Tuesday, May 20, 2008
For The Third or Fourth Time
F rom today's IHE, a piece on double-dipping conference presentations. This is a practice that has been on my mind somewhat during this, the most conference-intensive stretch of my current program of study. Of course, the very idea of "double-dipping" resonates with the bucket (or well) model of invention that, at its best, smacks of individualism and zero-sum economics and, at its worst, echoes of such horrifying social (and professional) improprieties as standing over a vegetable tray at a faculty gathering and using, re-using, and re-re-using the same celery stalk as a salivated dipping stick for that zesty ("Maybe dill?") salad dressing. The views included in the short article range from the cynical to the more generous-spirited. From the cynical camp, a shot about dumbfounded graduate students who are oblivious to the ethics of reperforming (revising, retooling, redelivering, etc.) one's work:
As Nelson C. Dometrius, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, writes in his introduction to [the debate featured in PS: Political Science and Politics], when he raised the question with senior faculty members, he received mixed reactions, with people quickly outlining special cases where they viewed such "double dipping" as justified. When he posed the same question to graduate students, Dometrius relates, "the modal reply was a blank stare -- a lack of comprehension that presenting the same paper as many times as you wished would be viewed by anyone as an unusual or questionable practice."
I don't know whether this says more about Dometrius, about the graduate students at Texas Tech (less likely), or about advanced graduate study in political science (even less likely), but it's a take that doesn't carry all that well over into my own experience developing and giving conference talks in recent years. If we are not to be flavor-of-the-week-ademics, isn't some return inevitable? What's implied here is that carry-over is suspicious, an indication that someone is slacking off or falsifying a work record.
On a more nuanced note, the exec. director of MLA--who was quoted in the article--suggests that re-use is smart and appropriate, especially when you take audience into account. If the audience is not the same from conference to conference, the matter of "double-dipping" becomes less a question of conferencing ethics and more a question of growing one's vita by dubious means (i.e., double-dipping as the HGH of higher ed). I would guess this works very differently when, for a dissertating graduate student, the list of life's work is fairly short and centered on a small number of projects than it would around year six or seven of an assistant professorship, after the chance to give the dissertation a rest, pour your heart into a couple of different projects, and perhaps even land a book contract. Artificial vita cultivation and re-tread scholarship: who really believes there will not come a day of reckoning for these practices?
One of the messages I return to from early in coursework: you can write insightfully and meaningfully about your work from any point in it, whether you are just beginning to find a research question, whether you have written full articles on the matter, or whether you have dedicated twenty years to this or that interest. Could this be construed as a kind of one-trick-ponyism? Perhaps. But it is not easy to decide without knowing better the work in question. Of course it's possible to re-use one's own stuff lazily, but all re-use, all "self-plagiarism," need not fall into that category of suspicion.
I am tempted to leap to personal anecdotes as a way to wander through this question a bit more. Those (i.e., the three of you) who have heard more than one of my conference papers in recent years will recognize overlaps, recurring interests, and ideas that re-appear because they click. But I am not giving the same paper in any two cases. Not exactly. Neither am I writing what I think of as purely original conference papers, since they all rise from an accumulating slosh of ideas and clusters of interests (providing copies of them is one measure of verification, but what about those extemporaneous talks?). The conferencing record is like a listing of cousins, not strangers, not siblings (most certainly not twins, which seem to be the concern of the article). But then again, perhaps I am merely invoking (to the point of abusing?) that graduate student exemption that grants greater leniency to experimentation, to trying ideas and presentational styles on for size, while trudging through all of those pre-professional uncertainties.
I have to stop here, but there are a couple of other matters of interest touched off by the piece:
- Self-plagiarism as a concept (closely related: self-citation). Also as a hypocritical practice (i.e., teachers forbid undergraduates from re-using papers across the curriculum, but themselves--allegedly--do it). The article does not provide examples, and the only ones I can think of (aside from the obvious sharing of curricular materials, syllabi, etc.) are where an article evolves into a book chapter, but this practice is, as far as I know, widely accepted.
- Whether publishing formalities apply to the conferencing circuits. If published articles have much greater purchase for tenure, wouldn't self-duplication in formal publications reflect the lackadaisical attitudes toward re-used conference materials? Some of this goes back to acceptance systems, double-blind peer review, etc.
- What of the practice of re-using conference proposals? Some lore about this circulates--the conference-goer who got in [to XYZ national conference] using the exact same proposal. Ethically objectionable? Change the title, re-submit the proposal. Does it matter whether the conference presentation was "original" if the proposal was a duplicate?
- Do political scientists study Bakhtin?
- The table, "Duplicate Presentations, by Year Doctorate Received," is fascinating in the trend it projects: by the year 3,000--for better or worse--all conference presentations will be double-dipped.
Posted by at Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Of Value To The World
I n a recent Chronicle column, "Tales of Western Adventure," (via) historian Patricia Limerick writes on the challenges facing "public" scholars. The public scholar vs. "scholar of the esoteric" dichotomy is fraught with brambles (might the passionate pursuer of the arcane run afoul of hasty caricatures?), of course, but nevertheless the column is a must read. I was especially taken in by her bulleted lists. The first one, halfway into the short piece, weighs reasons for not encouraging newcomers to pursue academic careers in the humanities. The second list consists of Limerick's everyday techniques or manners for delivering "on the promise that university-based academics are of value to the world." Among them:
- Face up to the fact that your own convictions may not be the final word in human wisdom. Surrender the pretension that can poison professorial efforts to communicate with the public.
- Apply to the world around you the methods you were taught you in graduate school for assessing evidence. Take in information carefully; keep your hypotheses in a limber state; do not leap to conclusions; resist the common human habit of celebrating the evidence that supports your pre-existing point of view, while dismissing the evidence that invites you to question your assumptions.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Where's Rhetoric?
T he above question was at the heart of last Thursday's C.15 session in New Orleans. It was a full session--packed to the walls after being bumped from one rather large space, Grand Ballroom D, to one of the smaller salons in the adjacent hallway. After a curmudgeonly attendee in the back grumped "Microphone?", the first speaker, Michael Bernard-Donals, described a needful relationship between composition and rhetoric (i.e., one in which composition needs rhetoric). Bernard Donals observed that, judging by the conference program, rhetoric appears to have been banished; it is invisible; it has been marginalized, at the very least. The decline of "rhetoric" in the program served as evidence for Bernard-Donals' claim about its compromised, fading status. He suggested, as well, that rhetoric might threaten composition's disciplinary thrust toward stability. Variations on this idea turned up on the talks shared by Thomas Rickert and Rosa Eberly, also. Rickert's "Rhetoric Beyond Critique: Grappling with Institutionality After Kant" thoughtfully considered the institutional inertia reflected in rhetoric's lowly status in the today's academy. His concern was less the relationship between composition and rhetoric than the tolerable limits of critique and, as well, the ways rationalism's powerful residue is deeply implicated in prevailing institutional norms. Neither my memory nor my notes serve me very well in saying more. Eberly echoed a slight variation on Bernard-Donals' suggestion that rhetoric threatens stability: "Rhetoric via Crowley brings the possibility that we change our minds." Up to that point, she worked--via performative flair and personal anecdote--at the idea that there are certain advantages in CCCClosets, walls that sequester and seal off, and so we need not hasten to dissolve divides where they linger.
This was an engaging panel all in all, perhaps all the more so for the sense I had leaving it that the question--"Where's Rhetoric?"--was answerable in a hundred different ways (not that the panelists presumed their work to offer any final word, of course). So, where is rhetoric at CCCC? As Bernard-Donals explained, it is less pronounced in the titles of sessions. And, because its omission from titles does not prove its omission from the conference program, he went on to say that in his methods of sifting the conference program for "rhetoric" he relied on tacit knowledge (familiarity with presenters, topics, and institutional affiliations, I would guess) to trace "rhetoric's fingerprints in the papers." By these methods, if he is right, "rhetoric" is fading at the CCCC.
It seemed to me to be a question of ground-truthing, the technique used by cartographers when they venture out, GPS in hand, to corroborate what's on the map with what's on the ground--what's real, that is, or evidential. But the very idea of finding rhetoric in the conference program (as opposed to the conference) also depends upon how rhetoric is defined and how generous or flexible the manner enacted in the process of looking. In other words, if you are not finding "rhetoric" where you are looking, is it a matter of how you look or where you look? Both, I suppose.
Maybe I can get at this a different way--by looking for "rhetoric" in two other panels I attended, first by glancing their titles and then by thinking about what happened in those sessions. First, consider E.34 Writing Pictures, Changing Writing. No mention of "rhetoric" in the titles. It is listed under "Practices of Teaching Writing." Is this a rhetoric panel? I don't know. Elsewhere: F.11 Visual Rhetoric of Comics, 'Spectacle', and Mail Art. This was a panel organized by the conference, so the title, I would imagine, was assigned somewhere in the selection process. One of the papers listed mentioned "rhetoric" explicitly, but that panelist was not on hand to present. Still, with "rhetoric" in the session title, and with "Theory" as its area cluster, I suppose it is more likely F.11 is a hit than a miss.
So, then, E.34, no mentions of "rhetoric", and F.11, explicit mentions of "rhetoric". Both concerned art, comics, and visual "rhetoric," to varying degrees. E.34 did so with far more examples of student-created comics; F.11, in so far as the papers concerned comics, dealt more with reading them, interpreting them, and analyzing them (rhetoric as a synonym for rhetorical criticism). McCloud's work was invoked by presenters on both panels. In E.34, the complete series from Understanding to Reinventing to Making Comics came up. In F.11, the discussion of comics stuck to Understanding Comics--McCloud's more analytical, critical (rather than productive) project. With this I am not trying to say that rhetoric was more or less present in one or the other of these panels, but I am trying to come to terms with the sense I have that rhetoric is potentially more or less present in the conference depending on how we as conference-goers listen for it, ask questions inflected with rhetorical concepts, and how our own uneven training in rhetoric positions us to expect that all writing activity is immersed in it. I am trying to come to terms with my own hunches (both Qs&As) about the C.15 question--"Where's Rhetoric?": What if it is here?
There are ninety-nine or more other ways to turn it, and it's a fun,
evocative question.
Where's rhetoric? Eating at
Evelyn's Place (and,
thus, ditching all D.sessions).
Where's rhetoric? What do I look like, rhetoric's mom?
Where's rhetoric? Touring.
Where's rhetoric? Getting schnockered on Bedford St. Martin's wine over at the
aquarium.
Where's rhetoric? If you are not finding it where you are looking, why are you
looking for it there?
Where's rhetoric? Last I saw, rhetoric was on the third floor, by the pool,
listening to an iPod and wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt with a tag cloud on the
front of it.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
H.16orn Tooting
I n step with Jenny and Scot, whose posts have alerted me to attend their respective panels at CCCC (although, Scot--8 a.m.?), I thought I should take advantage of the opportunity to promote yet another session at the upcoming convention. So, where should you be at 11:00 a.m. next Friday, April 4? Why, in the Elmwood Room on the Third Floor of the Hilton Riverside in N.O., of course, for H.16 Digital Research Ecologies: How Journal Web Sites Are Answering New Media's Challenges.
Do you need more encouragement? So be it. Here I give you the title slide from my talk.
More still?
We are presenting in room #12, not far from the swimming pool, which means you could bring your towel for a dip before or after the talk (or to hold over your mouth as an ad hoc filter for those sharp, chest-stabbing whiffs of chlorine). If, on the other hand, you skip the H sessions to go swimming, we will see you as we walk by, and perhaps even bear a small, short-lived grudge. Heh, I'm kidding about that last part. Anyway, come along to H.16 and we'll grab lunch afterward. Apparently there is seating enough for between 96 and 176 (depending on whether the chairs are "classroom" or "theater" styled).
Friday, August 17, 2007
Job Seekers' Wiki
O ver at the Academic Careers wiki, I just created a page for composition and rhetoric-related positions in the upcoming hiring cycle. Bookmark and contribute!
Okay, so maybe it's a little bit early to be fiddling with this. On the other hand, it's never too early to get the word out. And don't worry, I won't post a standalone blog entry about it every time I make a change over there (although I might post a follow-up).
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Transparency for Library Recalls
A nother one of the books I have out from the library was recalled the other day. It's due to be returned tomorrow. I've been holding onto it until the last possible moment because I wanted to eek out what notes I could about the one chapter that interested me (whether any of it finds a place in the diss is undecided...one of many undecideds). The library has recalled maybe six or eight books from me in the three years I've been at Syracuse. Often the book has been on my shelf for longer than its initial check-out period. Our libraries at SU make it very easy to renew online: bad for patrons who are put off by the "checked out" designation; good for my temporary collections.
With the most recent recall, it occurred to me that there might be certain advantages in a system that allowed the possessor and the requestor to see information about each other--something like a localized LibraryThing where borrowing patterns and common materials associate people at a given institution (or regional cluster of institutions). I mean that the recall request would disclose information about the person requesting the book and vice versa. There could be problems with this, also, such as when the possessor fails to return the book by the new deadline. I can imagine a disgruntled requestor parked outside my office door, fuming. Likewise, I can imagine scenarios where rank might play a role (even though, of course, it should not), such as when a sophomore makes a request for materials crucial to a tight-to-deadline research project by someone up the hierarchy.
Problems notwithstanding, transparency would make it possible for the possessor and requestor to have a conversation. Most of us wouldn't have time for this sort of thing every time materials are recalled, but why not make it an option, even for casual insights and also a different sense of connections across an institution? After all, books--even though they are things--participate in and even proliferate networks. Such a system (opt-in, of course) might stimulate cross-campus (even cross-institutional) conversations and serendipitous exchanges about reading and research that would not happen otherwise. I raise this not knowing anything about the requestor of The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920 or their motivations. Arbitrary (does anyone have a copy of...?) requests for materials to our program listserv would suggest that borrowers are likely to be our close colleagues. This is interesting and surprising--grounds for fruitful encounters. But equally interesting to me are those potential encounters beyond the usual circles in which we walk, read.
Whether there's anything to all of this, the recall did touch off an incentive for me to get some notes down on Veysey's chapter, notes which include these two striking excerpts:
"Those who reject the dominant scientific conception of the pursuit of knowledge can only wander off in a score of mutually unrelated directions. It is easy to see these as amounting to no more than a mixed bag of random leftovers. In particular, when such fields as history, English, foreign languages, and the history of art and music rejected science and yet invoked the past, there was the grave danger that they would run around in a spirit of sheer antiquarianism--calling attention to anything merely because it existed, with no self-conscious principle of selection, no concept of the logical relationship between evidence and larger hypothetical generalizations. Of course none of this matters if one stops dreaming of intellectual unification and rests content with the celebration of particular achievements in art, music, poetry, literary criticism, or philosophy. But these symptoms of confusion, drift, and retreatism deserve emphasis in dealing with a rubric that to outsiders appears far more coherent than it is" (57).
"The most important boundary may well be not the formalistic one between so-called amateurs and professionals but the line that divides those who William James called the once- and twice-born, between those persons of all backgrounds who have become converted to a profoundly sustaining intellectual allegiance of this kind and those others (possibly laboring alongside them in the same academic departments) who have not" (61).
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
In Action
J ust before the fall semester convenes one month from now, my graduate program will hold its annual Community Day event. The day-long event includes faculty and grad student symposia, a lunch, a conversation with the new cohort of students, and, in the evening, a potluck. The theme for this year's event is "Scholarship In Action," one of the hinge phrases in SU's mission statement. Scholarship In Action, as I understand it, is a positive designation for scholarly activity undertaken in such a way that it circulates broadly, intervening in the world beyond the academy. Community engagement, boundary-spanning initiatives, and participatory dynamics are entered into play. SIA complicates traditional models of research. I've been asked to talk for ten minutes about how the research I'm doing matches up with SIA, and so, largely because I agreed to do it, I've been walking the perimeter, getting bearings on the phrase, tracing it back through some of the references to it in recent campus discourse, keeping on the lookout for a eureka or two.
I read the university-wide shared reading for the fall, which, in one sense, presents TB-expert Paul Farmer as the consummate scholar in action. Also, I have had a few conversations with people about SIA or overheard it discussed in relationship to more inclusive sensibilities about tenure and promotion. While it might seem an over-statement to call SIA controversial, it's an idea that, because it jostles with traditional definitions of scholarship, strikes up some hard questions. For instance: Is SIA, in itself, adequate for progress toward tenure and promotion in all disciplines? Whatever the answer to this first one, what is the optimum ratio between SIA and traditional scholarship or, that is, basic research? And how does the ratio shift depending on rank? What are the risks involved in building one's own research agenda on SIA before establishing much of any record with basic or traditional research in a given field? I raise these questions mostly to begin to get at some preliminary ideas about how to talk for ten minutes about SIA relative to what I do (and what 'what I do' does). I mean that I want to understand the correspondence rather than just insist on it. I can see that these questions would imply that SIA and traditional scholarship are at odds. That's not necessarily the case. They might just as well be considered integral. Still, SIA implies an improvement upon basic, traditional scholarship.
Farmer's research agenda as well as his publication record is downplayed in Mountains Beyond Mountains. Occasionally, Kidder mentions that Farmer was dashing off an article late at night or during one of his trans-Atlantic flights. Often the article was solicited by a reputable journal, and, of course, the writing was tightly interwoven with his on-ground, applied research in the clinic. I mention this because I didn't have the impression that Farmer was exerting himself as a scholar, traditional or in action. I mean that SIA wasn't explicitly his plan.
I'm not sure that it's my plan, either. I mean, I hold SIA in favorable regard, and I think it is an especially crucial intervention where it expands definitions of tenurable (i.e., traditional, recognizable) scholarly activity, even if hasn't caught on at many institutions. SIA stretches these carefully defined domains, and it does so, in part, to re-integrate the university with the world at-large. To blend them together again while warding off the many pressures, forces, ivory towerisms, and economies of scarcity that hold them apart in far too many ways. SIA reverses the caricature model of traditional scholarly production: curmudgeonly hermits turning out article after unread article, monograph after unread monograph, reproducing a narrow-band echo-effect among a highly specialized in-group.
But then there are more hard questions: Another concern is that as a graduate student preparing at SU (an institution where SIA is valued), what bearing will it have in an institution where SIA is not valued, not recognized? Could SIA have a negative impact for a freshly minted Ph.D. seeking a faculty appointment at another institution? Perhaps. Again, the question of ratios in the combinatory mix--of balancing an SIA agenda with traditional, recognizable scholarship, and of doing so in such a way that SIA doesn't merely amount to yet another set of tasks. I suppose this could be read as cynical, but I don't mean it that way at all. I'm only trying to anticipate questions of whether (and to what degree) SIA introduces greater risks (or greater rewards) for graduate students.
I haven't even touched upon the intersection of SIA and digital research and scholarship, but this is what my ten minutes will sort through. To what extent is keeping a del.icio.us account a form of SIA? How about blogging? Online teaching? CCC Online Archive? I can make a case for it, I suppose, but there's also a way of dealing with the question that boils down plainly to what is included on one's CV. Others have talked about this at length--whether to include one's weblog on a CV. I would guess that most people, other than those who have won awards for it, don't include it. Obviously, I don't hide it (under what rug would it fit?), but neither do I list Earth Wide Moth (not even any of my favorite entries) on the CV under "scholarship."
In a similar vein, I know there are discussions at old U. about counting the development of online courses as publications. Online courses involve a sizable chunk of work and a lot of writing, but are they more article-like than syllabus-like? More review-like than teaching-statement-like? I don't know (er, perhaps I do know this tacitly, considering I don't list the courses I've developed as publications). Without putting SIA, applied research, traditional research, or basic research into tidy, discrete categories, I still need to sort through just how much of what I do matches with SIA and, as well, take stock of what it is worth to call it by that name.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Power Adjuncting
I mentioned before that in addition to teaching one course I'm working this summer in a mentoring role for first-term online instructors at old U. I'm assigned to two of them, an instructor of psychology and an instructor of economics. This involves email interchanges, sharing certain announcements and teaching documents, occasional phone conversation, and three formative evaluations throughout the term. In a recent phone conversation with the instructor of economics, he told me about a colleague from his M.A. program who has been power-adjuncting for a couple of years. The power adjunct, so I'm told, taught 16 online courses per term for who knows how many unwitting universities en route to earning close to $300,000 in one year. That would make this person's FTE, oh, between 11 and 12? Obviously, this involves torturous paces and is more possible where courses are flatly transactional, even where assessment follows a reductive circuit from the textbook to multiple-choice examination. Not the most sustainable career choice, but at 300K, a hyperactive part10-timer could work for only a couple of years before retiring comfortably (while teaching only two or three courses per term for groceries).
Yes, it is scandalous. Equally scandalous are the "university" systems that make the conditions for bloat-load teaching possible. There is more lore to this effect: stories of some low-lying part-timer in California who, with ties to just four different institutions, teaches online and earns six figures doing it (not 300k, but more like 100k). Something about it intrigues me, makes me wonder at the possibilities. No, no, not that I'd ever want to try it (300k...), but I'm anxiously waiting for someone else to write a monograph comparable to Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, only this time taking the exposé to the credit-hour-farmers who heft the virtual load, like day-workers at online Labor Ready, but instead of getting exploited, they get rich (well, okay, exploited and rich).
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Summer Is Off
T his summer's work is well underway. In addition to working on the dissertation (a rough chapter draft scraped together by July 20?) and CCC Online Archive, I am teaching an online section of HU211 (Intro to Humanities) for old U. and holding down one of three seats as a mentor for new online instructors. This is the first summer in several years where I'm teaching just one course. For five or six years in a row, I've taught two. The mentoring gig feels a small amount lighter to me than teaching a course. Fewer email exchanges, and the interactions with the instructors are highly professional, responsive, and collegial. The twist--always a twist?--is that the mentorship pairings shape up across the disciplines, so even though I am not formally trained in economics or psychology, the instructors I am working with are teaching courses in those areas: Principles of Microeconomics and Introduction to Guidance and Counseling. Of course, my purpose is not so much to pose as a content expert as it is to listen, share samples of various teaching documents, announcements, reminders, rubrics for assigning grades to the stuff that turns up in threaded discussions, and lend a hand with other administrative aspects of teaching online (in eCollege, following old U.'s procedural standards as relate to the handling of proctored exams, submissions of attendance, and so on). I also fill out a periodic, formative evaluation of sorts and check in on the exchanges taking shape in a discussion forum where instructors new and old from across the disciplines chime in with whatever is on their minds (not surprisingly, some of entries include laments that the students can't write or that they--h0rr0r!--plagiarize). Woe, the ongoing disenchantment with student prose.
All of this in addition to the travel (Detroit for C&W, Phoenix for camp, Michigan for my in-laws' 50th anniversary) and the cross-town move (coming up) accumulates to suggest that I don't have to worry about that fatigue (and blisters) that might otherwise accompany weeks and months of twiddling my thumbs.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Meeting of the Job Hunters
W e held our first job-seekers meeting yesterday afternoon, spent a couple of hours going over each other's CV and talking through how we rank criteria for the jobs we will soon pursue. I use pursue loosely and with a string of asterisks, of course, since this year I am only something like one-tenth on the market and nine-tenths not. I mean that I am going through the material preparations processes as if I am on the market and will only apply for positions too sweet to resist, provided, also, that I'm making progress on the diss. Why? Well, it would take an offer somewhere in the ball park of a five-year contract and 27.5 million a year for us to relocate before Ph.'s senior year of high school. Make that 30 mil. On top of that, it's not especially ethical or wise (in terms of reputation-building) for me to court jobs I have no genuine interest in filling from the outset. While I would like to dangle a toe in the waters of interviewing and giving job talks, I won't be pitching jobs for that reason alone. The process is too grueling for candidates and committees to tie up everyone's time and resources on my desire for full-on play-acting the year before I go on the market in earnest. Better to spend those energies building bridges (i.e., writing, conferencing, etc.) rather than dismantling them.
I have a fairly short list of criteria for my optimum job (#1. It pays. #2. Fringe benefits, such as health insurance. #3. The institution is accredited. #4. Not more than a 5/5 load. And so on...). But after those factors, I understand that there are many, many variables involved that have bearing on a candidate's fit, several of which are outside of the candidate's control. There's enough to say about this that I probably ought to make it a separate entry rather than ramble through it all right now. Jeff's point about good colleagues resonates with me. Entering an embattled department, while possible (I accept!), is not how I want to live out my first years on the job. May I be so fortunate as to land in a program where people like and respect each other, where they get along professionally even if they are not best chums.
What else came up in the meeting? The bullet-by-bullet-by-bullet:
- We talked about institutional differences, from R1 and R2 to comprehensive colleges, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and technical colleges. Expectations are all over the map--likely to fluctuate quite a bit among the types.
- How are administrative duties distinct from forms of service? My notes have it that administration places a clearer emphasis on leadership and responsibility, where service is a slightly different designation for involvement (committees, advising, etc.).
- Fledgling CVs ought not to look qualification-desperate. Use care in over-logging the minutiae of every meeting you attended in your graduate program. It fills a CV's pages, but there's no substitute for a demonstrable record of research, teaching, and service (no matter the extraneous yarns and additives). Along these lines, I described my own CV as the junk-drawer version. I'm still in the mode of tossing everything into it, but I understand that filtering is due before it would circulate to any hiring committee.
- Connected to this previous point, we talked about whether there are risks involved with keeping online versions of materials that don't match verbatim with paper-bound materials. In other words, must an online CV be an exact match with the copy that goes off in pursuit of a job? Probably (right?). Transclusive texts--those existing in multiple versions--can lead to unnecessary confusion, and confusion over a candidate's record can be disastrous.
- What are the ethics involved for graduate students listing in-progress publications on their CVs? On the one hand, we want the CV to do the work of answering what we're working on now. "Oh, it says here that you have an article in-progress." But should an article ever be listed on the CV before it is sent out? In other words, how many different designations are appropriate for in-progress works: submitted, under consideration, in-progress, under review, accepted, etc.? I'm of a mind to err on the side of conservativism for this one. Seems risky to list anything that hasn't been touched by the USPS (or an editor's email server for electronic submissions).
- My articulation of the conditions surrounding the ideal job got me thinking more about my own confidence. I am a confident teacher; I am learning to be a confident researcher. I have no concerns whatsoever about being a good colleague, a steady contributor when it comes to service, administration, and so on (unless I fail to say no and end up taking on too much). But the teaching/research confidence issue leaches into my description of the ideal job. In other words, I still find it much easier to discuss the appeal I find in teaching-intensive appointments compared to research-intensive appointments. Might be true for many graduate students who have taught extensively but who have published considerably less if at all.
Next meeting in +/- three weeks when we take up job letters.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Program Investment
W ith the weekend after my graduate program's visiting days trailing to a close, I've been thinking a lot about program ownership and investment. Wednesday night through Saturday morning, we hosted a group of prospective students, much like we do every year in late February or early March. Because I was on the graduate committee last year, I was heavily involved in the process, and two years ago, as a first-year student, I made every effort I could to welcome the prospective students, to spend time with them, answer their questions, and chat about the culture of our program, the styles of various faculty members, the challenges that come along with teaching undergraduates at SU, and so on. This year, however, I missed meeting any of the students on the first day because they were scheduled for various meetings throughout the day and the more casual evening events conflicted with an indoor soccer match on Ph.'s schedule. The second day, Friday, was loaded up with my preparations for the pre-CCCC talk. Finally, at the evening get-together and again at a breakfast on Saturday morning, I had the chance to get to know each of them a bit better. A terrific group, really. We'd be fortunate to have them here.
Given the various turnouts, however, this year's visiting days has me thinking about who lays claim to the program, who steers it, who gives it its shape, who carries it on their shoulders, etc. Of course, the program, in a strict sense, is the university's. Administrative decisions trickle down, governing the possibilities for the program and also setting limits. That's a given, I suppose. But I'm thinking, too, about the ratio of investment among faculty and students. It's never so neat as "all faculty" are thoroughly and equally invested (as measured by?) nor as "all students" are thoroughly and equally invested (as measured by?). But rather than talk about my own program in this regard, because I don't want to depict my program as faculty-heavy or student-heavy in terms of involvement ratios, instead I want to pose the questions about who owns the program. Whose stake is greater in efforts to recruit a prospective cohort? The question can be worked any number of ways.
My first thought--on Saturday, when I started mulling this over--was that the faculty, of course, have greater stakes. Faculty, in one sense, are the program (try to have a program without them). They define it; their decisions shape the curriculum; their mentoring and guidance have tremendous bearing on the development of students, interests, professional trajectories. That said, I don't have any idea whether such things are made explicit to faculty at most programs (in any contract or job description or conversation with a department chair or dean) or even whether faculty are on the same page regarding the degree to which their individual actions permeate the culture of the program. Again, SU aside, I suppose this would work very differently from place to place. Or perhaps not. It is also difficult to measure the value of any encounter with students, difficult to separate the faculty-as-collective from faculty-as-individuals. Is a well-taught graduate course of greater significance than behind-the-scenes advising? Is a fifteen-minute formal presentation to prospective students given greater weight than a full three hours of relatively superficial niceties? Volatile and irregular, the bases for these comparisons.
But the more I've been thinking about it, the more I have been thinking that the graduate students must carry the heavier side of the ratio in terms of laying claim to the program and its culture. Graduate students influence faculty decisions, too, though perhaps to a lesser degree than they influence ours. But when we leave a program, we will be forever associated with the program; that is, association with the program lasts with us in ways that are not quite the same for faculty, particularly for those faculty who will stop over at multiple institutions (this one, this stop-over becomes one among many in such cases).
It's a mistake to bifurcate faculty and students, to insist that one group or the other must tow the load of program culture. It's a tidier division in thought-experiment than in any actual program, I suppose. Maybe such things as highly differential faculty investment are discussed openly at faculty meetings. I don't know. I also wonder whether such matters should be addressed explicitly with students and how, assuming it is appropriate, one would go about reminding everyone that the program's culture is in their hands, if it's in the hands of anyone, that is. I mean that the program is defined by students, in equal part whether they are tend to be participatory (additive) or non-participatory (absent). Something like an employee-owned model of graduate education.
To return to the example of my own program and my place in it, the success of the prospective students matters every bit as much to me as the publishing being done by our faculty, the currents in our undergraduate curriculum, the careers of alumni, the reputations of recent grads, the rotation of faculty through various appointments in the program, the rates of faculty exiting, and so on. Complex systems and then some. There's a lot going on. These aren't substitutes for my own activities (progress on the diss, conference presentations, collegiality and whatnot) but neither are they discrete or isolated, especially where the program's reputation is in focus.
I suppose it seems like I'm tip-toeing around some unspoken happening. Not really. Nothing prompted me into these lines of thought besides a genuine question about mutuality in graduate program recruitment--the distribution of the load we bear in performing the program and shaping both its culture and its reputation, not only for the two days prospective students visit each spring, but for the rest of time. Personalizing this discovery might make this thinking-down-a-path clearer: the culture of the program and my own actions are, pretty much from the day I accepted admission, integral.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Carnival: Trimbur and Writing Studies
F ollowing Donna's renewed call for the late February Trimbur carnival, here are a couple of floats in response to "Changing the Question: Should Writing Be Studied?" from Composition Studies 31.1 (2003).
For now I'll try to keep it to just two or three ideas. I've heard passing mention of "writing studies" as an alternative name for the knot (bow?) where rhetoric and composition are tied together. When I used it myself once, I think someone suggested that the "writing studies" designation is typically claimed by discourse analysts--those whose encounters with texts are measured for pattern and (ir)regular features. Perhaps that's only of value inasmuch as it sheds light on my own baggage with the phrase: a moment of correction, definition, and re-association. And whether this is right or not is less the point, I think, than the contemplation of writing studies' orientation to particular methods and research agendas. As I read Trimbur's article, I also thought about another passing conversation with a colleague who described someone else's work in film this way: "[S.h]e does film studies, not production. Students who take film classes want production rather than all of the history, theory, and methodology that go along with film studies. They're impatient and even bored with film studies." That was the gist of it, anyhow. Out of this half-remembered conversation comes one question about a shift from workshop to seminar room and toward writing studies: at the cost of what? If the answer is that we study writing (n.) at the expense of writing (p.v.), the proposition becomes considerably messier. Of course, nobody is saying this explicitly, but to what degree is a quiet displacement of something else implied by the asking?
At SU, we're in a somewhat unique situation with a standalone writing program and a bona fide writing minor (also an undergraduate major inching toward approval and formalization). English majors at SU take up a program of study in what is called "English and Textual Studies." I don't know a whole lot about the curriculum, but the "Textual Studies" addition has always given me pause. As a generic concept detached from actual curriculum and teaching practices, it sounds an awful lot like a bridge between the work done in the writing program and the English Department (even if it's something more like the Königsberg bridge). Where is the slippage between "textual studies" as it matches with the work of colleagues in literature and "writing studies" as the basis for a four-year undergraduate curriculum?
Finally, for this entry at least, I'm interested in the relationship among the three questions Trimbur poses: 1. Can writing be taught? 2. How can writing be learned? 3. Should writing be studied? Changing the question suggests, in a certain sense, that Trimbur treats these questions as substitutive rather than additive or accumulative. Even as the discipline has matured, the staggered development of programs and practitioners leads me to think the questions should be additive--a layered, nested and continuous flow of inquiries. I mean that we mustn't too hastily retire either of the first two questions simply because they've been thought through and addressed by others before us.
Related:
Donna's
Belatedly: Trimbur and "writing studies"
Jeff's The Call to Write
Collin's
Trimbur Calling
Bill's Trimbur, "Should Writing Be Studied?"
Jenny's Studies of Writing (Carnival Post)
Jeff's The Call to Write II: Critical Gestures
Alex's Trimbur Carnival
Lance's (Carnival.) To Trimbur: Yes.
Nels's "Write Me a Letter..."
Jeff W.'s Writing Studies I and II
Added: I couldn't resist running Trimbur's essay through TagCrowd.
Friday, February 2, 2007
Courseware, Training Wheels
T hanks to everyone who threw in a congrats. May I never grow tired of waves of encouraging comments. (Makes me consider, for half a minute, the possibilities in announcing that I passed exams every week until the diss is finished. Entry #1419: For the Hundredth Time: Pass! Pass!)
For a few minutes now, I've bee thinking about Blackboard. IHE has this little news piece on Blackboard and law suits over patents. Blackboard, as I understand it, fancies itself the first to develop the web-in-a-box-ware used by so many colleges and universities for delivering online courses (or augmenting F2F with innovations like discussion forums). The legal loops are only marginally interesting to me. I mean, even though I think it is far-fetched, I can understand why Blackboard must, in the interest of solvency, claim as its property the idea of rolling together things like message boards, bulk email, and announcements into an unforgettable discombobulware.
I'm using Blackboard in an online course I'm currently teaching at SU. Its role in the course is minimal--merely a hub for discussion, assignments, and announcements. I've also taught with VCampus and eCollege in the past, and I can, without hesitation, say that I find both of the latter vastly superior to Blackboard. I'm no Blackboardian. Neither am I committed uncritically to VCampus or eCollege. I understand the need for such easy-to-use engorgementware (Just upload your Word docs). But I'm turning away from such things as much as I can. More and more, rails-heavy constraintware reminds me of training wheels. Only, rather than needing them to steady the vehicle, I see them more like the last set of training wheels that hanged dusty and rusted in the garage. They were strange, draped on a nail or resting on a shelf years later, a stark reminder of development as I aired the tires between popping wheelies and leaving skid marks in the driveway (a practice later banned by parental rule). Courseware as old training wheels, not the most flattering metaphor, eh?
So, as I said, I'm using anything else. For example: I'm making extensive use of Google Docs and Spreadsheets (formerly Writely) this semester for the online 205 at SU. In fact, it's the primary place where I ask students to turn in their work. They can upload Word docs or files from other word processing apps and then add me as a collaborator to let me know it's there, ready to be read and commented. When a student adds me as a collaborator, I get an email with a link back to the document in Google Docs. After I have read and commented on the piece, I simply select 'email' and the system asks me if I want to let the other collaborator know the document is ready for them to see. Google Docs runs server-side, so there's no uploading and downloading of files. All versions of a document are kept online, too, so I can easily select an early draft of a document for comparison or a quick reminder of what changed. I can add my comments as notes (which I often do), color code the notes, and use the highlighting options to assign shades to key concepts, moments of confusion, and so on. I hadn't tried the highlighting method before this semester, but it's the way that Becky made notes on my major qualifying exams, and I really liked the way it presents patterns among words and ideas.
After I return-email the document, routing it back to the student-collaborator, I'm left with a couple of nice options for the managing the list of documents associated with my account. I can add tags to individual docs or groups of them that will help me associate them with particular assignments, a stage of drafting, or a level of performance (I mean I can tag exemplary work as "exemplary" for future returns). Next I simply archive it, so I'm only faced with a list of active documents in the queue.
I'm sure this isn't a revolutionary practice, but it beats the heck out of anything I've seen in any of the courseware systems I've used to teach writing online. In fact, eCollege has yet to incorporate text formatting in their threaded discussion area (hyperlinks are automatically recognized, but still). And even in Google Docs there are a few small drawbacks (for each highlighting event, a color must be selected; it doesn't default to the last color used, and there is a similar wonkiness with changing the colors associated with inserted comments). Basically it amounts to a couple of extra clicks.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
An Account
L atour, in ch. 5 of Reassembling, writes this of "slowciological" accounts:
What is an account? It is typically a text, a small ream of paper a few millimeters thick that is darkened by a laser beam. It may contain 10,000 words and be read by very few people, often only a dozen or a few hundred if we are really fortunate. A 50,000 word thesis might be read by a half a dozen people (if you are lucky, even your PhD advisor would have read parts of it!) and when I say 'read', it does not mean 'understood', 'put to use', 'quoted', 'shelved somewhere in a pile'. At best we add an account to all those which are simultaneously launched in the domain we have been studying. Of course, this study is never complete. We start in the middle of things, in medias res, pressed by our colleagues, pushed by fellowships, starved for money, strangled by deadlines. And most of the things we have been studying, we have ignored or misunderstood. (122)
Even if I don't choose this as the epigraph to the preface to the rough draft of my dissertation prospectus, I find it to be an encouraging and humorous characterization of the phase that lies ahead. And this is to say nothing of Reassembling seeming one of the more important (read smart, even riveting) books I've picked up in recent months. Well, right, I am being sort of pokey in crawling through it, the way an aspiring slowciologist of associations should.
Friday, December 1, 2006
New Wine
A couple of days ago I resolved--silently--to postpone blogging until the end of qualifying exams (Dec. 21). Consider this entry a hiatus from my postponement. I've been condensing notes for the last two days, paring 24k words down to 8k, the amount I can smunch decently onto four sides of 8.5"x11" paper with a seven point font. I could drop to a 6 pt. font, but I figure there's no real need for more than the equivalent of twenty-four pages of notes when the answers I'm trying to write will each be 10-12 pages long. If all goes as planned, that is. Twelve pages spread across three hours: three...1...2...seconds...1...2...per...1...2... word. I probably shouldn't write the beats per word on the actual exam, should I? For today my notes seem adequate.
Where was I? I really only wanted to return a gratitude link to "New Media and New Literacies: Perspectives on Change," Carol Holder's New Horizons review in the latest Educause. The brief article opens with the following question: "What's it going to take to see new media, multimodal literacies, and curriculum and instructional change at colleges and universities?":
Fortunately, faculty who teach writing and are writing specialists, who help students become "literate," are in a discipline that has a long tradition of focusing research on curriculum, instruction, and the processes that lead to the development of literacy. Composition, rhetoric, and writing teachers were among the earliest adopters of computer- and Internet-based technologies in instruction, sharing results of experimental programs at conferences and in professional journals. (para. 5)
This definitely strikes a Concord given that I've been revisiting the C&W histories lately, polishing notes about Lisa Gerrard and Hugh Burns just yesterday. Generally, Holder has written an upbeat piece on change and diffusion, which also suggests some of the ways digital writing practices might productively alter the engrained patterns of conversations across disciplines. Plus, EWM gets an approving nod in the "New Wine" section. Cheers to that.
And now back to postponement, back to juicing the grapemash that is my brains six days from sitting the exams.
Sunday, September 3, 2006
Read:Write
I was interested to read Paul Matsuda's recent entry, "Read Everything," because it gets at the challenge involved in scholarly niche and rhythm. He begins with this:
One of the stock pieces of advice that I give gradaute students is to "read everything." Of course it's impossible to read everything that has ever been written, but I do expect researchers to have read everything--literally everything--on subtopics within the field on which they are writing.
This paradox is the ongoing challenge, no? Read everything; to read everything is impossible. Still, one must. But cannot. Etc. The outlying factors bear down and raise related questions: write everything? How much to read before writing? While writing? How much to write while reading?
I developed a decent relationship with my FYC professor at Central Michigan (where I studied for a year before transferring) and so listened in on many of his sage asides. For him, the maxim of read it all shifted to memory and attention and "read this": "Be one on whom nothing is lost." I remember him reminding us--fervently--that to feel intellectually small you need only to go to the library, look at one shelf on one floor of the library, and consider what you must do to understand it. Phew. Were we ever glad to have a reader.
To my mind Matsuda's stock advice is good for hearing, even if it can't be fully executed. In this sense, it turns into the performance of reading all that one can possibly read and recognizing (while also not being put off by) the unavoidable limitation in such a commitment as that.
Monday, July 24, 2006
VR@RL Underway
T he VR@RL Conference kicks off today and runs through the end of the week. Here's what I put together: "Digital Underlife and Writing Instruction."
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Out Comes
A s much as anything else, I wanted to gather together the full (re-released!) collection of interchange on "computer literacy" section of the WPA Outcomes Statement on technology. Why? Just so I'd have it, evidence of the watershed moment.
Suggested Section: Computer Literacy
Outcomes, Technology, and a Blog
Computer Literacy Plank on Outcomes Statement
Party like it's 1996
Why I
haughtta...
planks of technology
More on Technology, Outcomes, Walking Planks,
Being an Outsider�
WPA Technology
Outcomes Statement
Walking the
�Techplank�
While I'm at it, I've been thinking about outcomes statements for a few days now, too, not only because of the WPA OS on technology, but also because I've been deciphering quite a few acronym-rich emails with references to CO, CA and CAR associated with my summer gig.
Just moseying along, minding my business, when I bump into an OS, I want to ask, What comes out? (Is it possible to do so without seeming rude?) Put another way: What do we gain and lose by shifting outcomes from a noun to a question? What comes out? Or what, with adherence to the listed dictums, would come out?
That probably wouldn't work becomes outcomes are answers, affirmations of the implications of a particular set of activities (often associated with formal schooling). Because the answers or outcomes precede the activity, they run the risk of overdetermining the activity, reducing it to its forecast. They are, for the most part, inertial rather than accelerative, a happy cocktail of teleology, ideology and institution-ology. They depend upon clear, concise language, language that must not theorize, must not introduce perplexity (no matter how vital these things might be throughout the activity!). Outcomes, necessary though they are, might be the antithesis of inquiry. Inquiry moves ahead without full certainty or reassurance of already knowing. Inquiry knows not what will come out: wondering, wandering, guessing.
In fairness, we can all recognize the need for removing these three nuisances: theory, perplexity and inquiry. Outcomes statements must be the surest answers; the activity would be a failure if it didn't come out as predicted, if it didn't come out, that is, an exact match with the lowest replicable components (LRC).
Last thing: this brings up an audience problem. I mention this because audience seems to be a crossed-wires issue here. In "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline," citing Farrell, Lauer writes, "In social fields, advocates have two kinds of audience: 1) the epistemic court of experts and 2) larger affected populations for whom social knowledge exercises a rhetorical function, attempting to gain their acceptance of its conclusions and to induce their action" (24). Eventually there's a third audience (even if Lauer includes it with the second audience): "those writing instructors and pedagogical advocates who are neither in touch with existing scholarship nor contributing to it" (24). What do I mean about an audience problem? The three audiences, again:
1. Epistemic court (experts who keep up with the reading and write actively
on the issues they profess)
2. General public
2a. Those who self-identify with the field but who neither keep up with the
scholarship nor write actively on the issues they profess
Outcomes statements can't appease all three audiences at once, and it's altogether likely that those in the first group will find them to be egregiously reductive, simplistic and lacking in vitality (fair enough; Lauer wasn't writing about OSes, exactly). They must name only what is already known to be possible as an LRC (and often such sure things are a few years old) rather than naming what is possible or recently emerging.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Rhetorweight Boxing
D uring a conversation tonight about anthologies ("Anthologics," a future entry), somebody mentioned Cross-Talk in Comp Theory and, you guessed it, the Bartholomae-Elbow debate. There are others, but I don't know them (or I do, but I don't want to disturb sleeping giants). I should know them, list them. But for now I'm casually proposing a collection made up of the close-handed fisticuffs, an all-time greats in the knock-down-drag-outs of RC scholarship. Each conflict would be framed as a round with notes explaining the vitriol's sources, escalations of fired-up writing, and so on. A celebration of irreconcilability and over-my-dead-body investments in method, curriculum and the discipline. Who wouldn't order a copy of such a thing?
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
It's What You're Doing When You're Doing What You Look Like You're Doing
I t looks like I'm working on the last seminar paper. Ever. Two thousand credit hours later, I'm at the end of coursework, writing the last paper. And oh lordamighty does it need work. I presented the outline in class back in April. The response came, "That's a superb and amazing outline. For a dissertation." Which is lucky, because I'll officially be on the clock to write one of those beginning early next year. And I have an outline to steer it right. For a few days I thought this final paper would aspire to be prospectus-like, a speculative what-why-how for the diss. But that's too grandiose, I've learned, and so I need to turn out a few more pages on this: why not empirical methods (exploration, imagination and whatnot)? No, it's not the right question yet. Yes, I have particular methods in mind. What's an antonym for empirical? Felt? Intuited? [Added: Theoretical?]
The geography course finished this morning. AAG-like presentations. Mine: something on writing the map or what I want to call map writing--the writing activity taking shape with the online mapping apps that have boomed since Google Maps' API released last summer. Specifically, I read from a script that I ripped (then massaged) from the twenty page version of the paper. Such distinctive genres--the seminar paper and the 15-minute conference talk. There was a handout, Powerpoint slides, screenshots. Applause (okay, for everyone...polite clapping). And just five minutes for Q&_. There would be an A in a perfect world, but we ran out of time. Which means that, to the last question asked of me, I didn't get to let loose with how deeply important it is, particularly with cybercartographic apps (where mapping is participatory, written/plotted by users), to regard maps as rhetorical, to study maps rhetorically. This shift from authoritative (politically regimented) paper maps to online maps is a remediation much like book to screen, only, well, different, I think, because of the limited influence of rhetoric on cartography (or cartography on rhetoric). More about this another day, or comment away if you want to pick up where I'm leaving off. I've got to get back to doing what I look like I'm doing.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Conference Rewind
F inally I'm resetting the needle to a groove, settling in for the intensive few weeks until semester's end, and shaking off the thrill of conversation and catching up throughout the stay in Chicago. I had a good conference despite the sting of $leeping in the conference hotel. It was great to finally meet a host of folks I've known casually in blogspace--Marcia, Debbie, Spencer, Krista, Jeff, and Bradley. Blogging--whatever else can be said of it--gives folks a fuller presence at the conference (judging by the last two Cs); this idea--of quasi-professional connection--is what we were just beginning to get at in the SIG on Friday evening.
I made it to the chair's address and E.28 Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing and Composing on Thursday. I would've liked to catch the sessions on blogging and/or podcasting, but I hadn't eaten much before my session in Computers Connection, and the fifteen minute interlude between sessions wasn't long enough to get that accomplished. The chair's address--"Riding a One-Eyed Horse": Reining In and Fencing Out--worked through a few entangled claims about the field's ocular turn--the vis-rhet push, if we want to call it that. Wooten's framing of technologies was hyperbolic and overtly negative in some cases (even if she was only suggesting a critical framework rather than clearly endorsing such positions). It was a mix of literary reference, personal anecdote, and critique of privileging visual modalities in our teaching. She told about her own first experience of the "tyranny of the image": a newscast about trees that featured a clipart image of a tree in the display's corner. I wasn't comfortable with the tie between the images in Guaman Poma's First New Chronicle and Good Government (a staple in Pratt's famous address on contact zones) and the computer. I'll have to wait for the CCC version to make sense of that. And the reference to technology as a hobby horse was enough to leave me thinking I was missing Wooten's broader point. Noticed that near the end of the talk "one-eyed horse" showed on the teleprompter as "one idea horse."
E.28 Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age offered primer to copyright and remix, including examples of the remix: a tangelo and Sprite Re-mix. My notes are thin, and it wouldn't add anything to get it wrong. Selber's stuff on parodic trailers (The Shining trailer redone), design patterns as micro-genres (and copyright considerations of design patterns), and also breadcrumbing, a term that has come up in cybercartography (rel. to traces, paths), too, left me with some good stuff to think about. The panel also provoked questions about just what constitutes re-mix. What distinguishes re-mix from revision or one-text alteration? When does re-mix become an empty signifier for change or modification?
On Thursday, I caught F.15 The Rhetorics of Identification: Or, Me and You and You and Me, So Happy Together? followed by G.23 Mediating Genres: Examining Antecedent Genres as Discursive Resources in Academic Public Spheres. Each of these panels was extraordinary in its own right, but they also shared an uncanny and surprising coordination. Two of the three papers on F.15 involved mirror neurons, the recent neurophysiological discovery of synapses that fire the same way for an action whether it is carried out by you or by me (your hand grasps, the synapses fire as if my hand grasped). Mirror neurons are an exacting exemplar for consubstantiality. The first paper got at this issue through film--specifically "inducements to identify," and resolving the propositional quality of identity and suggesting identity as an acting together of subject and object (here, a tie to genre and uptake). The third paper--so theoretically rich that my notes were soon forgotten--dealt with the equalization of identification, consubstantiality and sociality, while working toward a "constitutive mimesis" and "mimetico-affective contagion." And the second paper--also very strong and worthwhile--engaged an "emergent rhetoric of randomness" through matters of causality, randomness and bluffing--particular to poker. The panel on genre was an easy choice because we're reading Devitt's book for tomorrow's 712 (Spinuzzi's Tracing Genres is up next week). Bawarshi led off with a paper on uptake--the space between genre and context. Uptakes are oftentimes conceptual and so, as was resolved in the Q&A, they're difficult to study using empirical frameworks. Uptakes correlate to the perlocutionary effects (from speech act theory), but rather than applying to utterances, uptakes name the living memory of a genre--a genre's persistence. He also suggested uptake profiles--sketches of sorts that would characterize "coordinated uptake" or "learned recognitions of significances" that are also shared. Because imitation involves uptake (in typified social action), I sensed a connection--an echo--between these papers and the previous panel. In the second paper, Devitt worked at the problem of how genres interact: genre intertextuality or "intergenerality." Specifically, Devitt dealt with individuals and their genre repertoires--especially important for her larger interest in teaching genre awareness. Students, she said, come in with genres, and this genre portability/transfer can be useful for teaching genre awareness. She re-emphasized two points when wrapping up: 1) People do not write in a genre vacuum; and 2) People adhere to known genres even while adapting to new genres. The final two papers on the panel looked at the evolution of the petition as a genre and the genealogy of email, particularly student-professor email interchanges in the context of Anne Freadman's work on uptake.
Later in the day I went to J.13 Brining Techne Front and Center: Examining the Material of the Art of Writing and then the blogging SIG. Saturday morning it was K.23 From Panel to Gallery: Twelve Digital Writings, One Installation and L.04 New Media, New Curricula.
Attended six panels, not counting my own slot at Computer Connections, the chair's address, and the SIG. Not bad. I missed a bunch that I would've liked to attend, but I felt like crud on Friday and so opted for a mid-day nap rather than grinding myself into conference dust.
Travels home were safe and good for pushing through a bit of reading. Even if the flight home on United (a.k.a. Sauna Skyways) was delayed an hour-and-a-half and also turned out to be the warmest flight I've ever suffered through (plus 90F in the cabin, I swear), it was much better than last year's trip.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
I Will Not Know
C lose to five this afternoon, I was waiting for a ride home from D., and I had a few minutes to pass in my office. I'd already booted down the laptop and stowed it in my backpack. I didn't have the gusto to continue readings (for next week already) from the two seminars I had today, and I was feeling somewhat blaze after a full day on campus overflowing with six hours of intense discussion. So I straightened up one of my office shelves and got to leafing through a few odd journals casually handed off to me by a colleague last year. There were five or six yellowed issues of Composition Studies and JAC; I fixed on JAC 8 (1988), specifically David Foster's "What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Composition?", which ends
As informed readers and deliberately inclusive thinkers, we must be the measure of our discipline. Science cannot claim ascendancy in any area of human knowledge, particularly in that complex blend of knowledge-streams we call composition. We must be wary of those who, uncomfortable with the ambiguities of discourse and complacent with the quantitative, empirical perspective, would have us assume that perspective alone. As informed readers, we must juggle and juxtapose the claims of different modes of inquiry, recognizing what each contributes and what each lacks. To ref use this invitation to an intellectual pluralism, to settle in its place for a single perspective, is to invite the punishment we all hated in grade school: having to write the same sentence one hundred times. In this case, it would be "I will not know. I will not know. I will not know..."
Stimulating find, I thought, and then I started to wonder whether what we are talking about when we talk about composition in 2006 is so radically remade from what we were talking about when we talked about composition in 1988. And then my ride was waiting.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Lugging Around
L ike Krista, I start back to classes tomorrow for the final semester of coursework. The following selections fill the docket, in no particular order; they're the ones I'll be hefting around in the coming months.
GEO781: Seminar in Cartography: Web Mapping and Cybercartography
Mapping Hacks, Erle, Gibson, and Walsh.
Added (on reserve): Mapping Cyberspace, Dodge, Martin and Kitchen.
Maps and the Internet, Paterson, ed.
Web Cartography: Developments and Prospects, Kraak and Brown, eds.
Multimedia Cartography, Cartwright, Peterson, and Gartner, eds.
The Political Mapping of Cyberspace, Crampton.
CCR651: Interdisciplinary Studies in Language and Literacy: Afrofuturism
Afrolantica Legacies, Derrick Bell.
Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam Banks.
Technicolor: Technologies of Everyday Life, Alondra Nelson, ed.
Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text (July 2002), Alondra Nelson,
ed.
Technology and the African-American Experience : Needs and Opportunities for
Study. Bruce Sinclair, ed.
African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, Ron Eglash.
Information and Communication Technologies for Development in Africa,
Ramata Molo Thioune, ed.
Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, Rayvon Fouche.
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora,
Sheree Thomas, ed.
CCR712: Advanced Theory and Philosophy of Composition: Mapping the Future:
Theory and Practice of "Writing" the Discipline
Practicing Writing: The Postwar Discourse of Freshman English, Thomas
Masters.
The End of Composition Studies, David Smit.
In Search of Eloquence, Cornelius Cosgrove and Nancy Barta-Smith.
Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective, ed. David Foster and
David Russell.
Geographies of Writing, Nedra Reynolds.
CityComp, ed. Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan.
Writing Genres, Amy Devitt.
Tracing Genres through Organizations, Clay Spinuzzi.
Making Sense of the Organization, Karl Weick.
The Moment of Complexity, Mark Taylor.
The Tactics of Hope, Paula Mathieu.
The Language of Experience, Gwen Gorzelsky.
The English Studies Book, 2nd ed., Rob Pope.
Added: Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress.
There remains, no doubt, a wagonload of articles extending well beyond these fine selections. And I've done pretty well to secure many of the books already, although my half.com orders placed just ten days ago haven't started showing up yet (most of the orders were for 712). Also, I have a few high-priced items from the third list to line up once I figure out how extensively they'll be used. Sixty-eight junior bacon double-cheeseburgers for the Foster and Russell edited collection had me thinking about how fond I am of libraries, for example.
Friday, October 21, 2005
GREater Than
N ext October ETS is rolling out a new and improved GRE (via). Allow me to break it down for you.
The press release tells us this: Old GRE < New GRE
The soon-to-be-former GRE ran 2.5 hours split out like so:
Verbal 30 minutes
Quantitative 45 minutes
Writing 75 minutes
(These are approximations pieced together from what few clues I could gather.)
The new and improved GRE will run just about 4 hours split out this way:
Verbal 80 minutes (2x40)
Quantitative 80 minutes (2x40)
Writing 60 minutes (2x30)
The new test will move completely online; it will be offered just 29 times per year with fresh content, nothing duplicated from previous tests, and so on. Thursday's press release credits David Payne, ETS's Director of the GRE Program, with this: "The new test will emphasize complex reasoning skills that are closely aligned to graduate work." How should we read the justificatory filling of the release against the redistributed minutes-on-task? And how will the 70+ doctorate-granting programs in rhetoric and composition respond? Will the GRE continue to play its time-honored role in admission to any of these programs? What other questions?
Notably, the 30-minute analytical "essays" will now be visible to the graduate admissions side. How will these writing samples be understood/interpreted/used by various programs? And when will the writing opportunity come up in the 4 hour examination?
I'm not trying to begrudge the GRE its overhaul, but I am interested in the way these changes--changes explained as "a more accurate gauge"--imply unaddressed shifts in what is being assessed. The first time I took the GRE in 1996, writing wasn't a part of the test. Instead there was a logic and analytical reasoning section and I fared pretty well on that section--better, in fact, than on any other section of the exam. When I took the GRE again in 2004, ETS was using the analytical writing section, but the scores were irregular, according to the results, because the sample of test-takers was yet too insignificant to normalize the scale. Whether my score was relatively normal or not, the writing section was memorably challenging. It capped the exam; after more than an hour of verbal and quantitative items: fizzle. And now, to think of writing a pair of 30-minute analytical mini-essays after nearly three hours of verbal and quantitative problems. Is this the part most "closely aligned to graduate work"?