Author: dmueller

How will I know when I’m blogging?

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I’m posting my first lil’ write-up on the Braddocks.  And I should beg
your pardon for not asking whether anyone cares if I turn this weblog toward
self-serving notes on some days (wait…nevermind…I do that every day). 
Periodically, over the next few weeks, I hope to register a series of scrappy
notes like this.  They’re not wonderfully critical or connected; they’re
not aimed at any research project.  They’re rather more like the solid (squiggly?) paint-lines along the highway to Syracuse’s
CCR program in the fall.  With that, I also confess to testing out Scribe–a
free note-organizing app.  These few notes are shaping up in Scribe as a way to see how it works, whether it’s worth the price.  Well, it will be. 
The program works.  How well, I just can’t be sure yet. One of the best
parts is how it fits conveniently on my 64MB jump drive and runs from there via
a USB port, making it easy to switch from home to work and back again.

I had to smile at myself more than once, chuckle, grin inside about my sense
of humor in this whole experiment.  A lot of behind-the-blog antics. 
A lot of tongue-in-cheek and silliness over the idea of taking myself seriously
here.  It’s not official, but I prefer to play around at Earth Wide
Moth.  For now, I’m resistant  to poisoning my blog with
responsibility; responsibility is everywhere else. 

Most of the way through Richard Braddock’s essay, I decided to mix it
up.  Avoid a linear reading of the honorary essays.  I pasted the
table of contents into Excel, inserted a random integer formula, and sorted by
the RAND() column.  Spice it up, you know? Before long, I’ll create a list
of my plan over in the sidebar (along with the ‘About’ note I’ve been mentioning).  And one more thing: I’m not applying a tidy, syntopical format to the essays, covering them only as Mo Adler would want me to.  Just jotting loose notes, free-associating, reacquainting with the Braddocks I’ve read and getting to know the ones I haven’t.  That pretty well covers the who, what and why. 

Braddock, 1975, “Frequency and Placement”

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 Braddock, Richard. “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Ed.
Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 29-42.

Big Idea
Braddock’s essay on the placement and patterns of topic sentences exposes a problem of referring students to mythic truths–affirmed in popular textbooks old and new–about professional expository writing. His empirical research and methodical investigation (lots of data-counts, tables) of faulty advice about prevalent organizational patterns is an affront to the echo and reiteration of uncritical teaching. His essay calls for
conscientious attention to topical organization in paragraphs.

Terms of Import
t-unit (minimal terminal unit , Kellogg Hunt (1965)) — the “shortest grammatically allowable sentence into which…[writing can] be segmented” (31).
delayed-completion topic sentence (35)–undeclared predicate forces us to read beyond the seminal t-unit and into a subsequent sentence
assembled topic sentence (35)–infused with quoted bits from another source
inferred topic sentence (35)–implied topic that cannot be reconstructed by quoting phrases from the original text
major topic sentence (35)–reflection of the “larger stadia of discourses,” like Irmcher’s “paragraph bloc”

Monday Morning
Simply put, teachers of writing should be cautious to make unfounded claims likening work done by students to work done by professionals. If we demand students organize paragraphs by locating topic sentences at the beginning and the end of their paragraphs, we must not justify the requirement by referring to foggy,
disproved characterizations of a larger writing institution. Braddock’s research establishes that only 45% of 761
paragraphs studied used simple topic sentences; only 16% located those topic sentences in the first or final sentence of the graf. 

So, 1.) We should always be skeptical about common truths in textbooks; 2.) We should not attest to gross generalizations about expository prose or, heck, even refer to “most” expository prose working in a particularly systematic way unless we are able to attach illustrative examples; 3.) We should watch for topical variations in students’ expository writing and teach organizational variations as a controllable feature of composition (particularly calling attention to it during stages of revision, I think).

Interrogations
How much time and attention do writing instructors give to teaching about
t-units or topic sentences in 2004? Is the concept of topic sentences irresponsible if it leaves off the subtleties and variations? Should instruction about topic sentences in expository prose foreground
the act(ion) of research writing? When should students be welcomed to think about it? Is it inline with broader studies of textual organization (merging HTML, visual rhetorics, distributed schemes)? How do we
teach organizational awareness? Outlining? Mapping? Of students’ writing? Popular writing? How much time and energy does this deserve in a FY writing course? In an advanced expository course? Is this essay
still regarded as important (for its methods, perhaps, as much as its contribution to more sophisticated pedagogy)? Or is it rather more like a shelved artifact? 

Passages Passages
“This sample of contemporary professional writing did not support the claims of textbook writers about the
frequency and location of topic sentences in professional writing. That does not, of course, necessarily mean the same findings would hold for scientific and technical writing or other types of exposition. Moreover, it does not all mean that composition teachers should stop showing their students how to develop paragraphs from clear topic sentences. Far from it. In my opinion, often the writing in the 25 essays would have been
clearer and more comfortable to read if the paragraphs had presented more explicit topic sentences. But what this study does suggest is this: While helping students use clear topic sentences in their writing and identify variously presented topical ides in their reading, the teacher should not pretend that professional writers largely follow the practices he is
advocating" (39).

Quiet While I Drill Your Head

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In the dentist’s chair this morning.  Hayakawa in my lap.  Getting
x-rayed, poked, scraped, polished, flossed.  Sprayed, vacuum-sucked. 
Shined by the brightest light ever put to me.  Hovered over by a masked
agent of the dental conspirators.  "Open wide.  Turn your head to
your right."  

I brush twice each day, floss once.  Tooth Invaders was one of the first
video games I ever owned; J. and me up late on the C64 with black and white TV,
scrubbing bacteria. Tooth brushing is ritual.  But in the dentist’s
chair-cranked-back, my mouth takes to bleeding.  Things a coherent, sober
person wouldn’t allow anyone to do: sharp metal prod to bare gums,
touched.  It was awful.  It is always, time after time,
awful.  Still, I return.

Why Hayakawa (Language in Thought and Action)? Haven’t read it before.
Quite a mix in the selected bibliography. Couple of interesting sections (though
brief) on maps, extensional world as territory, and also on the levels of
abstraction with a drawing of the ladder.  When the dental assistant
finished grinding my teeth, I picked up the book again, started reading where
I’d left off fifteen minutes earlier:

No matter how beautiful a map may be, it is useless to a traveler unless it
accurately shows the relationship of places to each other, the structure of
the territory.  If we draw, for example, a big dent in the outline of a
lake for artistic reasons, the map is worthless.  If we are just drawing
maps for fun, without paying any attention to the structure of the region,
there is nothing in the world to prevent us from putting in all the extra
curlicues and twists we want in the lakes, rivers, and roads. No harm will be
done unless someone tries to plan a trip by such a map. [emphasis in
original]

Continue reading →

So Pretty in the Sky

/ dmueller

It’s not like I’ve been sitting idle all evening. I have, for what it’s worth,
come very very close to giving this PC a good neoLuddite thrashing. I
just don’t have the right equipment to make movies sing. Went from a flubbed
synch (slides didn’t match cues in the song) to a Sony app which could give
me AVI format but not MPEG2 (with no good explanation…the documentation is…how
bad must it be before we no longer call it documentation?). Used yet another
app to convert the AVI to MPEG 2, and a fair amount of unwelcome cropping came
along with the switch–going from 720×480 to 480×480. Needed it in MPEG2 for
the gate to VHS for viewing in the classroom. So what is it? A digi-video of
D.’s lesson plan where second graders draw theme-oriented pictures (unwittingly,
they work from phrases in the lyrics) to concoct a frame by frame “music video.”
Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” and well-timed in light of all the
world news. Please don’t be deterred by the slow download; it’s the best second-grade
picture show we could muster.

Click to view.

And now back to grading papers.

^The vid’s autoload was gunking up my
bandwidth, so I redeposited it at the back of the server.  Click the TV if
you’d like to check it out.^

Icing Sore Kairos

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

The side panel is nicely redecorated now, arranged to my liking. 
Because this long weekend ends at midnight tonight and tomorrow is a day heaped
with appointments, athletics rigmarole and student writing, the side features
will remain just so for a while.  Or just so-so for a while, depending on
your view.  The only thing I hope to add over there is an about
cognomen–the insignia of self tucked to the right (or left, depending on where
you sit from the position of your monitor).  

Last night, I started to write an entry that I deleted and scrapped rather
than posting here. Didn’t even save a copy for returning to it another day down
the line.  That’s never happened before.  We’d just finished watching Radio. 
An easy, predictable movie.  Based loosely on a true story.  And I was
trying to write about the simplicity of the movie, about the appeal of being
entertained simply, about not wanting to complicate it by looking too
hard.  It should be a break from looking hard–I thought.  But it also
grabbed ahold of me in a few ways I wasn’t prepared for.  It wasn’t that I
didn’t want to be taken in to the foreseeably emotional story; it wasn’t that I
didn’t expect sad parts.  The movie turned me toward my own life–an
unexpected, uninvited warp of reflexigency in movie-watching.  Instead of
looking at Ed Harris and Cuba Gooding Jr., I was looking at myself and not fully
enjoying what it stirred.  And without divulging all there is to it
(without, again, making EWM into blewg confessional), it was mainly a mix of the
sudden death-of-mother scene piled on top of my own uneasiness with the Easter
holiday.  

Ridiculous, eh?  Nobody claims Easter as their difficult holiday.
It’s springtime, for Chris’sake. Christmas, Valentine’s Day…no problem. 
But Easter.  Guilt about following/not following the semiannual
lemming-march to church, self-identifying as a bad parent who does the
Easter Bunny way worse than Santa and the Tooth Fairy, associating the
desperation and powerlessness of a few years ago in the throes of
adoption.  My basket: melancholia de jure. Oh, and, well, the Junior Mints
I wrote about earlier.  Those have been tasty, minty cold.  So it’s a
mood and a passing rut.  Could blame Radio for my sourness and
withdrawal, but that wouldn’t be fair. It was a good one, the movie.

Hobbling around on a bum (sprained?) knee this weekend hasn’t helped
any.  Went for two jogs too many last week.  Two jogs total. 
Quite a shock to my muscular system. Binge exercise has worked great for
years, but no longer. More stretching is overdue. And on the subject
of stretching, I have a plan to key together a few notes on Richard Braddock’s
’75 essay on topic sentences.  It’ll be the start of a series of notes on
the Braddocks (over the next few weeks)–recapacitating disciplinarily for the fall. More blogging on |t/r|eaching and reading to come.

Better than a Faberge Egg

/ dmueller

Stumbled onto All
Consuming, a web site that crawls for bloggers’ mentions of books. 
This, whilst off-task from obligatory Sunday online course updates and sucking
on the Junior Mints left for me by one generous and intuitive bunny rabbit. All Consuming counts and links a (potentially) unconnected readership,
rendering, thereby, a (paper, not cyber) text-associated web of relations.

Nine Fluffed Cats Strutting Blogways

/ dmueller

I’ve added nine categories to Earth Wide Moth.  Wanted to move toward readability and organization.  I just thought about my interests, the entries over the last three months, where I see future entries fitting, then
dummied up some fun(ky) categories for breakin’ this blog down.  Chunked up, EWM now looks like this:

Media Massage-Dressage – Popular media, politicking, spin-doctoring,
manipulations, decorated pony shows and the Twist.
Critical Ethnogeotechnoinfography – Connections to cultural implications
of information geography, rhetorically and technologically affected places and
the peeps who inhabit them.
Spatialitiespatiality  – Toying with space theory, location,
descriptive realities and other stuff.
Composing Anyplace Afar – Computer-mediated distance education, remote
academia, mobilities in learning.
Reading Notes – Notes on articles/books/sites I’m reading; connections
among texts, etc.
Heteroglossia and Essayism – Free play with theory, essayisms, and
uncategorical leftovers.
Kairotic Strain – Whining and bemoaning, complaints and bad kairos
[credit to A.C. for this
last idea]: entries that might offend, upset, peeve off or otherwise have
professional consequences.
Orange – CNY 13244
On Weblogs, On – On Weblogs
*Dry Ogre Chalking – Re: pedagogy.
*Slouching Toward – Down funk, despondency and despair.
*Ground Swell – Upsurges, optimism, prospective, feelin’ good change.
*Under a Bushel – Obscurity, innuendo, underhanded views and opinions.

These last four are originals.  I’ll keep them around.  I’m not
settled on the categories, but I think they do a better job than the few splits
I had up for past three months.  All of this was brought on by my curiosity
about building aggregation lines (RSS feed) for individual categories in MT. 
It’s not perfectly clear how I’ll use the feeds, but I wanted to see what it
looked like, how tough it was to set up.  I was surprised to find it easy;
followed the fine instructions available

here.  Category-specific RSS was a recent topic in
blogs, a
new listserv concerned with a blogging SIG at the ’05 C’s in San Fran. I can
imagine it working nicely for research groups in a course weblog.  The
cat-specific aggregation could pool related entries; it’s easy enough to assign
multiple categories to an individual entry, too.  This might be useful in a
weblog with numerous student-contributors (in a class of 25, say).

A couple of other Friday notes:  D. is working on her teaching
portfolio.  As a final piece of her student teaching, she wanted to piece
together a audio-accompanied video slideshow.  I did a nice one–about six
minutes long–for our wedding last summer.  Tried another one this fall for
the retirement of one of D’s co-workers.  That’s when the cheap Dazzle
converter started screwing up.  When converting the MPEG to VHS, the bridge
(DCS200) would lock up, freezing the video in one blue stop-frame. 
Fortunately, it was sufficiently dubbed to put the three minutes to use, and the
day was saved.  Only now, more than seven months since the last
movie-making struggle, I’m staring at this project and thinking how sucky it is
to attempt video-making with PC equipment.  It’s like chewing broken glass.
Maybe worse.  I can’t keep track of the number of times the whole cruddy
system locks up in a single sitting with the Hollywood app open. The pattern of
lock-ups is a real time-hog.

One of my Good Friday errands was a stop at Kmart.  Mainly, I needed a
new light bulb for the refrigerator.  The other one fizzled early in the
week, so all week we’ve had no way of telling what’s in there.  Food that
was once easy to locate has been lost in the shadows.  So it was Kmart for
the 40 watt replacement.  Returned home.  Screwed it in (yes…it only
takes one blogger to screw in a fridge bulb).  The refrigerator was just as
empty and pathetic as it was earlier in the week.  Bowls of taco salad for
another night.  Dessert of mini-malted milk eggs (Easter Whoppers)–the
best candy of the holiday, if you ask me.

Categorically yours,

dmueller

(W)resting on Accreditation Pillars

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

I’m beginning to understand the accreditation process as an exercise in
abstraction.  We take our best, most descriptive account of the
institution’s functions and mold them rhetorically until they match the
accreditation pillars.  It’s not a process to be taken lightly. 
Abstracting is complicated.  Often it involves collaborative writing
efforts, slippery language and raptures of statistical data.  When the
bean-counts start whirring around, I’m out. Abstracting to verbiage is one
thing; matching imaginative institutional narratives to numbers and bar charts
is much less appealing.  And it’s never merely a project of abstracting
until the accreditation criteria match; it’s followed by an adaptive unraveling,
a denouement, maybe, through which the institution is reinvented into an
improved replica of its pre-accreditation body. This part takes years, and it’s
a road afflicted by hills, curves, chasms.

I was asked twice in recent weeks to serve on various accreditation
committees: one for the division of online learning (DOL) and one for the
something else I can’t describe exactly (partly because I haven’t heard about it
in a few days and it was a passing conversation).  The division of online
learning is abstracting itself toward "accreditation pillars," but I’m
having trouble discerning what, exactly, accreditation pillars are. And
this explains why I really should be picked last for accreditation teams. 
I find the abstraction and return to be wrenching–incredibly
mind-bending.  Pillars: I venture that they’re evaluative criteria; they’re
the abstract terms we aspire toward.  Explain how we meet them and we
effectively prove the structure of the Acropolis that is our
University.  

The division of online learning is handling much of their interchange in the
*new* CMS platform–eCollege.  It’s too early for me to have a critical
relationship to the interface.  I find George
Williams’ adaptation (via Palimpsest)
of Liz
Lawley’s MT courseware much more attractive.  The MT design is
friendlier than anything I’ve seen in VCampus or, in these few days, eCollege. 
I look forward to trying it out, perhaps in the fall since it won’t be used
where I’m teaching now any time soon.  One of our holdups on the DOL
committee has been the lack of an explicit institutional stance on IP.  I
keep pointing toward Creative Commons as the smart, responsible solution–for
University-wide content, including the stuff coming out of DOL.  That it’s
an incredibly hard sell affirms the power of corporatization and privatization to reduce such ideas to granules.

So, in fairness, I need to peel the sign off my back that reads, "Will
gladly serve on your accreditation committee."  It’s not that I’m
ungrateful, rather that I really struggle with the wiggles toward abstracting
the institution.  Something to work on: *learn to say ‘no’ politely.*

Reproduction of Labour-Power

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

[cross posted in response to Mike’s post at
vitia.org]

Here goes nothing. I haven’t made time to dig up the specific reference to Marx’s “reproduction of labour-power,” but as I understand it, the phrase applies to periods of regeneration and rest. Using a much more simplistic model than the one you’re building here, we talk about this in my intro to humanities class, borrowing from Camus’ contention that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy. Going one more, we take apart the notion that the interstice–the break from labor–defines and even classifies
work (if we’re given to taxonomic hierarchies). 

The idea that our work is reclassified by our regenerative periods, down time, or leisure, dismantles the common economic t-chart of production and service by preferring the antithetical–the
doing that’s done when we’re not producing-serving. Because our occupations with teaching and learning through reading and writing are concerned with
text (broad, widely imagined ensembles of texts, in this case), we are never separate from it or otherwise outside it. And the materiality of such text(s) is irregular, I guess.

Following a long-accepted model of continuous exertion (eight-ten hours, say) followed by continuous regeneration (or “reproduction of labour-power”), “text” has a commonplace association with leisure. Reading, writing, noticing
(noscere-to get to know?), mediating, and so on are done solely for pleasure, leisure. This is a gross simplification, of course. But in composition, the exertion of labour-power and its reproduction are intertwined, irregular to the extent that separations are not easy to share or to make visible. Our occupation isn’t merely those three hours in class or the 8-430 scuttle. I’m feeling vertiginous (can you tell I’m going in circles already?). What I want to suggest is that with texts at the center of our work, we are burdened by the economic pressure to make texts material (publishing is privileged); but, moreover, we’re charged with empowering students to those textualisms, opening discreet discourse systems, fostering agency, transgression, compliance, etc., in language. 

This leads me to suppose that reading is not always consumptive; in fact, I’d be more inclined to say that it’s always productive, always reproductive, always generative, always regenerative. As is writing. I wonder if that’s the “opportunity cost” for comp/rhetors–the constancy of language, the challenge of negotiating between leisure and laborious in after-hours (?) textual interludes, and the trouble proving the legitimacy and value of this bind to those who can’t see beyond the more traditional, pervasive economic work-structure and the more common relegation of
text as rest in it.

Study, Rest, Eat a Good Breakfast

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

A hard shot of seventh grade homework tonight: test on the Middle Ages
tomorrow along with a two-page chronology of the most significant developments
in computer technology from the abacus to artificial intelligence.  Quite
an undertaking for one evening, but it follows weeks of in-school
preparation.  So the pattern goes.  Ph. worked on the laptop drumming
up information via a few links suggested by his teacher for the computer
assignment while I wrestled a one-page study guide into readable shape for the
test.  Sufficiently torturous though there were no mentions of such
inhumanity in his notes and textbook.  

So I’ve been freshening up on everything from feudal social hierarchies and
the failed crusades (which opened trade routes to the East) to the MITS Atrios
8800, Bill Gates III and integrated circuits as the "Third Generation"
of computer technology.  Just when it was at its most agonizing–the
combination of assignments, that is–we laced up our tennies and went for a
jog.  First one in months for me, but overdue in the nasty-tense fallout from such an explosion between prehistory and posthistory, between medievalism and technocracy on such short notice. Run.  Artificial intelligence is the fifth (and present) generation of computer technology.  Senechals presided, with bailiffs, over the judicial order of the manors in medieval Europe.  Daniel Bricklin dubbed Visicalc; we are all so many vassals to Microsoft, jousting with PowerPoint, crusading for open source.  See?  How can I explain this?

You’ll notice I’m toying with a few jobs in the right column.  Thinking
about fleshing out my list of links, adding on the ones I aggregate, and others
I read and admire from time to time.  Most bloggers appreciate being
linked, right?  I want to redraw the "Divisions," dissect moth
into more descriptive parts.  Or not…no hurry.  I also copied
several of the recent
button-makers (such as feministe)
and put one together for EWM, just for the heck of it–during one of our study
breaks this evening. Perfectly ornamental.

Succumbed to another violent arm-tug to cover a pair of
classes first thing in the morning.  Everyone’s taking vacations but me, turns
out.  But I don’t mind.  It gives me something to blog about. Plus, Ph’ll need a good breakfast if he has any chance at discriminating between the chivalric code and vacuum tubes.