Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
In a previous post, I described my view from the Great Wolf Lodge; here it is:
Oh, and also the previously mentioned bird shit:
The whole set of our Traverse City photos is available here, for the truly curious.
Oh, and PS: if you are looking at this in early August 2009, the header at the top is Will at the dune climb in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
I just read in the Ann Arbor Chronicle that Eve Aronoff, who runs the restaurant eve, is a contestant on the upcoming season of Top Chef. Good for her, though I have to say I don’t recall going to eve. I say it like that because Annette says we’ve been, but I honestly don’t remember it one way or the other. I’ve heard it is very good, very expensive, and very pretentious (all things I generally enjoy in a restaurant), so maybe I’ll convince Annette to go (back?) after the Top Chef hub-bub dies down.
I have no real inside knowledge, of course, but I have to say this article and interview with Aronoff makes me think that she doesn’t last long on the show. I guess we’ll start finding out next week.
I’m sitting here in Traverse City on the patio of my hotel writing this post. I’ve got somewhat dicey internet access, and there is a fair amount of bird shit on the patio because of a nest that is in the eaves above. Across the way, there’s a fenced-in small herd (10 or so?) of buffalo. Somewhat close to nature, I suppose. Will is watching Spongebob while playing computer games, and Annette is reading and napping. Somewhat close to home, too.
We’re up here because I’m teaching a course called Technology for Teaching and Learning, which is offered as part of the EMU continuing ed program in Traverse City. Basically, my concept of the class has been as a hands-on course/workshop that runs from 8-ish in the morning until 2-ish in the afternoon for a week. The focus is on exposure to all sorts of tools (mostly of the web 2.0 variety) with the goal of helping folks figure out how various things might (or not) work in their teaching. It’s a lot of practice that hopefully sparks some theory. I originally imagined it as an English/Writing course, but all but one of the eight students have come from other programs and they are all grad students, too. It’s been a lot of fun and useful for students (I think), and the format has worked out pretty much the way that I hoped: lots of time to really try to figure out some of this software, lots of time to talk and brainstorm about what might work, lots of time to “bond” with each other. Anyway, check out the web site above.
As part of the deal, EMU puts faculty up in a local hotel, and in our case, we selected the option of the Great Wolf Lodge. Check out the web site for those not familiar; basically, it is a hotel with a waterpark, or a waterpark with a hotel. As Annette put it, staying here is a bit like staying in a Chuck E. Cheese: everything is set up for the 12 and under crowd (and parents, of course) for a one or two night stay (the desk clerk expressed surprise at my eight day reservation) of waterpark fun, story-time, ice cream, arcade games, some sort of weird Harry Potter-esque game in the hallways that involve kids playing with wands. Don’t ask because that’s all I know. Mind you, it’s a decent-enough hotel. Everyone has been quite nice, and, relatively speaking, it is pretty conveniently located, especially to get to the points east of here that are of touristy interest. But I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t on EMU’s dime.
While I’ve been teaching, Annette and Will have been touring about, taking advantage of the waterpark, and just generally hanging about. When you’re up north this long, you don’t feel as much pressure to do something all the time. So far, we’ve been up to Leeland (Fishtown and the Bluebird), Glen Arbor (and Cherry Republic), Sleeping Bear, Empire Beach, downtown Traverse City, and a few points in-between. We’re thinking about going up to Petoskey on Saturday. Whenever I come up here, I always have two reoccuring thoughts: first, it sure is beautiful up here and I understand the appeal of a sorta run-down cabin down a gravel lane by the lake. Conversely, it reminds me of how it is a lot more fun to visit a tourist town than to live in a tourist town. The traffic around here, especially in the “city” of Traverse City: jesh.
Anyway, some pictures/movies soon, including of the bird shit, birds, and buffalo.
… it is certainly connected to and yet different from networks like Facebook and Twitter. Case in point:
I’m writing this post because I saw Rebecca Howard’s Twitter post about Jeff Rice’s blog, which then pointed me to this ReadWriteWeb post, “Is Blogging Dead?” And this is a question, btw, that the RWW folks answer (basically) “no,” and comments ensue. And, because I think this is interesting and it will tie in with a class I’m teaching right now, hosted here using the blogging software wordpress. And I will probably alert people that I have made this post by posting a link on Twitter with a #fb tag, which then will in turn also post it to my Facebook account.
So what I mean is this: Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and all kinds of other Web 2.o/social networking/whatever you want to call it software is obviously connected, related, and increasingly redundant. I’m preparing for a course called “Technology for Teaching and Learning,” which is mostly a hands-on workshop where we’ll learn about all kinds of different tools (Google stuff, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasting, videocasting, wikis, etc., etc.) and talk about how this stuff can (and sometimes can’t) be part of good teaching practices. As I am going through these various tools, it strikes me how they all do very similar things in interestingly subtle ways. You update your status on Facebook, you update it on Twitter; why both? And yet, that’s exactly what lots of people are doing now, including me.
But they are also different, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes not. And this is one of the main reasons why I don’t think blogging is going to be dead anytime soon, much in the same way that I don’t think video or audio is going to replace the written word anytime soon (notice I didn’t say print on paper– that might be a different story). Alex Reid kposted something about this (well, the way I’m thinking of it right now at least), about digital video and scholarship, where he wondered what the role of video is as a means of delivering scholarship in comp/rhet. Why are there so many books and journal articles out there about web 2.0 stuff, not to mention video and film? Well, besides the academic capital issue, I think it’s because it turns out that these rather traditional forms actually are the best ones to sometimes articulate and reflect on ideas both big and small. Not in an either/or sense, but in a “use the right tool for the job” sense.
I guess where I see this in my own blogging/facebooking/twittering is this: Facebook and Twitter is for posting links and for posting about “being” on a day to day basis; my blog is a place to write out something more– not necessarily “thoughtful” per se, but more reflective. In that sense, I think that one shift that is going on in blogging in relation to these other medias (and perhaps why some think that blogging is “dead”) is that the diary aspect of blogging– I’m about to go mow the lawn (a true statement, btw!)– is much more effectively presented via Facebook/Twitter. So maybe the diary blog is a dying off, but that’s okay, I think.
Via the NCTE Inbox, I came across this Time magazine article, “Mourning the Death of Handwriting.” It’s pretty much the same discussion about handwriting that I’ve posted about in the past: isn’t it a shame that handwriting is dying, though there is no compelling reason as to why this really that bad of a thing.
But there are two twists. First, the article’s author, Claire Suddath, actually quotes pretty much the only “real” expert on handwriting I know, Tamara Thornton, who wrote a fantastic book called Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Thornton’s theory about the “death” of handwriting is more tied to the role of standardized testing than increased computer use. “If something isn’t on a test,” she said, “it’s viewed as a luxury.” She has a point.
Second, the article once again highlights the difficulty in trying to figure out just when exactly handwriting “died.” My parents were both born in the 1940s, and my mother writes with a sort of combination of cursive and print, while my father’s handwriting is print, and one that looks like it was heavily influenced by something like an engineering or drafting class he took. My wife and I were both born in the 1960s; Annette’s handwriting is neat and cursive, and my handwriting is awful. We and pretty much everyone else in our generation were formally taught handwriting, but it seems like I and everyone else I know prints. The article’s author, Suddath, interviews her third grade teacher (Suddath said she was in the third grade in 1990) who taught her handwriting and who implies that Suddath’s was pretty much the last generation for whom cursive was a “rite of passage.” My son, born in the late 1990s, has awful handwriting, but he was most definitely taught cursive and I do recall the third and fourth graders seeing writing in cursive as a “grown-up” thing to do.
Anyway, my point is it seems like handwriting has been waning and lost on the next generation for a long time now. But once again, as someone who has never had the coordination (left-handedness, mostly), skill, or patience to write– even print!– neatly, I welcome the ever-returning end of handwriting.
I learned via Dennis Jerz’s blog today and found more details at the Purdue OWL that the Modern Language Association is officially saying that underlining is out and italics is in. I suppose the bigger news is MLA saying that URLs are no longer required (and I agree with Dennis that sometimes requiring URLs makes a lot of sense), but I have to say my geeky little English professor heart skipped a beat at the victory about italics. My victory, that is.
Back in 1996, after I had finished and defended my dissertation, Annette and I were spending the spring/summer that year preparing for the move to Oregon for my first tenure-track job and I was running through the last details of submitting my dissertation to the graduate college for their official stamp of approval before it went off to the binary, DAI, and points beyond. This is a process which exists at all graduate schools (at least it did– maybe these offices have been phased out with more and more electronic publication of these projects?), and it is mostly to make sure that dissertations and theses adheared to standard formatting in terms of a style manual and also in terms of dimensions of the document so it could be properly bound.
As I understood it, the office that did the reviewing at BGSU was staffed with graduate students on various assistantships, which meant that the level of scrutiny these documents received kind of varied. I was lucky enough to get a, um, “eager beaver,” as my reviewer. I submitted my completed diss, and I got back what I believe was a print letter/memo (I don’t think it was an email, though I think I emailed my response) that indicated some real proof-reading errors I needed to fix, and two other global “errors” the reviewer insisted I correct. First, this person said that I couldn’t use any contractions so I had to change all of them throughout the manuscript. Second, I was told that I had to change all uses of italics to underlined text.
First off, I responded, there’s no rule in MLA style about the use of contractions, and I used them correctly. Second, MLA’s rules for underlining versus italics was inconclusive, and I personally preferred the use of italics. So, in effect, my response to the manuscript reviewer was “Thanks for your thoughts, but I’m not making those changes. Let’s move on.” The response I received was something along the lines of “While I will conceede that your use of contractions does not violate MLA style, I must insist that the use of italics is incorrect. Please make the appropriate changes.”
My response to this was (and I believe this is the technical phrase) I blew a nut. I was not about to have my completed dissertation derailed by some underline-happy MA student. To make a long-story short, I had to cite chapter and verse in MLA style to this person’s supervisor, who did admit that this person trying to hold up the process after my successful defense was perhaps overstepping their bounds just a tad. So the italics stood, and have always made a point of instructing my students that either underlining or italics is okay.
I’m looking forward to now telling my students to ditch the underlining.
* Plus or minus a bunch of money for various fees and such….
Via Twitter, I stumbled upon this video from back in February about the University of the People, which is an open source university that is free– except for the fee to register and the fee to take classes. Oh, and there are (apparently) no professors, unless you want to call them up and ask them for advice. And just now, I stumbled across this article on Mashup, “In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero.” It’s a really interesting collection of resources, and I’ll probably be sharing it very soon with my Technology for Teaching and Learning class in Traverse City. It could easily be useful for 516.
I have to say I’m a little skeptical. Perhaps I am having the same reaction to this stuff that Metallica has to music piracy, that this “free” university stuff is going to come back to bite people like me, who do not do this teaching stuff for just the love of learning. But the thing is there is a big difference between “information” being free and even course materials being free and an “education” being free. Not to mention a “degree” from an accredited university. Sure, you could study and learn at MIT’s Opencourseware site, but try to apply for an engineering job or something and tell your future employer that you don’t have a degree from MIT, just their web site.
So no, zero is perhaps a little misleading and unrealistic. I do think though that these projects have a lot to teach universities and college in the US. It seems to me that some of these open content and open courseware tools could be applied to lots of programs at EMU to reduce institutional overhead and cost to students. I don’t think that means that a degree from a “real” university is ever going to be free in this country, but it could get a lot cheaper.
A colleague of mine at EMU from another department sent me a link to this article in the CHE, “‘Teach Naked:’ Effort Strips Computers From Classrooms.” My first response was to send them to Alex Reid’s blog entry on this; as Alex points out, it isn’t a question about PowerPoint or any other technology per se. Rather, it’s about the problem of using technology to continue to the same old teaching methods, and it’s about using the technology in new and logical ways– e.g., podcasts and the like instead of lecture hall classes.
But I’ll point out two other things.
First, I suspect this colleague sent me this article because we’re both on this committee about remodeling/redesigning Pray-Harrold Hall, and I think there is a general fear (or maybe it’s just me) that the powers that be are going to throw good money toward a technology that will become quite useless in just a few years. When they built Halle Library (which is generally a very nice facility), they spent a ton of money stringing Ethernet cable all over the place. Just a few years later, they turned that all off because now the building is wireless. So, what I’m afraid of is we’re going to spend all this money in Pray-Harrold with whatever– computers in every classroom with lots of controlers and gizmos to more or less project PowerPoint slides– when that is both bad teaching (see above) and likely to be obsolete sooner than later. To quote from the article:
(José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University advocating the “naked” teaching) says most of those classrooms had two computers (a Mac and a PC), a DVD player, a VCR, and a tape deck, along with “one of those complicated control panels where you need a Ph.D. to figure it out.”
Last summer Mr. Bowen had most of that gear removed—though he left in projectors so that professors could plug in their laptops and do PowerPoint presentations, if they must. He also took out the old desks and replaced them with tables and chairs that professors could move around to allow students to work in groups more easily.
One reason for the changes was financial. The classroom computers were old and needed an upgrade when Mr. Bowen arrived, so ditching them instead saved money. Plus, the move cut support costs—the school was able to eliminate one staff position for a technician who responded to calls from professors about the classroom systems.
To encourage the kind of technology use Mr. Bowen did want, the school gave every professor a laptop and set up support so they could create their own podcasts and videos.
Some professors have complained about lugging their laptops to class, but others have jumped in with both feet.
This makes complete sense to me, and if you follow the trend in computer sales (desktops way down, laptops/netbooks way up), it just seems logical that more and more faculty will start doing this. Heck, most faculty bring laptops to classes as it is.
Second, the article oddly makes no reference to the truly naked (well, casually clothed and/or pajamas) form of teaching: online classes. I found that odd. Maybe they just don’t do this sort of thing at SMU, or maybe what Bowen means by naked teaching is more about the face-to-face experience, I don’t know. But I can say without a doubt that teaching online has done more to change my approaches, in both good and bad ways.
