From TechCrunch comes this story, Virtual Pedophilia Report Bad News for Second Life. Follow the link for the full story, though I personally find it kind of icky and unpleasant (which is why I suppose people should know about it). This is the sort of thing that might fit into my English 516 class since I am sure we’ll talk at least a bit about gaming, though I don’t know if we’ll talk much about Second Life and I really don’t know if I want to go down the path of talking about this aspect of Second Life. I have had students in the not so distant past, especially secondary school teachers coming back for their MAs, who see an article like this and then automatically dismiss any possible good things about SL. It’s one of those pieces that motivates a “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” kind of mentality. Anyway, we’ll see.
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.
This might have been fun…
… and maybe it’s something to think about next year: WikiSym, which just had its annual international conference which it says is the only international scientific conference dedicated to wikis.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but given that this most recent conference was in Montreal, a city not far away from here and a city I want to visit, it’s a shame I didn’t think of this earlier. We’ll see where it is next year.
Conveniently (and not surprisingly) enough, it would appear that many of the conference panel papers are available through the web site. Might be worth thinking about in some upcoming teaching.
Kinda cool guide to "The Question Concerning Technology"
Just doing some BAWS reading and writing and I did a search for Martin Heidegger’s famous “The Question Concerning Technology.” Among other things, it brought up this kinda cool guide to it.
Consumers guide to fighting back
I perhaps should be posting this on my official blog, since I talked about our horrific trip on Northwest Airlines to New York City last March there, and also because I have taught a course in the past where one of the assignments involves writing and answering letters of complaint. But I’ll put it here, anyway: The Ultimate Consumerist Guide To Fighting Back, which has lots of ways to complain and get satisfied when screwed over by a business of one sort or another.
Incidentally, we did complain about the Northwest trip and we did get some coupons for a discounted flight in the future. Not much, but something. Oh, and I found this link via boing-boing.
Does anyone out there speak Finnish?
At least I think that’s the language in question here…
I noticed in the “Incoming Links” part of things on my blog that “ePro SEPPO” has recently linked here and to my article “When Blogging Goes Bad,” which, up to this point of my career, seems to have become my calling card, academically speaking. I’ve seen/read discussion about this article in other places before, but it’s been a while (that article came out a few years ago now), and just the other day, this showed up.
The problem for me is that it is in a language I certainly cannot read that I think is Finnish, so I have no idea what this person is saying. It could be “Krause is the greatest thinker of our time,” or it could be “what a goofball, this Krause guy.” If I was a betting man, I’d pick the second one.
In any event, I might end up emailing the blogger in question here, but if anyone in the meantime has any idea what they’re talking about here, let me know.
Ypsilanti Income Tax: Vote yes, I think
This one goes out for the Ypsi locals….
I have waffled on this personally quite a bit, and I can’t say that I am 100% convinced that this is all going to work out, but I think I’ve been persuaded by some things I’ve read lately that the only decent solution to Ypsilanti’s financial woes is to vote yes on the proposed income tax. More below if you’re interested.
Continue reading “Ypsilanti Income Tax: Vote yes, I think”
Not your usual nature show footage
I came across this via TheOrangeSlayedTheRake:
As he said, the first couple minutes are kind of boring but then things take some pretty interesting turns.
Earthquakes celebrate perfect record, sort of
Today was the last game for Will’s soccer team the Earthquakes (I guess mine too, since I helped out Jim K. with coaching and kid wrangling), and what a miserable game it was. We had to play the first game (9 am), and that comes mighty early on a Saturday morning. It was in the 40s and rainy and kinda windy. Only sleet could have made it worse. And we lost and lost very very badly, like zip to 10. That caps off an 0-6 season, one where we played two (maybe three) games we really should have won, and three or four games where we just crushed.
But you know what? The kids really didn’t seem to care a whole bunch, and at this age (under 12), I guess that’s a good thing. This isn’t exactly a super-duper competitive league, and the kids all really seemed to get along great. It was a lot of fun working with/hanging out with the kids and with Jim, and I hope I get a chance to pitch in again in the spring. The way I figure it, I have a little more time this year with my “sabbatical lite” schedule at work, and I think Will is right at that age where it’s still “kinda cool” for Dad to be hanging out and one of the coaches.
Incidentally, in the picture above (there’s a bunch more in this flickr set) is the kids goofin’ a bit, holding up the “L is for loser” hand gesture. Good sense of humor, these kids. One of them was talking to Will about how they had this perfect record, that no one had ever lost all of their games like that. Will said “Oh yeah? I haven’t won a game in two years!”
Well, maybe next year….
Survey says… / Sabbatical Lite midterms of sort
I think I’m going to take the weekend off from BAWS/sabbatical/school work (other than getting caught up on my email, which will give me a chance to email some friends of mine anyway) and concentrate on stuff around the house– family things, cleaning, putting up Halloween decos, carving pumpkins, etc. After this last week, I feel like I earned it.
I finally managed to get my Blogs as Writerly Spaces surveys and human subject review paperwork submitted. I say “surveys,” but really it’s one survey (which I am going to invite folks to participate in more or less randomly and via email) and one set of case study questions (and I’m going to try to find case study subjects by the survey and also by trying to just invite some folks whose blogs I like to read). I’m happy to share my questions with anyone who is curious, and a big shout-out to friends and colleagues Dennis Danvers, Bill Hart-Davidson, Steve Benninghoff, and Linda Adler-Kassner for the advice and help they passed along. And also a big help to Joe Scazzero in the EMU faculty development center, which is one tip I would pass along to anyone putting together a serious survey: get someone to look at it who a) is an expert at survey construction and b) knows almost nothing about the topic of the survey.
As anyone who has ever put together a real survey knows, surveys is hard. They seem like they’d be easy– what first year composition teacher hasn’t had a student whose solution to a research pickle was to come up with a survey on the fly? But easy they ain’t. I puzzled over mine for the better part of the last month, and I feel like that was actually pretty quick. One of my colleagues told me a story about a survey she did with some folks way back when with a bunch of others, and took them about a year to come up with questions they were happy with.
Anyway, I’m pleased with that, and I’m also pleased that I am done with the Human Subjects Review stuff (what every other school seems to call “IRB”)– or at least I’m “done” as long as they exempt my project, which I expect they will. Not a lot of blood being drawn, not a lot of electrical shock, etc. Once that is all put to bed, I’ll load stuff up on surveymonkey and keep my fingers crossed that folks will actually participate.
And how is “sabbatical lite” treating me? Well, it comes and goes. I’ve had some weeks this semester in which it has worked out quite well, but last week was not one of them. I had to be on campus for something every day last week, and the “never before 1 pm” rule is starting to look less than workable. So in the sense that a sabbatical is supposed to be about “getting away,” sabbatical lite ain’t working.
On the other hand, not teaching (and thus not grading/commenting on a bunch of student writing) does give me a lot more time to do things like write surveys, read scholarly things, write my own things, etc. I do feel like I’ve gotten a lot done, I’m not really sure I would have gotten a lot more done if I was sabbaticalling in the traditional way, and I’m looking forward to next semester when I will essentially have an extra course release left over from splitting this one semester sabbatical over two.
Still, if I had the chance to do this over, I wouldn’t do this again. Sabbatical lite was the best choice I could have made at the time, but my advice to anyone contemplating splitting up a sabbatical themselves would be to not do it. And if I have a chance to apply for another sabbatical anytime soon, I’ll probably ask for the full year. Of course, with my son on the verge of entering private secondary school (probably) and then college (hopefully), I doubt I’ll be able to afford that….