Category: Scholarship

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Pseduo-anonymous "discourse"

Jill Walker has two interesting blog posts back-to-back, the kind of posts that ask to be cited in the vague and foggy book project on blogging and the “writerly life” I have in a corner of my brain. The first is yet another post on the whole pseduo-anonymous thing. She points out again that one of the (apparent) appeals of the pseduoanonymous blog is the play of it all, the “I’m going to take a picture of my eyes and make vague references to a region of the country; can you guess who I am? Have you seen me at the store or the coffee shop?”

In particular, this bit struck me:

I think what fascinates me about the hide-and-seek of pseudonymous blogging is that that is what we all do when we blog. In psuedonymous blogs the blogger gets to play with that. Real-name bloggers like me – well, we may only blog 1% of our lives, but people still seem to think they’re getting the whole picture – I’ve been asked at many a late party or conference how I can stand that people know me so intimately.

I very much had this experience (relatively) recently in Omaha. I received a ride from the hotel I was staying in to the conference by a Creighton professor who was also attending the conference and who I had not met. We exchanged some pleasantries, and then she explained how it was strange meeting me face to face since she had read both this blog and my unofficial blog and she felt like she knew me already. When of course, she didn’t; or at least she only knew a part of me.

Anyway, the second post on Jill’s blog of interest to me this morning was about a meme on what’s the last word in your dissertation. Kinda cute, I thought, so I pulled my dusty copy off of the shelf and looked:

discourse

I’ve decided to take this as an omen.

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Writing Cops?

Laurence Musgrove has an interesting piece in Inside Higher Ed called “The Real Reason Students Can’t Write.” I think it’s interesting because I agree with just about half of it.

Musgrove, who is an English professor-type who teaches first year writing and who has been involved in some writing programs at different schools, suggests the following causes of “bad student writing:”

I believe most faculty think that when they find an error in grammar or logic or format, it is because their students don’t know “how� to write. When I find significant errors in student writing, I chalk it up to one of three reasons: they don’t care, they don’t know, or they didn’t see it. And I believe that the first and last are the most frequent causes of error. In other words, when push comes to shove, I’ve found that most students really do know how to write — that is, if we can help them learn to value and care about what they are writing and then help them manage the time they need to compose effectively.

I think that this is all very very true. Musgrove also suggests that a lot of “bad” student writing continues to happen across the curriculum for two reasons. First, it’s a lot easier for most professors to complain about their student writing than to actually do anything about it– like, you know, teach (as opposed to merely assign) writing. Second, students rarely face serious consequences for bad writing; bad writing might receive a less than excellent grade, but rarely do students fail as a result of their bad writing.

But then Musgrove kind of loses me when he proposes this:

All faculty members are hereby authorized to challenge their students’ writing proficiency. Students who fail to demonstrate the generally accepted minimum standards of proficiency in writing may be issued a “writing ticket� by their instructors. Writing tickets become part of students’ institutional “writing records.� Students may have tickets removed from their writing records by completing requirements identified by their instructors. These requirements may include substantially revising the paper, attending a writing workshop, taking a writing proficiency examination, or registering for a developmental writing course. Students who fail to have tickets removed from their records will receive additional penalties, such as a failing grade for the course, academic probation, or the inability to register for classes.

Wha????

Look, average people/students already think that English and writing professors are members of some sort of grammar Nazi patrol; this guy wants to give us the power to write actual tickets? No thanks.

I have been thinking lately though how it’s a problem that comp/rhet folks have reduced the role grammar, correctness, and proofreading in contemporary pedagogy too much. To me, I think this is especially a problem in writing classes beyond first year writing. But that’s another post for another time.

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The danger of everything

See quotes about how things like rock -n- roll, the telephone, novels, movies, and the waltze were all once dangerous in “The Culture War.” I saw this article in WIRED (I actually bought it last month), and I was reminded of it again this morning at boing-boing.

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The confusing meanings of "tagging" Air Force One

Over the weekend, I stumbled across the “Still Free” web site, which is a publicity stunt/public advocacy page by the hip-hop/youth fashion company Ecko. The “Still Free” site features a shaky video of Air Force One outside of an airport hanger and hooded people climbing over a barbed-wire fence to get to it. Ultimately, one of these “vandals” spray paints the phrase “Still Free” on the side of the engine of the plane.

Also on the “Still Free” site ia a video of Marc Ecko himself titled “Why I Tagged Air Force One.” It’s kind of a convoluted explaination. He says he did this because the president needs to remember that when he goes places, he needs to represent freedom, and Ecko thought that spray painting the plane would be a great way to open a dialog. Then he goes on about graffiti as an art form and some of the kind of stupid laws that prevent kids under 18 from buying broad-tipped permanent markers in New York City and such. But then he says that vandalism is never right and he’s not suggesting that people go out and do that. Ecko just wants people to chill and talk about freedom.

Ah, okay. A bold (and crazy and illegal) move for freedom, I guess.

But it turns out (and actually, I knew this all along because this is how I found out about the “Still Free” web site in the first place) that this was all an elaborate hoax. As this AP wire story reports, the video appeared real enough that an Air Force spokesman for the unit responsible for Air Force One was “looking into it.” But of course it wasn’t real.

Why did he do it?

“I wanted to do something culturally significant, wanted to create a real pop-culture moment,” said Marc Ecko of Marc Ecko Enterprises. “It’s this completely irreverent, over-the-top thing that could really never happen: this five-dollar can of paint putting a pimple on this Goliath.”

Okay… so, tell us Marc; how did you pull it off?

Ecko acknowledged Friday that his company had rented a 747 cargo jet at San Bernardino’s airport and covertly painted one side to look like Air Force One. Employees signed secrecy agreements and worked inside a giant hangar until the night the video was made. Ecko declined to say how much the stunt cost.

“It’s not cheap,” he said. “You have to be rich.”

So ultimately, this statement about free speech– which appears to come in a form (vandalism) which Ecko says is of course illegal and wrong– is actually a fabrication, a fiction, and something that could never happen. Which, in a very real way, is not an example of free speech at all. And for me it is all the more problematic because it portrays itself as a “real” event in the name of “free speech.” It’s sort of like these faith healers you see getting people to get out of wheelchairs: at first, it demonstrates the powers of the healer; but it then it soon demonstrates the powers of the con man.

Or I guess it’s a lot like the whole Million Little Pieces thing.

That last sentence from Ecko in the wire story, “You have to be rich,” is of course key. It suggests two very important things of this speech act. First, it isn’t “free;” in fact, it’s really REALLY expensive. Second, it isn’t a protest at all, but rather a commercial. In the end, this is simply an advertisement for Marc Ecko Enterprises, which I suppose is a form of free speech, but its purpose is not really to raise awareness so much as it is to sell sweatshrits.

Anyway, I’m perhaps giving this more attention than it deserves, but go check out the video and see what I mean.

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Crowley Carnival, The Wealth of Networks

These comp/rhet reading carnival things always seem to crop up at the worst time for me. For example, at least Jenny, Jeff, and Debbie Hawhee are into reading Sharon Crowley’s latest book, Towards a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. And of course, they pick now, the end of the term, tons of grading and other last minute projects, to attend to. Sheesh. Well, judging from what they are saying here, it looks like it will be something worth looking at later.

Speaking of which: the other day I stumbled across the wiki for Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. This might be something I look through before the Crowley book, to tell the truth. For starters, the whole thing is available as a PDF on the wiki page for the book. But beyond the whole “ease of access” issue, Benkler’s book (as Will Richardson has blogged) was characterized by Lawrence Lessig as “by far the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.â€� Pretty darn high praise indeed….

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YackPack– something else I'll have to talk about in this podcasting article, I suppose…

See Yackpack, which (as far as I can tell after monkeying around with it for about three minutes) is a website/software that facilitates group podcasts. It looks quite easy and kind of fun. And it looks relevant to what I’m trying to write about, which is an expansion/revision of my CCCCs presentation on podcasting.

Of course, the tricky things about trying to incorporate this stuff into my online class this coming spring is I don’t have a lot of time to get it up and running. Classes this term end May 1 and classes in the spring term start May 8, which, given the rest of my life, is not a lot of time to do a lot of major revisions to the way I teach online. But it still might be worth a try.

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Yet another handwriting story

This one, which I stumbled across from a google news search, comes from the ABC News channel in Chicago: “Should students be concerned with proper handwriting?” The answer, according to these folks, is yes.

A couple of interesting quotes here:

Some educators link the demise of penmanship to the rejection of repetitive drills as a teaching tool. Also, teachers are spending less time on handwriting and more time covering subjects like reading and math, which are measured by standardized tests.

Huh? So, we should have a return to reptitive drills? And by the way, my third grade son seems to still be doing some version of reptitive drills with handwriting.

They talk about the problems of the handwritten portion of the SAT and the fact that many finals still need to be done by hand, etc. I wonder how long that’s going to be the case, though– I’d be surprised if my son will have to do a writing test for the SAT by hand, for example.

And then there’s this:

While teachers who grade the SAT are told not to mark off for sloppy penmanship, research shows that handwriting can send a message.

“It’s hard when you look at some types of handwriting, to not read certain things into it,” says Dana Huff, an English teacher at the Weber School – who also grades essays for the SAT. “You know the big, bubbly handwriting, for instance, can sometimes lead a teacher to think, ‘Oh, Airhead.'”

“If your handwriting is barely legible, it makes them think that you are not really an organized person,” says 17-year-old Adam Levinson, “that you are writing too fast, and you are not thinking about it.”

Which, again, is why I type everything but a grocery list.

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My entry into "filmmaking" (and probably not my last)

Despite the fact that I have had some version of iMovie since that software came out (after all, I’ve always had a Mac), I’ve never really played around with it. I suppose this is because I never felt like I had much use for it.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I’m just a little slow on the uptake.

So I have made my first entry into the world of “filmmaking” (really, screencasting would probably be a better term) with a MOV version of the first three parts of the talk I gave at the Jacobson Symposium. Here’s a link; be warned that it’s 88 MB.

I’m not entirely pleased with the quality of it for a couple of different reasons. First, I don’t think my “performance” as a speaker was that good, meaning that while I thought the content of what I said was okay, I didn’t think I was in as good of voice as I should have been– a lot of coughs and pauses and such.

Second, and more significant, the quality of the imported PowerPoint slide images is suspect at best, if you ask me. This is especially true with the lettering. I think a smarter approach might be to try to trick the “credits” feature in iMovie to behave the way that I want. Unless someone with more experience than I in these things has a better idea….

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HigherEd BlogCon: check it out….

I’ve been too busy with end of the (school) year business to really pay much attention to the blog-o-sphere lately, but check out the HigherEd BlogCon going on right now. I’m not completely sure who the sponsors of this thing are (I recognize a publisher’s name on the list), and I’m not sure these folks are necessarily in my “branch” of higher education. But it looks like there are just a gazillion different resources here. And I like the concept of the web-based conference/blog-based “carnival” of texts.

I’ll have to go back to this when I get finished shoveling through some more immediate paperwork and grading and such.

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Online secondary school in Michigan; African-Americans and Internet access

It’s the mad mad MAD dash at the end of the semester (note to self: next time you’re going to be out of town for two weekends in a row and you’re trying to put together a couple of presentations for said out of town trips, AND you need to then turn one of said presentations into some kind of longer piece, make sure you plan ahead), and I’m not sure I’m going to make it. Though given that it is one way or the other soon just going to “end,” I suppose I will.

Anyway, two articles of note here via the NCTE Inbox:

First, there’s this, “Online courses aren’t just for homeschoolers anymore,” which is in The Christian Science Monitor. Talk about learning something new every day– see these three opening paragraphs:

If high school student Kelsey Speaks had taken all of her classes at her bricks-and-mortar school, she wouldn’t now be three years into her Latin studies. Since junior high, Kelsey has enrolled in eight courses in a virtual classroom through Colorado Online Learning, a state-funded program. The junior at tiny La Veta High School in southern Colorado says taking courses online is a great choice. “It’s allowed me to do things I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do,” she says.

In addition to letting her take courses (for free) that her school doesn’t offer, online learning has made her schedule flexible enough that she can captain the debate team, edit the yearbook, and do volunteer work as well. She also gets to study independently, which she enjoys.

Once considered the domain of home-schooled students, K-12 online learning is a fast-growing option for public school students in rural, urban, and suburban areas. Michigan lawmakers are likely to pass legislation soon that will require high school students to take one course online before they graduate.

The second article is “Digital Divide Closing as Blacks Turn to Internet” and in the New York Times. For the most part, it does exactly what the headline suggests: it reports on the closing of the gap between different groups (particularly African-Americans, but other minorities too) as it relates to Internet access, which I have certainly seen in my own teaching. But it also reports that this “closing of the gap” is somewhat debatable, which I have also seen in my own teaching.