Category: Scholarship

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Some random thoughts on the supposed collapse of the university as we know it

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but as I head into what (I think?) is the end of the Bonk MOOC and after collecting a bunch of links on this, I thought I’d offer some random thoughts on the end of higher education as we know it.

Throw a brick out a window and you’re liable to hit an article like these:

I could go on, but you see the point.  Now to my random thoughts:

  • In a global way, I think Aaron Barlow says a lot of what I would say in this post and this post on his blog One Flew East.  As far as I can tell, education has been in a state of revolution that potentially eliminates the teacher since Socrates and Phaedrus talked about the dangers of literacy.  Books, print, cheap publishing, etc. have been available for learning without teachers or interaction with others for a long time, but as Barlow points out, “Only the rare person is a true autodidact.”
  • The fact that most of us (including me) lack the ability to intensely self-direct our learning (and I for one lack the crazily internal motivations for doing almost anything) is the key in understanding why both Thiel’s foundation and these various no credit MOOCs are basically a waste of time and/or a PR stunt.  Sure, if you hold a national contest attracting the best and brightest young people in the country and offer them $100K to develop those ideas, those folks can probably get away without having a college degree.  Sure, there are people– especially in the IT world– who are more or less self-taught and could be where they are without a college degree.  Sure, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college.  But the fact is most of us aren’t like that, and most of us are not Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or (insert your other anomaly genius name here).  Most of us need something a lot closer to a classroom and degree experience to succeed.
  • Wasn’t it just a few years ago that the popular press was running a bunch of articles about how it turns out that lecture hall discussions were bad and it was the interaction between students and teachers that fostered learning?  Wasn’t the whole “reversed classroom” thing the main topic of discussion just a few months ago?  So why on earth is an online version of a sage on the stage now seen as the solution?
  • Show me anyone writing for mainstream media that college is a waste of time and money and I’ll show you someone– that same writer– who has a college degree, and usually a college degree from a fancy-pants institution.  It’s the same argument I have about the coming revolution in digital scholarship:   I’ll agree that publishing in fixed manuscript form is over as soon as these folks publishing books about digital scholarship and the end of print start getting recognition for their actual digital scholarship and that work alone.  I think the days of printing on paper are numbered, sure.  But words in a row– even when those words in a row are about multimodality or digital rhetoric or what have you– aren’t going anywhere.
  • A few years ago, I did a project on correspondence schools in the late 19th and early 20th century, and a number of years before that and as part of one of the last classes I took in my PhD program, I did some research on elocution and the “home learning” movements of the 19th century.  Classes conducted via the postal service were a particularly big deal in the midwest.  William Rainey Harper, who has a community college named after him in the Chicago area, said in 1885 “the day is coming when the work done by correspondence will be greater than that done in the classrooms of our academies and colleges.”  Makes me think I should go back to those scholarly projects.
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Week 1 of Bonk Online: Motivation

Week 1 of  Curtis Bonk’s Massively Open Online Course about teaching online is all about motivation.  The main article assigned/discussed was the chapter “Well Leave the Light on for You:  Keeping Learners Motivated in Online Courses,” which is from a book called Flexible Learning in an Information Society. It’s really more of an article about things teachers can do to try to foster motivation, which (as anyone who has lead the horse to water only to watch him not drink knows) is not the same thing as students fostering motivation in themselves.  It’s basically advice on setting an engaging tone (including “ice breaker” activities), giving feedback (which I agree is a huge deal in online teaching), making sure students are engaged in meaningful ways, fostering choice and curiosity, valuing peer interaction, etc.  Though as I typed that sentence, I’m not sure what of these things are really all that unique to online (versus face to face) teaching.

In any event, I think in a very general way, Dennen and Bonk have fine ideas here.  There is no doubt that a big part of the problem of online pedagogy is teachers not recognizing the ways in which the online experience is different from the face to face experience of teaching in some really unexpected and interesting ways.  I think what Bonk is saying here can at least get teachers to begin to think about these differences.

But I don’t think he’s really addressing student motivational problems here, or at least he’s not addressing the problems I see.  In my experience at a public “opportunity-granting” university, a lot of courses are offered online to a population of students who don’t have the maturity or the “buy-in” to higher education generally to take the next self-disciplinary motivation to succeed in an online and largely self-guided class.  Simple example:  at EMU, we don’t teach first year writing classes online because the students we have in our program– especially the traditional freshmen– need to first learn how to routinely show up in person to class, how to complete assignments independently, etc.  And given the high drop-out rate of students in online versions of these classes at other places, I think we’re right about that.

I also think that when students don’t succeed in online classes it is often because they have misguided or flat-out bad motivations, self-guided or otherwise.  In the upper-level and MA classes I teach online, I see this all the time– or maybe a better way of putting it is I see students who don’t succeed online as often having a misperception problem.  Often, when students don’t succeed online:

  • They struggle with the technology in a way that is very difficult to address (and they often grossly overestimate their technological abilities in the first place), no matter what we try to do to help;
  • They nderestimate the amount of self-discipline it takes to get to the online class and participate, complete exercises, etc. (in that sense, an online class is a lot like buying an exercise bike:  it only does you good if you can motivate yourself to ride it every day); and /or
  • They bite off more than they can chew based on other classes that they’re taking and/or their complicated lives.  Show me a student who is taking 18 credits, working 40 hours a week, tending to an ailing parent/spouse/sibling, and/or at home with a newborn baby who thinks that her or his “problems will be solved” by taking an online class and I’ll show you someone who drops out or fails.

So I don’t know if this is missing from Bonk’s essay per se and I think his basic advice to help teachers new to online teaching is sound.  The point I’m getting at is when students don’t succeed in online classes, it is more often than not largely because the student wasn’t ready for the class and/or otherwise in over their head.

As for the MOOC experience so far:  it’s so-so.  A lot of the comments/posts by others are pretty good.  There’s certainly as much worthwhile stuff there as say the WPA-L or Tech-Rhet mailing lists– which is to say there is a lot of not worthwhile stuff too, but that goes with the territory.  It doesn’t really feel like a class in any meaningful way to me– more like a mailing list or blog discussion.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing; it’s just not the same as actually taking a class.

And so far, I think the Blackboard CourseSites stuff blows chunks.  Makes me appreciate eCollege, frankly, and that’s saying something.

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Thanks MLA, but…

As The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed both reported, The MLA has come out with “new guidelines” urging the consideration of digital work in the review, tenure, and promotion process for English department faculty.  Which is good, I guess.  But as I wrote about way back in January:

  • Since there have been “English” department (or at least comp/rhet) scholars have been trying to get “digital scholarship” to count for decades, this is a little late;
  • Lots of places– including EMU– figured out quite a while ago how to count alternative formats of scholarship toward tenure and review, and lots of places– also including EMU– have a significantly more reasonable process toward getting tenure than the “book plus” of research one institutions; and
  • I will believe that these new guidelines and truly digital scholarship will be seen as valuable as monographs/print when people like Cathy Davidson, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, David Weinberger, and other prominent and current digital media scholars proudly announce their new web site rather than their new book.

So yeah, thanks, I guess.

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“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

I got suckered into a point of purchase/cash register impulse buy the other day.  It was The Altantic, and the thing that got me was the cover headline “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”  I should have known better.  After all, this is the same magazine that brought us “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” a few years ago.

As was the case with the Nicholas Carr article (and I can now only assume that Stephen Marche, the author of this Facebook piece, is busily preparing a book-length treatment on his topic), I think the answer to his headline is “not really, but it’s more complicated than that.”  Marche is a clear and thoughtful writer, and if nothing else, I can see this being a useful reading in one of the various classes I teach where social media comes up as a topic, particularly undergraduate classes.  As I understand it, I think Marche is saying that a) there are lots of things that have increased “loneliness” (and we’ll get to whatever the heck that is supposed to mean in a moment), and b) it depends a lot on how you use Facebook.  Marche trots out a lot of pretty well-known bits of pop-research/knowledge on how suburbia, television, etc. (think of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone) have caused us as a culture to be more lonely, all of which is to say that at its worse, Facebook is one among many contributors to loneliness.

And then there’s this quote paraprhasing John Cacioppo, who Marche calls the “world’s leading expert on loneliness” (and of course I need to point out that being the world’s leading expert on anything is lonely, and being the leading expert on loneliness has to be the most lonely of all):

Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user.  “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.”  So of social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy.  If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.

Duh, right?  And I assume we can substitute “talk about issues of the day with people far away from you” or “meet for dinner and drinks” or “invite people to a party” for “football” and be fine.

Ultimately, I think this article raises a couple of questions that are different from the nature of social networks and Facebook per se.  First, how is it that psychologists study “loneliness?”  Because while Marche does a good job of citing/quoting from the scholarship on this, it all seems kind of sketchy to me– though, of course, this is not my area of expertise.  For example, according to Marche, the “best tool yet” for measuring loneliness is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which is basically 10 questions, each of which begin “how often do you feel…”  Here’s a link to an interactive version based on the survey; for me, my answers boil down to “it depends.”

Second, I always wonder about the extent to which the issue is not really “loneliness” but the complex emotions and connotations of the word “friend,” and how Facebook’s choice of that word complicates our relations between “friends” on Facebook and our relationship/interactions with Facebook as an interface and a tool.  Would there be articles like this one if Facebook had chosen instead to call the people you connect with “contacts,” or “connections,” or “acquaintances?”  After all, my Facebook friends in “real life” actually range from “people I care about and love deeply” all the way down to “people I don’t know at all” and even a few “people I actually don’t like or trust.”   What if we instead had “followers” ala Twitter, a social network which (at least so far) seems significantly less emotionally loaded than Facebook?  What if Facebook had always had categories of designating the degree of friendship and the nature of the connection, sort of like the professional Linkedin?

So, even though Marche is suggesting Facebook as a service is making us lonely and disconnected (and it’s not as if he’s the first person to make this claim), I think the real anxiety around Facebook is with its implications on “friendship.”  Facebook flattens the inherent hierarchy of friendship and relationships, putting “BFFs,” boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses, ex-Sig-Os, frenemies, work colleagues, people you went to high school with, and Velveeta Cheese all in the same big bucket– and let’s not forget that’s a bucket Facebook draws on to sell us specifically targeted ads.   It is nerve-racking and anxiety-inducing to think that my friendship status with people and products are on Facebook essentially the same thing.

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CCCCs in St. Louis: Review/Recap

My semester has been complicated, mostly by a search that is still not completed, some teaching challenges, and some department poly-ticks I won’t be describing in any great detail.  So in a lot of ways, the CCCCs this year was more of a distraction than an event for me, and it was a rapid and somewhat unusual distraction at that.

Sure, I saw some okay panels.  I thought the talk of the ghost(s) of Jim Berlin was interesting if only because he is now at this point a fainting (okay, fading, but I will keep that) memory for most of the upcoming scholars in the field.  I enjoyed seeing some of EMU’s graduate students presenting about Writing Center/WAC stuff because they were some of EMU’s graduate students.  I liked the panel on Latour I went to okay– certainly better than some of my colleagues– and it made me think that I really need to read some more Latour.  Actually, that in general is a take-away for this year’s CCCCs for me:  I really need to read more.  Like a lot more. A LOT more.  And while it was very cool to see Richard Lanham speak and when I could understand him he was great, he was so bad with the microphone that I’d guess that I only heard about a third of what he had to say.

My own presentation and my fellow speakers on the were okay.  It was a bit of an exercise of “which one of these things is not like the other” because my co-presenters were speaking about hypertext fiction and digital poetry.  They were both pretty young and new and there weren’t a lot of words exchanged between us, which was unfortunate.  On the plus-side there were more people there than have seen the YouTube version of my video so far (as of the time I’m posting this, it’s 26), and there was some good discussion. So that too was okay.

And the more important non-presentation aspects of the conference were okay to good, too.  I had some nice lunches and meet-ups with old colleagues, current ones, friends, and potential ones; I had a lovely dinner with old friends after the very excellent Bedford-St.Martin’s party at City Museum; had a lovely luncheon post-Lanham with a variety of folks and good friends John and Karen (who I’ll see again tomorrow, in theory); and I had quite the night on the town with Steve B. and then joined by John D. and Derek.

So while I had some good encounters and such and St. Louis was quite frankly a lot better than I thought it was going to be, it still falls for me into the okay category, and I think there might be two reasons for that.  First, for reasons that are more complicated than it is worth to try to explain here, I traveled and stayed by myself.  Now, that worked out better than expected because of an unexpected airplane voucher (let’s just say for now that after I get money back from EMU for my expenses, I expect to turn a profit on this thing) and I very much enjoyed my free internets in the otherwise dumpy hotel the Mayfair, but missed the camaraderie of my usual traveling and rooming companions.  Second, I wasn’t really there quite long enough.  I think it would have been a little better had I been there a little earlier– Wednesday night instead of Thursday morning– and/or a little later.

Maybe I’ll stay longer next year.  Actually, next year could be really interesting with the Las Vegas locale.  Annette and Will are thinking of joining me, but they would probably not come out until the end/the weekend part of the trip, which might then make the CCCCs 2013 a combination of family time preceded by a middle-aged and dramatically more tame version of The Hangover with my usual traveling companions.  We’ll see.

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CCCCs in St. Louis: Preview

Here’s a link to the Google Sites page I’ve set up for my CCCCs in St. Louis talk, “Amateur Auteurs:  The Problems of Teaching and Assessing Multimedia in Writing Classes Amateur Auteurs: The Challenge of Producing and Publishing Multimedia Scholarship in Writing Studies.”  I’m setting it up on a Google Sites page mostly because I am curious to play around with the Google Analytics tracking stuff on this.  I’ll keep folks posted.

I am sure more is going to be coming soon, but for the time-being, I need to go pack and do a few other things to get ready for my trip.  It’s sort of a “surgical strike” this year at the CCCCs:  in Thursday and home by early afternoon Saturday.  It’s also unusual in that I’m not sharing a room with anyone purely for scheduling reasons.  My usual traveling companions left for the conference much earlier than I had planned, and all that meant I needed to make my own plans.  It’ll be nice to have that luxury though, I am sure.

 

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Nothing Personal

I don’t know Geoffrey Sirc.  I have met him, I think, but that’s about it.  The only other thing of his I have read (other than the essay that is the topic of this CCCarnival, his CCC article “Resisting Entropy”) is his contribution to the Wysocki et al collection, “Box Logic.” I have always thought it was a so-so piece, though my students tend to like it a lot more than I do.  By the way, it’s interesting as I look back at that 2004 essay and read the opening sentences:  “Let me confess: it has been a frustrating last several years for me in my writing courses. The rapid advance of technology has meant a pedagogical dilemma for me: just what do I do in the classroom, what do I teach?”

And I haven’t read any of the books he is reviewing in this essay.  I at least own Hawk’s book and I suspect I would agree with Sirc’s review of Shipka’s book, though I also suspect I would like Miller’s book and, if I was a WPA, I might look to the Harris et al book for some ideas.  My own limitations thus make it difficult for me to evaluate the quality of Sirc’s review in relation to what he’s reviewing.  But it seems to me that this is such an odd and provocative essay because it’s only partially a review.  The rest of it is something else.  He writes in the opening paragraph:

On a personal, practitioner level, one always wishes for more sustained wonderfulness in the work of one’s students and so turns  to the classroom credos others have formed as a result of their own sustained  practice in the field, looking hungrily for inspiration from their pedagogy. On  the professional level, especially after doing historical scholarship and seeing,  shockingly revealed, a recursive, abysmal spiral of the same essay-based pedagogy from the field’s origin onward, one can’t but wonder why the field on the  whole seems so stunted and contrary and so looks for illuminating answers in  how others have surveyed and interpreted the field, finding, perhaps, hidden  avenues leading out of otherwise dead ends from the patient reconsideration of roads taken and not.

As I think about this passage and the one I quote from eight years earlier, it seems to me that Sirc has, for lack of a better way of putting it, made up his mind some time ago on these matters.  Which, I suppose, is its own form of entropy.

The most problematic part of this review for me is the way that Sirc just hammers Thomas Miller for his book The Evolution of College English:  Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns.  Like I said, I haven’t read it, though with final chapter titles like “At the Ends of the Profession” and “Conclusion:  Why the Pragmatics of Literacy Are Critical,” I can kind of imagine why Sirc is less than impressed.  There’s a long passage on page 510 where Sirc, foaming at the mouth a bit, takes up the value of Henry James (who I personally could never actually read when I was a student and who I have not been moved to return to either), New Criticism, Wordsworth, and all things literary.  Sirc concludes this passage:  “Part of refiguring English studies means rethinking composition’s sniffy attitude toward literariness; it means our subfield’s reimagining literature as a cultural value and practice, refiguring how it fits in a first-year course centered around writing.”

I hear echoes of this conversation from a week or so ago here, and my basic response is the same.  It’s not that literature cannot be an engaging part of a first year writing course; it’s just that a first year writing course shouldn’t be about literature, and it turns out there are a lot of texts and subjects and ideas that can ennoble and enrich students’ minds and souls other than literature.  I majored in English and then I was in a creative writing program where the goal was making literary art, so this idea that there was something besides literature that could be of cultural value took me a while to accept. And from a more pragmatic point of view, if you want to make first year college students hate all things literary, make them read and write about The Ambassadors.

Now, I do think revisiting the history of the field ala Hawk and others is useful, and I can see Shipka’s assignments and alternative approaches to writing as provocative and engaging.  I also think these things are happening in lots of writing classes right now.  Or at least they are happening along side uninspiring and regressive pedagogy, which is one of the long-standing problems of our field:  the teacher who believes in students making objects as research projects works right along side the teacher who feels the five paragraph structure is critical and who is a stickler for the use of who versus whom.

Then again, I wonder about Sirc’s response to Harris, Miles, and Paine’s book.  He seems particularly critical of their grading rubric language, which I agree does come across as a bit robotic.  Sirc writes:

Let’s please end the sham of this all-too-common editorial board/peer review practice: I’ve received good feedback from editors, but never such that I radically rethought a piece or even did more than tweak. More often, I’ve received  misguided, even atrocious editorial advice. Outside feedback never really enters  into what I’m doing. James writes to Wells in 1902: “certainly I shall not again  draw up detailed & explicit plans for unconvinced & ungracious editors. . . .  A plan for myself, as copious and developed as possible I always do draw up”  (Horne 376). Peer response remains popular, I suspect, because a certain fiction  of audience is easily teachable and helps reduce the complexity of creation into  a simplified sort of flow chart—do X to cue Y in your reader, do Z to give your writing authority. My students are taking a class with me; one of the benefits is  that they get to have an ongoing conversation about their writing with someone  who knows something about writing, who can help coach their work, identify  strengths and weaknesses. The thought of blowing off a class in a coffee shop,  listening to students’ pleasant, phatic comments on their assignments, would make me wonder if the whole thing was worth it.

It seems to me there is a space between valuing useful feedback and ignoring editorial response because the author knows best, between believing that as the teacher you are The Expert and turning over the whole enterprise to the students to sort out for themselves.  In my own growth as a writer, particularly as a fiction writer, peer review was critical.  I learned from the feedback of others of course, but I also learned a lot about myself in learning how to give others feedback on their writing.  So when I teach peer review in writing classes, I’m not trying to get the students to do the work for me– though when peer review works (and I will be the first to admit it often does not work well in first year writing classes), it does help.  Rather, I’m trying to teach students about the process of peer review and how it helps to both give and to receive feedback on writing in order to become a better writer.

And besides all that, my guess (again, I haven’t read it) is Harris, Miller, and Paine have written/edited a book useful in addressing the extremely practical and real conditions inherent in first year writing programs.  These are mandatory courses taught to very inexperienced students who frequently come into college with extraordinarily inaccurate ideas about learning let alone writing, and taught by comparatively inexperienced teachers who are rarely familiar with the scholarly and theoretical discussions of the field.  At any decent-sized university, we teach a couple hundred of these classes a year, all of which (in theory) are supposed to be meeting common outcomes and goals, all of which (again, in theory) under the guidance/direction of professionals who occupy that weird institutional space between “professor” and “administrator,” the WPA.  And despite (or maybe because) of its service/quasi-janitorial space on the academic food chain, it is a course that others at the university see as enormously important, especially when it comes to fixing the problems of students’ writing in other courses.  That, I assume, is the real world context and purpose behind Teaching with Student Texts.  So, given that Sirc is a critic of this institutional function of first year writing in the first place, it is probably not that surprising that he’s not a fan.

Like I said, I haven’t read these books and and I don’t know Sirc.  But by the end of this essay, I feel like I know a lot more about him than I do about the books he reviewed.

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The CCC Online Now (and before and before and for how long)

The other day on the WPA-L mailing list (this is the main electronic mailing list/exchange in the composition and rhetoric world), Bump Halbritter announced the CCC Online, version (edition?) 1.1.  Here’s a link to the public table of contents.  Since I have some history with previous versions of the CCC Online and even with this issue (and since this came up in some Facebook comments too), I thought it over and decided to write a response to the announcement.  A long response.  And I decided to post it here, too.

Read on in the continued part.  Hopefully, I don’t ruffle too many feathers and/or get into too much trouble….

Continue reading “The CCC Online Now (and before and before and for how long)”

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The MLA’s discovery of “digital scholarship”

Let me first explain why I have such a big chip on my shoulder about all this.  In summary:

  • I’ve had some kind of web site where I’ve published various scholarly and non-scholarly things since about 1994.
  • I can’t remember if this was in 1995 or 1996, but somewhere in there, I was one of the first members of the editorial board of Kairos, one of the first if not the first completely web-based and multimedia-oriented “journals” for work on computers and writing.
  • I published my dissertation online (along with the more traditional paper format, of course), also in 1996.  That site has been visited thousands and thousands of times, and while I am quite sure most people stumble across it and leave, I do get an email once in a while about it, folks at conferences tell me they’ve read parts of it once in a while, it gets cited here and there, etc.
  • In 2001, I gave a presentation– at the MLA convention in New Orleans no less!– titled “Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Value of Self-Published and Maintained Web Sites.”  This was part of a panel on digital scholarship put together by Todd Taylor and that featured myself, Bump Halbritter, and (the clear “headliner”) Gary Olson.  We had quite a large crowd as I recall, though I will confess it was the only thing I went to that year at the conference– the French Quarter was too close.
  • In 2002, I published an essay version of this in the then brand-new CCC Online.  A few years after that, I was disappeared by NCTE, a result of sloppy handling of online scholarship by NCTE, a practice that is, IMO, continuing (but that’s a different post, really). In any event, in 2007, I published  “’Where Do I List This on My CV?’ Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites, Version 2.0” in Kairos.
  • Also in 2007, I went ahead and self-published my failed ultimately rejected by the publisher textbook project, The Process of Research Writing.  And one of these days, I’m going to create a “new edition” based on this one and try to market it myself, but that too is a different post.

So I have experienced a few things about digital scholarship first-hand.  In fact (and I realize this is rather egotistical of me to even admit), the first thing that irritated me about the special section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” in the MLA’s Profession 2011 was the fact that no one cited me let alone barely anyone in composition and rhetoric in general or computers and writing particular, two fields/disciplines/groups  that a) have been working on issues of digital publishing for decades, and b) I  thought were areas of interest in English studies and thus MLA.  Though maybe not.

I agree fully with Cheryl Ball’s editorial in Kairos on much of this, and I am sure Cheryl has read and thought about this special issue more carefully than I am likely to anytime soon.  From what I have read at this point, the articles here are pretty good and potentially useful for edifying the clueless those who haven’t contemplated the changing patterns in scholarly publishing in English studies.  I do find it insulting that the introduction pretty much lumps my entire field into “other” as far as MLA is concerned, and there is also for me a bit of a helplessly haughty tone, kind of like the asleep at the wheel captain of that ship that crashed in Italy who has suddenly realized there might be some kind of “sinking problem.”  But this isn’t exactly new.

(Not that NCTE or Kairos has all of this digital/multimedia scholarship stuff completely figured out either, I should point out.  But that too is a different post, and probably the ultimate topic of my CCCCs presentation in St. Louis.  Stay tuned).

I did want to bring up two other issues that are different from what Cheryl and others have brought up.  First, at no point in time (at least as far as I can tell) is there any questioning of what exactly it typically takes (in terms of scholarship) to get tenure.  The assumption seems to be that to get tenure, professors in literature (and other “English” related fields) need to publish a book, that this is a universal standard, and that this is more or less the way it should be.  Thus the crisis in evaluating digital scholarship:  how can we make sure this stuff is as rigorous as a book?  Second, the assumption here seems to be that academic “books” (and their related counterpart, academic “journals”) are going to disappear completely and in the very near future, everything is going to be hyper-this and multimedia-that.

Both of these assumptions are ridiculous.

I’ve been a graduate student or faculty person at four different universities since 1988, and while none of these places have been particularly “prestigious” or “important,” I can name dozens of tenured faculty at these places who have not published a book or much of anything else.  I can point to many other institutions where this is also the case.  To quote myself from version 2 of the “Where do I list this on my CV?” piece:

Perhaps this is so obvious that it goes without saying, although perhaps this is something that is not said enough. I don’t think the variable nature of scholarship (and teaching and service, for that matter) is made clear enough to Ph.D. students as they prepare for academic careers; it certainly wasn’t made very clear to me. I recall the horror stories of the publish-or-perish phenomenon, 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 that 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.

And, as a slight tangent to that, because a lot of places like EMU consider lots and lots of different things as “scholarship,” I would argue it is these more common and less prestigious institutions that are ironically on the “cutting edge” when it comes to digital scholarly work.

As to the demise of books and journals:  paper is going away, not books and journals.  I don’t think I’m going out on much of a limb in predicting that it will not be long before there is no point in the paper version of academic journals when the PDFs are available through various databases, and when the vast majority of books will be read on kindles, iPads, and other devices.  (And I wait anxiously for Apple’s “GarageBand for Textbooks” announcement, too. That has the potential to shake up this whole “book” thing even more– or not.)

But so what?  The shift from scroll to codex didn’t end books– just changed them.  The same with the advent of print and paper as a medium.  Or let me put it this way:  I will believe this grand transition to something truly different when scholars stop turning to electronic (albeit refereed) journals like Kairos in favor of self-published web sites (especially for the purposes of tenure and review), when people like David Weinberger are invited to speak at a symposium at U of M based on his blog and not his book, and when Kathleen Fitzpatrick (and others) encourage PhD students take risks in a series of tweets or write about the end of publishing in academia on a wiki and not a book.

I do not believe this grand transition is going to happen, and, I have come to believe, it shouldn’t and it can’t happen.  I don’t have time to go into all this now, but I think there is an intrinsic value to a finished, uneditable or commentable and “object-like” (even if it is an electronic one) state of a text.  Not everything should be “in progress” and “in discussion” all the time.  And I am also convinced that all rhetorical situations– like so many other things– must come to some kind of end, and I think that end is print.  Or, in an electronic age, “print.”

 

 

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The year that was 2011

As I look back at past blog posts from this year, it occurs to me that 2011 has been a year that has taken me further away from a lot of blogging, writing, and reading activities. And it occurs to me that I’ve done a lot of other quasi-administrative and otherwise not writing/reading/blogging things this year– being on the search for the department head for example, not to mention all of the things I mention in this post.

So while there were plenty of highlights from the last year, not as many of them seem to have made them to the blog this year.  Among those posts and events I’ll remember though:

I’m leaving stuff out, of course.  I was kind of surprised to see it, but it doesn’t look like I blogged at all about our travels through the UP to Minnesota or to Glen Arbor, for example.  But you get the idea.

I don’t usually have New Year’s resolutions since I always think of the “year” starting when school begins in August, but I do have a few resolutions I’m hoping to work on starting this January:

  • No mornings at EMU.  And as a related resolution, not be up at school quite as much.  I was there almost every day/all day this fall and, as I think about it, close to that much last winter.  A lot of that had to do with teaching an overload and “ramping up” as I was stepping into the writing program coordinator job, but now that the dust has settled, I can settle in a bit too.  I already have things on my calendar that will break this “no mornings at school” resolution, but still, a boy can try.
  • Get serious about the “immediacy” book thing.  The most satisfying writing experiences I had this past fall was practicing what I was preaching in ENGL 621 and “touching it every day,” and by “it,” I mean going back to my dissertation in an effort to revive that project into a book, something I should have done literally a decade ago.  I don’t know if I’ll get there or not, but it is worth a try.
  • School myself on HTML 5 (which I’m teaching this term) and PHP/MySQL.  We’ll see how that goes.
  • And the usual eating right/losing weight/exercise thing.  I have more thoughts on that, but I don’t want to jinx myself here, so let’s just say I have some goals and plans I’ll keep to myself for now.