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See this article, “Let’s blog around the clock,” an article published as part of IT AsiaOne. I’m not entirely sure where this is taking place, but I thought it was interesting that it’s taking place in the instruction of Chinese and it is a tool that is being used pretty much in the same way blogs are used to teach English.

Check out Sorry Everybody, a very simple site that I find both happy and sad. Basically, it’s just pictures of people holding up signs of apology for the last election. I made my own picture:

It’s a shame, but “Sorry Everybody” has been such a success that they can’t take any more pictures. It’s not easy taking a picture of yourself, but I like how this one turned out. I like how I got the Howard Finster poster that’s in my home office in the background, and I also like how I was able to do some relatively signifcant editing of this image in Photoshop. I’m not gonna tell you what I changed though…

I haven’t seen all the details of it yet, but WEMU is reporting that EMU has been rated as one of the best schools in the country in terms of preparing K-12 teachers. This is apparently according to one of these US News and World Report books. There’s a link about all this on EMU’s homepage right now. I’d link directly to it, but I can’t– go see it, you’ll see why.

Of course, you have to take any of these sorts of rankings with a grain of salt, but it doesn’t really surprise me. EMU has a very large and very good teacher preparation program, and it’s something that everyone at EMU is involved in. Our department has at least 800 majors (maybe more), and most of them are in English Education. We have folks who specialize in that of course, but everyone in our department– writing folk, lit folk, lit folk, and so on– have some kind of “claim” on the major and helping those students. And I think it’s a fair guess that just about every other department at EMU has a similar connection with Education.

Anyway, congrats to us. It’s nice to hear some good news about EMU for a change of pace.

I posted about this here just a few days ago, and I thought it worthwhile to post this link Nick Carbone posted to tech-rhet as part of the on-going set of lessons from the 2004 electoral maps. This analysis (by some folks in computer science at U of M) goes even further in reconfiguring the red, blue, and purple maps by adding a proportional element.

For example, while Rhode Island is considerably smaller geographically than Wyoming, it has twice as many people. So on this map, Rhode Island is twice as big as Wyoming, though neither of them are really that large in this map.

This gets a little weird-looking when they start rearranging the purple maps, but I guess that’s their point: we really aren’t red and blue states as simply as been portrayed.

Via Clancy Radcliff’s blog (she’s a grad student at U of Minnesota), I came across this post from a “Sad American,” who (basically) is an anonymous and young Southern woman who insist she would have voted for Kerry under slightly different circumstances. It’s kind of a long post and it has 281 comments attached to it, but it’s worth browsing through.

What makes all this all the more interesting is this response from a sadder American. This writer pretty much goes point for point what I would have said, so I’d encourage you to read this bit after reading the merely sad American.

Let me repost what I wrote over at Clancy’s blog in brief:

I can never remember who said it, but you can’t change someone’s ideology (or “beliefs,” for that matter) with the “facts.” What I think is really interesting in the “Sad American’s” message is that in my reading, she’s sort of struggling with what she seems to know (or think) is “true” and how that is at odds with what she believes. When I was in grad school, I personally experienced this sort of thing a couple of times when encountering post-structualist theories of one sort or another: for me to agree with “x,” I have to bring into question belief “y,” if that makes sense. I see this in my students (undergrad and grad) now, and what happens too often is they retreat back into the comfort of their own ideological framework. Something along the lines of this: “I realize we’ve read all this stuff for class about how feminist are really just striving for equality among men and women, and for equal rights and consideration for women, and I even agree with it. But you know, I still don’t think I could ever be a feminist because I don’t hate men, and that Rush Limbaugh has a point with the whole ‘feminazi’ thing.”

What I’m seeing here is “Sad American” really wants to believe in Kerry and while she deep down inside knows that Bush is wrong, her ideological apparatus is not allowing her to change course that easily. And I think you see this in some of the logical fallacies in her argument, as pointed out by “Sadder American.” Of course, that could be my own ideological aparatus creeping in….

Anyway, what I think is really fascinating about “Sad American” is the same thing I see in first year composition class essays once in a while: a sort of tone from the writer that is trying to convince herself that, despite the evidence, she is still right. It’s no wonder that there are 281 replies to the SA. A lot of people trying to convince themselves they made the correct choice, right?

There’s be a couple of posts on the mailing list tech-rhet today with the subject line “75 reasons for using Bb,” which is Blackboard, one of the larger course management system set-ups out there. The critiques on tech-rhet with these things have been (basically) a) Bb doesn’t do all of this stuff that easily, b) this isn’t a list of reasons “why” so much as it is a list of capabilities, and c) you could do most (if not all) of these things with other tools, either competing products or “free standing” content management systems and/or good ol’ fashioned web sites, email, and the like. I’d write more about this, but since I am in the midst of grading things tonight, I’ll just let this list stand for itself:

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The following list was compiled from responses made to the larger national Bb listserv.

75 Reasons to Use Blackboard

Content

1. To put unlimited additional resources in the hands of students
2. To post course syllabus for easy access
3. To add content and learning objects
4. To link to library resources and databases
5. To post daily news, quotes, words, trivia, etc.
6. To publish classroom notes or study guides
7. To provide supplementary reading material
8. To create a virtual art gallery
9. To post movie clips
10. To post audio lectures
11. To provide links to useful websites
12. To allow students to read or listen to material repeatedly for understanding
13. To provide students who must miss class with easy access to materials
14. To include a glossary of course terminology

Communication

15. To enhance student-to-student communication
16. To enhance faculty-to-student contact
17. To distribute email messages to students
18. To encourage out of class discussion via discussion boards or chat rooms
19. To provide online homework help (virtual office hours)
20. To encourage collaborative learning
21. To connect students with community leaders and outside experts
22. To get 100% participation in class discussions
23. To reach “shy� students and allow them to express their thoughts
24. To provide opportunities for learning communities
25. To share community events
26. To set up groups for classes (large or small)
27. To send specific emails to a subset (group) of students
28. To facilitate group projects by allowing students to discuss particular topics or exchange certain files
29. To remind students of important deadlines
30. To share student ideas and projects
31. To develop a mentoring system
32. To collect student quotes
33. To help students find study partners
34. To assist in creating connections and inclusion
35. To communicate expectations and objectives
36. To provide advance organization for in-class discussion

Assessment

37. To allow students to monitor their own progress
38. To post assignments and allow students to submit work digitally
39. To assess student progress with just-in-time methods
40. To record, display, calculate, and analyze student scores
41. To publish student writing
42. To conduct student surveys for quick feedback
43. To provide self-help or self-improvement quizzes
44. To create drill and practice exercises
45. To post extra credit work
46. To post answers
47. To give students immediate feedback on quizzes and assignments
48. To keep students apprised of “how they are doing�
49. To facilitate test review
50. To measure student access to course materials and tools
51. To develop formative and summative assessments
52. To provide interactive activities
53. To gauge student understanding and interests
54. To eliminate time consuming exam grading
55. To encourage reflective thinking
56. To organize student papers electronically
57. To promote peer editing for review and suggestions
58. To gather suggestions from students for course improvements

Other

59. To time control access to information by students
60. To copy things from one place to another (within the same course or between courses)
61. To provide continuous access to a student roster
62. To reduce printing and copying costs
63. To provide more time for classroom instruction and activities
64. To encourage students to read their textbook
65. To help students come to class prepared
66. To put an end to the “lost papers� excuse
67. To engage students with different learning styles
68. To provide consistency in course structure
69. To improve retention of course material
70. To engage students outside of class
71. To allow students to review lecture before or after class
72. To meet student expectations
73. To integrate technology into curriculum
74. To provide 24×7 access to course materials—anytime, anywhere
75. To make teaching and learning fun!

See this article, Bush cancels agreement between nouns and verbs, which is from the kinda funny Borowitz Report. I like the sub-title here: “‘I Has a Mandate, and I Intends to Use it,’ Says President.”

Go to http://www.bopnews.com/, which is the “Blogging of the President” web site, and scroll down a bit to take a look at all the maps and graphs and such. I don’t have a lot of patience for the “they stole the election” kind of stuff personally– that’s a bit too paranoid for my tastes– but I do like the wide variety of maps an interpretations of the data here. Might be interesting to compare these maps with what’s being posted on some of the right-wing sites….

See this entry from the blog Many-to-Many, which I came across via Kariosnews. One of my many side projects (with the “billhd” who posted to Kairosnews) is an article about course management systems, and this situation of being forced into using a specific package (Blackboard, WebCT, etc.) to teach a particular class. A couple of thoughts:

* You know, I’m not so sure how often this sort of thing is actually happening nowadays– I guess some research on this might be in order.

* I’m scheduled to teach an online class in Fall 2005, and the way that it works at EMU is online classes are supported through Continuing Education and they use something called eCollege. I haven’t talked with these folks about the details of all this yet, but as I understand it, the main incentive they give here to people to use eCollege is they provide quite a bit of support to teachers. I think you can even do stuff like give these folks hard copies of materials and they will digitize it.

* What I hope/assume that I will do when do this class next year is to use the eCollege interface as a “front end” for the class and then direct students to web sites and such of my own making. And I’ll probably direct them to this web domain, too– that is, I’ll send them to a site I “own” instead of an EMU web site.

* One of the things that Bill and I need to talk and then write about is the metaphor for CMS. It could be said that the institution sees CMS as the same thing as the brick-n-mortar classrooms. If that’s the case, CMS forces folks into a box that is only inches away from the classroom boxes we get forced into in face-to-face teaching. CMS might also be said to be like a required textbook or set of assignments, the sort of approach common in a lot of first year writing programs.

In either case though, it seems to me that what “good teachers” do is figure out how to work within “the system” while simultaneously attempting to subvert it. Of course, that’s easier said than done….