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Stanley Fish has a new book coming out called Save The World On Your Own Time, in which, among other things apparently, he decries the ways in which politics have crept into the classrooms of university professors and how it ought to stop. What professors are supposed to do is teach and that’s that. He has an interview here in Inside Higher Ed where he talks about this and some of his other views.

Frankly, I think he’s kind of lost his marbles.

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I’m always suggesting to students making web sites– even simple web sites– that they draw them out first on a piece of paper.  Via Johndan, comes this link, where there are examples from famous web 2.0 sites where they did exactly that.

Speaking of things I want to link to that might come in handy for teaching English 516 next year: “University Presses Start to Sell Via Kindle,” in Inside Higher Ed. There’s been some discussion about this on the WPA-L mailing list, and my post there was basically that this just makes sense as the next logical trend for both the device and university publishing.

My friend Troy has one of these things and loves it; from what I’ve been able to tell (having not actually seen one in the wild), I don’t think these things are quite ready for prime-time. Still, if they come out with one of these things that can handle color, that can do a better job handing note-taking and such, and that is a little more affordable ($359 is a little steep for me), then I could see this being an important tool for both academic publishing and textbook publishing/reading.

Via NCTE Inbox comes this article/news release from the University of Minnesota, “First-of-its-kind study at the University of Minnesota uncovers the educational benefits of social networking sites; Study also finds that low-income students, contrary to recent studies, are in many ways just as technologically savvy as their counterparts.” Not a very succinct title, but it kind of says what it’s all about. This press release also includes links to some video of the researcher talking about her study; at some point, I’ll want to actually look this study up.

In terms of the graduate class I teach about computers, writing, and pedagogy (ENGL 516), this stuff– access and social networking– was “the line” last semester. I pointed out at the beginning of the class in winter 2008 that I wasn’t going to accept any seminar papers/research projects about a lack of access, because I believed that a) access has been proven to be not a problem, and b) that argument was really an excuse for “I don’t want to do/learn this computer stuff.” This new study will probably add to that argument. But while I haven’t had a lot of students do research/writing on social networking yet, this still seems to be a line that many of my grad students will not cross, particularly those students who are practicing teachers and closer to my age. I ask my students to set up a facebook account for the class, and there are a few who believe that this will end their careers and/or destroy their private life.

For fall 2008, I’m going to be making 3 big changes to the way I teach the class all the time, English 328:  Writing, Style, and Technology.  First, I think I’m going to abandon/retire the web site assignment.  Second, I think I’m going to add/replace that assignment with a movie-making assignment (though I really haven’t figured out yet what I’m going to do with that).

Third, I’m going to incorporate/add/integrate contemporary and Web 2.0 technologies into the class assignments– google docs, reader, flickr, the blog assignment I have given for a while, perhaps some kind of wiki assignment, etc.  Toward that end, here’s a kind of cool little tool: the Awesome Highlighter, which allows you to highlight and leave notes on web sites.  It’s a simple and intuitive little tool.

As the title suggest, I’m posting these things while watching TV, including Resolved, which is running on HBO right now. I thought I’d sort through my Google Reader feed with some links.

• The Hyperlinked Society looks like an interesting read, certainly something to think about for ENGL 516 or ENGL 444. Via a thaumaturgical compendium.
• The Reanimation Library, which looks like a kind of interesting installation art version on a library. Some cool pictures here. Via Earth Wide Moth.
• Five Free Online Video Editing tools. In the fall, I’m going to experiment with a simple video assignment, and one of these tools might be useful/worth playing around with.
• Obama as a Secret Vulcan, from culture critic extraordinaire Henry Jenkins. Pretty interesting analysis, and it’s better than saying he’s a secret Muslim– not that there’s anything wrong with Muslims, of course.
• Alex Reid has an interesting post about this article in the CHE about an online and non-university associated (kind of) first year writing course/program called StraighterLine, which is being run by SmartThinking, which runs a lot of online tutoring programs at universities. Besides the critique that Alex offers– which I completely agree with, that there is generally speaking a disconnect between the best scholarship in the field of composition and rhetoric and the course that generically tends be called composition and rhetoric– it just doesn’t seem like an idea that’s very workable. I think that one of the big textbook publishers tried to do this a while back, tried to offer a course with college credit not associated with a traditional institution. As I understand, that program folded up. So I guess I’m just not sure what the plan/business model is here.
• This also looks like a good book, one to think of for 516: Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Here’s a review at Grand Text Auto.

There’s probably other stuff I should put here too, but enough for now.  Oh, and go check out that movie, Resolved.

For reasons too complicated to go into, I found myself with about a half-hour/forty minutes to kill, which was not quite enough time to go on the “power walk” in a nearby park or to go to the gym before picking up Will. So I took the quasi-lazy way out and decided to catch up on some email, a bit of teaching work, and some web reading. This included the recent Atlantic Monthly article with the provocative title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. I was all set to be angry about it because, frankly, the title itself is kind of stupid.  “Um, no, stupid,” is basically my answer. But I guess the folks at the Atlantic didn’t think an article with a title like “What Google has to do with previous technologies of the mind and artificial intelligence” wouldn’t sell a lot of magazines.

I don’t agree with everything that Carr is saying here, but I actually do agree with a lot of it and I think this will be a good addition to my “invent your own technology” assignment in English 328.  Carr makes specific references to folks like McLuhan, Nietzsche’s reflections on the typewriter, Alan Turing, re-mediated ala Bolter/Grusin, and even Plato’s Phaedrus, and throughout the whole thing, I hear a sort of “back-current” of Walter Ong on the shaping power the external technology of literacy on human consciousness.

Not stupid at all, but like I said, stupid sells magazines.

I think this will certainly be something I include in the revamped version of English 328 I hope to roll out in the Fall term.

How big of a nerdy English/writing type of person does one need to be to appreciate the fact that the MLA has come out with a new edition of the style manual?  And does it make me an even bigger looser enthusiast that the first thing I want to look at in the newest issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing is a review of this new style manual?

Regardless, it’s an interesting piece by Kevin S. Hawkins, who is an electronic publishing librarian over at the University of Michigan.  The rest of the journal looks interesting this time around too.  Based on what Hawkins is saying, it sounds like MLA has made some advances in dealing with electronic resources and in acknowledging the fact that almost all of the writing/editing done in academic/humanities-type journals involves computers.

And for me, this observation brought back unpleasant memories:  “I’m glad to see that two holdovers from the days of the typewriter have finally been put to rest: underlining and double spacing after periods are out, and italicization and single spacing are in.”  Twelve years ago, when I was trying to wrap up my dissertation in the summer before I began my first tenure-track job, I was in an epic (well, for me) battle with a thesis/dissertation reader in the Bowling Green State University graduate college.

In those days (I assume this is still true, though I don’t typically have to deal with such things at EMU because our graduate students do “projects” and not “theses” that adhere to such strict rules), this was the final stop for a dissertation, a hoop soon-to-be PhDs had to jump through even after a defense.  The staff in this office was made up mostly of MA students on an assistantship, and their job was to proof-read for your run-of-the-mill errors and for adherence to a style manual– in my case, the MLA style manual.  This reviewer did catch a number of errors I was able to tidy up, but this person (who was always anonymous to me) also tried to argue that I had to eliminate all contractions (I dare you to find that rule in the MLA style manual) and to change all italics into underlined text.  I had a lot of italics in my diss, both for book titles but also for emphasis– probably a little too much emphasis– and I thought then (and think now) that underlining is ugly.

Well, long-story a bit shorter, I actually went back and forth via email with this person for a while, and I ultimately had to get a “supervisor” involved in order to remind this office that I had successfully defended my dissertation.  I ended up presenting this person with a quote from that edition of the MLA style manual (the second?) which said italics were at least an acceptable substitute for underlining.  I finished, went on with my life, and became the tenured professor you see before you today.  I don’t know whatever happened to this reviewer, but I am guessing they are not happy with these new MLA changes.

Depending on what happens with English 328 next year, perhaps this could be a reading for that class….

Via a site I found while surfing around and doing some BAWS research, “Take a Stroll Down Computing Memory Lane,” via Neatorama. This might actually be good territory to cover in a class like English 516, especially given that a lot of the students in that class are now too young to remember the “old days” of computers. Or perhaps I am now too old….

From one of my Google news feeds come this article from eSchool News, “Maine writes a new ed-tech success story: State’s pioneering laptop program contributes to improved writing scores.” Potentially a fine article for a class like 516.