I haven’t seen much about Computers and Writing 2009 from the usual academic/computers and writing blogs I read, I suppose because a lot of that crowd wasn’t there. There’s this Computers and Writing post at a blog called “NWP Walkabout;” there’s this post at “Amber’s UIWP Blog;” and Dennis Jerz has lots and lots of great stuff on his blog too. So, in an effort to procrastinate from wrapping up for the spring term and preparing for summer term, I thought I’d ramble on about my thoughts from this year in Davis (to build on my previous posts here and here).
Continue reading “#cw09 and when I saw the point/power/danger of Twitter”
“Do computers make students better writers?”
There was a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed the other day, “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers.” I think it might make for good reading/discussion for English 516, where this basic question of “are computers helping students be better writers” often comes up. I like this passage from Jeff Grabill too:
“The unstated assumption there is that if you can write a good essay for your literature professor, you can write anything,” Mr. Grabill says. “That’s utter nonsense.”
The writing done outside of class is, in some ways, the opposite of a traditional academic paper, he says. Much out-of-class writing, he says, is for a broad audience instead of a single professor, tries to solve real-world problems rather than accomplish academic goals, and resembles a conversation more than an argument.
Rather than being seen as an impoverished, secondary form, online writing should be seen as “the new normal,” he says, and treated in the curriculum as such: “The writing that students do in their lives is a tremendous resource.”
But I guess this does prompt me to think about/mention two things:
- My guess/gut feeling is that a lot of the expression students have about how they “like” to write more outside of school than inside of it has a lot more to do with school than it has to do with what it is they’re writing. I agree with Grabill about trying to give assignments in classes about real world problems, things that resemble conversation rather than academic, five paragraph, “there are three problems with x” kind of essays. But no matter what I do to incorporate these kinds of writing assignments into my courses, there is still all the apparatus of the situation. I mean, none of this is voluntary. I wouldn’t be doing these assignments and this teaching if I wasn’t empowered (and paid!) as a college professor, and my students wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t trying to complete coursework and a degree program. So there’s always going to be a division between writing students do for school and writing they do “outside of school” not because of the kind of writing but because of the situation of writing, which is school.
- Despite the headline, it seems to me that neither of these studies is actually trying to answer the “do computers make students better writers;” rather, both seem to be studying how students actually practice their writing in and out of the classroom with computers. Which is a good thing. My take on the “do computer technologies help make student better writers?” is that it is really an irrelevant question because it is what students and everyone else uses to write nowadays. If someone did a study and somehow was able to prove that people “wrote better” when they used a quill and parchment (or hell, just pens and paper), it wouldn’t make any difference because I think most people nowadays find using these older tools to be a pain in the ass.
And really, the stuff that Grabill is talking about in the part I quote isn’t about technology. You can teach a dreadful academic research paper kind of class in a computer lab, too.
If Twitter ever had a purpose, see #IranElection
Of course, I’m mostly interested in the idea that there is something resembling democracy and free elections in Iran, but as someone also keenly interested in new media and writing technologies, what’s been going on with Twitter and the Iranian Election is just fascinating.
Here’s a link to but one article about it, a NYTimes piece, Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online. Basically, the unwashed masses of the Twitterosphere (it hurts to type that word) have more than cleaned the clocks of Main Steam Media in keeping people in touch and involved. I don’t know if the Iranian election was rigged or not (I think it probably was though), but I have learned a hell of a lot more about what’s going on in 140 character bursts than I have listening to NPR.
So, if you haven’t done the Twitter thing yet because you thought it was a waste of time along the lines of Facebook (and, truth be told, it probably is a waste of time mostly), sign up and do a search for #IranElection. You’ll immediately see what I mean.
“Can you afford to be an adjunct?”
Some very good and blunt advice from “Piss Poor Prof” in Inside Higher Ed, “Can You Afford to Be An Adjunct?” Just about everything he says here is spot-on to me: the money isn’t worth it, it is not a “back door” into a more permanent job, it’s something only worth doing while doing something else (e.g., finishing a novel or a dissertation), and be prepared to teach at a bunch of different schools at the same time.
When I was the program adviser, I used to talk to plenty of current or perspective grad students who wanted to finish our MA and then teach at an area community college or part-time teach at a place like EMU. I wish I had had this article to show them. Making matters worse– at least at EMU– is we just aren’t hiring as many adjuncts as we used to. The situation here has more to do with local politics and general education shifts, but I suspect that there is something similar going on at places where budget problems are being solved by increasing teaching loads. It kind of feels to me like academia has been in some version of a recession for a lot longer than the rest of the economy.
Anyway, good advice. If you want to teach one or two classes as an adjunct while doing something else– and there is something to be said for having one’s sources of income diversified in an economy like this– that’s great. But it ain’t a long-term solution and it ain’t a career.
Oh, and since I read some of the CHE stuff online after I read the above article: No, “For Adjuncts, Stitching Together Part-Time Jobs Into Full-Time Pay While Staying Put” is not a viable and long-term strategy for anyone– administrators, faculty, adjuncts themselves, and most definitely not for students. But yes, “Adjunct and Tenure-Track Professors Need One Another, Say Speakers at AAUP Meeting” and can clearly work together just fine, as is the case in my department. But when part-timers or non-tenure-track folks are put into positions that really should be occupied by permanent and tenure-track folks, well, that relationship gets testy.
Just how does Twitter make money, anyway? (and a couple good Twitter links)
I came across– via Steven Johnson’s Twitter feed, actually– this article in the New York Times yesterday, “The Tweet Smell of Success.” The article is about how Twitter has in “the last few months it has plucked a few hundred users from a sea of more than 30 million and put them on its A-list, deeming them particularly worthy of being followed.” Johnson included, by the way: “It’s funny, everybody has been asking me, you got your Twitter ID on the cover of Time magazine, you must be getting an insane amount of followers,” he said. “And I say it’s nothing compared to the steady influx you get from being on the suggested user list.”
Also via Johnson’s feed this morning, I came across Andrew “The Daily Dish” Sullivan’s post about Iranian protesters using Twitter, and in this NYTimes article, I found the link to Johnson’s Time Magazine article on Twitter, “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.”
Anyway, there was one paragraph in the NYTimes piece about how Twitter is not believed to be profitable, which made me wonder: how doe these people make any money at this? Do they make any money? Am I going to start to see 140 word ads pop up on my feed sometime soon? And if I do, will I (or anyone else) still use the service?
This is certainly something that will come up in 516 next winter, maybe in 444 this summer too….
The internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule and it likes a voice
One of the many many things I need to worry about in the next couple of weeks is getting my summer section of English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web up and running. It’s increasingly difficult for me to decide what “counts” as “writing” for the “world wide web,” but generally, I have stayed pretty literal with exercises that focus on coding, blogging, and wiki-ing. Last year, we read a number of things about citizen journalism, and, since we locally have a front row seat to the demise of print newspapers (the Ann Arbor News is calling it quits after 174 years), I might include even more on journalism and the ‘net.
All a long prelude to a very good commentary by Dan Froomkin, “Why ‘playing it safe’ is killing American newspapers.” Besides talking about the money issues, Froomkin says smart stuff like this:
But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it’s mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it’s the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of “objectivity” — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)
The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)
Oh, and this is via what looks like a nice site, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.
Sign up for Technology for Teaching and Learning!
In the shameless self-promotion department: if you are an undergraduate or graduate student at EMU who has an interest in technology and teaching and who likes the idea of spending a week in August in Traverse City, sign up for a class I’m teaching, ENGL 479/592: Technology for Teaching and Learning. I’ve set up a blog and a wiki for the class, though both are drafts at this point– I’m already pretty sure I’m going to make a few changes. Here’s the description I have right now:
This will be a “hands on the keyboards” workshop on using technology for the teaching and learning of writing, and it is designed for Composition, English, and Language Arts teachers K-College. We will have extensive in-class activities designed to learn how to use a variety of internet applications in present and future teaching– email, web sites, blogs, wikis, bookmarking sites, image sharing sites, podcasing, online video, and so forth. Students will build their own basic web sites and complete a post-class exercise on using technology in their teaching. No previous experience with the technologies covered in this class will be necessary.
As a “special topics” course, our regular ongoing undergraduate and graduate students could take the course as an elective. However, it is not be a suitable substitution for required courses in either the undergraduate programs in writing or the graduate program in written communication (e.g., courses like ENGL 328, ENGL 444, ENGL 516, or the “Topics In” courses in the MA program, ENGL 517, ENGL 518, ENGL 526, and ENGL 527).
The CRN for the undergrad version of the class is 41988 and the CRN for the graduate version of the class is 41989. We’ll have a month worth of online discussion starting July 1 (mostly discussing some readings about how we use technology now to teach and learn and how we want to after the class) and we’ll meet in Traverse City from August 1 through August 7.
These Traverse City classes have declined in numbers in recent years as online classes have become more workable and popular. As much as I like teaching online, I think it’s a shame because the Traverse City environment is a really great way to both teach and learn. The class is “on the bubble” in terms of getting enough students to make, so if you are reading this and are thinking that you were going to sign up eventually, do so right away! Like yesterday!
Ann Arbor city council doing stupid emailing during meetings
This was an amusing way to wake up this morning:
Some question appropriateness of mocking e-mail banter during Ann Arbor City Council meetings in the AANews. Here are the opening paragraphs:
After his presentation to the Ann Arbor City Council, Washtenaw Audubon Society member Will Weber had every reason to think city officials shared his views about protecting birds during migratory season.
But while they publicly endorsed the efforts, the same City Council members who backed “Safe Passage Great Lakes Days” in March mocked its significance in e-mails that flew back and forth during the council meeting.
“The highlight of Hohnke’s legislative career a non-binding resolution to dim your lights to help birds,” Leigh Greden wrote in an e-mail to fellow council members Carsten Hohnke, Margie Teall and Christopher Taylor.
Greden’s March 16 missive prompted a dozen messages in which the four council members made sport of environmental or wildlife protection measures that they had passed.
The article goes on to recount a couple other conversations in which Ann Arbor City Council members walk a fine line between being just human, childish and/or assholes. I think my favorite part of the story is how these emails came to light:
Sent from city e-mail accounts, the messages were released by the city in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.
The Detroit-based law center was seeking communication about the city’s planned underground parking structure on Fifth Avenue. What it got, in addition, were a series of live e-mail exchanges among council members during three meetings in February and March.
So, what have we learned here today?
- Be careful about your email because it never ever goes away, even if you think you deleted it. I worry about this with my colleagues, actually. I’ve been on committees where fairly private/sensitive information found its way into email. I’ve been guilty of sending some of those emails myself. I recently had a conversation with a quasi-administrator-type person about a way to get reimbursed for something (I ended up getting paid the old-fashioned way, taxes and all) and this person told me to erase all those emails because they might get us in trouble. (Deep sigh) Well, if Kwame taught us anything it should be that stuff like email and text messages simply do not go away. Oh, and I don’t think those emails would have gotten anyone into trouble anyway.
- People just can’t resist back-channel discussions, even when they really REALLY should know better. So maybe we really shouldn’t be that hard on students who don’t pay attention 120% of the time, especially when the instructor is just standing there going blah-blah-blah.
- Many of the folks on Ann Arbor city council kinda seem like Douchebags, and, according to this wikipedia entry, I believe douchebag is the correct slang term: “The term implies a variety of negative qualities, specifically arrogance and engaging in obnoxious and/or irritating actions without malicious intent.”
Anyway, besides the local political/humor angle, I will have to remember this for English 516 or maybe English 444, some kind of class where we talk about how uses of email can go wrong.
Internet Mapping Project
Via boing-boing, this is a link to Kevin Kelly’s Internet Mapping Project, where he has asked people to draw a map of the internet and put themselves on it. Very cool and maybe something useful for 516 next year….
Comic Life Update and now also for Windows
Just came across this in the blogosphere: Comic Life (1.3) is available for Windows, and an update (1.5) is available for Apple OSX. The bad news is it is $30 for Windows; the good news is there is a 30 day free trial. So who knows? Maybe one of the other changes I’ll make to 328 is instead of using Flickr for making a comic, I’ll use Comic Life. Heck, maybe I’ll offer it as an option for 121 this spring and in the fall….