Category: Scholarship

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#cccc11 recap

This is kind of scattered because I started it over a cup of coffee Monday morning and finished it Wednesday morning before meeting meeting meeting/grading grading grading.  I’m super DUPER busy with wrapping up the winter term.  The last day of classes was yesterday, and I’ve got at least four stacks of things I need to/want to assign grades to by the end of the day a week ago.  I know.

But before I get to more detail than you want to know, I thought I’d make four general comments:

  • Partly in response to Derek and Alex and Kyle and I am sure others:  I’m not particularly grumpy about the quality (or not) of the panels or anything else at this year’s conference.  Yeah, the hotel was too expensive, but that’s why I didn’t stay at the conference hotel.  Yeah, there was no decent wifi and I think that should indeed be addressed, but most major conference hotels have the same problem and I always plan ahead and assume I won’t have decent wifi anyway.  Yeah, I kept running into the same people, but I kind of like that and I always have the odd experience of running into the same people at a particular year of the CCCC and not others– for example, last year I ran into Brian McNely everywhere, but this year, I didn’t see him once.  Etc., etc. I think I preferred the Louisville location to Atlanta for a variety of reasons (though I had a lot of fun in Georgia), but Atlanta was a lot more reasonably priced than New York or San Francisco.  And I don’t want to be too critical because….
  • … I don’t want to get involved.  While I do have some complaints about how the CCCC and the NCTE do business in all sorts of ways (its conferences and a lack of willingness to offer alternative formatted presentations like poster sessions, its publications and its confusion about the paperless publishing world, its view of what an organization is and how it ought to fund itself, its dumb as a bag of rocks view of anything resembling the internets, etc., etc.), I feel like I more or less give up my right to complain too loudly when I am unwilling to do anything about it by getting involved in the organizations’ governance.  I’m not willing to run for the Executive Committee of the CCCC or anything else involving the NCTE.  I thought about it at one point, but it just isn’t the sort of administrative/service work that interests me– at least not now.  So if I’m not willing to pitch and and “make a difference,” so to speak, then I can’t complain too much about the people who are willing to do that.
  • I don’t know if the conference has changed that much or not, but I know I’ve changed.  The first CCCC I went to was (I think?) in 1995, and I attended and presented at the conference pretty consistently through about 2005 or so.  When I was a graduate student and first starting my career down the tenure-track, listening to what people had to say at the CCCC was part of my education and presenting at the conference was real scholarship.  But this year wasn’t my first rodeo, and I’m all tenured/promoted -out.  I still learn some things from panels; but mostly, it’s variations on things I’ve heard before, simply by virtue of the fact that I’ve been around long enough to have heard a lot of stuff before.  I still propose to the CCCC so I can get on the program (and thus some funding for the trip), but I need another CCCC presentation on my CV like another hole in the head.  So sure, the conference isn’t as “new” and as “exciting” as it once was; but neither am I.
  • Having said that, I do think there’s more that the CCCC could do to reorganize itself (more like– dare I say it?– MLA by having subject areas organize panels instead of assuming that we’re all there to talk about freshman comp in some variety; have a wider variety of presentation-types; have published proceedings; etc.); and, in an era in which I can communicate with like-minded scholars all over the world via email and the blogosphere and I can publish a media-rich version of my presentation for free, I think the fundamental purpose of the “academic conference” has to be questioned.  Why do we spend the time and resources to do this anymore?  The answer to me is not panels; it’s being in meet/meat -space with other scholars in the field.

The biggest thing I get out of the CCCC at this point is the incidental contact.  So, along with the actual and direct activities, here’s more or less the order of things as I remember it:

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CCCC 2011: The prelude

I’m getting ready for what is setting up to be a somewhat unusual CCCCs in Atlanta this year.  My connection to the conference this year is not through a regular presentation, but through a couple of what i guess I would call “group projects.”

One of the folks who organize the CCCC IP caucus contacted me after my presentation on RiP! a Remix Manifesto last year and asked me I’d like participate in the event for 2011.  How can I turn down an invitation?  I don’t completely know how this will go, but I’m on a roundtable on RiP! during this session.  Here’s a link to a web site I put together for it– it includes a little info on the movie and my notes.  It might ultimately include some links/information from my co-roundtable-ish folks, one of whom is a former MA student here at EMU.  So we’ll see how that goes.

The other thing I’m doing is a roundtable with some of my EMU colleagues, “A Department in Exile: The Challenges of Contested Spaces and Roles.” It’s an interesting story– at least to me– about how this all came about.  When the theme of the conference was announced– “contested spaces”– I immediately thought about the literal contested space that we’ve been put in here at EMU, being displaced out of our building while it is being remodeled.

Anyway, I put together a roundtable with a bunch of my EMU colleagues and we sent it in.  It ended up being rejected initially, which I found odd.  I mean, I realize that the theme of the conference is supposed to be metaphorical notion of “contested spaces,” but you’d think that there would be room on the program for a literal discussion of contested space.  So I appealed, and the good news was we were ultimately accepted into the program.  The bad news is we are near the very very end of the program, the last session on Saturday.  I am assuming we will be a group talking amongst ourselves.

So, in part to make the talk actually usable and to help my colleagues figure out what to do, I put together this video:

We’ll see how it goes. My assumption is that this will be a presentation like one I gave on a Saturday at the CCCCs in New York a few years ago, one where I put together a comic book of sorts, assuming (correctly!) that not a lot of people are willing to turn out for a Saturday presentation.

Part the “adventure” for this conference is Bill H-D and I are driving down on Monday and then coming back (with Derek M) on Sunday.  Part of the problem for me with this version of the CCCCs is the IP thing is on Wednesday and the roundtable thing is on Saturday.  It’s potentially not a good idea for all sorts of obvious reasons, but I didn’t like the idea of being in Atlanta the whole week without any transportation.  Once again, we’ll see how it works out.  The adventure starts Monday morning.

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The kids today and the internets

This is mostly a reminder post for 516 for winter 2012 (I assume I’ll be teaching it then) and some reading(s) I might want to add about participatory culture and digital natives, and it’s in my mind now because I literally came across both of these things almost at the same time while looking for other things.

First, there’s the book Born Digital, which looks like a much smarter version of the whole “digital natives” argument than Pensky.  Along these lines is the web site/group Youth and Media.

Second, Clay Spinuzzi posted on his blog a useful review of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century By Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, useful not only for his comments but also for the link to the book.  Thanks Clay, and go read some more Jenkins– good stuff.

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The failed textbook paying off again

I gave a talk at the Computers and Writing Conference at UC-Davis in 2009 with Nick Carbone about textbooks– my failed project, Nick’s perspective from St. Martin’s, etc.– and one of the things I talked about then was the two kinds of “capital” that comes from publishing.  There’s capital as in “money,” and, there is definitely more of that with textbooks than there is with traditional academic publishing.  Though one thing that I definitely learned from working on a textbook is that doing it for the money is not a good strategy.  If I calculated my earnings based on an hourly wage, I’d say I would have done a lot better financially getting a part-time job at Starbucks.

Anyway, then there’s capital as in “academic credits” of various sorts, usually in the form of a CV entry.  As I pointed out in Davis, my talk there about my failed textbook was an example of that, and I’m happy to report two more of these more nebulous and abstract forms of capital.  The first is I have a chapter in volume 2 of Writing Spaces called “On the Other Hand: The Role of Antithetical Writing in First Year Composition Courses.”  Basically, it’s a revised and repurposed version of a chapter in The Process of Research Writing on the antithesis exercise, which I personally still think is one of the better ideas I had for that book.

The second is a project that is a little more tricky for me to describe on the CV.  Out of the blue, I was contacted about the online version of my book from Eleven Learning, which is a tech start-up in Boston (I think) that has a pretty sweet interface for online books.  I’m not sure what the future of this operation is likely to be or even what is at stake with them right now, but I think it’s a great idea.  Even if I can’t put it on a CV.

I guess the moral of the story is that even “dead” projects can have another life.

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Yet another collection of miscellaneous links

With all the news about delicious going belly-up (or not?), it seems more important than ever for me to park some links here that I want to keep track of:

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A mini CFP for a roundtable at C&W: Blogs are Dead: Yes, No, Maybe, Other

Proposals for the Computers and Writing conference are due tomorrow, and I don’t have a proposal together yet and I’m undecided as to whether or not I should propose something.  Oh, I’ll be going to the conference, of course; but because it is so local– just across town, really– it isn’t going to cost me anything more than registration.  I’m sorta/kinda already involved in the planning, and I’m also sorta/kinda involved in the “unconference” discussions that have been going on about an alternative to the online conference.  And I need another conference presentation on my CV like I need another hole in my head.  So it might be interesting to go to the conference just to, you know, go.

So I’m on the fence here.

But while I was contemplating what to propose (or not propose), I decided that it might be interesting to throw out there something on the end of blogging.  The title I have in my head right now is “Blogs are Dead:  Yes, No, Maybe, Other,” or maybe just “Blogs are Dead:  Yes, No, Other.”  I have some sense of what I would say about that in a 15 or so minute presentation, and it might actually motivate me to do something with my mostly abandoned “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project.

And then I thought that maybe this would be a fine roundtable sort of presentation that was more of a debate and made up of as many current and former bloggers interested in C&W that I could muster.  I’m imagining something like a 75 minute panel where each participant would have as much time as possible to talk given the need to leave at least 20-30 minutes for discussion.  In other words, if it’s three participants, everyone gets 15 minutes; if it’s 10, everyone gets four and a half minutes; it it’s some number in between 1 and 10, then the time will be somewhere between 15 and four and a half.

So, I emailed a half dozen or so people who have blogs I read occasionally.  I got back some answers rather quickly, though most of these folks are already committed in one fashion or another. So then I thought “hey, why not throw up a blog post that tries to drum up some interest quickly?”

And so I wrote this post.  Which, I should point out, I’m also sharing with the world via the tech-rhet mailing list, Twitter, and Facebook, which I suppose speaks to why I personally think the answer to the question about the death of blogging is both complicated and interesting.

In any event, if you are reading this now, if you do (or you used to) keep a blog, and if you were thinking about going to C&W this year, then it seems to me there’s a chance that you too might be interested in participating in this.  If so, add a comment and/or send me an email, skrause at emich dot edu.  We need to get this together very soon though!

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“The Four Hour Work Week” and “The Happy Academic”

Several months ago, I mentioned that I was starting to read Timothy Ferriss’ “self-help” lifestyle/work/get rich (sorta) book The 4-Hour Work Week, and I finally got around to finishing it the other day/week. I should mention it’s not that I read that slow– I just have other things to do/read, and I read Ferris’ book in 20 minute or less bursts while on the bike at the gym.

The short version: I am not a Ferris convert/disciple, but it’s an entertaining book with occasionally good tips, some of which sorta/kinda connect with the happy academic lifestyle.  Much more after break.

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I dunno, I don’t think they hate me…

“Why Do They Hate Us?” is a commentary in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas “not his real name” Benton where he laments the sorry state of “anger about professors.”  This piece gives me pause right out of the gate when he begins recapping a series of not so hypothetical unpleasant conversations he’s had over the years.  Among the “unpleasantness” he raises:

  • “What you teach is worthless—I mean, who needs more measurements of Walt Whitman’s beard when the economy and the environment are collapsing?”
  • “Why don’t you English profs just teach people how to write?”

I have to say as someone who teaches writing and not literature in an English department, I don’t think these hypothetical jabs are as inaccurate as Benton implies.

  • “I wish I had tenure and didn’t have to worry about being fired for not doing my job.”

Hardly a new argument, of course, one that misses the point of tenure, and one that seems to also forget that lots of employees– those in unions, those who work for the government– are notoriously hard to fire.  So when this comes up in polite conversation– which it does with my family once in a while– I shrug my shoulders, put up a sort of weak fight intended to educate the complainer that it is isn’t about job security but about academic freedom, and I agree that the system is problematic.  But on the inside, I also agree with Alex Reid when he wrote this about people who say things like “I wish I had tenure and didn’t have to worry about my job” sorts of comments:

“Well, maybe that’s why you don’t have tenure. To get to tenure, a person has to exhaust a tremendous amount of labor. Seven years of graduate school (on average), working as a TA or adjunct, borrowing a lot of money all for the chance to just compete for a tenure-track job. Most people wouldn’t take that risk (probably because they are sane or something). Then one has to negotiate the job market and tenure process. Really you can only get to tenure if you have a tremendous amount of intrinsic motivation for doing the work required.”

  • “My job [pharmaceutical sales] saves lives; your so-called work is a waste of other people’s time and money.”

Pharmaceutical sales?!  Anyone who would actually say that just deserves a punch in the mouth.

Benton then trots out a pretty long and old list of books proclaiming the death of the academic culture (including, for example, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published a lifetime ago in 1987) and then goes into a pretty typical laundry list of what’s wrong with America as the cause for why “they” “hate” “us.”

I’m not going to go through all of Benton’s reasons for why he feels hated because none of them are remotely new.  Instead, I thought I’d create my own little list as to why I don’t feel like I’m hated.

I’ve clung firmly to the stance that at the end of the day, what I do here is a job. It’s a good job and it’s a job that takes a lot of experience and training, but at the end of the day, it’s a job not unlike many other jobs that take experience and professional training– doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, CEOs, small business owners, etc., not to mention a lot of jobs that might not require as much schooling but that require a level of skill and experience I don’t possess– mechanics, carpenters, welders, farmers, etc.  I mean, I am enough of an elitist to acknowledge that being a college professor isn’t work that can be done by “just anyone,” but academics too often think it’s something much MUCH more than it is.  And again and again, I think that the saddest academics are the ones who somehow thought that becoming a professor was like being crowned prince of the kingdom.

I’m pretty ignorant about most other jobs, too. I agree that it is frustrating to read again and again AND AGAIN that professors are pampered because they can’t get fired, they work six hours a week, they’re drunk before noon, etc., etc.  At the same time, I don’t really know what my allergist does either.  As far as I can tell (based on my once a year or so 20 minute visits where he listens to my breathing, asks me how my shots are going, and where we bullshit about local news and events), he doesn’t do much of anything.  A monkey could go around and see patients like this.  What’s he doing to earn all that money?

Obviously, I know I don’t know what I’m talking about here.  Heck, for all I know there’s a blogger written by an allergist complaining about how stupid people are about the work he does, and I do think my allergist knows his stuff reasonably well.  The point is this:  given that I don’t really know what a lot of professionals really do, why should I be surprised that they don’t know what i do?

I think it’s okay that students go to college for many reasons, including getting a job and/or becoming a professional. I think that when people like Benton write this– “A generation ago, we could still defend the belief that our courses in literature, art, history, philosophy—the liberal arts, broadly defined, and always self-critical—were enriching in ways that could not be deposited in a bank or measured by outcomes assessment”– they’re assuming that at one point going to college was purely an intellectual curiosity, the study of the liberal arts just for the sake of the liberal arts.  That’s silly.  Higher education in North America for the last 300 years (and before that in Europe, of course) has always had some occupational component to it.   Becoming “self-critical” and a “better” and “enriched” person was and continues to be the mission, but to suggest that was ever the only reason for higher education is just wrong.

I value my teaching and my colleagues, and I do only the scholarship I want to do. Maybe another way of putting this:  not all jobs in higher education have been created equal by any stretch of the imagination, and at EMU, a lot of the traditional and fairly wide-spread problems of work in higher education just aren’t here.  There is “solidarity” of a sort among faculty through the faculty union, and the requirements for tenure and promotion and tenure are modest enough here that we get to do things that we want to do and not that we feel like we have to do.  Though I will admit this isn’t true everywhere.

I am lucky enough to live in a college town where being a professor isn’t a weird job. I’m lucky enough to live in a county where there are literally 75,000 or more college students and a stone’s throw away from Ann “college town central” Arbor.  I have to admit it’s a lot easier to be a college professor when you’re surrounded by a lot of other college professors.

So, like I said.  I don’t feel too hated.  And I don’t feel too sorry for myself either.

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And in more link catching up news

Again, in no particular order– just things I want to keep track of that I have left open in my browser for a while now:

  • “Reading in a Whole New Way,” which is a very readable/accessible piece about how technology has altered the sense of “book,” from Smithsonian.com. And this is a link to the article itself, where there is worry about the iPad.
  • Speaking of which:  “Revisualizing Composition:  Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students” is a WIDE whitepaper/study about the way that students use writing technologies to write in different aspects of their lives.  There’s a lot here, but I was struck by the idea that students write as often for “personal fulfillment” (with Facebook, texting, etc.) than for school.
  • “Nine Important Trends in the Evolution of Digital Textbooks and E-learning Content,” from something called “xplana.”  I think these trends are debatable at best, but I like things that speculate about the future of publishing, especially when they are horribly wrong.
  • I really liked this cbd post “Taking Notes,” and I wanted to keep a link– a note?– of it for future reference.  Lots of good stuff here.
  • To be honest, I don’t know if this is worth passing on, but I will anyway:  From Inside Higher Ed, “An Adjunct’s Novel,” which in some ways seems amusing but in many ways seems rather predictable to me.
  • Here’s a link to an iPhone app I might try out later, something called the Sleep Cycle alarm clock. Though the whole thing seems a bit problematic to me.  First off, I set an alarm for a particular time not because it is the “best time” for me to necessarily wake up, but because it is the time that I logistically need to wake up to go on with my day.  Second, I don’t get how this app could possibly work, and I guess what bothers me most is that the reviews suggest that it does indeed work.
  • I might get this book called The Whuffie Factor:  Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business because it does sound pretty interesting.  But to be honest, between stuff I’m reading for school and for fun right now, this is going to have to go down the list a bit. Still, for the Kindle (iPad, of course) edition, it might be worth it for the next time I’m on a plane.
  • What’s the point of an iPad?  How might it be used in the “real world?”  Here’s a link from Apple to tell us. I’ve pulled my iPad out a couple of times in my first year composition class and what I think is interesting is that my students in that class seem pretty dismissive of its usefulness.  So much for “digital natives” understanding this stuff so much better.
  • Speaking (again and again!) of the iPad:  I recently won an iShine give-away from PadGadget by being early enough on Twitter to retreat an article from the site PadGadget.  Here’s a review of the iShine, which I mostly agree with.  I prefer to have my iPad in its Apple case because it’s easier to prop it up and such, but the iShine bag is handy and easy too.
  • Finally, this is something I really ought to do with my laptop:  from Lifehacker comes “Starting from Scratch:  A Step-by-Step Guide to Reinstalling Your OS.”
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Three brief thoughts on burning the Koran

You have perhaps heard this story, about the nut-jobs in Florida (so many of them are in Florida) who are going to have a “Koran burning” on 9/11.  See, for example, “Pastor’s Plan to Burn Korans Adds to Tensions” from the New York Times from a couple weeks back.  At least three things occur to me, each of which has something to do with my line of work (well, sort of at least):

  • If it were not for Web 2.0/social media and the 24/7 news cycle, no one would have ever heard of these crazy people.  In other words, this is a highly “immediate” rhetorical situation, as I discussed in the Diss oh so many years ago, and it is yet another example of how technology directly impacts the ways in which rhetorical situations are processed by rhetors, audiences, and messages themselves.  Technology gives much, but it also causes bat-shit crazy stuff like this.  In any event, one wonders what would happen if this whole thing had simply been ignored, if we thought more carefully about the exigence for this situation, if this would even be possible before cable news, etc.
  • I am reminded of the flag burning debates of a few years ago with all of this.  Sure, this has a distinctly different flavor in the shadow of 9/11 and “war(s) on terrorism,” the non-issue of the Burlington Coat Factory turned  mosque/community center somehow vaguely near “ground zero,” and just a sort of general ill-placed fear of “Islam,” which is at least as diverse a religion as “Christianity.”  But I am also reminded of a Miss Manners article way back when, in which the always delightful writer Judith Martin pointed out that there was no point in legislating against flag burning because the reason why someone burned flags was to make a point by being terribly rude.  Of course, this is extra-über rude, but still.
  • Finally, this once again speaks to the extreme importance of the materiality of the book, and by “the book,” I mean the old-fashioned codex book, paper pages, pagination, a cover, the whole nine yards.  I don’t mean the Kindle or the iPad, and I hasten to add here that I really do like (love might be too strong) the reading experience on my iPad a lot.  I’m reading a couple of books on it right now, and I am going to be preparing for a day of getting some articles I’m teaching on my iPad after I finish this post.  Obviously, electronic reading and writing has an incredible power (see observation #1).However, if these crazy people got together and said “hey, we’re going to burn this here Kindle with the Koran on it,” or “we’re all gonna bring our laptops and erase our copies of the Koran all at the same time,” no one would have given a shit about that.  Not even a little bit.   What’s got everyone all excited is that these things are the actual and material thing that was previously the only definition of “book,” and they really will burn and give off flames, smoke, and heat.  Never mind that there are millions of other copies of the Koran, so it’s not like these people will have any real potential to damage the religion.