Category: Scholarship

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Misc. posts while watching million dollar password and the movie “Resolved”

As the title suggest, I’m posting these things while watching TV, including Resolved, which is running on HBO right now. I thought I’d sort through my Google Reader feed with some links.

  • The Hyperlinked Society looks like an interesting read, certainly something to think about for ENGL 516 or ENGL 444. Via a thaumaturgical compendium.
  • The Reanimation Library, which looks like a kind of interesting installation art version on a library. Some cool pictures here. Via Earth Wide Moth.
  • Five Free Online Video Editing tools. In the fall, I’m going to experiment with a simple video assignment, and one of these tools might be useful/worth playing around with.
  • Obama as a Secret Vulcan, from culture critic extraordinaire Henry Jenkins. Pretty interesting analysis, and it’s better than saying he’s a secret Muslim– not that there’s anything wrong with Muslims, of course.
  • Alex Reid has an interesting post about this article in the CHE about an online and non-university associated (kind of) first year writing course/program called StraighterLine, which is being run by SmartThinking, which runs a lot of online tutoring programs at universities. Besides the critique that Alex offers– which I completely agree with, that there is generally speaking a disconnect between the best scholarship in the field of composition and rhetoric and the course that generically tends be called composition and rhetoric– it just doesn’t seem like an idea that’s very workable. I think that one of the big textbook publishers tried to do this a while back, tried to offer a course with college credit not associated with a traditional institution. As I understand, that program folded up. So I guess I’m just not sure what the plan/business model is here.
  • This also looks like a good book, one to think of for 516: Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Here’s a review at Grand Text Auto.

There’s probably other stuff I should put here too, but enough for now.  Oh, and go check out that movie, Resolved.

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Not that stupid after all

For reasons too complicated to go into, I found myself with about a half-hour/forty minutes to kill, which was not quite enough time to go on the “power walk” in a nearby park or to go to the gym before picking up Will. So I took the quasi-lazy way out and decided to catch up on some email, a bit of teaching work, and some web reading. This included the recent Atlantic Monthly article with the provocative title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. I was all set to be angry about it because, frankly, the title itself is kind of stupid.  “Um, no, stupid,” is basically my answer. But I guess the folks at the Atlantic didn’t think an article with a title like “What Google has to do with previous technologies of the mind and artificial intelligence” wouldn’t sell a lot of magazines.

I don’t agree with everything that Carr is saying here, but I actually do agree with a lot of it and I think this will be a good addition to my “invent your own technology” assignment in English 328.  Carr makes specific references to folks like McLuhan, Nietzsche’s reflections on the typewriter, Alan Turing, re-mediated ala Bolter/Grusin, and even Plato’s Phaedrus, and throughout the whole thing, I hear a sort of “back-current” of Walter Ong on the shaping power the external technology of literacy on human consciousness.

Not stupid at all, but like I said, stupid sells magazines.

I think this will certainly be something I include in the revamped version of English 328 I hope to roll out in the Fall term.

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The new style manual is here! The new style manual is here!

How big of a nerdy English/writing type of person does one need to be to appreciate the fact that the MLA has come out with a new edition of the style manual?  And does it make me an even bigger looser enthusiast that the first thing I want to look at in the newest issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing is a review of this new style manual?

Regardless, it’s an interesting piece by Kevin S. Hawkins, who is an electronic publishing librarian over at the University of Michigan.  The rest of the journal looks interesting this time around too.  Based on what Hawkins is saying, it sounds like MLA has made some advances in dealing with electronic resources and in acknowledging the fact that almost all of the writing/editing done in academic/humanities-type journals involves computers.

And for me, this observation brought back unpleasant memories:  “I’m glad to see that two holdovers from the days of the typewriter have finally been put to rest: underlining and double spacing after periods are out, and italicization and single spacing are in.”  Twelve years ago, when I was trying to wrap up my dissertation in the summer before I began my first tenure-track job, I was in an epic (well, for me) battle with a thesis/dissertation reader in the Bowling Green State University graduate college.

In those days (I assume this is still true, though I don’t typically have to deal with such things at EMU because our graduate students do “projects” and not “theses” that adhere to such strict rules), this was the final stop for a dissertation, a hoop soon-to-be PhDs had to jump through even after a defense.  The staff in this office was made up mostly of MA students on an assistantship, and their job was to proof-read for your run-of-the-mill errors and for adherence to a style manual– in my case, the MLA style manual.  This reviewer did catch a number of errors I was able to tidy up, but this person (who was always anonymous to me) also tried to argue that I had to eliminate all contractions (I dare you to find that rule in the MLA style manual) and to change all italics into underlined text.  I had a lot of italics in my diss, both for book titles but also for emphasis— probably a little too much emphasis– and I thought then (and think now) that underlining is ugly.

Well, long-story a bit shorter, I actually went back and forth via email with this person for a while, and I ultimately had to get a “supervisor” involved in order to remind this office that I had successfully defended my dissertation.  I ended up presenting this person with a quote from that edition of the MLA style manual (the second?) which said italics were at least an acceptable substitute for underlining.  I finished, went on with my life, and became the tenured professor you see before you today.  I don’t know whatever happened to this reviewer, but I am guessing they are not happy with these new MLA changes.

Depending on what happens with English 328 next year, perhaps this could be a reading for that class….

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Computers and Composition, the “Top 25”

Out of a discussion on Tech-Rhet the other day came this little tidbit from Bill HD: ScienceDirect (which indexes Computers and Composition) has a “Hottest 25” feature for various journals. So, for example, here’s a link to the “hottest 25” articles (in terms of people accessing them at least, I assume) in Computers and Composition from the October-December 2007 issues.

Since this site also has a handy “blog it” feature and there are some articles I can imagine teaching next year, I think I’ll go ahead and link those below as well:

Understanding”Internet plagiarism”
• Article
Computers and Composition, Volume 24, Issue 1, 1 January 2007, Pages 3-15
Howard, R.M.

Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning
• Article
Computers and Composition, Volume 22, Issue 1, 1 January 2005, Pages 5-22
Kress, G.

The fair use doctrine: History, application, and implications for (new media) writing teachers
• Article
Computers and Composition, Volume 24, Issue 2, 1 March 2007, Pages 154-178
Rife, M.C.

Why Napster matters to writing: Filesharing as a new ethic of digital delivery
• Article
Computers and Composition, Volume 23, Issue 2, 1 January 2006, Pages 178-210
DeVoss, D.N.; Porter, J.E.
 
Weathering wikis: Net-based learning meets political science in a South African university
• Article
Computers and Composition, Volume 24, Issue 3, 1 June 2007, Pages 266-284
Carr, T.; Morrison, A.; Cox, G.; Deacon, A.
(I did teach this one this past year, actually.)


Plagiarism, originality, assemblage
• Article
Computers and Composition, Volume 24, Issue 4, 1 September 2007, Pages 375-403
Johnson-Eilola, J.; Selber, S.A.
 
CMS-based simulations in the writing classroom: Evoking genre through game play
• Article
Computers and Composition, Volume 24, Issue 2, 1 March 2007, Pages 179-197
Fisher, D.

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Computers and Writing 2008: Krause’s Big Wrap-Up

First off, let me back-track a bit and fill in a few more details on what I’ve already mentioned about C&W and this trip:

  • The “very good session” I went to on Friday morning before Jay David Bolter’s talk featured Rik Hunter, Dan Anderson, and Alex Reid. Follow the links for more info on the presentations. Actually, in Rik’s and Dan’s case, you can literally see what they did: both of them had everything pre-recorded and just “delivered” it by cranking up the computer and pushing play. Alex did his the old fashioned way– just talking. All were very good, but it was kind of strange to see the presenter standing there while his movie plays his presentation.
  • Speaking of Alex Reid, congratulations on the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award for Digital Digs!
  • I wish Jay David Bolter’s talk was online someplace, and maybe it will be at some point– they videotaped it. I thought it would be a really interesting teaching tool because he made a bridge/connection between the hypertext experiments of the early 90’s (remember StorySpace?) with gaming experiments (newsgaming.com, for example), poetry that plays on your iPod or your cell phone when you are in certain points of the Atlanta subway, a podcast tour of a cemetery, etc. It reminds me that I need to work gaming back into English 516 the next time I teach it.

Now on to the “part 3” or concluding episode of Computers and Writing 2008 from my pov:

  • My session was at 10 AM on Saturday, and the “prime time” seemed to help us draw a pretty decent-sized crowd. Before me was Gian Pugnucci with a talk called “The WikiBib Project: Exploring the nature of Teaching Collaborative Scholarships in a Wiki.” Basically, he was talking about using a wiki as a means of facilitating collaboration on an annotated bibliography assignment in a graduate class. I’ve talked with Gian about this before and I think we’re going to try and work something out together on this for his and my grad courses next year.

    I was second, and I’ll pretty much let my presentation speak (or not) for itself:

    A slight tangent here: I actually managed to forget the do-hickey for hooking up my laptop, so I spent a few moments thinking I was screwed. But it turns out I was doubly covered. Since this was the computers and writing conference after all, someone in the audience (Carl Whithaus, actually) immediately volunteered his adapter. But besides that, the fine folks in Georgia were completely prepared for this, too. The guy doing tech support for UGa told me he had a whole bag full of the adapters I needed and was very confident that he could get the projector set-up to work. Quite a contrast to the way the projectors often work (or not) in Pray-Harrold.Anyway, I got some great feedback from folks on what to do with the whole “finished blogger” issue, and as we discussed during the session, my use of the word “failure” in my talk is probably not right. “Not finished,” “abandoned, or and as often as not, “ended at the appropriate time” are probably better terms. In any event, helpful ideas from attendees.

    The third presenter was Natalie Szymanski from Florida State with a talk titled “Wikis and Composition Pedagogy: Avoiding the Bandwagon.” Basically, she was suggesting that maybe we ought to slow down a bit on all of this stuff like wikis. While I didn’t agree with many of the things she had to say, I had to give her credit because it’s nice to see someone at this conference have the guts to point out that we’re in the “writing business” and not the “isn’t this software I just learned about cool business.”

  • And then it was time for golf. I was part of a foursome with Steve Benninghoff, Gian, and Nick Carbone out at the University of Georgia Golf Course. In hind-sight, I think we should have picked a more “accessible” course since Benninghoff and I could have used a bit of a “palate cleanser” after the challenges of that course in Kentucky, and Gian and Nick, neither of whom had swung a club in over a year, could have just used something easier. This was one bad-assed hard hard course, certainly in the top 2 or 3 in difficulty that I’ve played, and a course that made me wish for an easy one like Pierce Lake or Eagle Crest.

    But hey, it was a friendly game, and a good time was had by one and all even if the play wasn’t great. Actually, it got a lot more fun when we started the back nine and we played a cart versus cart scramble, but Nick had to leave a little early, so it just kind of degenerated into some sloppy play at the end of a long death march of a round.

  • Steve B. and Gian and I had some BBQ that I thought was pretty so-so, and then we went off to Kingpins Bowl and Brew for the ritual of the bowling night. I managed to catch up with a few folks who I didn’t get a chance to talk to much during the conference itself (including Courtney, who is doing great), had a few more Terapins, and even managed a little bowling (I scored 100– I had forgotten that real bowling isn’t as easy as Wii bowling).
  • And then Sunday was the long drive home. I managed to prod my more leisurely traveling companion onto the road by 6:30 and we were back in Ypsilanti in less than 12 hours, which, when I think about the expense and general pain in the butt of flying, makes me think that driving was a good idea, with or without the golf.

So an excellent conference/roadtrip. Well done, UGa, folks! Here are some pictures of the whole things– eventually, I’ll add some info about all these pictures.

Next year, C&W is going to be at UC-Davis and it is going to be toward the end of June. I don’t know if I’ll be going yet or not, to tell the truth. On the down-side, the CCCCs is in San Francisco this year, and I don’t think I can afford 2 trips to California just to conference. On the other hand, Annette and Will and I might want to make this part of a west coast “pilgrimage” back to Ashland. We shall see….

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On the road from C&W; in the mean-time, enjoy this movie

Steve B. and I are (hopefully) going to be leaving soon for the long and exciting one day haul back to Michigan from the Computers and Writing Conference here in Athens, GA.  But before I go, I wanted to post a link to a movie I made of my presentation, as I promised I would during my presentation.  So here is:

Blogging Software Choices

Interestingly enough, I tried to upload this to Google Video and I was “rejected” for what they said were copyright reasons.  I’ll have to figure out what the deal is with that later.  I recorded this with KeyNote as I was talking at the conference, so this really is a kind of “Live, from Athens!” sort of deal.

Okay, onto the highway….

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C&W 2008, day 2

Sure, some folks are at the Rhetoric Society of America conference right now (or soon) instead of at this fine conference, though, as I learned from talking to David Blakesley the other night, there are at least a few people going to both C&W and the every other year RSA in Seattle.  David talked about how he was flying from here to there.  Yikes!  Not my idea of fun….

But so far, here (as in C&W) has been a pretty fun and informative conference.  Steve B. and I drove for hours and hours and hours on Thursday, and made it in time for the reception at Tasty World (which was a bar rather than a cake store) and then had subsequent and largely unmentionable evening activities about Athens, GA.  I can’t post pictures of anything right now because I forgot the cable to upload picts from my camera (very annoying), but I can tell you a good time was had by one and all.

I went to a good session this morning, went to a very good talk by Jay David Bolter, and a good and kind of heart-warming panel where I am pretty sure most of the speakers were giving their first conference presentation.  I thought that was cool because I too gave my first conference talk at a C&W many moons ago….

Anyway, Steve B. and I did some shopping in the afternoon before attending the usual banquet.  We left a little the banquet a little early (because we could) and wen  heard afterwards that Nick Carbone was recognized this year as the  C&W contributor/person of the year.  Or whatever that is called.  Congrats to him!

So far, UGa has put on a very pleasant comfortable and pleasant C&W, and Athens has been a lot of fun.  As far as I can tell, it is as if Ann Arbor, Blacksburg, VA, and Charlottesville had a love-child and named it Athens.  I don’t think I’m going to see much of the college music scene that has made this town so famous, but I’ve liked what I have seen.

Tomorrow, Steve B. and I present at different times and then it is off to the UGa golf course.

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Is the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning still Open Source?

Maybe it’s just a temporary thing, but I’m a little miffed right now:

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation sponsored a great series on “Digital Media and Learning,” and worked out a deal with MIT press where you can order the print version or you can download the open source version for free. Here’s a link to that site.

However, when I tried just now to browse through one of these open source publications, the MIT press gives me an error and says that the file wasn’t found. What gives? Did someone have “take-backs” on these once free articles?

Update, May 26:

I’m happy to say I am wrong– all of this stuff still is available as PDF downloads. The site just appeared to be down for a while.

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Long belated post on “Videos from The English TA Experience by Iowa State Students”

I am startlingly tardy in posting about Inside Higher Ed’s article “Voltaire Wasn’t Cut Out to Be an Iowa State TA” and the videos that are the subject of this– linked on Facebook here and here. Frankly, for all the excitement over things like the Graff and Birkenstein exchange on WPA-L, I’m kind of surprised that no one in the Comp/Rhet blogosphere has commented on this.

I guess someone has to start.

On the one hand, I appreciate the experiences being noted/recorded in these two videos. I’ve been there, of course. And I don’t blame these grad assistants for making these two videos and I don’t dismiss the reaction they have to the writing program at Iowa State (if I was running that program, I’d see this video as a bit of a “warning sign,” frankly). But I do have more of an “other hand” here.

First, this is probably more of the kind of video that should have been shown at some kind of GA gathering more or less privately, giggled at, and then put away. Probably not a video to post on YouTube or, um, Facebook. Second, and I don’t mean to sound all old and WPA-ish on people, but it’s never a good idea for GA’s to make fun of students publicly, even it is in modest ways and clearly in fun (as is the case with this video). Third, the administrative folks clearly over-reacted in trying to repress this. That just goes to show you what happens when administrators freak out.

And fourth (no offense to those folks at ISU) this video is probably twice as long as it should be. A little sensible editing would have helped, honestly.