Category: Scholarship

Wayne Booth, RIP

I just learned from a post on the WPA-L mailing list that Wayne Booth passed away yesterday. According to the Wikipedia entry on him I link to above, he was 84, and according to the discussion on WPA-L, he had Alzheimer’s.

I have kind of have a soft-spot for Booth’s work because one of my first “big” projects as a Ph.D. student a dozen years ago now was to give a presentation on Booth’s work in a rhetorical theory class. I hadn’t read much of his work before that assignment, but I ended up reading quite a bit for that class spiel. I especially remember a book he wrote called The Company We Keep, which I remember being a particularly readable and humane alternative to some of the theory I was trying to digest. And I am hoping to soon get on with reading Booth’s last book, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.

Thanks for the inspiration and fine words, Dr. Booth.

"Authors are saps" about Google

Via boing-boing this monring, I found an editorial by boing-boing co-editor Xeni Jardin in the LA Times titled “You Authors are Saps to Resist Googling.” The particular authors/saps in question are members of the Authors Guild, which is a group that represents author (about 8,000, according to Jardin). BTW, if you go to the Authors Guild web site, you can see plenty of links about why they are fightin’ mad at Google.

I think Jardin is totally right for at least three reasons. First, Google’s plan isn’t to show an entire book as the result of a search; rather, they’re just going to show a portion of the book relevant to a search. It isn’t going to be possible (apparently) to just get the whole book.

Second, the VAST majority of writers/authors that I know really want readers to read their writing; they aren’t as concerned with how many books they can (or really, can’t sell). Writers write for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons I write is because I like the attention, and I for one have gotten a lot more attention from things I’ve published on the web than I anything I have published in traditional print.

Third, putting information about books online– including big chunks of content– helps sell them. As Jardin writes:

Perhaps the Authors Guild members would prefer that search companies pay them for the right to build book search services. If Google has its way, their logic goes, we’ll lose control over who can copy our work, and we’ll lose sales. But Internet history proves the opposite is true. Any product that is more easily found online can be more easily sold.

Amazon.com’s “look inside” feature works similarly. And, surprise, the Authors Guild has squabbled with it too.

Yep. Saps.

Cool use of Screencasting (and my own Teaching Online adventures continue)

Via Collin’s blog comes this link to Will at Weblogg-ed about giving student feedback via a screencast. For the time-being, I really just want to link to this so I can come back to it later when I start working more earnestly on my CCCCs presentation. But I guess I’ve got two thoughts for now:

  • I’m not sure I like the idea of screencasting for each student’s essay, but it’s an interesting demonstration.
  • Personally, I’m having enough problems/”challenges” just keeping up on the “basics” for my online class. I’ve whined about this before, so I’m not going to whine about it now, but I guess what I’m getting at/wondering about is the tradeoff between doing things like screencasting or podcasting versus the time it takes to make screencasts and podcasts, not to mention the learning curve.

U of M dentists beat me to my podcasting idea (but not really)

The Ann Arbor News ran a story today in the business section (of all places) titled “iPods help drill U-M students dentists: Lecture ‘podcasts’ now available.” Drill students– get it? get it? Ah, that dental humor….

Actually, this isn’t really what I’m trying to attempt with including audio in my online class, at least not exactly. I’m not even completely sure I’m doing what would be called “podcasting” because I haven’t quite figured out that part of the technology out yet, particularly the RSS stuff. I mean, I know that blogger has an audioblogging feature that is stupid easy to use: just record a message with them with a phone. The sound quality isn’t fantastic, but it is passable and I think I can set that up with RSS, but I want to do something more sophisticated than that.

Of course, the concern/worry I have is that if I build some sort of podcast outside of the class shell, I’m not convinced that my students will use it. And furthermore, I don’t know if I really need to build it outside fo the class eCollege software. As I think I mentioned earlier, I can record sound files with my iPod and a Belkin microphone, save these things as mp3s, and then simply upload them to the eCollege site. They aren’t “podcasts” in the purest sense, but hey, who cares? If they help…

… which brings me back ot the dentists. Basically, they are doing some podcasting of lectures at the U of M dental school, and you can even get them through iTunes (no, I’m not going to try to find a link to them….) The dean of the college is behind it– he says in the article that he’s on his fifth iPod.

But the thing that I thought was interesting for my purposes was this:

[Jared Van Ittersum, who was credited with heading the podcasting concept at U-M] said podcasting lectures evolved from a similar effort at the U-M Medical School, which provides low-resolution video of professors’ lectures for students to download from the Web.

But given the prevalence of the music players among students, podcasting emerged as a more mobile medium, said Trek Glowacki, an employee at the dental school’s informatics department and a student at U-M’s School of Information. Glowacki led the pilot study into whether students preferred podcasting to video. He found most picked the pod, which also involved far fewer university staff hours to deliver.

This interests me for a variety of different reasons, but besides the idea that the technology of the podcast is easier and more mobile for students, I think it is also considerably easier and more mobile for instructors as well. I could record and broadcast video of myself with eCollege, but even with the support I would get from Continuing Education at EMU to do this, it would still be an enormous pain in the ass. I mean, I’d have to go to a studio someplace, they’d have to cut the video together (or I’d have to do it, and that’d be a totally different learning curve), it would take a long time for students to download, etc., etc. Making and delievering a 10 minute mp3 file (albeit a not great sounding one) takes me a total of 20 minutes: 10 for the recording and 10 with the futzing. Not counting-retakes, of course.

(A slightly belated) welcome to the CCC Online

I meant to post about this earlier in the week, but better late than never: welcome to town, the new CCC Online! I certainly think it’s the right idea and direction for the CCCCs. My copy of the paper version of the journal arrived yesterday (quite a bit fatter than usual too, in part because of the inclusion of Forum, which is a newsletters for non-tenure-track teachers and faculty in composition), and I guess it makes me wonder when College Composition and Communication (the paper journal) and the CCC Online will become one entity.

This might be kind of naive or it might be kind of obvious, but it just seems inevitable to me that academic journals like the CCCs will eventually not be published on paper anymore. I don’t mean this as some pronouncement of the “end of print,” nor do I think that the codex is going to vanish anytime soon. Books are just too convenient of a technology, especially for things like trade books and novels and such. I do think academic book publishers– especially the smaller ones –would be wise to investigate various “print on demand” technologies that make it cost effective to publish a single book, which would thus allow these presses to take on projects that are intellectually important but “impractical” from a sales and marketing point of view. Though this is a slightly different rant.

But I think academic journals are different. I don’t know if I am a typical reader of academic journals or not, but I subscribe to only one (the CCCs) and I do not read that journal all the way through (though, as part of my “new school year resolutions,” I intend to take the time to actually read some of the current scholarship in my field). I am more likely to browse online journals like Kairos, but the way that I usually engage with academic journals is through my research with various electronic search tools– the MLA Bibliography, WilsonSelect, etc. With this research, I do not go and look to read a journal per se; I look to read the article in that journal. Furthermore, if I can find that article electronically (and if it’s a PDF, even better!), then I probably wouldn’t even touch the actual periodical.

So, assuming my way of using periodicals is not too far off from the norm, why not just publish these things electronically? The advantages to web-based academic journals just seem so obvious to me that I don’t understand why paper periodicals haven’t gone to the web. I mean, electronic journals would save a lot of money (because you eliminate the costs of printing, mailing, and storing the paper), they are a lot more flexible (want to include color images with your essay? sound? video? etc.? go ahead!), potentially more interactive (which is what the CCC Online is after, I think), and a lot more accessible.

Without the restraints of print, journals could also eliminate things like maximum page lengths, they wouldn’t need to think in terms of volumes and issue numbers, and they could be a lot more nimble when it comes to bringing things out to readers (though in my experience with electronic journals, both as a writer and as a reviewer of articles, just because they can publish stuff more quickly doesn’t mean they will).

So it just seems to me that merging of College Composition and Communication (the paper publication) and of the CCC Online (the web site) is kind of inevitable. What will be interesting to see how and when we get to that place.

New Year's Resolutions

Today’s the first day of classes here at EMU. Since I don’t teach today, my original plan was to actually not be at school today, but it turns out that I have a Faculty Council meeting I need to attend. Oh well; summer is over.

I’ve thought of the beginning of the school year as the beginning of “the year” pretty much my whole life and certainly since I started teaching 17 years ago. Jeesh, 17 years ago. I was a graduate assistant back then. I was 22 years old in an MFA creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, teaching first year composition about three or four months after I finished my BA. Ah, memories….

Anyway, since I’m at the beginning of the new year, I thought it might be good to make some new year’s resolutions (and I also thought that if I made them here, I might stick to them, too). So here they are, more or less in this order:

  • Get into shape. This might seem like the sort of thing I would mention on my unofficial blog, but I mention it here because I have an academic schedule this term that allows me few excuses for getting exercise and I really do want to make losing some weight and being a bit more healthy my top priority this semester.
  • Figure out this online teaching stuff. So far, so good, though I haven’t seen any activity on my online class yet. It’s pretty early though. And one of the things I am going to have to figure out for sure this year for my online teaching is podcasting and (possibly) screencasting, too. I just found out my CCCCs proposal was accepted; it’s called (right now) “Broadcast Composition : Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and for the time-being, it’s going to be about using things like podcasting and other “lower-end” multimedia to supplement my online teaching. But that could change and evolve.
  • Read. I have mentioned this in the recent past on my blog, but basically, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) finished with my textbook project, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) pretty much off of the job market, and I have therefore reached a point in my career where I don’t have to produce scholarship in order to participate in that “academic game.” So, for a while at least, I think I’m going to become mainly a consumer of scholarship and read, both current scholarship and some of the things before.
  • Blog. And despite what Ivan Tribble said again, I stand by what I said back in July: While he did have some valid points, I think blogging can help someone on the job market and I think it helps those of us who are more “established” in academic careers too. To read more about Tribble II, I’d suggest reading Collin’s entry about this. By the way: it occurs to me that it is a little– I don’t know, strange/funny/ironic — that Tribble in this article seems to think that blogging under one’s own name can be okay and yet he’s sticking to his pseduonym here. Hmmm…..

Plagiarism: The Lawsuit/Web Site, The Building, The Movie

Here’s kind of a catch-up post on some stuff I’ve come across lately:

  • Bill H-D sent me this link to an article in Inside Higher Ed, “New Tack Against Term Paper Providers.” Here’s a quote:

    Lawyers for a graduate student named Blue Macellari filed a lawsuit in federal court in Illinois alleging that three Web sites that sell term papers made a manuscript she had written available without her permission. She is charging the owner of the sites (as well as the sites’ Internet service provider) with copyright infringement, consumer fraud and invasion of privacy, among other things.

    But it gets a bit more complicated than that.

    According to Macellari’s complaint, a friend doing a casual Google search of Macellari’s name last January came across references to a paper she had written during a year abroad at the University of Cape Town in 1998, which Macellari had posted in 1999 on a personal Web site at Mount Holyoke College, where she earned her degree.

    But the friend found links to the paper not on her Mount Holyoke page but on two Web sites, DoingMyHomework.com and FreeforEssays.com, that said the paper was in their databases. Macellari says she later found several hundred words of her paper on another site, FreeforTermPapers.com.

    In other words, Macellari’s essay got lifted from her web site by some online papermill. Great, just great. Those papermill/spam bastards ruin it for everyone.

    Stopping students from publishing their writing on their web sites obviously isn’t much of a solution. But it is probably not a bad idea for me to recommend to students that they slap a creative commons agreement on their work. It isn’t going to stop people from taking their work, but it might give them ammo for a legal remedy.

  • In the “building” department and via Johndan’s blog comes this article “Brothers From Another Mother,” by Clay Risen and published in a web periodical called “The Morning News.” Here’s a quote from the first paragraph:

    Plagiarism is usually associated with college term papers and the occasional historical bestseller. Recently, though, the big story in architecture circles has been a growing list of supposedly “copycat� designs—in other words, architectural plagiarism. The hot architecture gossip blog, The Gutter, has made a regular feature—called the Gutterland Police Blotter—out of tagging similarities between, say, Rem Koolhaas’s elevated subway sheath at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a train station in Santiago, Chile. In a groundbreaking ruling earlier this month, a federal judge allowed a suit against Freedom Tower architect David Childs to go forward; the suit, by a former architecture student, accuses Childs of stealing the tower’s design from one the student had presented in a class project. And a recent New York Times article noted three other high-profile clashes between purported plagiarizers and their alleged sources.

    Johndan talks more about this on his site as well; for me, it raises some interesting questions about what counts as a “text,” what’s the difference between “copying” and “imitating” (I guess, as they say, doing it well is part of it), and do the rules of “words in a row” literacy apply to things like architecture.

  • Finally, Plagiarism the Movie. Well, okay; just kind of a cool flash intro to Washington State University’s plagiarism site, which also has some good info.

An "Intelligent Design" theory I am willing to support

On my official blog, I try to steer clear of direct and overt politics and such. I don’t agree with the right’s argument that academia is too liberal to be fair to conservative students and I’ve voiced my opinions about all that here, but generally, I save my expressions of my politics and religious beliefs for my unofficial blog.

But I want to come out here all in favor of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or, as it has also been called, Pastafarianism.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an August 29 New York Times article, “But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?” As the article reports, the Kansas State Board of Education is giving preliminary approval for the teaching of alternatives to evolution like “Intelligent Design” in science classes. Bobby Henderson, “a 25-year-old with a physics degree from Oregon State University,” has some problems with this, which he shared in an “Open Letter to the Kansas School Board” in which he explains that if they are not willing to include the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s teachings about the origins of life in their “Intellifent Design” curriculum, he would take legal action. To quote from the New York Times piece:

In perfect deadpan he wrote that although he agreed that science students should “hear multiple viewpoints” of how the universe came to be, he was worried that they would be hearing only one theory of intelligent design. After all, he noted, there are many such theories, including his own fervent belief that “the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.” He demanded equal time in the classroom and threatened a lawsuit.

Soon he was flooded with e-mail messages. Ninety-five percent of those who wrote to him, he said on his Web site, were “in favor of teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in schools.” Five percent suggested that he would be going to hell. Lawyers contacted him inquiring how serious he was about a lawsuit against the Kansas board. His answer: “Very.”

I think this is interesting for a whole variety of different reasons, but I will limit myself to two for the time-being:

  • The “Intelligent Design” movement is a fantastic example (maybe the best example ever) of how simply renaming something changes the values assigned to it by an audience. These folks were getting nowhere with the term “creationism,” largely because of the overt religious connotations. But “Intelligent Design:” well, who could be against that? It’s the same tactic we’ve seen with “The Death Tax” (which is a name that tested significantly better than what it really is, “The Estate Tax”), “Personal Savings Accounts” as they connect to Social Security, and so forth. But somehow, the language and approach of “Intelligent Design” seems unusually persuasive, perhaps beause the words “intelligent” and “design” so often have positive connotations.
  • The “Intelligent Design” movement is another example of what I see as a sort of re-emergence of religiosity into the public sphere. This is perhaps the most overt example, but I think that there are subtle ways in which the line that has traditionally separated “church” from “state” has become quite a bit more porous in recent years. Part of it is the Bush administration of course, but I also think a lot of it is a response to 9/11. Personally, I have nothing against religion per se, but a) I’m not a religious person and I don’t want to be compelled to be a religious person by the state, and b) we shouldn’t be teaching religious concepts of origin (or just about anything else, for that matter) as “science” or even as “scholarly,” and c) we shouldn’t be doing these things in publicly funded institutions.

Unless we do go down the Spaghetti Monster path. I’m all for that.