Writing – Page 8 – Steven D. Krause

June 25, 2009

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.

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?