree with the general sentiment of folks I link to above, that while open source is a good idea, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to boycott journals that haven’t gone that route), I guess I am just having a hard time getting too excited one way or the other about this. Yes, I can’t get Boyd’s article directly from the Internets. But we also have this old-timey academic technology called “the library,” and from there, I am sure I will be able to access this article, either electronically or, if EMU doesn’t subscribe to Convergence, via inter-library loan. The last time I got an article via interlibrary loan, they emailed it to me as a PDF. So while this might not be as open and as easy if it were “just there” on the web and while the EMU library probably doesn’t do this for people coming in off the street (though they might, actually), it’s still pretty quick and open and accessible if you ask me.

One of the things that most of these (kind of, but not really) closed access journals get you is paper, and paper, as I discuss in this section of version 2.0 of my article “Where Do I List This on My CV?” can matter. Granted, these closed (but again, not really) journals don’t have the reach of stuff that’s just up on the ‘net; on the other hand, paper doesn’t just disappear, which is something I experienced with the first version of this piece.

Besides, if Boyd (or anyone else) wants to put up an academic article that they wrote up on the web, well, go ahead. Anne makes a point of saying that she has written this into contracts for things that she’s published. That’s probably the legal and proper way of doing things, but I don’t think that’s even necessary. As I wrote in this article (also in the section I quote above), plenty of scholars in my field just put things up on the web– Carolyn Miller, Michael Day, most of the people in my blogroll, etc. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I intend to make links to PDF versions of stuff I published that came out in closed journals available under the “Scholarship/CV” tab. If some academic publisher wants to email me and tell me to take it down, then I will. But really, is that going to happen?