Category: Scholarship

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Computers and Writing 2008 CFP (and other conference thoughts)

I just found out about the call for proposals for the 2008 Computers and Writing conference in Athens, GA. It’s going to be May 21-25, 2008; proposals are due some time between December 3 and January 10.

The theme of the conference is “Open Source as Technology and Concept,” which I might or might not ignore, depending on what I decide to propose. My plan, which may or may not be acted upon ultimately, is to drive down with Steve B. and Bill HD and to bring the golf clubs. Besides many fine courses around Athens, I figure we can play on the way there and/or back. We’ll see how it turns out.

While I am certain (almost) I’m going to C&W this year, it does beg the “how many conferences” question. Originally, I was planning on going to the CCCCs this year, despite having my proposal rejected in a problematic fashion. But without going into any details right now, it is beginning to look like I’m going to a different conference in mid-April, and that has raised the “Is this Conference Necessary?” question for me. I am not quite the jet-setting academic eluded to in this article, but like most folks who are “active scholars,” I still go to a few conferences a year. Of course, at this stage, attending conferences is lot less important than when I was a grad student seeking a job (and needing to have something to put on my CV) or when I was a tenure/promotion-seeking professor. I spent quite a bit of student loan money going to conferences simply because it helped me get a job, and I spent a fair amount of time at whatever conference in order to keep my job. Now? Well, the mileage isn’t quite the same. Actually the mileage is pretty much zero, career-wise.

So, since conferences don’t count for me much anymore, I get to make choices. And I think I’m going to choose Athens and choose to stay home from New Orleans. Though I could easily change my mind.

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Perhaps a "pre-made" unit on copyright/creativity/teaching

I’m still trying to figure out what to do (well, in detail) in my English 516 course for the winter 2008 term, and while there is already too much stuff in the class, I have been thinking about adding a unit on issues having to do with technology and copyright. This post on the always useful DigitalKoans has a link to a current post about an article called “Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap;” but conveniently, it also has links to previous DigitalKoans articles on the same topic. Maybe I’ll just include a link to this blog post and tell my students to read it.

PS: They could just read this post, too.

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NCTE Aftertaste

Here’s a 6:18 video of my trip to New York City and the National Council for Teachers of English conference:

This little video is an unusual project for me because it’s very much a mixture of my “official” and my “unofficial” lives. Of course, conferences tend to be spaces where there is inevitably a blending of serious/scholarly things (giving papers, attending sessions, etc.) and not-so-serious/friendly things (cocktails with colleagues in the field, dinners, travel, touring, etc.). Anyway, since our session was about film/video making and writing, I thought I’d give it a shot.

I had a very mixed experience at the conference, frankly. On the one hand, I thought our panel was fantastic– great people, everyone was super-duper prepared, everyone had really interesting projects, everyone was really really smart and cool and all the rest, etc., etc. As I said in my NCTE prelude post, I went into this panel kind of as an accident and as a result of the CSW movie I made. I mean, I didn’t have that much specific interest in making movies, certainly not as a writing teacher. But I came out of this session really jazzed about the possibilities I saw from my fellow presenters, about diving into FinalCut Pro (or Express) and trying my hand at Garage Band, etc.

And I also had excellent “not-so-serious/friendly” activities at the conference. I got to hang out with my former colleague and still fantastic friend Annette S. a bit, I met a new bunch of people, I had a great dinner and great conversation with folks from the computer and writing world, Doug Eyman, Mike Palmquist, and Nick Carbone. Not to mention tourism in New York.

But on the whole, I’ve got to say that NCTE is not really my conference.

First off, we only had about 10 or so people in the audience. Now, normally, that wouldn’t be that big of a deal to me– I mean, let’s face it, that’s kind of par for the course at most conference presentations. But we were a “Featured Presentation,” we had an ideal time slot, and we had a hot topic– or so we thought. The only guess I have as to why the crowd was so small was because NCTE really is mostly about K-12, and those folks just aren’t interested in things like making movies in writing classes.

Second, the facility where this was being held was a problem. The amenities were, um, incomplete. We did a lot of planning via email before this session, and one of the concerns many in the group had was what sort of sound system we would have– or not have. Pete Vandenberg saved us on that score by bringing along a great system. We had assumed all along that we were covered with a projector to show the movies, but it turned out the projector the NCTE folks were prepared to provide was of the overhead variety. Fortunately, we did not have perform our movies; I brought a projector along from school as a plan B. I could go on, though I think this is whiny enough. All I’m saying is that if conferences like the NCTE (or the CCCCs, for that matter) actually want to give opportunities to presenters to talk about technology, they need to provide some basic technology.

But enough complaining. I had fun, I made it home, I’m ready for this coming week. Sort of.

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If my plan had crashed…

… half of the English classes in Southeast Michigan (K thru college) would have to be canceled. I sat next to two women who I think are elementary education folks and who were drunkenly giddy through much of the trip. I remained quiet, semi-surly, and finished a book.

Tomorrow, the main event.

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NCTE prelude post

I was in the office doing various quasi-administrator kinds of things all day on Monday, and when I left, I had the satisfying feeling of leaving a note that said I will not be returning until November 26. This warning/promise was somewhat short-lived since I’ve been to my office twice since putting up that sign, but that was/is the plan. I’d like to say I am doing this so I can hole-up and work on the BAWS project, but the main reason is travel of both the conference and family variety.

Tomorrow, I’m off to New York City (I hope the salsa is as good as they suggest in those Pace commercials…) for NCTE, where I am part of a double session/featured session called “Writing, Reading, Composing: The Movie(s).” Here’s a link to my web site for the project, though there isn’t much there other than links to the movies I’ll be chatting about.

It’s been an unusual deal for me. I made the “Celebration of Student Writing” last fall basically because I was the interim writing program administrator and because I could– that is, we had this cool equipment and a desire to use it. I posted a link on the WPA-L mailing list, my EMU friend and colleague Linda Adler-Kassner pulled together a presentation, and I was in. I was debating about going because NCTE isn’t usually my conference and because New York City is way too freakin’ expensive and I knew my wife wasn’t going to be able to go with me. But somewhere along in the process, we became a “featured session” that is going to run all afternoon on Friday.

We’ll see how it turns out. Given the topic and the time, I think we’ll have a big crowd. We have had some interesting discussions about some of the technicalities and, as a “plan b,” one person presenting is bringing a sound system and I’m bringing a mini projector from school. I’m also planning on making a sort of “movie of the movie session” with my Flip video camera, along with a little “traveling with Steve” video log. Stay tuned….

Oh, and next week I’m not going to school because it’s Thanksgiving. Duh.

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"How to" article on Creative Commons by Doctorow

This looks potentially interesting and useful for teaching, especially since we’re talking about developing a new course that would have a unit on stuff like this: Cory Doctorow on Creative Commons in Locus Online.

I’ll read it later. This morning, I’m just now wondering/contemplating two things: it looks like I need to start thinking about getting stuff together for the winter term coming up, and how is it that this Doctorow has time to sleep or eat or do anything other than write?

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Catching up on a boatload of online readings

I have about 15 tabs open in my browser with things I have been meaning to read and/or blog about. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this now, so here’s a whole bunch of stuff that might be useful and/or interesting later, mostly in terms of teaching but some scholarship, too:

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Did they really mean that? (and does it matter?)

I am behind on blogging for a whole bunch of reasons (school, BAWS, getting ready for NCTE, etc.), and I will probably be catching up today and/or over the weekend. This post is one I meant to write days ago:

Via jill/txt I came across Nicholas Carr’s blog, where he writes about “McLuhan’s Web.” It’s an interesting read, and I think that Carr’s main point is that while a lot of people have rediscovered McLuhan’s work and reapplied it to the Internet, it doesn’t quite fit. Here’s a quote:

The internet does seem to represent the fulfillment of McLuhan’s vision, at least in some ways. As we’ve seen with the explosion of blogs, podcasts and homemade videos, the net encourages media participation on an unprecedented scale. If a global village is emerging, it’s on the web.

But it’s hard to imagine that McLuhan would be sanguine about today’s “electric media.� In fact, he’d probably have a hard time even recognizing them.

Television, which McLuhan saw as a cool medium, is rapidly turning into a hot one, with mammoth screens, high-definition images and surround sound. And computers, rather than freeing us from the printed word, have made text more ubiquitous than ever. Whether surfing the web, typing messages on our phones, or checking our BlackBerrys, we are wrapped in a cocoon of text that would have boggled McLuhan’s mind.

The internet doesn’t really fit into McLuhan’s “hot� and “cool� dichotomy. It is, as Scott Rosenberg wrote back in 1995, a “lukewarm� medium. It encourages participation but it also sucks up our attention and dominates our senses. When we gaze into a computer screen, we tune out everything else.

I’ve been thinking about this– the perhaps not completely application of previous theories with contemporary applications– with Barthes lately, specifically his notions of “writerly texts” as he discusses it in the opening pages of S/Z. Most often, scholarly-types refer to the first few pages to quote from Barthes on the definition on writerly (Barthes’ ideal text) of S/Z– here’s a good example of what I mean from what looks like a pretty cool site. Then most critics connect this to things like hypertext, or, as I am/will be doing with my project, blogs. But here’s the thing: most of what Barthes is doing in this book/essay is a really REALLY close reading of the Balzac story “Sarrasine.” The way I understand this then is that for Barthes, his act of reading this story and describing that reading in great and playful length in this book/essay, is what Barthes meant by “writerly,” or at least it is his example. So besides the fact that Barthes knew nothing of things like the Internet or hyperext (at least I assume that’s the case), it seems to me that the kinds of texts that Barthes is assuming that one engages with in a writerly fashion are literary. I know that Barthes writes about/studies plenty of non-literary-type texts though, so maybe suggesting that he means a writerly text to be a response to a “readerly” one is too much of a stretch.

In any event, I guess what I’m getting at is this: like what Carr is saying about McLuhan, I think a lot of folks have perhaps revived Barthes to apply it to kinds of texts he could not have even imagined. So when people say that hypertext or web sites or blogs or whatever are “writerly,” that probably isn’t what Barthes meant. At the same time, it probably doesn’t really matter what McLuhan or Barthes meant. Citing someone like Barthes to talk about the writerly nature of online texts is of course an appeal to authority: lots of people admire Barthes’ criticism, so referencing him means that the contemporary critic can also be found credible. But the appeal to authority is just a starting point; ultimately, what I think folks invoking the likes of McLuhan and Barthes are trying to do is to build new theories of things like “writerly.”

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Innovative Wikipedia assignment kind of smells like comp/rhet pedagogy

There’s a good article in the October 29 Inside Higher Ed, “When Wikipedia is the assignment.” It’ll be good for something like English 516. It’s another report from the Educause conference, and it’s about how a professor teaching a course in the University of Washington at Bothell’s “Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences” program (sounds a bit like a gen ed class to me) has required her students to post their papers to Wikipedia. To quote from the article:

At first glance, a college term paper and a Wikipedia entry appear to have little in common. Term papers are intended for an “extremely limited audience, namely, me,� as Groom pointed out, they have little impact outside of the classroom and are constrained to a specific “time� and “place� in the world of ink-on-paper documents. “That is not a very good model of scholarship, to say that anything you produce [belongs] in this tiny space,� she said.

On the other hand, shared, public online documents have characteristics in common with parts of the academic review process. “The shift to thinking about placing the term paper as a Wikipedia encyclopedia entry allows for another level of peer review,� [Martha] Groom said. Such entries have references and citations; allow for a process of repeated, continual editing; and encourage collaborations between authors.

They also reach a much wider audience, through the Wikipedia site and search engines. “How do you motivate students to do their best work?� she asked — implying that the answer lies in the possibility of others viewing it. The public nature of Wikipedia content also means that, in theory, students would be less likely to reuse others’ material as their own.

In short, Wikipedia is a good place for students to publish their work because it encourages students to write beyond the teacher, it encourages revision/peer review/collaboration, it shows the importance of citation, and it makes writing public. Sound familiar?

Now, don’t get me wrong– I think what Groom is doing here is great, and I think there are lots of reasons why this would be a fantastic activity for fy comp or other research writing classes. But I always have some involuntary eye-rolling when someone in another discipline discovers something about writing pedagogy (e.g., “hey, let’s get students to write something not just for the teacher!” or “hey, let’s get them to collaborate on their writing!”) that folks in my field have known for decades.