Category: Writing

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Innovative Wikipedia assignment kind of smells like comp/rhet pedagogy

There’s a good article in the October 29 Inside Higher Ed, “When Wikipedia is the assignment.” It’ll be good for something like English 516. It’s another report from the Educause conference, and it’s about how a professor teaching a course in the University of Washington at Bothell’s “Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences” program (sounds a bit like a gen ed class to me) has required her students to post their papers to Wikipedia. To quote from the article:

At first glance, a college term paper and a Wikipedia entry appear to have little in common. Term papers are intended for an “extremely limited audience, namely, me,� as Groom pointed out, they have little impact outside of the classroom and are constrained to a specific “time� and “place� in the world of ink-on-paper documents. “That is not a very good model of scholarship, to say that anything you produce [belongs] in this tiny space,� she said.

On the other hand, shared, public online documents have characteristics in common with parts of the academic review process. “The shift to thinking about placing the term paper as a Wikipedia encyclopedia entry allows for another level of peer review,� [Martha] Groom said. Such entries have references and citations; allow for a process of repeated, continual editing; and encourage collaborations between authors.

They also reach a much wider audience, through the Wikipedia site and search engines. “How do you motivate students to do their best work?� she asked — implying that the answer lies in the possibility of others viewing it. The public nature of Wikipedia content also means that, in theory, students would be less likely to reuse others’ material as their own.

In short, Wikipedia is a good place for students to publish their work because it encourages students to write beyond the teacher, it encourages revision/peer review/collaboration, it shows the importance of citation, and it makes writing public. Sound familiar?

Now, don’t get me wrong– I think what Groom is doing here is great, and I think there are lots of reasons why this would be a fantastic activity for fy comp or other research writing classes. But I always have some involuntary eye-rolling when someone in another discipline discovers something about writing pedagogy (e.g., “hey, let’s get students to write something not just for the teacher!” or “hey, let’s get them to collaborate on their writing!”) that folks in my field have known for decades.

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"Faking" the Palmer Method

As part of my always on-going interest in things like early writing technologies and teaching, I’m posting this article from the Cheboygan Tribune, “I was taught the Palmer Method, but mostly faked it,” a reminiscence about learning how to write way back when by Bruce Callander. The most interesting part of the article for me is Callander’s description of how Palmer came to be so popular in the early 20th century:

Palmer was good at fancy writing, which included drawing birds and leaping deer along with the letters. As a school teacher, however, he developed a less-complicated method of writing that retained the free-flowing letters but not all the embellishments. His basic idea was that you should use your whole arm, not just the fingers.

If he had stuck to teaching, things would have been easier for the rest of us, but he began to write out his lessons and publish them. By 1912, he was selling a million copies of the course per year. By the time he died in 1927, some 25 million Americans had learned to write by the Palmer Method. I was not one of them because, at that date, I was only 3 years old, but, along with thousands of other youngsters, I was soon to be exposed to his approach.

Thank goodness I type….

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Ward Churchill, Academic Publishing, upcoming Kairos article

It’s funny how some of these things link together– or maybe how I make links between them:

While browsing my google reader feed this morning, I came across this article from Inside Higher Ed, “Ward Churchill Fired.” Old news, but basically Churchill was let go by the University of Colorado because (officially, at least) because of what has been called “overwhelming evidence” of scholarly misconduct. When this case was still an issue, I wrote on my blog and on the Inside Higher Ed site that Churchill shouldn’t be fired because of some unpopular views on 9/11. But when it turns out that he was cheating in his scholarship, well, that’s a different story. Still, I think this paragraph sort of sums up my feelings about the whole thing:

The meaning of the Churchill case has been heatedly debated over the past two-plus years. To Churchill and his defenders, he is a victim of politics and of a right wing attack on freedom of thought. To Brown and others at the university, Churchill’s case is not about politics at all about enforcing academic integrity and punishing those who don’t live up to basic rules of research honesty. To many others in academe, the Churchill case has been less clearcut. Many academics have said that they are troubled by both the findings of research misconduct against Churchill and by the reality that his work received intense scrutiny only after his political views drew attention to him.

This article lead me to this interesting blog post by Aaron Barlow on a blog that I will probably add to my feed reading called Free Exchange on Campus. Barlow’s post is trying to parse through the meaning of the Churchill case in complex terms so I won’t try to simplify it here, but I admire his efforts of trying to sort it out.

Anyway, reading Barlow’s post lead me to another post on the Free Exchange on Campus blog that lead me to this, “University Publishing in A Digital Age,” on another site I ought to add to the feed, Ithaka, which is site about promoting “the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide.” Here’s the abstract of this piece:

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing�. Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.

This paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.

I haven’t had a chance to read the full report yet, though I kind of wish it had come out a few weeks/months ago. Forthcoming in Kairos is going to be “Version 2.0” of an article I had originally had published in College Composition and Communication Online, “Where Do I list this on my CV? Considering the Value of Self-Published Web Sites.” Had I known about this Ithaka report earlier, some of what’s in the abstract here might have been good to incorporate in this revised article. Oh well; at least my thinking now and in 2002 are in line with some others.

Oh, PS:
Inside Higher Ed had a piece about this Ithaka report, too.

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A clean, well-lighted space in the big city

Via Maud Newton, I came across this interesting link: The Mercantile Library Writing Studio in New York City. Basically, for as little as $100 a month (if you are just writing at night, for example), you can get access to a desk, a locker to keep personal things, and a computer and/or electrical outlets for your laptop.

I can imagine that the struggling writer living in a dinky apartment in the big city would very much welcome such a space. And this also reminds me of an experience in my MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University oh so many years ago. A bunch of us got together and had a kind of party with a bunch of MFA types in the art department in their studios. Now these people had cool work spaces with all kinds of mini construction projects and stuff hanging about.

Which reminds me: one of the things I want to continue to do today is to get my work space “BAWS” ready, though I’m close as it is. It’s in the basement, which is not exactly the kind of place where a lot of people like to work (it isn’t as clean as ideal, and it is not necessarily well-lit either), but it is big, quiet, comfy, etc. I just need to clean up and organize a bit so I feel like I can get down to it.

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I didn't even know it was ill

Via Huffington Post comes this, “Email is Dead,” at least to teens who use MySpace and Facebook.

I never buy these kinds of pronouncements. While I do like Facebook and all, but I certainly don’t use it as a substitute for email. And frankly, a lot of my students at EMU do not have a Faceebook or a MySpace account, and they have no interest in such a thing. danah boyd got in a bit of a dust-up recently by making some generalizations about Facebook versus MySpace users, but it seems to me the group she left off entirely were the folks who either have gotten off the Facebook/MySpace bandwagon and/or who never got on it in the first place.

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MySpace Warning in the Local Media Yet Again

Here’s the 3,435,671th warning about putting stuff on MySpace (or Facebook) and thinking that it’s completely private, though this one has a twist: The Ann Arbor News ran a lead story in last night’s paper with the headline “Online comments roil officials.” Frankly, my first reaction was “what does ‘roil’ mean?” My wife, smarter than me, set me straight– “pissed off.” Anyway, here are the opening passages:

Editor’s note: This story contains a term that may offend some readers. The News does not print profanity unless it is important for the understanding of the story.

Saline High School Senior Bobby Schilke thought the disparaging comments he posted on Facebook.com about the school district superintendent would only be seen by other members of his network on the Web site.

Schilke, 18, was surprised when he was called to the superintendent’s office with his parents for what he described as a scolding.

Beverley Geltner, the Saline superintendent, found out about the group – called “new superintendent = bitch” – and other sites she said contained “inappropriate language.” She held meetings with families, including the one with Schilke and his parents.

Geltner said the aim of the meetings was to address the “limited understanding” that parents and young people have about the dangers of Internet postings.

“A lot of things were said about people, including me, that were hurtful, ignorant,” said Geltner, who declined to say how many students were involved in meetings. “I paused and thought, ‘What is my responsibility?’ These are our students.”

Schilke’s father Ken Schilke said his son did nothing wrong.

“There’s no shame in expressing yourself,” said Ken Schilke, who attended the meeting along with Bobby Schilke’s mother. “Unless (not criticizing administrators) is in the code of conduct, then there’s no reason to quash the freedom of expression.”

This is kind of an interesting case/example, if you ask me. On the one hand, I wouldn’t be real pleased if there was a MySpace book calling me a “bitch” or whatever. But on the other hand, I don’t think I’d call that student into my office and yell at them. And on the third hand, it seems to me that if you are the superintendent of a school district, then you are more or less a “public figure” and open yourself up for that kind of criticism.

One way or the other though, it’s clear to me that Geltner over-reacted and the Ann Arbor News took on this story since it contained the oh-so-dangerous words My Space. Well, that and the word “bitch.”

Anyway, the solution here is to have some workshops and meetings to talk about some of the “safety and privacy” issues with MySpace. Geltner said that she was bothered by some of the groups on both MySpace and Facebook that had racial and gender-biased language. Back to the paper itself:

n cases where she perceived a threat, Geltner said she was be obligated to call the police. In other instances, such as Schilke’s, she notified parents and brought the family in for a meeting.

Geltner declined to say how many threats she may have passed along to the police, but Pittsfield Township Director of Public Safety John Phillips said that those found threatening are currently under investigation.

“Kids talk to each other, they think it’s the same type of secrecy as going into a room, writing in a diary and locking it in the top drawer,” Phillips said.

Phillips will be among the speakers at the community meetings Wednesday. The seminars were planned for parents and students to shed light on online risks, Geltner said.

“Young people may unwittingly be opening themselves to consequences they hadn’t thought about,” she said.

Consequences like being hauled into the superintendent’s office, no doubt.

On the one hand, it probably isn’t a bad idea to alert/remind students about the consequences of posts on Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc., that these things aren’t completely private. Although as an aside, I think this is something that most high school and college-aged folks already know. I mean, I’ve had these sorts of conversations with my 9 year-old son, and the idea that the internet is a very public space is common sense to him.

But clearly, clearly, the main reason why Geltner is doing this is because some kid called her a “bitch” in a public forum. They could have had these community meetings on the “dangers” of MySpace months– years– ago. The fact that it took Geltner and the other folks in Saline this long to find out about this new fangled thing called MySpace is problematic, and the idea that the motivation for these meetings is “safety” when it clearly is about taking offense at being called a bad name is even more troubling.

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The Process of Research Writing: The Web Site

Over this weekend, I had and/or created some time away from grading, a sort of calm before the storm. Among other things, I finally got around to putting up on the web my failed (?) textbook project, retitled what I had originally called it, The Process of Research Writing.

As I wrote back in July and in other entries here, I decided that I was not interested in trying to restart the textbook project with another publisher mainly because I was not at all interested in going down the path of reworking this book yet again. Thus this web site.

This is not a collaborative/wiki-like textbook, mainly because it would have been too time-consuming and complicated to do. I mean, this is a 200+ page manuscript. I don’t think I would describe this an “open source” textbook either, though it is free. But maybe that’s debatable.

Anyway, I for some reason felt the need to get this thing out there/get the monkey off my back so that I could then go on to other things. This might be a simple mental thing only for me, but I also like to think that there are at least some folks out there who might find some parts of this project useful.