Category: Scholarship

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Don't worry about the government

There’s been a smattering of readings out there today on the “smack-down” the congress has given to the U.S. Department of Education’s work on the Spellings Commission, which (in my very VERY simplistic understanding of all this) is the Fed’s way of trying to bring us all of the “successes” of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and standardized testing to the realm of higher education.

It perhaps goes without saying that folks in higher education have been resisting this, but what’s interesting to me with today’s news is that the congress is stepping in and saying, more or less, we’ll pass the laws and then tell you and your pals, Secretary Spellings, how to regulate and enforce the laws. Not the other way around.

See this CHE piece, “House Panel Moves to Bloc Accreditation Changes While Increasing Pell Grant,” and this Inside Higher Ed piece, “Congressional Timeout for Spellings.”

I have to say I haven’t lost a lot of sleep over the Spellings Commission and its related topics prior to this news. There are several reasons for this, both bad and good:

  • I realize that topics like “assessment” are really important in my field of composition and rhetoric, and there is a body of scholarship out there about it, and it’s really a big deal, yadda-yadda-yadda. But I have to say that I find this kind of stuff dreadfully dull. I guess that makes me a bad compositionalist. Or a bad person. Maybe both. I will have to live with that….
  • I don’t worry about this stuff too much because there are far too many smart people already worrying about this stuff for all of us– for example, my colleague and friend, Linda “browndogsblog” Adler-Kassner. This would make for good blog fodder, Linda….
  • I think that a lot of academic-types (who are obviously looking at this issue from an insider’s perspective) are forgetting that there are a lot of “face value” problems with this kind of regulation among the public at large. Two examples immediately come to mind. First, while NCLB might (and that’s an iffy “might” in my mind, but okay) have some logic on the surface, the way it’s been implemented has been so bad that I bet if you ask parents of kids who have been impacted by this at all they would not have a favorable impression. If they knew what NCLB was at all.

    Second, the motivations for calling for regulation of K-12 Ed don’t work with higher ed. It seems to me that regulating elementary and secondary ed has been reasonably popular with the general public because of reports on how U.S. kids compare to kids in Korea or Germany or France or wherever. But the thing is people from other countries keep coming to universities and colleges in this country, despite all of the challenges of this kind of study abroad in a post 9-11 world, in large part because US universities and colleges are considered among the best in the world. So, um, if they’ve done as well as they have up to this point, what’s the reason to change the way we’re regulating/assessing/accrediting them now?

  • For the time-being, I think I am in the same boat as Bernard Fryshman who wrote the commentary titled “Have I Been Watching this Movie Backwards?” for Inside Higher Ed. It probably isn’t such a bad idea for institutions of higher education in this country to at lest think a bit more systematically about assessment and accreditation, and the fact that universities and colleges are talking about this stuff is evidence that at least one good thing has come out the Spellings Commission. But before we go all wild about standardized tests and measures and numbers and stuff, we’d best figure out just what the heck we’re trying to measure.
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Blog writing: attention vs. productive procrastination

At the recent Computers and Writing conference in Detroit, I went to a presentation where Derek Mueller talked the role of “attention” in motivation for blog writing. I’m simplifying quite a bit just because I don’t have my notes here (though, note to self– remember to ask Derek for a copy of his talk).

Derek had a lot of good points in his talk, but I managed to stumble across another explanation that seems to explain a lot of the blogging that I do: structured procrastination.

It’s kind of an old essay by John Perry, no slouch of a Philosophy professor at Stanford. “Structured Procrastination” is a brief internet essay I probably should have come across earlier (had I been paying attention); regardless, it seems to ring a bell to the practice of blogging. For example:

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Of course, it looks to me that Perry is still procrastinating from going into any more detail about all this procrastination. But that’s another project….

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Inside Higher Ed News on Textbooks

See “Next Chapter on Textbooks,” published on June 1 in Inside Higher Ed. Basically, it’s a long piece about the high price of textbooks (various investigations, etc.) and the various solutions for dealing with the expense, including legislation. Frankly, I think the idea of the feds stepping in to control the price of textbooks is a little like getting them to step in and control the price of gasoline: it makes for good politics with various constituents, but at the end of the day, the price of gasoline (and textbooks) goes up.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by “expensive,” too. I had a book rep tell me once that the really expensive books in the sciences– ones that typically involve a lot of full-color printing– are more or less “break even” propositions for publishers. So that might not actually be expensive. On the other hand, charging $60 for a warmed-over fifth edition of some composition textbook is a profit source.

Anyway, let’s assume that textbooks cost too much money. Why is that? Here’s an interesting passage that I think tells at least part of the story:

“Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable,� is the result of a yearlong study by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, a nonpartisan federal panel that advises Congress on issues of access.

The advisory group adopts a common framing of the issue. The textbook market, it says, is driven by supply rather than demand. Publishers set the price. Bookstores order the products. Students have little, if any, direct influence over the final cost, format and quality of the textbook. The common retort from publishers: Pay more attention to the faculty role. They are free to choose cheaper editions or unbundled material but resoundingly say educational value trumps price in their purchasing decisions.

I like to say that textbooks are a lot like dog food. Dogs don’t pick out their dog food; their owners do. As a result, dog food companies market to their owners. Like dogs, students don’t pick out the textbooks for their classes; their professors do. As a result, textbook companies market them to the professors. There’s one significant difference though: textbook companies rarely tell professors explicitly how much the books they are ordering for students actually cost.

What to do about all this? Well, a lot of the solution in the article revolve around organized online publishing, but it seems to me that this is probably not going to reduce the costs, and it ignores the many reasons for textbooks. And besides, a lot of times, a) a print textbook is the best way to deliver content, and b) the cost of some textbooks is actually worth it. Don’t get me wrong– this is not some kind of apology for the textbook business. There are a lot of really bad textbooks out there. Still, there are also a lot of good ones, too.

It also seems to me that professors can often find alternatives for textbooks if they just look around a bit. For example, I’ve been assigning Joseph Williams’ Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace for years– the 1995 trade book edition. I’m not sure if it is still in print or not, but students have never had a hard time getting it, and it’s about $12 or so new, $5 or $6 used. On the other hand, Williams’ Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (now in its ninth edition) is $43.33 from amazon.com. Now, I suppose the textbook version might have some advantages, especially for less than prepared instructors.

And as a slight tangent: that’s another function of textbooks that seems overlooked by this piece. Textbooks– especially in a field like composition studies, where instructors are frequently inexperienced– are often a key part of the “on the job training,” as much of a teaching tool for the graduate assistant or part-timer as it is for the students in the class. I know I learned a ton about teaching writing from the textbooks I was required to use as a new graduate assistant.

Obviously, I have mixed feelings.

Of course, I’m also for the solution of just self-publishing textbooks, like my modest little project, The Process of Research Writing.

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Might be a good book; might not

Technicity, edited by Louis Armand and Arthur Bradley. The blurb says (in part) “In this collection, a group of internationally-known figures within the fields of philosophy, linguistics and cultural studies come together to consider the meaning of “technicity” at the beginning of the 21st century.” So it might be interesting. But one of the things I think is weird is the table of contents. (pdf) It has the authors’ names in big and bold letters, and the title of their essays in harder to read and smaller italics. It’s almost as if it’s saying “pay no attention to what I’m saying; pay attention to who I am.” Hmm….

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C&W 07: My Presentation

I presented at the very last session on Sunday, May 20, at the recently completed Computers and Writing conference in Detroit. To be honest, more people showed up to this session than I thought would, mainly to support the other two presenters, I think. Still, it was a marked improvement over my “crowd” at the CCCCs.

In any event, I am making my presentation available at this web site with three basic versions:

  • the script of my talk with a few key slides pictures included (the version I’d recommend for most readers);
  • just the script with numbers where I inserted the slides; and
  • the Keynote slides saved for the web.

I’m also going to be sharing this presentation to the EMUtalk.org community since, after all, it’s about them. We’ll see what they have to say about all this.

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Computers & Writing, Days 3 & 4: Another Bulleted List

  • I was planning on attending the 9 am session on Saturday morning, but things around the house and traffic held me up. These things happen.
  • Went to a session called “Mediating Literacy: Plugging Latour into Computers and Writing.” I learned a few things about Douglas Engelbart and his invention of computer interfaces, and also about a student project involving partially cooked chicken, but I didn’t learn a whole lot about Latour. Oh well; I did work on my presentation during all this.
  • Met up with Bill HD and one of his grad students for lunch, though we cut out before the presentation to do a little roaming about and shopping. I bought a lovely T-Shirt.
  • Went to a round-table on Ong to celebrate the 25 years after the publication of Orality and Literacy that was pretty decent. Hawisher and Selfe were sitting behind me and making me feel inadvertently guilty about multi-tasking.
  • Steve B. and I took off the last panel and went over to the Detroit Institute of Art, which is getting ready to close for the next six months for the final stages of renovation. As a result, there wasn’t much of the collection open. But we did spend a fair amount of time with the Diego Rivera mural “Detroit Industry,” which was worth the minimal admission. Pictures don’t really do it justice, but we did take a few. Pictures are forthcoming, I promise.
  • We went over the the African American History museum after this, quite a bit early, but we didn’t have anything else to do. The folks setting up the dinner said we could take the tour, so we did. It’s one of these museums where you have to go through a linear/historic path: first Africa, then the slave trade, then the Civil War, etc. Pretty interesting exhibit.
  • By the time we were done, the crowd was gathering for the banquet. Excellent food for this, too.
  • The room/lobby/whatever where this was being held was a dome/rotunda sort of structure, and the acoustics in there were bizarre. Conversations taking place halfway or more across the room bounced off the ceiling and marble floors/walls so that it sounded like it was right behind me. I thought I was hearing voices. I mean more than usual.
  • Ended up sitting with a lot of BGSU folks, which was good, especially with Kris Blair winning a technical innovator of the year award. What’s interesting to me about all this is that C&W was my first presentation, back in 1994, and I remember that me and Mike/Mick Doherty, John Clark, and Bill HD road-tripped to Missouri from BGSU. We were it. This time around, I’ll be there were 10 or more current and former PhD students there. Things have changed for the better.
  • Congrats to everyone who won various awards, but once again, I have not won anything. Actually, I’m not sure who the person(s) is/are who won the ward for best blog, to be honest. But congrats to them, too.
  • The keynote speaker was Richard Doyle, and he was, um, interesting in places. I think he was anticipating having internet access; I’m not sure. Doyle was pretty entertaining and funny, but as far as saying anything that was important or interesting or whatever: I thought he vacillated between making some good points and just rambling. Maybe he was hearing voices in his head from the dome/rotunda too.
  • Thanks to the directions from Nancy A., I didn’t get lost on the way home, which was nice.
  • Up and at ’em this morning, I drove back in and moderated a panel, “Virtual and Audio Teaching: Three Instructors’ Tales: Creating Environments for Varied Student Populations,” also made up of former BGSU grad students. A small group, but a good conversation.
  • Then it was time for my spiel. Funny story about tech and about the conference: there wasn’t a projector in the room I was presenting in. This was not good. So I went down to the check-in table and very calmly said “I need a projector in the room where I am presenting.” A couple of Wayne State-types show up with a projector and a computer, feverishly pushing buttons with mixed results. They leave. I hook up my computer, push the power button on the projector, and we’re in business. A link to my presentation is coming soon, I promise.
  • Kudos to Robin Murphy (BGSU) and Kimberly Lacey (Wayne State), the PhD students I prsented with and who did great things in their talks. And congrats to Robin on defending and going on to join the ranks of the tenure-track, too.
  • And then time to go home. All and all, an okay conference. I got a lot of good book project ideas, and a lot of inspiration for getting my act together on all that very very soon. The “home game” aspect of the conference was fun, though I have to say that I’m looking forward to C&W in Athens, GA next year. Bill HD and Steve B and I are contemplating road-tripping down there and playing golf along the way there and back. But that’s next year.
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Computers & Writing, Days 1 & 2: The Bulleted List

  • Steve B. and I drove into Detroit City late Thursday afternoon. We arrived at the registration table at about 4:50. Some person there said “Sorry, we close registration at 5.” Um, okay….
  • Went to the St. Martin’s sponsored reception at the Detroit Beer Co., which was a nice way to kick stuff off. Good beer, good company. Showed Bob Whipple a bit about Comic Life, chatted with all kinds of folks.
  • Steve B. and I were going to go out for Greek food, but pooped out and ended up at an Ypsilanti institution and EMU hang-out, the Sidetrack. Ah, the pleasures of the familiar.
  • Friday AM, I moseyed in around 10:30 or so. Met up with a former MA student of ours who is now at the PhD program at BGSU. She interviewed me about blogging for a project she’s working on, which sounds pretty interesting.
  • Went to the lunch event, ate with my colleague Nancy Allen (who has been on sabbatical this year, so it was good to catch up a bit) and managed to be close enough to the front to actually hear it. No microphone. But some interesting talks from Metroblogging Detroit, dETROITfUNK, and DetroitYES, bloggers from three very different area blogs/communities. I talked with them a bit afterwards about contacting them later as case study sources, and they all seemed pretty okay with that.
  • Went to an excellent panel, Blogologies with Collin Brooke, Krista Kennedy, Derek Mueller, Donna Strickland, and Jeff Ward. Review forthcoming, but some useful stuff for this quasi-hypothetical book project. Oh, and there I was, right there, when Derek quoted from my “When Blogging Goes Bad” article. That’s the first time I was quoted right in front of me, which was kinda cool.
  • Talked a bit with Collin and contemplated buying a Wayne State cap. I went into the store and didn’t like the selection, though I did like the sweatshirts they had indicated the major of “Undeclared.”
  • The damn Starbucks was closed so no decent afternoon coffee.
  • For reason too convoluted to go into here, I ended up missing Geoffrey Sirc’s speech because I was eating a lovely ruben and drinking fine beer in a place called Saloon Circa 1890. About 10 minutes after Sirc’s presentation was over, the place was full of C&W folks. At least one photo forthcoming. Talked with many other folks like Nick Carbone and previously mentioned folks, and heard tales from Mike Palmquist of his elaborate motorcycle travel from Colorado State U to here.
  • Drove home without incident (which, knock on wood, has been the case so far in my travels into Detroit) and hung out with the wife and child. All in all, a good day indeed.