Last chapter of Postman’s Technopoly for class tomorrow. After that,
106ers are on to a series of articles about Powerpoint and the problems with
tech-dazzle mesmerization, the rhetoric of blurb and bullet (adapted heavily
from Traci
Gardner and Nick Carbone at TWiaOW).

For the past day, I’ve been grinding over how to respond to an email from an
instructor who teaches two sections of the online version of 106 I
developed. Since I’m the developer, I field questions from the instructors
of the various sections from time to time, doing what I can to tease out
effective practices or, in some cases, return to the drawing board to tweak the
curricular plan. Here’s the note:

I made a small accommodation-change this past term, one which may be worth sharing. I
required students to include their thesis statements right below the title to help me with grading actually. I was amazed; only [a few] students […] completed this task with some degree of competency; some did get better, but all-in-all it was an enlightening experience concerning
these students.
Their inability to express what they meant to do was, of course, manifest in their essays. At least I had a clearer how-to-improve target.
Thanks, F.

Continue reading →

Kill is a volleyball statistic (so is dig… a murderous sport,
indeed).  And I’m crouched in my noisy office today, hiding out from the
poundacious, bangtastic bongo and hoot that is intercollegiate men’s volleyball. 
Balls careen off the uninsulated walls; the splat of every hard spike is drowned
by a basal oooh-aaah.  And three matches are playing out within ear shot. 
Good thing I’ve got terrific work-study students to relieve me from being more
proximate to the events, as in at the courtside.

After seeing

Non Sequitur this morning, I’ve been having a look at human and animal
image-dispositions at the following web sites:
Nature |
Wild America (Mungry:
the speculatin’ critter in the upper left! Will he eat the berry?) |
CBS’s Survivor Series.

But then I got caught up in comparing the alterations to the page designs
from Borneo to All Stars.  The banner graphics (the program’s logos, if you
will) tell a story, perhaps even tapping into grand narrative of colonialism or
something like it.  All of this could be the disturbing side-effect of too
much coffee this morning, a McDonald’s sandwich turning a pirouette in my tummy
or the slap-racket in my percussion-tank office, but I have time to play
around–so that’s what I’m doing.  Here are the graphic insignia,
sequentially ordered, from the Survivor series.

And here’s some of what I see.  Borneo: no humans, no
animals, light colors, watery lower panel.  Australian Outback: a
darkening, a roo in the rising sun, bouncing left, heat waves in lower panel.
Africa: a giraffe following the roo’s path, scraggly acacias on each side,
grassy lower panel.  Marquesas: jutted island, some kind of Tahitian mask
(civilization?), watery lower panel. Thailand: temples surrounding a decorated
elephant, red lower panel.  Amazon: gigantic serpent and a toucan, serpent
integrated into lower panel. Pearl Islands: ship silhouette, skulls, gold coins
piled thick in the lower panel. All-Stars: human form, torch-bearing, generic
natural landscape in the background. What do you notice?

When I began thinking about these panels as a narrative
sequence, while also thinking about groovy assignments for the introduction to
humanities class I teach, I also thought about Perry Miller’s Errand Into the
Wilderness (which I haven’t completely read in the strict sense of page by
page, word by word; know him for some of the sensational rhetoric stuff). 
Found a

web site from CU-Denver that summarizes Miller’s central theme in Errand
thus:

"The End of the World" (217-39) William and Mary
Quarterly 8.2 (April 1951): 171-91.
In this concluding "piece," Miller sums up his thesis:
"Can an errand, even an errand into the wilderness, be run indefinitely? To
this question, it seems, Americans must constantly revert…. Can a culture,
which chances to embody itself in a nation, push itself to such remorseless
exertion without ever learning whether it has been sent on its business at
some incomprehensible behest, or is obligated to discover a meaning for its
dynamism in the very act of running? … In the civilizations that emerged
out of the primordial wilderness of Europe, this assurance solidified into the
Christian eschatology; in that form it was brought to America, most
energetically by the Puritans. Officially the doctrine of an end to the world
has, of course, been professed by every denomination within the country, even
when, as lately, some have striven to interpret it metaphorically. What
will America do – what can America do – with an implacable prophecy that there
is a point in time beyond which the very concept of a future becomes
meaningless? Protestant America, as well as Catholic, has an implicit
commitment to this event. What then happens to the errand?" (217)
[emphases mine]

I don’t have time to brush out the kinks or to trick around with
much more today.  Weather’s too nice outside to keep puzzling over whether
the grand narrative loosely suggested by the graphic sequence answers or somehow
engages Miller’s questions, and this crummy tournament is winding to a
finish–last matches start at 2:00 p.m.  There seems an interesting way of
reading this sequence of images (and their telling, and the series of programs
itself, perhaps) through Miller’s notion that Christian civ. must foretell a
material end whose details are unknown and that the promise of wilderness’ end,
of the cessation of travails and conquest, compel, in the purveyors of dominant
culture continuation, an attraction to rhetorical/artistic refashionings of the
grand narrative of conquest–as redesigned through an increasingly
human-centered tale.  

In simple terms, and because I fear that none of this makes
sense, here’s what I mean to suggest is the answer to Perry’s question, "What
happens to the errand?". My answer:  Survivor.  Quite a ramble
spun out of a funny non sequitur.

Hard to believe two days almost ticked by with no new words at blog. 
See, the new online term (Spring II) started on Monday, and I’m experimenting
with a whole lot more writing in that forum.  Trouble is, it’s
private.  Behind closed portals.  I could share my password (and I’m
tempted; oh! how I’m tempted), but then an imposter could misrepresent me, variegate
my teacherly persona.  Who would that be good for?

Been busy as heck with teaching.  EN106ers are pouring over Postman and
Agre.  Our next essay is a kind of strange staged,
imagined dialogue between Postman, Agre and you (the person writing the
essay).  We’re reading Welcome
to the Always-On World, holding it up alongside Postman’s middle-late
chapters, and looking for ways to laceweavemesh the texts.  Today, students
suggested interests in disruptive technology (God forbid, cell phones in
church!), social networks (best friends online) and time-squeeze efficiency
models brought on by mobile gadgets.  All of these themes bubble and churn
in Agre and Postman.  

Feeling philanthropic, I picked up a few other volunteer teaching assignments this week, covering
for a certain blogger you might know who’s been on interviews lately.  Job
interviews, not the talk show circuit (I won’t do it; I won’t attempt the
satire).  So I picked up his section of LS301 this afternoon: one hour and
fifteen minutes of really incredible student-lead discussion on the Childhood
chapter from Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. We talked over the
metaphors for childhood as a social construction: tabula rasa, plant organism
and market.  Good stuff.  The most interesting moments came during one
student’s explanation of a local program called  Exchange City which is
like an urban simulation field trip for fifth graders where they effectively act
like laborious adults.  Others in the class had been through this
program.  Turns out one of the students in LS301 was once assigned to the
assembly line–a factory job making checkbook covers–when she went to Exchange
City in fifth grade. Now she aims to be a labor activist who lobbies for
pay-production fairness.  

Enough.  I agreed to cover two other classes for Dr. Job-Marketeer
tomorrow morning at eight and nine, and I’m not accustomed to coursing my Friday
morning blood flow to teaching pace by eight o’clock.  So I’ll trick System
with a jug of coffee.  Gonna watch the last few splits of March Madness
then hit the hay. 

Heavy eyes and not a lot of time to post tonight.  So here are
a few things I’m reading alongside each other to round out (balloonishly round!)
my prep for tomorrow morning’s EN106 class session:

Mark Federman’s essay, "The
Cultural Paradox of the Global Village" (PDF) from the McLuhan
Studies program at Toronto.  I want to talk about the wheelbarrow
anecdote as a like conveyance of Postman’s "Invisible Technologies" pitch in c. 8 of Technopoly.  Postman’s chapter is all about the bent information of statistics and poll data.  I’m mildly concerned that I’ll have to jitterbug through the end section on management and systematized technique–as Postman calls it.  It’s a tough concept, and even though I’m rerereading it, it’s more of a puzzler than some of the other stuff.  Perhaps that’s precisely where we should begin.  Here’s a snippet of the wheelbarrow story from Federman:

There’s a cute story about a man who, during wartime, would come to the
country’s border with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The border guard looked at
the man’s papers and all was in order for him to cross. But the guard was
certain the man was smuggling some sort of contraband in the wheelbarrow. So the guard took a shovel, poked around in the dirt, but found nothing. The man was allowed to cross.

The next week, the man once again comes to the border with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Again, the border guard found that the papers were in order and dug through the dirt, but still found nothing. And again, the man was allowed to
cross. Week after week, it was the same story: Man approaches the border with wheelbarrow full of dirt. Guard finds nothing of interest and the man crosses.
At the end of the war, the guard sees the man and asks him: “Look, I know
you were smuggling something across the border, but I could never find a thing
hidden in the dirt. What were you smuggling all those years?” The man
answered: “Wheelbarrows.”

And then (like so many fence posts thinly wired and roughly in a row) this
from CNN via Scripting News:
"Welcome
to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web."  We’re going to use it
as a way to talk about web quests and exploratory exertion.  Is RSS spoiling
us?  Complacency, so on.  The CNN article returns to the info
superhighway model to suggest that RSS feeds will serve as a different kind of
"on-ramp."  But I know when I lived in Detroit I generally had to
accelerate on the on-ramp, despite the caution signs, because my survival in
that context of pace and flow (I-696 W from Gratiot, 7 a.m. Monday morning)
depended on it.  Conversely, in KC, yield signs are, well, like stop
signs.  They actually mediate the traffic; in fact, it’s quite common to
see someone stopped on the on-ramp.  In brief, there’s plenty of variation
in on-ramping; probably always will be.  Not to mention the contraption
whose pedal you’re mashing: Yugo or Caddy, dial-up or Ether, on-ramping might
have less to do with the ambitions of the driver than the technical machinery
making it possible.

Speaking of fence posts, this
bit from National Geographic News explains what Max, our ancient Yorkshire
Terrier, has been failing to do on his trips to the yard for all these
years.  Why a failure?  Well, for one, we still have the Christmas
black cat hanging around the back porch.  My only question for Max, which
he won’t hear because he tends to be tonally numb or, at the very least,
indifferent, is: fencing in or fencing out?

And I have a student this term–the online term that started today–in HU211 who is on assignment in Uzbekistan. 
She slid me an email today asking who she should use for a proctor (on the final
exam) in Uzbekistan.  It’s an intro to humanities course.  Can’t anyone
proctor the exam?  *Looking at the ceiling*  I replied that I’d think
about it, then flicked up a red flag in Outlook so I don’t forget.