Category: Scholarship

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It's 2006– now get back to work

Last year at about this time, I was resolving to get back to work on my textbook project. Well, that didn’t turn out so great.

My textbook project probably isn’t completely behind me because I think I still have some post-mortem work to do on that project, and also because it might yet have a life as a web site (that’s still being sorted out). Beyond that, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an article in this experience. Who knows.

But the textbook is mostly behind me. So, what’s next?

Well, 2006 promises to be a pretty busy year for me. Starting this term, I am the writing program coordinator at EMU. Basically, I’m the “lead person” for the undergraduate majors and the graduate programs, which means that I advise students, promote the programs, etc., etc. I’m teaching an over-load this coming winter term, mostly because I need to teach another online section of English 328 to further some scholarly projects. And because I like the class and I like the extra money.

I have a CCCCs presentation to get together and potentially an article sort of about my CCCCs presentation (again, another reason why I need to teach that online class), I have a speaking gig in early April, and I have to get together a proposal for Computer and Writing (which is also probably going to be about online teaching). And I think I am going to start reading and thinking again about my writing technologies before the computer project.

Oh yeah– I think I’m going to try to write a novel, too. But that’s not until May.

I read a great book while at the gym last month (my workout routine, to the extent that I have one, includes 30 or so minutes on either the bike or the elliptical machine while I read something kind of light) called No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. Basically, the book is a “field guide” to how to participate in the contest/dare that Baty started called “National Novel Writing Month.” The goal is to write the first draft of a novel (defined here as 50,000 words, which is really a pretty short novel– think The Great Gatsby) in 30 days. November is the designated month by the organization, but that’s never a good one for me. So I’m thinking I’m going to give this a try in May. I’ll have just enough schoolwork on my plate to keep me busy, and I’ll have just enough freetime to justify a folly like this.

ObviouslyHopefully, writing something that is largely made up is different than writing something based on research. But beyond novel writing, I think Baty’s book is one I’d recommend to anyone who is “stuck” on a large writing project– a thesis or a dissertation, for example. Baty’s emphasis is on turning off the “internal editor” that all too often stops people from writing anything in the first place. He has great advice on where to find time in a busy schedule to write, and he goes into useful detail in describing strategies for finding the right kind of place to write. Some of his tips come across as a bit goofy (having a “writing totem,” for example), but in a weird way, they have a ring of truth to them, too.

And like I said, his book is ultimately about revision because the point of writing a draft of a novel at break-neck speed is so you can take your time fixing it and polishing it later.

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Looking in on (and remembering) the MLA

Say, did I mention that I didn’t have to go to MLA this year? And that I’ll probably/ hopefully never have to go to it again? Oh yeah, I guess I did mention it a few times….

Well, not unlike the rubber-necker looking at the three-car pile-up on the other side of the interstate, I have spent a bit of time skimming through some the things in the blogosphere about MLA. A few random thoughts/memories:

  • At “Thanks for Not Being a Zombie,” there is a nice list of links to others who have been blogging about MLA.
  • As Rebecca Moore “Schenectady Synecdoche”Howard pointed out on her blog, composition studies– specifically, first year composition– seems to be the target by at least a few folks at MLA as the place where all that liberal indoctrination is taking place. She’s referring to a series of articles by Nick Gillespie on the TCS web site, specifically the first of a three part series. One of the things worth remembering (Gillespie doesn’t seem to realize this) is that, at least at a lot of Ph.D. granting schools, most of the people who teach first year composition are actually literature students.

    Anyway, I don’t think first year writing should be a site for “liberal indoctrination” and really, I don’t think it is 80% or so of the time. So often things are exaggerated in the ether of MLA. When I teach first year writing at EMU, I’m just trying to get students to grasp “words in a row” literacy.

    Having said that, I do agree with Gillespie when he writes (in the second part of the three part series) “… the MLA’s politically correct and arguably even more annoying obscurantist tendencies have also provided fertile ground for an annually repeated story in the Times and elsewhere, one every bit as worn out and tedious as an Art Buchwald holiday column.” Sure, as Gillespie points out in the same column, the MLA includes serious panel presentations (with not necessarily racy titles) about all manners of literary studies. But so much of MLA is so unpleasant, and besides that….

  • …. it isn’t my field. At least it isn’t anymore. I’m not entirely sure when it happened (though for me, it has happened in the last ten or so years), but while composition and rhetoric might fall into the broad category of “English studies,” it really doesn’t seem to have any meaningful connection to the study of literature anymore. At least it doesn’t to me. As Collin writes, “I can state with certainty that I feel no more at home at MLA than I did as a noob and an applicant,” and “I’m more and more convinced that all it would take is for several of our leading programs to decide to interview at NCTE, and within 4-5 years, we could dispense with MLA altogether.” Collin says he doesn’t think this move to the NCTE is likely to happen (and he might be right about that), but I do think there has been and will continue to be a move away from MLA. More and more folks are doing phone interviews (and, as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, I think that all first round interviews ought to be phone interviews), and you’re also seeing more interviewing at the CCCCs, too.
  • Unlike Collin, I have presented at MLA, twice. The first was in 1998, the year I was interviewing for the job I currently have. My presentation had to do with the practice of ellocution in 19th century America. Not counting the panel chair and other presenters (grad students talking about their dissertations), I believe there were two people in the audience. The second time was in New Orleans in 2001, where I was on a panel that was organized by Todd Taylor that featured Todd’s mentor, Gary Olson, one of Todd’s grad students at UNC, and me (I am not sure how I got into this mix). The panel was on electronic publishing– this is where my now disappeared CCC Online article “Where Do I List this on My CV?” had its origins– and I think there was about 100 or so people in the crowd. I believe Susan Miller argued with me about something, though I’m not sure if it was her or not.

    Anyway, that MLA was kinda fun. My wife and I left our toddler son with the grandparents, and we flew into New Orleans, went out eating and drinking that afternoon/evening; wandered around the French Quarter the next day; I went to my panel; we went out eating and drinking that night; and then we got back on an airplane, back to the grandparents and our son. I guess the moral of that story is MLA can be okay, if you don’t actually have anything to do with MLA.

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It Turns Out that Intelligent Design is Kinda Dumb (at least in Dover)

The Dover, PA “Intelligent Design” case was decided today. In the nutshell, the school district’s use of language in science classes of how evolution was “just another theory” and that Intelligent Design was a competing theory was a violation of the separation of Church and State since Intelligent Design is really creationism in a fancy coat.

Good for the judge, who, according to this New York Times article, is a Repubilican and Bush administration nominee. Here’s a good quote from this piece:

Judge Jones also excoriated members of the Dover, Pa., school board, who he said lied to cover up their religious motives, made a decision of “breathtaking inanity” and “dragged” their community into “this legal maelstrom with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

Another good piece on this was this commentary piece by Lawrence Krauss on All Things Considered. I don’t know if Krauss is right, but he claims in this commentary that about half of Americans believe that the Earth is actually the center of the universe, the sun revolves around it, and it is about 10,000 years old, as suggested by the Bible. (BTW, just in case you’ve wandered into this blog for some strange reason, none of these things are true.)

In any event, it’s nice to hear that at least something smart came of this.

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The "Future" of English? Depends on what you mean by "English," if you ask me…

There’s a piece in Inside Higher Ed: by Margaret Soltan called “No Field, No Future,” where she argues, basically, that English as a field is collapsing for a variety of different reasons, most of which have to do with the problems of critical theory. Personally, I have a kind of morbid fascination with arguments that claim the “end” of my field– well, sort of my field, as I’ll get to a moment. So I really wanted to like this piece. Alas, I didn’t.

First, I think it is mainly a rehashing of the same old argument about how, as the result of critical theory that no one really understands, English departments have lost their way. I have some sympathy with this argument– but just some, and more important, I’ve heard it many times before.

Second and more important, Soltan doesn’t mean “English;” she means “Literature.” Now, while I realize that in many English departments, English is the same thing as “Literature” (in the essay and in the comments that follow it on the Inside Higher Ed site, the idea of studying English at a “prestigious school” crops up again and again), but this is certainly not the case in many (maybe most?) other English departments. As I’ve mentioned before, my own department is called “English Language and Literature,” which for me is a useful way of saying that our department includes literature, but includes a whole bunch of other stuff: linguistics, English education (by far our biggest undergraduate program), journalism, public relations (I know those last two are kind of unusual in an English department, but Journalism has been in EMU’s English department since the early 1900s), creative writing, technical/professional writing, and composition and rhetoric.

These last two fields/disciplines/whatever– technical and professional writing and composition and rhetoric– are intriguing omissions from an article that is supposedly about the lack of a future for the “field” of “English.”

Why did she do this?

Is Soltan unaware of the fact that composition and rhetoric exists as a “field” usually within English departments? Possibly, but given that there are at least 50 PhD programs in Composition and Rhetoric right now (not to mention probably another 100 MA programs) and that nearly every English department in the country teaches a significant amount of first year writing, this seems unlikely.

Or is she saying, in a very indirect way, that English = Literature and ONLY Literature, and the fact that that is changing (and has been changing for, I dunno, 40 years) is a bad thing? I think so, but I’m not sure. In any event, if what she’s really saying is “Literature is a field that has no future,” well, she might have a point.

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How to Make Academic Blogging Count? Publish It!

This is just half an idea, one that I will toss out before I forget it, and then I will comment on student essays, I promise:

I’m not sure how I stumbled across this, but there is apparently a book available in the UK called 2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere. To quote from the blurb on the amazon.uk web site:

Famous bloggers like Belle du Jour and the Baghdad Blogger have already secured lucrative book deals thanks to the quality and vibrancy of their writing. But there are literally tens of thousands of bloggers who have not yet made the move to print. “2005: Blogged” provides a complete round up of the way the blogging community covered the major events of the year.

Anyway, this got me thinking: what if there was a way to put together a journal– maybe print, maybe electronic– that was kind of a selection of different blogger’s entries, perhaps arranged around a topic? This publication could reproduce those blog entries and even encourage the original writers an opportunity to go into more detail in the form of an “article” or “chapter” of some kind.

Too crazy?

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Turkey Post #2: More On The Value of "Academic" Blogs

There was a good discussion on Tech-Rhet and some thoughtful commentary on an article that appeared in/on Slate (in a week of articles about academia), Robert S. Boynton’s “Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs– When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?” In the nutshell, Boynton, focusing on the story of Daniel W. Drezner, who keeps a well-regarded blog (which I don’t read on a regular basis because it’s about stuff like political science and economics and stuff), was denied tenure at the University of Chicago (and Drezner writes about this experience quite a bit in his blog), and eventually offered a tenured position at Tufts.

I am sure there are many places in the blogosphere where folks are talking about this, but there’s a useful post at the if: book blog, a post that raises the issue of making blogs “count” in academic sense with peer review, so-called blog “carnivals,” and the like. This entry conveniently links to a bunch of other useful sites, and ends more or less like this:

It will be to the benefit of society if blogging can be claimed, sharpened and leveraged as a recognized scholarly practice, a way to merge the academy with the traffic of the real world. The university shouldn’t keep its talents locked up within a faltering publishing system that narrows rather than expands their scope. That’s not to say professors shouldn’t keep writing papers, books and monographs, shouldn’t continue to deepen the well of knowledge. On the contrary, blogging should be viewed only as a complement to research and teaching, not a replacement. But as such, it has the potential to breathe new life into the scholarly enterprise as a whole, just as Boynton describes.

I have a number of thoughts about all this:

  • For most of us academic bloggers, happy and otherwise, I think it is either misguided or downright delusional to compare our situation with that of Drezner’s. At least it is for me. I mean, I have around 25-50 readers day– far fewer, I suspect, than Prof. Drezner– and while there are people in my department who know I keep a blog, most seem unaware and I don’t think any of my colleagues care one way or the other about my blog. Blogging always has to be a personal decision because most blogger’s top readers are going to be me, myself, and I.
  • Drezner himself points out that he doesn’t think it was his blog that cost him tenure at U of Chicago, and he doesn’t think it was that big of a factor in terms of snagging his new job at Tufts.
  • The vast majority of academics by definition don’t dwell in the rarified air of Drezner and his colleagues. I wrote an essay about valuing self-published web sites as part of the tenure and review process a couple years ago, an essay that was published in the online version of College Composition and Communication and that was part of a special multi-journal issue of various electronic journals. My essay was “disappeared” by that site, so I set it up on my own web server space here. I make a lot of points in this essay, but to me, one of the more significant points is this one:

    I recall the horror stories of “publish or perish,” of assistant professors who had books published by good presses and were still denied tenure. The picture that was painted by my advisors made me think that tenure at most schools was a fifty-fifty proposition, at best.

    The fact of the matter is this happens almost exclusively at Carnegie Classification Research I or Research II institutions, or it happens in situations that probably have more to do with complicated politics and personalities than it does with publications. The vast majority of community colleges, colleges, and universities in this country are not research institutions and do not have the same notions about what does or doesn’t count as scholarship for the purposes of tenure, review, and promotion. Yet this reality is routinely ignored in documents that offer advice and guidelines for tenure, promotion, and review.

    Or let me put it this way: the rules for tenure vary. A lot. Since I finished my undergraduate degree, I have been a graduate student or a faculty member at four different institutions, all of which might be best described as “regional state universities” (though I think Bowling Green State is a “Research I;” they certainly have a lot of Ph.D. programs). At each of these institutions, I know that faculty have been awarded tenure and/or promotion with less than a book.

  • So should blogs “count” toward tenure? Maybe, maybe not. But as I argued in my piece about self-published web sites, I think this is a situation in which tenure/promotion seekers have to make arguments that appeal to the individuals within their own institutions. At some places, they might count; at other places, they might not.
  • Personally, I don’t really care if my blogging “counts” in that sense or not. For one thing, one of the things I like about blogging is that for the likes of small-time bloggers like me, the motivation to keep a blog is pretty much internal. In other words, I do this because I want to, not because I have to. And let’s face it: the road to hell is paved with academic presentations, articles, and books that were written solely as a chip to add to the tenure basket.

    Besides, I get a lot of indirect benefits from blogging. I’ve been able to give presentations and write articles based on my blogging and teaching with blogs, and I’ve even made a little money from the whole blog thing. So that’s worth something.

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Turkey Post #1: Majoring in Video Games

This is the first of what I am imagining as at least two (maybe more) posts today and over the next couple days during the holiday break. Which is a break in the sense that I have a couple of days off from school and I’m not teaching tonight and we’ll be enjoying some Thanksgiving cheer at a friend’s house this afternoon, but it isn’t a break in the sense that I have much grading to do, I’m trying to roughly speaking plan my classes for the Winter term, and I have a ton of stuff to do around the house.

I suspect that my “holiday” is similar to many of yours.

Anyway, Right now, I want to make note of this New York Times article, “Video Games Are Their Major, So Don’t Call Them Slackers,” which is about a couple of different places around the country that are starting full-fledged programs in “Video Game Studies” at both the undergraduate and graduate level. There is some “pooh-poohing” of this, but most of the article is praise; here’s one interesting passage:

“The skills and methods of video games are becoming a part of our life and culture in so many ways that it is impossible to ignore,” said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is now president of the New School, which includes Parsons.

Parsons has offered game courses to graduate students for five years and this fall began an undergraduate program in game design.

“But if you just look at the surface of people playing games, you are missing the point, which is that games are all about managing and manipulating information,” Mr. Kerrey said. “A lot of students that come out of this program may not go to work for Electronic Arts. They may go to Wall Street. Because to me, there is no significant difference – except for clothing preference – between people who are making games and people who are manipulating huge database systems to try to figure out where the markets are headed. It’s largely the same skill set, the critical thinking. Games are becoming a major part of our lives, and there is actually good news in that.”

This is all fine and good, and as a professor in a field where sometimes the exact application of the degree can be fuzzy, I appreciate Kerrey pointing out the critical thinking skills that can be applied to things beyond game design.

Still, I have to say that, for the most part, video games have passed me by. Oh, I go through phases with games like The Sims 2, and I might get Civilization IV when it comes out for the Mac (and it will probably be available for the Mac at about the same time as I’m ready to get a new home computer, actually), but I can’t get into any of the PlayStation games. On the other hand, my 8 year old son plays video and computer games about as much as he watches TV and/or reads. It is for him an equal mode of entertainment, and I suspect that this is also the case with a lot of my 20-something students.

Of course, here’s the question: will today’s 20-something video gaming students still be playing when they are near 40-somethings like me? Hmmmm…..

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A couple of links/planning my near teaching future

I’ve been pretty swamped with this pesky school stuff lately. As I often joke, being a college professor would be a pretty easy job if I didn’t have to do things like grade and read student work; alas, that job is of a college administrator….

Anyway, I came across a couple of links I need to think about for at least one (possibly two) class(es) I will be teaching in the winter.

  • As mentioned Kairosnews, there’s this article, “Who Needs a College Campus?” an article in Forbes by a computer science professor at Yale who (basically) suggests that students at all but the most elite schools will soon be taking all of their classes online. I don’t want to make too many judgements about an article I have yet to read, but I suspect a bit too rosy of a picture of the future. I do agree with one passage that is a quote from the article (apparently): while online classes probably cannot replace a well-taught small group seminar, they probably can replace big lecture hall classes taught by less than stellar teachers. I would add (and I don’t know if this is in the article or not yet), based on my experiences this semester, that while I don’t think students need to take all of their classes online, I think it makes perfect sense at schools like EMU for students to take about a third of their classes online.
  • I wanted to include here a link to an article from last week’s CHE, “Do Not Fear the Blog” by Rebecca “her real name” Goetz. Basically, she is giving the flip-side to Ivan “the worst fake name ever” Tribble’s articles from earlier in the year where he suggests that academic blogging is a bad thing. These articles might make for a nice conversation in my graduate course and maybe my Writing for the World Wide Web course.

Speaking of which: I think I have (at least more of) a plan for the courses where I was asking for help previously. I am almost certainly going to be using the Wysocki et al collection Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. My copy arrived just yesterday, but after looking at it for about 10 minutes, I’m already saying “Oh, yeah. I obviously should use this.” I think I will stick with the Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States by Selfe and Hawisher and many “et alâ€� book (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004 ) because it went over well (though it is a bit pricey, if you ask me), and then I will round out the readings with quite a few articles and web readings.

For my Writing for the WWW class, I am going to use Horton and Lynch’s Web Style Guide (which I still think is a great book, even if it is getting a little dated), Williams’ and Tollett’s The Non-Designer’s Web Book (3rd edition), and Molly Holzschlag’s Spring Into HTML and CSS. I was originally going to use a different book that folks had recommended, but– long story short– I was worried about the availability of this other book because a new edition of it is coming out in March 2006 and I think the publisher has listed the current edition as out of print, which might make it tricky for students to get.

Now, my original plan for this week was to have all of my “ducks in a row” so that I could spend my freetime over Thanksgiving break getting these Winter classes ready. Alas, my ducks are still scattered about. Oh well, I’ll still have some time to work and such next week… and I might work in some eating, too….

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A few more miscellaneous links

I need to get myself caught up on grading today, so for now, just a few miscellaeous links to things from the blogosphere for the last couple of days:

  • Assigned plagiarism, from Mike at Vitia. Basically, Mike set up a project where he got his students to plagiarize to simultaneously make a point about research and plagiarism. Good assignment, I think.
  • Via Johndan comes this link of a “Typography Crash Course Roundup,” which could be interesting to look at… someday….
  • Via the CC Dean comes this post, “Teaching in Context, or, All Hail Dr. Crazy.” The “Dr. Crazy” in question is another blogger, who has a number of posts about the challenges of teaching (to quote Dr. Crazy) “at a Non-Elite, Teaching-Driven Institution.” They are good posts I suppose, but as a comp/rhet person who has always worked at these kinds of schools, they aren’t exactly surprising to me.
  • Via John at Machina Memorialis comes this article “Intelligence in the Internet age,” which is on CNET News. In a way, it’s kind of a “pop” version of a lot of the reading I tend to assign at the beginning of a couple of different classes I teach; might be interesting to come back to later.
  • Finally, and I’m not sure where I got this one (CultureCat?), comes CiteULike, which is “a free online service to organise your academic papers.”
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Even MORE About the Illustrated Elements of Style (and the problem of "Writing")

Talk about a little story that has legs: on NPR’s “Morning Edition” yesterday (I actually started writing this post while listening to this show yesterday morning; it’s been one thing or another the last couple of days), there was a fairly long piece about the recently published illustrated version of The Elements of Style. Besides talking about the book and its illustrations, the story also talked about the “opera” (but not really so much an opera as a song cycle) that has words based on the book. They have a web site that includes samples of two songs, the story from earlier, and a few pictures from the book.

By the way, the music, IMO, is what Laurie Anderson once referred to in a piece of hers as “Difficult Listening Music.” But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I don’t want to make too much out of this, and I do think that the Maria Kalman illustrations are hilarious and charming. But I guess I have two problems with the way that these reports talk about The Elements of Style. First, while there is a lot of useful advice in Strunk’s and White’s little book, there’s quite a bit wrong with it, too. The book doesn’t so much offer instruction as it offers Strunk’s (and, I am sure, White’s) “pet peeves” about grammar and useage. Strunk’s and White’s advice– “Be clear,” “Omit needless words,” “Do not affect a breezy manner,” etc.– are merely affirmations. They are to writing instruction what Dr. Phil is to psychotherapy.

And beyond that, Strunk’s and White’s editions of the book are elitist and down-right sexist. I say “Strunk’s and White’s editions” because the latest edition of the book and the edition that Kalman illustrated was published in 2000, about 15 years after White’s death and at least 45 years since Strunk’s demise. This is significant because there are some interesting differences between the 2000 edition and the 1979 edition: many of the examples have been changed to make the book at least a bit more inclusive, they actually mention computers (not significantly, but more than they did in 1979, of course), and they eliminate White’s rather defensive prose on the use of “he” for the generic pronoun. In fact, one of the examples that Kalman illustrates– something like “Chlöe smells good, like a pretty baby should” (Kalman has a picture of a big and pretty baby)– was originally “Chlöe smells good, like a pretty girl should,” which obviously has different connotations. There are dozens of examples like this. I suppose we can credit Strunk’s and White’s assumptions to the fact that the book is a “product of a different time,” but we shouldn’t gloss over Strunk’s and White’s view of the world with a revision that “corrects” them.

The second issue is more significant and more difficult to do anything about, the concept “out there” about what counts as “writing.” Just about every English professor or teacher in the universe has been in the situation where they meet a stranger (on a plane, at a party, waiting in a line, whatever) and after they tell the stranger that they are an English professor or teacher, the stranger says something like “Oh, I better watch my grammar.” And when I tell people outside of English studies (and sometimes inside, too!) that I do things in my classes like make web sites, study email exchanges, examine the balance between text and graphics, etc., etc., they get a bit confused.

I was reading Kathy Yancey’s CCCC 2003 keynote essay the other day (I think it was the 2003 keynote; it was published in the December 2004 issue of the CCCs) and I think she makes a pretty good argument about where we ought to be going with writing. One quote that sort of sums it up for me:

This new composition includes rhetoric and is about literacy. New composition includes the literacy of print: it adds on to it and brings the notions of practice and activity and circulation and media and screen and networking to our conceptions of process. It will require a new expertise of us as it does of our students. And ultimately, new composition may require a new site for learning for all of us.

Right on; now, the question is how do we convince people outside of our own narrow little world that this ought to be what they think of “writing?” And how do we get a story about this new concept of writing in the New York Times or on NPR?