Boy, skip reading the boing-boing feed for a couple of days and you miss out on some gems:
First, there’s this, BB on GOOD: The “Twitter Revolution” – Social media meets social unrest in Guatemala.” In more evidence that I am both out of the loop and big media does not give a rat’s ass about little countries to the south of US, I was unaware of the upheaval in Guatemala that is apparently underway, nor was I ware of the role of technologies like Twitter and blogging in both getting the word out and causing problems. Definitely something for 516 in the winter 2010 term.
Second, from Michael “Orange Crate Art” Leddy comes “What Plagiarism Looks Like.” Here’s a quote that kind of sums it up:
Some enterprising readers (faculty? student-journalists?) have gone through the dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan, highlighting every passage in Meehan’s that can be found, word for word, in Boening’s. Neither the University of Alabama (which granted Boening and Meehan their doctorates) nor Jacksonville State University, where Meehan is president, has chosen to take up the obvious questions about plagiarism that Meehan’s dissertation presents.
Plagiarism– it’s not just something students do poorly….
This looks pretty cool: via boing-boing, I found David Lynch’s INTERVIEW PROJECT, which is going to be/is a year-long project where David Lynch’s people (I don’t think it is the director himself) goes on a road-trip and interviews everyday people. If the first one and the promo are any indication, the “real people” in question are more or less drifters, which is pretty fitting for David Lynch’s style.
It looks like it might end up being pretty interesting, and it also very much looks like the kind of thing that might work well for something like English 121, especially as I’m doing these student documentary video projects this term. I have no idea how they’ll turn out yet, of course….
There’s way too much for me to go through all of these links now, but just glancing at this list tells me it is something I will need to look at for 516, 328, maybe for 121, and God only knows what else: “80+ Videos for Tech. & Media Literacy” from Alec “open thinking” Couros. Definitely worth checking out.
Via Shaun Slattery on Facebook, I came across two potentially interesting/useful Twitter links:
First, there’s “10 High Fliers on Twitter” from CHE is about some popular academic Twits– or Twitterers, I guess. The most active Twit(terer) is Sarah Evans, director of PR at Elgin Community College. Over 20,000 followers. Jeesh.
Second, there’s “Ten Handy How-To Resources for Twitter” by Traci Gardner on the Bedford Bits blog. Basically, a list of good links about what Twitter is and hwo to use it for teaching and beyond.
I’ve had a Twitter account for a while now, but I really have as of yet to see what the hype is about, even compared to something like Facebook (which, given the fluff factor of the book o’ face, is sathing something). Things weren’t helped much by my winter 2009 section of English 516, which was generally (and rather curiously) somewhat Luddite in terms of technology and teaching. They were pretty resistant to Facebook, actually, and we never got to Twitter because, well, we just had a lot of stuff to do.
Anyway, I know we’ll deal with Twitter next winter, and I might find a way to include it in 444 this summer and 505 in the fall term.
The fam took a mini road-trip to Columbus, Ohio Friday and Saturday mainly to see The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone, and the Changing Face of Comics. I personally am not a particularly big fan of Bone and/or Jeff Smith, but the complete Bone is one of Will’s favorite books, Annette is teaching it this spring in a class, and I generally like comics, though I think I like them more in theory– that is, what they mean in terms of visual rhetoric, teaching with images and words, etc.– than I do as a fan. Though the movie made me think that Bone might be something I ought to give another chance.
One of the highlights for all us was Will getting his complete Bone signed:
Smith was super-duper nice to everyone waiting to get stuff signed, and he chatted a bit with Will, noting that his copy of the 1300+ page well-worn book had obviously been read.
The movie itself was pretty good/kind of so-so, mainly because it was essentially a Jeff Smith love-fest/puff-piece. But I thought it was interesting in a lot of different ways. Smith had an extensive background in making animated television commercials, and that definitely had a major influence on his approach to comics and Bone in particular. Bone began as a self-published comic, and I suppose it still is self-published in the sense that Smith and his wife (and his wife seemed to be the real business brains behind the scenes) still run what appears to be a pretty lucrative operation.
What I didn’t realize before this movie was that lots of the independent/underground comics sold in places like Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor are self-published, though obviously not on the scale of Bone. Which made me wonder why this hasn’t worked in conventional “words in a row” publishing; I mean, self-publishing a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is pretty much a good way to not be taken seriously, and while I know that’s changing a bit with some web sites, you’re still not likely to see a lot of self-published books even in locally-owned and independent book stores.
I suppose the same is true with academic writing and publishing.
Some of the difference seems to be in the materiality of the comic and the collecting fetish. There were many geeky 30 to 50 year old men waiting in line with Will to get signatures from Jeff Smith, only they were holding stacks of the individual issues of Bone or other Smith comics. In the movie, Smith and some of the other featured comic writers (including Scott McCloud, BTW) spoke a couple times about the physicality and “object-ness” of comics in a way that just isn’t the same with words-in-a-row books, IMO. Interestingly though, one of the ways that Bone caught on and one of the main ways comics continue to be promoted was/is the Internet.
As for Columbus proper: we didn’t get to see much, unfortunately. We had so-so Ohio “Mexican” food in a place in the Short North area, which looked like it would have been a fun place to hang out but which probably involved more “adult” entertainment (e.g., bars and stuff) than might have been fitting for Will. He did have fun in the hotel room though:
And now it’s back to a “working holiday:” stuff around the house today, commenting/grading on papers tomorrow.
First off, there is Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video from the American University School of Communication Center for Social Media. How’s that for a mouthful? Anyway, the site includes a very handy video and lots of other resources to help academics/students/etc. navigate a bit through the world of social media. This will probably be must reading for 516 next year, maybe for 444 too.
Then there’s xtranormal “Text-to-Movie,” which is a site that allows you to make very simple animations quite, well, simply. Here’s my first effort:
I don’t know if this is a teachable moment or not; it probably is, actually. But beyond that, it’s a fun little site to play around with. This might even find its way into my 121 this spring.
Via boing-boing, I learned about Us Now, which is a documentary film/project “about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet.” I don’t really have time to watch it right now, but I can imagine this being something worthwhile for English 444 this summer and maybe 328/516 in the near future.
From Inside Higher Ed, Rob Weir offers advice on teaching online in “Take a walk on the wired side.” I think his advice is reasonably accurate, and it contains some good links to other sources on advice for online teaching. I especially agree with what Weir says at the beginning of the article. Even though online teaching is being sold to “young people” as another “cool” thing they can do with the internet and as “fun” way to learn in your pajamas, the reality is that those who succeed best in in online classes tend to be older students who are organized and highly self-motivated.
The only thing he doesn’t cover in this article that I would have brought up had someone asked me for advice about teaching online has to do with course size. Basically, I think the rule of thumb is to keep the numbers low, lower than you would in a comparable face to face class. Anyway, potentially some good reading for English 516 next year.
So far, my online class this term is going reasonably well, though it is tough to get the work all done in such a short term….
Just catching up on some blog reading the other day, and I came across on Henry Jenkins’ blog this post, and then this morning this post, both about participatory culture. Both of these posts also talk about a ton of resources, examples, etc. available at Project New Media Literacies. Given my approach to teaching 121 right now and stuff I am certain we’ll talk about in 516 in the winter, this is a mighty mighty useful set o’ links for teaching. And if my CCCCs proposal gets accepted, it will good for that too.
A pretty interesting article in CHE I just skimmed: How a Student-Friendly Kindle Could Change the Textbook Market. It’s kind of interesting because it basically ends up focusing on all the various reasons why the eTextbook thing hasn’t worked so far and why the Kindle DX is not liable to fair much better. This passage seems to sum up things for me:
What the textbook industry needs is the equivalent of an iTunes store for e-books, say some experts, who note that sales of digital music never took off until Apple created the iPod and an easy-to-use online music marketplace. That’s why Amazon seems like a promising entrant.
Except for one thing: Publishers have already set up a digital store meant to serve as the iTunes of e-textbooks, and it has been slow to catch on. The online store, called CourseSmart, was started two years ago by the five largest textbook publishers. Now 12 publishers contribute content to the service, which offers more than 6,300 titles. The e-books are all designed to be read on laptops or desktops, rather than Kindles or other dedicated e-book reading devices.
One problem for CourseSmart has been a lack of awareness by both students and professors that the service even exists.
“I’ve never heard of that,” said David K. Belsky, a graduate student at the State University of New York at Albany who started a Facebook group calling for cheaper textbook options. He has heard about Amazon’s plans for a new Kindle for textbooks, but he said he isn’t likely to invest in one. “I already have my laptop, and there’s only so many things you can carry,” he said, adding that he regularly types notes during class on his laptop. “I wouldn’t sit there taking notes on a Kindle, that’s for sure.”
I like that the Kindle DX is bigger and can render PDFs better. For my purposes, which basically are to load it up with the readings I teach, this could be a good thing. But at $500, I think I want to kind of wait a bit. I mean, for that kind of money, I might as well wait and see if Apple comes up with some kind of Mediapad that doesn’t require Verizon and/or that lets me choose a service provider.
