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Alex Reid’s post (along with just the end of things) prompted me to post this end of the term summary of things:

Overall, I was pleased with the way my graduate class, Rhetoric of Science and Technology, turned out this term.  It was the first time I taught it online, and we posted a staggering 1,738 comments on 91 posts during the course of the semester.  If you average that out to about 200 words a post (many were less, many were more), I’d say that the class wrote about a novel and a half (in draft form, of course) worth of text.  Besides quantity, the quality of interaction was quite excellent– lots of give and take, lots of smart comments that indicate to me a lot of reading and a lot of thinking.  And as a bonus, we even had a couple of the people whose work we read weigh in on the class, not the sort of thing that can happen with the course is behind a firewall.  Anyway, the next time someone suggests you can’t teach an advanced seminar class online, I’m going to point them to this site.

But I will say there are two things I’ll definitely be changing the next time I teach this class.  First, the wiki writing experience didn’t work.  The idea was to use a wiki for students to work collaboratively on reading notes for the texts we were reading since a lot of what we read during the class is dense and complicated stuff.  That didn’t work well for two reasons.  First, with all of the activity going on at the class web site/blog, the wiki was too often repetitive and/or forgotten.  We tried talking about the last thing I assigned (a couple chapters from Collin Brooke’s book) on the wiki exclusively, but that didn’t work that well either.

Second, I think I’m going to change up the writing assignments for next year.  Instead of having one “seminar paper” at the end, I’m going to have a shorter project in the middle of the term where students will write based on the first group of readings (probably “the old stuff” and related essays); another shorter project for the second part of the term based on those readings (many of which I will probably get students to research and find); and a more comprehensive and “worth more” final.  We’ll see; this was only the second time I taught this course, so I’m still trying to figure it out.

My section of English 328:  Writing, Style, and Technology was a little more, well, odd this term.  In contrast to English 505, 328 is a class I’ve taught literally 50 or more times, and I kind of feel like I’ve “got it down” pat.  Perhaps that’s part of the problem, which is why I’m looking forward to changing some of it up in the winter term, a lot of those based on the stuff Derek has been messing around with this term.  It’s been fun for both me and our colleague Cheryl Cassidy (Cheryl is the other person here who has taught the bulk of these 328 classes over the years) to watch Derek begin to find his way in that class.  Anyway, this term was weird in several ways I probably shouldn’t go into in any detail; let’s just say that a majority of the students who signed up the class originally didn’t finish it, which is a first for me.

And then there was my section of English 121, Researching the Public Experience (aka first year comp/rhet).  This was the first time in years and years (maybe ever?) since I’ve been at EMU where I taught a “real” section of this class– that is, one that was offered during a normal term and one that was actually made up of mostly first year students and one where we got to participate in the “Celebration of Student Writing.” (I teach this often enough in the spring or summer terms, but those classes are 7.5 weeks long and usually mostly juniors and seniors who transferred in, who took it and failed it before, and/or who just forgot to take it until the end of their degree programs.  This is different population of students to say the least.)  I’d say it both went pretty well and it was kind of depressing, too.

It went reasonably well mechanically/logistically.  I used a wiki powered by MediaWiki, and that had advantages and disadvantages.  All of my students posted all of their work to different pages within the wiki and they used the wiki to comment on each others’ various drafts and exercises.  Students liked being able to see what others in the class were doing in one centralized place like this, and I liked it for those reasons along with various “classroom management” issues.  I didn’t collect any paper from them this year, I knew exactly when they did (or didn’t) do things because it was all time-stamped on the wiki, and viewing the “history” of one of the major portfolio assignments gave a very clear picture of the revisions and changes that they made.  But the problem of the wiki was it was still a little more technical/complicated for students to negotiate than I would have preferred.  Maybe I’ll use it again the next time I teach this; maybe I’ll try using something like PBWorks or whatever else has come along in a couple years.

But it was also kind of depressing because of what I guess I’d call an “achievement gap.”  This has been on my mind/in the news around EMU as of late because the board of regents and other forces around campus are growing more concerned about the institution’s retention rate, which is something like 39%– that is, around that percentage of students actually graduates from EMU within six years.  Compare that to U of Michigan, where the number is more like 90%.  I saw this statistic played out in my section of freshman comp.  Of the 25 students on my role, 9 of them either withdrew from the class or failed it– and pretty much the only way to completely fail the class is to just not show up and/or do the work.  Of the 16 who did finish, three were juniors or seniors who were taking 121 too late and who were already well on their way to graduation.  Of the 13 “real” first or second year students left, I would guess that five or six of them won’t be at EMU in a year or two from now– some for good reasons (I know at least one student in this class who was planning on transferring because of a change of heart about a major), but most because of “life distractions” (e.g., working too much) or because of their abilities.

So, if my section of 121 was a little micro-version of the institution, that 39% figure seems about right.  Actually, it might even be kind of high.

Anyway, I don’t worry that much about the sorts of issues that Alex was worrying about in his post, about the problems of teaching writing as a series of discreet moves rather a more authentic writing/writerly experience.  Institutionalized education is by definition artificial and a form of imitation of “the real,” which also has an element of “realness” in and of itself.  Alex uses the youth soccer coaching analogy, and I think that works well here too:  writing classes are more like practice, where the players run through a series of drills and do some scrimmaging to prepare for the “real game” that comes later.  I’m okay with that.

But what I do worry about is that ever-eternal problem at “opportunity granting” institutions like EMU:  what is the line between giving a kid who did not do great in high school a second chance with college versus just taking money from someone who is so poorly prepared for college that they just don’t have a chance of succeeding?  That’s the kinda depressing part.

Anyway, the term is a wrap, and for the first time in many a holiday season, I’m not taking any work with me on my various travels– some things to read (mostly for fun), a notebook and a pen (no laptop), and an iPhone.   See ya next year.

This is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now and that has come up in a couple of different places recently:  is blogging, well, “over?”

No, but I do think it’s different than it was.

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In the “build it and they will come” (sorta) department:  I received a lovely email today from Sally Stephenson about using my freely available and online textbook, The Process of Research Writing. Stephenson is teaching in China and wrote to thank me for making TPRW available free and online:

I am currently on sabbatical from Frostburg State University in Maryland, now teaching Ph.D. students in China at Hunan Normal University, and so much of what we take for granted academically in the States is totally alien here. I am grateful for your permission to use your material and will make good use of it, and credit you accordingly. I especially appreciate all the trouble you took to put the APA and MLA examples up in Chapter 12. I’ve been drilling them on paraphrasing and quoting–something foreign to Chinese culture, which is based on the “one-for-all and all-for-one” philosophy–and am about to tackle the monster of citations and references.

In my search for your well-hidden email address, I also enjoyed browing your blog. Most blogs are blocked here in China, so you might be interested to know yours made it through the “Great Firewall” as it is not-so-fondly called.

So, not only do I have a fan in Asia; I’m escaping Chinese censorship.  Go figure!

I know that the image there is going to be too small to read, but go ahead and click on it to read it.  This comes from Lucy Knisley who seems to be a bit of a Renaissance woman of sorts with comics, journal writings, illustrations, crafts, etc., etc.

Really REALLY smart stuff about a group of old school comics folks lamenting the falling of print, which was written and drawn by a comic artist who is obviously enthusiastic about digital books.  As she points out, there was a point in the past where these codex book things were weird (where’s the scroll?), and of course there was a time where print itself was weird, too (why are all the letters so neat and orderly?), not to mention stuff like page numbers, etc.  And, as she writes here, “I’d just rather not expend all my energy worrying over how my words are delivered, and instead concentrate on the quality and content of the words.”  Exactly, and the problem with journalism and traditional publishers is that they keep thinking that they are in the bottle business instead of the wine business.

Anyway, this also jarred in me the question again about “e-readers” or electronic books or whatever you want to call them. Knisley talks in this comic about reading stuff on her iPod/iPhone, but I don’t know if I could/would be willing to do that.  I don’t mind reading blogs or email or similarly “short” sort of things on my iPod, but I don’t know if I’d want to read a book-length work on my phone.  Too little of a window for me.

The Kindle is still problematic for my own reading tastes, as far as I can tell.  I don’t really like the way that the device is locked down/locked into amazon.com only content (remember that infamous 1984 issue?), it apparently doesn’t handle PDF files well, and it doesn’t allow for easy annotations.  I’ve heard good things about Barnes and Noble’s Nook, but I’d certainly want to play around with it.  For me, the ability to handle the PDFs from academic journals and the things I assign students to read in various classes.  I don’t need one of these things to “just read” novels or magazines or whatever, which perhaps makes me a reader who is not in the marking plan for companies like amazon.com or B&N.

Anyway, must reading for 516 and/or 444, probably for 328 too.

The other day, I was in Ann Arbor and at Comet Coffee in Nickels Arcade– it’s next to the place where I get my hair cut, and they do make a really good cup of coffee.   Anyway, they had the syringe-like AeroPress for sale.  I think I had read about it someplace– boing-boing maybe?– and I was sucked in by the hyperbole on the side of the box.

Now, I do like the AeroPress quite a bit.  I wanted something to make just a cup or two of coffee at a time, and my French press is a bit of a pain to clean.  What I like about the AeroPress is that it’s quick, easy, and even kind of fun to use, it makes a good single cup of coffee (well, sort of an Americano; one of these days, I might just try to “drink it straight” as if it were real espresso, or figure out a way to froth up some milk to make cappuccino), and it takes like 15 seconds to clean.  Plus it’s very portable– comes with a travel bag no less!

But some of the hyperbolic claims made on the side of the box and on the AeroPress web site are down-right bizarre.  For example:

“It makes the absolute best cup of coffee I’ve tasted in my entire life.” Lewis Singer – Cooks Junction

“I didn’t know the same coffee could taste so good.” Peter Whitely – Sunset Magazine

“A couple of years ago I bought a $1500 espresso machine. It works well – but it doesn’t turn out the consistent quality of the AeroPress. Now I use the AeroPress for ALL brewing and only use my expensive Italian machine for heating the AeroPress water and for foaming milk for my cappuccino.”
Tom Osborne – Stewarts Point , CA

Now, there are some people who do have some more coffee ethos who say good things about the AeroPress, but really? The best cup of coffee of your entire life?  Better than a $1500 espresso machine? And who are these people?  Should it mean something to me that it is the Lewis Singer of Cooks Junction?  Are the people of Stewarts Point known for their tastes in coffee?

And yet, I was sucked in by the hyperbole.  I saw the side of that box that a complete stranger with no ethos or credibility said “the best cup of coffee I’ve tasted in my entire life,” and I thought on some level “wow, let me give that thing a try.”  In other words, even though the claims made by the product’s advertising were and are completely ridiculous and unreasonable, it worked on me.

So, maybe making really outrageous claims can work sometimes.  And I could go for a cup of coffee, too….

This is on the BBC news radio as I type this:  “How does Brown’s handwriting compare with other PMs’?” talks about this a bit, but basically, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown sent a hand-written condolence letter to a mother who’s son was killed in Afghanistan, and it turns out the letter itself was filled with errors and exhibited terrible handwriting.  To quote from the article:

The spelling mistakes in Gordon Brown’s solemn letter to Jacqui Janes were not the only shortcoming, according to the bereaved mother.

In expressing his condolences for the death of Jamie Janes, who died in Afghanistan on 5 October, Mr Brown appeared to correct the soldier’s first name, as well as rushing the communique.

“I saw he had scribbled out a mistake in Jamie’s name,” Ms Janes told the Sun newspaper. “The letter was scrawled so quickly I could hardly even read it and some of the words were half-finished. It’s just disrespectful.”

I will say this: I at least give Brown credit for the effort of a hand-written note; I don’t think that happens in the U.S….

For the first time in what seems like a month, I feel “caught up,” almost.  I think ever since the “National Day O’ Writing” thing, I’ve been bailing water.  Anyway, I haven’t thought through much in terms of anything too interesting to say, but thought I’d post a few links, a few updates:

• My English 505 class goes well, and it took a somewhat surprising turn the other day:  Richard Vatz, the author of “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” contacted me after coming across the class online.  Which is just another one of those examples I suppose of the pros and cons of putting an online class truly online and “out there” for the world to see.
• Utah State UP will live another day with a different model, as a (mostly?) electronic press.
• “Are we naked in the cloud?” from the Atlantic. I think the answer is “well, yes,” which is why cloud computing will only go so far, at least until these sorts of ownership/privacy issues are sorted out.
• Just got on Google wave; we’ll see how it goes….
• Maybe I haven’t been writing enough lately because I haven’t been feeling grumpy.
• I tried to comment on this post about imagining an online composition platform at Alex Reid’s blog (and that didn’t work), so I’ll post something here:

  For starters, I don’t think online versions of first year writing is a good idea– at least not entirely online, and at least not at EMU.  We admit a fair number of first year students at EMU who are “at risk” in some fashion, and what I see in my current section of freshman comp is a real mix in levels of responsibility and maturity.  Some students would be fine with a completely online class; many would not.  Hybrid first year writing classes is another issue though.

  Second, the online platform that I imagine is probably something like a wiki.  I’ve been using media wiki for this term and I used a wetpaint wiki for my spring 2009 term class.  Of course, this isn’t an online class, but I like the interface for publishing student work and class materials, and I think that students like it too.  There is a level of “individuality” with this set-up because I have organized the site by having each student have a page, but at the same time, all the stuff is right there together.  The down-sides of these sites are they don’t foster ongoing conversation that well (though I suppose that’s in part because we haven’t tried– it is a face to face class, after all), and there are different technical issues.  Mediawiki is a little unwieldy for students; Wetpaint is super easy to use, but there isn’t much you can do to customize it.

This is kind of quick and scattered, because as a result of the stuff I helped out on doing for the National Day on Writing here at EMU on Tuesday, I am woefully behind on dealing with the writings of my students– blogs, online postings, wiki entries, “essays,” etc.  But in brief, it was quite the event.

Linda Adler-Kassner and Cathy Fleischer (the two folks who were the leads on this here) estimated that about 1700 students participated, and we (meaning me, Derek Mueller, and Steve Benninghoff, along with some great help from reps from Apple) uploaded about 400 things to the web site– pictures of hand-written activities, blog entries, and YouTube videos.  It was a tremendous amount of fun, but it was a huge amount of work and I still kind of feel like I am physically recovering from being that “on” for pretty much 12 hours straight.

Now, the NDoW was/is one of those kinds of events that is really easy to be cynical about. Someone– it might have been Clay Spinuzzi too– said having a National Day on Writing is sort of like having a National Day on Hygiene.  I don’t completely disagree with these sentiments.  As we were talking about the various activities for the local NDoW at different meetings, there was not an insignificant part of me that was thinking “this is all pretty goofy.”   Or worse:  how is the (capital D) Discipline of Composition and Rhetoric (or maybe more specifically, just Rhetoric) ever going to be taken seriously if we present it to the rest of the academy and beyond as merely Freshman Composition, or, as one of my students described the NDoW,  as the “Writing Carnival?”

But you know what?  We do every once in a while do need to celebrate things that are  mundane and something we all (should) do, like writing or hand-washing, simply because it gets little recognition and it’s simultaneously important.  What I saw on Tuesday was a lot of college kids having fun doing activities where they thought and wrote about writing, sometimes in surprisingly profound and interesting ways.  And I think it turns out that “goofy” and “interesting” are not mutually exclusive.

As one of the uploaders, my job was to take pictures of things written by hand or to upload videos that people took with flip video cameras.  Most of the students were at the event as part of a class or to get what we call at EMU “learning beyond the classroom” credit, but there was no requirement to upload anything.  These students, mostly college freshman, who came up to the upload station were usually rolling their eyes when they held up their work or handed me the video camera, a smirky and often not at all concealed “OMG, this is so stupid” look on their faces.  But then, after I uploaded the artifact and showed it to them on the web site, they inevitably let their guard down a bit and showed a little pride and pleasure that their thing– a movie, a six word memoir, a “PEOP,” whatever– was up there for the whole world to see. Given that the site had 28,000 hits on Tuesday, I think it’s fair to say that the stuff done at the NDoW has reached a broader audience than your typical academic essay, which makes me think that maybe serious academics ought to pay attention to some of the less than serious NDoW projects to get the word out.

And God forbid we do things that allow our students to associate “writing” with “fun.”

Anyway, go check stuff out at the EMU National Day on Writing site. As someone really interested in this idea of how people perceive themselves as writers (or not), I think there’s a goldmine of stuff there.

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.

I haven’t had time/desire/etc. to post one of my usual “new school year resolutions,” and to be honest, I don’t have any new resolutions this year.  It’d be nice if I could actually manage to do some of the resolutions from last year. But I will mention two things that are kind of resolution-like that are not really school related (though they are not completely unrelated either) that might be worth working harder at this year.

First, there’s “Why your kids have such terrible handwriting and what to do about it,” which was posted to the WPA-L mailing list last week.  Basically, it’s an article from Slate.com about the author, Emily Yoffe, and her eighth grade daughter both working through Nan Jay Barchowsky’s Fix it Write, a lesson plan/process for improving your handwriting– and Yoffe’s article is also about some various histories and issues of handwriting, too.  Somewhat on impulse, I just decided to order this, and I’m hoping I can convince Will to give these lessons a try along with me.  I have and have always had horrific handwriting, something I’ve learned to live with and also to blame on my left-handedness.  But Will also has pretty bad handwriting, and he’s still at a place (in seventh grade) where a) bad handwriting can actually make a difference on things like essay tests and such, and b) where he could still do something about it.  In any event, Will and I (or at least me) will try our hand at this during the school year.  So to speak.

Second, there’s the news I learned via Facebook today about Eddie Izzard running through the UK (actually, it turns out he finished on September 14th), about the equivalent of 43 marathons in 51 days.  As this BBC News article suggests, he started with almost no training, he’s pretty injured, and what he is doing is quite ill-advised.  At the same time, he has made quite a bit of progress in his seven week.  He started “running” a marathon distance is 10 hours (which, of course, isn’t really running at all– that’s walking a marathon, still an impressive enough feat as far as I’m concerned), and at the end, he was finishing his running in five hours.  By the way, there is a seven part video diary series of this on YouTube here.

Now, I’m not going to do what he’s doing for all sorts of obvious reasons, and I don’t really see myself training for a marathon.  But I took up “running” earlier in the year, “ran” in the Dexter-Ann Arbor 5 K this past spring, and have tried to keep “running” two or so miles three days a week.  (And I should point out that I am extremely slow. I say “running” to mean that if you saw me, you would say “well, that’s not walking, so I guess it’s okay to call it ‘running,’ sort of.”)  I’ve actually kind of come to enjoy it, and while I was originally planning on keeping my goals here modest, there’s something about seeing Izzard, who clearly has lost a lot of weight and is in much better shape at the end of this fund raising stunt than he was at the beginning, that wants me to extend my goals.  So I dunno; maybe a 10K?  Maybe a half-marathon at the Dexter-Ann Arbor run this year?