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Via my friend Chris and via boing-boing comes this “Sweded” version of Star Wars:

Oh, where to begin?

First off, this is why I want to very much see the here and gone almost immediately movie, Be Kind Rewind. As the wikipedia entry suggests, the plot of the movie involves the characters remaking the videos in a rental store, and, when customers complain about the remakes, which are like the one above, the excuse offered is that the videos are from Sweden. Or something like that– I have yet to see the movie.

Second, I think this would be a fun way to spend the afternoon with Will and some of his friends. Not this particular afternoon, but I can see the film maker in me yet….

And third, I actually think this might be a kind of cool assignment for some of the writing classes I teach, particularly English 328. I am imagining something like asking students, working in small groups, to make a 2 minute or less “sweded” version of something. It could be a pop movie, or, if I wanted it to fit more in the theme of the class, maybe it could be of a style and/or grammar rule, maybe a writing “tip” of some sort. We have the cheap cameras and (I think?) things like iMovie to make this work. Then students would have to write about the experience in terms of the process, what this different kind of “writing” says about more conventional “words in a row” writing, etc.

I don’t know, I think this is just crazy enough to work.

I haven’t seen the whole piece, though this might be one I will actually track down through the library or through the paper version we get in the English department: see “U. of Iowa Writing Students Revolt Against a Plan They Say Would Give Away Their Work on the Web” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The gist of it (at least I think) is in these two sentences: “Graduate students in the University of Iowa’s writing programs are up in arms. A new university procedure, they fear, will make their novels, plays, and other creative works—done as dissertations—freely available on the Web.”

Thus the title of this entry.

I was an undergraduate and English major at the University of Iowa way back when, and the creative writing program was of course as legendary then as it is now. In fact, I am sure that the whole vibe was what inspired me to pursue an MFA in creative writing. I applied to the Iowa program and of course did not get in– probably because my submission just simply did not rank, but I like to think that they also didn’t want folks from Iowa because they could draw from anywhere. At the end of the day, I went to VCU, I had a great experience there, and, in hindsight, I’m kind of glad I didn’t get into Iowa. Going to a lesser-known program gave me a chance to actually think about writing and not think about the “big contract,” which, rumor had it, was the problem with the Iowa program: too many of the students were looking too far ahead.

Anyway, the path to hell is paved with completely unpublishable MFA dissertations theses, and while I realize that the Iowa students are (arguably) the cream of the crop, I don’t really know where these folks are coming from here. Newsflash: if your goal of going to graduate school is to make money, go to medical school or business school or law school or something. And if you want to make a bunch of money and/or be famous as a writer, well, who knows the formula for that? I know it’s not getting an MFA just by itself. The two people I studied with the most at VCU didn’t have MFAs. Didn’t J.K. Rowling get her start as an unwed mother living on the UK’s equivalent of welfare? Didn’t Stephen King write his first novel while working in a laundromat? Didn’t Faulkner write As I Lay Dying while he was a night watchman at a power plant or something?

I do know two things though. First, an MFA and its thesis, regardless of how excellent it might be, is a long way away from a meal ticket in itself. Yes, there are these stories and legends about folks who were able to take their theses and turn them into publishing deals, but those stories are very few and far between. Second, it seems to me that if you did have this MFA thesis that publishers were clamoring to buy, having it up online for all to see could only be a good thing. A really really good thing.

So think that the one thing that is going to stop some MFA at Iowa from getting that sweetheart deal is electronic publishing of their theses is silly. Or, as I said to begin with, wishful thinking.

I found this via a Facebook ad: Word Clay, a self publishing service with a pretty snazzy-looking interface. And I like the name, Word Clay.

Of course, vanity press er, self published books are worth pretty much diddly-squat in academia and such, but this site and my recent trip to the new Borders (which features a sort of self publishing station in the techno-geek area) makes me wonder: has some marketing study decided that self publishing is the next big thing in the age of the Internets?

Some of the other English teachers in the crowd out there may have seen this one before; I had not, and it game me a chuckle in a good kinda way:

While surfing about this morning, I came across a promo for a film called “The Last Calligraphers,” which is coming out this summer and which is a documentary about the only newspaper in Asia (maybe the world, I don’t know) written by hand. It’s been running since 1927. They do ultimately convert what they write into plates and print it, but the way that they “get it down” is kind of cool.

One more post for now, in the spirit of posts that catch up on things I’ve been meaning to note here: Via one of the blogs I read listed below (I can’t remember which one), Merlin Mann at 43 Folders (a blog I haven’t read for a while now, but that perhaps I’ll get back to one of these days) has a favorable review of the writing software Scrivener. This post lead to this one, “NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps.” I haven’t read it yet, but will after I finish here.

You know, I’ve had a demo copy on both my desktop and laptop computers for over a month now and it has been on my “to do” list for quite a while to finish the tutorial/figure this thing out, and for whatever reason, I haven’t done so yet. Perhaps my writerly head is resisting new techniques; or perhaps that’s just evidence that I haven’t been writing enough lately. In any event, since we are entering winter break and this is going to be a chance for me to catch up on all sorts of things, maybe I’ll have some of my own thoughts to share on this by next weekend. But I do have probably 100 items on my current to do list, so….

One of the many MANY things I need to think about dealing with on my lengthy “to do” list is to start getting my presentation for this conference I’m going to in mid-April. It’s a little early to start planning, but my intention is to put together an elaborate PowerPoint presentation with lots of cute and clever slides so that it can move at a fast pace, etc. I’ve done this sort of thing before; I’m not as good as Lessig is at it, but it’s fun to do nonetheless.

Anyway, this crossed my mind again today because I came across this (via boing boing), “How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations,” via a blog called i09. It is a summary of some of the work of cognitive psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn and his book Clear and to the Point, which is about psychological principles and PowerPoint. Go read the blog post, but basically, the four rules discussed here are The Goldilocks Rule (the “just right” amount of information on a slide), The Rudolph Rule (make important things on a slide stand out), The Rule of Four (no more than four pieces of information on a slide), and the Birds of a Feather Rule (if you want things to be identified as being together, group them in terms of colors and proximity and the like).

Now, this is all fine and good, and I realize that I am only looking at a very brief summary of some principles that, for all I know, might be a lot more complicated than this. But I have to wonder: is this psychology or is this rhetoric? I’ve wondered this before about things like “usability design” for web sites. As far as I can tell, a lot of the usability folks out in industry see this as something that is (in terms of an academic pursuit) about psychology, but from my point of view, this stuff is clearly about texts, literacies, and rhetorics. So what’s the scoop?

Maybe in my next academic life/pursuit, I’ll try to study up on psychology and have a better answer to these questions.

“Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up: Annoyed with the ad deluge on social networks, many users are spending less time on the sites” from BusinessWeek.

As I finish up sorting through my RSS feed, I have to note posts from Alex, Jeff, and (via Jeff) Anne regarding Dana Boyd’s call for academics to boycott closed/”locked down” journals. It’s all kind of interesting in an, um, academic way; but is this dust-up really all that relevant?

Boyd seems to be kinda steamed because her article in the journal Convergence is not just “out there” on the Internets for one and all to grab for free/as an open source document. Without getting into the pros and cons of all this (though I think I agree with the general sentiment of folks I link to above, that while open source is a good idea, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to boycott journals that haven’t gone that route), I guess I am just having a hard time getting too excited one way or the other about this. Yes, I can’t get Boyd’s article directly from the Internets. But we also have this old-timey academic technology called “the library,” and from there, I am sure I will be able to access this article, either electronically or, if EMU doesn’t subscribe to Convergence, via inter-library loan. The last time I got an article via interlibrary loan, they emailed it to me as a PDF. So while this might not be as open and as easy if it were “just there” on the web and while the EMU library probably doesn’t do this for people coming in off the street (though they might, actually), it’s still pretty quick and open and accessible if you ask me.

One of the things that most of these (kind of, but not really) closed access journals get you is paper, and paper, as I discuss in this section of version 2.0 of my article “Where Do I List This on My CV?” can matter. Granted, these closed (but again, not really) journals don’t have the reach of stuff that’s just up on the ‘net; on the other hand, paper doesn’t just disappear, which is something I experienced with the first version of this piece.

Besides, if Boyd (or anyone else) wants to put up an academic article that they wrote up on the web, well, go ahead. Anne makes a point of saying that she has written this into contracts for things that she’s published. That’s probably the legal and proper way of doing things, but I don’t think that’s even necessary. As I wrote in this article (also in the section I quote above), plenty of scholars in my field just put things up on the web– Carolyn Miller, Michael Day, most of the people in my blogroll, etc. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I intend to make links to PDF versions of stuff I published that came out in closed journals available under the “Scholarship/CV” tab. If some academic publisher wants to email me and tell me to take it down, then I will. But really, is that going to happen?

There was a little piece in Inside Higher Ed today, “Evolution of a Writing Program,” which is about changes coming to Dartmouth’s first year writing program. The opening paragraph:

Many a college has de- and then re-constructed its approach to teaching writing — in composition courses, in classes across the curriculum, or both. In announcing the creation of a new Institute for Writing and Rhetoric last week, Dartmouth College presented its particular take, including a new focus on tying together public speaking and writing instruction, expanding support services for students writing in foreign languages, and eliminating exemptions from an introductory writing course sequence required of all Dartmouth students.

The exemption thing is significant because (apparently) about 200 of the 1,000 first year students get out of the writing requirement now– that’s several more sections of fycomp that they’re going to have to staff. The article also quotes the dean of faculty wondering how the heck they are going to access writing success among their students? Where will they turn for resources and advice? Where indeed….

Actually, it also strikes me as a move that could benefit schools like EMU. Speaking only for myself, I would just as soon make it impossible for students to be able to exempt our required first year writing course; maybe with the move Dartmouth is making here we can argue “well, if they’re requiring for all their students, why the heck shouldn’t we do the same?”

Anyway, this all makes me think of the past in two different ways. First, depending on the version history that one subscribes to, it is from old and ivied schools like Harvard and Dartmouth and such where the split between writing and speaking first became evident back in the 19th century. I did some research on this that I (regrettably) have yet to publish on this stuff as it ties in with elocution, and I think this is an argument that David Russell makes in Writing In the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990, but basically, this split in the US happened after the Civil War. Some places never did quite give up the whole connection between FYComp and speech– this was the case at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate.

Just a guess, but I suspect that as writing and composition studies becomes more about “media studies” (with pedagogy that embraces multimedia/new media as standard fare in all sorts of courses, including fy comp) and as the field drifts even further away from literature and traditional English department studies, I suspect we’ll see more programs like this.

Second, this is a “back to the future” moment for me personally. For reasons I won’t go into right now, I actually tested out of first year composition entirely at the U of Iowa. As a first year student, I of course thought this was great thing, but as a college professor, I think I missed out. As Lindsay Whaley, associate dean for international and interdisciplinary programs, says in this piece: “In a sense, I think it was [perceived as] an honor to be exempted. There was a sense that ‘Wow, this is great.’ From a faculty standpoint, there was a sense that they’re missing out.” I think that’s right.