Category: Uncategorized

Well no, not really.

Hits to my site are up quite a bit, and I didn’t really think of it much until I came across this post at the “Playing School, Irreverently. Basically, the “profgrrrrl” didn’t like the way I mentioned her blog in my blog the other day. Read the comments on the blog, and you’ll see what I mean.

Well. Let me again publicly apologize to the (pseudo)anonymous profgrrrl and her friends and fans. It’s not my intent to belittle or anything like that. Sorry if I hurt feelings.

But, at the risk of ticking people off more by writing under my own name and at my own blog, I thought I’d make a couple of observations about all this stuff:

* Obviously, I have a bit of a problem in terms of my own “identity” and “power” in this discussion because I’m a middle-aged and married white guy who is tenured. So when I say that I don’t think it’s true that women or the untenured need to hide behind a fake name in blogs or anywhere else, those women are going to say “Yeah, easy for you to say that, tenured male dog-pig!” I suppose they have a point.

Nonetheless, I still think what I’m getting at is true. Academia– or at least what I’ve been able to see of it up to this point– tends to reward the squeaky wheel. People who critique the system in intelligent ways tend to actually get positive attention from folks because academics, who tend to be pretty smart people, welcome these insights. Or at least academics recognize that they are supposed to welcome these insights. I’m not sure a lot of my administrative colleagues at EMU are “pleased” with the criticism they’re getting right now, but I am sure that they won’t publicly castigate faculty for complaining about things.

In any event, and maybe this is naive, I think it’s rare when someone faces reprisals in the world of academia for saying what they think in something like a blog space. I’ve always said that if the most famous of anonymous bloggers, the “Invisible Adjunct,” had published under her own name, she wouldn’t have been fired as an adjunct, and, in fact, she may have been hired into a tenure-track job.

* I personally have a hard time understanding why anyone would go through the effort of creating a somewhat elaborate pseudonym persona on an academic blog, an identity that includes a fake name, a fake school, a fake town, maybe even a fake discipline, just so that person can write about things in a public place they wouldn’t be able to write about otherwise. But okay, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there are good reasons for doing this. It seems to me that there are at least two inevitable issues/problems.

First, once a writer writes something and posts it to the web on a blog for all to see, that writer more or less loses control of their text. In other words, once you post it to the world and make it available for linking and everything else, it isn’t yours anymore. Period. So if other readers interpret what you’re saying differently or don’t like what you’re saying, well, too bad, there’s nothing you can do about it. This is why I believe it is important for folks to think before they post and to recognize that, despite the fact that blogs frequently feel to writers and readers like a personal journal or diary, they really ultimately aren’t.

Second, I’m not sure that using a pseudonym/being anonymous is going to automatically protect you and allow you to say whatever you want. Now, having said that, I guess the Invisible Adjunct was able to protect herself with her pseudonym; however, she didn’t really say anything that mean or negative in a way that might get her in some kind of trouble. But if “profgrrrrl” really went off on her place of employment or on a colleague or a group of students, I have to think that she would be “outted.” And of course those bloggers who use pseudonyms are practicing a form of self censorship in order to protect their “real” identity anyway. So what’s the difference?

* Identity is a pretty strange thing, especially on the Internet. I could go on and on about this– and I kind of do in my dissertation, particularly in the fourth chapter— but in the nutshell, the nature of the medium (and I argue about this in terms of “the rhetorical situation,” but it’s easy enough to think about this in other ways too) makes identity extremely fluid. I always think of that famous New Yorker cartoon from the early 90s that shows two dogs sitting at a computer. One dog is talking to the other, and the caption reads “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Ain’t that the truth.

So I would contend that all of us– including me– create and recreate our identity(ies) all the time, certainly every time we write. I try to create some “order” with my identites by maintaining this “official” blog and my “unofficial” blog, but this too is a completely artificial construction of aspects of my identity, and it most certainly isn’t a complete or even partial picture of my identity. How could it be?

* I have to think that one of the appeals of maintaining an anonymous blog, academic or otherwise, is it’s a little bit, well, “naughty” and secretive and like wearing a costume or something. You know, like going in costume to a Star Trek convention: you can pretend to be a Vulcan or a Klingon. I guess that’s some peoples’ idea of fun, and I guess it’s harmless enough; but part of what I’m getting at is I think that the folks who create a pseudonym to blog with are doing it less to “protect” themselves and more because it’s fun to pretend.

That’s enough of that. I need to get on with the work of the day, the whole “teacher/scholar” thing…

I came across this article, “UAB’s editor’s blog raises legal questions,” while surfing around and stumbling across yet another “anonymous” blogger telling sassy stories about the underbelly of academia, Playing School, Irreverently.

The newspaper article is about a guy named Doug Gillett who works for the University of Alabama at Birmingham as an editor in the “creative services department,” whatever that is. Gillett keeps a blog called “George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!” and he got in trouble for spending “company time” working on this blog. To quote from the newspaper article:

Election law prohibits public employees from using “state, county or city funds, property or time, for any political activities.” The state ethics law has a similar prohibition….University of Alabama at Birmingham spokeswoman Dale Turnbough said Thursday Gillett will face disciplinary action. “UAB has clear policies against using university time and resources for partisan politics or non-university business and takes violation of those policies seriously,” Turnbough said. “We began to look into this matter as soon as it was brought to our attention today, and we will follow up with appropriate disciplinary action in a timely fashion as soon as we conclude our review.”

Several thoughts come to mind:

* As I’ve always said, this is one of the reasons why I have always maintained an “official and academic” blog and an “unofficial and rant ‘n rave” blog.

* This is also one of the reasons why I have for several years owned my own computer. I used to have an EMU-owned laptop as my main computer, but that always made me nervous– not because of a free speech issue, but because if the computer had been lost or stolen on my watch, I would have owed EMU for it. If the laptop I own is stolen, that’s a different kind of problem. Plus I can play games and goof-off with this computer without a tinge of guilt.

* One of Gillett’s problems (as far as I can tell from the story) is he was an “on the clock/regular” employee of UAB and not a faculty person. That doesn’t mean Gillett doesn’t have his right to an opinion or anything like that; but the nature of the work habits of many faculty, I don’t think they’ll getting many tenure-track folks on this same “policy” against using university time and resources.

* Every person I know who has a “real” job (and I must admit, I don’t know that many people who do have “real” jobs) spends at least part of their office time surfing the web.

* I doubt this sort of thing would happen at EMU. I don’t want to be too critical of the folks at UAB, but it doesn’t surprise me that a policy like this exists in Alabama. And it also doesn’t surprise me that they’re coming down hard on an anti-Bush site. I’m just speculating here, but I wonder if folks at UAB posting to the anti-Kerry blogs on company time are getting a “pass?”

* Finally, the blog “Playing School, Irreverently” is like the second or third blog I’ve come across lately that is written anonymously by someone who claims to either have another blog with their name on it and/or that they are “successful” and “well-known” academics in their more “visible” lives. Inevitably, these anonymous blogs are set up as a space to complain and gripe and vent about things.

A while back, I thought about setting up a blog that focused on my “happy academic” theme of posts. But I got lazy and I decided I could just post those things on this blog. But now I’m rethinking that. I don’t want to be anonymous for reasons I’ve written about before, but I’m beginning to think that it might be kind of fun to have that separate space, and maybe to invite some folks to post their own “happy academic” stories. Just for a change of pace.

See this article, “Square Peg, Round Hole,” by Charles A. Goldthwaite, Jr. (actually his real name. Basically, Goldthwaite (I wonder if he’s any relation to “Bobcat”– remember him?) tells the story of how he was a freelance science and medical writer while in graduate school and how he “ramped up” his business after he couldn’t find a job with his new PhD in American Lit.

I think he’s giving some good advice here to folks who find themselves in similar situations– PhD in some form of lit in hand and no place to go. But, wearing the hat of a happy academic, I have to make two observations:

* Given all the science and medical writing that Goldthwaite has done as a freelancer, both as a grad student and since then, I kind of wonder why he didn’t try to “re-package” himself as a technical writing scholar? It might take a bit, but I don’t see it as much of a stretch. I might be totally wrong about this, but it’s such a “seller’s market” for folks who study and teach technical writing nowadays that my impression is a lit PhD who “does tech writing” would be able to get a tenure-track job in tech writing. One of my tech writing colleagues here at EMU essentially has that background (though he has very much left his literary studies behind), and I know a guy who was working on a PhD in literature at about the same time I was working on my PhD in comp/rhet who now teaches tech writing stuff in the business school at Western Michigan U.

Maybe Goldthwaite doesn’t realize that this is a possible route back into academia, or maybe the last thing he wants to do is teach tech writing. I don’t know. But I do think it’s something for him to think about.

* I have to take issue with what Goldthwaite is implying is the “curse” of his “whiteness” and how it hurt his chances on the academic job market. To quote at length from the article:

At my first mock job interview with a faculty member from my home institution, I was informed that I would appear “too white.” (My dissertation examined the uses of rock music and culture in American prose literature of the last 50 years, and white men have created the lion’s share of the source material.)

Having been white my entire life, however, I was unsure how to amend this shortcoming in the three weeks that remained before the real interviews at the Modern Language Association convention. Am I efficient? Yes. Able to fill a niche? I think so. White? Without a doubt.

Again, I can only speculate on the whole story, but I suspect the fact that his scholarly project focused on late 20th century American lit hurt his job prospects a hell of a lot more than his whiteness. The academic job market is simply saturated with folks who study and teach this kind of thing nowadays, and the result is an extreme “buyer’s” market. I wasn’t on any of the comittees, but we’ve hired recently in American lit, and the folks we’ve been able to hire are pretty impressive.

Second, I don’t think “being white” is a disadvantage because I don’t think the implication of reverse discrimination is accurate. Let me put it this way: there is no question that qualified job candidates who are members of some minority group (African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, etc., etc.) have a certain advantage on the academic job market. As they should– I’m a firm believer in the value of diversity in higher education. On the other hand, I don’t think academic hiring committees make choices against white candidates in the way that I think Goldthwaite is implying here; that is, I don’t think hiring committees say “we can’t hire another white guy.”

Beyond that quibble though, I think Goldthwaite’s article is a “must read” for the many folks in a similar “PhD in hand and no academic job” position.

See http://www.angusdiet.com/, part of Burger King’s latest ad campaign about their non-dietary burgers. I have to say that a big part of me, including the part that has been trying to diet, admires this ad campaign because it’s basically a big ol’ “fuck you” to all these sensible diets, like the South Beach diet. The message here is eat more greasy burgers, it’ll make you feel better. Sure, why not?

I’m getting together a syllabus for a gradute course I’m teaching in the fall called “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice.” The course is pretty much about what the title implies, although one thing not obvious is the course is supposed to be about pedagogy.

One of the challenges about teaching classes that have to do with technology and writing (as opposed to, say, Shakespeare) is that most readings more than about 3 years old get pretty “long in the tooth.” While I’ve taught the class several times before, I haven’t taught it since spring 2003, and back then, the readings I were teaching were getting kind of old. One of the things I’m doing in the spirit of the “out with the old, in with the new” this fall is to assign book review presentation/projects for the class. Basically, students get 15 minutes to give their spiel in class about one of the books on this list, and they need to hand in a short (3 or 4 page) essay about the book.

In putting together this list, I decided to stick to “authored books” (as opposed to edited collections of essays), books published in the last 4 years, and that it had something to do with “computers and writing.” I was aiming for books that had to do with teaching, but I also included things on the list that I guess have more to do with things like “media” and “cyberculture” in a more abstract sense. Anyway, here’s my list of books available for review (and for goodness’ sake, if you have anything to add to the list or if there’s anything here that you know is bad, let me know):

Alvermann, Donna E. Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies, Vol. 7). Peter Lang Publishing, 2002. (Steve’s comments: the amazon.com description says in part: "Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World explores the significance of digital technologies and media in youth’s negotiated approaches to making meaning within a broad array of self-defined literacy practices.")

Bolter, Jay David Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Second Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. (Steve’s comments: solidly a "computers and writing" book; revision
of one of the very important books in the field)

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 2000. (Steve’s comments: Interesting book, very much about "cyberculture" and fairly theoretical, too).

Cuban, Larry. Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. (Steve’s comments: Cuban’s book focuses on K-12 issues and not "computers and writing" per se)
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. (Steve’s comments: This book comes highly recommended from several friends and colleagues.)

Hayles, N. Katherine, and Anne Burdick. Writing Machines (Mediaworks Pamphlets). MIT Press, 2002. (Steve’s comments: Hayles is a very theoretical writer, and the reviews suggest that this book is a melding of "pseudo-autobiography" and theoretical reading of the way electronic publishing has changed texts.)

Inman, James. Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Era. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. (Steve’s comments: A "brand-new" book, Inman is a fairly well-known and respected name in the "computers and writing"
community. Probably a focus on higher ed and theories of writing).

Kress, Gunther. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge Press, 2003. (Steve’s comments: Kress is a great writer and his previous work focuses on "Language Arts," education, technology.)

Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel. New Literacies. Open University Press, 2003. (Steve’s comments: the description on amazon.com suggests this book is about the "new literacies" and "new social practices" of literacy.)

McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality : Literature after the World Wide Web. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.(Steve’s comments: Brand-spankin’ new book which seems to be as much about "literary theory" as it is about the web.)

Meadows, Mark. Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. Pearson Education, 2002. (Steve’s comments: Highly recommended; the focus seems more on the uses of "interactive/multimedia" narratives in "writings"in general– not really about education).

Monroe, Barbara. Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology in the Classroom. Teachers College Press, 2004. (Steve’s comments: Brand-spankin’ new book that looks like a promising read).

Palloff, Rena M. and Keith Pratt. The Virtual Student: A Profile and Guide to Working with Online Learners. Jossey-Bass 2003. (Steve’s comments: Highly recommended, a focus on K-12 and "education," not just English studies.)

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Perseus Publishing, 2002. (Steve’s comments: Rheingold has gotten a lot of "buzz" as a result of this book; more about "cyberculture" than it is about "computers and writing.")

Selber, Stuart. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Southern Illinois UP, 2004. (Steve’s comments: Selber is a well-regarded "computers and writing" scholar. The focus here is almost certainly higher ed.)

Snyder, Illana and Catherine Beavis. Doing Literacy Online: Teaching, Learning and Playing in an Electronic World. Hampton Press, 2004.

Warschauer, Mark. Electronic Literacies: Language, Culture, and Power in Online Education. LEA, 2000. (Steve’s comments: This looks to be pretty clearly about "computers and writing" with a focus on higher education).

Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. MIT Press, 2003. (Steve’s comments: As the title suggests here, the focus is on the concept of "the digital divide." Less about writing or education and more about "cyberculture" in some broad sense).

Wepner, Shelley B., William J. Valmont, and Richard Thurlow. Linking Literacy and Technology: A Guide for K-8 Classrooms. International Reading Association, 2000. (Steve’s comments: Judging from the description comments on amazon.com, this is a book that seems to emphasize "practice" over "theory" in K-8 teaching.)

Wysocki, Anne Frances; Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Utah State UP, 2004. (Steve’s comments: A brand-spankin’ new and probably somewhat experimental book, very much "in the middle"of computers and writing.)

Via the Humanist listserv, I came across this site, about a Ted Nelson concept in database design called ZigZag. Nelson describes what these databases would look like (sort of) in this talk at a “wearable computer” conference; toward the end of that talk, he defines ZigZag as:

“ZigZag is software built entirely out of connections in an interesting space, which I call Quantum Hyperspace (though it may have some other mathematical name I don’t know about, since I stumbled upon it independently).  It’s best compared to beads on a string: every cell is like a bead with many holes, and you can put one string of any color (dimension) through each bead.”

and…

“ZigZag takes place in a conceptual space which can be made visible as rows and columns, and mapped to human activities and interests in a rich and insightful way.  Thus it offers some very interesting interface possibilities.  I see it as a possible new basis for a new world of software, outside of today’s fads– with no icons, no “metaphors” (dead-end scraps of comparison like the “desktop” and “clipboard”), and best of all, no “applications”– separated, imprisoning, proprietary activity traps in which the commercial software vendors try to mire us.”

Kind of interesting, I guess, but whenever I think of Ted Nelson, I always think of this great article from a 1995 Wired magazine, Gary Wolf’s “The Curse of Xanadu.” Maybe one of the best articles I read in Wired when I used to subscribe to it, Wolf tells the “tragic” story of Nelson, a brillian guy we would today describe as having A.D.D. or something like that. Before you buy stock in ZigZag or even get too excited about it, read this.

… Craig Dean Willis, the recently retired president of Lock Haven University, in Pennsylvania. Go to the EMU homepage to learn very minimal details.

I have been doing some googling about this guy, but I’ve found very little. I will say this in the “for what it’s worth” category of things:

* Lock Haven University, while a school that originated as a “normal school,” seems quite a bit different than EMU to me. It’s a small school– less than 5,000 students– and it is in rural Pennsylvania.

* Willis was president of Lock Haven for 12 years, and at one point in time, that made him one of the longest serving university presidents in the country.

* On first glance, I couldn’t find anything particularly negative about Willis, nothing along the lines of “Willis house controversy lingers” or “Willis farewell canceled because of protests” or something like that.

So, we’ll see. I wonder if Willis fully understands what he’s got himself into…

Update:
I thought I’d mention that the board didn’t pick Willis’ name out of a hat– well, at least not exactly. Apparently, Willis works for The Registry for College and University Presidents, an organization that specializes in placing interim college and university presidents. In fact, as I understand the story as reported on WEMU this morning, Willis will technically work for this organization, and not EMU.

In other words, Willis is a “temp.” I used to be a temp for about a year and a half, between the time I was in school for my MFA and my PhD, and while the work I did back then (mostly things like filing and simple computer work) is different from what Willis will be expected to do, the principle is the same: EMU will pay “The Registry” (WEMU just reported this morning that we’ll pay them $23,000 a month for Willis), and then “The Registry” will pay Willis (and I assure you that it will be less than $23,000 a month).

Two more thoughts on this:

* I don’t want to disparage the concept of going to this agency and hiring a temp president. Far from it. This very well may be the first “smart thing” the EMU board of regents has done in, well, years…

* It’s kind of fascinating to me that there is enough of a “demand” out there to keep a company in business that specializes in placing interim presidents in colleges and universities. That tells me there must be a lot of interim presidents out there.

I’m starting to lose a little faith in Alton Brown here…

As I wrote way back in May, one of my favorite cooking guys, Alton “Good Eats” Brown, said he was going on a diet and that he was hoping to be down to 185 by the end of July, In fact, way back then on his blog of sorts called “Rants and Raves,” which is part of the altonbrown.com universe, he wrote the following:

To keep me honest I make this promise: On July 30 of this year I will post a photograph on this web page of myself wearing nothing but a bathing suit.

Hmm. Some “bathing suit,” huh?

It seems to me that there are only two possible conclusions here. One possibility is that Alton is just too modest to pose in a real bathing suit for all the world to see. Anyone who has seen his show, one where he regularly makes a fool of himself in the name of food science, will tell you that Alton ain’t shy. The other possibilty in my mind is it that he didn’t come close to meeting his goal. Given that one of his most recent entries about the movie Supersize Me! has a sort of “so what?” conclusion about the fact that the food McDonalds serves is profoundly fattening.

Alton, Alton, Alton…

-13 pounds

I know it’s just early August, but the summer is winding down for us. We don’t have a lot of “entertainment commitments” coming up (Annette’s parents are coming to town for a few days, and we might have some folks over one weekend before school starts, but that’s about it), I don’t think we’re leaving town again, and we’re going to have to start getting ready for school sooner than later. So it’s time for us to get “back on the wagon” diet-wise.

I’m back to -13 as of this morning, but that’s after being back to phase 1 (more or less) for a couple days. The Amanas in particular and Iowa in general was a fatty-fat adventure, and as I wrote before, it’s been kind of hard for me to think of myself as “dieting” at all since Hawaii. But Annette and I both realize the vacation food-wise is really over, and I think we both feel a bit better being back to the SB plan– or perhaps more accurately, our version of the SB plan.

My goal– highly over ambitious, I realize– is to be at -20 by the time school starts. That would be over 2 pounds a week, which strikes me as possible, but not probable. I can live with -16 or so though, so if I aim high, I’ll hopefully hit low.

See this article from The Washington Post,“Computers Weighing In on the Elements of Essay.” I found this via the NCTE Inbox newsletter, and I’m pretty sure that you need a user login to read the Post online.

There isn’t anything really that new here– I posted a couple of times a few months ago about this software being used to read the writing portions of some big standardized tests. One of my (many overly ambitious) goals for today is to put together the syllabus for the grad course I’m teaching in the fall, and one of the “units” or topics of discussion for one day’s class is going to be on assessment. This article, and some of the others that I found earlier in the year, ought to fit in there nicely.

And like before, I think I may be alone in my colleagues in English studies who is not completely against these electronic grading systems, especially for things like standardized tests. This story, like the other ones I’ve read, is talking about “grading” writing samples on a scale of 1 to 6; it isn’t about providing comments in the form of entering into a dialogue with the essay, or in the form of offering ideas for revision. Just a grade, and just a grade on a very standardized sort of test. Oh, and in this particular story, which is about the GMAT I believe, there is a human reader that goes back to the writing sample too– in other words, each essay gets read by the computer and by one human. If there is disagreement over the score, it is read by another human.

I don’t know, but this seems a pretty reasonable application of the current technology to me.