Category: Teaching

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9/11 Comic Book

I read in the Ann Arbor newspaper yesterday about a comic version of the 9/11 commission report and I found this morning the amazon.com link, which is where I might be ordering this book from. Or I might be waiting until I get back from my upcoming summer break.

Anyway, this is the sort of thing I need to get for both my teaching in English 328 and in 516, especially the undergraduate class, Writing, Style, and Technology. For a whole bunch of reasons I won’t go into now (but which boil down to the process EMU as an institution is now going through to accredit secondary school teachers), visual elements have become a lot more important in this course in the last year or so. Because Scott McCloud was on campus at EMU in winter 2006, I incorporated some readings and activities from Understanding Comics in my version of the class last year, and I am totally sold on the value of getting students to think about “the visual” as it relates to “the textual.”

At least at this level and for this class; I’m not as sold on this for fy comp. But that’s another story.

In any event, this new 911 comic looks promising. Besides as a potential teaching tool, I am interested in reading it myself.

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Electronic Academic Publishing Inevitable (or I told ya so….)

On various occasions in this blog and elsewhere, I’ve argued that it seems increasingly obvious to me that almost all publishing for fields like English studies and composition and rhetoric will be done electronically. This is perhaps most likely with journals– heck, even the less than techno-savvy CCCC now is available electronically before the paper copy arrives– but I also think it’s going to happen with books too.

Anyway, not that I’m the only one who has had this crazy notion before, but you’ve heard it here before. Now, according to the July 14 issue of Inside Higher Ed and the article “New Model for Scholarly Publishing,” it turns out I’m right. Maybe.

It’s a good piece, one you should read for yourself and one that would probably make good reading in my graduate course on computers and writing (which reminds me: I need to start doing some of the set-up work for that….). A few highlights:

  • “Rice University on Thursday announced a plan to shake up those interconnected problems. Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.” They go on to say that since the editing and vetting process for these books will be the same as for traditional, “on paper” books, the folks at the reborn Rice UP believe they should “count” the same as traditional books.
  • “And Rice also announced plans Thursday to take on the textbook industry, offering print-on-demand textbook versions of scholarly resources it has been assembling — generally for less than $25.” Hmmm…. perhaps they’d be interested in a little textbook project I’m slowly working to publish electronically….
  • “The home for Rice’s new publishing ventures will be Connexions, the university’s open source site that has been gaining more and more users with its compilation of course and scholarly materials, prepared by professors from all over the world and provided for anyone to use.” What’s interesting to me about Connexions is, at first glance at least, it’s just a Plone-driven CMS with a lot of content.
  • “The Rice press plans also arrive at a time that some scholarly associations are pushing for more recognition for digital scholarship. The Modern Language Association has a special committee working on a proposal to change the tenure process in many ways, one of which is to provide more recognition for work online. English professors have been particularly concerned about the decline of monograph publishing, which has made it especially difficult for them to earn tenure.

    “Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, is a member of the MLA tenure reform committee, and he said Thursday that he was very encouraged by the Rice announcement. ‘This sounds like a fascinating model,’ he said.” So perhaps even the MLA is on board with this one? See, I am right!

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"The Internet is a series of Tubes:" the dance song

Via boing-boing, I came across “DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix: ‘A Series of Tubes'” just now. Senator Ted Stevens said in committee that was debating a law (which, as boing-boing put it, would allow the phone company to charge you for a Google search) that the Internet was a series of tubes. Among other less than tech-savvy things.

Anyway, I thought I’d post these things here because it might make for some good info in an English 516 class. And in a way, it points again to the discussion going on at places like the WPA-L mailing list, where I think the general sentiment there is that yeah, the Internet is kind of a series of tubes….

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Umpteenth article on student writing (but this one says its good!)

Here’s a piece in Inside Higher Ed that might come in handy for English 596 for the Fall: “Worse Than Ever?” by Laurence Musgrove. It’s a refreshing piece because it actually makes the argument that I think is clearly the case: students are not actually becoming worse writers. And it’s a frustrating piece because there are a whole bunch of comments that basically say “I don’t care what various forms of evidence say– I still think that the kids are going to hell in a handbasket!”

At times like these, I always like to remind folks of one of my favorite quotes from the canon of ancient Greek rhetoricians; it comes from Isocrates’ Antidosis

Yes, and you have brought it about that the most promising of our young men are wasting their youth in drinking-bouts, in parties, in soft living and childish folly, to the neglect of all efforts to improve themselves; while those of grosser nature are engaged from morning until night in extremes of dissipation which in former days an honest slave would have despised. You see some of them chilling their wine at the “Nine-fountains”; others, drinking in taverns; others, tossing dice in gambling dens; and many, hanging about the training-schools of the flute-girls.And as for those who encourage them in these things, no one of those who profess to be concerned for our youth has ever haled them before you for trial, but instead they persecute me, who, whatever else I may deserve, do at any rate deserve thanks for this, that I discourage such habits in my pupils.

In other words, about 2400 years ago, the teacher/writer/rhetorician Isocrates was noting the bad habits of Greek young men– basically, back then, they too had too much in the way of drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll. The fact that adults/elders have problems with young people strikes me as more a factor of adults/elders facing their own mortality and distance from their own wasted youth than anything else.

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"Someone to Watch Over Me" article

I wasn’t planning on writing anything here this morning because I gave myself the treat of buying the Sunday New York Times and was planning on just reading and hanging out. But I came across an article that I think might be good for teaching, especially in 516, “Someone to Watch Over Me.” It’s sort of an exaggerated story of the virtual social life of the writer, though it might not be that much of an exaggeration.

I guess that just goes to show you that when academic-types aren’t working, they’re still working….

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Don't throw out the library yet

NCTE’s Inbox lead me to a Des Moines Register article on public libraries in Iowa which lead me to a report by the Americans for Libraries Council called “Long Overdue” (ha-ha; library report humor; get it? get it?). In the nutshell, both the article and the report say that Americans still very much like libraries. This is the sort of piece that would probably fit into my 516 class, where we usually talk about the implications of “internet technologies” and the library for one class period.

Two other things seem kind of interesting to me about this stuff. First, it seems kind of at odds with the glut of articles about how stupid Americans are– especially the kids– and how all they do is watch TV and play video games and heat the house by burning books.

Second and more important perhaps, it seems from my skimming of the article and the 2 page summary of the report suggests that people very much value the “community” aspect of libraries and they value the computer and other network tools available there. For example, consider this passage from The Des Monies Register article:

“Libraries are not that quiet place anymore, they’re where it’s happening,” said [Iowa first lady Christie] Vilsack, one of 34 civic leaders interviewed for the report, which was sponsored by the Americans for Libraries Council and paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Vilsack, who has toured nearly 500 of Iowa’s 543 libraries, said Iowa libraries have added coffee shops, increased the number of computer workstations, and opened themselves for gatherings and other activities.

State librarian Mary Wegner said the report affirmed what experts already knew: Libraries are still necessary.

“What the study found is both encouraging and enlightening,” she said. “Most Americans believe that libraries are not only relevant to our time, but essential to their communities.”

Now, I guess what’s missing from my brief reading here is that people value libraries because it’s where they keep the books. But like I said, perhaps libraries are still important though in different ways.

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Bush Admin Hates Higher Ed: Shocking!

I came across an interesting article this morning on the Spellings Commission, which is looking into reform of higher education in the U.S. It’s “A Stinging First Draft,” and it’s about the first draft of the report coming out of this group. Feel free to read these pieces, but I guess I have a few quick thoughts:

The article talks again and again about how “mean spirited” the report is. Given the politics of the folks leading this group, that’s hardly surprising. Only three things comfort me about all of this. First, I hope that the public and legislators have enough of a memory to recall the on-going problems of “No Child Left Behind” and thus will not repeat the mistakes of that legislation. Second, the fact that this is a first draft and one that members of the committee are themselves divided about suggests that there will be changes. And third, since so-called “public” institutions get increasingly less money from states or the feds, I’m just not sure how much difference this or other reports will make.

The bottom-line (well, at least so far) of the problem(s) at hand and the problem(s) of solutions is summed up pretty well in the Inside Higher Ed piece with the comment by Jonathan Cohen (I’d link to it if I could, but I couldn’t figure out how). To summarize it/put my own spin on it here: the report says that there are three basic problems that impact higher education:

  • K-12 education quality and standards are inadequate.
  • Costs are out of control.
  • There’s no reliable feedback on what students are actually learning.

Well, first off, there isn’t much higher ed can really do about K-12. And if the thinking is that higher ed should up the requirements for entry (thus forcing K-12, particularly secondary schools, to get their act together so their students are prepared for college), I can tell you right now that flat-out isn’t going to work. It certainly wouldn’t work at “opportunity granting” institituions like EMU.

As far as costs being out of control goes, I would say I agree a lot with what Cohen says about how the first place any reformer ought to look is at the administrative costs, both in terms of the high-priced salaries of administrators, the number of administrators, and the “creep” of administrative work on to faculty. Take me, for example: right now, I receive a course release a term for being the coordinator for the writing program (meaning our undergraduate majors and graduate programs), and next year, I’ll receive even more release time as I step into the role of interim writing program administrator (meaning first year writing). Not to mention the faculty time it takes to research and write the mind-numbing and irrelevant reviews and reports and crap that no one ever reads.

Sure, there are other places to save money too, but it seems to me that other things vary too much from institution to institution. Comparing the costs of faculty and virtually everything else between a place like EMU and a place like the University of Michigan just doesn’t make that much sense. But the one “universal” here seems to be administrative costs.

Oh, and the other reason why tuition is going up so fast is pretty simple: the government at both the state and the federal levels are getting out of the higher education “business,” and they’ve been doing so for a long time now and at an alarming rate. If the state of Michigan cuts funding to EMU, then EMU has to look someplace else to pay the bills, and that someplace else is student tuition. Seems like math even an English professor can figure out.

Finally, figuring out what students learn: I think that this commission and others that have driven things like standardized testing are looking for an answer to an unanswerable question: how can we really really tell what students learn in our classes? To me that’s like trying to figure out what someone really really “believes.” There comes a point where it is ultimately an act of faith.

The best we can do, IMO, is think about this via accreditation. We’re about to go through an interesting, um, “time” here at EMU with NCATE, which will assess and ultimately accredit our many majors in K-12 educaiton. While this is likely to be a highly problematic process in all sorts of ways, that’s one way to deal with this: have accrediting bodies of higher education actually do more than rubber-stamp.