Category: Writing

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"At the heard of the writers strike, a tangled web"

I’m doing a little web surfing this morning before getting ready for the NCTE– perhaps the last time I’ll be online on this trip since I don’t expect to be back here until later tonight, and since I’d have to pay another $10 for internet access for that time, I think I’ll probably wait to post any thoughts about the conference until Saturday night from home.

In any event, while surfing, I came across this article from the Chicago Tribune, “At the heart of the writers strike, a tangled Web.” It’s interesting stuff to me as a writer and a “technology guy,” and I can imagine that this strike will be something worthy of study in the future. Here’s a quote:

As the screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams”) says in an explanatory video at United Hollywood (unitedhollywood.blogspot.com), a quasi-official strike blog, “This is our generation’s moment.”

The writers union gave in to producers and took a pay cut when royalty rates for home-video sales were being negotiated in the 1980s, he says, and it was a huge mistake to compromise merely because it was an unproven business. Now, the issue is another fledgling business, the Internet, threatening to again change the means by which people get their entertainment.

“I don’t want, 30 years from now, writers looking back at us, saying, ‘What were these clowns thinking about? How could they not know that the digital revolution was everything?’ ” Robinson says.

But now I gotta get ready for the teacher-type gig.

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Innovative Wikipedia assignment kind of smells like comp/rhet pedagogy

There’s a good article in the October 29 Inside Higher Ed, “When Wikipedia is the assignment.” It’ll be good for something like English 516. It’s another report from the Educause conference, and it’s about how a professor teaching a course in the University of Washington at Bothell’s “Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences” program (sounds a bit like a gen ed class to me) has required her students to post their papers to Wikipedia. To quote from the article:

At first glance, a college term paper and a Wikipedia entry appear to have little in common. Term papers are intended for an “extremely limited audience, namely, me,� as Groom pointed out, they have little impact outside of the classroom and are constrained to a specific “time� and “place� in the world of ink-on-paper documents. “That is not a very good model of scholarship, to say that anything you produce [belongs] in this tiny space,� she said.

On the other hand, shared, public online documents have characteristics in common with parts of the academic review process. “The shift to thinking about placing the term paper as a Wikipedia encyclopedia entry allows for another level of peer review,� [Martha] Groom said. Such entries have references and citations; allow for a process of repeated, continual editing; and encourage collaborations between authors.

They also reach a much wider audience, through the Wikipedia site and search engines. “How do you motivate students to do their best work?� she asked — implying that the answer lies in the possibility of others viewing it. The public nature of Wikipedia content also means that, in theory, students would be less likely to reuse others’ material as their own.

In short, Wikipedia is a good place for students to publish their work because it encourages students to write beyond the teacher, it encourages revision/peer review/collaboration, it shows the importance of citation, and it makes writing public. Sound familiar?

Now, don’t get me wrong– I think what Groom is doing here is great, and I think there are lots of reasons why this would be a fantastic activity for fy comp or other research writing classes. But I always have some involuntary eye-rolling when someone in another discipline discovers something about writing pedagogy (e.g., “hey, let’s get students to write something not just for the teacher!” or “hey, let’s get them to collaborate on their writing!”) that folks in my field have known for decades.

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"Faking" the Palmer Method

As part of my always on-going interest in things like early writing technologies and teaching, I’m posting this article from the Cheboygan Tribune, “I was taught the Palmer Method, but mostly faked it,” a reminiscence about learning how to write way back when by Bruce Callander. The most interesting part of the article for me is Callander’s description of how Palmer came to be so popular in the early 20th century:

Palmer was good at fancy writing, which included drawing birds and leaping deer along with the letters. As a school teacher, however, he developed a less-complicated method of writing that retained the free-flowing letters but not all the embellishments. His basic idea was that you should use your whole arm, not just the fingers.

If he had stuck to teaching, things would have been easier for the rest of us, but he began to write out his lessons and publish them. By 1912, he was selling a million copies of the course per year. By the time he died in 1927, some 25 million Americans had learned to write by the Palmer Method. I was not one of them because, at that date, I was only 3 years old, but, along with thousands of other youngsters, I was soon to be exposed to his approach.

Thank goodness I type….

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Ward Churchill, Academic Publishing, upcoming Kairos article

It’s funny how some of these things link together– or maybe how I make links between them:

While browsing my google reader feed this morning, I came across this article from Inside Higher Ed, “Ward Churchill Fired.” Old news, but basically Churchill was let go by the University of Colorado because (officially, at least) because of what has been called “overwhelming evidence” of scholarly misconduct. When this case was still an issue, I wrote on my blog and on the Inside Higher Ed site that Churchill shouldn’t be fired because of some unpopular views on 9/11. But when it turns out that he was cheating in his scholarship, well, that’s a different story. Still, I think this paragraph sort of sums up my feelings about the whole thing:

The meaning of the Churchill case has been heatedly debated over the past two-plus years. To Churchill and his defenders, he is a victim of politics and of a right wing attack on freedom of thought. To Brown and others at the university, Churchill’s case is not about politics at all about enforcing academic integrity and punishing those who don’t live up to basic rules of research honesty. To many others in academe, the Churchill case has been less clearcut. Many academics have said that they are troubled by both the findings of research misconduct against Churchill and by the reality that his work received intense scrutiny only after his political views drew attention to him.

This article lead me to this interesting blog post by Aaron Barlow on a blog that I will probably add to my feed reading called Free Exchange on Campus. Barlow’s post is trying to parse through the meaning of the Churchill case in complex terms so I won’t try to simplify it here, but I admire his efforts of trying to sort it out.

Anyway, reading Barlow’s post lead me to another post on the Free Exchange on Campus blog that lead me to this, “University Publishing in A Digital Age,” on another site I ought to add to the feed, Ithaka, which is site about promoting “the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide.” Here’s the abstract of this piece:

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing�. Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.

This paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.

I haven’t had a chance to read the full report yet, though I kind of wish it had come out a few weeks/months ago. Forthcoming in Kairos is going to be “Version 2.0” of an article I had originally had published in College Composition and Communication Online, “Where Do I list this on my CV? Considering the Value of Self-Published Web Sites.” Had I known about this Ithaka report earlier, some of what’s in the abstract here might have been good to incorporate in this revised article. Oh well; at least my thinking now and in 2002 are in line with some others.

Oh, PS:
Inside Higher Ed had a piece about this Ithaka report, too.

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A clean, well-lighted space in the big city

Via Maud Newton, I came across this interesting link: The Mercantile Library Writing Studio in New York City. Basically, for as little as $100 a month (if you are just writing at night, for example), you can get access to a desk, a locker to keep personal things, and a computer and/or electrical outlets for your laptop.

I can imagine that the struggling writer living in a dinky apartment in the big city would very much welcome such a space. And this also reminds me of an experience in my MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University oh so many years ago. A bunch of us got together and had a kind of party with a bunch of MFA types in the art department in their studios. Now these people had cool work spaces with all kinds of mini construction projects and stuff hanging about.

Which reminds me: one of the things I want to continue to do today is to get my work space “BAWS” ready, though I’m close as it is. It’s in the basement, which is not exactly the kind of place where a lot of people like to work (it isn’t as clean as ideal, and it is not necessarily well-lit either), but it is big, quiet, comfy, etc. I just need to clean up and organize a bit so I feel like I can get down to it.

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I didn't even know it was ill

Via Huffington Post comes this, “Email is Dead,” at least to teens who use MySpace and Facebook.

I never buy these kinds of pronouncements. While I do like Facebook and all, but I certainly don’t use it as a substitute for email. And frankly, a lot of my students at EMU do not have a Faceebook or a MySpace account, and they have no interest in such a thing. danah boyd got in a bit of a dust-up recently by making some generalizations about Facebook versus MySpace users, but it seems to me the group she left off entirely were the folks who either have gotten off the Facebook/MySpace bandwagon and/or who never got on it in the first place.