I should be doing any number of other things today/right now, but for whatever reason, I decided today was a good day to try to finally combine my previous blogs into this one. So now this blog has 2,360 entries, 2,238 comments, and dates back to August 2003. Yikes.
Welcoming our robot grading overlords
Well, no, not really– but I thought that post title might be provocative, sort of like writing essays in a way that tricks the grading software.
There’s been a lot of discussion on things like WPA-L and elsewhere about “robo-readers,” as this New York Times piece sums up well, “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously” and this further discussion on Slashdot. The very short version is it turns out that machines are just as capable of scoring writing that is completed as part of standardized tests– things like the GRE or SAT or other writing tests that ask students to respond to a very specific prompt. Writing teachers of various flavors– the WPA-L crowd in general and Les Perelman from MIT in particular– are beside themselves with the wrongness of this software because it’s not human, it can be fooled, and cannot recognize “truth.”
Of course, ETS and Pearson (two of the companies that have developed this software) point out that they don’t intend this software to replace actual human feedback, that they admit this is not a way to check facts, and the software is not a good judge of “poetic” language. And I’ve also seen plenty of humans fooled by untruths in print. But never mind that; writing teachers are angry at the machine.
Now, I mostly (though obviously not entirely) agree with my WPA-L colleagues and Perelman, and, as I wrote about in my previous post, I’m not a fan of education that eliminates teaching and minimizes the opportunity for learning simply to jump through a credentialing loop. So yes, I would agree that taking a batch of first year composition papers and dumping them into the robo-reading hopper to assign grades would a) not work and b) be bad. Though again, it also appears that the people who have developed this software have the same position.
But let’s just say– hypothetically, mind you, and for the sake of argument– that this kind of software and its inevitable improvements might actually not be evil. How might robo-grading (or maybe more accurately automated rating) software actually be “good?”
For starters, if this software is used in the way that ETS and Pearson say they are intending it to be used– that is, as a teaching/learning aid and not a grading tool per se– then it seems to me that this might be potentially useful along the lines of spellchecks, grammar-checks, and readability tests. Is this a replacement for reader/ student/ teacher/ other human interaction in writing classes of various sorts? Obviously not. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful to readers, particularly teachers during the grading process.
Let’s face it: the most unpleasant part of teaching writing is grading– specifically “marking up” papers students turn in to point out errors (and in effect justify the grade to the student) and to suggest ideas for revision. It is very labor-intensive and the most boring part of the job, as I wrote about in some detail last year here. If there was a computer tool out there that really would help me get this work done more efficiently and that would help my students improve, then why wouldn’t I use it?
Second, I think Perelman’s critique about how easily the machine is fooled is a little problematic– or at least it can be turned on its head. It seems to me that if a student completing some standardized test writing is smart enough to out smart the machine– as Perelman demonstrates here— then perhaps that student actually does deserve a high grade from the machine. It’s kind of like Kirk reprogramming the “no win” Kobayashi Maru test so he could win, right?
Third– and this is maybe something writing teachers in particular and writers in general don’t want to accept– writing texts that are well-received by machines is a pretty important skill to master. I know that’s not the intention of this robo-reading software, but my writing teacher colleagues seem to suggest that this is not only an unnecessary skill but a particularly dangerous one. Yet there is an entire web business called Search Engine Optimization that is (in part) about how to write web pages to include frequently searched keyword phrases so that the results appear higher in search engine– e.g., machine– results. The keywords and structure of your monster.com resume can be half the battle in getting found by a potential employer who is using searches– e.g., machines– to find a match.
Anyway, you get the idea. No, I don’t think we ought to turn over the teaching/grading function in writing classes to machines, and I don’t think a robo-grader is going to be able to look into the soul of the writer to seek Truth anytime soon. But I think the blanket dismissal of and/or resistance to these kinds of tools by writing teachers is at best naive. It’s probably more useful to imagine ways these tools can help our teaching practices in the long run.
Learning vs. Teaching vs. Credentialing
There’s been a couple of interesting developments in higher education news in the last couple of days that has me thinking more about how the “education” part of things in colleges and universities actually works. First, there’s the announcement that U of M and several other universities will be offering “free courses” on a variety of different topics for anyone out there on the internets who might be interested. This is being done through an outfit/start-up called Coursera, which I assume is making money through data mining of its users and maybe by eventually morphing into an actual credit-granting enterprise. Here’s an interesting quote from the annarbor.com article about this:
For U-M, adapting to the platform gives faculty a unique way to communicate with alumni and prospective students.
“This is a great way for alumni or prospective Michigan students to experience a little bit of what a U-M education is like,” Scott Page, the professor teaching Model Thinking, said in a release.
Added Martha Pollack, vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs: “This is one more way for us to connect with prospective students and alumni.”
The other event– seemingly the opposite kind of thing but maybe not– comes from Inside Higher Ed in the article “Pacing Themselves.” Here’s a long quote:
The media conglomerate Pearson today announced a partnership with Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana to provide online, self-paced courses that the company says will help Ivy Tech deal with student demand and overcrowding issues in required general education courses.
For Pearson, which already sells modules for instructor-led courses, the move represents a further step in the company’s strategy of inserting itself into virtually every area of e-learning short of full degree programs.
“We thought it was time for us to have a self-paced play that our partners could then plug into their institutions and get more students into higher education,” said Don Kilburn, the CEO of Pearson Learning Solutions.
Meanwhile, the partnership allows Ivy Tech to refer certain students to hands-off self-paced general education courses — which it does not currently offer — without building such courses itself.
“It is a way to test out that modality and see if it works for some students without taking a lot of business risk on our own,” said Kara Monroe, associate vice president for online academic programs at Ivy Tech.
Both of these events problematize in strange ways this mission of education in colleges and universities. And by “educational mission” of the university, I basically mean three things:
- Learning, or more accurately, extending to students the opportunity to learn. Universities are pretty good at that, but so are lots of other things– wikipedia, the public library, about.com and other web sites, a good book, life, etc.
- Teaching, which is when a professor (or instructor or adjunct or grad student) guides a student in learning something. There’s really nothing I teach that students can’t learn on their own through some of the things I mentioned as sources for learning, but the advantage students get in being taught a subject by someone who knows a lot about the subject is guidance, interactions with other learners, systematic efficiency (because teaching is really good at steering learning in a way that is less likely to be counter-productive), positive (and negative) feedback, and so forth.
- Credentialing, which means some sort of evaluation that is recognized by others as having some merit. Practically speaking, this means a “seal of approval” (e.g., grades) given by teachers for these discreet learning units we call “courses,” which are systematically taken (a “major” which leads to a “degree”) and which are also validated by institutions (say EMU) which are in turn validated by both official evaluators (say the North Central Association) and unofficial but certainly more powerful evaluators (various “top university” rankings like US News, what employers say, word of mouth, etc., etc.).
Now, learning, teaching, and credentialing are obviously all related, though in complicated ways. For example, teaching someone something is not the same as them learning it. It takes a willingness to learn and to be receptive to teaching, and everyone who has ever taught– especially something that is not considered by many “fun,” like first year composition– knows there are a surprising number of students who don’t seem able or willing to take on the learning challenge. Another example: a lot of professors are completely comfortable with the teaching and learning part of education, but most would just as soon avoid the credentialing/grading part of what we have to do to make this whole enterprise work. Faculty get even more squeamish when we talk about the mean cousin of credentialing, assessment.
Anyway, to turn back to what I think is troubling (at least to me) about both the Pearson Learning Solutions and the Coursera deal. It seems to me that the Pearson “solution” is a rather cynical way of skipping ahead to just the credentialing leg of the stool and calling it a day. There’s obviously no teaching involved and with only an e-textbook and “10 free hours of online tutoring support,” it doesn’t seem to me like there’s much of a chance for a lot of student learning here either. Besides that, the credential they are trying to provide here is minimal at best. I mean, given that the unofficial value of an Ivy Tech Community College is probably pretty low to begin with (certainly relative to the institutions sponsoring Coursera courses), what does this sort of move do to the perceived market value of their degrees?
The Coursera “great minds” courses might seem at first to be a completely different and more noble venture, but it seems to me that this isn’t education. Sure, there’s a lot of learning potential with these classes, but so what? There are already plenty of places on the ‘net to learn about science fiction and fantasy literature, for example. As of right now, U of M (and I suspect the other institutions associated with this) is not really thinking of this as education at all; it’s marketing, something that might connect with alumni and maybe with potential students.
Of course, this could change. I seriously doubt that U of M would ever accept their own Coursera courses as credential-worthy credit that is the same as their more traditional courses, but that doesn’t mean that Coursera isn’t going to try to sell that credit to someone else. Inside Higher Ed had an article on all this, and here’s a passage that made me think this idea of Coursera granting credit ala Pearson:
“There are no definite plans yet for what courses, if any, might have certificates and, if they exist, how much might be charged for them,” wrote MacCarthy via e-mail. “That said, if there were to be some monetization and revenues in the future, universities would partner with Coursera in determining any future structure or pricing for certificates.”
Ng, one of the Coursera founders, said “no firm decisions have been made yet” on how the company’s university partners might recognize the achievement of their non-enrolled students. “We’ve had informal discussions with the partner universities about different certificate options, but the final decision will be made on a per-university and per-course basis,” Ng wrote via e-mail.
These certificates wouldn’t be the same as credit– well, at least initially, and at least at a place like the University of Michigan. I can imagine a scenario where the Ivy Techs of the world say “sure, we’ll count that as credit,” and I can also imagine a slippery slope where all kinds of institutions– maybe never U of M but places like EMU– start counting a certain number of these certificates as transfer for things like general education.
The other thing that both Pearson and Coursera are attempting here is a version of education without teaching. This is patently obvious in the Pearson/Ivy Tech arrangement, but it is also the case with the Coursera courses. The idea here is to have tens of thousands of students in these classes– potentially a great learning environment, but not something where you could really expect any meaningful teaching. At best, the teaching that might take place is in the form of an army of part-timers to watch over those thousands of students participating in discussions and quizzes and the like. That appears to be the case with their hiring.
So I really don’t think this is the future of higher education on the internet. At least I don’t hope this is the future of higher education on the ‘net. I’d kind of like to keep the teaching in education….
“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”
I got suckered into a point of purchase/cash register impulse buy the other day. It was The Altantic, and the thing that got me was the cover headline “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” I should have known better. After all, this is the same magazine that brought us “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” a few years ago.
As was the case with the Nicholas Carr article (and I can now only assume that Stephen Marche, the author of this Facebook piece, is busily preparing a book-length treatment on his topic), I think the answer to his headline is “not really, but it’s more complicated than that.” Marche is a clear and thoughtful writer, and if nothing else, I can see this being a useful reading in one of the various classes I teach where social media comes up as a topic, particularly undergraduate classes. As I understand it, I think Marche is saying that a) there are lots of things that have increased “loneliness” (and we’ll get to whatever the heck that is supposed to mean in a moment), and b) it depends a lot on how you use Facebook. Marche trots out a lot of pretty well-known bits of pop-research/knowledge on how suburbia, television, etc. (think of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone) have caused us as a culture to be more lonely, all of which is to say that at its worse, Facebook is one among many contributors to loneliness.
And then there’s this quote paraprhasing John Cacioppo, who Marche calls the “world’s leading expert on loneliness” (and of course I need to point out that being the world’s leading expert on anything is lonely, and being the leading expert on loneliness has to be the most lonely of all):
Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So of social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.
Duh, right? And I assume we can substitute “talk about issues of the day with people far away from you” or “meet for dinner and drinks” or “invite people to a party” for “football” and be fine.
Ultimately, I think this article raises a couple of questions that are different from the nature of social networks and Facebook per se. First, how is it that psychologists study “loneliness?” Because while Marche does a good job of citing/quoting from the scholarship on this, it all seems kind of sketchy to me– though, of course, this is not my area of expertise. For example, according to Marche, the “best tool yet” for measuring loneliness is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which is basically 10 questions, each of which begin “how often do you feel…” Here’s a link to an interactive version based on the survey; for me, my answers boil down to “it depends.”
Second, I always wonder about the extent to which the issue is not really “loneliness” but the complex emotions and connotations of the word “friend,” and how Facebook’s choice of that word complicates our relations between “friends” on Facebook and our relationship/interactions with Facebook as an interface and a tool. Would there be articles like this one if Facebook had chosen instead to call the people you connect with “contacts,” or “connections,” or “acquaintances?” After all, my Facebook friends in “real life” actually range from “people I care about and love deeply” all the way down to “people I don’t know at all” and even a few “people I actually don’t like or trust.” What if we instead had “followers” ala Twitter, a social network which (at least so far) seems significantly less emotionally loaded than Facebook? What if Facebook had always had categories of designating the degree of friendship and the nature of the connection, sort of like the professional Linkedin?
So, even though Marche is suggesting Facebook as a service is making us lonely and disconnected (and it’s not as if he’s the first person to make this claim), I think the real anxiety around Facebook is with its implications on “friendship.” Facebook flattens the inherent hierarchy of friendship and relationships, putting “BFFs,” boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses, ex-Sig-Os, frenemies, work colleagues, people you went to high school with, and Velveeta Cheese all in the same big bucket– and let’s not forget that’s a bucket Facebook draws on to sell us specifically targeted ads. It is nerve-racking and anxiety-inducing to think that my friendship status with people and products are on Facebook essentially the same thing.
A brief “the new iPad” review
As an official iPad expert and now owner of the iPad 3 the new iPad, I thought I would offer a brief review. Even though the iPad has existed for just over two years, I have already owned four of them. I bought the first iPad when he came out in March 2010. The following year, I bought the iPad 2 for my birthday in March 2011. That turned out to not a great idea because EMU ended up more or less permanently loaning me one because of a grant program I’m involved in. Long story. Anyway, all at one point in time I actually have three iPads. I mention all this because this is the main reason I have the new iPad in the first place: I sold my first two iPads to finance the new iPad, and since I didn’t sell the one I got from EMU I still have a spare.
There are lots of good places to look on the web for various reviews of the new iPad. Of the ones I’ve seen, I think this one at the site Macgasm makes the most sense— go check it out, including the pictures and their answers to the question “should I get a new iPad?” For me,the new iPad feels a little bit more zippy in in launching applications and the like, and the cameras are significantly better. Other than that, it mostly comes down to the so-called retina display. It is impressive, but to be completely honest, I’m not sure it really is that much more noticeably better than the previous iPad. Maybe I haven’t use the new iPad enough, or maybe I’m just having better memories of the previous iPad, but it seems like reading on the new iPad is pretty much the same as the old iPad. Though it is better. This side-by-side comparison pictures in that Macgasm article are pretty accurate in my experience.
The other feature with the new iPad that is interesting is the ability to dictate text. In fact, I wrote a draft of this post by first dictating it into my iPad. I was hoping to report that this is a great tool, potentially useful for academic types trying to take fieldnotes, for example. Unfortunately, I think it is kind of buggy. I don’t know why, but my cell phone with Siri seems to take better dictation. I suspect that this dictation software will get better though, and it might have to do with how I am using it too.
So, is it worth it? If you don’t have an iPad at all, sure, absolutely, and unless you’re on a tight budget, spring for the new iPad instead of the more modestly priced iPad2. If you have the first iPad and you’re starting to feel like you want some of the features that only came with the iPad2 and now the new iPad (a better display, cameras, iMovie, a few other apps, etc.), sure, get the new one. Though if you are still using your original iPad do do some basic computing stuff, read, play a few rounds of Angry Birds, etc, then probably not. And if you happen to have a couple extra iPads laying around that are easily sold, then the new one is probably worth it too.
CCCCs in St. Louis: Review/Recap
My semester has been complicated, mostly by a search that is still not completed, some teaching challenges, and some department poly-ticks I won’t be describing in any great detail. So in a lot of ways, the CCCCs this year was more of a distraction than an event for me, and it was a rapid and somewhat unusual distraction at that.
Sure, I saw some okay panels. I thought the talk of the ghost(s) of Jim Berlin was interesting if only because he is now at this point a fainting (okay, fading, but I will keep that) memory for most of the upcoming scholars in the field. I enjoyed seeing some of EMU’s graduate students presenting about Writing Center/WAC stuff because they were some of EMU’s graduate students. I liked the panel on Latour I went to okay– certainly better than some of my colleagues– and it made me think that I really need to read some more Latour. Actually, that in general is a take-away for this year’s CCCCs for me: I really need to read more. Like a lot more. A LOT more. And while it was very cool to see Richard Lanham speak and when I could understand him he was great, he was so bad with the microphone that I’d guess that I only heard about a third of what he had to say.
My own presentation and my fellow speakers on the were okay. It was a bit of an exercise of “which one of these things is not like the other” because my co-presenters were speaking about hypertext fiction and digital poetry. They were both pretty young and new and there weren’t a lot of words exchanged between us, which was unfortunate. On the plus-side there were more people there than have seen the YouTube version of my video so far (as of the time I’m posting this, it’s 26), and there was some good discussion. So that too was okay.
And the more important non-presentation aspects of the conference were okay to good, too. I had some nice lunches and meet-ups with old colleagues, current ones, friends, and potential ones; I had a lovely dinner with old friends after the very excellent Bedford-St.Martin’s party at City Museum; had a lovely luncheon post-Lanham with a variety of folks and good friends John and Karen (who I’ll see again tomorrow, in theory); and I had quite the night on the town with Steve B. and then joined by John D. and Derek.
So while I had some good encounters and such and St. Louis was quite frankly a lot better than I thought it was going to be, it still falls for me into the okay category, and I think there might be two reasons for that. First, for reasons that are more complicated than it is worth to try to explain here, I traveled and stayed by myself. Now, that worked out better than expected because of an unexpected airplane voucher (let’s just say for now that after I get money back from EMU for my expenses, I expect to turn a profit on this thing) and I very much enjoyed my free internets in the otherwise dumpy hotel the Mayfair, but missed the camaraderie of my usual traveling and rooming companions. Second, I wasn’t really there quite long enough. I think it would have been a little better had I been there a little earlier– Wednesday night instead of Thursday morning– and/or a little later.
Maybe I’ll stay longer next year. Actually, next year could be really interesting with the Las Vegas locale. Annette and Will are thinking of joining me, but they would probably not come out until the end/the weekend part of the trip, which might then make the CCCCs 2013 a combination of family time preceded by a middle-aged and dramatically more tame version of The Hangover with my usual traveling companions. We’ll see.
CCCCs in St. Louis: Preview
Here’s a link to the Google Sites page I’ve set up for my CCCCs in St. Louis talk, “Amateur Auteurs: The Problems of Teaching and Assessing Multimedia in Writing Classes Amateur Auteurs: The Challenge of Producing and Publishing Multimedia Scholarship in Writing Studies.” I’m setting it up on a Google Sites page mostly because I am curious to play around with the Google Analytics tracking stuff on this. I’ll keep folks posted.
I am sure more is going to be coming soon, but for the time-being, I need to go pack and do a few other things to get ready for my trip. It’s sort of a “surgical strike” this year at the CCCCs: in Thursday and home by early afternoon Saturday. It’s also unusual in that I’m not sharing a room with anyone purely for scheduling reasons. My usual traveling companions left for the conference much earlier than I had planned, and all that meant I needed to make my own plans. It’ll be nice to have that luxury though, I am sure.
Boldly (or foolishly) going where I haven’t gone before: HTML5
I’m teaching Writing for the World Wide Web right now, a course I’ve taught about once (sometimes twice) a year since I developed it back around 1999/2000. There’s always been a coding component to the course, and despite the changes in web publishing that have taken place over the last decade or so, I still firmly believe students in this writing course should have to get in there with HTML and CSS, even with things like wordpress and social networks where coding is really unnecessary.
When I first learned and started teaching this stuff back in the mid-1990s, you could make analogies between making web pages and the early days of printing: that is, the first printers made the books, wrote the books (or printed previously written books like the Bible), and sold the books, all pretty much out of the same shop. Back in the day, working in “web publishing” meant you wrote copy and you wrote code, and you probably did some other computer server stuff too. I don’t think that’s as true anymore, at least based on what I see in ads and what students out on the job market tell me.
That said, I think a “working knowledge” of HTML and CSS is still pretty important even for that tech/pro writer who is only going to be writing copy that goes into a CMS or that someone else codes/deals with. I had a student a few years ago in this class who had (still does, actually) a “real job” as a tech writer and she told me that after my class, she was able to have completely different and more productive conversations with the person who actually deals with the company’s web site. So even if this student doesn’t do a whole lot more with HTML and CSS herself, I feel like my mission has been accomplished.
Now, I’ve always had a bit of a “learning along with my students” approach to code. One of my first publications was “Teachers Learning (Not Teaching) HTML With Students: An Experimental Lesson Plan for Introducing Web Authoring Into Writing Classes.” The title is basically what it’s about: instead of “teaching” coding to students– which suggests and/or requires a certain level of expertise that is above and beyond the students’ knowledge– why not try to learn how to do HTML along with students? I called this an “experimental lesson plan” because back then, I really did know more about HTML coding than the vast majority of my students. But I kind of put myself in this position of learning along with my students when I first started messing with CSS. In fact, I was a “leader” in a workshop on CSS (along with people who knew what they were doing, Bill Hart-Davidson and Steve Benninghoff) where I knew nothing about CSS, and it was a good year or two of teaching Writing for the WWW after that before I finally got a working knowledge of CSS under my belt. Anyway, all this is to say that I have had plenty of these “let’s learn this together” kinds of experiences in this and other classes, and generally, I think it works out.
So with that in mind, I decided to give this HTML5 thing a whirl in my class, even though I knew nothing about it before the term began. We’re using Head First HTML5 Programming, which builds off of the book Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. I like the approach that Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson take in explaining HTML and CSS in that book and it seems like they do a pretty decent job of picking out the highlights of what’s most important to understand and what you need to know. So I am willing to trust them when it comes to them explaining the basics of HTML5. And this brings me to a disturbing realization that is settling in as I try to learn with/teach my students this: I’m not sure I understand HTML5, and I’m not convinced I ever will.
I’ve always thought it was kind of silly when people claimed that HTML and CSS were “programming languages” because, well, they’re not– or, without going too deeply into the definition of “programming” (let alone “language”), HTML is just not that complicated, and CSS is only just a little more complicated. It certainly is not learning a new language. In contrast, HTML5 is essentially javascript, and that my friends, that is a computer language, and thus there is a reason why this book is called HTML Programming.
I am barely ahead of my students in the book as I write this post (and no, I didn’t read the book before I assigned it, something I do all the time, believe it or not), and I have two reactions so far. First, this is waaaaay over my head, though since many of my students are better at and more practiced in mathematical equations than me (the last math class I took was in 1984, and I learned the other day that my high school freshmen-level son has now eclipsed my math skills based on his coursework), they might have a better handle on this. We’ll see. Second, I am not yet convinced that this is something that needs to be in a class about writing for the web, for while I think a working knowledge of HTML and CSS is pretty important for understanding how content online works and it is definitely a “writerly” activity, it seems to me that HTML5 so far is so much more programming-oriented. From what I’ve learned so far, I don’t think I need to know HTML5 to successfully write web-based content in the same way I don’t need to know how my transmission works to drive my car.
Mind you, it’s interesting, much in the same way that it might be interesting to take a class in transmission repair. I’m just not sure it’s necessary for me and my students to know, and I don’t think I’ve ever put myself so far out there on teaching “learning” something along with my students.
A late start to birthmonth/link round-up
It’s been a pretty busy and confusing couple of weeks around here for me. Besides some work stuff I’m not going to go into in any detail right now (and this even showed up on twitter), I also have been kind of thrown off by Will’s winter break followed by our winter break, both of which weren’t really “breaks” because it was just work work work. Plus I made the mistake of assigning some HTML5 projects in Writing for the World Wide Web— a mistake because I don’t really know anything about HTML5.
Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here and I’ve got lots of links that have been piling up, so I thought I’d blog about those a bit tonight. So in no particular order:
8 tools to make your web site for free Mostly graphic editing things, but pretty nice list.
The top 10 ways to create digital magazines A nice list of resources here. It’s kind of interesting: about a year ago, I got involved in a mobile computing initiative here at EMU that has kinda floundered a bit. My proposal/interest in this as to learn more about software for producing documents (books, magazines, etc.) that are intended to be read on the iPad. A year ago, I didn’t know a whole lot about the options. But now, besides these choices, I’m working on converting my failed textbook project into an iPad book with iBooks Author. I’m looking forward to investigating these software options, too. It’s interesting what a year makes in iPad-land.
Top 10 pro tips and tools for budding web developers and designers. A lot of “top” whatever numbers in this update. I like this one if for no other reason one of the tips is get educated.
100 Mac Apps to Rule Them All. Sure, you don’t need most of these, but it’s a cool list.
The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words. Nice article, really a good one for 354, Critical Digital Literacies.
From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg. Actually, this is a review of this book by a blogger at e4innovation.com
Ebooks: The Giant Disruption. Nice article about the pros and not so much of eBooks. This is another topic I can see figuring into 354 the next time I teach it, and maybe 516, too.
Nothing Personal
I don’t know Geoffrey Sirc. I have met him, I think, but that’s about it. The only other thing of his I have read (other than the essay that is the topic of this CCCarnival, his CCC article “Resisting Entropy”) is his contribution to the Wysocki et al collection, “Box Logic.” I have always thought it was a so-so piece, though my students tend to like it a lot more than I do. By the way, it’s interesting as I look back at that 2004 essay and read the opening sentences: “Let me confess: it has been a frustrating last several years for me in my writing courses. The rapid advance of technology has meant a pedagogical dilemma for me: just what do I do in the classroom, what do I teach?”
And I haven’t read any of the books he is reviewing in this essay. I at least own Hawk’s book and I suspect I would agree with Sirc’s review of Shipka’s book, though I also suspect I would like Miller’s book and, if I was a WPA, I might look to the Harris et al book for some ideas. My own limitations thus make it difficult for me to evaluate the quality of Sirc’s review in relation to what he’s reviewing. But it seems to me that this is such an odd and provocative essay because it’s only partially a review. The rest of it is something else. He writes in the opening paragraph:
On a personal, practitioner level, one always wishes for more sustained wonderfulness in the work of one’s students and so turns to the classroom credos others have formed as a result of their own sustained practice in the field, looking hungrily for inspiration from their pedagogy. On the professional level, especially after doing historical scholarship and seeing, shockingly revealed, a recursive, abysmal spiral of the same essay-based pedagogy from the field’s origin onward, one can’t but wonder why the field on the whole seems so stunted and contrary and so looks for illuminating answers in how others have surveyed and interpreted the field, finding, perhaps, hidden avenues leading out of otherwise dead ends from the patient reconsideration of roads taken and not.
As I think about this passage and the one I quote from eight years earlier, it seems to me that Sirc has, for lack of a better way of putting it, made up his mind some time ago on these matters. Which, I suppose, is its own form of entropy.
The most problematic part of this review for me is the way that Sirc just hammers Thomas Miller for his book The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns. Like I said, I haven’t read it, though with final chapter titles like “At the Ends of the Profession” and “Conclusion: Why the Pragmatics of Literacy Are Critical,” I can kind of imagine why Sirc is less than impressed. There’s a long passage on page 510 where Sirc, foaming at the mouth a bit, takes up the value of Henry James (who I personally could never actually read when I was a student and who I have not been moved to return to either), New Criticism, Wordsworth, and all things literary. Sirc concludes this passage: “Part of refiguring English studies means rethinking composition’s sniffy attitude toward literariness; it means our subfield’s reimagining literature as a cultural value and practice, refiguring how it fits in a first-year course centered around writing.”
I hear echoes of this conversation from a week or so ago here, and my basic response is the same. It’s not that literature cannot be an engaging part of a first year writing course; it’s just that a first year writing course shouldn’t be about literature, and it turns out there are a lot of texts and subjects and ideas that can ennoble and enrich students’ minds and souls other than literature. I majored in English and then I was in a creative writing program where the goal was making literary art, so this idea that there was something besides literature that could be of cultural value took me a while to accept. And from a more pragmatic point of view, if you want to make first year college students hate all things literary, make them read and write about The Ambassadors.
Now, I do think revisiting the history of the field ala Hawk and others is useful, and I can see Shipka’s assignments and alternative approaches to writing as provocative and engaging. I also think these things are happening in lots of writing classes right now. Or at least they are happening along side uninspiring and regressive pedagogy, which is one of the long-standing problems of our field: the teacher who believes in students making objects as research projects works right along side the teacher who feels the five paragraph structure is critical and who is a stickler for the use of who versus whom.
Then again, I wonder about Sirc’s response to Harris, Miles, and Paine’s book. He seems particularly critical of their grading rubric language, which I agree does come across as a bit robotic. Sirc writes:
Let’s please end the sham of this all-too-common editorial board/peer review practice: I’ve received good feedback from editors, but never such that I radically rethought a piece or even did more than tweak. More often, I’ve received misguided, even atrocious editorial advice. Outside feedback never really enters into what I’m doing. James writes to Wells in 1902: “certainly I shall not again draw up detailed & explicit plans for unconvinced & ungracious editors. . . . A plan for myself, as copious and developed as possible I always do draw up” (Horne 376). Peer response remains popular, I suspect, because a certain fiction of audience is easily teachable and helps reduce the complexity of creation into a simplified sort of flow chart—do X to cue Y in your reader, do Z to give your writing authority. My students are taking a class with me; one of the benefits is that they get to have an ongoing conversation about their writing with someone who knows something about writing, who can help coach their work, identify strengths and weaknesses. The thought of blowing off a class in a coffee shop, listening to students’ pleasant, phatic comments on their assignments, would make me wonder if the whole thing was worth it.
It seems to me there is a space between valuing useful feedback and ignoring editorial response because the author knows best, between believing that as the teacher you are The Expert and turning over the whole enterprise to the students to sort out for themselves. In my own growth as a writer, particularly as a fiction writer, peer review was critical. I learned from the feedback of others of course, but I also learned a lot about myself in learning how to give others feedback on their writing. So when I teach peer review in writing classes, I’m not trying to get the students to do the work for me– though when peer review works (and I will be the first to admit it often does not work well in first year writing classes), it does help. Rather, I’m trying to teach students about the process of peer review and how it helps to both give and to receive feedback on writing in order to become a better writer.
And besides all that, my guess (again, I haven’t read it) is Harris, Miller, and Paine have written/edited a book useful in addressing the extremely practical and real conditions inherent in first year writing programs. These are mandatory courses taught to very inexperienced students who frequently come into college with extraordinarily inaccurate ideas about learning let alone writing, and taught by comparatively inexperienced teachers who are rarely familiar with the scholarly and theoretical discussions of the field. At any decent-sized university, we teach a couple hundred of these classes a year, all of which (in theory) are supposed to be meeting common outcomes and goals, all of which (again, in theory) under the guidance/direction of professionals who occupy that weird institutional space between “professor” and “administrator,” the WPA. And despite (or maybe because) of its service/quasi-janitorial space on the academic food chain, it is a course that others at the university see as enormously important, especially when it comes to fixing the problems of students’ writing in other courses. That, I assume, is the real world context and purpose behind Teaching with Student Texts. So, given that Sirc is a critic of this institutional function of first year writing in the first place, it is probably not that surprising that he’s not a fan.
Like I said, I haven’t read these books and and I don’t know Sirc. But by the end of this essay, I feel like I know a lot more about him than I do about the books he reviewed.