Category: The Happy Academic

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Welcome to the Journal of Writing Research

I tend to think of the academic study of writing– as in “composition and rhetoric” in general terms– as a largely North American phenomenon. Sure, they do some of this stuff in Australia too, but the vast majority of people in the field I am in are in the U.S., and the idea of studying writing pedagogy and process is (sorry for the pun here) largely foreign to academics overseas.

Well, that perspective has always been wrong in different ways, and now there is a new journal to prove my wrongness: The Journal of Writing Research has published its first issue. It looks both potentially interesting and kind of weird, which, truth be told, is essentially my somewhat ignorant view of all things European. Take for example this abstract for one of this first issue, “The internal structure of university students’ keyboard skills” by Joachim Grabowski:

Nowadays, university students do not necessarily acquire their typing skills through
systematic touch-typing training, like professional typists. How, then, are the resulting typing skills of university students structured? To reveal the composition of today’s typical typing skills, 32 university students were asked to perform three writing tasks: copying from memory, copying from text, and generating from memory. Variables of keyboard operation that presumably reflect typing abilities and strategies were recorded with ScriptLog, a keystroke logging software; these variables include typing speed, keyboard efficiency, and keyboard activity beyond keypresses that become visible in the final text. Factor analyses reveal three components of typing behavior per task. The clearest interpretations of these components concern keyboard activity/efficiency and typing speed. Across tasks, typing speed is the strongest individually stable facet of keyboard operation. In summary, university students’ keyboard behavior is a multi-faceted skill rather than the mere mastery of a touch-typing method.

See what I mean?

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Misc. posts while watching million dollar password and the movie “Resolved”

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.

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One hundred push ups: it’s worth a shot

I’m getting ready for a series of endings and new beginnings around here.  The spring term is wrapping up, and at the end of that, I’ll be passing the baton of writing program coordinator to my colleague Cheryl Cassidy– more on that another day.  Anyway, that seems as good as time as any to start getting back to exercise and losing weight.

I don’t want to make this about sharing too much information here, but basically, I was able to work out pretty steadily in the fall term, even if I wasn’t able to really lose much weight.  In the winter and the spring, I’ve been quite a bit lazier.  So I’m primed for a restart here.

Which leads me to this link, one hundred push ups.  The premise is very simple:  it’s a six week training program designed to get you to a point where you can do 100 pushups at one time.  Given that the training sessions don’t take that long, hey, what the hell?  I might as well give it a try.

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The new style manual is here! The new style manual is here!

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….

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Computers and Writing 2008: Krause’s Big Wrap-Up

First off, let me back-track a bit and fill in a few more details on what I’ve already mentioned about C&W and this trip:

  • The “very good session” I went to on Friday morning before Jay David Bolter’s talk featured Rik Hunter, Dan Anderson, and Alex Reid. Follow the links for more info on the presentations. Actually, in Rik’s and Dan’s case, you can literally see what they did: both of them had everything pre-recorded and just “delivered” it by cranking up the computer and pushing play. Alex did his the old fashioned way– just talking. All were very good, but it was kind of strange to see the presenter standing there while his movie plays his presentation.
  • Speaking of Alex Reid, congratulations on the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award for Digital Digs!
  • I wish Jay David Bolter’s talk was online someplace, and maybe it will be at some point– they videotaped it. I thought it would be a really interesting teaching tool because he made a bridge/connection between the hypertext experiments of the early 90’s (remember StorySpace?) with gaming experiments (newsgaming.com, for example), poetry that plays on your iPod or your cell phone when you are in certain points of the Atlanta subway, a podcast tour of a cemetery, etc. It reminds me that I need to work gaming back into English 516 the next time I teach it.

Now on to the “part 3” or concluding episode of Computers and Writing 2008 from my pov:

  • My session was at 10 AM on Saturday, and the “prime time” seemed to help us draw a pretty decent-sized crowd. Before me was Gian Pugnucci with a talk called “The WikiBib Project: Exploring the nature of Teaching Collaborative Scholarships in a Wiki.” Basically, he was talking about using a wiki as a means of facilitating collaboration on an annotated bibliography assignment in a graduate class. I’ve talked with Gian about this before and I think we’re going to try and work something out together on this for his and my grad courses next year.

    I was second, and I’ll pretty much let my presentation speak (or not) for itself:

    A slight tangent here: I actually managed to forget the do-hickey for hooking up my laptop, so I spent a few moments thinking I was screwed. But it turns out I was doubly covered. Since this was the computers and writing conference after all, someone in the audience (Carl Whithaus, actually) immediately volunteered his adapter. But besides that, the fine folks in Georgia were completely prepared for this, too. The guy doing tech support for UGa told me he had a whole bag full of the adapters I needed and was very confident that he could get the projector set-up to work. Quite a contrast to the way the projectors often work (or not) in Pray-Harrold.Anyway, I got some great feedback from folks on what to do with the whole “finished blogger” issue, and as we discussed during the session, my use of the word “failure” in my talk is probably not right. “Not finished,” “abandoned, or and as often as not, “ended at the appropriate time” are probably better terms. In any event, helpful ideas from attendees.

    The third presenter was Natalie Szymanski from Florida State with a talk titled “Wikis and Composition Pedagogy: Avoiding the Bandwagon.” Basically, she was suggesting that maybe we ought to slow down a bit on all of this stuff like wikis. While I didn’t agree with many of the things she had to say, I had to give her credit because it’s nice to see someone at this conference have the guts to point out that we’re in the “writing business” and not the “isn’t this software I just learned about cool business.”

  • And then it was time for golf. I was part of a foursome with Steve Benninghoff, Gian, and Nick Carbone out at the University of Georgia Golf Course. In hind-sight, I think we should have picked a more “accessible” course since Benninghoff and I could have used a bit of a “palate cleanser” after the challenges of that course in Kentucky, and Gian and Nick, neither of whom had swung a club in over a year, could have just used something easier. This was one bad-assed hard hard course, certainly in the top 2 or 3 in difficulty that I’ve played, and a course that made me wish for an easy one like Pierce Lake or Eagle Crest.

    But hey, it was a friendly game, and a good time was had by one and all even if the play wasn’t great. Actually, it got a lot more fun when we started the back nine and we played a cart versus cart scramble, but Nick had to leave a little early, so it just kind of degenerated into some sloppy play at the end of a long death march of a round.

  • Steve B. and Gian and I had some BBQ that I thought was pretty so-so, and then we went off to Kingpins Bowl and Brew for the ritual of the bowling night. I managed to catch up with a few folks who I didn’t get a chance to talk to much during the conference itself (including Courtney, who is doing great), had a few more Terapins, and even managed a little bowling (I scored 100– I had forgotten that real bowling isn’t as easy as Wii bowling).
  • And then Sunday was the long drive home. I managed to prod my more leisurely traveling companion onto the road by 6:30 and we were back in Ypsilanti in less than 12 hours, which, when I think about the expense and general pain in the butt of flying, makes me think that driving was a good idea, with or without the golf.

So an excellent conference/roadtrip. Well done, UGa, folks! Here are some pictures of the whole things– eventually, I’ll add some info about all these pictures.

Next year, C&W is going to be at UC-Davis and it is going to be toward the end of June. I don’t know if I’ll be going yet or not, to tell the truth. On the down-side, the CCCCs is in San Francisco this year, and I don’t think I can afford 2 trips to California just to conference. On the other hand, Annette and Will and I might want to make this part of a west coast “pilgrimage” back to Ashland. We shall see….

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Too much information?

I have to get caught up on grading and get geared up for my road-trip/golf trip to the Computers and Writing Conference in Athens, GA (don’t worry, more will be coming soon on that), but I thought I’d take a moment to post on a couple of articles that I’ve been meaning to post on for a couple days now.  The first Julie Frechette’s piece in Inside Higher Ed, “Crossing the (Digital) Line,” which points to a NYTimes piece, “The Professor as Open Book.”  The short version is that both stories talk about the ever-amusing “Professors Strike Back” web site and show, and they talk about that fuzzy line between a college professor “relating” to students and materials by sharing personal information, versus the professor who shares, um, too much.  Frechette sees this as a potential professorial power-play:  the professor shares details and expects his students to give up equally (more so?) juicy details.  That makes sense to me, but in my own experiences as a student, I guess I was particularly put off by the professor who interprets a class about, say, 18th century British Literature (I didn’t take that class, btw) to be primarily about him, his cats, his wife, and their broken-down Subaru.

But I think what information a professor shares in a teaching/professional environment is different than the information that a professor (who, generally speaking, is also a human) shares about him or herself via a web site or a blog or a Facebook account or whatever.  And while there is always some discretion involved in what one does or doesn’t write about online (or at least there should be), I think that most professionals who work in the public sphere (professors, but I would also include lawyers, doctors, journalists, clergy, etc.) have to make a decision about “sharing.”

I used to keep a “professional” blog and a “personal” blog in an effort to draw some separation between those areas of my life.  I like Derrida and Spongebob Squarepants, for example.  But as I wrote when I started this combined blog, I realized that that separation had broken down a long time ago.  Thus one blog.

In any event, students in my students are not likely to hear me go on and on a lot about my wife, son, and dog during class.  But they are as likely to read my thoughts on teaching, scholarship, and the upcoming C&W conference as they are about my golf game.  Fortunately, this week’s trip will likely combine all of the above.

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What those crazy college kids are reading: 87/97/07

I haven’t had a chance to read all of this, but I wanted to post a link before I forgot, before I restart my browser and computer, and before I start grading. This is “A snapshot of student reading habits over two decades,” from a UC-Berkeley News website. Since I don’t have the time to do the reading right now (ironically enough), I just stuck with the top 10 lists, and just to make it even easier, I’ll just stick here with the top 2:

  • 1987: #1 The Color Purple (Alice Walker); #2 The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
  • 1997: #1 The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) #2 A Hundred Secret Senses (Amy Tan)
  • 2007: #1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling) #2 title unspecified (J.K. Rowling)
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PhD program advice yet again

There’s a discussion going on the WPA-L mailing list right now about advice for PhD programs; the basic request was to come up with a “top 10” list of PhD programs in composition and rhetoric, but it would appear to me that most people on the list resisted that temptation pretty quickly. As they should, of course. This did bring back for me this post from a month ago, but I liked this post from Paul Kei Matsuda’s blog that Mike Garcia of a “top 10” of advice on what to think about when choosing a PhD program. This is a heck of a lot more useful than a list of ten schools that may have or may not have earned their reputations.

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Warning– Blogging may kill you

From the NYT, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” Basically, some of these professional bloggers are working to a point where they are hurting themselves:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Well, I think you can substitute “blogging” with occupations/pursuits/situations like “graduate school” or “working in a chicken processing plant” or “being homeless” or the like. It isn’t hard to think of things more dangerous than professional blogging. Still, it is a reason why it seems to me that it is better to be an amateur blogger.

I might be able to use this in the Writing for the World Wide Web class this spring….

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What does a Comp/Rhet person do? (or, taking the bait on two recent comp/rhet articles)

Via the wpa-l mailing list, I learned about two different and oddly related articles out there in the blogosphere: “What Is a Composition and Rhetoric Doctorate?” from Inside Higher Ed and “What is Rhet/Comp for?” from Mark Bauerlein in the CHE. The IHE article is reporting on a session from the current CCCCs about the “split” between composition and rhetoric, the future of PhD programs in the field, and the shift into more “media” and technology oriented kinds of things. The Bauerlein piece, basically, is him wondering why it is that the field of comp/rhet, when they should have the answer for solving writing problems in the workplace and everywhere else, is worrying about things like social justice, identity, inequality, etc.

Nothing new under the sun down there in NOLA, as far as I can tell.
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