Technology – Page 10 – Steven D. Krause

October 19, 2009October 19, 2009

The remains of the weekend

There’s actually a longer post embedded in some of these items, but for now, I thought I’d just get some of these down here. After all, I had intended on doing so last night but went to bed instead….

Cheryl Ball posted on Tech-Rhet asking about a Mac organizing software from a company (or maybe that’s the software) called Circus Ponies. It’s an organizational tool, which might be useful, though I find that my problems with organization and/or “getting things done” are not software-related.
Talking/working with Derek on a panel, and two ideas I want to get down before I forget: 1) it sure seems like a lot of people (including me) aren’t blogging at the same rate they used to blog (that’s a post one of these days, btw), and 2) while Facebook and Twitter are kinda cool, they aren’t a very good replacement for blogs.
Where have blogs gone? Well, one theory I have is as newspapers and other print journalism go online, they are pressing into the space that was once occupied more by individuals. This is not to say that individual blogs are going to go away, but why read (or even write) on your own individual blog if there is going to be a big newspaper out there willing and able to host your posts and comments?
Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff notes some of the writing on the backs of desk chairs of classrooms where she is doing evaluations.
Alex Reid has a nice post about learning to write and how it impacts how we should and shouldn’t teach classes like first year writing. I’ll need to come back to this. I never actually took first year writing– I tested out of it. I even was videotaped giving the speech I gave to get out of it, and I believe they took me and the other people who tested out to a lunch. Thinking back on it briefly now, I believe we were an informal focus group.
Fine writing advice, he gist of which I give all the time and which I have to work very hard at myself to follow (and I frequently fail at that).
I kind of feel like I been a teleworker/web worker/distance worker/whatever for a long time, but that’s because I teach a fair amount online, and also because tenure-track faculty tend to have the luxury of working wherever they want. Of course, the problem with “decentralized” work in general and defining “the work” of a college professor in particular is that I’m always working, in an office or not.
What’s the big trend now? Nowism. Actually, it’s more interesting than it sounds. I like the list of “now applications” that are down the page a ways, and I like the term “Liquid Modernity” which comes from Zygmunt Bauman.
“The lost chicken hatcheries of Iowa City, IA.” Of course I have to note that, even though I am not all that crazy about chickens in Ypsilanti (I have yet to spot a coop in my neighborhood).

October 13, 2009October 14, 2009

I’m at danah boyd’s talk at the John Seely Brown Symposium at the University of Michigan this afternoon. There was a pretty productive and interesting twitter feed on all this: see http://wthashtag.com/Danahjsb A few thoughts as it went on and now slightly edited over coffee at the Food Whole (which explains some of the mixing of tenses and other mixes between notes at the moment and something slightly more thought out):

This is in the Ross School of Business. Whoa, you talk about seeing how the other half lives. I came from cramped and smelly Pray-Harrold where I was showing a movie to my 121 students with a laptop and a projector with crappy sound. And then I walk into this place. This auditorium (I’m sitting in the balcony) had freakin’ leather seats. They probably spent more money on this room than EMU is going to spend on the interior fixtures in the Pray-Harrold remodeling. I think they spent more money on the lobby of this building than they are going to spend on the entire project. There was some group talking with students in the lobby about tailored suits. The ten miles between EMU’s campus and U of M’s campus is long indeed.
I showed up kind of late, but I don’t feel like I’ve missed much. A lot of stuff I’ve heard before– I like the idea of “collapsed contexts” (which is also what Wesch talks about with YouTube) as being like a wedding: a bunch of people come together who normally wouldn’t and the situation is more or less mediated by alcohol. The problem is there is no alcohol like that online (says her…).
Now she’s talking about her argument/blog argument about her MySpace being “ghetto,” which was indeed problematic, as I recall. Here she seems to be talking about the experience of writing in public a bit, but I think she is going back to defend her claim. I think my problem is that all of her evidence seems to be based on the sort of unsubstantiated claims of her teens, and I don’t think cherry picking the gut feelings of teenagers really represents “evidence.” In other words, I suppose it’s fine to say that teens perceive this to be the case, but it’d be a lot more interesting to me if she tried to peel away at that to figure out why they think this.
Or thought this– the split between Facebook and Myspace in terms of class I think used to be true, but probably not anymore. As someone said in the twitter discussion, MySpace has kind of become the defacto place for indie bands. Or I guess to the extent that this split is still true, it is perhaps less so than it used to be. Or maybe just another way of putting it: online spaces tend to replicate face to face world interactions, which is certainly something people have talked about for a long time.
How do we teach this stuff? How does this work for learning? boyd argues that one of the best uses of this media is for various “flex time” to help students learn about learning– I guess to make those connections beyond the classroom experience? She sorta skips that there has always been lots of technology, but she’s right that a lot of students don’t know about technologies like delicious and a lot of students don’t seem to think about a lot about wikipedia. They aren’t critical users. Of course, most of what she seems to mean by students/young people is high school kids.
She makes also a reference to mashup culture and how a lot of students don’t seem to know much about that either– also true, I think. I just came from teaching my 121 class (why I was late), where I am showing them the first part of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, and while it’s difficult for me to get a clear sense about what they thought about it today (didn’t have time to talk about it yet), I could tell that it was something different to them. This “youth culture” of raves, remixes, mashups, internet culture, copyleft, etc. is probably a lot more tied to class and race than the proponents would like to admit and/or recognize.
“Is it the technology you’re against, or is it the things you are seeing that you are against?” I agree with that too….
She told a story at the end that I thought was kind of interesting about how one group of Christian students she interviewed who thought that MySpace was a Christian web site. boyd, obviously confused, asked why they thought that, and the students showed her that everyone they know had Christian stuff on their web site. That seems to me to undercut part of her argument a bit in that what it suggests it that users can take this giant world like MySpace and completely misinterpret it to match up with their own world views.
Cliff Lampe offered a pretty good response to a lot of boyd’s points; I’ll need to look him up on this. Lampe suggests that students are using Facebook to collaborate a lot, while professors are not a part of that. I think it’s not so much that professors are not involved in student collaboration as much as they are left out. Or maybe a better way of putting it is students and professors both kind of need their own space, so if my students are using Facebook to collaborate with each other and are leaving me out of it, I think that’s awesome.
Libby Hemphill talked mostly about the problems of getting data on this, which I think is very true….
Ed Vielmenti Vielmetti talked a bit about the way that the migration from one service to another is often a lot more about particular histories (a server broke, etc.) personalities (people have fights and split up groups), a whole group just moves from a mailing list, etc. I don’t disagree with this, but that doesn’t discount completely boyd’s argument either.
To be honest, I got sort of distracted during John Seely Brown’s remarks by a really useful twitter post with this: “@misterkrot: Interesting that the panel on youth use of social media has nobody under 30 on it.”

And then they kinda chatted. One thing that I thought was interesting at the end: boyd talked about how she started blogging because she wanted to take an independent study from a Religion professor who moved away and she wanted to post those texts online.

All in all, a pretty good talk and event. I do think though that it is weird to have a talk about youth, class and social networks in this very fancy palace of an ivory tower and with (mostly) kind of old, rich, white people.

September 18, 2009

Wanting to check out “A Better Pencil,” though with some irony and a smidge of bitterness

I just heard via my colleague Linda AK and the WPA-L mailing list that Dennis Baron is interviewed here in the most recent Inside Higher Ed about his new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. I’m mostly interested in this because I’ve been teaching Baron’s “From Pencils to Pixels” for years, I’ve been teaching an assignment like the one Baron describes in the article where students have to write with something other than traditional tools, and I’ve done some scholarship on the general area of writing tools and pedagogy– an article on chalkboards, presentations on paper, pens, and a couple other things like this I’m forgetting now.

But I’m also interested in seeing this book to see what could have been. Maybe.

Several years ago (maybe close to 10 years ago now), when I was working more earnestly on some of these articles and presentations about writing technologies, I put together a research leave proposal to work on a book. Basically, I wanted to trace the connection between a rising awareness of writing instruction and the accompanying writing technologies. So I went through the process of writing the proposal, outlining the various technologies I planned on writing and researching about, and I thought I had a pretty decent and compelling idea. It was recommended by the department, and was ranked reasonably high in the college of arts and sciences process, too. But when it got to the final committee at the graduate college (or the university as a whole– I’m not sure which– but a committee which I believe had no one from my department on it), my proposal was ranked dead last. I mean like out of like 40 proposals, number 40.

Now, there are a number of different reasons for this of course; the process here tends to weigh toward the sciences or projects tied to grants, and I am sure that my original proposal had any number of problems and limitations. I’m sure I didn’t deserve the award and I’m not saying I was “cheated.” But I do remember some of the comments that came back to me from the committee were rather dismissive of the whole idea. Someone wondered what qualifications I had to research this kind of history; another said the idea of researching writing technology seemed more like an article in a place like Harper’s Magazine rather than a book-length project.

Obviously, I can’t blame this rejection for my lack of follow-through on this project; my not finishing pressing ahead with a book project on this is my own fault and my fault alone. Still, it wasn’t exactly a confidence boost to be told that my scholarly interests seemed mostly fit for curious feature article in a genteel albeit liberal monthly magazine. So I have moved on to other projects, projects where I’m also managing a lack of follow-through, but that is a slightly different story.

Anyway, I’m interested in seeing Dennis’ book and I’ll probably order it today. There’s a part of me that is interested in seeing/imagining “what could have been,” but that’s a very small part since I realize that is a kind of dumb reaction to Baron’s book on my part, and, based on the Inside Higher Ed interview and a peek at the table of contents on the Oxford UP site, there’s probably room for the kind of book-length project on writing technology and pedagogy I have in mind. I’m mostly interested in it because I am interested in the subject matter– like Baron, I’ve been fascinated with various communication technologies for a long time– and there may very well be elements of it that figure into my teaching sooner than later.

But I’ve got to say, I’m also interested in it for a bit of the “I told you so” aspect. I have no way of knowing who on that university committee nearly a decade ago said the history of writing technology was just not worthy of a book, and it is water under the bridge at this point. Still, I wouldn’t mind sending this person/these people a copy. You know, just to point out that there was one press (and a pretty good one, too) that thought the general idea might be worth a book.

September 1, 2009

Oh, you almost had me again, Stanley

There’s a kind of curious entry/article on Stanley Fish’s New York Times “blog,” “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2,” which is about writing instruction and which picks up on his previous article, which I blogged about here. I posted a response on the NYTimes site, but since I have no idea if it will appear there or not, I thought I’d just post it here:

I have to say this seems more of a “revision” of your previous post and less a “response.” After all, in part one of this series, you seemed to be all for a traditional view of teaching grammar and rhetoric: you cited the conservative organization the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and you did write “I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.” Now you are saying that it is “of course” nonsense to teach grammar out of context. But as I am sure you are aware, most administrators, the ACTA, and “people on the street” would interpret the phrase “teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else” as “teach grammar out of context.”

Be that as it may, I agree with your revision, more or less, though I would argue that form in writing various depending on purpose and audience. This is why it is is important that universities are pushing more toward writing within disciplines while simultaneously acknowledging that writing is a field/discipline that itself has content and a purpose. This is why departments separate from “English” have emerged at many colleges and universities.

But what I still see missing in your response/revision is addressing the issue of “the kids today.” The way I read it, you were pointing to anecdotal evidence that college students writing skills were getting worse to support your criticism of “the composition establishment.” This sentiment was certainly echoed in many of the comments, where writers agreed with you that the students today do not write nearly as well as the students of the past.

So, I was wondering what you make of the Stanford Study on Writing, which has received some (albeit more modest) attention recently. The basic argument of Andrea Lunsford and its other researchers is that the youth of today write in more places and for more purposes than they ever have before. Lunsford goes so far as to say “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” This is a lofty claim for sure, but it does appear to be based on actual research, not unlike the Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer article you cite here.

Have you revised/revisited your impression of the sorry state of today’s college writers? Or is that too part of your response/revision here?

August 20, 2009

Teaching online and how I warn students

A student I had in English 444 online this summer and who I will be having in English 505 online this fall noticed that the warning message I send around to students before the class begins is more or less boiler-plate. This is true, and I was also reminded that a couple of different faculty colleagues have asked me for that warning. So, in the spirit of sharing, I offer (after the jump) the email that I send to students before the class begins to warn them about what it is they are getting themselves into.

A couple of thoughts/caveats:

Feel free to borrow/modify from this for your own teaching, though if it makes sense to give me some credit, that’d be okay.
I see this as mostly a “buyer beware” sort of message, but the origins of this message are frustration. When I started teaching online several years ago, I had a couple of students who wrote to me in email messages “I’m not very good with computers.” I found this rather frustrating; why, I asked these students, would you sign up for a class where the main interaction involved a computer?
Has this message “worked?” Yes and no. Mostly “Yes” because some students receive this message and decide that the class might not be right for them, which I take as a success. I’d rather have students recognize that the online class is not for them and not get into in the first place than have to withdraw when they can’t get their money back. And I’d say “Yes” in that when students do get in over their heads, they do know that they had been warned. But “No” in that I still have students who either don’t take my warnings seriously or who over-estimate their technical abilities or time-management skills (though fewer than before).
I ask students to respond to this message, and what’s interesting to me is that students who have had online classes before generally seem to appreciate it the most.

Okay, to the message itself:

Continue reading “Teaching online and how I warn students”

August 14, 2009August 14, 2009

A funny fake and a blog that explains how they did it

I thought this was a lot of fun to read/learn about (while I should have been doing other things): First, there’s this amazing water slide video:

This is fake, and I guess that’s kind of common sense, really. But what I liked as much and/or better was this from Juice The Blog: Unbelievable Waterslide Compositing Walkthrough. Yet another reason to learn more about video….

July 30, 2009July 30, 2009

If your lecture hall looks like this…

… then why have lecture halls at all?

This comes from Will Richardson’s weblogg-ed.

July 29, 2009

Once again, I welcome the death of handwriting

Via the NCTE Inbox, I came across this Time magazine article, “Mourning the Death of Handwriting.” It’s pretty much the same discussion about handwriting that I’ve posted about in the past: isn’t it a shame that handwriting is dying, though there is no compelling reason as to why this really that bad of a thing.

But there are two twists. First, the article’s author, Claire Suddath, actually quotes pretty much the only “real” expert on handwriting I know, Tamara Thornton, who wrote a fantastic book called Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Thornton’s theory about the “death” of handwriting is more tied to the role of standardized testing than increased computer use. “If something isn’t on a test,” she said, “it’s viewed as a luxury.” She has a point.

Second, the article once again highlights the difficulty in trying to figure out just when exactly handwriting “died.” My parents were both born in the 1940s, and my mother writes with a sort of combination of cursive and print, while my father’s handwriting is print, and one that looks like it was heavily influenced by something like an engineering or drafting class he took. My wife and I were both born in the 1960s; Annette’s handwriting is neat and cursive, and my handwriting is awful. We and pretty much everyone else in our generation were formally taught handwriting, but it seems like I and everyone else I know prints. The article’s author, Suddath, interviews her third grade teacher (Suddath said she was in the third grade in 1990) who taught her handwriting and who implies that Suddath’s was pretty much the last generation for whom cursive was a “rite of passage.” My son, born in the late 1990s, has awful handwriting, but he was most definitely taught cursive and I do recall the third and fourth graders seeing writing in cursive as a “grown-up” thing to do.

Anyway, my point is it seems like handwriting has been waning and lost on the next generation for a long time now. But once again, as someone who has never had the coordination (left-handedness, mostly), skill, or patience to write– even print!– neatly, I welcome the ever-returning end of handwriting.

July 25, 2009

“In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero”*

* Plus or minus a bunch of money for various fees and such….

Via Twitter, I stumbled upon this video from back in February about the University of the People, which is an open source university that is free– except for the fee to register and the fee to take classes. Oh, and there are (apparently) no professors, unless you want to call them up and ask them for advice. And just now, I stumbled across this article on Mashup, “In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero.” It’s a really interesting collection of resources, and I’ll probably be sharing it very soon with my Technology for Teaching and Learning class in Traverse City. It could easily be useful for 516.

I have to say I’m a little skeptical. Perhaps I am having the same reaction to this stuff that Metallica has to music piracy, that this “free” university stuff is going to come back to bite people like me, who do not do this teaching stuff for just the love of learning. But the thing is there is a big difference between “information” being free and even course materials being free and an “education” being free. Not to mention a “degree” from an accredited university. Sure, you could study and learn at MIT’s Opencourseware site, but try to apply for an engineering job or something and tell your future employer that you don’t have a degree from MIT, just their web site.

So no, zero is perhaps a little misleading and unrealistic. I do think though that these projects have a lot to teach universities and college in the US. It seems to me that some of these open content and open courseware tools could be applied to lots of programs at EMU to reduce institutional overhead and cost to students. I don’t think that means that a degree from a “real” university is ever going to be free in this country, but it could get a lot cheaper.