Category: Scholarship

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On writing talks

I can’t say that I’ve been somewhat MIA on my blog simply because I’ve been working super-duper hard on talks that I’m giving at the CCCCs and at the Jacobson Symposium in Omaha the following week. That’s only part of it. The week before last was winter break, and while I did blog and work a lot while in Florida, I also vacationed a lot too, which means that I fell too far behind on work things due this past week. And there was also a fistful of meetings and other obligations in the department. It was one of those weeks that felt like two weeks.

Anyway, even if I haven’t been working super-hard on my presentations, I have been working. I’m not completely done with either of these spiels but I have good starts on both and, in a sense, they are both written in my head already. This is not to say that I am ready to give these talks, nor is it to say that I am going to just “wing it.” But I’m getting there.

I know that I’ve written about this here in the past– actually, almost exactly a year ago— but it’s on my mind so I’ll say it again: in the choice between conference performance styles of someone “reading a paper” versus “speaking/talking extemporaneously,” I say “reading a paper” wins out. Listening to someone read something out loud that isn’t meant to be read out loud can be painful, but I think it is much worse to listen to someone, ah, “wing it.” Let me put it to you this way: just “winging it” often ends up being a bit like singing in the shower: sure, it sounds fine in there to you, but try that in front of other people and it usually goes poorly. So, IMO, unless you’re a really REALLY good public speaker and/or you basically have a presentation that you wrote previously memorized, it’s probably best to read something.

If my speaking role is small/short, obviously interactive, and/or extremely casual, I prepare some notes– possibly a hand-out– and that’s about it. These sorts of settings would include what at the CCCCs are called “Special Interest Groups,” workshops (which are basically the same as teaching and things like that tend to be too interactive to plan too carefully), roundtable discussions, etc.

But if my speaking role is not short, which is the case for both of the things I have upcoming, I need to write a script. And I say “a script” as opposed to “a paper” or “an article” because I think a presentation script has to sound good in a way that’s different from something meant completely for the page, and it has to be relatively short. In my experience, a 15-20 minute presentation should be about eight pages long, double-spaced. And better to be the speaker whose presentation is a little short than the one who is still rambling on after 25 minutes.

There are two different things I’m playing around with this year that are new for me. First, PowerPoint slides, and lots and lots of ’em. At last year’s CCCCs, I went to see a fantastic presentation by Lawrence Lessig. Most of Lessig’s fantastic-ness was the very smart things he had to say, but almost as impressive to me was the “show” of his presentation, which included about a million slides. Most of them were very simple– just a few words on a screen– but the effect was fantastic. So while I’m not hoping to imitate Lessig exactly, I am going to have a bunch of slides in the spirit of Lessig.

Well, that and Stephen Colbert’s “The Wørd” segments on his Comedy Central show. In other words, I’m hoping to have a lot of slides that are a combination of informative and entertaining.

Assuming the LCD projector works, of course.

The second thing I’m playing around with– probably after the conference, actually, though who knows, maybe before– is this software that Collin mentioned recently in this post which is supposed to make it easy to merge audio and PowerPoint (or Keynotes) presentations and end up with an mp4 multimedia presentation. The software is called Profcast, and other than what I just wrote, I have no idea how it works yet. If I get around to finishing my presentations soon, I’ll let you know….

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MySpace: The Movie

Yesterday, I came across “Online parody ‘MySpace: The Movie’ helps launch amateur’s career,” an AP story that showed up in a lot of places (this link is from the Kansas City Star because it was the one that showed up first in news.google.com). It’s about how a kid– almost literally (he’s 21)– is apparently going to get a film deal based on several movies that he’s made.

Anyway, the one that has gotten all the best press is “MySpace: The Movie,” an 11 or so minute short that is a parody of various MySpace habits. The link here is from the YouTube site because this guy’s web site– David Lehre Productions— is getting about 1.8 million hits a day right now. Oh, and as far as I can tell, this guy is from the ‘burbs of Detroit.

A camcorder, a Macintosh computer, and you’ve got a chance….

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Academic Blogging (No Kidding…)

Jeff “Yellow Dog” Rice has a nice piece in his favorite internet publication, Inside Higher Education, called “Serious Bloggers.” Lots of good stuff here, most of which I agree with.

Four thoughts:

  • I completely COMPLETELY agree with the bit about anonymous academic blogging, a practice I have thought problematic for a long time. See, for example this entry and this one from the distant past (oh, okay, a year and a half ago). But I really like Jeff’s turn on the term “seriousness” in this essay. He writes:

    The consequences of this seriousness can be quite problematic, more problematic than whether or not a reader will take offense (or even retribution) at one’s postings. The consequence of this seriousness is stagnation. When we become too serious about novel ideas too quickly, we deny ourselves the ability to experiment with and develop the very innovations in communication we are attracted to in the first place. In turn, we replicate processes already in circulation; i.e., we maintain a status quo and fail to explore possibilities raised by the new medium. One hears that stagnation in the repeated refrains of “fear� pseudonymous bloggers express or the tropes of general complaining many pseudonymous weblogs turn out.

  • Some of the comments on this piece strike me as misguided. Folks, when Rice suggests we need to take the form of blogging “less seriously,” I don’t think he is talking about “being funny” per se.
  • On the other hand (#1), academic bloggers often want their blog writing to be taken “seriously” in an academic sense of it “counting” for something. Many of the folks in this circle of bloggers has written about this in the past– possibly even Jeff.
  • On still yet another hand (#2), academic (and other) bloggers, serious ones and not so serious ones, always self-censor in the sense that no one ever reveals everything about their lives on their blogs. As a simple example, while Jeff’s blog is indeed a mix of all sorts of different things, I don’t think you’ll find him complaining about his students or his colleagues on his blog. Conversely, it seems to me the main purpose of a lot of anonymous academic blogs is specifically to bitch about the people the work with and the students they have to teach. (Okay, maybe Bitch, PhD doesn’t really do that, but I couldn’t resist the link.)

That’s enough– I don’t want to take this too seriously, and now I have to get on with the day a bit.

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See? Blogs in secondary schools aren't all bad…. Oh, but don't forget about Facebook

One of my catch-up/work activities is sorting through email, and another is preparing for the “TBA” reading sections in my two on-campus classes, both of which are examining blogging issues. Which is why I’m linking these two articles:

  • “Reading, Writing, and Blogging,” from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which is about a Richmond, VA area school district where all the teachers are required to keep blogs. The idea is for teachers using blogs to keep in touch with students/parents/etc., and some of these teachers have used their blog spaces to publish some student writing, too. One thing that’s impressive from looking at these web spaces/blogs in this school district: these people appear to have their techno-stuff a lot more together than most school districts around here.
  • “Blogs are a ‘voice out to the world for teens,” which was in the Sunday Ann Arbor News. It’s a “Q&A” with Paul Mobbs, Dexter’s (a suburb just up the road) school liaison police officer about blog stuff. Basically, Mobb writes about how he gives workshops for students about what they ought to be careful about with blogging. Here’s a good quote:

    I’ll pull up a student’s blog and say, “Is this too much information?” And most people will say no.

    Well, then I get on their buddy list and within five minutes, I have the ability to figure out from other messages what school they go to, what grade they’re in, what activities they’re involved in. Some people put phone numbers. Within a few minutes, without even trying, I could do a MapQuest to their house. Someone could use that information to create a profile and attempt to start a relationship with that person.

    The students don’t really think of it along those lines, but if you put the pieces of the puzzle together, you can get a lot of information.

    In other words, Mobbs is teaching some basic writing and rhetoric skills regarding audience awareness and computer technology. What I want to know is how come this stuff isn’t being taught in a Dexter high school English class? Or maybe it is?

  • But it’s not all hunky-dory. The EMU Echo has a two article series on the Facebook at EMU. The first article, “Face-ing the Truth,” takes the angle of faculty and staff and others using Facebook to keep tabs on students. To be honest, I don’t think this article has much to say. I mean, “student conduct” isn’t my job, but I have to think that most of the faculty and staff who have Facebook pages are kind of like me (I set up a page after this article): we’re just curious to see what this thing is all about.

    The second article is both kind of obvious but also the sort of thing that our students probably should remember: “Facebook Could Hurt Job Chances.” Here’s a quote:

    It is strikingly common for students to post revealing information about themselves in their Facebook photos. Many students younger than 21 post photos of themselves drinking or playing beer pong, for example.

    David Stollman, a co-founder of Campuspeak.com who has delivered speeches to college students about the dangers of posting dicey information online, said employers are watching.

    “I have talked with employers who have told me that the Facebook entry of an applicant has ruled them out of an interview process,” Stollman said in an e-mail interview. “Basically they said they get lots of resumes and when the person doing the research on the applicants finds ridiculous pictures, stories, etc., [the applicants] were told not to waste their time anymore.

    Now, the article also points out that there aren’t any statistics about how common this scenario actually is; if anything, the article suggests, the number of people being denied jobs because of Facebook things is probably pretty low. Still, students (and everyone else, of course) ought to be aware that whatever you put up on the web has a chance to come back and haunt you, even if you think you’re anonymous. And all I know about Facebook (at least at EMU) is it seems to be a web space most students use to post pictures of themselves and their friends, generally “partying” in some sense. It seems fairly harmless and fairly useless to me.

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Recommended listening: Cut and Paste Plagiarism on NPR

I caught most of the “cut and paste plagiarism” episode on the NPR talk show “Talk of the Nation” this afternoon, and I must say that on the whole, it was a pretty good piece. While you had just enough “alarmists” to keep it interesting (and, sorry to say this, it seemed that most of the alarmist were high school teachers), most of the discussion was, I thought, surprisingly reasonable. Of course, this wasn’t a Rush Limbaugh talks about plagiarism show….

Check out the link, if you’re interested; I’m likely to assign this as at least “recommended listening” for my grad class.

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Yet ANOTHER article on penmanship

Via the NCTE In-Box comes this LA Times article, “Remember Penmanship?” In many ways, this is an article a bit different from the usual lament about handwriting in some interesting ways. Among other things, here’s what I learned:

  • This article quotes a guy who identifies himself as the past president of “The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting.” What he says isn’t that interesting– you can guess. But the fact that there is such a group and these people are even holding a convention is pretty fascinating to me. There’s not much information about this convention; only that it is going to be this summer in Chicago (roadtrip?).
  • “[A] soon-to-be-published nationwide survey of primary school teachers found about 90% had received little or no formal training in how to teach penmanship.” ‘They didn’t feel they were prepared, or they had little training and it wasn’t something they particularly liked to teach,’ said Steve Graham, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who has studied handwriting since 1979 and who conducted the survey.
  • There is some talk about the new SAT writing test and the ways in which handwriting skills (or lack thereof) figure into that. That’s a concern, but a) I think most students print (which is not what these handwriting people are talking about), and b) I suspect that very soon– in the next couple years or so– the students taking the writing portion of the SAT are going to be able to do it with a computer.
  • The article does a pretty good job of countering the handwriting “alarmists” by noting that there simply isn’t time. Having said that, I do think that students– especially younger students– are learning handwriting skills. As I type this, my third grade son is working on his homework, and a lot of that includes practicing handwriting and newly-learned cursive skills. He just finished one sheet of homework where he carefully wrote out the answers in pretty neat handwriting (I don’t think he’ll have my issues). But now he’s on to another project, and this time he’s printing the answers. When I asked him why, he told me he printed the answers with this project because he could. So, I ask, you like printing better than cursive? “Oh, yeah, of course!”
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Link-a-dink

It’s been a pretty crazy-busy week around here, mostly with one thing or another with various school things that have little to do with teaching or scholarship, including an all day meeting yesterday about NCATE, which I suspect is going to be the bane of everyone’s existence at EMU for the next few years.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to post here about a variety of different things during the week, but I haven’t had time. And just to complicate matters more, I’ve spent the last couple hours (off and on, and while listening to the radio) coming across even more cool links. So, with little commentary and no sorting, here are all of these things now in no particular order:

Alright, enough of that. Now I’ve got to get back to my to-do list to get ready for a crazy week next week….