Category: Teaching

Posted on

The state of the "blogosphere"/sabbaticalizing

Via jill/txt comes a link to “Sifry’s Alerts” on the “State of the Blogosphere,” which is based on technorati statistics, which is where David Sifry works. Some potentially interesting stuff for both my teaching in the winter term (and beyond), and also my scholarly endeavors.

Speaking of which: A big public thanks to the folks who gave me some valuable input and support on my recent “last minute” sabbatical proposal– my wife, Linda AK, Steve B, Bill HD… I think that’s all of ’em. I feel pretty good about the proposal I put together, though the creative writer part of me that believes it is both bad luck and tacky to talk about work not yet done is a little reluctant to start posting about it here in too much detail. All I will say for now is that, if nothing else, it was a good feeling to start thinking again in terms of scholarly work, I have a pretty good idea for at least one essay and one conference presentation, and, if I actually follow through on all this (and I think I will), I do think I might have a good book idea.

As for the sabbatical: well, it’s a long-shot, I think. One of the great ironies of things like sabbaticals nowadays at EMU (and I think this is true just about everywhere, frankly) is, because the competition for fewer and fewer sabbaticals is keen, you basically need to have a book contract in hand to win the award. And, obviously, if you already managed to put together a project that merited a book contract without release time before, then you probably really don’t need it now. In effect, sabbaticals are not about granting release to do promising and future research and scholarship; rather, they are a “reward” for a job (already) well done.

But like I said, it has been self-motivating if nothing else, and that’s a good thing. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky.

Posted on

Neil Young Mixing Sound and Words and Pictures

Normally, I try to stay away from posting things here that are overtly political, though I have to say that I do agree with the sentiments that Neil Young is expressing in his song “Let’s Impeach the President” and his album Living With War. And I like Neil Young well enough.

But I just thought that this video for the song “Let’s Impeach the President” was really brilliant. It just does a really good job of parodying/imitating the genre, of mixing words and images and sounds, of reporting research data, etc. It’d be great to show students in FY Comp– well, except maybe the politics would stir things up too much…. Or maybe that would be a good thing.

Here it is also available via YouTube:

Posted on

Can high school kids get dooced?

Via the NCTE InBox email they send around every once in a while, I discovered this USA Today article, “Students, officials locking horns over blogs.” Here’s a passage I think is kind of interesting:

School boards across the country already have blocked sites such as MySpace and Facebook on school computers. But school districts now are reaching into students’ home computers, severely punishing and even expelling students for what they write on those sites from home.

Some examples:

•A student at an Indianapolis-area school was expelled for making sexually explicit comments about a teacher on MySpace.

•Officials at a Pittsburgh school kicked a student off the volleyball team for an Internet message that criticized an art teacher.

•A cheerleader at a Fort Worth-area school was kicked off the squad for derogatory comments someone posted on her blog about other cheerleaders.

The issue has created a free-speech debate between school administrators who are worried about the disruption of the learning process on one hand; and students, parents and First Amendment advocates who are worried about whether overzealous school boards are overstepping their bounds on the other. The debate is beginning to be explored in courts.

“Some courts have said that speech which is done on school computers is clearly within the domain of the administration to set reasonable standards for. Some have said if it’s off-site, then the students are fully protected. Some have said if it can be read by people on the school premises, then it comes within the jurisdiction of the school board,” says Tom Clarke, a San Francisco attorney who works on First Amendment questions. “Those are the three crazy standards that currently exist.”

I must say though– and they kind of talk about this later in the article– schools are kind of between a rock and a hard place on this one. I mean, one of the critiques against the Columbine-type tragedies is that these students are giving off warning signs, and they are often giving off warning signs in writing. Of course, banning these writings doesn’t stop them.

Oh, and in case you are wondering: to be “dooced” is web/blog lingo for being fired.

Posted on

Good Wikipedia Article; as usual, Academics have "mixed feelings"

One of the things I’m supposed to be doing right now is planning for my online version of English 516 (a graduate course called “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”) in Winter 2007, and preparing/proposing an online version of the class English 444 (which is “Writing for the World Wide Web”) for Spring 2006. One reading that might be useful for both of these classes comes from last week’s CHE, “Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?” I think it does a good job of kind of covering the “issues” with Wikipedia in terms of what it means as an academic source, meaning it doesn’t settle anything (how could it do that?), but it raises lots of good questions in an easy to access piece.

Personally, I think the argument that wrong stuff can be (and usually is) quickly changed is the most compelling reason as to why Wikipedia is, for the most part, a “trustworthy” source. I suppose we could (and when it comes to teaching classes like FY Comp, I suppose you have to) debate the idea of Wikipedia being source for “research,” but my basic answer to that for myself is that it is pretty much the same as using an encyclopedia as a “research” source: both might be useful to get started, but neither is a real source.

Posted on

NPR, Blogs, and Slang

I heard two good stories on NPR’s “All Things Considered” which might be good teaching resources some time this coming winter. First, there was “Blogs Capture, Amplify Galludet Protest,” which is about how a couple of bloggers covered the ongoing problems at Galludet in DC. Given the nature of the story, there’s a transcript at this site, too.

On a completely different topic, there was also this story, “American Slang, Adapted and Updated.” This is an interview with Paul Dickson on an updated version of a dictionary he has on slang. I thought that this might be an interesting thing to think about in a first year composition class, actually….

Posted on

Is this the next "big" thing?

I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but boing-boing had a link pointing to Vox the other day. I had actually heard of this site earlier (and btw, if I have heard of something before it shows up on boing-boing, does that make me super-duper cool or what?), but I haven’t set up an account yet.

It does look promising though; basically, this it’s like a blogger-type space that allows you to easily incorporate lots of video, audio, pictures, etc., etc. That’d be pretty handy for a class where one of the goals is to get students to do stuff with a variety of different online medias but where there isn’t a lot of time or computer lab access to take students to work on iMovie and other software.

Posted on

MacArthur Foundation and "Digital Learning"

I have no idea how cool (or not) this is going to be, but I got an email from my department head the other day about the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning web site, which looks like a new initiative for making grants and spreading the word on, well, digital media and learning. Ther’s a forum this coming week I signed up for (though next week I probably won’t have a lot of time to read it, to be honest), and there’s a bunch of other potentially interesting things on this site.