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Visual Rhetoric(s) and connections to McCloud (or, duh, use Google)

It’s funny how I have managed to do a lot of stuff different in my teaching from the way I’ve done then in the past, and I’m just now realizing it mid-way through the semester. For example, while I’m not completely sold on what seems to me to be the current/recent emphasis on so-called “Visual Rhetoric,” I decided to have students in my English 328 class do a project on it. Among other reasons, I decided to include this in the class because Scott McCloud is going to be on campus in the Winter as the EMU McAndless Professor. We’re reading/discussing Understanding Comics of course, but I’m trying to find one or two other readings to supplement this. Oh, and I need to come up with a writing assignment, too.

Can you see how carefully this is all planned? Jeesh.

Anyway, a colleague of mine recommended the first chapter of Claude Gandelman’s Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, but I don’t think that’s going to be right. Gandelman is coming at the issue as an art critic, and while this chapter is really interesting (it’s about the connection between “touch” and “vision,” and argues that the eye physically does not take all of an image at once), I don’t think my students will get the connection with McCloud. Derek’s comments on Bolter’s essay in the collection Elloquent Images makes me want to take a look at that book, but the EMU library doesn’t have it and someone has it checked out of the U of Michigan library. I think Richard Lanham’s essay “The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge” will work well as a sort of “bridge” text between this unit and the next ones, but it is slightly dated, originally published in 1994.

Of course, when all else fails, I do what my students do: I just Google something obvious, like “Visual Rhetoric.” Among many other things, this turned up The Visual Rhetoric Portal, a handy bibliography of materials on visual rhetoric, these resources at the University of Iowa, this David Blakesley course, etc., etc.

Sometimes the obvious yeilds surprising results.

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Why I (too frequently) hate going to the movies

Annette and Will and I went to see Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit on Friday for a late afternoon matinee. First off, it was a great movie– far from a “kiddie flick,” and anyone who has ever seen any of the other Wallace & Gromit shorts will love it. A lot of fun and worth seeing in the theater.

However, I am increasingly irritated about seeing movies in the theater. The expense and such is part of it, but I guess most of it is the people around me who seem to have no ideas about the basic rules of how to watch a movie in a public place. Like I said, we were there in the late afternoon. Among a few others, there was a large group of people behind us, and as far as we could tell, all of them had brought fistfulls of candy wrappers with them to the show. We heard a steady krinkle-krinkle-krinkle-krinkle, sort of like a grass fire.

And then, to make matters worse, there was a couple in their late 40s/early fifties sitting to my right who seemed to be in the theater not so much to see the movie but because they were looking for a place to sit to carry on other business. I mean, this woman was on her cell phone off and on, they were talking and talking about God knows what, and then, when they did notice that there actually was this movie going on, they would make loud and stupid proclaimations like “hey, LOOK at THAT!”

Idiots. And for the three of us, we paid around $30 for the pleasure of dealing with these kinds of people. This is why a really good big-screen TV/home theater seems like not only a good idea but ultimately cost-effective.

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Laptops in every, ah, lap

Via BBC News comes this story, “US school swaps books for bytes.” I think I had a link/discussion about this same Arizona school a few months ago, but it would appear that now things are actually happening at this school.

A couple of interesting quotes; the first one answers the “either computers or books” issue, at least from the point of view of a start-up budget for a high school:

Providing all the pupils with Apple iBooks did not dent the school’s budget as much as might be expected. But part of that is down to the school having been newly built.

The money that was budgeted to buy text books, which was about $500 a student, was spent instead on the laptops.

“Our laptops cost is about $800 per pupil. Our net cost is probably $100 to $200 more than if we had used text books,” he [Calvin Baker, chief superintendent of the Vail School district] says.

By giving all the students a laptop computer, the school has done away with computer laboratories too.

Baker is also quoted in this article as saying that the school is not “book free”– there’s a library, for example– but most of the content students work with in classes are delivered via these laptops.

Putting aside the sort of Sophie’s Choice method of financing these laptops, that last line, that a laptop on every student’s desk (and, since it’s mobile, in every student’s backpack and in every student’s house) has replaced computer labs, is really something that appeals to me. We’ve been experiencing some, ah, “technical challenges” with the support people as of late, which just underscores the ongoing problem an underfunded university like EMU has with technology. I’m not saying that a laptop program would solve everything; in fact, I think you could make a pretty good argument that all a laptop program at the college-level does is shift the burden of who has to pay for and maintain the hardware. But if we went this route, students wouldn’t be in a situation where they were learning how to do something on a computer they aren’t likely to use much, we could have computer labs which had higher-end hardware and software (for example, a multimedia lab), and the tech support people could focus on the keeping these smaller labs and the network running. And I think it would do a lot to help “technlogical literacy” on the whole at EMU.

In a way though, I think the idea that every student will have a laptop is kind of inevitable, plan or no plan, since more and more students are showing up with laptops all on their own. It’s easy to imagine a time four or five years from now where my students ignore the computers in the lab in favor of their own laptops, and that would be fine with me.

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Turnitin Turn-Ons?

Rebecca Moore “Schenectady Synecdoche” Howard, who has published quite a bit on issues having to do with plagiarism, tells the story of using Turnitin.com for the first time. As she explains, it turns out that she largely plagiarized herself.

We have a site license for Turnitin.com at EMU, and there has been some controversy about its use– the usual issues having to do with the “policing” function, ownership of the text, etc. I have used Turnitin.com a grand total of one time, and I used it to help me vet a couple of student essays I am (hopefully) including in my textbook as examples. These were already good essays and these students were long done with my class, so it wasn’t me trying to play policeman. I just needed to go through both essays to make sure everything was fine.

Now, maybe it was because I was working with some strong examples, but I found Turnitin pretty useless. I mean, all it did was highlight parts of the essays where the students include quotes. Sorta. Big deal.

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Kirkpatrick Lands at Texas A&M

Here’s one for the “you’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me” file: Sam Kirkpatrick, the highly problematic former president of EMU, is now “Executive Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Management, and Executive Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.” You can take a look at his Texas A&M bio and such right here.

First off, I can’t resist pointing out the irony/weird justice of the situation: Kirkpatrick has been hired by the Bush (as in George I) school. Make your own political jokes here.

Second, our colleagues at Texas left some itty-bitty details off of the bio on the web site. So, just in case anybody in Texas is wondering who is this Kirkpatrick guy, they might want to do a search on Google for the words “President Kirkpatrick Eastern Michigan.” Or, if you want kind of a press round-up, check out this special section of M-Live devoted to the infamous house scandal. You will certainly wish you would have done this before you hired Sam, but now you know what you’re likely to be in for.

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Fuzzy Writing

Via Kairos News comes a link for something called fuzzmail. Here’s my lame little test of this app.

It’s kind of a cute little thing, the kind of thing that looks like it came out of a class on working with javascript, though it isn’t quite what I was expecting. Still, it might be kind of cool to show in my 328 class for a couple of reasons. First, this is kind of a very mini/junior version of the sort of usability software tools, the things that tech writers and psychologists and computer geeks use to study in depth the kinds of things that people do when they actually “use” web sites. Though what disappoints me a bit is that this is a very mini/junior version of that.

Second, it does potentially fit in with the project(s) we’ll be doing in that class regarding “visual” rhetoric. We’re going to read McCloud’s Understanding Comics and at least one or two essays from Handa’s collection on visual rhetoric, and we’re going to do at least one assignment– possibly two– in which playing around with this site might make sense. We’re going to do something (you can see how well planned this all is in my head!) that makes some kind of connection between images and words ala McCloud. But I’ve been thinking lately of making the last assignment in the class (at least in the “face-to-face” class, where I know I have access to some quasi-decent software in our computer lab and much better hardware/software at other places on campus).

See, I’ve been interested lately in learning for myself how to use Flash, iMovie, and other “moving pictures” sorts of technologies, I guess because I’m impressed with presentations like this one, “Identity 2.0” or the fabulous one that Lawrence Lessig did at the 2005 CCCCs. Neither one of these examples (and I’m sure there are many others) are using exactly rocket science technology (jeez, these two examples are basically PowerPoint), both of these presentations required the speakers to actually write something out ahead of time because you can’t just “wing it” (as so often is the case with conventional PowerPoint presentations) when you have a whole bunch of slides like these examples, and I think that these presentations are pretty effective. And really, beyond my students doing these projects, I’m interested in learning more about doing these kinds of things myself because I think it would enhance the online teaching experience.

But I digress. In the short-term, fuzzmail is kinda cute.

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Bombadill’s makes the Eastern Echo

There’s a nice little write-up about Bombadill’s Coffee House in Ypsilanti in EMU’s student paper, the Eastern Echo.

I’m actually in Bombadill’s right now, certainly the best coffee shop in all of Ypsilanti and my choice of a coffee shop destination when:

  • I really have to get down to work instead of merely “hang out” and/or people watch;
  • When I need a reliable Internet connection and I don’t want to be at home (I say “reliable” because some of the coffee shops I go to in Ann Arbor have spotty at best WiFi and because if something doesn’t work here, I know the people behind the counter well enough to ask them to fix it);
  • I’m meeting someone from EMU for something (for example, I actually taught a class that met here in Winter 2005– a great idea); and/or
  • When I’m in the mood for the Chicken Chili (which, since today is Tuesday, ought to be on the menu for lunch).

But I still don’t have Ypsi in my veins the same way that Pete does.

Anyway, c’mon down and check the place out.

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"UnGoogleable"/Disappearing from the Web (not)

Jill has a useful post that has some good discussion and a couple of good links about trying to “disconnect” from the Web. Sorta.

  • First, there’s this Wired News article, ”UnGoogleables’ Hide From Search.” I think the headline makes it pretty clear what this is about; the Wired News article also has some very good links to previous Google-oriented articles, which makes me think that Google and its ilk might be a prominent topic of discussion in one or more of my classes in the Winter term.
  • The second link is to Michael Joyce’s web page, where he announces “Michael Joyce is no longer maintaining a public web presence.” Of course, he goes on to provide a bunch of links and even a CV that includes an email address, an office address, and an office phone number. In other words, Joyce’s “lack” of a web presence is significantly greater than the eb presence of most of my colleagues.

Personally, I am at a state in my career/life where I very much want people to find me via a Google search. I don’t see what the problem is. I do understand the privacy issues and I agree that there are some things about me that I don’t want to be out there for one and all to see, but go ahead and read my blogs, look at my class pages, etc.

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Wayne Booth, RIP

I just learned from a post on the WPA-L mailing list that Wayne Booth passed away yesterday. According to the Wikipedia entry on him I link to above, he was 84, and according to the discussion on WPA-L, he had Alzheimer’s.

I have kind of have a soft-spot for Booth’s work because one of my first “big” projects as a Ph.D. student a dozen years ago now was to give a presentation on Booth’s work in a rhetorical theory class. I hadn’t read much of his work before that assignment, but I ended up reading quite a bit for that class spiel. I especially remember a book he wrote called The Company We Keep, which I remember being a particularly readable and humane alternative to some of the theory I was trying to digest. And I am hoping to soon get on with reading Booth’s last book, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.

Thanks for the inspiration and fine words, Dr. Booth.