Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
See this game, “Home Run,” which has directions in German and a domain address in, I don’t know, Switzerland or the Czech Republic or some place (but I know Germany is “de”). Anyway, the goal is to help the drunk home.
Those sophisticated Europeans….
Here’s another interesting article that appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail about the importance of handwriting, “Is the Pen Mightier than the Keyboard?” by Margaret Philip. It is a story that features the “usual suspects” regarding the demise of handwriting, though it does include an interesting reference to a study:
Prof. [Marvin] Simner [a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario] conducted a research study a few years ago in which he compared the writing of pupils in public elementary schools in London, Ont., with that of children enrolled in private Dutch Reform schools, where handwriting and the distinct flourishes of the European-style script are still taught.
Not only was the private-school writing more legible and artfully crafted, students could write faster, producing a full sentence more than a minute faster than their public-school counterparts.
“This gets to be very important,” Prof. Simner says. “Obviously, if handwriting is slower and you’re taking notes, you’re not copying down everything that’s important. Children who are struggling with handwriting and are slower tend to forget what they want to say because their thoughts are fleeting. And that affects their grades.”
Ah, if they keep notes on a laptop, then typing speed matters a whole lot more, doesn’t it?
In any event, I don’t think it’s an “either/or” situation. My son, who is in second grade, spends a fair amount of time in his schooling working on his handwriting, including on cursive. I’m told that cursive is taken more seriously in the third grade, maybe in the fourth too. That isn’t a whole lot different than when I was a kid.
Furthermore, I recall the shift to keyboarding in junior high when I was a kid 25 years ago; I can’t remember if it was seventh or eighth grade, but I definitely remember taking typing. As I think about it now, the teaching technique for the course was bizarre. The teacher (a woman who I imagine was not exactly thrilled to be teaching five sections of typing a day every day) stood at the front of the room, standing before a raised desk with a typewriter on it. All of the students sat in rows before their electric (I think they were electric) typewriters. There were typing instruction books that stood before us like tents. “Turn to page 14,” the teacher would say. “Hands in place.” We’d put our hands in place, index fingers resting on the f and the j. “Begin,” and then we’d type whatever phrases were on that page to test our fingering.
A pretty stupid class, but I still touch-type pretty well. I can’t say the same about my current use of cursive.
The end of the semester and school year is near, so I don’t have much time to post. But besides being one of the busiest months in the school year, April also is National Poetry Month. I was reminded of this not by the fine poets who teach here at EMU but by some fellow comp/rhet folks. Go figure.
Anyway, let me direct you to two different posts for your poetic musings:
this means that you are
other words tar
class top style margin left
class should bereft
learn about software help your
a b drawer
chunk of reading
and writing about the world heading
web site into a
old that can make a passe
p blockquote p
access to a personal tee
p not surprisingly there will
that genre this project will swill
you will propose
talking about basic design prose
I like those last couple lines a lot. Sort of sums up the purpose of that class….
I don’t know if this is a good idea or a bad idea, but here’s the story: Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.4 Billion. It might be good because a combined Adobe/Macromedia could defend itself against Microsoft; it might be bad because the sort of interesting differences between Macromedia’s products might get sorta squished into Adobe’s products, and vice-versa.
Interesting.
Anyway, I now return to end of the semester grading and other duties….
I’m not much of a meme kinda guy, but just to build on posts by Collin, Jeff and Jenny (and because it was kind of fun playing around with this in Flickr), I present my “memory map.” I don’t think I played the game correctly because it’s not a map of where I grew up or live or anything like that, nor is it a story per se. But like I said, it was fun playing with both Google’s Map site and with Flickr’s note editing options. Click on the picture to see the notes.
I had an annoying conversation with someone at EMU today (who will remain unnamed because I am polite and also because I don’t remember his name) about the concept of “fair use” as it pertains to copyright. I’ll spare the details here, but this colleague was convinced that I was most certainly breaking the law with my use of EMU’s e-reserves system and the reason why I wasn’t being sued over this was because I was “small potatoes,” or some such thing. He said this to me several times.
I don’t think that this colleague had any unique wisdom regarding copyright and fair use; his main qualifications for making such a pronouncement seemed to be that he was much older and taller than me.
In any event, I came home and did a little bit of basic web research and I learned two basic things. First, it seems that the rules for fair use as they apply to e-reserves kind of depends on who you want to believe. For example, this press release from the Association of American Publishers suggests that materials in e-reserves have to be cleared in the same fashion as materials that appear in printed course packets. I was under the impression that one of the main reasons why the coursepack people had to go through this was because they made money from them. Regardless, this kind of “hardline stance” isn’t surprising, given the nature of the organization.
On the other hand, The American Library Association Statement on Fair Use and Electronic Reserves is pretty open-minded and flexible about fair use as it applies to e-reserves. Again, probably not surprising. I think one of the most interesting passages is the “Summary” that appears in the last paragraph:
While there is no guarantee that a practice or combination of practices is fair use, such certainty is not required to safely implement e-reserves. The law builds in tolerance for risk-taking. At one end of the continuum are combinations of practices with which individuals and institutions tolerant of some risk will be comfortable. On the other end are combinations of practices with which those who are averse to risk will be more comfortable. Each institution’s combination of practices reflects its tolerance for risk against the background of prevailing beliefs about fair use. Understandably, “not knowing” makes many people uncomfortable, so Congress explicitly addressed this aspect of fair use. Section 504(c)(2) of the Copyright Act provides special protection to nonprofit libraries, educational institutions and their employees. When we act in good faith, reasonably believing that our actions are fair use, in the unlikely event we are actually sued over a use, we will not have to pay statutory damages even if a court finds that we were wrong. This demonstrates Congressional acknowledgement of the importance of fair use and the importance of our using it!
I’m reading this as meaning that as long as I’m not trying to violate copyright laws and my intentions are educational, I’ll be fine, as will everyone else at EMU who are acting in good faith. In other words, my taller/senior colleague ought to not worry.
However (and this is my second learned idea of the day), I do think that my review of the “rules” of fair use make me realize that I need to maintain and/or “close off” my e-reserve sites at the end of semesters and not just leave that stuff up there all the time. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but part of fair use seems to require me to occasionally take things off of the site. It doesn’t say exactly how long I have to do that, but since I won’t be needing these things this summer, I’d say that will probably be long enough.
This is what I’ve been doing off and on this afternoon instead of what I’m supposed to be doing.
This is at the South Park Studio site. Pretty fun stuff.
Okay, I’m going back to work now. I promise.
I just got an email via tech-rhet about the Computers and Writing Conference, which is going to be at Stanford Univesity this year. To be honest, I haven’t heard much about this year’s conference, though I haven’t been paying that much attention, either.
Don’t get me wrong– C&W is always a great conference, and while I’ve heard some grumblings about the way things have been organized (or not), I’m sure that it will be a fine time for one and all once things get underway in mid-June. But I’m not going this year simply because of location. I went to the CCCCs in San Francisco this year, and while that was a surprisingly inexpensive trip for me, I decided I can’t really afford to go to two conferences way out on the west coast in one year. I suppose there are people out west who feel the same way about coming east.
Hopefully, many of the usual suspects will be out there and blogging about various events. And I will be attending next year when it will be (in all places!) Lubbock, Texas. I’m looking forward to visiting Texas Tech, though I am so not looking forward to going to Lubbock– no offense to, ah, Lubbockers? Lubbockities? Lubs? Anyway, I’ll be going to next year’s C&W because a) I’m not going to this year’s C&W, and b) the other conference I’ll be going to this coming year, the CCCCs, is an easy four hour drive from here in Chicago. I was going to say “c) I can drive to Lubbock,” but Mapquest tells me it’s around 1400 miles from Ypsilanti. Hmmm….
One thing I am becoming increasingly convinced about: blogging doesn’t work that well as a teaching tool.
No, scratch that–
I haven’t figure out how to use blogging effectively in my own teaching. At least not quite yet.
I’m working on an essay that will hopefully come out soon that makes part of this argument, and I made another part of this argument in an essay that came out in Kairos last Fall called “When Blogging Goes Bad.” But basically, I just haven’t had that much luck in using blogs in my teaching, especially as a way of facilitating conversation among students in class. I think emailing lists do a much MUCH better job of fostering interaction and discussion, especially as it pertains to readings and class activities. Now, some of that has to do with the way that I’ve used emailing lists in the past and the sort of presumptions I have about what counts as “interaction.” I mean, just because my students post a lot of message on email doesn’t necessarily mean they “interact” more than they do on a blog.
Anyway, my efforts at using a blog collaboratively this semester was in my Writing for the World Wide Web class. Here’s a link to the class blog (which I’ll probably delete soon, btw). I thought it went okay– better than some collaborative experiences I’ve had before, not as well as I hoped (though again, maybe expectations were too high).
One thing that did work reasonably well were the student blogs in my tiny graduate course, Writing Research Theory and Practice. Students kept individual blogs about their “adventures” on the research trail, and while not all students were as diligent with their posting as I would have preferred, I wasn’t as diligent as making use of the blogs in my teaching as I would have preferred. It’s been a crazy semester. See yesterday’s post.
Anyway, I do think this use of blogs– individual student research journals– has some potential. I’m scheduled to teach a section of first year writing in spring term (which actually starts the first week of May), and I think I might try to incorporate an assignment like this into the class. I’ll probably be a bit more specific about what and when I want students to write, and I think I’ll build an “interactive” component into the assignment by requiring students to post comments and/or links to each others’ blogs. We’ll see how it turns out.
But regardless, I really REALLY missed having a class emailing list for these two classes this semester. Besides a lack of interaction (or at least my own perceived version of interaction), it just was kind of hard to get a hold of students on short notice. And there were a couple times this semester where I needed to get a hold of folks in these classes (and btw, these two classes only meet once a week) to inform them of important schedule changes and such. A crazy semester, like I said. See yesterday.
I could (and did) post schedule updates on web sites or blogs, but I wasn’t always confident that students got the information. With an emailing list, I felt a lot more confident (even positive?) that students knew what was going on because 9 out of 10 of my students check their email every day, or at least in a timely fashion before the class meets.
I’m thinking about some ways I can use blogs and other blog-like tools for an online class I’m teaching in the fall, but that’s another story. More end thoughts later.
Outside of the EMU Halle library today, I saw a young woman standing outside. Under a jacket, I saw she was wearing a T-shirt that said “Kiss Me– I’m Vegan.” Then she reached into her jacket, pulled out and then lit a cigarette.
