Category: Scholarship

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Winter Break 2007 "To Do" List

It’s winter break season here– what everyone else in the universe refers to as “spring break.” Given that it’s February and it’s a slushy/icy mess outside right now, winter break seems a lot more accurate to me.

This year, we’re not visiting relatives in Florida nor are we off to Mexico (the destination of several of my colleagues with their families). We’re hanging out here, where my wife and I both hope to catch up on work while our son is in school and in various after-school activities. As long as there aren’t any snow days.

Here’s some of what’s on my “to do” list this week:

Make listAlways the first item I put on every list I make.
Go through email
Register for Computers and Writing Don’t worry, Jeff– I’m coming, but I just don’t want to spend the big bucks any earlier than I have to.
Clean House
Clean Garage
Clean Dog
Clean computer labs at EMU. Actually, this one got done on Friday. Long-story short: we have had always had problems getting our computer labs cleaned, in part because the janitors can’t get in their for security issues, and in part because no faculty person is in charge of these labs right now. Anyway, after a series of complaints, I said I’d help clean it ourselves, and I persuaded a “crew” that consisted of Steve B., my colleague Christine Tracy, a long-time journalism lecturer (thanks, Arnie!) and even our department head, Laura George. Laura generously invested in a variety of cleaning supplies, including a cheap shop-vac (btw, one of the best tools ever for sucking the dirt and dust out of computers, IMO). Besides dusting, washing, and mopping up the general filth, we also threw away four giant construction-grade plastic bags of junk: software at least six years old still in the box and the shrink-wrap, stacks of manuals for some mystery product (also still in the shrink-wrap), journals and articles a decade old, cables and plus and adapters for mystery bits of equipment, old course packs and student projects, papers folders and posters, and, inexplicably, one pinata.
Work on The Process of Research Writing web site. When my textbook project went belly-up last year, I started to put it up on the web. As happens in life, I got distracted with other things. But now I’m feeling like it’s time for me to put this thing up to bring some closure to this project.
Clean my school office.
Work on the Department Conference coming up the first week in March.
Get English 516 stuff up to date.
Get English 328 stuff up to date.
Sign up English 516 folks for class blog.
Get busy (again) with BAWS project. I really would like to get the survey/Human Subjects Review stuff going before the end of this week.
Go to the gym more.
Wait patiently for delivery people. I ordered a new home computer the other day, a 20 inch iMac along with a second 19 inch monitor. I know, it’s overkill, but it’ll be my overkill. Stay tuned for details.

Hmm, seems ambitious. I guess if I finish half of this, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something….

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Teachers lack "Media Literacy Skills"

Via the NCTE In-Box comes this EducationNews.org article, “Survey of Educators Finds Lack of Focus on 21st Century Media Literacy Skills.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Washington, DC – More than 60 percent of educators said that their schools are not putting enough emphasis on media literacy, and 80 percent said they have to learn about how to teach media literacy on their own, according to a survey conducted by Grunwald Associates.

The survey, commissioned by Cable in the Classroom (CIC), clearly shows that media literacy is an urgent – and unmet – priority among educators in schools today. While young people spend more and more time using all forms of media in and out of the classroom, teaching them how to be thoughtful about their media use, to recognize the overt and hidden messages in media and to consider the consequences of their own actions online is simply not a priority in most schools.

“We explicitly teach children how to understand, analyze and communicate using words on paper, and rightly so. Yet we get our news and information more from TV and the internet than from the newspaper. We communicate through email and text messaging and social networking more than writing letters. We should be teaching children how to ‘read’ and ‘write’ in all forms of media,� said Frank Gallagher, director of Education and Media Literacy at CIC.

The results of the CIC Educator Survey, Media Literacy: A Vital and Underserved Need in Schools, can be found online at
http://i.ciconline.org/docs/CICmedialitreport11-2006.pdf

This certainly fits neatly into some things I’m up to my neck in right now: my online graduate class, which has some secondary school teachers in it and where (basically) I’m trying to convey some of these “21st century skills,” and the annual English Department conference, which I’m co-chairing and which is focusing this year on “multimedia in the English classroom.” Funny how these things all sink up some time.

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An Infobits Treasuretrove for Online Teaching Stuff

The latest “Infobits” (which comes out of the University of North Carolina’s Info Tech services area) is particularly useful for the likes of me, someone who is teaching online and someone who is teaching a course about teaching with technology. Lots of stuff about online teaching and also about social software in the college classroom. I think my reading list for my grad class might have just changed again. Anyway, check it out.

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Blogs as Writerly Spaces: The proposal

When I am advising students who are working on their thesis or a final writing project as part of our MA in Written Communication, my most common bit o’ wisdom is that when you’re working on a project like that, you have to “touch it” every day. I’m not suggesting to these students that they work on their projects for an hour or two every day (though, if you can be that disciplined/regimented, that’s probably a good thing), because different days will afford you different amounts of time. But, I tell my students, even if you have all kinds of other work and life responsibilities and the like, you still should try to at least touch your project, just to keep it in the back of your mind. Sometimes, that will mean spending just a few minutes on it. But those few minutes, I tell my students, will help you on those days when you really do have time to work on your project in more detail, and those few minutes at a time will help you keep on your long-term goal of finishing.

Like I said, this is advice I give to my students, but like so many other pieces of advice, it’s easier given than followed.

Well, today I’ve decided to start taking my own advice and I’m going to make myself get back into the swing of a project I’m calling Blogs as Writerly Spaces. Thus the category here of “BAWS.”

My first “touch” on this project (and to be honest, I see only touches on this thing for the next couple weeks at least, but hey, I’m still following my own fine advice) has been to revisit the proposal I submitted for a sabbatical for next year. I’d be of course curious to find out what others out there have to say about it– oh, and if you’re a book publisher and want to offer me a contract straight-away, let me know.

I’ve obviously got a lot of thinking, researching, interviewing, writing, etc., to do on this yet. But I will say that it’s nice to look back at this proposal, something I haven’t paid much attention to for about two and a half months, and still be reasonably happy with it.

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A blog reading round-up

I’ve been totally swamped the last week or so with all sorts of different life and school things lately (thus my lack of blogging here). For one thing, I’m behind (though getting caught up) with my online teaching. For another, I’m being paperworked to death because I’m applying for promotion this year, which mainly means putting together a report and a thick binder of materials to make my case. So that’s why I haven’t been around here lately.

But I decided to try to do a little blog reading at least this morning. Here are a couple of links to things I found, some stuff to read later, some things that were interesting, etc.

  • Collin has a post here about reading/re-reading John Trimbur’s 2003 article “Changing the Question: Should Writing be Studied?” He links to posts by a couple of others thinking about this stuff too. About a month or two ago, I wrapped up my very small part of a collaborative editing project of a forthcoming issue of Composition Studies that discusses what a writing major might look like, and I’ve got a meeting later today about changes we want to make to our own undergraduate major in writing. So to me, the answer to Trimbur’s question (without really reading what he had to say or even too closely what Collin et al have to say) is “yes.” Of course, what’s more interesting is why the answer is yes, and that’s why it’s worth reading Collin’s, Jeff’s, and Donna’s posts.
  • Speaking of things I don’t have time to read right now but I’ll have to come back to later: Bitch PhD posted her MLA presentation, something that I wrote about here a few weeks ago.
  • Via Anne 2.0, I like this post, “The Most Tiresome Cliché in Technology Today,” which is “Make it easy enough for my mom to use.” To quote briefly: “I doubt any of my three kids will ever say that. They might say ‘make it easy enough for my dad to use’ because in our house it’s dad who’s the more technologically clueless.”
  • The new issue of Kairos is out, and, just browsing the TOC, I can see one (possibly two or three) articles to include in my current online graduate course. More things to read later.
  • John Walters says there’s a bunch of audio in the Ong collection available online now. Something to listen to while I’m reading these other things I’m going to read later. Actually, this might also be a good thing to have for teaching Ong, too.
  • And finally, I relate quite a bit to Jeff’s YouTube surfing efforts.

Oh, and in the spirit of somewhat random YouTube sites and academia mashed together, I give you Derrida talking about writing:

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Interesting article on an IRB Blog (aka, "Human Subjects Review")

Quite an interesting piece in the January 19 issue of Inside Higher Ed: “Reviewing the Reviewers,” which is an article mostly about a blog called “Institutional Review Blog” started by a George Mason University historian named Zachary M. Schrag. There are a variety of interesting issues that strike me here.

  • This blog that Schrag has set up is actually pretty interesting for a whole bunch of different reasons (though, I will admit, they are all pretty academic reasons). And Schrag is clearly not some crackpot, either.
  • When I was in my Ph.D. program, I took a course that was specifically about research methodologies like this that involve subjects. As far as I can tell, I was the only one of the students in that class who a) went through the official channels at BGSU for getting my study approved, and b) did something vaguely quantitative. Interestingly enough, that’s the only Ph.D. -level course I took where I got a B.
  • In part because of problems with this sort of review, I quite purposefully decided to do a project that did not involve people because I didn’t want to deal with the paperwork. Things worked out for me fine, though it does make one wonder….
  • In my experience, this sort of review (which at EMU is referred to as “Human Subjects Review”) varies tremendously from institution to institution, and even within the institution. At EMU, I think the process is relatively painless, I suppose because we aren’t a “Research I” with a medical school or something like that. Of course, I’ve only put myself through this review process once or twice.
  • Speaking of which: one of my many “to do” list items is putting together the paperwork for review of my blogs as writerly spaces project….
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The "home office"

Home Office

Clancy says that this “home office” thing is a new meme, but I actually posted about what has got to be the fourth or fifth version of my current home set up on my unofficial blog way back in May. I guess that makes me an accidental trend-setter. BTW, Clancy, I would have posted to your site, but it didn’t like my login info and I gotta get on with some other work…

This current version of my home office is soon to be altered yet again since I am pretty sure I am soon going to hauling home most of my school office, where I currently keep most of my books, snowglobes, miscellaneous toys, etc. I don’t really know if I have the space, but I look at it like this: sooner or later, they are going to remodel the building that houses the English department at EMU, and I have a feeling that this is actually going to be sooner than later (it’s just a feeling, but still…). Besides that, this term I am teaching entirely online, and I am hoping to be on sabbatical for a term next year. So it’s probably time to move and revise the home office yet again.

But now it’s time to actually work.

Oh, for what it’s worth: The above picture has flickr notes, and it also shows a much MUCH cleaner home office than the one I am working in right now.

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Inside Higher Ed's "Meet the Bloggers" (and a few other tidbits)

I had a day of unintended “blog silence” yesterday because the service I use to host this (and other) blog(s), ICDsoft, crashed for the day, and crashed hard. From the sounds of it, something blew a fuse or a cable was cut or something. Anyway, they’re still a reliable service and I’d still recommend them.

This didn’t give me a chance to blog about an article that showed up on Inside Higher Ed yesterday, “Radical Shift for MLA– on Meeting Date.” To quote at length:

The endorsement of a date change by the Delegate Assembly at the MLA annual convention in Philadelphia Friday was perhaps the biggest news for the thousands of MLA members who voiced overwhelmingly on a recent survey that holding the convention during the peak of the holiday season no longer makes sense. In a survey of 20,000 members, which yielded 5,806 responses, 75 percent indicated that shifting the date so that the convention always begins the first Thursday following January 2 would positively affect their decision to attend. Just 9 percent said it would negatively affect their decision (9 and 7 percent respectively said it would not affect their decision or they weren’t sure).

This will certainly help the situation, but as long as MLA keeps up its primary role as a “job market,” I think that people will still be pretty grumpy at it. Oh, and as long as it continues to equate “English studies” with “literature,” I’m not that interested.

Anyway, the other Inside Higher Ed piece was a report on the “Meet the Bloggers” MLA panel by Scott McLemee called “Against Phalloblogocentrism.” Interesting piece for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it includes links to several of the presenter’s papers, things I’ll have to go back and read when I’m not distracted by getting ready for this pesky school semester coming up next week.

From what I can tell from this article, it was a pretty good panel, and the apparent “star” of it was Bitch, PhD. Interestingly enough, this panel (and also this article) “outted” the pseudoanonymous blogger as Tedra Osell, an assistant professor of English at the University of Guelph. From there, it’s but a hop and a skip to a brief version of her CV, and then even a site with a picture of her (but I’ll let you do your own searches for those).

Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the so-called phallocentric nature of the “blogosphere” that McLemee discusses and that Osell’s presentation (as of yet not online) eluded to. To quote from the Inside Higher Ed piece:

There was one moment in Osell’s presentation that must have hit close to home, given the panel’s Y-chromosomal preponderance: her reference to the “old-boy network� in the blogosphere. This is no joke — and no exaggeration, either. Just before heading off to Philadelphia, I had photocopied an article from the summer 2006 issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly called “The Gendered Blogosphere: Examining Inequality Using Network and Feminist Theory.� Looking it over now, it’s striking how exact her formulation really is.

The authors, Dustin Harp and Mark Tremayne, are both assistant professors of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “Sampling over one year from blog rankings,� they note, “we found that 10% of the top [political] bloggers were women.� They consider various explanations of why this might be, but conclude that “the linked nature of blogs� has had a skewing effect given certain tendencies familiar to network theorists.

Well, okay. But what’s the gender sample for blogs who are writing about cooking? About childcare/family life? About composition studies? What I’m getting at is it perhaps makes some sense that most political blogs are gendered male since politics in general has been gendered male for a long time.

One more thing about Osell’s/BitchPhD’s appearance at this: I have never been much of a fan of the pseudo-anonymous blog thing, and there are lots of reasons why I don’t read BitchPhD that much. I like the things that she (and others) have to say there about academia and politics (occasionally, at least); I’m not as wild about the posts on her boyfriend and semi-open marriage (that falls into the category of “too much information” for me, but call me a squimish small-town boy from Iowa on that if you like).

So I’m not a fan/regular reader. But I have to think that at least part of the fascination people have with reading that blog is trying to figure out who she is. Well, now that we know, is it as interesting?

Slight addition:

From Sivacracy.net comes another summary of this panel.