Category: Scholarship

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Academic Holding Pattern

When it comes to writing the generic “start of the term” post, I have a couple of problems. While our trip to Europe earlier this month was a lot of fun, it wasn’t exactly relaxing. It was more of one of those great “trips” that require a bit of a “vacation” for recovery. So in a sense, I have kind of been making that vacation now, even though I’ve been sitting in on the training sessions for graduate assistants that Linda AK is leading before she hits sabbatical and hands me the keys to the first year writing program store– more on that in a bit.

And then there’s the whole faculty union stuff. But that’s the subject of a different (tomorrow’s?) post.

In any event, even the threat of a strike casts quite a shadow on the beginnings of the term, especially when it comes to the advising and quasi-administrative work that is going to make up the bulk of my work this year– again, more on that in a bit. I found myself last night going through a backlog of email and telling students, potential students, and other advisees that I will be available next week– unless we’re on strike. That’s kind of annoying, and while I suppose the union negotiators can be blamed for some of this, I mostly blame the administration and I really REALLY blame the lawyer that the university hires to break negotiate with the union. I am certain that if this guy was not at the table, the folks from the faculty and the folks from the administration would have worked out a deal months ago. But the lawyers get paid by the hour, and they get paid to bring us to the brink, right?

Oh wait– I said that was going to be a different post….

Besides this academic holding pattern created by a combination of my body/soul forcing a post-trip “break” and the relative uncertainty of the start of the term, I feel like my non-academic life is in a bit of a holding pattern, too. Our son doesn’t start school until after Labor Day, and oh my, we are all soooo ready for him to go back to school. The Washtenaw County Rec Center, which is where I go to work out (when I go to work out) is closed until September 1, which has thwarted my plans to start getting in shape right after our trip.

Anyway, I know this hold will end eventually. And when it does, when the term really does start, I will begin what will be I hope a very interesting year as a sort of faculty/administrator. I have been the “writing program coordinator” in our department since January. My charges in that job are to more or less run the undergraduate majors in professional and technical writing and our graduate programs in professional writing and teaching of writing. In addition to that, I’m going to be the “interim director of first year writing,” which is what Linda usually does and which is more akin to what most people think of as a WPA. I’m the go-to person for the 120 or so sections of first year writing we have each term, I’m the one who has to do all sorts of miscellaneous paperwork and meeting associated with all of that, and I’m going to take over the teaching of the course our grad students take to get ready to teach first year writing. Linda is teaching the part that meets for two weeks before the term begins right now.

So thing number 1 on my agenda for next year: Don’t screw up the Interim WPA thing too badly. Given the great incoming students we have and the support I’ll be getting from some other folks here (along with Linda from a short distance away), I think this is a goal I will be able to meet.

Agenda item #2: read (and not write) some scholarship. There’s two basic reasons for this. First, with my various quasi-administrative roles, I just don’t know how much time I’m going to have to work a lot on new articles or whatever, God forbid a book. Second, as I elluded to in my earlier posts about my academic mid-life crisis, I kind of feel like that if I don’t have a “burning project” I just have to do, then it would perhaps be a better idea to not do anything for a while. So I’m looking forward to just reading stuff for a year or so.

Well, other than at least one conference presentation.

Finally, there is agenda item #3: Get in better shape. This is an annual agenda item for me, of course. But given item #2, I might actually have a little more time to do this one this year….

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Catching up on blog reading

I did have relatively good Internet access while I was in Europe. It came at a price of between 2-4 Euros an hour, which isn’t too cheap, but it was everywhere. I didn’t take a computer with me, something I will reconsider on my next trip overseas– it would have been nice to do some writing and to watch some DVDs, though there was no WiFi access as far as I could tell. So I went to Internet cafes and I got online about four or five times, mostly to check my email for anything super important, to post to my unofficial blog about our travels, and to check the news.

It’s funny to think about; the last (and only other) time I was in Europe was on my/our honeymoon in 1994, quite a while before Internet cafes and news web sites and such. It was tough back then to even get newspapers and magazines in English, at least where we were. As a result, we found out about OJ and his infamous white Bronco ride a week after it happened while looking at a magazine on the way back home in the plane. This time, we had the ‘net, we had CNN Europe, we had access to USA Today. And as a result, I can tell you I think this John Karr guy is probably just a nut; I’d be very surprised if he did indeed kill JonBenet.

Anyway, even with this connectivity, I didn’t get a chance to read much in the way of blogs while I was away. So, in no real particular order, here are a few things I came across this morning via my RSS reader that might be helpfu to me later on and/or that I just thought were kinda interesting:

Okay, I know I missed a lot, but there you have it.

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A BOATLOAD of citations on Scholarship in Electronic Publishing

Wow, what a handy resource: the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which I found by another handy resource, Digital Koans. A lot of this stuff is really about digital resources in academic libraries, but still a potentially very useful research resource.

Oh, and along these lines and also from the Digital Koans site I came across “Lessons for the Future Internet: Learning from the Past,” by Michael Roberts, in the July/August 2006 version of Educause. It’s a nice little history (more or less) of the Internet that might be useful in a class like English 516.

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Electronic Academic Publishing Inevitable (or I told ya so….)

On various occasions in this blog and elsewhere, I’ve argued that it seems increasingly obvious to me that almost all publishing for fields like English studies and composition and rhetoric will be done electronically. This is perhaps most likely with journals– heck, even the less than techno-savvy CCCC now is available electronically before the paper copy arrives– but I also think it’s going to happen with books too.

Anyway, not that I’m the only one who has had this crazy notion before, but you’ve heard it here before. Now, according to the July 14 issue of Inside Higher Ed and the article “New Model for Scholarly Publishing,” it turns out I’m right. Maybe.

It’s a good piece, one you should read for yourself and one that would probably make good reading in my graduate course on computers and writing (which reminds me: I need to start doing some of the set-up work for that….). A few highlights:

  • “Rice University on Thursday announced a plan to shake up those interconnected problems. Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.” They go on to say that since the editing and vetting process for these books will be the same as for traditional, “on paper” books, the folks at the reborn Rice UP believe they should “count” the same as traditional books.
  • “And Rice also announced plans Thursday to take on the textbook industry, offering print-on-demand textbook versions of scholarly resources it has been assembling — generally for less than $25.” Hmmm…. perhaps they’d be interested in a little textbook project I’m slowly working to publish electronically….
  • “The home for Rice’s new publishing ventures will be Connexions, the university’s open source site that has been gaining more and more users with its compilation of course and scholarly materials, prepared by professors from all over the world and provided for anyone to use.” What’s interesting to me about Connexions is, at first glance at least, it’s just a Plone-driven CMS with a lot of content.
  • “The Rice press plans also arrive at a time that some scholarly associations are pushing for more recognition for digital scholarship. The Modern Language Association has a special committee working on a proposal to change the tenure process in many ways, one of which is to provide more recognition for work online. English professors have been particularly concerned about the decline of monograph publishing, which has made it especially difficult for them to earn tenure.

    “Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, is a member of the MLA tenure reform committee, and he said Thursday that he was very encouraged by the Rice announcement. ‘This sounds like a fascinating model,’ he said.” So perhaps even the MLA is on board with this one? See, I am right!

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Bush Admin Hates Higher Ed: Shocking!

I came across an interesting article this morning on the Spellings Commission, which is looking into reform of higher education in the U.S. It’s “A Stinging First Draft,” and it’s about the first draft of the report coming out of this group. Feel free to read these pieces, but I guess I have a few quick thoughts:

The article talks again and again about how “mean spirited” the report is. Given the politics of the folks leading this group, that’s hardly surprising. Only three things comfort me about all of this. First, I hope that the public and legislators have enough of a memory to recall the on-going problems of “No Child Left Behind” and thus will not repeat the mistakes of that legislation. Second, the fact that this is a first draft and one that members of the committee are themselves divided about suggests that there will be changes. And third, since so-called “public” institutions get increasingly less money from states or the feds, I’m just not sure how much difference this or other reports will make.

The bottom-line (well, at least so far) of the problem(s) at hand and the problem(s) of solutions is summed up pretty well in the Inside Higher Ed piece with the comment by Jonathan Cohen (I’d link to it if I could, but I couldn’t figure out how). To summarize it/put my own spin on it here: the report says that there are three basic problems that impact higher education:

  • K-12 education quality and standards are inadequate.
  • Costs are out of control.
  • There’s no reliable feedback on what students are actually learning.

Well, first off, there isn’t much higher ed can really do about K-12. And if the thinking is that higher ed should up the requirements for entry (thus forcing K-12, particularly secondary schools, to get their act together so their students are prepared for college), I can tell you right now that flat-out isn’t going to work. It certainly wouldn’t work at “opportunity granting” institituions like EMU.

As far as costs being out of control goes, I would say I agree a lot with what Cohen says about how the first place any reformer ought to look is at the administrative costs, both in terms of the high-priced salaries of administrators, the number of administrators, and the “creep” of administrative work on to faculty. Take me, for example: right now, I receive a course release a term for being the coordinator for the writing program (meaning our undergraduate majors and graduate programs), and next year, I’ll receive even more release time as I step into the role of interim writing program administrator (meaning first year writing). Not to mention the faculty time it takes to research and write the mind-numbing and irrelevant reviews and reports and crap that no one ever reads.

Sure, there are other places to save money too, but it seems to me that other things vary too much from institution to institution. Comparing the costs of faculty and virtually everything else between a place like EMU and a place like the University of Michigan just doesn’t make that much sense. But the one “universal” here seems to be administrative costs.

Oh, and the other reason why tuition is going up so fast is pretty simple: the government at both the state and the federal levels are getting out of the higher education “business,” and they’ve been doing so for a long time now and at an alarming rate. If the state of Michigan cuts funding to EMU, then EMU has to look someplace else to pay the bills, and that someplace else is student tuition. Seems like math even an English professor can figure out.

Finally, figuring out what students learn: I think that this commission and others that have driven things like standardized testing are looking for an answer to an unanswerable question: how can we really really tell what students learn in our classes? To me that’s like trying to figure out what someone really really “believes.” There comes a point where it is ultimately an act of faith.

The best we can do, IMO, is think about this via accreditation. We’re about to go through an interesting, um, “time” here at EMU with NCATE, which will assess and ultimately accredit our many majors in K-12 educaiton. While this is likely to be a highly problematic process in all sorts of ways, that’s one way to deal with this: have accrediting bodies of higher education actually do more than rubber-stamp.

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Online Book Reviews, Blogger Conventions: two links for later…

Both of these are links I’m interested in keeping track of for teaching (I can easily imagine them as a reading (or really, listening) assignment for Writing for the World Wide Web or my graduate course in computers and writing:

  • “Upon Further Review,” which is an NPR Morning Edition Sunday story about how the new book The Stolen Child has become very popular not as the result of professional reviews but because of “amateur” critics on amazon.com. Nice and crabby comments from “professional” critics about how the amateurs can’t possibly get it right.
  • “Lefty Bloggers Assemble in Las Vegas,” also on NPR Morning Edition Sunday. I had read about this in the NYT a couple weeks ago (and still have that article kicking around someplace), but this is a nice addition to the coverage of the Daily KOS convention. The question is if you put a bunch of bloggers into a room together, would they actually talk to each other? Or just tyle with/at each other?
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Does it matter being at a "top tier school" anymore? No, but maybe yes

Kind of an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed this morning called “Losing Their Edge?” It’s about a study of economics departments that is trying to suggest that “the internet” has lead to a flattening out of the heirarchies between different economics departments and being at a “top 20” econ program doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Here’s a quote:

The basic approach of the research was to examine the productivity of professors at elite universities (defined as the top 25 in economics and finance) in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. What the scholars found isn’t good news for those top departments. In the 1970s, a faculty member moving from a non-top 25 university to Harvard University would nearly double in productivity (based on various measures of journal publishing, which is where most economics research appears). By the 1990s, this impact had almost entirely disappeared.

Beyond Harvard, the study found that moving to 17 of the top economics departments would have had a significant positive impact on productivity during the 1970s, while moving only to 5 of them had a significant negative impact on productivity. By the 1990s, only 2 such departments were having a positive impact on productivity while 9 had a significant negative impact.

It goes without saying that this study, at least as described in this Inside Higher Ed piece, sounds kinda fuzzy if you ask me. And, of course, I am not in economics. But I have to say that there is a grain of truth to it, and I certainly see communication technologies like the web (and, once upon a time, things like gopher), email, and other internet search tools figuring into my own Ph.D. education and my current practices as a happy academic.

I earned my Ph.D. at Bowling Green State University— a good school for composition and rhetoric, but not exactly the “center of the academic world.” But technology made it considerably less far-flung. For example, I did most of my research with OhioLINK, a service that essentially allowed me to browse and borrow books from a whole bunch of different university libraries in Ohio. Unlike an inter-library loan request, I could do an OhioLINK search with no paperwork and I could expect to get my requests in a day or two. So instead of using just BGSU’s library (which was pretty good), I was using a whole bunch of libraries.

Another example: back then, MBU, an email list discussion about computers and writing stuff, was very active. For me, MBU served as both an instructional medium– that is, I learned a ton of stuff from the discussion on this list, things about the connections between writing instruction and technology that I wasn’t getting anywhere else– and as a space where I was able to participate in a discussion with colleagues (fellow grad students at other schools, senior “big name” faculty at fancier schools, and everyone in between) in the field. As the writer(s) note in this Inside Higher Ed piece, forums like MBU have made it possible for scholars to talk with others all over the world, while in the old days, scholars talked mostly with people down the hall and/or “across the quad.”

It’s strange to me that mailing list discussions have either dried up (MBU went off-line in 1997, and it’s replacement, tech-rhet, is basically stopped) or have turned into kind of annoying spaces (WPA-L has these tendencies). Perhaps a lot of the discussion has moved to the blogosphere, which is a shame since I for one see blogs as a poor substitute for electronic mail list discussions. Perhaps it’s just me though; perhaps I’ve moved to a place in my training where I don’t “need” the email discussion forums as much as I did way back when.

So, heirarchies have flattened, at least a bit. Does this mean that being at a “tier 1” school no longer matters? Of course not, and the Inside Higher Ed piece makes that clear as well.

I think there is still a lot of unspoken heirarchies in place in hiring practices, even in a field like comp/rhet, which is considerably less “stuffy” and traditional than fields like philosophy, history, or literature. Basically, it is very difficult to rise above one’s academic class: someone who holds a Ph.D. from what is largely a regional state university (me) is unlikely to secure a position at a flagship state university– the U of Michigan, Michigan State, and University of North Carolinas of the world. Further, there is a difference between working at a university like EMU versus a university like the University of Michigan, most of which are probably obvious: money, teaching load, institutional facilities, support, etc., etc.

Of course, there are certain interesting advantages at working at an “opportunity-granting” university like EMU too, advantages that are often overlooked by status/heirarchy-minded academics. But that’s another post.

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See you in… Perth?

Via Jill Walker, I’ve learned that the CFP for the seventh annual International Digital Arts and Culture Conference is out. It sounds like a great conference that will be an interesting mix of digital stuff; among other things, the call says:

Topics of interests may include, but are not limited to, computer games, hypertext theory and literature, new media narrative, streaming media, interactive and networked performance, digital aesthetics, interactive cinema, theory, art, bio-art, nano-art, augmented reality, cyberculture, electronic fiction, electronic music, electronic art, games culture, games system design, games theory, interactive architecture, cinema and video, MOOs, MUDs, RPG, virtual reality, virtual worlds.

Oh yeah, just one thing: it’s in Perth, Australia.

Despite the fact that, from here, the directions to Perth are basically “go south and west halfway across the planet, and then turn right,” I have half a mind to submit a proposal. I looked up a flight from Detroit to Perth and was somewhat surprised to find that it was “only” $1500 or so. It costs $1200 to fly to Sydney, so to go all the way to Perth seems like a bargin. Heck, it was going to cost me $600 or so to fly to Lubbock; so compared to that, it’s down-right cheap!

Besides that, what are my chances for visiting Australia and getting (at least some) money from EMU to do it and writing the rest off on my taxes? Hmmmm….

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To Conference Or To Not Conference

Right now, Bill H-D (when he isn’t eating, drinking, or juggling) is at a conference in Denmark, Collin is getting ready to go to the Rhetoric Society of America conference, though he is writing here about the Computers and Writing Conference, and, more specifically the “Get Info” project, where presenters offer one minute “teases” or “trailers” on their presentation. Here’s an example from Dan Anderson, though I’m not sure if all of these have to be or are going to be electronic.

I, on the other hand, am trying to get myself motivated to do a little house-cleaning and a little more gardening. I’ll check in on my online class today, though the big day will be tomorrow (a rough draft for peer review is due). I have a couple of meetings next week. And I know I’m playing golf on Monday, at least. In other words, I am most certainly not preparing for a conference.

Originally, I had planned on going to the Computers and Writing conference this year. C&W is easily my favorite annual conference. In short, these are my people. But I didn’t go last year because I couldn’t justify/afford two trips to the San Francisco Bay area in one year, and I’m not going this year also because of money. Mostly.

What it boils down to is the support at EMU for travel, like many under-funded universities, is less than stellar. I can generally get enough money to cover one conference, two if one of those two is cheap. I had originally planned on going to the CCCCs in Chicago and to C&W, but while the CCCCs was not too expensive for me this year (I drove), it wasn’t exactly cheap, either. And Lubbock was going to pretty expensive. Before I even thought about the conference registration fee, I think travel and lodging was going to be close to a grand.

So basically, I did a cost/benefit analysis and Lubbock came up short. Not to be too crass or anything, but I don’t really need to go to conferences anymore, certainly not in the way I did when I was seeking a job and then seeking tenure. And, no offense to the folks in Lubbock (Lubbockers? Lubbockians? Lubbockites?), at this stage of my life, if I’m going to spend $1,000 of my own money to go someplace, that someplace has to be one where I’d actually want to visit on purpose. C&W and the Buddy Holly Center just isn’t enough of a draw for me.

Besides, I’ve got enough going on this summer. I’ve already mentioned my online teaching; beyond that, my “to do” list includes getting a research project on blog writing going, getting my defunct textbook online, revising the layouts of my blogs, setting up a blog/web space for stuff on writing for the web, setting up a blog/web space for an online version of a graduate course I’m going to teach next year, getting geared up to be the interim writing program administrator, etc., etc., etc. There’s a ton of things to do around the house, it is golfing season, and there’s family travel plans, including an August trip to Europe. Looking at it now, it kind of feels like going to C&W this year would have just been “piling on.”

Oh well, have fun in Texas. And I’ll certainly see everyone next year at C&W in Detroit. In fact, since I will more or less not have any travel or lodging expenses, I might even just “attend” and not present….