The Elements of Style Opera Reviewed (sorta)

Via boing-boing, I came across this MSNBC article about the recent opera of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Here is but one of the funny little quotes from the piece:

Unfortunately, the operatic style of the piece rendered the lyrics all but unintelligible to this listener—in ironic contrast to the simplifying ethos of “Elements”—though that may be more the fault of the acoustics of the library venue, which was, after all, designed for silence.

Not that any of this prevented the piece from garnering titters of appreciation capped by a standing ovation from the high-tone crowd in attendance. Although the piece may have violated E. B. White’s advice to “Prefer the standard to the offbeat,” it was more than effective in fulfilling another edict: “Be obscure clearly.”

Oh, the culture I miss not being in NYC….

Coursecasting, Teaching Online, and figuring out Podcasting on the cheap (sorta)

I noticed this morning that the CHE has an article in the online portion called “Lectures on the Go: As more colleges use ‘coursecasting,’ professors are split on its place in teaching.” I don’t subscribe to the CHE, so I’ll try to see if I can snag this article from the copy in the English department (unless someone wants to email this to me– wink-wink, nod-nod….)

It’s funny how these things work. My CCCC’s proposal this year is tentatively titled “Broadcast Composition: Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and back in April, it seemed like a pretty original idea. I suppose it still is, relatively speaking. But now it’s “mainstream” enough to be in the CHE, and I mentioned an article that appeared in the Ann Arbor News about podcasting in the U of M dental school a while back.

In a way, this is starting to remind me of one of my first big conference presentations at NCTE in 1994. Like the CCCCs, NCTE (this was the conference they hold in November) proposals are due almost a year in advance. A grad school buddy of mine, John Clark, and I had a presentation proposal accepted about how to use Gopher in the classroom. Remember Gopher? Yeah, those were the days…. Anyway, we had heard of this new-fangled “World Wide Web” thing, but in early 1994, there literally wasn’t anything there yet. But by the time the NCTE rolled around, nobody was interested in Gopher anymore.

Anyway, I’m not sure if podcasting will be everywhere by next March or not. I have been using audio files to supplement my notes for some reading materials for my online class, and I think it has worked out quite well. But they aren’t “podcasts” per se; they’re just audio files that are loaded on the CMS shell. Actually, eCollege would support streaming audio, but it’s easier for me to just record the audio and upload it myself.

I did figure out how to do a “low-fi” version of podcasting, though. I’m not going to go into it right now, but a blogger account, a few cellphone calls to audioblogger, an RSS 2.0 set-up from feedburner, and a visit to iTunes and I’ve got a podcast. Even if it is just me saying “testing testing, testing again, testing 1-2-3” so far…

Sunday morning (now afternoon) links

Instead of reading the paper this morning, I decided to read through my RSS feed to see what’s interesting. I guess I was indirectly thinking about teaching in the winter term because I found a bunch of links that will probably come up in my computers and writing class.

Can The Elements of Style: The Movie be far behind?

Via a New York Times article called “Style Gets New Elements,” I discovered this morning that Penguin Press has come out with a version of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style which (or is it that? perhaps I should look that up) includes illustrations by the artist Maria Kalman.

What did she illustrate, you ask? As the article reports:

In the new clothbound edition, Ms. Kalman’s whimsical paintings are sprinkled through the text, often responding to the wry or quirky examples the authors chose to enliven what might otherwise have been a dry discussion of grammatical rules. On the topic of pronoun cases, they offer: “Polly loves cake more than she loves me.” On the uses of the dash: “His first thought on getting out of bed – if he had any thought at all – was to get back in again.” Ms. Kalman had no shortage of material.

I routinely teach The Elements of Style in an advanced writing class I teach called “Writing, Style, and Technology.” I won’t belabor it now, but my goal in teaching the book is to problematize it because, while I think Strunk and White offer a lot of good advice, I also think they offer a fair amount of bad or just plain “wrong” advice, too. And, along the way, they have a lot of kind of strange examples– thus the illustrations, which are a hoot.

The illustrations aren’t designed to explain the rules at all; rather, they are pieces of art that take their inspiration from the rules themselves. The result is some very funny and charming pictures, and I think it has this effect on the original that I can’t quite put my finger on yet. But basically, I think the illustrations change the book from being a bunch of pretty static and straight-forward rules into a kind of strange and surrealist “art” piece.

But wait– there’s more. According to The NYT:

…the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought “Elements of Style” song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight at 8 in a highly unusual, if oddly appropriate, concert setting: the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library.

Oh, and at the end of the article, they quote a letter White wrote in 1981 that mentions a ballet based on The Elements of Style.

At some point in the (hopefully) near future, I think I’d like to/need to write some sort of review or article about this thing. I don’t know who would publish it, but….

Misc. Post

I’ve been meaning to post about a variety of different things lately, but I’ve gotten a bit behind with school things (though I am about to come ’round the corner, too– I can sense it). So what I’m doing to do instead is post a few quick comments and links and such and let the chips where they may.

  • On the way home yesterday, I thought about what would happen if (for next year) I abandoned the eCollege software for teaching online and tried to do the whole thing myself with Moodle or Drupal or something. What would be lost? What would be gained? Would the powers-that-be at EMU be annoyed with me? Hmmm….
  • My routine has been thrown off by fund-raising time at public radio. Don’t get me wrong– I understand why they need to do it, and I am indeed a member of my favorite public radio station, WEMU. But I just find it annoying. So please, if you listen, give what you can so they can get back on with it.
  • Johndan observes that Apple computer controls are for lefties. He blames this on the mac, but aren’t the common short-cut commands for the PC (alt-x, alt-v, alt-c) all on the left too? Having this, I must say he might have a point. The touchpad on my laptop has been a problem for a while now, so I’ve been using a mouse, and the USB port is… on the left. But since I’m left-handed, this is totally okay with me.
  • Via Weblogg-ed cmes this article, “Web logs go to school” on C|Net News. com. It’d be interesting to share this piece side-by-side with the bad press that things like Xanga have been getting in high schools lately.
  • Speaking of which, via an email that Rich Rice sent to Tech-Rhet, I’ve learned that at least one school, Santa Clara University, is using the student blog angle in order to help market itself. Granted, Santa Clara U is a tad different from, say, EMU (SCU bills itself as “The Jesuit University of Silicon Valley”), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
  • Jenny Edbauer wrote about two interesting and free applications. First, there is a blog software called Blogsome, which gives users Word Press-like features. It’s worth thinking about instead of Blogger, that’s for sure (btw, now even Blogger is having spam problems! Is Word Press the last blogging software that seems to not have significant issues with this stuff?). Second, there’s Jot, which is another free wiki software. I’d like to compare it with PBwiki before using it, but I suspect that Wikis will play a role in my Writing for the World Wide Web class next time around.

Okay, enough catch-up with the blog. Time to catch up with the other things in life.

Visual Rhetoric(s) and connections to McCloud (or, duh, use Google)

It’s funny how I have managed to do a lot of stuff different in my teaching from the way I’ve done then in the past, and I’m just now realizing it mid-way through the semester. For example, while I’m not completely sold on what seems to me to be the current/recent emphasis on so-called “Visual Rhetoric,” I decided to have students in my English 328 class do a project on it. Among other reasons, I decided to include this in the class because Scott McCloud is going to be on campus in the Winter as the EMU McAndless Professor. We’re reading/discussing Understanding Comics of course, but I’m trying to find one or two other readings to supplement this. Oh, and I need to come up with a writing assignment, too.

Can you see how carefully this is all planned? Jeesh.

Anyway, a colleague of mine recommended the first chapter of Claude Gandelman’s Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, but I don’t think that’s going to be right. Gandelman is coming at the issue as an art critic, and while this chapter is really interesting (it’s about the connection between “touch” and “vision,” and argues that the eye physically does not take all of an image at once), I don’t think my students will get the connection with McCloud. Derek’s comments on Bolter’s essay in the collection Elloquent Images makes me want to take a look at that book, but the EMU library doesn’t have it and someone has it checked out of the U of Michigan library. I think Richard Lanham’s essay “The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge” will work well as a sort of “bridge” text between this unit and the next ones, but it is slightly dated, originally published in 1994.

Of course, when all else fails, I do what my students do: I just Google something obvious, like “Visual Rhetoric.” Among many other things, this turned up The Visual Rhetoric Portal, a handy bibliography of materials on visual rhetoric, these resources at the University of Iowa, this David Blakesley course, etc., etc.

Sometimes the obvious yeilds surprising results.

Laptops in every, ah, lap

Via BBC News comes this story, “US school swaps books for bytes.” I think I had a link/discussion about this same Arizona school a few months ago, but it would appear that now things are actually happening at this school.

A couple of interesting quotes; the first one answers the “either computers or books” issue, at least from the point of view of a start-up budget for a high school:

Providing all the pupils with Apple iBooks did not dent the school’s budget as much as might be expected. But part of that is down to the school having been newly built.

The money that was budgeted to buy text books, which was about $500 a student, was spent instead on the laptops.

“Our laptops cost is about $800 per pupil. Our net cost is probably $100 to $200 more than if we had used text books,” he [Calvin Baker, chief superintendent of the Vail School district] says.

By giving all the students a laptop computer, the school has done away with computer laboratories too.

Baker is also quoted in this article as saying that the school is not “book free”– there’s a library, for example– but most of the content students work with in classes are delivered via these laptops.

Putting aside the sort of Sophie’s Choice method of financing these laptops, that last line, that a laptop on every student’s desk (and, since it’s mobile, in every student’s backpack and in every student’s house) has replaced computer labs, is really something that appeals to me. We’ve been experiencing some, ah, “technical challenges” with the support people as of late, which just underscores the ongoing problem an underfunded university like EMU has with technology. I’m not saying that a laptop program would solve everything; in fact, I think you could make a pretty good argument that all a laptop program at the college-level does is shift the burden of who has to pay for and maintain the hardware. But if we went this route, students wouldn’t be in a situation where they were learning how to do something on a computer they aren’t likely to use much, we could have computer labs which had higher-end hardware and software (for example, a multimedia lab), and the tech support people could focus on the keeping these smaller labs and the network running. And I think it would do a lot to help “technlogical literacy” on the whole at EMU.

In a way though, I think the idea that every student will have a laptop is kind of inevitable, plan or no plan, since more and more students are showing up with laptops all on their own. It’s easy to imagine a time four or five years from now where my students ignore the computers in the lab in favor of their own laptops, and that would be fine with me.

Turnitin Turn-Ons?

Rebecca Moore “Schenectady Synecdoche” Howard, who has published quite a bit on issues having to do with plagiarism, tells the story of using Turnitin.com for the first time. As she explains, it turns out that she largely plagiarized herself.

We have a site license for Turnitin.com at EMU, and there has been some controversy about its use– the usual issues having to do with the “policing” function, ownership of the text, etc. I have used Turnitin.com a grand total of one time, and I used it to help me vet a couple of student essays I am (hopefully) including in my textbook as examples. These were already good essays and these students were long done with my class, so it wasn’t me trying to play policeman. I just needed to go through both essays to make sure everything was fine.

Now, maybe it was because I was working with some strong examples, but I found Turnitin pretty useless. I mean, all it did was highlight parts of the essays where the students include quotes. Sorta. Big deal.

Be careful with the Facebook, folks

Sorting through a bunch of old email, I came across this article that Nick Carbone posted to WPA-L Mailing List: “When students open up– a little too much” from The Boston Globe. The Facebook, of course, is an online directory/social exchange forum for college students. But to be honest, I don’t know a whole lot more than that, mainly because I’m not a college student any longer and I don’t know if it’d be a good idea for me to set up an account where I’m pretending to be a student. Though that might be kind of a fun thing to do.

Anyway, back to the point here: this article is just another example of how students need to be careful about what they say about themselves on the ‘net because what you say might get back to the wrong audience. Here are the opening paragraphs of this article:

Last school year, Brandeis University junior Emily Aronoff tapped this sentiment into a computer: ”I enjoy the festive greens.”

The reference to marijuana became part of her profile on facebook.com, the online student catalogue that allows Aronoff and tens of thousands of collegians to share photos and idiosyncratic odds and ends of their lives, intended for viewing by other students.

But others were reading as well — including ”an individual in the community,” she said, who shared the reference with her parents in Marietta, Ga. Eventually, word reached her grandmother.

”My bubbe,” she said, using the Yiddish word for grandmother, ”told me her seniors home was abuzz with the news, and I was like: ‘I hate the Facebook.’

The article also has a nice quote from a communications professor named Steve Jones: “I would put money on a political candidate — probably 20 years from now — getting in hot water on account of something posted on Facebook.” I think Jones is right, and I would extend this to the kinds of things that students put up on web sites, too. In one of my classes the other day, a student asked if he could put anything he wanted on the web site he (and all the other students) are creating for the class. I said that he could, but I also pointed out that it could come back to haunt him later on. I think I might post a link to this article to my class blog….