Digital Canvass

I s. has been asking lately--passionately--to paint. In fact, "paint" is one of those five-alarm words around the house: we know that saying it will tip Is. into such intense determination that, once it is said, there is no getting out of some sort of painting. D. will happily set out the water colors for her on the kitchen table (at breakfast this morning, Is. pointed to lingering brush marks on the wall and proudly claimed it: "Baby paint!" But she is almost as content with the graphics tablet and digital canvass. I can map the tablet to the exact size of the blank canvass on the interface and assist her (by mouse) with choosing colors--all a far better match with my own material preferences when it comes to painting. Whatever else can be said of it, Is. is picking up on subtle distinctions between colors (i.e. dark red and what she calls "yellow-white," although I'm still not always sure what this latter one is). And, on any given day, she gets enough of the water colors and enough of the graphics tablet to refer to them both as "painting" (a word you must not mutter in our company unless you want to alter the course of our lives for an hour).

Above, the first is just some futzing around with colors. The second looks to me like the end of the purple dinosaurs or the smoke monster from Lost knocking Mr. Echo onto his back.

Washback

D . asked me about this term yesterday, and I had never heard of it before, perhaps because I haven't taught many courses where tests were involved. As I now understand it (freshly, sketchily), washback describes pedagogical revision, the on-the-fly adjustments teachers make after they have evaluated a set of exams. The test, depending largely upon how well it is designed, should report general strengths and weaknesses among the group; washback is how the future lessons and activities are adapted in light of the patterns indicated by the test.

I don't know whether I will get much use out of the term, but it did get me thinking about similar phenomena in writing courses. There is a kind of going back over things--something like washback--that sometimes happens depending on how a sequence of assignments is envisioned. It reminded me of a mild tension in my MA program between those who thought a complete course of study--including all writing assignments, prompts, and activities--ought to be laid out from the outset and those who thought a course of study should be designed to allow for those inevitable contingencies. To the extremes: the first type is top-down, water-tight and risks being inflexible; the second type is like taking to the air without a flight plan: improvisatory and roomy. The first regards the contextual peculiarities (and surprises!) very little; the second sets out with the proposition, "How can I devise the second unit of the course until I know what happened with the first?". One values teaching everything as if it is channeling toward week fifteen; the other lives and teaches for today and wants not to overdetermine the what's-to-come.

I am, at times, drawn to each of these extreme positions; they appeal to me for different reasons. What I have come to understand is that, in moderate forms, both are simultaneously possible, and good teachers understand--and perform--them--a balancing act of managed flexibility. By now I have wandered away from washback as it relates directly to tests and measurements, but I only wanted to generalize it to the scenes of teaching I know best.

Breathe

S omewhere along the way, I acquired a Solstice cold. Judging entirely from the phlegmatic emanations (coughing, sneezing, and wheezing), I drafted the following schematic, which I will carry to my doctor later this week (only if absolutely necessary). It is a preliminary attempt to characterize the great range of unpleasant sounds and sensations associated with the bug.

If I know my doctor, she will take one look at this and say, "Yes, you do indeed have a cold." At which time I will resume heavy dosages of Vitamin C and Tylenol Cold (i.e., crunching down those buggers like a warm box of Good & Plenty) and hope they sustain me until I am well again.

Satellitization

B efore touring the old Santa Ana Pueblo a week ago on Thursday morning, again and again we were reminded that no photography was allowed. Also, no sketches, no recording of sounds. The rationale for this goes directly to simulacrum and the sacred: the ground itself and all activities upon it remain contained, singular, rare. When reproduction and representation are banned, the site does not suffer from diffusion but instead remains intact. On the tour to the Zia Pueblo a few years ago, there was a similar admonition. There, a sign was posted in front of the church. Something like, "Any recording or reproduction at this site is punishable by a fine of $3,500."

While on the walking tour, I wondered whether Old Santa Ana can be seen from above in Google Maps. It's not far from Albuquerque, after all. At what resolution has satellite imagery in effect leached the site's sanctity? Later, when I checked, I found that indeed the spot is plainly visible from above; aerial topography, it turns out, has not honored the on-ground policies.

At breakfast the next day, however, I was surprised to find another replica, this one, a scale-diorama of sorts, in a display case near one of the restaurants in the Hyatt Tamaya--a resort on the edge of Santa Ana No. 2 (what is called New Santa Ana, as I understand it). Strangely enough, in this instance, nothing is posted about copies (or sketches) of the copy:

After the Camp

T ech Camp 2008 ended on Thursday after three days of entirely worthwhile, invigorating stuff tied to imagework, web writing, and video.

I was asked to open the morning's discussion on day three, and I did so by writing a short list of openings and provocations on the marker board at the front of the room. I felt most uncertain about the first item because I'm not sure I've considered it from enough angles. I was thinking about the rock and the hard place for new media in rhetoric and composition: critique, on the one hand, and technology grand narratives, on the other. Critique, as I think of it, rears its head where the focus is on reading and analyzing new media objects. Visual rhetorics often gravitate in this direction, too, toward a consciousness-raising hermeneutics of thorough noticing performed on images and objects made by others. Critique includes conversations about access to technology, which are relevant and important, but do not serve well as ends in and of themselves. Access-based critiques of technology cannot be not easily singled out from that same predicament--is it an inevitability?--for literacy and orality, nor have enough of them gone beyond commentary (even moralizing) into action--grant writing, creative workarounds, and putting computers on desks.

If critique (i.e., the rock) is loose and inclusive, sweeping narratives (i.e., the hard place) are even more capacious and also sticky (a Great Katamari; look out!). Woes of technological imminence prevail here: it makes us stupid, it is anti-intellectual, it atrophies muscles, etc., often in unfortunately broad strokes.

If I sound dismissive of these two responses to technology, I don't mean to. I am simply trying to characterize two counterweights that deliver a great deal of inertia to the scene of composing in new media--writing, producing, making, experimenting, sampling, mixing, selecting, and so on. They expunge it. They halt it in its tracks. I am not arguing that these gestures are empty or that it is anything short of imperative for new media producers to be familiar with them, even in those occasional cases where they are misguided or unsubstantiated. Yet they stand out because they are inertial, because they risk turning production on its ear.

That's what I meant to bring up, anyway.

Moving Meditation

I was out of town and more or less offline late last week when the July/August Atlantic Monthly hit newsstands with its front cover blazing the title of Nicholas Carr's article, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" (the "Stoopid" is much sexier on the actual cover than it is here because the letters are done colorfully and in the Google font). Jeff and Alex posted thoughtful responses, and I am sure there will be more.

Carr's article, if you have not read it yet, hops along like Level 1 on Frogger (which, coincidentally, was released in 1981): without much exertion, the argument leaps from personal anecdote to the role of media in shaping cognition to the insidious effects of too much easy access to information via Google: drumroll...

"[A]s we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence" (63).

Carr welcomes skeptics but also fends off all-out dismissals of his deep wariness of the changes he has experienced first-hand. He begins the article with his own reasons for believing this "flattening" to be endemic and imminent for Google users: 1.) he is more and more easily distracted in his own attempts to read anything longer than a couple of pages and 2.) what was once pain-staking research is now available to him almost instantaneously. With a simple search, he can quickly summon great heaps of material on [enter search terms]: "And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation" (57).

Chip.

A couple of lurking assumptions in the piece (as I read it): First, all reading is evened out--or ought to be. Any act or habit of reading contends with all other reading because time is scarce. Reading, thus, is in constant competition; certain reading techniques are fundamentally incompatible with others. Carr admits to losing his ability to adapt, to losing the agility necessary to read with great differentiation. He writes about reading as if it derives mostly from his work as a writer. That is, reading is equated to research.

The greatest problem with what I see Carr attempting here is in his giant leap from the mechanical regularity of directed search a la Google to Frederick Taylor's über-efficient "systems" for industrial manufacturing. Carr's suggestion that Google runs on Taylorist principles alone is a reach; it conveniently overlooks the creative and conceptual 'serious play' embraced by any thriving company in Silicon Valley. On this point, the article moves beyond the trolling Alex mentions. It ferries in and relies upon a strict coupling of Google and efficiency-drive that the article has by its narrow pairing of these issues, left no room at the end for conclusions other than those thoroughly agreeable to a fist-shaking class of Postman-following skeptics/critics whose values the piece implicitly promotes.

Car writes:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only build into the workings of the Internet, it is the network's reigning business model as well. (15)

I read Carr's article in O'Hare, plucking it off the news stand to fill up a few minutes of layover between Albuquerque and Syracuse. In the air, I'd been reading Pink's A Whole New Mind, nodding along with the R-directed senses he outlines in the second half of the book. On the second leg of the flight, after reading Carr's article while on the ground, I came across Pink's discussion of Who Moved My Cheese?, and found it applicable to the dubious correlation Carr suggests between Google and Taylorism.

I don't disagree with the message of Who Moved My Cheese? but I do take issue with the metaphor. In the Conceptual Age, Asia and automation may constantly be moving our cheese, so to speak. But in an age of abundance, we're no longer in a maze. Today the more appropriate metaphor for our times is the labyrinth. (227)

Pink's invocation of the labyrinth doesn't end here. He goes on, in his discussion of meaning, to differentiate mazes from labyrinths:

Mazes and labyrinths are often lumped together in the popular imagination, but they differ in important ways. A maze is a series of compartmentalized and confusing paths, most of which lead to dead ends. When you enter, your objective is to escape--as quickly as you can. A labyrinth is a spiral walking course. When you enter, your goal is to follow the path to the center, stop, turn around, and walk back out--all at whatever pace you choose. Mazes are analytic puzzles to be solved; labyrinths are a form of moving meditation. (228)

Want "compartmentalized and confusing paths, most of which lead to dead ends"? Then fetishize undifferentiated, conventional reading as the only sort worth doing, the only sort with any value in the twenty-first century (or ever, for that matter). Do we really need any more trumpeting about the deleterious effects of the internet on reading or on the decline of the Great Books?, even while many school systems are still making students read classics and at once forbidding them from using the internet (viz., "Do not consult Wikipedia!", etc.). Carr's is a rendition of that overplayed track about literacy and inertia, best hummed to the tune of a funeral dirge while digging one's own grave: Who Moved My Copy of War and Peace?

Look: Google only makes us stupid if we are already stupid--stupid in the sense of lumbering through the network head-down without a sense of connections, without any awareness of the serendipitous relations and inventive capacities that make the web so prolific. Directed search (at the exclusion of all else) is a prime example of this. It relishes the outcome, follows a teleology of the maze, as if toward a delectable block of sharp cheesefood.

But why should that be all? Well, of course, it shouldn't be all, and it isn't all. That's what makes Carr's article borderline irresponsible, in my opinion. We are becoming machine-like, he writes, becoming "pancake people"--wide and thin generalists (distracted robots) rather than narrow and deep specialists (sentient humans).Extreme caricatures aside, what's still unclear to me is why the two variations here should be so much at odds.

Camp After Camp

I 've returned from Albuquerque, from three terrific days on the Santa Ana Pueblo on the edge of Bernalillo where I was involved with the 12th annual Native Vision camp. More here. Photo: Eastward from the Hyatt Tamaya, a line of trees along the Rio Grande and, in the distance, Sandia Peak.

In the week ahead, I'll lend a hand at our Writing Program's Tech Camp, a three-day technology intensive workshop for writing teachers, something like a condensed, in-house CIWIC or DMAC, minus the acronyms.

Awards, Biscuit Nougat

I 've just returned from the second awards event in the past week. Last week, the athletic banquet (we did not stay to the end); tonight, academic awards. Ph. collected a Certificate of Academic Achievement in, of all things, English. He was one of four who were nominated by a particular teacher. I have many thoughts about all of this, but the main one: Way to go!

Tonight's gathering in the high school auditorium included:

1. The senior class's top fifteen students seated in rank order on the stage for the entire event. Lower ranked students sat behind them.
2. When the valedictorian was announced, also introduced were his recent valedictorian older brother and his grandmother, who was valedictorian of her class in 1934. For this, a standing ovation.
3. An aside: Standing ovations sort of sweep you up so that it is never an option to remain seated or hands-in-lap.
4. A super-efficient run-through of the 28-page program in a mere hour and twenty minutes. I was deeply dispirited when I saw the thickness of the program, the hundreds of names listed for various awards. Next we said the pledge of allegiance and they started rattling off the names at the pace of morning attendance.
5. Four students in the current senior class have GPA's above 100.0. They're better than perfect, in other words, so I suppose it makes sense that they are going off to Yale, Penn, Columbia, and Smith.

On the subject of Ph., his school year is grinding to a halt (any sort of academic year that, without interruption, reaches into June is unkind). He has a project in Spanish due at the end of the week: translate a recipe, carry it out, bring the foodstuff to class, and read the recipe to the class. Also, the recipe must include an image of the thing. It's not the best food photography ever (no Petunia Woodbridge Food Photography Award for you!); nevertheless, here is the "South American Biscuit Nougat" concoction he decided to share with the class in a couple of days (sugar, coconut, orange juice, cinnamon, more sugar).

And now I must pack my bags for an early morning jetplane ride so I will have proper comforts for the next couple of days, which I will spend here:

Reanimation

T he Reanimation Library in Brooklyn (via) offers a collection of discarded and found books not likely to be held elsewhere: curios, out-of-print, wonders. Here librarianship is inflected with an art aesthetic (perhaps more outwardly or radically than in the common case). There seems to be more than rarity justifying the in-status of the books; but it is a sort of rare collection, one inflected with the idiosyncratic impulses and tastes of the collector. The 600-book collection raises the question of whether it is simply an installation called by the name of library. The mission statement:

The Reanimation Library seeks to assemble an inspiring collection of resources that will facilitate the production of new creative work and promote reflection and research into the historical, legal, and methodological questions surrounding the adaptive reuse of found materials. It strives to provide the necessary space and tools to allow these activities to flourish, and to foster a climate of spirited collaboration.

"Adaptive reuse of found materials" and so on: sounds like ideas that would serve well as the guiding impetuses for a composition course--one I'd like to teach, anyway. The Thingology entry refers to this recent report from the Minneapolis City Pages; both of them mention Dewey's Nightmare, a playwriting experiment tied to the Reanimation Library in which seven writers wear blindfolds and pick one book each randomly from the stacks. Their challenge, then, is to shape the random sample into something for the stage. Quite a methodology, and one not unlike the stuff Sirc discusses in "Box-Logic": the found collection, the interplay of contingent samples and selections, renewal in re-coordinating affinities, pulsion, etc.

Don't miss the catalog or the pile of images.

Practice Makes

H urried this sequence together in just a few (i.e. 30) minutes with Pencil, a simple, open source animation app.  Because I am on a PC, the best output is to Flash (.swf), but if you do your thing on a Mac, you can output to .mov.  Another Saturday night experimenting with motion pictures while working on my free throws.

Terminal Mesterbation

I am out of patience for coinages that use "-mester" to name some new period of time for college study. Semester, trimester: I can live with these. Even "Maymester," has a certain ring to it, although it could just be that I was born into May that it sounds okay. May might be the only month that works with "-mester." Syracuse offers a Maymester. Quadrimester, no. Mester is, in effect, a Latin root meaning month, right? Consider a few of the possible, if redundant, blends:

Janumester
Februmester
Marchmester
Aprimester
Junemester
Julmester
Augmester
Septembestermester
Octmester

Mercy already! You get the point. Yet today I saw promotional materials that use one of these identifiers for a four-week term of study. If you don't believe me, Google all of them and you will see.

Did you look them up? It's Julmester. Julmester?

In fact, two of these--Julmester and Junemester--are in circulation now as I blog. The only place we even find "-mesters" are in the academy and in the maternity ward. Higher ed, in my opinion, does not need to be any -mesterier than it is already. Perhaps listing a few more -mesters will keep their great awkwardness out of play, maybe even make those who think them up pause when they search to see which -mesters have already been scooped. More to chill your spine:

Here-today-gone-tomorrowmester
Lakers-in-a-sweepmester
I'm-a-lousy-tester-mester
Winchester-Cathedralmester
Karatemester
Extracreditmester
Yestermester
Jägermeistermester
Earthwidemothmester
Who-are-you-the-mester-police? Yestermester.
Put-a-forkester-in-memester

By now you have thought of one or two others to claim so nobody else ever ever tries to use it to identify a new! improved! term of academic studymester. If so, feel free to add them in the comments.

Allergens

I told myself over the weekend that this would, in terms of sheer productivity, be a mop-up week: anything still hanging around the to-do list all these weeks would, before the end of the day on June 6, have a big ole X through it.

And then the allergies came along, stinging blasts from pollen and other airborns that have my eyes and nose leaking like sieves. Mop-up week, I asked for; mop-up week, I got. At the same time as this, I am easing off of the caffeine² habit I got all junked up on while in Seattle. But deep down I believe caffeine stimulants help block histamines. Probably old fool's tale, but I might have to get after some coffee tomorrow to continue experimenting in the self-clinic. Also I picked up some Loratadine (i.e., generic Claritin) at the pharmacy while on a bike ride earlier this evening just in case. I can't pinpoint an exact cause for the allergies; never was allergic to much other than bee stings and poison ivy as a kid. Probably I'm allergic to summer.

I'm back on a fitness kick, too. For me that means I step out the front door and run as hard as I can until I am cramping up, half falling over, gulping desperately for air, and suffering those burning, explosive heart palpitations. And then I get the mail and walk back up the length of the driveway with my hands above my head (for maximal lung capacity) until I regain my composure. Sixty feet, 0 minutes, 6.31 seconds.

That was a joke. Seriously, I have been grinding out 2.5 miles, which include two decent sized hills. That and an evening bike ride--nothing too rigorous except that Is. is on board, so those few miles are only slightly more challenging than when I ride by myself, especially on the inclines. But I have a sports camp coming up next week and so I have a short little window to get back to a fitness peak where, at the very least, I can bounce a basketball, blow a whistle, and stand on my feet all day long.

That's about it. Monday's work-pace was good enough that if I can repeat it on Tue.-Fri., I will inflict permanent strikethroughs out the list of stuff that has been parked too long on the to-do list. Ahead: More mid-day jogs. And I'll try to scale back on some of my bad dietary habits, laying off the caffeine, the Desert Pepper Peach and Mango Salsa, and the Twizzlers black licorice, and instead popping Loratadine indulgently like candy (the allergies, you could say, are kicking my anise).

A slight chance for more blogging, too, although I have much much much too much to complain about, and I generally try not to do that here unless left with no other choice. So that I am not being cryptic: car repairs and Quality Matters course redevelopments (for PU) are giving me a hell of a time in addition to the allergies. At least it's June.