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Never mind the handwriting; what about typing?

I’ve posted many things here about handwriting and computers over the years; here’s what I think is the first article on typing: “Exercise still key to computing,” a poorly written headline for an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Long gone are the days of high school typing classes, where the clack of manual Underwoods and electric IBM Selectrics echoed down the hallway.

Students as young as first grade are introduced to a keyboard in computer technology classes. The state’s technology standards recommend that all students be able to type proficiently on a keyboard by eighth grade.

But as with handwriting, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to teach keyboarding. Schools are preparing students for state tests, or there’s so much more technology to teach than just keyboarding.

There’s also a cool picture here of kids typing at computer keyboards with boxes over their hands so they can’t “cheat” from their practices of touch typing.

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"Paperless" school article

From the Orlando Sentinel comes this article, “Who needs pens? School goes paperless,” an article about (guess what!) an elementary school with lots of computers and laptops and such.

First off, I don’t think it’s so much about paperless as it is about just having computers. The idea that this is a “paperless” seems to be the work of a headline writer. Second, I think this falls into the wildly optimistic view of technology. For example:

“Technology is one of the best and worst things introduced in schools in the last 20 years,” [Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., a University of Miami education professor] said. “It can be an extraordinary tool. . . . But it can also be the difference between watching a movie about Venice and actually going to Venice and smelling the salt air.”

I mean, I am of course all for computers in the schools and technology and stuff like that, but this view seems a little rosy. Unless they’ve got smell-o-vision on those computers in Florida….

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Thanksgiving blogging, part 1

Thanksgiving is actually one of my favorite holidays, largely because it revolves around one of my favorite activities, which is eating. Oh yeah– there’s some family stuff, too. Anyway, in no particular order, the T-Day holiday so far:

  • This year, we went to Iowa to see my side of the family. At Christmas, we’ll make the trek down to Florida. We drive to Iowa, but after about 10 hours in the car, caught in traffic etc., we started to wonder how much would it cost to fly.
  • We stopped on the way at Panera, in part because we were thinking that it was a healthy option. Well, according to Dottie’s Weight Watcher page, not so much. It’s still tasty, though.
  • Yesterday involved the running of a variety of errands– car washing, picking up pies, buying a University of Northern Iowa sweatshirt. Two things that eternally fascinate me about visiting my hometown: first, Cedar Falls strikes me as so much more “liveable” of a place than it was when I was a kid, mainly because so many more things are so easily available here than it used to be. For example, good coffee, good books, the New York Times, decent restaurants, good shopping options, organic vegetables, good cable, etc. Call it progress; call it the state of advanced capitalism.

    Second, I inevitably get lost when I come back to my hometown because a few years after I moved away (I actually haven’t lived here full-time since I was about 19, and I am pretty sure that I passed the point where I have lived more outside of Iowa than in Iowa a few years ago), they did a major road reconstruction project, totally changing the traffic patterns and right way to go. It took me more than an hour to pick up the pies.

  • Lots of play with the kids on the playground, lots of play in the backyard, card playing, eating and drinking, etc., etc. I was going to upload some pictures, but I left the cable for that at home, so it will have to wait until we get back.
  • Other than that, pretty boring stuff. Good dinner, but no green bean casserole, which is, of course, wrong. My father grilled the turkey, and at no point did anyone think about deep-fat frying it. The neighbors across the street did, but nothing bad happened.
  • Other than that, a lot of the last couple of days has involved me catching up on email and determining the schedule for my online teaching in the winter term. Really exciting stuff.

But I will leave you with this amusing item about bunnies cooking turkeys:

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T-Day/Multimodal Literacies

I’m getting ready to get out the door for the holidaze, but before I go, I have to make a link to the NCTE Multi-Modal Literacies site, something I stumbled across via John Walter’s blog. This is a potentially interesting site to me for at least two reasons. First, it’s right up the alley of something I ought to mention in a version of English 516, and one of my (oh too many) goals for the Thanksgiving “break” will be to start getting a version of that class ready for online consumption.

Second, it speaks to the sort of weird way that NCTE speaks about these things. “Multi-Modal” strikes me as an odd phrase, as does the language that is NCATE/NCTE-related, the phrase “non-print texts.” This is the term used again and again in one of the documents about accrediting secondary teachers in English, a document my department has been paying a lot of attention to lately because we have several hundred majors in this area. I understand what NCATE and NCTE are trying to achieve with these phrases, but both muli-modal and non-print strike me as, well, odd phrases.

But maybe that’s just me.

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Where’s Steve been, you ask?

Well, it’s been busy around here, to be honest. Work has been super-duper busy for all kinds of different reasons, including a somewhat odd visit to my office by the president of the university. Plus there is that pesky teaching thing, plus I did quite a bit of work on what I suspect will be a long-shot sabbatical request, plus various meetings/getting ready for Winter 2007 teaching, etc., etc., etc.

And quite frankly, I haven’t had much time to do much of anything else. A little yard work. We’re having an “Indian Food Fest” tonight, an annual dinner party we have (it’s going to be a dozen this year). Next week, we go to Iowa for Thanksgiving.

So just the typical busy stuff.

Sorry I don’t have much else to offer; in the meantime, why not enjoy this video of naked mannequins on skateboards I found via boing-boing?

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"Video Game Programs Look for New Ways to Use Games"

I heard this story, “Video Game Programs Look for New Ways to Use Games,” on NPR yesterday afternoon, a piece I will probably include in a unit for 516, a new one I need to develop on gaming, technology, and writing. Quite frankly, computer/video games are not my cup of tea (with the possible exception of a once or twice a year dip into games like “The Sims” or Civilization or something like that), but there’s a lot of interesting things out there right now about games and literacy, obviously.

The funny thing I remember about this NPR radio story: the reporter is talking to a student who is in the new major/program at U of Southern California (I think) on video game development about this game the student is developing. It’s impossible to figure out what one “does” in this game, but the student keep referencing philosophers like Foucault and he describes himself as “obviously a poststructualist.” The reporter asks “um, do you imagine this being a popular game?” “Absolutely not,” the student responded.

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Another good link, another thing to think about for English 516…

Jeff had a good point/link on his blog yesterday about YouTube. I’m not completely sure I agree with him entirely (mostly though), but I haven’t read the IHE article about YouTube he mentions yet.

Oddly, the think that most immediately comes to my mind is not YouTube, the article in Inside Higher Ed, or Jeff’s take on it. Rather, the first thing I thought was “jeez, that’s something else I need to figure out for English 516!”

I’m teaching that course online in the winter term and I have an embarrassing amount of stuff to do to get ready to do that. Don’t get me wrong; I have a pretty good sense about what I’ll be doing this coming term, mainly because I’m in the third year of this particular cycle of the course. (What I mean by that is I have found that I have to pretty much throw out everything but the most foundational texts– things like Ong on writing as a technology, Selfe’s “Paying Attention” essay, a few other things– about every three years because they simply become too dated).

But as I have learned before, the tricky thing is figuring out how to make this stuff translate to the online experience. For example, one of the things I’ve done in this class in recent years that I think has been reasonably successful is student presentations on books from a selected reading list on “cutting edge” issues in computers in writing. A lot of it is stuff that I’d like to read but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Anyway, in a face-to-face setting, this is pretty easy to facilitate: students talk about their book project for about 10 minutes or so and they hand in a brief essay. I could of course just ask student presenters to write something that the rest of the class can simply read. But that doesn’t really capture the “presentation” experience. On the other hand, I could ask students to make a presentation and post it– an audio file, a video, etc. But that makes technical demands at a level that I’m not sure I can expect from online students.

So we’ll see. It makes me nervous to say this, but there is going to be a “making it up as we go along” element to this class in the winter….

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Just when I was used to Web 2.0….

The New York Times has a front page story today with the headline “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided By Common Sense” that is about– are you ready?– Web 3.0. A newer and even more improved version of Web 2.0, no doubt.

Here’s a passage that tries to explain the difference between 2 and 3:

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up� — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.�

Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

Somehow, I have my doubts….

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The state of the "blogosphere"/sabbaticalizing

Via jill/txt comes a link to “Sifry’s Alerts” on the “State of the Blogosphere,” which is based on technorati statistics, which is where David Sifry works. Some potentially interesting stuff for both my teaching in the winter term (and beyond), and also my scholarly endeavors.

Speaking of which: A big public thanks to the folks who gave me some valuable input and support on my recent “last minute” sabbatical proposal– my wife, Linda AK, Steve B, Bill HD… I think that’s all of ’em. I feel pretty good about the proposal I put together, though the creative writer part of me that believes it is both bad luck and tacky to talk about work not yet done is a little reluctant to start posting about it here in too much detail. All I will say for now is that, if nothing else, it was a good feeling to start thinking again in terms of scholarly work, I have a pretty good idea for at least one essay and one conference presentation, and, if I actually follow through on all this (and I think I will), I do think I might have a good book idea.

As for the sabbatical: well, it’s a long-shot, I think. One of the great ironies of things like sabbaticals nowadays at EMU (and I think this is true just about everywhere, frankly) is, because the competition for fewer and fewer sabbaticals is keen, you basically need to have a book contract in hand to win the award. And, obviously, if you already managed to put together a project that merited a book contract without release time before, then you probably really don’t need it now. In effect, sabbaticals are not about granting release to do promising and future research and scholarship; rather, they are a “reward” for a job (already) well done.

But like I said, it has been self-motivating if nothing else, and that’s a good thing. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky.