Writing – Page 8 – Steven D. Krause

June 23, 2009

I’m not the only one who self-published on the web…

I gave a talk at the recent Computers and Writing Conference on self-publishing my textbook, The Process of Research Writing, a talk which I’m hoping to eventually make available here– stay tuned. But this morning, I came across this article from Inside Higher Ed from last week, Douglas J. Amy’s “Adventures in Web Publishing.” In short, Amy self-published a book that he could not get a popular press to take on and he said he wasn’t interested in working with a university press since the readership would be so small. So he put it up on the web.

Part of what he discusses in this article is what I discussed in my presentation, which is the “capital” one collects from projects like this; for example:

I have also received a surprising amount of feedback on my work. I could probably count on both hands the number of letters or e-mails I have gotten from strangers about my other books. But I’ve received hundreds of e-mails about the materials on this Web site. Undoubtedly, part of this is due to simple convenience: Readers merely have to click on the link “Contact the Author” to send me a message. But also, the culture of the Web is a very interactive one, with people used to making comments and discussing issues online.

June 17, 2009June 17, 2009

“Do computers make students better writers?”

There was a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed the other day, “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers.” I think it might make for good reading/discussion for English 516, where this basic question of “are computers helping students be better writers” often comes up. I like this passage from Jeff Grabill too:

“The unstated assumption there is that if you can write a good essay for your literature professor, you can write anything,” Mr. Grabill says. “That’s utter nonsense.”

The writing done outside of class is, in some ways, the opposite of a traditional academic paper, he says. Much out-of-class writing, he says, is for a broad audience instead of a single professor, tries to solve real-world problems rather than accomplish academic goals, and resembles a conversation more than an argument.

Rather than being seen as an impoverished, secondary form, online writing should be seen as “the new normal,” he says, and treated in the curriculum as such: “The writing that students do in their lives is a tremendous resource.”

But I guess this does prompt me to think about/mention two things:

My guess/gut feeling is that a lot of the expression students have about how they “like” to write more outside of school than inside of it has a lot more to do with school than it has to do with what it is they’re writing. I agree with Grabill about trying to give assignments in classes about real world problems, things that resemble conversation rather than academic, five paragraph, “there are three problems with x” kind of essays. But no matter what I do to incorporate these kinds of writing assignments into my courses, there is still all the apparatus of the situation. I mean, none of this is voluntary. I wouldn’t be doing these assignments and this teaching if I wasn’t empowered (and paid!) as a college professor, and my students wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t trying to complete coursework and a degree program. So there’s always going to be a division between writing students do for school and writing they do “outside of school” not because of the kind of writing but because of the situation of writing, which is school.
Despite the headline, it seems to me that neither of these studies is actually trying to answer the “do computers make students better writers;” rather, both seem to be studying how students actually practice their writing in and out of the classroom with computers. Which is a good thing. My take on the “do computer technologies help make student better writers?” is that it is really an irrelevant question because it is what students and everyone else uses to write nowadays. If someone did a study and somehow was able to prove that people “wrote better” when they used a quill and parchment (or hell, just pens and paper), it wouldn’t make any difference because I think most people nowadays find using these older tools to be a pain in the ass.

And really, the stuff that Grabill is talking about in the part I quote isn’t about technology. You can teach a dreadful academic research paper kind of class in a computer lab, too.

June 14, 2009

That’s how Cory Doctorow does it all

Cory Doctorow had a post on boing-boing yesterday, “Daily Routines: a blog about the habits of interesting people.” The blog he was talking about, Daily Routines, is only kinda/sorta interesting. More interesting to me was the routine Doctorow described for himself:

I’m a total creature of habit, even when I’m on the road, a 5AM-rising daily writer; the last thing I do before bed is all the breakfast prep for a huge, elaborate three-course breakfast for the family so that I can bang it all out in ten minutes after getting to inbox0 from the night’s email and getting through all the morning’s blogposts, hot and ready by 7AM. I get a nap, half an hour’s reading and half and hour’s yoga every afternoon, get in two pages of the novel, two pages of the short story, and about 3 to 5 times a week, I write a column. Every Monday is podcast day. Monday and Wednesday night, I leave the office ten minutes early, get the kid from day care and make sure she’s bathed, fed and in bed by 7 when the sitter comes by so Alice and I can go to a proper 1.5h yoga class around the corner. Sunday mornings we have breakfast out, and I walk the kid to the PO Box, stop and play in the park on the way back, drop off all the stuff from the box at my office, then come home and put the kid to bed while Alice kills zombies on the Xbox. I love my routine.

All of which makes me think a) I need a routine, and b) I need a nap because I did not intend to wake up at 5 am this morning.

May 29, 2009

Writing tools come in many shapes and sizes

For example, see this post on boing-boing about Rudy Rucker’s Swiss writing knife, a good luck charm of sorts. Hey, whatever works to get the words down, right?

April 19, 2009

Taskbarn and online collaboration

See Taskbarn, a free project management/collaboration tool.

I don’t know if this would help or not (and I haven’t played with it yet), but one of the challenges my online students in English 328 had this term was collaborating on the movie projects. I knew this might be tricky. I’ll post more about this later, but the short version is that it all “worked out,” but not without some challenges along the way.

In the end, the groups in both of my online sections mostly did face-to-face collaboration, which makes sense since at least 80% of the students in these online classes are currently taking class on campus. In fact, I think there were only two students in total who were really “distance learners,” one in another state a couple time zones away, and another in the military and stationed in the Middle East. Without getting into details now, people coped as best they could and it basically worked out about as well as the collaboration did in the fall term in the “normal” face to face class.

Still, I think that students really could/should be able to do the whole thing online by exchanging text, audio, and video. In theory, they could use emuonline for this, but it has some kind of clunky features in terms of uploading large files and such. So maybe something like this would work better.

April 19, 2009

Some charts look like a pie and you know that’s sweet

Via boing-boing on a blog reading break comes this handy visual rhetoric reference:

Now back to the grading grading grading….

April 2, 2009

Eric Idle on writing and collaboration

I found this on YouTube while looking for something else:

Interestingly enough, I more or less recognize each of these different styles of collaboration, which I suppose is one of the reasons why I tend to write alone. Anyway, could be a handy little vid to share as part of a collaboration discussion I think.

March 27, 2009

ReReRe:CCCC-ing, part 1 (Rip: A Remix Manifesto)

The call for proposals for the 2010 CCCCs in Louisville is titled “The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew.” First off, proposal readers better get ready for a whole bunch of “Re:”s which is likely to be included in just about every single proposal. I didn’t look too closely at the CCCCs program for San Francisco, but I will bet you there were enough waves to make a reader seasick.

Second, I suspect the CCCCs ought to be careful what it asks for. Is this an organization that is really ready to rethink, revise, and renew? I dunno.

Third– and maybe this is just me– but that “The” bothers me, as in “The Remix,” which suggests singularity which obviously not only doesn’t exist but which is defied by remixing in the first place. Plus every time I read the phrase “The Remix,” I misread and/or hear “The Reflex” by Duran Duran.

I’ve got a couple of vague ideas for proposals, but one thing I’m kind of thinking about is something along the lines of Rip: A Remix Manifesto, only in the form of an essay/word-driven project. Here’s a preview:

The Ann Arbor film festival is going to screen this on Saturday night, but not until 9 pm. And given that I am a flying solo this weekend while Annette is off at a conference, I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it or not. But the point of the movie, as I understand it, is it is the first “open source” documentary, where the filmmaker invited folks to remix/mashup the video. So the two things I wonder about:

Could this work in a “conventional” first year writing project, where one of the research writing “essay” projects was replaced with a “mashup” essay?

And is the CCCCs and/or comp/rhet world actually ready for something like that?

March 17, 2009March 18, 2009

Two modest observations about the jounalism biz

I was talking to a friend of mine this morning who has worked as a newspaper reporter for a long LONG time now, this after hearing a story on NPR this morning about how the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is going to make a run of it publishing only online:

I think the story has been, ironically enough, somewhat mis-reported. True, fewer people are reading paper/printed newspapers. But when I talk to people who actually know about newspapers, what they tell me is that the loss of revenue that is just crushing them is classifieds. So it isn’t things like Google News or online versions of the newspapers that are doing them in; it’s things like Craig’s List and Monster.com This might seem like an overly nuanced take on this, but all the reported news I’ve heard has been about how the demise of newspapers has been the result of them giving away its content, when really, these other services invented a better mousetrap
On the one hand, newspapers are folding because they aren’t making any/enough money. “We can’t make money at this anymore.” Well, maybe newspapers need to figure out a better business plan or they need to acknowledge they are no longer relevant because of the technology. On the other hand, this is bad because the press as the “fourth estate” stuff. “But we need to protect democracy!” Well, maybe newspapers need to reorganize as not-for-profit entities more akin to public radio/TV, or as foundations like the Pew Trusts. But the only way that newspapers can stay both profitable and a force for democracy is to travel back in time.

Update: If anyone is interested in the opinions of other “experts” (actually, I am in this case), check out this post from Clay Shirky and this one from Steve Johnson. Both are also excerpted in this NYTimes op-ed piece. All good 444 stuff.