Sunday, August 10, 2008
195
A draft of my fall syllabus was due on Friday, so draft it I did. I'm slotted for a section of WRT195: Studio 2 for Transfer Students. It pitches itself as a "best of" blend, a rip-and-mix that puts the best of WRT105 and WRT205 into a single course for transfer students.
For several weeks, I mulled over using Pink's Whole New Mind. I read Johnny Bunko, too, and thought about how I could fit that stuff into the course. But at the last minute, I went with another plan focused for now on the latest greatest literacy crisis and also on Googlization (while taking up some of Vaidhyanathan's blogbook-in-progress). So we'll read about and write around some of the stuff that happens when we 'do a Google,' size up some of the apps, and forage around for research projects concerned with Google's construction of the web or the world, grand databases and privacy, Knol, directed and serendipitous search, and so on. So far, the course opens with a digital memoir of sorts (not quite a mystory, but maybe not too far off), some summary and critique work, a researched argument, and a translation (switching the argument into a 2.5 minute audio short or a Pecha Kucha slide-improv, I haven't decided yet). Here's the current plan, subject to minor revisions until I hear back from a coordinator later this week about whether it will fly.
I'm also slotted for ten hours per week in the Writing Center, or, I should say, doing Writing Center work online, as we continue stabilizing some of the consulting options piloted this summer. More on that when the batteries in this cordless keyboard are recharged.
Posted by at Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Annotated Bib?
O ff and on since Friday--one of the early consulting sessions in the W.C.--I've been thinking a little bit about why we ask students to produce annotated bibliographies. Yes, I, too, have done it--asked students in a lower division writing course or intro to the humanities course to produce an annotated bibliography. Why?
A student on Friday asked me how best to proceed with developing his own annotated bibliography. But he was already in the advanced stages of drafting the project. The annotated bib was an afterthought, a by-product. Probably not the way the instructor imagined it working. It was not organic, not a rigorously-researched advance screening of the conversations or materials in play. It was not done with interest, but rather with a makeshift, this-will-do (will this do?) spirit--much like I've seen in my own students when I served up the exciting annotated bib opportunity.
And underlying question is how to (also whether to) reconcile rigor with pleasure in the processes of collection and annotation. What if the collected thing isn't good enough? What if the annotations do not legitimate its inclusion? (viz., "How did this get here?) In other words, academic collections are too often burdened by preformulation; what goes together is molded by the course, the syllabus, the discipline, the library, and probably the teacherly gestures to clarify--"Oh, but this or that thing fits so well into what you have gathered together!" Topical heaviness pins much of this stuff down, filters it in advance, places a screen in front of the chaotic mess.
Another side of the annotated bib assumes engagement with some sort of conversation. And I am generally in favor of this idea--that reading and annotating produce valuable identifications (summary, etc.) and also help us to have a more or less distinctive take. But I don't know whether the "you enter a parlor" shtick works in all case where writers (who don't know enough of what they need to know). Motive gives way to other questions about how much we must understand discourse conventions, the key concepts getting major play, and so on: Did you realize you entered a parlor? Did you look up to see who-what was there or fixate on the exit? And why did you enter the parlor, anyway?
I know. Just a few mushy thoughts rolling around about annotated bibliographies. I'm not sure I've ever had an annotated bib assignment go especially (memorably) well. I'm not throwing up my hands as much as reconsidering why we have students do them in the first place and whether it is even reasonable to ask students to produce notes on books and articles rather than notes on anything whatever (as a possible alternative). So, through all of this I am thinking about collection and annotation--much in the way Sirc writes about them in "Box Fitting" and also about that which is collectible. These seem to me to necessarily precede the academised annotated bibliography. And so these problems are stoked when academic research and writing (as assigned) do not bear any obvious or self-evident relationship to what drives the passionate, geeky collector.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Argument Clinic
"I'm very sorry, but I told you I'm not allowed to argue unless you've paid."
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Multiple, Sequential, Reciprocal
T
his one is from the same Nagi Noda who made
"Sentimental Journey,"
the other when I'm observed, I watch this.
I think these three--multiple, sequential, reciprocal--ought to apply to teaching observations. Were I a WPA, I would prefer an approach to classrooms observations that involved multiple visits in a sequence of classes, if at all possible. I would also prefer to see teaching observations arranged reciprocally, where each person involved observes the other. One-time teaching observations are good for verification, for affirming that one's work checks off as acceptable on a list of program, department, and institutional expectations. But that is the end. Until next cycle. This is the typical approach, right?, the automobile inspection version of teaching observations.
A preferable (perhaps also idealistic) model is one where senior teachers (i.e., those with experience) opt in and enter into a mentorship arrangement with new, inexperienced teachers. This could work for new and returning TAs, too, depending on the nature of the program. Each would observe the other three times in a semester. They would also sit down to talk about their impressions, about in-class happenings, about the shape of the course, its successes, its shortcomings, its surprises, and maybe even student writing. Much of this interchange could be handled via email, if schedules conflict. The culminating piece would be a brief (few pages) record of the conversation representing both participants, with some evidence of what materialized in their conversations. It could even be formatted as a dialogue. This would go to the WPA would would, in turn, sign off on a small stipend (oh, say, $50 or $100 bucks). These conversation pieces could also be circulated internally, turned into a resource for future practicums, colloquia, and so on. There is not money for this? Then it isn't important enough to do. But this is a weak defense when money (or release time, other forms of compensation) are already offered for some form of observation and reporting. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying. I've just been thinking about teaching observations over the past couple of days.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Inobservance II
T he teaching was observed this evening. The 105ers were sharp, so it went well, although observations always feel like, hold still now, freezemation. I would characterize my part in tonight's class session as slightly plastic. Neither terrible, nor embarrassing. But somewhat best-behaviorally tense.
Yes, this entry is, in fact, a rerun from a year ago.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Bringing Legibility Back
F or the first time in '07, I am writing by hand on student work. In the spring and summer, I taught exclusively online. Today, after penning notes on a short stack of two-paragraph summaries, I feel like Mark Cuban (fine, Cuban as a broke grad student)--able only to scratch together an unreadable Rorschach blot when I put the pen to the paper. My handwriting is embarrassing! I already knew I couldn't draw; now I can't even draw letters. When committee members at Prospective U. (it's the season of market preparations) say something like, "I noticed that all of your materials are typewritten. How is your handwriting?," I will resort to an end-around, by-passing the subject of handwriting (as a basic literacy andprequalifier for the professoriate?) altogether, and getting right to an answer that begins, "I can qwerty like the breeze...."
Monday, July 9, 2007
Mojiti
I had just five minutes to tinker around with Mojiti the other day, but I'm intrigued by some of the possibilities it suggests. Mojiti is a video editing application that lets you layer word balloons, thought bubbles, captions, and other markers (circles, boxes, and so on, all of which can be animated) over any video on YouTube and a number of other video hosting sites. It's good for mash-ups of existing content (music videos, news clips, etc.), but I can also imagine using it similar to the way the Word of the Day works on Colbert, where they deliver the straight-faced monologue and then upset it with captions, creating ruptures overflowing with puns and hilarity. Where'd I hear of Mojiti? Over at Mashable, of course. As feeds go, it's one of the best new additions I've made in recent months.
To try Mojiti, I checked it out (remember, in only five or ten minutes) with this goofy little YouTube clip of the highlights from a soccer match Ph. and I played on the PS2 several weeks ago between Senegal and Italy.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Ends and Begins
I turned in grades a few minutes ago, so my semester has officially ended. I taught an online seniors-only section of WRT205 this semester. As far as I know, it's the first time the Writing Program offered the course in exactly this way (online and for seniors). At this stage, there's not a whole lot I can say for the course. It tends to enroll students who didn't complete this sophomore-level writing course (emphasizing textual research) when they were sophomores. Or juniors. Certainly there is an inherent obstacle in their putting off this course for any number of reasons, ranging from bad experiences (withdrawing) to more enticing course offerings to presumptions about the tortures of academic writing. On this, the last last day of the semester, I'd be hesitant to describe what took shape over the past sixteen weeks as an unqualified success. Good at times, and less good at other times. The general attitude toward online courses at SU seems to me--given admittedly limited experience teaching online for SU--to be one of avoidance or disengagement. The online course isn't the scene students flock toward for more lively, engaging, and rigorous experiences.
Shoot, all of that sounds fairly grim, doesn't it? Let me say this, then. While this isn't the ideal way for students to take a required sophomore-level writing course (online, I mean, and in their final semesters of undergraduate studies), there were impressive projects and bright moments. One student worked at the knot where systems for juvenile punishment tie messily in with effective rehabilitation efforts (looking, that is, at how such institutions risk reinscribing criminality). Another project sorted through the uses of Latour and SNA for understanding the complexity of the United Nations. And then there was this project, a sequence on interactivity influenced by McCloud.
As much for my successful prospectus hearing as for capping WRT205, I'm relieved the semester is over. Next, I'm headed to Detroit for Computers and Writing. Aside from trips to Arizona and Michigan in June and teaching an online course for old U. and moving, what's left will be filled up with the diss.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Certainties
B . Franklin left it at death and taxes, right? As I teach SU's research-based second semester writing course to seniors (and only seniors), I'm feeling the weight of the death-n-taxes counterpart in academic writing: length limits and deadlines. Two unavoidable encumbrances. Give either of them a liberatory shrug--whatever--and what happens? So we need, instead, to declare two-thousand words by Friday, and so on, arbitrary though it might seem. What, besides length limits and deadlines, structures the writing activity one does for academic credit? Sure, there are sentences and paragraphs (utterances, gestures, etc.), but I'm not talking about language forms. Length limits and deadlines certify the institutionality of the writing. Institution-free, the writing need not adhere to either staple, right? With blogging, for instance, what of deadlines? What of length limits? But figure blogs into a course, what will happen if matters of length limits and deadlines or frequency, even if left to such vagarisms as "flexible" or "open," are not otherwise determined? Just a few thoughts...
I did the annual income taxes this morning, filed them electronically, and then realized I had Is.'s SS# wrong. But the fast-acting S.S. Administration databases couldn't match the number with any person they'd heard of, so the flub was caught and corrected and the forms re-submitted. I was able to move on with the day, tax-collectedly ever after.
About the certainties in my own work of late as it relates to the counterparts deadlines/death and limits/taxes: for the past two weeks I'd probably fall in the category of Willie Nelson* at the slot machines in the lounge of a Cryonics laboratory*, which is to say, avoiding the so-called certainties or producing at a rate not so much frozen as vitric.
*Neither an endorsement of Nelson's habits of interaction with the IRS, nor any acknowledgment of a belief that cryonics legitimately extends human life (what if?).
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Databasic Writing
O ur program requires that we attend two mini-seminars every semester. Several different mini-seminars are available, from three-hour sessions on a single day concerned with the discipline (the Reese's PB Cup variety of rhetoric in my composition and vice versa), world Englishes, WAC, or some other topic, to sessions broken across a couple of weeks on stuff like teaching online, service learning, and information literacy. The mini-seminars are meant to foster professional development. Everyone in the writing program--besides first-year TAs and full-time staff and graduate faculty (who oftentimes lead the sessions)--are made to attend.
I was at a session this afternoon on information literacy. But I only mention the mini-seminars to set the scene and to note that I've been a good mini-seminarian this semester as it was my last one.
But the idea today's session tipped me onto is what I'm thinking of as databasic writing. We've heard of basic writing. The idea goes way back, back past the 1976 CCCC in Kansas City, which asked, "What's REALLY Basic?" Thirty years have passed, however. The remediation that finds root in remedy (cure-all comp; whatever ails you) shared its name with media historicism, the remediation that focuses on precedents, on the old in the new. The old ancestors of new media were young once. Maybe this analogy will clear up what I mean: remediation is to basic writing as remediation is to databasic writing. Claro!
That didn't work. Damn. What I mean is that there are varieties of writing new media concerned with writing the database. I don't mean roughing out a plan for a MySQL database or some other gridtrodden boxstrocities built to file complexity into slots (although, try to blog without a dbase). I'm thinking of the blend of tagging and collecting, a compound of non-syntactic semantic variables and things--light, pulsatile, electrate. We're not only writing sentences, we're composing quirky, irregular collections. And while databasic writing borrows felicitously from Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library," it is a library whose gathering is inscribed. Databasic writing also resonates with Sirc's "box-logic," with collecting and annotating, and also with personal knowledge management. The question on my mind is "What's REALLY Databasic?" Databasic writers know del.icio.us. Tag, aggregate, gather, into crumb-paths of surprises, wonder, curiosity, and safe-keeping.
technorati tag: teaching-carnival
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Still-Unbuilt
C lasses begin one week from today, and so I've been wrenching and soldering the course I'm slotted to teach. The syllabus must be ready one week in advance of the semester (i.e., today) so that our plans and projections can be vetted, held up alongside what's acceptable. And once the syllabus is vetted and approved, TAs are awarded their precious copy codes. That said, I'm teaching an online section this semester, and so it's entirely possible that I won't make a single photocopy over the next sixteen weeks. It's a section of Studio II, the second course in SU's two-course composition sequence, a course normally taken during the second semester of the sophomore year. But the section I've been appointed is designated for "seniors only," which means that there will be ten or so seniors enrolled who will graduate in May and who have yet to take WRT205 for any number of reasons. Rather than explain my plan here, feel free to check out the syllabus if you're so inclined. You should be warned that the front piece looks like garbage in IE, but I've checked it for CSS compliance and it's looks dandy in Firefox, Netscape, and Safari--just like I want it to look. And yeah, I have been futzing with style sheets just for kicks in the last day or so.
I still have a fair amount of work to do for the course in the days ahead, but I'm confident that what's there will go off without a hitch. Holding face-to-face conferences is, as my reviewer pointed out to me, a wildcard, but as I imagine it, it will be significant to meet once at the library for everyone who is relatively near to campus. Even in such cases where it's impossible to meet, we can use Skype or telephone to chat about the first project and what's to follow.
I never said much about it, but the course I taught in the fall, WRT302, improved markedly down the stretch. In fact, on the final day, one day before I sat my major exams, everyone wanted to stay and spend time with each others' final projects. I mean that I said we could end a few minutes early since everyone's stuff was turned in, and they asked if they could look at the culminating projects on the big screen. So we stayed until the last minute of class, watching together the impressive work they'd composed. I'm reminded of this as I head into the new semester because, along with getting the syllabus ready for the upcoming 205, I've been arranging some of my teaching materials and getting a few more pieces, like teaching evaluations, online. I have mixed feelings about sharing the evals because, read apart from the course, the commentary they offer--good and bad--is inevitably vague and ambiguous. Yet, to spend much time explicitly rationalizing specific comments seems excessive (even when I've done this quietly, privately). I learned: This student liked an group work; that one preferred to work alone. One student thought Barthes was the highlight; another, DJ Spooky. Evaluations are useful only insomuch as they are understood as the average effect, the studium of pedagogy. What more be said about the evals is that they tell me this: rarely do I have a set of students who end the semester of a like mind. That is, if the purpose of mass education is to replicate ideas--to grind the burrs from the automatons, something's gone wonderfully wrong. Anyway, I've been putting teaching evaluations up, too, and thinking about the limits of what that might mean.
Thursday, November 2, 2006
Open Gallery
T he open gallery introduces variation--a lift!--to the withering paces of the semester. I'd never tried anything quite like it before, and to be honest, even though I listed it on the course schedule for WRT302, I considered a reversal of plans right up until two days before. The open gallery emphasizes circulation, conversation; whatever the compositional pieces, there's a gathering, music, movement, laughter. A lightness.
Eleven students are now enrolled in the course. They'd been working on their "combinatorial scenes" (imagework and logics of association and juxtaposition) applied to arrangements of image and text (other conceptual hooks in Barthes' studium and punctum). Tabblo, Flickr, Wayfaring, and Flash. We meet in the computer cluster (a lab, basically). Guests passed through much like they would at any other sort of gallery, browsing, taking in glimpses, chatting informally: "What have you done?". And there was a bowl of Halloween candy for ramping up the blood sugars.
To be fair, I agreed to do what I could to encourage attendance provided everyone else brought a guest. Many students arrived with guests; a few did not. My own emails to the department and graduate program listservs persuaded a few colleagues to drop by (although acknowledgements were off on my listserv account, and I was unconvinced that the invitation had been distributed, so I re-sent it...for some it poured, like a good sp&m, into their inboxes three times, and still, they didn't attend the gallery).
We planned to hold the open gallery for just thirty minutes, 1-1:30, although our class ordinarily convenes for 80 minutes, from 12:45-2:05. The narrowed time-frame allowed us to meet for a few minutes before people started showing up, and it left us time at the end of things (around 1:40) to talk about how it had gone, what would have been better had we done it another way. We could have promoted it more aggressively by chalking the quad and posting fliers, but too large a crowd might have upset the cadence in the room. In other words, with just 20-25 people (including class members), everyone was able to move at a reasonable pace from station to station and take it all in without being hurried.
I would do this again. I like the idea of opening up the classroom, especially opening it to students who might be interested in taking a course or the proximate but distant colleagues who have only a vague sense of what happens in a course called "digital writing." Because it went well, I want to continue to look for other ways to generalize the open gallery to other courses, other occassions to feature what we do.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Inobservance
T
he teaching was studied watched over
scrutinized ogled observed today. The 302ers
were sharp, so it went well, although observations always feel like, hold still
now, freezemation. Resembles having a small part in this, I suppose:
Only less cool. (via)
Monday, August 28, 2006
Electracuse
G iven that classes started today, I guess it is both appropriate and timely to declare that WRT302 is more or less together. Along with tightening the schedule, I touched up a few minor things this morning. I also drew up a questionnaire to gauge familiarity and interest related to a series of twelve applications (not all apps: HTML, image work, Flash, etc.). For the first time ever (in a class, day one) I projected a few slides onto the screen to frame our opening trajectories re digital writing. The plan--the course's imagined topography--still feels pocketed in a few places, but I'll wait a week or two before deciding to shuffle anything for that reason alone. Also, I haven't come to terms with the role of del.icio.us just yet, as its unkempt state suggests.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Triadicity
T
wo I think of initially: the discourse triangle
(Message
- Writer - Reader) and the rhetorical situation (Writer/Speaker - Audience -
Context). Followed by: Aristotle's: Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Berthoff's:
Reference, Word, Referent; and my own: Legos, Mentos, Wormholes, and so on. I
made that last one up just now. I'm not convinced that it gets at anything
particularly profound. Heck, it only took a few seconds to think up.
In the past, I've used traingular models a time or two for whatever reasons (i.e., in a weak moment, deferring to a textbook). I've run across a few variants, and most of them, as well as I can tell, side with one of two teams (been watching the World Cup?): hermeneutics or meaning-motivated triangles and dramatics or event-motivated triangles. And when the final whistle blows, they trade jerseys. I hope you'll tell me what I'm leaving out.
Here's the thing: I've overheard triangles off-handedly dismissed as only so much simplistic rubbish (right, of course, there are more thoughtful, respectful and smart critiques, too). During a few of those triangle bashings, I admit, I sat by, complicit in my silence. Which should I prefer? Why one? Any?
I briefly looked again at Bitzer's famous essay early this week and was reminded that he relies on the troika of exigence, audience and constraints (is it a generous gloss that this transmodifies into speaker-audience-purpose (or context)? Or does this last one come from elsewhere still?). Insufficient though Bitzer's set may well be, I wonder whether you think they're suitable as a beginning model for, say, students in a lower division writing course who have never heard of rhetoric or who have never considered situation as an object of study. Given that we're concerned with a rhetorical situation understood to be a small slice of a complex ecology of activities and intensities, do you think that Bitzer's three terms do justice as a starting point?
Really, what I'm trying to find out is whether you ever use any triangular model when teaching a writing course. And which one? Why? Go on, be anonymous with your comments if you wish.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Trying to Catch Me Writing Dirty
O n the road to Staples and then Home Depot this afternoon. I need three translucent plastic pockets, jackets for stuffing with collected scraps of writing and whatnot. From H.D., a few planting implements, seeds, and so on. Faced with some regreening in the days ahead (mentally, physically, botanically).
Ph. was with me because we also agreed on a stop at the pound to see if any dogs were brought in since Tuesday.
Driving along Bridge Street, Chamillionaire on the radio. Ph. tells me he likes the song. I haven't heard it before. Oblivious: I'm old now, bookish, fading into sunset culture (I remember when I was...):
They see me rollin'
They hatin'
Patrollin' and tryna catch me ridin dirty
(tryna to catch me ridin dirty) X 4
My music so loud
I'm slangin'
They hopin' that they gonna catch me ridin dirty
(tryna catch me ridin dirty) X 4
"Is that riding or writing?" I ask Ph.
"Riding, I think."
"Could be 'writing.' Yeah?"
"Mhm."
And this made good sense coming just after Ph.'s report of a letter-writing episode at school today. Not his Language Arts class but another one. Instructions: write a letter to an elementary school student (among the ones they'd been mentoring throughout the year). The way he tells it, Ph. banged his letter out. Others hassled the teacher about for the "what for?," resisted. So Ph. was finished relatively quickly. Next there were corrections and scolds about letters proper. All due and appropriate, I'm sure (Align your date and your closing, will you!?). But then, he reports, there were moments when the teacher worked at his keyboard and deleted some of his stuff and then told him to write ten more sentences (to fill up the time, he says).
Did this happen? Exactly this way? Who knows. I'm not complaining (even if the narrative includes some over-the-top acts, namely a teacher taking command of the keyboard and deleting). He and I had a nice talk, after all, about school writing and propriety, a talk grounded in stuff that again and again surprises me about Ph.'s interests in language, reading and writing. I'm equally interested in Ph.'s reports of his peers, freshmen in H.S., turning away from writing, resisting it, complaining about how much it sucks. Only to rush home to the nettlewerk, to vast investments of time and creativity in Myspace activity. Not approaching a universal truism, by any means, and yet it was a striking moment: our conversation, the song lyrics, the follow-up. School writing. Chaste writing. Some explicit instruction: Tryin to catch me writin dirty? Whatever the case, the lyric is forever altered for me.
Saturday, April 8, 2006
Aftereffects
R eading from Technicolor yesterday (for 651), I ran across this bit on Juan Atkins, producer with Cybotron and key figure in the emerging techno scene in the early 1980s. From an essay by Ben Williams called "Black Street Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age":
Davies and Atkins had met in a "future studies" class at Washtenaw Community College in Ypsilanti, which Atkins attended in order to study data processing after reading a Giorgio Moroder album sleeve that describe d the sequencers the Italian producer had used to create his metronomic disco epics. After realizing he didn't need to be able to program computers to use electronic instruments, Atkins dropped the course, but not before encountering the work of Alvin Toffler. In his book The Third Wave, Toffler articulated America's impending transition to a postindustrial, high-tech economy in a distinctly utopian manner; in the process, he also popularized many of the most enduring myths of what is now known as "the new economy." (157)
What holds me about this is the matter of school's temporal economy: timing. Atkins read Toffler and only later on, according to Williams, does Atkins acknowledge a tinge of influence, a generalized impression he felt when he recognized the second wave machinations of Detroit's three-shifts-per-day labor cycles and Toffler's foresight. This is not to say Atkins wasn't influenced by Toffler immediately in the WCC classroom. But I think it's reasonable to imagine that the influence was different later on, that it wasn't constant. Perhaps such things as memory, learning and uptake never level, never stabilize. More about school time: The temporal orthodoxies of the academy persist despite composition's post-process crisis (had the po-pro era dissipated so soon?). As our own processual-temporal enigmas grind against the larger clock's slots, especially at this time of the semester, I'm reminded about the burden of the institution's march, the academy's variation on the five o'clock whistle. My slow or fast doesn't matter; it's un-self-regulated many times and instead, differed or shifted.
But more than my own pace and workload, the excerpt from Williams reminded me of how this works for other students, FYC students let's say, particularly at evaluation time. Formal evaluations turn up on the institution's timer, always inviting critique only at the terminal moment, the semester's end. Why should this point in time be the most lucid for reflection and valuation of experience? Efficiency. I can't argue with that (presence is a precondition for filling in the encumbered spaces with no. 2 leaded pencils). But, as with Atkins, tinges of influence often aren't realized until later on. Learning, of course, is both an now-effect and an after-effect; it's a during, an after, and an after after. But the temporal economies of schools can't tolerate open futures; sure, just try to get alumni to fill out a questionnaire. This is not surprising nor is it particularly insightful.
Before CCCC, I sent a WRT302 promo email to former students chosen from the 80 I've had in class at Syracuse in these two years. Sign up for Digital Writing in the fall, I insisted. Just checked enrollments, and four lucky somebodies have registered. One student responded to say he regretted that he wouldn't be able to take the course. He was an early admit to law school, starting in the fall. But he went on to say how taken he'd become with network studies, the loose theme of a research writing course I taught a year ago. He expressed gratitude and acknowledged that he didn't much appreciate the fullness of our study at the time (now, his project: network studies to understand political conceptions of unity). Heh, perhaps I didn't either. Again, time. A semester ends and only later, perhaps many months or years later, we realize that we were getting somewhere. And though it eludes the formal institutional recognition, it's reassuring when the echoes of a few good moments long-ago taught turn up--unabated by the arrhythmia of school time.
Monday, April 3, 2006
Diversity Writing
M arzluf, Phillip P. "Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices." CCC 57.3 (2006): 503-522.
Later today our grad group (CCRGC) is engaging Marzluf's recent CCC essay in conversation for an hour. We developed the grad group at the beginning of the semester as a supplement to what's already a solid lineup of colloquia. Why? Primarily so we could invite faculty for focused discussions and devise our own brief sessions around common concerns (CV workshops, conference proposal collaboration, practicing talking about our work, reading stuff outside of coursework, etc.).
I'm short on time and really should be writing toward the three (better conceived as 1+1+1 or .1+.1+.1+.1...tiny installments) seminar papers whose terminal buzzers go off at the end of the month or thereabouts, but I wanted to get down a few notes about issues I'd like us to take up during today's session. First, Marzluf's article works like this:
After opening with a brief account of what he means by diversity writing, Marzluf sketches a brief history of Natural Language Theory (oral language is purer than written; generally favors rationalism). In the third section of the essay he critiques expressivist commitments to the authentic voices of students, commitments Marzluf contends too easily lead to a salvationist ethic, embracing a student's "natural" vernacular at the expense of more self-detached models of rational (i.e. serious) academic discourse. Failed writing, Marzluf argues, paraphrasing Elbow, results "when writers falsify their voices" (513), and diversity writing can lead to such falsifications if teachers over-correlate student identity and demonstrations of authenticity through writing in the vernacular. Marzluf levels a strong critique of the salvationist proclivities that too easily align with diversity writing, including uneven valuations of authenticity in voice (505). He writes,
My goal in this article has been to reject a salvationist tendency in diversity-writing scholarship, one that attempts to save, affirm or legitimate students. Though diversity writing should provide students a comfortable space for interrogating difference, it need not force students to perform their commitment to language and their communities. This is not to imply that diversity writing should be apolitical or impersonal, only that it is a clumsy apparatus indeed for students to use to reveal and perform themselves. (517)
Early in the essay he defines "diversity writing" as "a pedagogical approach that invites students to apply critical reading and writing strategies to situate themselves within, analyze, and research the political and cultural assumptions, consequences, and issues that constitute human difference" (503). Diversity writing becomes synonymous with diversity studies, or, as I read it, a label consistent with "studies of difference."
Here are a few of questions/concerns I want to get at later today:
1. On the basis of his description, how does our FYC curriculum at
Syracuse match with the curriculum at Kansas State--particular to their
"diversity writing" orientations? Does his definition work for us? Does it
adequately name the thing we're trying to do or enact when we teach in a
"diversity writing" curriculum?
2. With his overt emphasis on race in "diversity writing," how is his
curricular model problematic for this narrowed focus? How might his
arguments about Natural Language Theory, salvationist motives, and authenticity
generalize to broader identifications?
3. What do you make of his use of content as a rhetorical strategy
for answering "an audience of skeptical students, parents, and administrators,
who may react strongly to the political connotations of 'diversity' or fear that
evaluation will be based on the ideological whims of individual writing
instructors" (519)?
Saturday, March 11, 2006
The Cuttlefish and Its Ink
F rom Barthes' RB:
I am writing this day after day; it takes, it sets: the cuttlefish produces its ink: I tie up my image-system (in order to protest myself and at the same time to offer myself).How will I know that the book is finished? In other words, as always, it is a matter of elaborating a language. Now, in every language the signs return, and by dint of returning they end by saturating the lexicon--the work. Having uttered the substance of these fragments for some months, what happens to me subsequently is arranged quite spontaneously (without forcing) under the utterances that have already been made: the structure is gradually woven, and in creating itself, it increasingly magnetizes: thus it constructs for itself, without any plan on my part, a repertoire which is both finite and perpetual, like that of language. At a certain moment, no further transformation is possible but the one which occurred to the ship Argo: I could keep the book a very long time, by gradually changing each of its fragments. (163-4)
It didn't spring to mind while I was resting face-up in the MRI machine yesterday afternoon (tomorrow's entry?), but I eventually settled on a title for WRT302, as I noted in the comments following yesterday's entry expressing my dilemma, a title brought about by RB's bit above. So it'll be WRT302: The Digital and Its Links. I thought about The Network and Its Links, but opted for the former. Plus I had a thousand really good suggestions, all of which I'd have done well to take up. The course proper is still six months out; I wanted something splashy enough to attract enrollments and also something that makes theoretical sense to me--something that would motivate me toward working carefully through the many decisions between now and then. I really like the way RB gets at the ratio between stabilization and drift, the inter-portions of anchor and flotation, between a buried bow in the sand and a three-thousand year voyage. The "image-system" generalizes to digital composition quite effectively, I'd argue; arrangement and spontaneity, "structure is gradually woven." Could be true of.... And so it will do. Not to mention, when I decided, yes, this is it, I still had the metallic grind and industrial deep-buzz of the body-part scanner lasting with me into the evening; all the more appeal for the idea of composition as the increasing magnetization of ongoing attempts.
Friday, March 10, 2006
A Snappier Title
H elp! I need a catchy title for the digital writing course I'm teaching next fall. I've been racking my brain for a half hour now, running through titular possibilities and trying to land a phrase with enough pizzazz to spark interest and compel enrollments. Here are a few that I've ruled out (fine...so what if a few of these are still in the running, the running is thin).
- WRT302: Status 405 Method Not Allowed
- WRT302: Effectively Banning Virtual Shenanigans
- WRT302: Writing Teachnologies: Chalk, Dry Erase Markers and Smartboards
- WRT302: Two-Button Mice and Macs
- WRT302: Dude, Where's My Jump Drive?
- WRT302: The Pop-up Experience: Digidipity and Exasperation
- WRT302: Three-hole Punchers as Overlooked Writing Technology
- WRT302: Minimize, Restore Down, Close: The Abundant Adaptabilities of Windows
- WRT302: BRB: Dearest Cyber...I've Missed You
- WRT302: Investigating the Rising Cost of Grounded Plug Adapters
- WRT302: Discordant Coloration: From Painting the Screen to Painting the Walls
- WRT302: Climbing Beneath the Desk to Untangle Wires: A Gordian Approach
- WRT302: Wired Panaceas: Now Don't You Feel Better?
- WRT302: Wifi, Bird-flu and Other Untreatable Stuff in the Air
- WRT302: Familiar Voltage: My Uncle's An Electrician
- WRT302: ASCII, We Hardly Knew Ye
Maybe it will come to me when I slide into the MRI tube later today for a good going-over of my knee.
Saturday, March 4, 2006
Digital Writing
F our days until I have to turn in a course description for the WRT302 course I'm teaching in the fall. Here's what I've come up with so far, keeping as much as possible with the official course description.
WRT302: Advanced Writing Studio: Digital Writing
With the shift from writing the page to writing the screen we encounter both expanded possibilities and new responsibilities for assembling images, text, audio and video. In WRT302, we will compose new media texts while engaging issues at the crossroads of writing activity and specific digital technologies. The course will balance experimentation and application with conceptual approaches; in addition to reading about and exploring online tools, students will propose and develop a series of projects that extend from our investigations of specific sites and applications, including simple web pages, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, video, and tag-based systems such as Flickr and del.icio.us. Opening lines of inquiry involve the following questions: What is gained and lost in the transition from the page to the screen? What are the practices and techniques we might associate with digital writing? How do digital texts circulate? How are they read and by whom? How are acts of digital writing implicated with choices about navigation, links, and code? This course will also foreground invention, design, usability and accessibility. All students are encouraged to enroll. No previous experience with computers is required; however, some familiarity with basic uses of technology will be helpful. Email dmueller -at- syr.edu for more information.
I welcome all critique and insight. I'm hesitant to include the phrase "new responsibilities" in the first sentence. The final point about previous experience is messy, too. Is it common to be explicit about experience with technologies going into a course like this one? I haven't committed to any readings yet, but I have a few highly-probables, and I've ordered a desk copy of this techxbook, fresh off the press. The projects, too, will have to be only provisionally defined/outlined because I won't know the ease-with-tech felt by the students until I meet them.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Wordwatcher
E arlier in the fall our program hosted Tim Diggles, coordinator of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Presses in Staffordshire, for a colloquium on working class writing/publishing. I didn't get around to posting any notes after Diggles visited, and although I have a few lines about a range of things he talked about penciled into a composition notebook, I want to zero in on the thing Diggles mentioned that has been on my mind periodically ever since: wordwatching.
The wordwatcher, Diggles explained, is a common parliamentary role; in meetings of all sorts, one person is assigned the wordwatcher's role--to interrupt the casual flow of conversation with stasis questions (scroll down), primarily questions of definition: what do you mean by...? The wordwatcher (C. suggested Dictionarian) attends to terminological slippage, calls out for (folk) etymology, re-collects fanned-out usages, and does so with a potentially calm remove--a cool distance from the more heated interchanges (no, I'm not saying neutral position, and this doesn't always have to be the case...the wordwatcher could be more implicated, even po'ed, for example). The point isn't to domesticate the meaning (or broadly officialize/standardize) as much as to make explicit tacit and unexplored nuances and differences, admit them to the discussion.
The wordwatcher's role interests me, even appeals to me as I think about teaching. Why not designate wordwatchers as a way to emphasize contested or complex terms (with ties, of course, to stasis theory)? This could work across several levels--from grad seminars to the FY course. And I'm almost certain it's being done somewhere, perhaps under another name, but motivated by a similar set of interests. I've also been thinking about how a wiki (i.e. the ww must be quick) would support wordwatching, especially in a course like WRT302: Digital Writing--the next course I'll be teaching at SU, coming in fall '06. Wordwatching might be a good way to bring in the shared, ongoing formation of wiki content, talking about how they work, and so on, while also sharing the demands of keeping stasis questions fresh, continually a part of the conversation, etc.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
To Ignoble Use
T oday, a longer-than-normal day on campus: biked up, three hours of 691 kicked off the morning; half of a tuna sandwich while a student from last fall popped in to see how things we going, dashed off to five fifteen-minute conferences with 307 students, hurried up to the second floor of HBC for the first CCR colloquium of the semester--on Examinations--where I finished the tuna sandwich (nervousness re mayo), next mixed in a shower with thick-frosted marble cake and baby-congrats galore, and then a meeting about a hand I'm lending on some tech stuff...biked back home again.
All-in-all, a busy eleven hours, and although much if it is worthy of comment (how do exams work in my program? what played out in 691? joy: babies and students who return for conversation), I've been thinking a lot today about conferences with students. I've never quite perfected the conference, nor I have I cemented it into the status of a must practice. Generally, I find it useful to set compulsory conferences early in the semester, but it's so much more about tone-setting and really talking rather than obliging institutional roles--the expectancies suspended between us early on (even before we meet), a pre-conditioning of formality and institutions. Confer, then, to unravel some of it. And yes, this is much more manageable with lighter teaching loads. But even with heavier loads, it can be handled by replacing class meetings with small group meetings--three or four students for fifteen minutes of face.
With five consultations today (consultations? it's professional writing...), I'm just over the halfway point for this week. No need to say very much about the students (blogging specific details about my students; you kidding?); the point I'm trying to note is less about the specific interactions with specific students than it is about the effect(s) of the conference. Last spring I didn't hold compulsory conferences, and the entire semester felt different. That difference might be attributable to any number of things, but my rearview tells me that early-semester meetings might've productively influenced the then-developing dynamics.
Around lunchtime today, we met again in the Noble Room, a spacious lounge area next to People's Place coffee shop in the basement of Hendricks Chapel, center of campus. Offices can be a bit stuffy, a bit prof-turf, and, accordingly, formal-seeming. Noble Room: relaxed, out in the open, and relatively quiet. And then we didn't see it coming. A free luncheon put on by campus ministries. No signs and without warning (midst of conversation, me and a student), the student group started moving furniture around, laying out two-liters and sandwich trays, and next (um, beg pardon, but we're conferencing here): let us pray. But, uh, we were mid-sentence and sharing what I thought was a campus lounge (stop talking?). Wasn't a terribly off-putting thing, turned out. The one taking the lead finished with his "food's ready" and "many thanks, amen" and then we slinked to the hallway benches where I stayed through the remaining appointments (the entire time rethinking, why not meet in the office?).
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Droplets
W hen the first class meeting involves dripping water, the second class meeting must include some sponging up.
Actually, the steady drip from the ceiling on Monday inspired some wonderful insights about the mysterious water source one floor up--and when it wasn't raining outside. After obligatory syllabus-readskimreading, we collaboratively chalked a professional writing free-association map. Everyone contributed two impulsive associations (I'd structure it a bit differently next time, urge a bit more contemplative attention to the emerging relationships, spontaneous though they were). When everybody left, I grabbed a photo of the chalk board, and today I dropped it into a CMap for later reference. I'm thinking about introducing CMap Tools, even encouraging its use for part of one of the projects, but I also was thinking it'd be interesting to revisit the first-day map of sorts, perhaps expanding it periodically as a group. Or even have students work from a common file to revise their individual concept maps for semester-end portfolios (something that moves nodes around, adds pieces, points to found relationships, etc.). For the mapping activity, I basically turned everyone loose at once, which gave me a change to watch interactions, conversation, preferences for mapping off of the terms from others, and so on. Primarily, I was curious about what would come together, where we were starting, how we tend to think about the terms naming the course.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
QD
I was at the front of the room--staring into the light from the projector bulb--for most of this morning's Writing Program TA orientation session on Quick & Dirty Research. What put the Q&D in today's talk? Aggregation and RSS. Everyone going along with it now has a fresh-fed Bloglines account and 67 subscriptions. For more, here's the agenda and the accompanying screencast. I welcome any suggestions; the screencast is a bit rough in spots (and longer than I'd like).
Basically, the talk hinged on these few thoughts:
- Aggregation as Q&D (not slow and clean) is applicable for students working on projects and also for your work as a teacher, writer, scholar and academic.
- It leads with questions about the inventive and generative activity rather beginning with a hierarchy predicated upon licensed sources (credible if it's from the library only, myth debunked).
- It dislodges the material orthodoxy in composition (what materials are appropriate for composition, what counts as writing...it's unbothered by intermittent junkiness in feeds).
- It exonerates us from narrow or unnecessarily constrained reading habits. Qualification: this isn't meant to disparage book-reading.
- It productively complicates (or steadies, if you're into efficiencies) our information ecologies and personal knowledge management systems.
I carried on just a bit blahngerandthenandthen than I would have like to, but it was challenging to fit all of this into one hour and 20 minutes. We finished with three minutes to spare, which means it was just about right for the time allotted. I left, as I often do, knowing full well that it will take more experimentation and play with Bloglines for folks to take it up more fully, even make it part of a daily routine. The group was gracious enough to clap, so, well, I've had my fill of applause for the week. Tomorrow: full-on Writing Program fall retreat. Friday: a mini-seminar on access and success for student-athletes.
Added: I regret that the screencast shows IE, but it's the less-customized browser on my machine, hence better for a generic-seeming browser view. Also, I didn't come up the name "Quick & Dirty"; it was assigned to the time-slot when I agreed to lead the session.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Three Oh Seven
M y syllabus for WRT307 still needs a small bit of tuning, but it's sufficiently complete that I have turned it over for a departmental stamp of good-enough. The schedule is much rougher, but I have plans for the week ahead to sharpen the early weeks, and I'm generally reluctant to hyperplot the daily events, especially for a MWF class. I've always found MWF classes challenging to pace; the 50-55 minute meetings spill over too easily, exceeding the tight unit of time.
I'm asking you for feedback, too, either in the comments or via email, especially if you're struck with the sense that what shows might (not) work--an added reading, an assignment tweak, an alternative order of events. Two quandaries with the course-as-planned:
(-1-) The Writer's Cluetrain: The End of Professional Writing as Usual is conceived as a semi-formal collaborative project that will take off from The Cluetrain Manifesto and devise writerly insights from it. People of the world: 50 theses. We'll devise these while reading CM, I think. The pinch: all fit and flow, where in the course, how to frame it as a subsidiary and collaborative project and still have it come together. That's all.
(-2-) Because this is the first time I'm teaching WRT307, I've been softening my stance toward the use of a textbook. In fact, I ordered exam copies of Pearsall's Elements of Technical Writing and Gurak and Lannon's Concise Guide to Technical Communication. At $25 per copy, Pearsall's is inexpensive, and as I looked it over, I just didn't find it to be the kind of thing I would use very much. A few of the examples are good, but the framework is just a bit reductive--elemental. Not flawed elemental, just elemental. And that's Pearsall's shtick with this book: affordable and basic. Gurak and Lannon are quite the opposite. Their Concise Guide is really quite a textbook as textbooks go--loaded with rich and impressive (situationalized) grips on tech comm. Problem: at $62 bucks a pop I wonder how central a piece it must be in the course to be worth its price. Quite a book, quite a price. I'm inclined to adopt it, but I think this move will also compel me to expand the textbook's role and do a bit more to feature it. That's quandary no. 2.
Friday, August 5, 2005
Make Yourselves Uncomfortable
P h. and I stopped up on campus after 5:00 p.m. this evening--late enough to park close to the office. I had a few books to shuffle into my campus workspace, and I needed to run a couple of PDFs from chapters I intend to use this fall in WRT307: Professional Writing. I'll share a link to the syllabus when it's ready; all you'll find there now is drafty stuff, tentative experimentation and pre-planning.
On the way out of HBC (home to the Writing Program) and on a whim, Ph. and I tried a door on Hall of Languages, the building where I'll be teaching the class. I've been meaning to peek in on the space for a few weeks since I learned about the assignment, but I just haven't gotten around to it. Low priority that it is. And being after hours, I'd expect it to be locked. But the door creaked open.
"We try to encourage their young minds to wander" - Morticia
Local lore has it that SU's Hall of Languages, viewbook frontpiece that it is (appearing on all the admissions brochures) influenced the design of the house in the Addams Family. Yep: 1313 Cemetery Lane. You decide.
And so I'll be teaching composition in the building of campus buildings (notable improvement from the basement of Bowne Hall (Chemistry?) and the "Orange Grove" modular building I taught in last fall, not that I'm hard to please re: teaching spaces). I recall that our teaching request forms invited us to rank preferences for courses, wired-ness and time of day; all in all, I fared well on the counts of the course and the technology. Time o' day: 12:45-1:40 p.m., MWF. I know.
Their house is a museum.
When people come to see 'em
They really are a screa-um.
The Addams Family. (track)
Museum, eh?
The best part of this architectural mash-up (HL201/1313CL) is that Gomez (or Fester?) was endlessly inviting prospective business clients over to the house where they'd get all unsettled by Lurch or Cousin Itt or Thing or Kitty Kat (all of the cast, really). Interesting relation: the theme of deals-chased-off by the grotesque, the bizarre.
"Make yourselves uncomfortable." - Fester to his clients
Just checking campus spaces, reporting on them. And so I'll stop here, on the precipice of the unnerving next-step that would be explaining how any of this has seeped into my imaginings about what the course could be. But Ph. and I did check the room, and we found that the furniture is far more agreeable to a semester of Professional Writing than the corresponding space (the Play Room?) on Cemetery Lane.
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Palm Caked Hard
Q uick and Dirty research (really just wanted to see Q in drop caps). I accepted an invitation to participate in (talk/click)-ing through a few minutes of a session for incoming TA's on Q&D. A few others will give brief pitches, too, so I can't hog the floor (not that I would). Thinking for now that I'll emphasize the D--dirty, as in the perpetual grubbing aligned with aggregation and a few other must-use sites. The 'Dirty' in research not only identifies with the hands-dirty dig-dump-sift set of metaphors, as was so eloquently introduced to me by a memorable professor at my MA alma mater what, six years ago; it also drops the point of a spade into composition's material orthodoxy. Unsifted presumptions about the material suited to composition research preserves the orthodoxy (straight phenomenological knowing), avoiding the deep down griminess, and instead digging materials delicately, troweling with too much propriety. Worry-free and proven: Spray-n-Wash. Library databases: Quick and Clean research--different work involved in plucking a clean-authorized article (scrubbed by peer review), patching it into an essay.
Let me try to say a bit more. What materials are un/becoming for composition? (You know I've been reading Sirc's book slow and steady, until recently: concerned about bread only.) I want to avoid the way of talking about Q&D research that ordains the library (and its subscription databases) alone. We already have a hundred ways of talking about Boolean strings into ProQuest, and if we run dry on ways of talking about such things, we can schedule entire class sessions where a librarian will break it down, work through examples and prove the merits of every database we wish to query. Now someone might mistake me to be saying that I don't think students should understand how to undertake library research. Nah. Not so. I love the library. I even have a Friends of the Library membership card for my undergrad alma mater for kicking in a few bucks and earmarking it for books. I have seventeen borrowed books right here. But they're not in accordance with Q&D research. But I think a Q&D method doesn't strive to eliminate the happen(ings)stance--chance encounters, unpredictability, surprising messes. As for the "quick" in this tandem, I suppose it's clear enough that it refers to the temporal quality of a process, the truism of time as a aspect of any event. Less time for the Q&D.
I'm not trying to make trouble, just want work through some of the stuff racing around in my earliest pre-thinking. I don't want to assume there is any confusion about Quick and Clean versus Quick and Dirty (of course everyone gets this, yeah?), and I don't want to seem over-eager in asserting the merits and vitality of unconventional materials, although I do think it's a question we mustn't stop vetting: where do allowable materials begin and end? And so something more moderate (reasoned, settled, ortho-) will present some of the following sites as as worthy of having on hand (for the hand with cuticles bearing an easily-washed-away speck of dirt, anyhow): Google Advanced Operators Cheat Sheet, Google Print, oishii, FindArticles, and for gem-finds, Bloglines with subscriptions to a few well-chosen del.icio.us tags. To those doing image sequences: Flickr and front page photos, I suppose. See? If I was really way out to sea on this one, I'd have admitted a plan to bring more ridiculously exemplary alter-materials: such as this or this (via).
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Fall Teaching
I have yet to start full-on prep for the course I'm teaching in the fall, but I did learn the other day that I'll lead a section of WRT307: Advanced Writing Studio: Professional Writing. Just the one course for teaching this fall, plus taking two or three (I have an elective yet to elect, either fall or spring).
WRT307 is relatively familiar, although among the bazillion comp courses I've taught, a professional writing course, per se, isn't among them. I've been through the repository of syllabi from recent semesters, scanned a select few of them into PDFs for later reference. A gross curricular generalization about the course as read through quick glances at the heap of course documents: lead with generic forms (a resume and cover letter assignment); follow with a study/analysis of workplace information flow, rhetorical analysis of a specific document or document set, or interview with a professional on writing practices; follow with a simulation-project with emphases on design, usability, ethics. Collaborative and presentational dimensions are inscribed in the course outcomes, I think.
I still have about two weeks before I'm obligated to order books. For now, I'm leaning toward a course pack--a collection with a chapter or two from The Social Life of Information, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Porter and Sullivan's essay, "Repetition and the Rhetoric of Visual Design," a chapter from Dias et.al.'s Worlds Apart (on the notebooks of architects or academe/workplace transition). Much of the other stuff I can come up with online (perils of blogging, perils of powerpoint) or perhaps by bringing in a chapter from a text book (recommendations?). Frankly, for now I'm trying to think of ways to breach some of the constraint I find in the conventional genre approach (a resume is always only x, y, z). I understand convention, and I'm not trying to squander my students' futures. Just the opposite, in fact. I'm actually interested in doing more than filling compartments with autoblandography. Workplace templates are so pervasive and so deeply systematized that we can teach to them be-damned the specific situation? The simulation approach (let's be a business) presents some interesting possibilities and challenges, too, but I have to give it more thought. If it will be done well, it will be done with a different sort of joint involvement. Certainly all of this will ripple and shift when we convene this fall (and so the sim performances might be held off until the last chunk of the course). But it's one of the things I've been working through in recent days, besides reading and responding to work from students in the two (soon-to-end) courses I'm teaching, besides putzing with CSS and MT plugins on breaks from reading student work, besides crying (tears? sweat?) about the unbearable heat and humidity (mid-sixties overnight tonight though...finally, some sleep).
Any thoughts about what's missing from this developing plan?
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Vitality
O r vitae-lity?
When the call I was 'specting about a bit of web futzing didn't jingle my cellular phone this morning, I figured may just as well go to work on my site. My site. The one concerned with all things grand-boxy and professional.
That's what I did. It's not quite ready for mass consumption--the high traffic of folks who'd have any business digging around in the proper record of my professional life. But it is ready for a glance. I anticipate a few conversations in the coming months with my influential mentors, but any thoughts you have--first reactions--let 'em fly, eh?
I know things will shift over the next few years, so I'm content--for the most part--that this is an early version of a project that will likely enjoy an overhaul about two years from now, just before I spruce it for the job search. I've started with twelve (hehe...eight too many!) front-page links: CCR, bio, vita, teaching, coursework, dissertation, weblog, flickr, links/del.icio.us, collections, media projects, and graphs. The bio, I think, can be a space where I represent, less formally, stances, stuff I've done, questions entangled with my academic work. Overkill?
I was also uncertain about representing the diss already because it's not conceived yet. So that's a placeholder for the prospectus, chapter synopses. Yeah...that's all. Collections, media projects and graphs are all loose and mysterious, even to me. At the collections link, I think I'll begin developing a small bundle of bibliographic clusters, starting with provisional exam reading lists for the end of next year. I don't intend for it to grow to the scope of Becky's collections, but I admire the model and find it exceedingly useful to jog my memory by looking over lists of things. Collections will also include sets of assignment-related links. Media projects--there I'm thinking video, audio, and screencasts, especially if I get on the ball with spoken word essays or documentary stuff with my students in the next two years. And graphs, graphs will house some of my messing around with data visualizations, infographics and other stuff I draw or design (rhetorical models, or lexical equivalency chains--been intending to flesh that out).
You might be disappointed to find that many of the links are as of yet inactive. But I just wanted to share what I worked on for a few hours today. Seriously, I'd be grateful for feedback. It's just a draft, really. For example, the more I look at it, the less I like the splotch of spray-can brush stroke underlining on the image swap-out. Hell, by morning, I might have the whole thing replaced with something new (although I am fond of the box-fitting motif).
Ah, I've also been checking around at the various taxonomies put to use in the vitae of folks whose work I admire. No intention of going too wild too soon with the whole project; rather, just trying to survey the possibilities, locate a few adaptable models. Gaps: invited talks, for one. Heh. Maybe I should include a sub-heading for uninvited talks. Judging by a couple of my students' course evaluations, that one could double for teaching.
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
5
Y oga poses: fish I, dog, rolled leaf, cowface posture, bear. None of it helped. I started my day with some of this serenity stuff and I've been doubly-stressed all damn day long. Why? Oh heck, maybe it started with the meeting last night at Ph.'s high school to be. He's going into ninth grade in the fall, so they invited the parents of all incoming freshmen to an orientation session. Ninety minutes in, we were still watching the same powerpoint slide show which, click by agonizing click, listed every single bloody course the high school offers. Math I. Math IA. Math II. Math IIA. Regents Math Facts. Like all gripping powerpoint shows should be, this segment was narrated by a math teacher--"We offer Math I. Math IA. Math II. Math IIA." And in explanatory moments, we'd hear, "If your child is deficient math, those students take Math IB...." Of course, I was mostly off in another world by this point, watching the six-year-old at the next table make faces and fly his hands around like jet planes, marveling at the absurdity. I should have known it was going to keep us on the edges of our seats when the moderator of the whole meeting (the guy clicking the mouse to list each of the hundred courses) started with, "We're on a four day schedule. We have day one. Day two. Day three. And day four. Most classes are offered on days one and three or days two and four." Was straight to this meeting after ten hours on campus. We almost skipped, but after sitting in the near-vacant parking lot for ten minutes, enduring a prolonged three-way dunno-about-this, I said, "Let's go." And of course we picked a table in the middle, more than five paces away from all the exits.
By the time those in charge got around to scanning the room to decide whether they should explain the ELL (formerly ESL) courses, which they described in the most obtuse terms imaginable, and by the time they announced that the Child Development course was for "young girls who are pregnant or who might not be pregnant but who will have children one day," and by the time they told us that Health I "covers everything about healthy lifestyles except for sex and drugs," I was long past burned up. I think some of that carried over to today. Must've.
But there's also been a heaping load of work stacking up. Five. Five! letters of recommendation for freshmen I had in class last semester--three for scholarships and two for transfer applications. I really don't mind doing the letters, but five at once felt like quite an addition, and I wanted to customize them sufficiently that each one actually characterized the student. And extra care with proofreading. Probably shouldn't have signed them "transferably yours," eh?
Nothing more than that. Posted something over at the 711 blog, and I've still got more reading to do before tomorrow, so I'm going flip through some of that, see what I find, ruminate over what I meant to put together here.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
The Other Bone Collector
D
.'s busy modeling pellet-gogy. You know, pellet-gogy?
Owl
pellets?
Turns out the timeless icon of wise (How many licks does it take to get to the center of the TRTP?) chows small animals whole...then returns the too-bony-to-pass bits in a hardened furry ball. She tells me most of the kids are eager about the put 'em back together project, which involves picking through the dried gunk, finding resemblances, bringing them to the frame (a paper outline) and so on.
She's hot-glue-gunning the intricate bones of rodents, piecing together--femur by rib cage by skull--the outline of a tiny skeletal structure, all to show the school kids what it might look like, provided the dense hunk-o'-burped-up by the owl indeed consists of a like specimen. Sure it's disgusting; after that, however: research methodology. Sorry for crossing signals; I'm tuning 205 stuff. But what if we thought about about a metaphor for research that makes use of the pellet topos--reconstituting once-unacceptable bits into something tangible--restoring robbed coherences?
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
TR
M et 205ers this evening. I'll probably jinx the whole dy-nam, but all in all, it was one of the more encouraging first classes I can remember teaching (which might only indicate that my memory is on the fritz). We broke the ice, socialized until it was too noisy, rolled through the syllabus, and set up the more general premises of what we'll attempt in the next 15.5 weeks. No need to elaborate, really, but there is something energizing about it. Teacherly snap.
Heard one Yike! Not that! comment about McLuhan, which sent me back to everything I took for granted in deciding it would be a good fit for the course. Re-composed, though, and we agreed to give it a whirl. Later, a small ugh-rumble when I said that our only work for Thursday was to build self-profiles in the Facebook. Serves as a minor tech-proficiency measure and will set up later discussions of tagging, links, and so on. Might help me learn names more quickly, too. Granted, it is a bit experimental, but this group definitely has opinions about it, and they're willing to share them. Perfect for a here-ending first day of Semester.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
No Dark Sarcasm In the Classroom
P ink Floyd's "we don't need no" school-children have mustered a lawsuit to collect royaltie$ on "The Wall."
The school was paid £1,000 and later given a platinum record of the song but the pupils were paid nothing.
The headmistress who banned the teens' media involvement in 1979, thereby anonymizing them, had a change of heart; she now supports their claim.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Stale Art
O n my mind--Emig citing Jakobovits. Any guesses when Jakobovits likened composition to stale art?:
The linguist Leon A. Jakobovits suggests that "stale art" is algorithmic--that is, it is produced by a known algorithm, "defined as a computational device that specifies the order and nature of the steps to be followed in the generation of a sequence." One could say that the major kind of essay too many students have been taught to write in American schools is algorithmic, or so mechanical that a computer could readily be programmed to produce it: when a student is hurried or anxious, he simply reverts or regresses to the only program he knows, as if inserting a single card into his brain.
From Janet Emig's "Lynn: Profile of a Twelfth-Grade Writer."
Friday, October 1, 2004
Archisemiotics, To Critiques of Space
L ike Chuck, I started my FY writing class early this morning with a teaser about the debates last night: who watched? next-day gut-level impressions?
The first comment in my 8:30 a.m. section: "George Bush came off as really likable and genuine. He was angry at times, but he was real, like somebody you'd meet at a bar. His vocabulary seemed more everyday. He came right out and said 'You can't do that. The president can't lead that way.'"
Mm-hmm. Okay. The barstool intellectual stumble-de-do is exactly the thing that worries some folks (although I won't name specific names). <loop> It's a lot of work. You can't say wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. What message does that send? It's a lot of work. Six-party talks...if ever we ever needed China, now.</loop>
Students had great insights on the debates; they recognized nuance between the candidates, articulated them with conviction that this election matters to them. We shifted our attention after several minutes, even though some students preferred a sustained conversation about the event over the other plans for the hour. The connection, for us, came from the debate's framed emphases: foreign policy and homeland security. Homeland security is particularly timely in these classes--the two I teach every MWF. The courses are organized around questions involving spatial analysis--geographies of exclusion, socio-spatial critiques of the campus and of hometown spaces, and arguments about surveillance, privatization of public spaces, neighborhood watches and localized security poses, perceptions of threat, and so on. In fact, the second assignment is called, "Homeland (In)Securities." So I wanted to move from the debates--how would we understand homeland security if we could read the notion through last night's debates alone?--to our current, in-progress projects on hometown spaces, memory work, strangers and safety, contested zones, etc.--how can we extend the idea of a controlled surrounds (in the debates, taken to the limits of the globe, empirically exhaustive) to the material-spatial patterns of policing, security, "known" threats and deliberate municipal designs aimed at thwarting risk?
I grumbled about Mike Davis's "Fortress L.A." article (from City of Quartz), earlier in the week, but I'm doubling back on those doubts now that the classes read the chapter. Davis adopts a term I'm growing ever more fond of as we move ahead with spatial analysis--archisemiotics. Basically, Davis argues that L.A.'s architectural development implies unambiguous messages about social homogeneity in the urban center. If we accept the latency of meaning in the city-scape (buildings, barriers), reading spaces becomes a process of seeing significance in spatial design as it determines who can go where, when, for how long, etc., and imposes a character on the peopling of the space, its social flows--viscocities. It makes structures rhetorically significant, inscribing them to their perimeters with a sentience--not unlike, according to Davis, the eerie, systematized conscience of the building in Die Hard.
I suppose there's a whole lot more to it than I can exhaust here and now--or than I'd even care to considering I have one helluva cold. I just wanted to register an few thoughts about teaching at SU this semester--because I haven't yet--and, too, comment on last night's debate. The cross-over this morning, even though I'm not teaching courses with an explicit focus on the election, was striking--even exciting; it was a pleasant reminder that I'll never be too busy to savor moments when students are brilliantly conversant with each other over hard questions.
Posted by at 
Monday, September 27, 2004
Oil y Automatons
O
ntology, fua, fua...
Ontology, fua, fua, fua...
[This is the sound of my brain-motor oiled with too much reading.]
Looking one day ahead--all critical pedagogy: Shor on why vocationalism spells r-u-i-n and what he was doing in his classroom in 1979 (hamburgers as objects of inquiry, wedding contracts, so on); Thelin & Bertoncino on the plight of comp-teaching Kroger clerk who was assailed by Dr. Jones, the crank observer; good ole Freire--conscientization.
Looking to next Monday--We're spending another week on Foucault's The
Order of [Words and] Things, too. But we voted on it; I lost. We need
another week to map episteme shifts since the Baroke Breaque
17th c. But I get the project, more or less (fine...perhaps
less), and I feel ready to move on. So I voted 'nay' on continuing with
more ruminations. Others: 'yey.' Democratic. But I don't want to
explain here what it means for Barthes (who sat in the week where a third bout
of Foucault now sits). Dammit! 'Course Barthes will remain in my
project. And, in protest, I'm referring to Foucault's book acronymically
as TOOT for a while.
Have you ever read something you put on the schedule for a class you're teaching, just before you're about to work with it, and think, "What?" Wednesday morning: Mike Davis's c. 4 from City of Quartz: "Fortress L.A." What? fua...fua...
Sunday, September 5, 2004
It's Both A Pressure and Privilege To Be Here
K en MaCrorie's Uptaught is funny as hell. We have about seventy pages of it excerpted for Tuesday's Curriculum and Pedagogy session. It's particularly interesting for how he pits Percival the computer as essay-reader against the robotic, mechanistic professorate. MaCrorie (of I Search notoriety) comes around to a method of spurring invigorated self-discovery toward students' notice of voice, intellect, conscience--blended. But he's ingenious for the way he parodies the field, for the way he cracks on the serious posturing among those who "preach Engfish."
PUBLICIZE THEIR ERRORSEngfish teachers pass around to each other what they call "bloopers" made by students in their papers. They post them on bulletin boards. They send them to teachers' magazines , which publish them as humorous material to fill empty spaces in their pages. Three of the commonest slips are:
1. His parents were having martial trouble.
In the column heading of a recent issue of an English teachers' state association newsletter appeared the words CALENDER. In the graduate school I attended the English Department distributed to faculty and students a notice containing the word GRAMMER. These bloopers were not posted or printed in magazines as filler. (72)
2. He took it for granite.
3. The boys were studing in the lounge of the girls' dormitory.
Okay, so MaCrorie's a hoot. WTF's the point? We're reading this as a lens on the compositional redirect--stuff in the early sixties that carved out a space for composition as the modern behemoth spillway in higher ed--the conditions (Dartmouth Conference and NCTE's The National Interest and the Teaching of English) as the incubus for what's since taken root. And in another class, it's Sharon Crowley's Comp in the University that takes up the stance (through polemicals and historicals...mostly excessive historicals!) that we oughta cut the FY course loose. Perhaps. We. Should. To the sea.
I find the National Interest rationale especially interesting in light of the resulting material strains felt by teachers who were by and large destroyed (critically) in the NCTE's report. Stop it! Material conditions suck (onward). That's clear. That hasn't changed. Teacher shortages, class sizes, resources, technologies ("Composition, literature, and language are taught more effectively in rooms which permit the storage of books and papers, as well as the use of recordings, tape recorders, and other audio-visual aids," goes the NTCE doc.) all were named in 1961 as musts for the bedding of National Interest and the Teaching of English. The whole "send it in motion" pretense makes me think about the Russian space program, particularly all of the animals that went, unknowing, into the beyond. Poor Laika. Poor comp.
But material strains and abominable labor practices--it seems to me--are only a few of the problems deserving attention (and leading us to seriously consider Crowley's plan--note, I'm only halfway through b/c the book hasn't arrived yet...only a six-chapter tease), and in the mini-paper (called Crowley: A Response) I'm about to write, I plan to call out the top-down tenure and promotion meritocracy as one more of the fundamental constraints defining the field as we know it. In a field so notably self-conscious about its legacy of inferiorities in English Departments and plodding with the cement shoes of a broadly perceived service ethic, burdened additionally by what Donna Strickland dubs the managerial unconscious , composition--of all fields (and, why not?, others too)--needs ways to re-imagine the safeguarded meritocracies , especially in an era where over-stocked archives and gobs of peer-reviewed information (spilling far and wide, disciplinarily vast) make entrance into the field drowningly ominous for all who approach.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Extreme Makeover: Discourse
I didn't intend to post this morning, but the latest entry at datacloud jogged my thoughts about EN106, which is winding to conclusion. Winding.
EN106ers commandeered the course two weeks ago; they organized, mobilized, demanded an opportunity to take the PowerPoint sequence one step farther by siphoning two speeches of historical import into slideshows. It wasn't my plan; I was thinking our last bit of work would be a research plan: a research question or prospectus, a five-source annotated bibliography, and a critical review of one source. But, like so many good Pirates, they accepted my early-term insistence that they make the course their own, took over, put their plans for the last coursework ahead of my own.
We switched into groups for the speech conversion activity; they worked in clusters to remake Ursula LeGuin's "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech into PowerPoint shows (admitting, along the way, that such gross reductions felt irresponsible). Their essays--due Tuesday--are framed loosely as critiques of the process, critiques of the other group's work at identifying key bits in the speeches. Here are their shows, if you're interested.
Ursula LeGuin, "A Left-Handed Commencement Address
HTML
version | PPS
version | Full
Speech
Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have A Dream"
HTML
version | PPS
version | Full
Speech
If I did this again, I would build in a round of peer response--some kind of interchange and revision for polishing the shows (this part of the process was left off due to time constraints in the semester). The best part of the sequence was our class session the other day when we started to talk about the process by borrowing the premise of the extreme makeover programs on television lately. We had a good time working through the transformation in light of the mad-dash grab-n-fix that is so popular on the tube. The Extreme makeover: discourse trope was fun and seemed to be an incredibly rich pop culture pass-card toward theorizing what PowerPoint does--and in ways we didn't appreciate as fully when we worked from the smattering of articles.
Students are in their last week of compulsory blogging. I told them they could turn a critical eye on the semester if they wanted to, contemplate what's happened since January, open up about forced blogging, our pace, workload and focus for the semester of study. Many of the students are doing just that.
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Where'd you put my laser pointer, Bart?
V
oice: "Will the revolution be blogged?"
All the people: "Hell yeah!"
Got that out the way. It's been said a time or two--it won't be blogged, it will be blogged, it won't be blogged--so many daisy petals, so few revolutions. I'm wanting to talk shop here, talk pedagogy tonight, but I'm in the midst of a set of mini-essays from humanities on Geertz' Balinese cockfight and the notion of common ground. Sore eyes. A few loose ends of prep for Thursday a.m.
About that: we're using the EN106 blog this week as a note-sharing space. I'm using all of the links from TWiaOW for the Point/PowerPoint sequence and then some. We're basically reading the issue of efficiency in poorly conceived slide shows--the rationing of language brought on by bullet points with the ever-popular PP program. We're also using the sequence as a way to talk about the articles and information credibility, especially as it applies to blog entries. Here are the links from the PPT sequence, in case anyone is interested in how the popular business software continues to get attention (and not because it's in the biggest letters, as BULLET POINT A):
PowerPoint
Makes You Dumb, New York Times
(free subscription)
PowerPoint ReMix,
Aaron Swartz: The Weblog
ET on Columbia
Evidence—Analysis of Key Slide
Turning
Heads With PowerPoint, Wired News
PowerPoint
Is Evil, Wired
Learning
to Love PowerPoint, Wired
The
Level of Discourse Continues to Slide, New York Times(PDF)
Absolute
PowerPoint, New Yorker
Here are a few others I've added:
Bullet Points may be Dangerous, But Don't Blame PowerPoint, Presentations.com
Don't Blame the Tool - Reader Responses, Presentations.com
To Avoid the Perils of PowerPoint, take a kid's-eye view, Presentations.com
PowerPoint has Always been the Point, Presentations.com
Can This Off-Site
Be Saved, Fast Company
Honestly, this list serves a second purpose. I want to be able to send it any time I receive a PowerPoint show that would work better as a traditionally formatted page. Since I started thinking about this sequence, my inflow of PowerPoint shows at work is at an all time high. Maybe PowerPoint is soo powerful that the mounting of critiques creates some kind of karmic vacuum--PowerPoint skepticism met cosmically by a surge of colorfully-themed shows rushed to the doubter's inbox. Two shows were sent my way in the past week. One was a self-evaluation for whether or not you (dear reader) would be a fit candidate for teaching courses online. (Slide One: Are you technically proficient with checking email?) The other involves staff encounters with media--how to talk to reporters. (Slide Fourteen: 1. Speak in short, concise sentences. There is no such thing as "off the record.") Time for an analysis likening PowerPoint to The Blob. Seriously.
I've got to get back to finishing touches on my night's work (which, sorry to say, blog, ain't this). But I wanted to plant another seed about divergent uses for blogs in teaching composition. I've been following the discussions about the ways blogs hinge on concomitant reading and writing (via here and here) and also about the way blogs might be put to fairly limited uses by some composition teachers (here). I can't say that I'm addressing all or any of those important concerns in this entry, but I am happy to chronicle my own discovery and rediscovering this semester of the social dimension of blogs. Blogs turn narrow conceptions of reading and writing as private, independent, and isolationist upside down in favor of an extracurricular literacy network--a connected arena of extraspatial (beyond the walls we meet between) contact and community. And, of course, there's more to it than I can plow through just now in the interest of convening tomorrow as a potentially jubilant day. But I want to note the latest activity I'm toying with--a kind of bum-rush anno