Category: Scholarship

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Wanting to check out “A Better Pencil,” though with some irony and a smidge of bitterness

I just heard via my colleague Linda AK and the WPA-L mailing list that Dennis Baron is interviewed here in the most recent Inside Higher Ed about his new book, A Better Pencil:  Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. I’m mostly interested in this because I’ve been teaching Baron’s “From Pencils to Pixels” for years, I’ve been teaching an assignment like the one Baron describes in the article where students have to write with something other than traditional tools, and I’ve done some scholarship on the general area of writing tools and pedagogy– an article on chalkboards, presentations on paper, pens, and a couple other things like this I’m forgetting now.

But I’m also interested in seeing this book to see what could have been.  Maybe.

Several years ago (maybe close to 10 years ago now), when I was working more earnestly on some of these articles and presentations about writing technologies, I put together a research leave proposal to work on a book.  Basically, I wanted to trace the connection between a rising awareness of writing instruction and the accompanying writing technologies.  So I went through the process of writing the proposal, outlining the various technologies I planned on writing and researching about, and I thought I had a pretty decent and compelling idea.  It was recommended by the department, and was ranked reasonably high in the college of arts and sciences process, too. But when it got to the final committee at the graduate college (or the university as a whole– I’m not sure which– but a committee which I believe had no one from my department on it), my proposal was ranked dead last.  I mean like out of like 40 proposals, number 40.

Now, there are a number of different reasons for this of course; the process here tends to weigh toward the sciences or projects tied to grants, and I am sure that my original proposal had any number of problems and limitations.  I’m sure I didn’t deserve the award and I’m not saying I was “cheated.”  But I do remember some of the comments that came back to me from the committee were rather dismissive of the whole idea.  Someone wondered what qualifications I had to research this kind of history; another said the idea of researching writing technology seemed more like an article in a place like Harper’s Magazine rather than a book-length project.

Obviously, I can’t blame this rejection for my lack of follow-through on this project; my not finishing pressing ahead with a book project on this is my own fault and my fault alone.  Still, it wasn’t exactly a confidence boost to be told that my scholarly interests seemed mostly fit for curious feature article in a genteel albeit liberal monthly magazine.  So I have moved on to other projects, projects where I’m also managing a lack of follow-through, but that is a slightly different story.

Anyway, I’m interested in seeing Dennis’ book and I’ll probably order it today.  There’s a part of me that is interested in seeing/imagining “what could have been,” but that’s a very small part since I realize that is a kind of dumb reaction to Baron’s book on my part, and, based on the Inside Higher Ed interview and a peek at the table of contents on the Oxford UP site, there’s probably room for the kind of book-length project on writing technology and pedagogy I have in mind.  I’m mostly interested in it because I am interested in the subject matter– like Baron, I’ve been fascinated with various communication technologies for a long time– and there may very well be elements of it that figure into my teaching sooner than later.

But I’ve got to say, I’m also interested in it for a bit of the “I told you so” aspect.  I have no way of knowing who on that university committee nearly a decade ago said the history of writing technology was just not worthy of a book, and it is water under the bridge at this point.  Still, I wouldn’t mind sending this person/these people a copy.  You know, just to point out that there was one press (and a pretty good one, too) that thought the general idea might be worth a book.

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A few thoughts on Obama, education, indoctrination, and immediacy

The latest crazy far right Obama worries about his “back to school” speech is symptomatic of lots and lots of different things.  I think part of it is about race because the crowd who is afraid to have their children exposed to the president while in school is (basically) the same ones who are worried about Obama’s death committees, who don’t believe Obama was born in the United States, and, back in the campaign, the same ones who said that Obama was an Arab Muslim and dangerous man.  But I also think these folks would say crazy stuff about Obama’s plans if he was a white guy, too.  Part of it all is rooted in legitimate concerns and differences of opinion, though anyone who thinks that Obama’s plan is somehow like the Nazis and who fears the impact of the government being involved in health care in this country doesn’t know anything about the Nazis and they are unaware of the extent to which the government is already involved in health care via Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP program, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Besides all that, I think this stuff is an example of my dissertation work, which was about the ways in which rhetorical situations become problematized as the result of technology.  Basically, I argued that communication technologies– radio and television immediately come to mind given this example, but I focused more on internet technologies like email and the web–  skew previous notions of both “rhetorical situation” and kairos.  I used the term “immediacy,” because things that are “immediate” lack clear boundaries and are close together, and “immediate” has both connotations of quickness and confusion, of intimacy and chaos.

A simple example:  last night, on the NBC news, they had a story about Obama’s indoctrination message stay in school speech that featured a snippet of video of a couple who were terribly afraid of what the president might say to their children about gay marriage.  It was only a few seconds, but in those few seconds, those parents– who were both crazy and wrong– were given an enormous platform to play the part of the rhetor, and were thus able to either change or confuse the message for a large segment of the audience.

Now, NBC was showing these people in the name of “objectivity” and “fairness” in that journalistic tradition of showing “both sides” and they did follow up the few seconds with these parents to quote from Obama’s speech, which, in a sense, discredited them.  This of course presumes it is even possible for journalism to be purely “objective” and “fair,” and it is also presumes a reasonable method for approaching objectivity on a topic is to simply present “both sides,” even if one of the sides is completely and utterly wrong (in this case, parents afraid Obama will talk to their children about gay marriage).  But let’s just table that for the moment.

In a conventional rhetorical situation, these fringe elements would not have the opportunity to voice their arguments at all.  But in a rhetorical situation heavily mediated by technology, rhetorical situation become immediate and fraught with challenges.  The Rush Limbaugh-types on the radio, the Bill O’Reily-types on the television, and the thousands of bloggers, emailers, and other (inter)network communicators flatten the dimensions of a rhetorical situation to allow a chaotic mish-mosh where the definitions between rhetors, audiences, purposes, and messages themselves all exchange roles.  Health care reform becomes about death panels, and a president talking about kids staying in school becomes a socialist indoctrination favoring gay marriage.

Now, it’s not as if rhetorical situations were ever that clear; in the classic “egg versus chicken” debate that is Bitzer and Vatz, it seems clear to me that rhetorical situations both occur and thus demand discourse to fill them (Bitzer notes the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but I would also add the speech atop the rubble of the World Trade Center after 9/11 by George W. Bush) and are created by the rhetor with discourse (Vatz notes the Viet Nam war, and I would add the war/debacle in Iraq).  But what the Internet, talk radio, and the 24/7 cable news cycle has done is sped all this up, making already potentially dangerous and chaotic moments even more ripe for miscommunications and misunderstandings.

And in my own narrow way of looking at things, this is all the more reason why I ought to think about going back to that dissertation project and maybe writing something about it.

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Lessig ends blogging for what are emerging (for me, at least) classic reasons

Lawrence Lessig announced today that he’s more or less giving up blogging, and it’s striking to me how many of his reasons seem to correspond to my own very limited research on why it is people hang up the ol’ blog.  To simplfy:

  • Life and other work has intervened– Lessig is expecting another child and is taking on more time-consuming responsibilities at Harvard.
  • Technologies of blogging has become somewhat problematic, especially in terms of spam.  Though I have to say I think this is a kind of lame explanation/excuse since it’s easy to set up a blog to dissuade spam.
  • Moving to other spaces– or, in Lessig’s case, putting his energies on other spaces he’s already mainitaining:

This isn’t an announcement of my disappearance. I’m still trying to understand twitter. My channel at blip.tv will remain. As will the podcast, updated as I speak. I will continue to guest blog at Huffington Post. And as Change-Congress.org enters a new stage, I hope to be doing more there. But this community, this space, this board will now rest.

Interestingly enough, I think the Lessig blog also exhibits the classic signs of ending blogs:  a flurry of posts in recent days here in late August 2009, but none in July 2009, and one in early June.

But I have no doubt that Lessig will remain an important and prolific voice online and beyond the blogosphere.

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Some artists are just kinda wrong

From the blog Livin’ it Up Big Time comes this entry, “Looks Like If The Words Are Bleeding (Collected Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009).” This popped up on the WPA-L mailing list.  Basically, the blogger/artist Theodore Diran Lyons III took some particularly poor examples of writing assignments he had collected from seven years of teaching at different institutions, tacked them up on the wall, circled some of the errors in red and highlighted other errors with large font pull-quotes, and said it was an art piece about illiteracy in America.  Comments on his blog ensued, and I am apart of the thread as the long-winded “Steve,” if you’re curious.

I don’t know, perhaps I was giving the guy far too much grief/far too much attention here, but I got sucked in.  The whole conversation bothers/bothered me.  This is certainly an example of the sort of feedback loop I’ve experienced/written about in terms of blog writing and viral media.  I guess I also think it’s interesting the extent to which we reached an impasse regarding the definition of illiteracy (which is obviously more complicated than mistakes circled in red), and the extent to which Lyons is so defensive about all this.  Oh well; I guess we all have a way of being defensive, eh?

I think one of the key differences of opinion is the idea about what counts as a “fair game” object of art or public discussion.  Lyons wants to claim that artists can claim pretty much anything.  In his way of thinking about it, the students abandoned these essays (they didn’t pick up them up at the end of the term), so they were his to do with as he pleased.  I think that when we ask students to write things, it is uncool to turn around and then use those things in our own work.  For example, it would be problematic for me to lift chunks of text from one or more of my students’ essays and then claim it as my own (though we’ve all heard stories of this happening before).  And it is clearly and completely wrong for teachers to use a public forum– a blog, an art gallery, both, etc.– to make fun of students’ failings.

I suppose it’s different here since Lyons isn’t exactly presenting this work as his own and he did work to conceal the identities of his “illiterate” students; but he is using his students’ work, unbeknownst to them, in an attempt to make a point.  And in my way of looking at it, he is using his students’ work to more or less demonstrate that they are not very smart and to make fun of them.

That’s just mean.

It also seems to me that the more successful of this mode of found/quasi-performance art uses as the subject/victim the artist himself.  I’m thinking of people like Chris Burden, who nailed himself (well, someone else obviously must have done the nailing) to the back of Volkswagen and who was shot by an assistant as art.  Think what you will of Burden’s art, but in these pieces, at least he is the object/victim.  In contrast, Lyons’ piece victimizes his students.  Granted, we’re talking about abandoned writing assignments here and not truly life-threatening acts/art, but these students are victims of a sort nonetheless.

For me, a more interesting piece might have involved Lyons tacking up some of the student evaluations he has collected over the years on a big wall in some sort of pattern.  Maybe there are reoccurring comments from students he could circle?  Maybe he could note the ways he himself has progressed as a teacher?  Maybe he could note the mistakes he continues to make?  Lord knows that’s a piece I could put together.

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Blogging isn’t dead, but…

… 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.

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A couple of thoughts on “Aurality and Multimodal Composing”

I read/skimmed Cynthia Selfe’s CCC article “Aurality and Multimodal Composing” essay while on the bike at the gym the other day. It’s a good read and something I’ll probably assign the next time I teach English 516 in winter 2010. It made me think about two other things that are kind of/kind of not related to the point she was trying to make:

  • A lot of the piece is historical in that Selfe is discussing how writing pedagogy evolves and emerges out of an 18th/19th century tradition of education where being able to speak well and present one’s self with good elocution skills was frankly more important to college graduates than writing skills. This reminds me of a project I did as a PhD student oh so many years ago about elocution, especially as it evolved as a popular “home learning” and primary/secondary school activity in the mid to late 19th century in the U.S. Basically, as elocution lessons became passe in higher ed, it became popular in the homes, and presumably the homes of people of a certain class who would never go to college. It’s one of those projects that I keep thinking about coming back to, and this article might help me do that.
  • The lingering thought I have with this article and most others in comp/rhet publications (not to mention many/most presentations at conferences like Computers and Writing) is about university departments and divisions. We “do” writing in composition and rhetoric and we “do” reading, writing, and literature in English departments because that’s our slice of the discipline pie. When we then try to do stuff like web design/usability, we’re kind of crossing over into (taking pie from?) computer science; when we incorporate graphics and graphic design in writing classes, we’re kind of taking pie from art; and when we have students do stuff like make movies and podcasts and give speeches, we’re kind of taking pie from communications.

    So, for me, there are two problems with this. First (and this is perhaps an institutional problem that is more acute at EMU than it is at other places), there is a lot of guarding of turf in academia. Two brief examples: we’ve had various challenges over the years in my department proposing courses with the words “communication” or “film” in them because my colleagues in the Communications department basically claim those terms as theirs. We have similar turf claims about terms like “literature” and “writing,” too. Second, as a student I had years ago reminded me, just because you give someone a video camera or a tape recorder doesn’t mean they are going to be able to make a movie or a radio show.

    Don’t get me wrong– I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing these things, and I don’t disagree with Selfe at all. We’ve been doing these multimodal and aural compositions for a long time, probably forever. I have my students in a wide variety of classes make little videos, web sites, recordings, etc., etc. In a theoretical and ideal world, these things are all a form of “writing” and the borders we’ve built between text, images, movement, and sound are all fictions. But in a practical and materialistic world, these borders are what defines institutions, academic departments, and individual courses. And in a time of tight budgets and assessing things like who should get what tenure-track lines and on-going funding, those theoretical fictions have a material value of real dollars and cents.

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A couple of online teaching articles in Inside Higher Ed

First, there’s “U.S. push for free online courses:”

WASHINGTON — Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration.

The program is part of a series of efforts to help community colleges reach more students and to link basic skills education to job training. The proposals are outlined in administration discussion drafts obtained by Inside Higher Ed. A formal announcement could come in the next few weeks. In addition to the free online courses, the plan would provide $9 billion over 10 years to help community colleges develop and improve programs related to preparing students for good jobs, and a $10 billion loan fund (at low or no interest) for community college facilities.

Fair enough, but there’s a difference between putting a bunch of stuff up online and offering an online course, and that difference is basically some kind of teacher. I mean, there’s plenty of things online right now to help people to get “good jobs;” making information available in and of itself doesn’t seem like that much of a move to me.

And then there’s this, “The evidence on online education.” Here’s a quote and a link:

Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis(PDF) released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.

The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took “blended” courses — those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction — appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.

But part of what this meta-analysis suggests is that at least some of this is the result of students spending more time with online classes and being more highly motivated– in other words, not so much about the teaching medium as the students themselves. And of course a lot of this depends on how you define some of these key terms: learning, instruction, better, etc., etc. Still, it’s interesting. In my own experiences, it’s hard for me to tell if students are doing better online, but I don’t think they are necessarily doing worse. Of course, a lot of online students don’t finish the courses, which means I guess the ones that finish do “better.”

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And other Computers and Writing highlights

I was going to wrap this all up in my previous post on Twitter, but since that got kind of long and very Twitter-centric, I thought I’d post one last time about C&W09 here. Some of the other highlights:

  • Before the Ganley keynote, Nick Carbone and I worked on incorporating some video from Matt Barton (who was originally going to come to C&W this year but then he didn’t, I think because of travel fund issues) into my part of our talk about textbook publishing, “Textbook 2.0: Open Source Textbooks and Multimodal Composition Programs.” There is a podcast recording of it on the C&W 09 web site– one of these days, I’ll connect that audio with my slides and post them here. Anyway, it was a pretty well-attended session in my estimation, and I enjoyed presenting with Nick.
  • I was “back to back” presentation boy at this year’s conference as I followed the textbook presentation with my contribution to “Sustainable Blogging: Problems and Promises for School, Work, and Play.” I set up a new web site/blog, “Blogs as Writerly Spaces,” to host stuff about this research, and I have a link to my presentation script here. It was a smaller crowd than the textbook talk (which says to me that I’m a lot more interested in my research in blogging at this stage than most other people), but some really good presentations from my Indiana University of Pennsylvania colleague and friend Gian Pagnucci, along with some IUP grad students, Sabatino Mangini and Jessica Schreyer.
  • Friday night was the banquet, which was fine but not that exciting one way or the other, and then it was out to the Davis nightlife with various C&W folks.
  • Slept in Saturday morning (well, sort of slept in– I never did get my time issues straight out there) and managed to walk through the Davis farmer’s market on the way to the conference. I debated getting some beautiful looking morel mushrooms, but I wasn’t sure I could get them back on the plane in my carry-on luggage. Probably, but I didn’t want to chance it.
  • Then to the conference and I went to see “Researching Fully Online Instruction: Assessment, Pedagogy, and a Sustainable Theory of Hybrid Online Learning,” which was a panel by some fine folks at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Given the discussions we’ve had here in my program about teaching online, I guess there are two things I found striking. One speaker, Christopher Dean, presented about how the research suggests there is “no significant difference” in what students learn in online classes versus similar face to face classes. There are some big problems with these kinds of claims, including a kind of fuzzy sense of what exactly it is we are measuring when we describe “learning.” But I will say that in my own experiences his claims seem accurate to the extent that the writing projects and other graded “artifacts” students produce in online classes are pretty much the same as those students produce in face to face classes, and that even includes things like the collaborative video projects and such. More important to me though was that two of these folks, Randi Browning and Kathy Patterson, spoke about their experiences teaching online for the first time. I wish these folks would come and talk to some of my EMU colleagues because I think they would be a lot more persuasive than me in speaking about what it’s “like” to make the leap of faith to teach online.
  • Went to Bill Cope’s keynote, which was fantastic, in my mind: very solid theoretically, well-put together and polished, pushing the edges of what counts as technology, etc. Interestingly, I think he was making the same basic point as Ganley; but besides the delivery, I think the differences had to do with tools than it had to do with concepts.
  • Then I took a conference break to go grade– I was and remain woefully behind– and I had a solo lunch and grading session at Crepeville. Very nice, and I got a fair amount of work done, too.
  • I attended another panel after my grading lunch (a pretty good one– G1, “Hybrid Writing Classes: Literacy, Dialogues, and Intellectual Property”), I went to Town Hall III, where I was on the panel. This was an odd experience. First off, I was pretty unprepared compared to the other people on the panel, I guess because what I thought I was supposed to do mostly was react to the stuff I had seen at the conference. I wasn’t expecting to have a little speech written up. And second, as I was sitting there next to Cindy Selfe and Kathy Yancey (not to mention some other heavy-hitters), I most distinctly had the feeling of being a little like Kathy Griffin on “the D list.” But it was a good conversation and a good opportunity for me. I tried to get Cindy to sign onto Twitter with no luck though.
  • Then it was an art exhibit that actually was kinda cool (I have some video to upload sooner than later) and then bowling. I took lots of pictures that are here, but my favorite is the one video I took:

    And this was followed by a comparatively quiet night on the town.

  • And just to prove that the conference isn’t over until you’re long LONG gone: I ended up riding back on the plane with a fellow conference goer and right behind this group of drunk women. It’s a long story, and it was a long plane flight, and I’m still running behind….

All in all, a fantastic C&W this year. I thought Davis was great, I think I actually went to more panels than I’ve gone to in a long time, and I have to say I enjoyed thoroughly having my own room (though it cost too much). Carl Whithaus and friends did a fantastic job, and I’m looking forward to next year’s conference at Purdue.

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C&W 09 prewriting/preparing post

I’m off to what is generally my favorite conference of the year, Computers and Writing, which this year is in Davis, California. It’s not one of the “big ones,” like the CCCCs or something, and it can be kind of inconsistent in terms of who attends and the overall “quality” of the experience because it is a conference that is more or less hosted by folks who are willing to host it. But it is still my favorite or one of my favorites, mainly because these are my people, so to speak.

Anyway, a few random, preparatory thoughts:

  • When I have mentioned to people “in the know” about California that this conference is going to be in Davis, the general reaction has been “oh, that’s too bad.” Well, all I know is I’m planning a trip to Napa Thursday, the weather is likely to be pretty nice (sunny, dry, low 90s during the day, 50s-60s at night), and I’ll be busy doing conference stuff most of the time anyway.
  • My usual traveling companions are not going this year, I suppose because they already had their trip to California with the CCCCs. I suspect that is true with lots of people, actually. In any event, since this is my only conference this year, I am kind of “livin’ large” with my own room and such.
  • My “main presentation” from my point of view is “Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging,” which is part of my ongoing blog research. I’m in the process of setting up a web site for that project, http://baws.stevendkrause.com, which is going to host some of the stuff I’ve done and will continue to do, including responses to the survey I conducted.
  • My “not main presentation” is “Fast, Free, and On the ‘Net: The Story of a Self-Published Textbook,” which is a round-table discussion called “Textbook 2.0: Open Source Textbooks in the Land of Sustainable Computing.” The table promises not to be that “round” though because Joanna bowed out and Matt had his funding cut– he’s going to maybe make a video. I’ll post stuff here when I’m done getting something together that is, well, postable. Interestingly enough, someone from a Cal-Irvine PR office called me to ask some questions about my presentation to drum up some interest locally in the conference. I guess I’d better be ready for people showing up to this one….
  • And I’m on a panel/a respondent at the “Town Hall III: @ School, Work, and Play in Freeborn.” There’s some really cool people in that group, but since it’s the last thing of the day before “dinner on your own” and bowling, I’m not exactly expecting a huge crowd. Well, maybe I’ll at least have some good people to go eat dinner with after that…
  • I’m kind of annoyed with my air travel plans because I don’t get there today until almost midnight and I won’t get home on Sunday until about 10 pm. Grrr.