Category: Scholarship

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Home– NOT from MLA

My wife and son and I all returned home yesterday afternoon from the south Florida office (e.g., the in-laws) where we had a long, restful, warm and productive (I did much planning for winter term classes poolside, for example) holiday, and this morning, we’re all recovering from a “disco” New Year’s Eve party that was small but darn fun.

Lounging about, I am NOT coming back from MLA. But it sure seems like many on the blogosphere are reflecting on their MLA adventures.

It sounds like a lot of folks had fun, but my favorite post about MLA so far comes from my friend Mary. I’ll quote it in its entirety here:

At the MLA

Please, kill me now.

Zen-like, isn’t it?

Anyway, as I wrote about this time last year, I ain’t going anymore, even in the unlikely event I end up “on the market” again. There are so many problems with MLA I don’t even know where to begin, but for now, I will attempt to make four observations about the main function of MLA (points I made on the WPA mailing list a couple weeks ago), which is not actually the conference but interviewing.

  • It seems to me rather unfair to defacto charge PhD candidates $1000 or more so that they can get an interview. This is especially a problem in literature of course, where someone finishing up their dissertation on some dead white guy has to invest in a suit (and I don’t care if you are a man or a woman, it’s the same damn black suit!), get airfare, get a hotel room, eat, etc., all of this for one or two or maybe three interviews. That’s a condition that strikes me as one very much rooted in the good ol’ days (like 35 or more years ago) when there were both plenty of jobs and where everyone in PhD studies was of a “certain class” where they could afford all of these expenses.
  • Because at least two-thirds of the people at MLA are really there as part of the arcane interviewing process still practiced by many English departments, the majority of people there are in a bad mood. This has at least been my experience. Interviewees (e.g., job seekers) are obviously stressed out (“the rest of my life hinges on the next 20 minutes– I hope my black suit looks okay…”), but interviewers are mad too (“oh God, I’m interviewing another one of these kids in a new black suit when I could be home with the family watching football games…”). Just a bad bad vibe all around, and, having been on both sides of that table, I personally think that being the interviewer is actually the worst end of the bargain.
  • There is of course a pretty easy technological solution to this whole interview problem, a new-fangled talking device called “the telephone.” Say, did you know they even make them with speakers now so multiple people can talk and listen? Amazing! I have some colleagues (all in literature, btw) who are convinced that the 20 minutes of “real life” contact you have with someone at MLA most certainly tells you so much more about a candidate than 20 or so minutes on the phone. Having been on both sides of the phone a couple of times, I think that’s rubbish.
  • Here’s my first prediction of the year: it won’t be too long before it will become normal to conduct interviews via a live audio chat with a video enhancement. Every Mac on the market right now has a built-in camera, and that means it won’t be too long before every windoze computer has one too. So at that point, what will be the point of interviewing at MLA? The hand-shake?

Enough of that. Time for me to slowly move on with the day and cook up some black-eyed peas….

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Links/Readings on Web 2.0 Stuff

A couple miscellaneous readings I’ll probably need to think about for English 516 for the winter:

  • There’s this article from the Sunday NYT, “2006, Brought to You by You,” which is about a whole bunch of different Web 2.0 phenomenon and a pretty good introduction to one of the latests twists in the ‘net typified by things like YouTube, MySpace, and other sites with “user generated content.”
  • I came across a web site this morning called Open Culture, which appears to be a blog with lots of cool links to, well, “open culture” sorts of things. I came across it after following a link about free sites for learning foreign languages with your iPod.

Again, just something to start making me for next year– really, next term, but I’m going to say “next year” to make me feel like I’ve actually got more time to work with.

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Reconstruction's special issue on blogging

Via Collin’s blog, I found out about Reconstruction, 6.4 (2006), a special issue of the journal on blogging. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I am sure that I will soon enough.

Actually, I haven’t had much time to read much of anything or do anything as of late. Or so it seems. There are two reasons for this. First, I am easily distracted. I had intended to get up and exercise this morning (someone ought to use the treadmill we have!), but I was almost immediately distracted by an email a friend of mine sent me about the Tuscan Milk phenomenon. I blogged about it on my unofficial blog, but I suppose I could have written about it as an “internets trend” here, too.

Second, life/work keeps interrupting me. For example, in my role as the accidental WPA, I am going to a previously unplanned meeting this morning with some of the folks in the new EMU Student Center, where we will be having our annual (well, once a semester– would that be bi-annual?) semester “Celebration of Student Writing.” This is the first time we’ve had this event, which attracts around 1000-1500 people, in the new student center, and it appears that there are some, um, “new rules” that have to be sorted out.

Anyway, I guess what I need to do is stop being distracted by my computer and just exercise, dammit, and I think I need to build in research/scholarship time into my schedule and stick to it. Dammit.

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Never mind the handwriting; what about typing?

I’ve posted many things here about handwriting and computers over the years; here’s what I think is the first article on typing: “Exercise still key to computing,” a poorly written headline for an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Long gone are the days of high school typing classes, where the clack of manual Underwoods and electric IBM Selectrics echoed down the hallway.

Students as young as first grade are introduced to a keyboard in computer technology classes. The state’s technology standards recommend that all students be able to type proficiently on a keyboard by eighth grade.

But as with handwriting, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to teach keyboarding. Schools are preparing students for state tests, or there’s so much more technology to teach than just keyboarding.

There’s also a cool picture here of kids typing at computer keyboards with boxes over their hands so they can’t “cheat” from their practices of touch typing.

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"Paperless" school article

From the Orlando Sentinel comes this article, “Who needs pens? School goes paperless,” an article about (guess what!) an elementary school with lots of computers and laptops and such.

First off, I don’t think it’s so much about paperless as it is about just having computers. The idea that this is a “paperless” seems to be the work of a headline writer. Second, I think this falls into the wildly optimistic view of technology. For example:

“Technology is one of the best and worst things introduced in schools in the last 20 years,” [Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., a University of Miami education professor] said. “It can be an extraordinary tool. . . . But it can also be the difference between watching a movie about Venice and actually going to Venice and smelling the salt air.”

I mean, I am of course all for computers in the schools and technology and stuff like that, but this view seems a little rosy. Unless they’ve got smell-o-vision on those computers in Florida….

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T-Day/Multimodal Literacies

I’m getting ready to get out the door for the holidaze, but before I go, I have to make a link to the NCTE Multi-Modal Literacies site, something I stumbled across via John Walter’s blog. This is a potentially interesting site to me for at least two reasons. First, it’s right up the alley of something I ought to mention in a version of English 516, and one of my (oh too many) goals for the Thanksgiving “break” will be to start getting a version of that class ready for online consumption.

Second, it speaks to the sort of weird way that NCTE speaks about these things. “Multi-Modal” strikes me as an odd phrase, as does the language that is NCATE/NCTE-related, the phrase “non-print texts.” This is the term used again and again in one of the documents about accrediting secondary teachers in English, a document my department has been paying a lot of attention to lately because we have several hundred majors in this area. I understand what NCATE and NCTE are trying to achieve with these phrases, but both muli-modal and non-print strike me as, well, odd phrases.

But maybe that’s just me.

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Another good link, another thing to think about for English 516…

Jeff had a good point/link on his blog yesterday about YouTube. I’m not completely sure I agree with him entirely (mostly though), but I haven’t read the IHE article about YouTube he mentions yet.

Oddly, the think that most immediately comes to my mind is not YouTube, the article in Inside Higher Ed, or Jeff’s take on it. Rather, the first thing I thought was “jeez, that’s something else I need to figure out for English 516!”

I’m teaching that course online in the winter term and I have an embarrassing amount of stuff to do to get ready to do that. Don’t get me wrong; I have a pretty good sense about what I’ll be doing this coming term, mainly because I’m in the third year of this particular cycle of the course. (What I mean by that is I have found that I have to pretty much throw out everything but the most foundational texts– things like Ong on writing as a technology, Selfe’s “Paying Attention” essay, a few other things– about every three years because they simply become too dated).

But as I have learned before, the tricky thing is figuring out how to make this stuff translate to the online experience. For example, one of the things I’ve done in this class in recent years that I think has been reasonably successful is student presentations on books from a selected reading list on “cutting edge” issues in computers in writing. A lot of it is stuff that I’d like to read but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Anyway, in a face-to-face setting, this is pretty easy to facilitate: students talk about their book project for about 10 minutes or so and they hand in a brief essay. I could of course just ask student presenters to write something that the rest of the class can simply read. But that doesn’t really capture the “presentation” experience. On the other hand, I could ask students to make a presentation and post it– an audio file, a video, etc. But that makes technical demands at a level that I’m not sure I can expect from online students.

So we’ll see. It makes me nervous to say this, but there is going to be a “making it up as we go along” element to this class in the winter….

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The state of the "blogosphere"/sabbaticalizing

Via jill/txt comes a link to “Sifry’s Alerts” on the “State of the Blogosphere,” which is based on technorati statistics, which is where David Sifry works. Some potentially interesting stuff for both my teaching in the winter term (and beyond), and also my scholarly endeavors.

Speaking of which: A big public thanks to the folks who gave me some valuable input and support on my recent “last minute” sabbatical proposal– my wife, Linda AK, Steve B, Bill HD… I think that’s all of ’em. I feel pretty good about the proposal I put together, though the creative writer part of me that believes it is both bad luck and tacky to talk about work not yet done is a little reluctant to start posting about it here in too much detail. All I will say for now is that, if nothing else, it was a good feeling to start thinking again in terms of scholarly work, I have a pretty good idea for at least one essay and one conference presentation, and, if I actually follow through on all this (and I think I will), I do think I might have a good book idea.

As for the sabbatical: well, it’s a long-shot, I think. One of the great ironies of things like sabbaticals nowadays at EMU (and I think this is true just about everywhere, frankly) is, because the competition for fewer and fewer sabbaticals is keen, you basically need to have a book contract in hand to win the award. And, obviously, if you already managed to put together a project that merited a book contract without release time before, then you probably really don’t need it now. In effect, sabbaticals are not about granting release to do promising and future research and scholarship; rather, they are a “reward” for a job (already) well done.

But like I said, it has been self-motivating if nothing else, and that’s a good thing. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky.