Category: Writing

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A bit about the National Day On Writing at EMU

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.

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Wanting to check out “A Better Pencil,” though with some irony and a smidge of bitterness

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.

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Handwriting and “running”

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?

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Oh, you almost had me again, Stanley

There’s a kind of curious entry/article on Stanley Fish’s New York Times “blog,” “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2,” which is about writing instruction and which picks up on his previous article, which I blogged about here. I posted a response on the NYTimes site, but since I have no idea if it will appear there or not, I thought I’d just post it here:

I have to say this seems more of a “revision” of your previous post and less a “response.”  After all, in part one of this series, you seemed to be all for a traditional view of teaching grammar and rhetoric:  you cited the conservative organization the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and you did write “I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”  Now you are saying that it is “of course” nonsense to teach grammar out of context.  But as I am sure you are aware, most administrators, the ACTA, and “people on the street” would interpret the phrase “teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else” as “teach grammar out of context.”

Be that as it may, I agree with your revision, more or less, though I would argue that form in writing various depending on purpose and audience.  This is why it is is important that universities are pushing more toward writing within disciplines while simultaneously acknowledging that writing is a field/discipline that itself has content and a purpose.  This is why departments separate from “English” have emerged at many colleges and universities.

But what I still see missing in your response/revision is addressing the issue of “the kids today.”  The way I read it, you were pointing to anecdotal evidence that college students writing skills were getting worse to support your criticism of “the composition establishment.”  This sentiment was certainly echoed in many of the comments, where writers agreed with you that the students today do not write nearly as well as the students of the past.

So, I was wondering what you make of the Stanford Study on Writing, which has received some (albeit more modest) attention recently.  The basic argument of Andrea Lunsford and its other researchers is that the youth of today write in more places and for more purposes than they ever have before.  Lunsford goes so far as to say “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”  This is a lofty claim for sure, but it does appear to be based on actual research, not unlike the Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer article you cite here.

Have you revised/revisited your impression of the sorry state of today’s college writers?  Or is that too part of your response/revision here?

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Student writing is getting worse– or wait, it’s getting better!

Ladies and gentlemen:  It is time for the main event, the forever battle over students getting worse and worse as time goes on.  Let’s get ready to

RRRRUUUUUUMMMMMMBBBBBBBLLLLLLLEEEEEEEE!!!

Representing the world champion, the “going to hell in a hand-basket,” the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach?” on his New York Times “blog.” Judging by the many comments here that repeat “oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be,” he’s clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn’t he be?  Isn’t it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both “better” than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today’s grown-ups) were also better than the current youth (“When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now…”).

In the challenger’s corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article “The New Literacy,” in which he argues that “it’s not that today’s students can’t write.  It’s that they’re doing it in different places and in different ways.”  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let’s see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

Fish opens with what he even admits is a pretty old attack:  the problem is that composition classes in college don’t teach the craft of writing, and they instead teach something– well, something else.  Political stuff.  Saving the world.  Not writing and grammar and rhetoric.  “As I learned more about the world of composition studies,” Fish writes, “I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.”  Those bastards in composition!!

Thompson’s opening anticipates and parries this old attack: “As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?” Right. Oh wait, the idea that the kids can’t write isn’t right? Perhaps we will read on….

Fish argues that his position now has “received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.”  What could possibly be wrong with these folks?

Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure college and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

Ouch.  Having a right-wing group supporting your position on education is always a little, um, uncomfortable.  What have you got, Thompson?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Ah-HA!  One of those evil compositionalists!  Of course she is saying this! The problem is though that Lunsford actually uses this stuff that academics like Fish and Cheney are supposed to respect, this stuff– oh, what’s it called?  right!  Actual research with actual student writers.

I think the thing that Fish gets most wrong is to assume that somehow, it is even possible to teach “grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”  Grammar and rhetoric are always about something; you can’t just teach rules are about how to persuade and not have some kind of content.  And I think where Thompson and the Stanford study get it most right is to recognize that students (and everyone else) need to write with some kind of purpose and for some kind of audience, and they do this often in out of school settings, like Facebook and blogs and Twitter:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This fight ends sort of  like the first Rocky, I am sure:  the upstart still loses.  But who knows?  Maybe after a dozen sequels, we’ll finally get a round where the good guys win.

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Why wouldn’t you want to be read?

I’m beginning the wrap-up of my summer term around here (I won’t be done completely until August 25– it’s complicated).  I had two really fantastic classes– Writing for the World Wide Web and Technology for Teaching and Learning:  great and smart students, fun discussions, interesting insights, etc., etc.  In both of these classes, where we talked in different ways about blogging and social networking, the “why” question came up, especially in terms of blogging.  To paraphrase and simplify, a lot of my students asked “why would anyone want to post what they think about stuff out there for the whole world to see?”  And in a related note, there were some students who seemed anxious or even kind of afraid of the idea of an audience.

This meshes with one of the modest conclusions I discussed in my Computers and Writing Conference presentation called “Endings,” which was about why people quit blogging.  In my email survey/interviews, one of the reasons that came up as to why some folks give up blogging was because of the potential– real or imagined– that some particular people might end up reading what they wrote.  In other words, they quit not because they lacked audience; they quit because they realized they might have an audience.

I’m always a little surprised when anybody says they’d rather not have people read their writing.  Granted, I wouldn’t want to have everyone to read everything I write and I like to think that the writing that I share with audiences now is better than the writing I wrote to share with other 10 or 20 years ago.  But from my point of view, the main point of writing is to get other people to read it.  Sure, there is the desire to please yourself too, but for me, the main reason why people write is because they think they have something to say to others.  The goal then is to get other people to read that writing and for them to get something out of it. To me, to write only for yourself is missing at least half of the point of writing in the first place.

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Once again, I welcome the death of handwriting

Via the NCTE Inbox, I came across this Time magazine article, “Mourning the Death of Handwriting.” It’s pretty much the same discussion about handwriting that I’ve posted about in the past:  isn’t it a shame that handwriting is dying, though there is no compelling reason as to why this really that bad of a thing.

But there are two twists.  First, the article’s author, Claire Suddath, actually quotes pretty much the only “real” expert on handwriting I know, Tamara Thornton, who wrote a fantastic book called Handwriting in America:  A Cultural History. Thornton’s theory about the “death” of handwriting is more tied to the role of standardized testing than increased computer use.  “If something isn’t on a test,” she said, “it’s viewed as a luxury.”  She has a point.

Second, the article once again highlights the difficulty in trying to figure out just when exactly handwriting “died.” My parents were both born in the 1940s, and my mother writes with a sort of combination of cursive and print, while my father’s handwriting is print, and one that looks like it was heavily influenced by something like an engineering or drafting class he took.  My wife and I were both born in the 1960s; Annette’s handwriting is neat and cursive, and my handwriting is awful.  We and pretty much everyone else in our generation were formally taught handwriting, but it seems like I and everyone else I know prints.  The article’s author, Suddath, interviews her third grade teacher (Suddath said she was in the third grade in 1990) who taught her handwriting and who implies that Suddath’s was pretty much the last generation for whom cursive was a “rite of passage.”  My son, born in the late 1990s, has awful handwriting, but he was most definitely taught cursive and I do recall the third and fourth graders seeing writing in cursive as a “grown-up” thing to do.

Anyway, my point is it seems like handwriting has been waning and lost on the next generation for a long time now.  But once again, as someone who has never had the coordination (left-handedness, mostly), skill, or patience to write– even print!– neatly, I welcome the ever-returning end of handwriting.

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MLA says no more underlining (13 years later, victory is sweet)

I learned via Dennis Jerz’s blog today and found more details at the Purdue OWL that the Modern Language Association is officially saying that underlining is out and italics is in.  I suppose the bigger news is MLA saying that URLs are no longer required (and I agree with Dennis that sometimes requiring URLs makes a lot of sense), but I have to say my geeky little English professor heart skipped a beat at the victory about italics.  My victory, that is.

Back in 1996, after I had finished and defended my dissertation, Annette and I were spending the spring/summer that year preparing for the move to Oregon for my first tenure-track job and I was running through the last details of submitting my dissertation to the graduate college for their official stamp of approval before it went off to the binary, DAI, and points beyond.  This is a process which exists at all graduate schools (at least it did– maybe these offices have been phased out with more and more electronic publication of these projects?), and it is mostly to make sure that dissertations and theses adheared to standard formatting in terms of a style manual and also in terms of dimensions of the document so it could be properly bound.

As I understood it, the office that did the reviewing at BGSU was staffed with graduate students on various assistantships, which meant that the level of scrutiny these documents received kind of varied. I was lucky enough to get a, um, “eager beaver,” as my reviewer.  I submitted my completed diss, and I got back what I believe was a print letter/memo (I don’t think it was an email, though I think I emailed my response) that indicated some real proof-reading errors I needed to fix, and two other global “errors” the reviewer insisted I correct.  First, this person said that I couldn’t use any contractions so I had to change all of them throughout the manuscript.  Second, I was told that I had to change all uses of italics to underlined text.

First off, I responded, there’s no rule in MLA style about the use of contractions, and I used them correctly.  Second, MLA’s rules for underlining versus italics was inconclusive, and I personally preferred the use of italics.  So, in effect, my response to the manuscript reviewer was “Thanks for your thoughts, but I’m not making those changes.  Let’s move on.”  The response I received was something along the lines of “While I will conceede that your use of contractions does not violate MLA style, I must insist that the use of italics is incorrect.  Please make the appropriate changes.”

My response to this was (and I believe this is the technical phrase) I blew a nut.  I was not about to have my completed dissertation derailed by some underline-happy MA student.  To make a long-story short, I had to cite chapter and verse in MLA style to this person’s supervisor, who did admit that this person trying to hold up the process after my successful defense was perhaps overstepping their bounds just a tad.  So the italics stood, and have always made a point of instructing my students that either underlining or italics is okay.

I’m looking forward to now telling my students to ditch the underlining.

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“We are all writers now”

The ever-readerly Nick Carbone posted this link to some of the usual mailing lists:  “We are all writers now,” in More Intelligent Life and by Anne Trubek. It’s a nice piece, especially in response to that old “we’re going th hell in a handbasket with writing and reading because of these dang computers.”  Here’s a quote:

Go back 20, 30 years and you will find all of us doing more talking than writing. We rued literacy levels and worried over whether all this phone-yakking and television-watching spelled the end of writing.

Few make that claim today. I would hazard that, with more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.

BTW, I wish there was an easy way for me to post the same post to two or three different blogs…. Anyway, this one will come in handy for things like 516 for sure.

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And other Computers and Writing highlights

I was going to wrap this all up in my previous post on Twitter, but since that got kind of long and very Twitter-centric, I thought I’d post one last time about C&W09 here. Some of the other highlights:

  • Before the Ganley keynote, Nick Carbone and I worked on incorporating some video from Matt Barton (who was originally going to come to C&W this year but then he didn’t, I think because of travel fund issues) into my part of our talk about textbook publishing, “Textbook 2.0: Open Source Textbooks and Multimodal Composition Programs.” There is a podcast recording of it on the C&W 09 web site– one of these days, I’ll connect that audio with my slides and post them here. Anyway, it was a pretty well-attended session in my estimation, and I enjoyed presenting with Nick.
  • I was “back to back” presentation boy at this year’s conference as I followed the textbook presentation with my contribution to “Sustainable Blogging: Problems and Promises for School, Work, and Play.” I set up a new web site/blog, “Blogs as Writerly Spaces,” to host stuff about this research, and I have a link to my presentation script here. It was a smaller crowd than the textbook talk (which says to me that I’m a lot more interested in my research in blogging at this stage than most other people), but some really good presentations from my Indiana University of Pennsylvania colleague and friend Gian Pagnucci, along with some IUP grad students, Sabatino Mangini and Jessica Schreyer.
  • Friday night was the banquet, which was fine but not that exciting one way or the other, and then it was out to the Davis nightlife with various C&W folks.
  • Slept in Saturday morning (well, sort of slept in– I never did get my time issues straight out there) and managed to walk through the Davis farmer’s market on the way to the conference. I debated getting some beautiful looking morel mushrooms, but I wasn’t sure I could get them back on the plane in my carry-on luggage. Probably, but I didn’t want to chance it.
  • Then to the conference and I went to see “Researching Fully Online Instruction: Assessment, Pedagogy, and a Sustainable Theory of Hybrid Online Learning,” which was a panel by some fine folks at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Given the discussions we’ve had here in my program about teaching online, I guess there are two things I found striking. One speaker, Christopher Dean, presented about how the research suggests there is “no significant difference” in what students learn in online classes versus similar face to face classes. There are some big problems with these kinds of claims, including a kind of fuzzy sense of what exactly it is we are measuring when we describe “learning.” But I will say that in my own experiences his claims seem accurate to the extent that the writing projects and other graded “artifacts” students produce in online classes are pretty much the same as those students produce in face to face classes, and that even includes things like the collaborative video projects and such. More important to me though was that two of these folks, Randi Browning and Kathy Patterson, spoke about their experiences teaching online for the first time. I wish these folks would come and talk to some of my EMU colleagues because I think they would be a lot more persuasive than me in speaking about what it’s “like” to make the leap of faith to teach online.
  • Went to Bill Cope’s keynote, which was fantastic, in my mind: very solid theoretically, well-put together and polished, pushing the edges of what counts as technology, etc. Interestingly, I think he was making the same basic point as Ganley; but besides the delivery, I think the differences had to do with tools than it had to do with concepts.
  • Then I took a conference break to go grade– I was and remain woefully behind– and I had a solo lunch and grading session at Crepeville. Very nice, and I got a fair amount of work done, too.
  • I attended another panel after my grading lunch (a pretty good one– G1, “Hybrid Writing Classes: Literacy, Dialogues, and Intellectual Property”), I went to Town Hall III, where I was on the panel. This was an odd experience. First off, I was pretty unprepared compared to the other people on the panel, I guess because what I thought I was supposed to do mostly was react to the stuff I had seen at the conference. I wasn’t expecting to have a little speech written up. And second, as I was sitting there next to Cindy Selfe and Kathy Yancey (not to mention some other heavy-hitters), I most distinctly had the feeling of being a little like Kathy Griffin on “the D list.” But it was a good conversation and a good opportunity for me. I tried to get Cindy to sign onto Twitter with no luck though.
  • Then it was an art exhibit that actually was kinda cool (I have some video to upload sooner than later) and then bowling. I took lots of pictures that are here, but my favorite is the one video I took:

    And this was followed by a comparatively quiet night on the town.

  • And just to prove that the conference isn’t over until you’re long LONG gone: I ended up riding back on the plane with a fellow conference goer and right behind this group of drunk women. It’s a long story, and it was a long plane flight, and I’m still running behind….

All in all, a fantastic C&W this year. I thought Davis was great, I think I actually went to more panels than I’ve gone to in a long time, and I have to say I enjoyed thoroughly having my own room (though it cost too much). Carl Whithaus and friends did a fantastic job, and I’m looking forward to next year’s conference at Purdue.