Category: Scholarship

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More about audio in writing classes (or, a slight blast from the past)

There’s a discussion happening on the listserv tech-rhet right now about audio comments on student essays. One handy link posted by Jim Kalmbach was to a 2002 Kairos essay by Jack Wilson called “Perception is All: Using Audio Files To Reach Across the Divide.” I’ve only had a chance to skim it at this point, but basically, it’s about Wilson’s use of audio comments, which he creates (created? I assume he still does this) digitally.

As I posted to tech-rhet, this sounds kind of interesting, and maybe I’ll experiment with it next semester. On the other hand, it also sounds like it might be more work than it’s worth, too. Hmmmm…..

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The Elements of Style Opera Reviewed (sorta)

Via boing-boing, I came across this MSNBC article about the recent opera of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Here is but one of the funny little quotes from the piece:

Unfortunately, the operatic style of the piece rendered the lyrics all but unintelligible to this listener—in ironic contrast to the simplifying ethos of “Elements”—though that may be more the fault of the acoustics of the library venue, which was, after all, designed for silence.

Not that any of this prevented the piece from garnering titters of appreciation capped by a standing ovation from the high-tone crowd in attendance. Although the piece may have violated E. B. White’s advice to “Prefer the standard to the offbeat,” it was more than effective in fulfilling another edict: “Be obscure clearly.”

Oh, the culture I miss not being in NYC….

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Coursecasting, Teaching Online, and figuring out Podcasting on the cheap (sorta)

I noticed this morning that the CHE has an article in the online portion called “Lectures on the Go: As more colleges use ‘coursecasting,’ professors are split on its place in teaching.” I don’t subscribe to the CHE, so I’ll try to see if I can snag this article from the copy in the English department (unless someone wants to email this to me– wink-wink, nod-nod….)

It’s funny how these things work. My CCCC’s proposal this year is tentatively titled “Broadcast Composition: Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and back in April, it seemed like a pretty original idea. I suppose it still is, relatively speaking. But now it’s “mainstream” enough to be in the CHE, and I mentioned an article that appeared in the Ann Arbor News about podcasting in the U of M dental school a while back.

In a way, this is starting to remind me of one of my first big conference presentations at NCTE in 1994. Like the CCCCs, NCTE (this was the conference they hold in November) proposals are due almost a year in advance. A grad school buddy of mine, John Clark, and I had a presentation proposal accepted about how to use Gopher in the classroom. Remember Gopher? Yeah, those were the days…. Anyway, we had heard of this new-fangled “World Wide Web” thing, but in early 1994, there literally wasn’t anything there yet. But by the time the NCTE rolled around, nobody was interested in Gopher anymore.

Anyway, I’m not sure if podcasting will be everywhere by next March or not. I have been using audio files to supplement my notes for some reading materials for my online class, and I think it has worked out quite well. But they aren’t “podcasts” per se; they’re just audio files that are loaded on the CMS shell. Actually, eCollege would support streaming audio, but it’s easier for me to just record the audio and upload it myself.

I did figure out how to do a “low-fi” version of podcasting, though. I’m not going to go into it right now, but a blogger account, a few cellphone calls to audioblogger, an RSS 2.0 set-up from feedburner, and a visit to iTunes and I’ve got a podcast. Even if it is just me saying “testing testing, testing again, testing 1-2-3” so far…

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Sunday morning (now afternoon) links

Instead of reading the paper this morning, I decided to read through my RSS feed to see what’s interesting. I guess I was indirectly thinking about teaching in the winter term because I found a bunch of links that will probably come up in my computers and writing class.

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Can The Elements of Style: The Movie be far behind?

Via a New York Times article called “Style Gets New Elements,” I discovered this morning that Penguin Press has come out with a version of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style which (or is it that? perhaps I should look that up) includes illustrations by the artist Maria Kalman.

What did she illustrate, you ask? As the article reports:

In the new clothbound edition, Ms. Kalman’s whimsical paintings are sprinkled through the text, often responding to the wry or quirky examples the authors chose to enliven what might otherwise have been a dry discussion of grammatical rules. On the topic of pronoun cases, they offer: “Polly loves cake more than she loves me.” On the uses of the dash: “His first thought on getting out of bed – if he had any thought at all – was to get back in again.” Ms. Kalman had no shortage of material.

I routinely teach The Elements of Style in an advanced writing class I teach called “Writing, Style, and Technology.” I won’t belabor it now, but my goal in teaching the book is to problematize it because, while I think Strunk and White offer a lot of good advice, I also think they offer a fair amount of bad or just plain “wrong” advice, too. And, along the way, they have a lot of kind of strange examples– thus the illustrations, which are a hoot.

The illustrations aren’t designed to explain the rules at all; rather, they are pieces of art that take their inspiration from the rules themselves. The result is some very funny and charming pictures, and I think it has this effect on the original that I can’t quite put my finger on yet. But basically, I think the illustrations change the book from being a bunch of pretty static and straight-forward rules into a kind of strange and surrealist “art” piece.

But wait– there’s more. According to The NYT:

…the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought “Elements of Style” song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight at 8 in a highly unusual, if oddly appropriate, concert setting: the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library.

Oh, and at the end of the article, they quote a letter White wrote in 1981 that mentions a ballet based on The Elements of Style.

At some point in the (hopefully) near future, I think I’d like to/need to write some sort of review or article about this thing. I don’t know who would publish it, but….

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Misc. Post

I’ve been meaning to post about a variety of different things lately, but I’ve gotten a bit behind with school things (though I am about to come ’round the corner, too– I can sense it). So what I’m doing to do instead is post a few quick comments and links and such and let the chips where they may.

  • On the way home yesterday, I thought about what would happen if (for next year) I abandoned the eCollege software for teaching online and tried to do the whole thing myself with Moodle or Drupal or something. What would be lost? What would be gained? Would the powers-that-be at EMU be annoyed with me? Hmmm….
  • My routine has been thrown off by fund-raising time at public radio. Don’t get me wrong– I understand why they need to do it, and I am indeed a member of my favorite public radio station, WEMU. But I just find it annoying. So please, if you listen, give what you can so they can get back on with it.
  • Johndan observes that Apple computer controls are for lefties. He blames this on the mac, but aren’t the common short-cut commands for the PC (alt-x, alt-v, alt-c) all on the left too? Having this, I must say he might have a point. The touchpad on my laptop has been a problem for a while now, so I’ve been using a mouse, and the USB port is… on the left. But since I’m left-handed, this is totally okay with me.
  • Via Weblogg-ed cmes this article, “Web logs go to school” on C|Net News. com. It’d be interesting to share this piece side-by-side with the bad press that things like Xanga have been getting in high schools lately.
  • Speaking of which, via an email that Rich Rice sent to Tech-Rhet, I’ve learned that at least one school, Santa Clara University, is using the student blog angle in order to help market itself. Granted, Santa Clara U is a tad different from, say, EMU (SCU bills itself as “The Jesuit University of Silicon Valley”), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
  • Jenny Edbauer wrote about two interesting and free applications. First, there is a blog software called Blogsome, which gives users Word Press-like features. It’s worth thinking about instead of Blogger, that’s for sure (btw, now even Blogger is having spam problems! Is Word Press the last blogging software that seems to not have significant issues with this stuff?). Second, there’s Jot, which is another free wiki software. I’d like to compare it with PBwiki before using it, but I suspect that Wikis will play a role in my Writing for the World Wide Web class next time around.

Okay, enough catch-up with the blog. Time to catch up with the other things in life.

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Laptops in every, ah, lap

Via BBC News comes this story, “US school swaps books for bytes.” I think I had a link/discussion about this same Arizona school a few months ago, but it would appear that now things are actually happening at this school.

A couple of interesting quotes; the first one answers the “either computers or books” issue, at least from the point of view of a start-up budget for a high school:

Providing all the pupils with Apple iBooks did not dent the school’s budget as much as might be expected. But part of that is down to the school having been newly built.

The money that was budgeted to buy text books, which was about $500 a student, was spent instead on the laptops.

“Our laptops cost is about $800 per pupil. Our net cost is probably $100 to $200 more than if we had used text books,” he [Calvin Baker, chief superintendent of the Vail School district] says.

By giving all the students a laptop computer, the school has done away with computer laboratories too.

Baker is also quoted in this article as saying that the school is not “book free”– there’s a library, for example– but most of the content students work with in classes are delivered via these laptops.

Putting aside the sort of Sophie’s Choice method of financing these laptops, that last line, that a laptop on every student’s desk (and, since it’s mobile, in every student’s backpack and in every student’s house) has replaced computer labs, is really something that appeals to me. We’ve been experiencing some, ah, “technical challenges” with the support people as of late, which just underscores the ongoing problem an underfunded university like EMU has with technology. I’m not saying that a laptop program would solve everything; in fact, I think you could make a pretty good argument that all a laptop program at the college-level does is shift the burden of who has to pay for and maintain the hardware. But if we went this route, students wouldn’t be in a situation where they were learning how to do something on a computer they aren’t likely to use much, we could have computer labs which had higher-end hardware and software (for example, a multimedia lab), and the tech support people could focus on the keeping these smaller labs and the network running. And I think it would do a lot to help “technlogical literacy” on the whole at EMU.

In a way though, I think the idea that every student will have a laptop is kind of inevitable, plan or no plan, since more and more students are showing up with laptops all on their own. It’s easy to imagine a time four or five years from now where my students ignore the computers in the lab in favor of their own laptops, and that would be fine with me.