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I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
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Tinderbox 3.5?? I just got an email from Eastgate announcing the release of Tinderbox 3.5. I haven't posted here since Sept. 2004, and I am using Tinderbox 1.2.3, although I haven't wanted to take the site down because I still access some of my notes, and I don't mind keeping the site up as an archive of blogging activity between 2002 and 2004. This site is relevant to an article I published on blogging--another reason to keep the blog up. I do still blog, but in really fragmented ways. Something close to a personal blog at TenADay Clippings from my feedreader at "All Clippings, all the time." Various course blogs through blogger, the most active and interesting (IMHO) for my Visual Culture and Language Course. I wonder how blogging is evolving for other people? Some high profile bloggers just pack it in, others slow down, some, like Douglas Rushkoff, just announced that he is looking for teammates because individual blogging is too demanding. Blogging has often been defined by its regularity, but it seems to me that, like journaling, and like most of our human activities, we do it when it makes sense and fulfills us, and we don't do it when it becomes a drag, a bore, a burden--and we have the luxury to just stop. I also wonder what I am supposted to do with these files once my iMac passes along and I no longer have a functioning version of Tinderbox. True archives, at that point? To be read and printed, not manipulated?
New Literacy and The Essay Two pretty interesting finds tonight, thanks to Dad and Google Alerts. A concise but comprehensive overview of The New Literacy, published earlier this month. A smart and interesting essay about The Essay, written by a Computer Programmer / writer, a likely combination in the next age of literacy.
McLuhan, Ulmer, Method I'm working on an essay about McLuhan's Laws of Media, and I am often thinking about how McLuhan's laws relate to Burke's Pentad, and tonight, Ulmer's CATT(t). Whenever I bring McLuhan and Ulmer together, I see in their work a lot of similarities even though Ulmer specifically distanced himself from McLuhan in Applied Grammatology. Okay, to the heart of the matter. McLuhan and McLuhan say that if you drop one of the laws of the tetrad, you end up with "not formal but efficient cause, and familiar Method" (8). Ulmer's first chapter in Heuretics establishes his own heuretic, CATT(t), which I have tried to map onto the Laws: Contrast = obsolescence or reversal (can't quite tell). Analogy = enhancement, intensification, or amplification. Theory = a repetition of an existing theory, modified = retrieval Target = enhancement or reversal (also can't quite tell). Ulmer's "tale" is the telling of the new theory, and while McLuhan did not include the tale as part of the tetrad, he clearly understood that his own new tale needed a new kind of telling, a telling consistent with his message and distinct from the old kind of telling. If analogy and target both function to describe how a Method (or a technology) are kinds of enhancements, and contrast is in fact best mapped to obsolescence, what Ulmer seems to be dropping is reversal--what will the new Method become, when taken to its limits? Because his frames of reference are Plato's Phaedrus, Descartes on Method, Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism," none of these methods contain within it an account of their own reversal. They are all methods concerned with asserting themselves, with pushing other examples and problems aside, drawing on existing, authoritative theories. Ulmer, to the extent that he continues to work in the tradition of Method, is in the process of trying to invent something new (hence his latest book, Internet Inventions), and his work focuses fairly precisely on issues of composition--how should we compose in the age of video? within the apparatus of electracy rather than literacy? McLuhan did not pose that question so much as simply tackle it through his own compositions, focusing instead more precisely on the hermeneutic tasks of "understanding media". Ulmer may consistently identify with Derrida rather than McLuhan, but it seems increasingly like he builds off of McLuhan implicity as more or more than he builds off of Derrida. That said, if his CATT(t) in fact does not consider reversal, the future ground, the reversal of the New Method, remains unclear, and the invention is made without a sense of its consequences. Ulmer's focus on Methods and theories and even genres, framed in the context of rhetoric, perhaps makes the question of reversal less pressing than say, inventions like nanotechnology, although the questions of reversal for discourse do seem worth considering. Ulmer's objects of analysis are pretty consistently textual, rather than material, although he clearly understands that rhetoric, invention, literacy, and electracy happen within the context of technologies and a material world. So, in sum ; ) McLuhan's objects: media, technology, texts (in his literary scholarship). Ulmer's objects: texts, pedagogies, Methods, media--although largely assumed. McLuhan's goal: understanding, with a generalized sense of action. Ulmer's goal: application, invention, understanding assumed. McLuhan's laws: figures and grounds balanced. Ulmer's CATT(t): figures privileged, obsolesced grounds acknowledged. Nuff' said?
Farenheit 9/11 Thoughts I saw Farenheit 9/11 yesterday--emotionally draining, especially seeing the Iraqi and American mothers emotionally destroyed by the war. As reviewers have been saying since Cannes, Moore is actually pretty low key, and during the last 30 minutes or so, lets the people on the screen provide the analysis. Two initial thougths (I'm expecting more later): Moore has stayed incredibly "on message" since Roger and Me. F 9/11 ties threads together adeptly towards the end to send the message that America is far from a classless society, and that the war is part of the process of keeping the class structure in place. He even has footage of Bush addressing a fundraising crowd and saying "You are the haves and the have mores, and you are my base." Along similar lines, he continues to use Flint MI, his hometown, as a rich topoi, a rhetorical place, to return to, for issues that are about America and the world. He follows two Navy recruiters on a day at the mall in Flint (not the new, suburban mall, but the old, urban mall); we see them target young men and women, work them over pretty aggressively. Moore comes back to a scene of young African American men at a gym talking about the war--all knew people in service. He has a short scene where he shows a neighborhood that looks as bombed out as the Baghdad. But he really focuses on a mother from Flint who had always believed the forces were a great option for the young and unemployed in Flint, until her son was killed. Her son's last letter expressed his anger at Bush for sending troops to Iraq for no reason, and she herself says that she feels fooled and betrayed by the government. I've been wondering what conservatives are saying about the film. According to this story from the AP, the White House and Republican party are taking a "no comment" approach, but a group called "Move America Forward" calls it a "misleading and grotesque movie" and they are using a letter writing campaign to try and keep it out of theaters.
Links to Tetrads online I'm compiling a list of online materials that explain or use McLuhan's "laws of media," also known as the tetrad. I'll probably update this note periodically, but here is what I have so far. I'll make the links active, eventually. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. "The Internet, Laws of Media, and Identity Politics." http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Tetrads.html. 1996. Accessed June 3, 2004. A good essay, especially for emphasizing the need to go beyond the tetrad. Federman, Mark. "Laws of Media Tetrads." http://www3.sympatico.ca/federman/MerrillConsulting/transform/ncb2.htm. Accessed June 3, 2004. Federman consistently does a nice job of glossing McLuhan. Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin. A Webcomic Tetrad: http://www.e-merl.com/comtet.htm. Accessed June 6, 2004. This webcomic tetrad is a webcomic in itself, offering a narrator and a story line--although viewers are free to move around the space. Very cool. Moulthrop, Stuart. "You Say you Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media." Postmodern Culture 1.3 (1991) 53 para. Archived in Project Muse: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3moulthrop.html. Accessed Oct. 3, 2001. Probably the most extensive application of the laws of media in the field of Computers and Writing, although Moulthrop does not exploit the visual dimension of tetrads. "The Tetrads: Four Laws of Media." http://www.jesgrew.org/wake/tetrads/index.html ND. Accessed June 3, 2004. And McLuhan, Eric. "Survivor Tetrad." http://www.jesgrew.org/wake/tetrads/Survivor.html. ND. Accessed June 3, 2004. Eric McLuhan's tetard is a link off of the main tetrad site. Both are short and to the point. Rheingold, Howard. "McLuhanizing Mobile Media." Mon Nov. 24, 2003. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100229&ref=1310423 A short article that emphasizes the brainstorming qualities and use of the Laws of Media.
what if we have already learned all of McLuhan's lessons? In reading a stunning lecture McLuhan delivered to educators in 1959, I started to wonder what a retrieval of McLuhan can really add to educational reform. Not that his radical vision‹discovery based education, problem-based education, educating students in the mastery of global new media, etc.‹has been realized, but that many radical educators are still pushing many of the same kinds of reforms. Joshua Meyorwitz essay about taking mcluhan seriously ends with this observations: "In the long run, educational theorists and practitioners have taken McLuhan and "medium theory" rather seriously after all‹even if they have not been fully conscious of it" (106). So, what is the value in recovering his ideas? The rhetorical weight of being able to say to those who resist "look it was obvious to McLuhan in 1959 what needed to be done, and we still haven't done it!" ? A "theory value" is often attributed to doing this kind of recovery work, but McLuhan's reputation is so problematics, the dynamics are considerably different than the great Bakhtinian recovery of the 1990s. Is the recovery worth the risk? Although Ulmer chose to use Derrida as his relay, there would seem to be a relay-value in working through McLuhan's texts, as they more adequeately spur me to write like tv than do Ulmer's texts. McLuhan, as I noted in an earlier post, can be thought of as an early practitioner of alternative academic writing. I also wrote about Jeff Rice discovering, after the fact, that his pedagogy essentially matched up with McLuhans--raising the very problem I have started this entry with. Maybe some of the value will be in looking at contempories who have been influenced by McLuhan but continue to be overlooked in educational circles. scott McCloud's work on comics, David Byrne's films, music, and multi-media composition, david carson's photografiks, etc. The grand sweeping move would be to re-configure the humanities based on McLuhan, vygotsky, Montessori rather than Frye, Bruner, Newman -- although such a totalizing move seems antithetical to the McLuhan project of probe and exploring rather than theorizing and explaining McLuhan himself preached "understanding," but I like the notion that we can only have "simple knowing," -- see the introduction to gramophone, film, typewriter. The anti-theory arguments have always had a certain appeal for me; theory hope continues to prevail.
Cooling off classroom discussion I was thinking about McLuhan's "acoustic space" today and trying to figure out ways to illustrate it that are more concerete than the examples he tends to give. I thought about my education--my time as a student--and my attempts as an educator--my so called life as a professor. My professors were certainly all products of print culture and more or less products of visual space: ordered, hierarchical, communication moving in a single direction. I certainly didn't email my professors, doubt that I ever called them on the phone, remember getting calls for two of them. None of them blogged. Even during the four years I was working on my PhD, I have few memories of emailing my professors. I can remember a couple of classes that set up listservs--usually the students set them up--and I can remember a few of the discussions getting Hot really quickly. The email culture at that institution, in that department, was generally quite Hot. But as I probed that memory, I also thought about my interface: the old vt 100 terminal or whatever that thing was called. Orange text on black screen. I usually composed my Hot contributions to class discussion late at night, dark room, dark screen, nothing but letters appearing on the screen. I don't think I have been involved in any exchanges online quite so hot since then. I am wondering how much that has to do with the move to GUIs, to discussion boards where all the text is there to be read and re-read, rather than disappearing in to mail boxes. I've become goofy, ridiculous, a McLuhan-wanna-be punster typing away in black on white and surrounded by the serene blues of OSX, the puppy dog icon for Fetch, etc. Apparently flaming (such an appropriately hot metaphor) still exists on slash dot or other techie lists where the involvement in work is sufficiently intenses that fires still burn through words, and various websites still steam with hatred for the Other, but I am going to bet that in the ground of classroom, online discussion, the fires of the 1990s have cooled, and the interface(s) have some significant(?) roles to play. I
McLuhan and academic writing Baeten, Jan. "Illustrations, Images, and Anti-Illustrations." Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 2003. 179-99. The point I would like to stress here is how McLuhan and Fiore's two books play a fundamental role in the emergence of a new type of academic writing, in which word and image (or better: textuality and visuality) are merged in a kind of big McLuhanian move toward "global connectedness" and in which the principle of scholarly distance and Olympian neutrality is abandoned in favor of a more committed and "writerly" way of writing, and thus of thinking. (190) The general point about McLuhan and Fiore being innovators in re-thinking academic writing is solid, but this article drove me crazy with its misrepresentations of McLuhan as determinist and postive futurist, and with its claim to advance a "screen theory" which is simply a variation on "the medium is the massage."
Jeff Rice on cool Rice, Jeff. "writing about cool: teaching hypertext as juxtaposition." Computers and composition 20 (2003): 221-36. available at sciencedirect.com if your institution subscribes. Drawing on Ulmer's chorography, Rice describes a class built around the many meanings of cool‹McLuhan's participatory media (cool media) and Amiri Baraka's notion of cool as calm, unimpressed by the horror's of the world, including African American cool towards oppression and appropriation, among others. Rice connects the works of McLuhan and Baraka to the 1963 4Cs call for a rethinking of research paper, a rethinking that is needed more than ever, Rice suggests, considering the changes in the writing environments. Student produced handbooks of cool are mosaics, juxtapositions, embodiments of cool about cool that perform the cultural studies practice of decoding "cool" with the rhetorical practice of making something cool. Rice acknowledges that he inadvertently is proposing essentially what McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan proposed in 1977 (234). I have never met Jeff, but I dreamt about him the other night. What better sign that I should get reading and blogging him?
2003 in the rearview mirror My semester has ended and my blog has officially been neglected. If I go back and look at my blogging for 2003, I think I will see that I was most active in the summer when I had more unstructured time (ie research time), and that I am having trouble making blogging a central feature of my teaching. Like my students, I simply have trouble fitting it into my schedule. My plan is to try my blogging space as a freewriting space in the spring of 2004, and see if a stronger notebook focus, rather than filter focus, will both bring me to the blog more frequently and motivate me to find time to write during the semester. blog, I will talk through you in January. have a nice break.
Green Squiggly Lines I mentioned an essay in class today called "Green Squiggly Lines." I have been meaning to read this piece for quite some time, so I am finally getting arount to it--turns out to be quite a substatial evaluation of writing instruction in computer-mediate environments. I will need to return for a closer reading. Perhaps some of the most valuable concepts/skills I can teach my students are 1) how to understand search engines and do search engine math, and 2) how to understand and use a grammar checker.
Blogs in Education--an update My use of my personal weblog has fallen off this semester, and in my ongoing study of weblogs in my classrooms, I would also say that students this semester have shown less interest than students last time this year. Fair enough--the technology and the product have to make sense to the user. That said, I browsed Jill/Txt's teaching archives and found some great new material. She talks about three student responses to blogging: 1. You see it, get it instantly, love it and blossom with it. (I'm one of these people) 2. You see it, don't quite see the point, perhaps you're quite sceptical, but if you do it for a while you come to find it valuable. 3. You see it, hate it, try it reluctantly and continue to hate it. The full post is worth the read! Jill/Txt also links to a visual representation of the use of weblogs in education, posted by Scott Leslie. I'm a little obsessed with information graphics right now--very nice! J/T links to Adrian Miles (Australian new media guru) and his assessment matrix -- could be very helpful in my electronic communication class's discussion board. Miles links to a blog parody, and says you know a genre is a genre when it can be parodied: the dullest blog in the world. Finally, 'cause it is late on a Friday night/Saturday morning, I will cull from this archive a link to Mark Bernstein's (mr eastgate, maker of Tinderbox) entry about reading websites critically. His observations are sharper than the usual Library tip sheet: he points out that a #1 ranking on Google does not = quality or authority, just popularity. He uses as examples that Rebecca Blood's history of weblogging is the #1 hit for "history of weblogging" but it is a much criticized article within the community. He also says the #4 ranked site for "theory of evolution" is a creationists site of skeptical value.
Weblogs and online communities Sybil is working on an MA paper: how to build an online community (the bison blog) via a weblog. I need to help her find some relevant scholarship: Everything in Moderation is a weblog about managing online communities. Abbe Don is a interface designer and interactive multimedia artist specializing in digitial storytelling, information architecture, and virtual community projects. Her reading list seems like a great place to start. Derek Powazek has a site promoting his book (which is on the reading list): Design for Community.
The Tetrad in Action Mark Federman, host of the McLuhan Program weblog, has an extended discussion of the fallacy of the brainstorming and the ways in which the tetrad can make brainstorming more productive. scroll down to his Nov. 14 entry.
Learning to Love PowerPoint Edward Tufte has gotten more of the attention this fall than David Bynre for their paired essays in Wired, but my students definitely have sided with Byrne and learned to love (at least for a while) PowerPoint as they put together music video in this o-so-flexible meta-program (paraphrasing Byrne). A bunch of views, representing both sides and more, are collected at the community blog, metafilter. Johndan Johnson-Eilola, a professor of technical communication at Clarkson U, reminds us all to not think of technologies in such simple cause-effect terms, but instead to think of the "complicated inteplay among users, technologies, and contexts." The blog City of Sound likes Byrne's essay, but refers to it as "hilariously pretensious." Maybe--Byrne's tone is always very tough to figure out. This last post, from the wonderful online 'zine about information architecture, is probably the first place any student should go if he/she wants to see someone (Juan C. Durstetler) summarizing, and then commenting on, the Tufte/Byrne debate.
Electronic Communication I'm starting to think about spring semester and one my classes is going to be "Electronic Communication," a 400/600 level web based course. I want to be able to start with a little historical perspective, so I have been checking out online histories of electricity. "Tommy's History of Western Technology," is readable and interesting, but stops at 1976. IEEE has a virtual museum with a very non-technical history of electricity, with a very strong focus on communication technologies: telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computer, etc. More later--my son needs to play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2.
Blog Tips--titles are everything! A top 15 (?) list: a set of tips to think about as we all blog. Did my title catch your attention? If not, at least I've kept this simple. Two of 15 ain't bad.
The Toronto School of Communication The McLuhan Program Blog alerted me to a new site about the Toronto School of Communication. Twyla Gibson, a senior fellow at the program, has published excerpts or synopses from her dissertation (2000), and the site provides a quick visual and textual outline of the ways in which the Toronto School (Havelock, Innis, McLuhan, and others) drew from Plato and each other.
Blogger refreshed I had a couple of good conversations this past weekend with friends who don't blog and hadn't seen many blogs. Both could immediately see the potential for engaging students in conversations, in the intellectual work of searching the web and sharing what they find with others in a class or a non-academic community. Those positive responses have inspired me to get back on the TeachingBlog--even though I had never intended to neglect it this long! I simply haven't been logging on from home to do any surfing this semester--and my son is always playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater. My students have migrated to Blackboard, preferring the one-stop-shopping of a course management system, and frankly, who can blame them. Weblogging will find a home in education, but it will have to dislodge or tustle with those damn course management systems.
News Story about Purdue Bloggers This article from Purdue's students newspaper was quickly filtered on Kairos News, but I thought it worthy of more attention. Samantha Blackmond, who I have filtered this summer, describes her array of teaching techniques and technologies. In other words, she does a nice job of putting weblogs in the context of class room discussion, journaling, email, etc. Does make me wonder how much we can cram into our classes. The article also cites a recent survey that found 4.12 million blogs on the Internet, but 2.72 million of them abandoned. We won't be able to judge blogging's success by the # or permance of blogs; they need to be understood, I think, as a process and a technology/genre deployed at specific times for specific reasons. There are no expectations that eveyone journal all the time, and the genre is not considered a failure because people pick it up and then abandon it.
Time and Blogging One of McLuhan's Laws of Media is that a new technology obsolesces, or pushes aside, another technology--if it takes hold culturally and individually. John Lovas at De Anza College identifies TV as the pushed aside technology in his life. I suspect that when I ask students to blog, they feel the opposite impulse or pressure: instead of gladly pushing aside TV or some other activity, they resent the time away from a preferred activity (including human interaction).
Brian Massumi I just started a new book by Brian Massumi, Parable of the Virtual. A scholar who writes books with that title has to have a web site, right? "There is a certain hubris to the notion that a mere academic writer is actually inventing. But the hubris is more than tempered by the self-evident modesty fo the returns. So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, aset aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking‹and enjoy? If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however a small way, however really abstractly‹well, just hang it up. It is not that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a questin of right and wrong‹nothing important ever is. Rather it is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you are busy critiquing you are less busy augmenting. . . . Like all strategic questions, it is basically a question of timing and proportion. Nothing to do with morals or moralizing. Just pragmatic. " (13) "I have tried to take seriously the idea that writing in the humanities can be affirmative and inventive. Invention requires experimentation. The wager is that that there are methods of writing from an institutional base in the humanities disciplines that can be considered experimental practices. What they would invent (or reinvent) would be concepts and connections between concepts. The first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is simple: don't apply them. If you apply a concept or system of connection between concepts, it is the material you apply it to that undergoes change, much more markedly than do the concepts." (17) Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
National Institute on Media and the Family (110) If you are looking for a pattern in media effects, you might want to check out the National Institute on Media and Family's website. You can find well developed studies on media habits, content analysis of teen oriented music, ratings of video games, etc. I know some of you are thinking about writing about the effects of violence in music on children/youth, but the effects of lyrics likely have to be considered along with factors like other media consumption and the child/youth's personality.
Thoughts on McLuhan and PowerPoint (399) Donald Kunze, an Associate Professor of Architecture at Penn State U, claims that McLuhan had "it" right all along--a man after my own biases. Kunze uses McLuhan's notions of hot and cool media to analyze PowerPoint. When presenters simply offer text that they then read, the presentation is hot on hot--intensity without audience participation (participation in the sense of closure). Kunze suggests that a move towards highly graphical, image-driven presentations can increase audience participation--the cool(ness) effect. Hot and cool are slippery terms, but Scott McCloud in understanding comics points out that television and comic books are the pre-eminent cool mediums. PowerPoint is certainly comic-bookish in nature.
Comic Book Art Reviewed (110, 399) My father sent me a link to a review of "Comics for Grown-Ups," by David Hadju, published August 14, 2003 in the New York Review of Books. This review essay is relevant to all my current pre-occupations. It is an example of a formal review for my English 110 students who are working on reviews; and Hadju happens to use the music industry as an illustrative parallel for the serious comic book industry. In Visual Culture and Language, we just finished reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. While McCloud doesn't get a mention in this piece, his mentor/role model Will Eisner does, and Hadju echoes the argument McCloud makes--that comic book art needs to be taken seriously. To top it all off, Hadju reviews Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, and says this graphic novel is part of a growing trend in music, graphic novels, and the Internet: the "recording" of daily life, the mundane, the nothingness of our lives. Yup, he means blogs.
Music in Wired (110) The October issue of Wired features the "Superproducers," and my education in contemporary music continues. The Neptunes, Nigel Godrich, the Matrix--these producers and producer-teams are hailed as the brains behind the current musical major-domos. The piece ends up being photo-heavy and text light, but what the producers say might provide an interesting spin on a hot new idea in composition circles. The idea that writing in a digital era is actually a bit like being a DJ (mixing and spining others ideas, rather than making an original composition) takes on a new twist in a writing classroom. Students might be the DJs, but instructors might be the producers. "We find direction for the artist a lot of the time" says Lauren Christy of The Matrix. "Producing is diplomacy," says Nigel Godrich. "If you have an idea you really want to follow, sometimes you need to trick them into doing it. You have to be political and shrewd and cunning." On file-swapping, the issue is has a couple of juicy graphics on the real problem in the music industry--CDs being too expensive. Also a story about "BigChampagne," a company tracking all of your downloads--not to bust you, but to help somebody sell something to you.
Blog stuff to remember A guide to weblogging.--student directed. An online workshop -- teacher directed. I'm taking good filters and making them bad--see Kairosnews for the good stuff.
McLuhan and Manovich, again Nice review of Manovich's The Language of New Media by William B Warner in Telepolis. Warner sees Manovich's work as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan," and he goes on to do a nice job of summarizing McLuhan's basic premises (the medium is the message, the medium is the massage, media exist in an environment in which we need to pay attention to all media). Warner also quickly identifies with main critiques of McLuhan's work: that he is a determinist, that the probes are "facile" and "anecdotal," and that McLuhan seems to adopt a quasi religious perspective on the ways in which electronic communication are like primitive communication. I particularly like this summary of the critiques because all three points are off base, although the concern about the probes is not one I had read much about. Definitely something to keep in mind as I conduct my own probes.
CDs I listened to on the way to Mpls and back (110) "The Eminem Show." I have heard songs and seen Eminem on SNL, but not listened to a whole CD before. The first cut, "White America," floored me--wonder why that didn't get radio play ; ). Eminem's racial politics struck me as angry but insightful; his gender politics were hard to listen to. The relentlessly autobiographical nature of his work might be consistent with hip-hop, but also caught me by surprise (I know, I know, get my head out of the sand). X-treme blogging, broadcast to millions: we are clearly a society that is willing to listen to, and share, personal stories, on a grand scale. The White Stripes, "White Blood Cells." Fun and jangly--new to me, but like a lot of music I have listened to. A bit of Velvet Underground, Kinks, and an obscure Canadian band named the Enigmas. Didn't get a strong feel for where they are coming from lyrically: after Eminem, the pop-sound just didn't carry a strong, clear message. The Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots." I was getting close to the Twin Cities, so my concentration started turning to the road. Mello and interesting--I'd like to figure out what the techno-japanamation connections and interests are for this group. David Byrne, "Uh-Oh" and "David Byrne." I listened to "Uh-oh" twice on the way back--Byrne is all-over the place musically on this collection, but he always goes to such interesting places! Some danceable big horn pieces, some quiet sharp pieces. I'm starting to pick up some important motifs in his work: getting stoned while watching television (not sure how literal he is being--television can stone the straightest of us), postmodern playfulness ("Twistin' in the Wind" as follow up to "Road to Nowhere")--as if this one wasn't obvious! The self-titled had no horns that I picked up, and seemed to be relentlessly inter-textual: reworking some of his old work, reworking the Velvet Underground, reworking the Beatles. Harder to listen to than "Uh-Oh," but definitely will be getting some further attention from me.
Research methods and weblogging I spent two days at a symposium called "New Research for New Media." The discussions were intense, informative, and intellectually fruitful--I hope I can put some ideas into action. Here are some ideas I generated. Ethnographic studies of bloggers. Many non-bloggers wonder "where do bloggers find the time to write every day?" That information sometimes leaks out on a blog itself (I claim only to be weekend blogger), but it might be fruitful to study how bloggers fit their writing into their lives, how it impacts the rest of their lives (are they always talking about blogging?--my experience so far), what it does to their sense of online an offline community. Experimental studies of blogging. I suppose I am partially engaged in this already--what happens when you introduce blogging to the classroom? But at the symposium, we heard a summary of a massive study done by the Annenberg School of Communication at U of Pennsylvania: randomly selected US citizens were given web TV in exchange for agreeing to participate in once-a-month discussions of the 2000 Presidential race. I wonder who would be interested in funding a similar experiment involving weblogging? In other words, the Annenberg study was interested in fostering political discussion/debate; a weblogging study might be interested in fostering reflection, collective intelligence, online community not generated by debate--probably about a specific topic like a Pres. Election, Health Care Reform, the impact-value of GMOs, nanotechnology, etc. Qualitative studies of blogging. I was introduced to a kind of linguistic analysis, Dynamic Topic Analysis, being used to study Chat. Certainly many kinds of close-grained linguistic analysis of weblogging might turn up some interesting patterns, although this kind of analysis seems to work best when couched in the context of trying to study a larger issue. The hot topic in the media right now seems to be the carry-over of IM and text messaging "speak" to formal writing; it might be interesting to see how prevalent this language is, how systematic, and what kind of carry-over can really be measured. A really fun study of video gaming also offered up some categories of analysis that could be used for weblogging: object inventory (what stuff do you find on blogs? -- pics, icons, feeds, weather, etc.), interface study (pretty self-explanatory, I think), interaction map (closely tied to interface for weblogs), game-play log (built in!! the blog is the log--at least in some cases). Also a great "meta-meta" session on research design, where the speakers, in their own ways, suggested that new media researchers do need to think outside the box of research design even as they draw on familiar tools. Some powerful new ways of generating data were explained, and an iterative design process (very rhetorical design, very responsive and flexible design proces) was beautifully presented.
Research note to self An announcement for the NEH summer stipend came through my email. I should think about proposing my comp in RRV project, with an emphasis on explaining "literacy" in the the 21st century. Historical portion: the ways schools in the RRV have gone about educating literate citizens, the ways they might need to go about it in the 21st century, and the ways academics might need to go about writing history--to themselves, to the public, to their students.
Information Graphics Students in my visual culture and language class are working on information graphics right now, so I started browsing around for some resources. The Institute for Scientific and Technical Communication has a review of Information Graphics: A comprehensive Illustrated Reference. I will have to track that book down. The site has many valuable links about scientific and technical communication--worth a return visit. Juan C. Durstetler has a good, succinct page about how to make an information graphic--and the page itself illustrates some of what he is talking about. A must read! Andrew Mundi's Principles of Graphic Design looks very promising--more later.
Will Richardson on Weblogs Will Richardson's "Web Logs in the English Classroom: More than Just Chat", which just appeared in English Journal [93.1 (Sept 2003): 39-43] is a really clear description of Richardson's use of weblogs in high school English and journalism classes. He identifies the following benefits: weblogs stimulate debate the motivate students to do close readings the open up avenues for conversation they open up classrooms to authors and parents they encourage depth in student writing. Richardson sums up the benefits this way "They are an easy an inexpensive way to improve instruction, facilitate publishing, build community, involve different audiences, and provide a lasting record of learning" (42). Will's personal weblog is one of the best educational sites going (see my short blogroll), and his practices are clearly explained and reasonable. I took a quick look at Manilla this summer as an alternative to Blogger for my students, but I clearly didn't spend enough time with it to figure out all the features Will describes in this piece. In terms of pedagogy and place, the essay got me wondering about some of the differences btw high school and college settings. My sense is that college students put a high priority on socializing, and while blogs can foster that, they mainly get in the way of socializing. High school students can socialize with such minimal effort, and may spend significant time online already, making weblogging an easy (easier?) activity to integrate Students at NDSU, and other places with course management systems, also seem a little bit confused as to why I ask them blog rather than use the Blackboard discussion board. They understandably want all their information for all their courses in one place. I'm still interested in the potential of weblogs at the college level, but I wonder if the complexity of networks students find themselves in -- especially the first year -- will create some barriers for would-be bloggers. Oh yeah, this essay can be found online if you access NCTE's website from an institution that subscribes to NCTE's journals.
Top 10 Lists We will be looking at top 10 lists in English 110 (kinda catchy) as a way to think about genre, and as an ice-breaker for the semester. Hard to talk about top 10 lists without talking about Letterman--still funny after all these years. Because this is a blog, I should probably link to another blog that has some lists. I found this one via a google search for "lists make good reading." The author of the list might be australian, seems to be a writer, and likes music. That's good for us. I've linked to Mark Bernstein's article "10 Tips for Writing the Living Web" before, but it is worth re-linking in this context. What do you think of a top ten list that can't be easily scanned in 30 seconds? Or does this pieces support scanning and reading? And finally, in my list of top 4 sites about top 10 lists, a really good lesson on how to write funny top 10 lists by Jeff Justice, Certified Speaking Profession.
A funky photoessay / art project (399) I've been looking for good photo essays online for a while, with surprisingly bad luck, but Elizabeth Cohen's "Double Exposure" both explains her process and shows off her funky product. She says: "In Double Exposure , a 1950s detective film made for TV is projected onto the screen of a monitor, at the same time that images come up to the monitor from a tape I compiled, alternating images of Reagan being questioned at the Iran Contra Hearings with Air Force training films for WWII and Vietnam. " Follow the link to see and read more. This piece can be found in the online journal, Invisible Culture.
RIAA lost a battle This story in PC World says that Boston College and MIT won their request to reject subpoenas issued by the RIAA --these universities aren't interested in protecting their students' right to download music, but they are interested in protecting their students' privacy and identity. A little closer to home, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has spoken out against the RIAA's shot gun approach to protecting copyright.
Great Description of the blogging process Dave Pollard describes and illustrates his blogging process--with an emphasis on how to turn a weblog into a conversation. Beautiful--a must read.
Professors who blog Hey, I'm not on the list! I think I must be on the "C" team--somebody please blogroll me! Oh, that's right. This weblog is for me and my students--I shun publicity ; )
All Music Guide Thanks to a site that had a link to Curt Kobain, I was led to the All Music Guide. Great bio and discography for David Bynre--I bet you will find the artist(s) you are looking for here.
File Sharing and RIAA The hotest issue in music that isn't directly about music is file sharing. I just read in Wired (Sept. 2003), the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is cooking up a variety of technological solutions (to supplement their legal actions) in order to foil file sharers. SUCK, for example, will be an RIAA program that looks for large collections of MP3s, then starts downloading files in order to jam the host system and likely draw the attention of the host's Internet Service Provider. I also read a profile in Rolling Stone (Aug. 21, 2003) of one of the four students the RIAA sued and settled with, Jesse Jordan. Jordan settled for $12,000, but file-sharers around the US are sending Jordan money because they hate what the RIAA has done, and is doing, to their sense of "fair use." Jordan shares his experiences on chewplastic.com--a weblog worth following if you want lots and lots of views about file sharing.
Views on PowerPoint Wired, Sept 2003, offers two teazers articles--David Byrne (from Talking Heads--see other music notes) and Edward Tufte (visual communication guru) on PowerPoint. The two pieces are set up as point-counterpoint fashion, but in fact, they don't address or respond to one another and they compliment each other. Byrne started using PowerPoint as satire--he would make presentations about making presentation, he would us the ultimate corporate tool to satirize corporate communication. He understands McLuhan--the medium is the message--as I have said elsewhere on this blog. But slowly, he says, he discovered more earnest (though not boring) and valueable potential in making graphic art with PowerPoint. He is releasing a book/DVD with this art in September, as well as new music. Tufte has long despised chart junk, and considers PowerPoint the ultimate tool for producing chart junk. If he had responded directly to Byrne, he would have agreed that PP is best for producing art, for playing around, and not much use for supporting straight-forward corporate presentations. Tufte's piece is a teazer for his book on PowerPoint, its excesses, and the negative cognitive impact it is having in schools and corporate America. These pieces aren't available online--yet. I'll check on them later.
Weblog thoughts I have been working on an essay about weblogging, in which I claim that weblogging pushes aside "academic writing" because I would rather be digging around the web for good material to filter and not writing long, difficult to follow, academic essays that consume a lot of time and energy. But clearly the academic writing won out for a while, and maybe there is hope for me--I might be able to balance the two. If you are looking for more updates from the TeachingBlog, however, don't expect anything until the middle of August--I'm heading to the wilds of Minnesota for a little R&R before the semester starts.
Dixie Chicks The Dixie Chicks have been stirring up the political world in 2003 and definitely seem worthy of some attention for a course about writing and music. A really comprehensive but unoffical Dixie Chicks site: lots of emphasis on their roots. CNN.com published a good piece about the two prongs of the D.C.'s controversy: Natalie Maines saying to a concert crowed: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas" and then the band posing on Entertainment Weekly clothed in words only. Lead Singer Natalie Maines speaks out about speaking out. Short article--I'd like to hear more about her views! Here is a very focused analysis of the political workings behind Dixie Chick boycotts, and a report of the strong fan support they have received. Counterpunch, the newsletter/website that published this editorial, looks like a site worth paying attention to. Erika Waak wrote an essay for The Humanist called "Celebrities Counter the War." The piece starts with a summary of the responses to the Dixie Chicks, then looks at responses to Michael Moore, the Oscar winning director who critized Bush at the Oscars, Sean Penn, Annie DeFranco, and others. This essay is a good example of academic commentary because it doesn't simply look at one incident (the Dixie Chicks); it looks for a pattern in a number of similar incidents. If this link doesn't work, go to InfoTracs and search for "Erika Waak".
Eminem I suppose if anyone wants to think seriously about the state of music in 2003, Eminem's work has to be considered. An Interview from 2000--he says, among other things, "I feel like when something's bothering me, the best way to get it out is to write a song about it, I think when I do that, people can relate to me more. The more I tell them, the more in touch they are with me. " Sounds a bit like writing a weblog, or reality tv. An Interview from 2002-- about his movie, 8 mile. The Infotrac Expanded Academic Index has about 250 articles on Eminem. Ray Grundmann's essay in Cineaste, partly about 8 mile, but more generally about Eminem's fame and controversy, is an example of academic commentary on popular culture and music. If the link doesn't work, go into Infotrac and search for Ray Grundmann as author.
Anti-Bloggies The Anti-Bloggies are awards for many of the worst and some of the most interesting blogs, in the (humble?) opinion of a couple of other bloggers.
Kairos Issue on New Media Volume 8, issue 1 of Kairos (2003) has a New Media Cover Web. I've browsed a few pieces so far, but just finished watching a flash movie called "Writing Spaces: Performances of the Word," by Veronica Austen. Austen describes her piece as a poetic essay that explores the visual aspects of electronic writing, and she says she hopes to explore the multi-modal components of e-writing in future work. The piece contains many clever elements of kinetic writing--she is a creative writer with a great sense of word play and visual-word play. I hope the piece can serve as a touchstone for my own experiments with Flash, and for work my students do. Like Austen, I think the piece (or future pieces) will work even more effectively with a sound-track, probably with more variety of components (photo images, scanned images, elements other than words , letters, morphemes, phonemes, and syllables in motion). I think these kinds of pieces probably need to be about as long as a music video (Michael Jackson videos not included); I did start to leaf through a book part way through (how ironic is that?!).
Top 40 Weblogs Some days, I realize that I am quite out of the blogging loop. I just followed some of my favorite links to a site that gives a daily top 40 stories--the stories most frequently linked to by the 1000 weblogs this site has indexed. Today's top story: "Blogs shake the political discourse"--a piece about the blogging exploits of Vermont Governor Howard Dean. I had been hearing about his use of blogs, and wanted to read more. Thank you, blogosphere.
Sean D. Williams on teaching integrated composition I just spent a couple of hours getting to know the scholarship of Sean D. Williams, currently at Clemson. He wrote a 2 part piece for Computers and Composition in 2001 (18.1 and 18.2), and his essay in JAC 22.2 builds on that work. His fundamental argument in C&C isn't going to get any arguments for those of us who want to encourage/teach digital literacy--he says we need to expand the definition of composition to include visual as well as verbal components. The actual work that he envisions students doing, however, is always presented as hypothetical--no specific examples are used--and he always labels these integrated compositions as "arguments." He works from Mark Berstein's notion of neighborhoods to visualize hypertext, but I guess since I have started blogging, I have been thinking and worrying less about the structure of hypertext. Now I think in terms of database and scroll, not neighborhoods. And while I am engaged in an argument with William's text right now, I see the central purpose of my weblog as not being argumentative, but as being connective. I hope a few people will google by, and maybe exchange some ideas and observations, but I don't really want to argue with them. Sean, if you read this, I am not arguing with you--I just want to talk more, and flesh out our similarities and differences. I suppose I am starting to split hairs about what an "argument" is, but let me wrap up with one more observation. In the JAC article, he turns to Toulmin's The Uses of Arguments to continue expanding on his notion of how arguments on the web work, but I can't imagine a more print-based theory of argumentation than Toulmin's. I know I am being ego centric to wonder why he doesn't turn to McLuhan to think about web arguments, or turn to McLuhan to understand that the web is not primarily a medium of argumentation. Sure, there are lots of arguments going on via the web, but a cool medium like the web encourages participation and engagement, it encourages images and associations, and it encourages collecting, but not the sustained kind of argument that Toulmin theorizes, and that Williams seems to be imagining for his studetns. I just read the other day that web-readers, on average, spend less than a minute on a screen when they are surfing--no time for engaging in an argument! So, yeah, I guess if I want my students to construct a good old fashioned web argument that is still pretty print-biased (spiced by an image and associative logic), Williams is definitely on the right track. If I want a videossay, a probe, a killer power-point, I think I slightly need a different frame of refernce. I hope this doesn't sound to argumentative. These are good pieces--I'm just more interested in understanding how my own take on digital literacy, on integrated composition, is different from the views of leaders in this field.
McLuhan on NPR NPR hosted a special, "Marshall McLuhan Revisited" in August of 2002, with guests Paul Levinson, Derrick de Kerchkove, [both McLuhan-esque scholars] and Kevin Kelly, founding editor of wired. The sound file didn't download for me--somebody tell me what they said! Oh, and web site's first paragraph is very misleading. McLuhan didn't have trouble communicating with American students in the 1960s as the intro says [well, he might have, but that is a different issue]. The standard story is that McLuhan didn't know how to communicate with the first-year students at U of W, Madison, in the 1940s, and that lead to his first book, on advertising, the Mechanical Bride, 1951, I believe.
The latest words on weblogs Sixteen days since my last post--ouch. Working on a paper tentatively entitled "Understanding Weblogs: A Rhetorical-Poetical Probe," and I need to update some of the scholarship/journalism about blogs. Here goes: Increasingly, I realize that Dave Winer must be cited for insight/opinions on the web: his brief history identifies early bloggers like himself, and links to some stories from '99 and '00. From Dave, I got Nichole Manktelow's observation: "There are two kinds of bloggers. Those who want complete control over every morsel of their website, and those who'd prefer someone else did all the hard work." Dave also shows up at the "Harvard Weblogs" site: good ol' HU is offering weblog services to students. On his BloggerCon site, he filters Chris Lydon filtering Harold Bloom saying that Ralph Waldo Emerson is a valuable figure for Americans (and especially bloggers) during these transformative times. Would McLuhan call this a movement from cliche to archetype?
Nancy K. Miller on Autobiography Nancy K. Miller's new book But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives jumped off the library shelf at me--I might have to rename my weblog "But Enough About Me." Key insights from the book so far: "it takes two to perform an autobiographical act--in reading as in writing . . . the writing autobiographical subject--female or male--almost always requires a partner in crime--and often that partner is the reader" (2). heightened sense of identification in reading memoir, and writers seek readers who identify with them. "Writers of autobiography and readers of autobiography are codependent. Writing autobiography, like reading autobiography, can be addictive." (3) Miller also has a great list of reasons why memoir is so hot as a genre, including the "me" generation, the access to truth, the minority experience in an antielite era, an assertion of identity and agency in a postmodern era, voyeurism for a declining, imperial narcissism (12). Miller doesn't buy, or doesn't stress, the "me" component of the autobiographical act, however, as her title suggests. "I want to propose the notion of memoir as prothesis--an aid to memory. What helps you remember. In this sense what memoirs do is support you in the act of remembering. The memoir boom, then, should be understood not as a proliferation of self-serving representations of individualistic memory but as an aid or a spur to keep cultural memory alive." (13-14) I really like her rhetorical focus: she is getting at what the genre does, not what it says, and that is fundamentally important act for understanding weblogging. Memoirs seem more narrative than database, to use Manovich's distinction in (new) media forms, so I'm inclined to think that bloggers are comfortable with fragmented identities, and may not be railing against postmodernism. And I am a little underwhelmed by the notion of memoir as prothesis, because since Socrates/Phaedrus, writing in general has been understood as either a poison to memory (if memory is seen as contained only within an individual), or as an aid to memory (an extension or prothesis). Miller's analysis, however has got me thinking that blogging is about participating in a moment / movement, about participating in the sputtering, tentative, growth of the web as interactive space. Bloggers are definitely not writing for themselves: they are hoping, screaming, crying, philosophizing, performing in the hopes that someone will stop by and say hello. I shouldn't over pitch that notion--I am finding much intrinsic value in blogging. But I have, since the middle 1990s, since I first became aware of the web, sought, interaction through discussion boards, listservs, maintaining a website, and now blogging. Other teachers stop by the site occasionally. With any luck, a few McLuhan scholars might say hello at some point.
"Blog" and "blogging" are here to stay In a cool little article called "Among the New Words," "blog" and its verb form "blogging" have been identified as the new words for 2003 that are most likely to succeed. Be sure to check out the paragraph on "Iraqnophobia". Most creative of the year.
Blogumentaries Chuck Olsen says he wants to make a blogumentary--makes good sense to me. Check out his clips if you want a visual introduction to blogging--students might dig this! He led me to a PBS component about weblogs. I'll have to bring the video camera to our next blog work session. Oh, and I'm batting around an idea for trying to put my weblog in motion. I imagine an html page with flash component, but I don't know how I would bet the weblog entries to feed into the flash file. Any suggestions?
Online Lives: Blog essays The journal Biography published a special issue about "Online Lives" in winter, 2003. I've skimmed the first two essays, and both authors are in one way or another disturbed by weblogging. Having been blogging for about a year now, and having included very little of my personal life on this teaching blog, I sometimes forget how raw and perhaps disturbing the journal / personal blogs might be. But to be honest, when a reader is disturbed by somebody else's presentation of self, it seems likely that the reader is, in general, disturbed the huge cultural barrier that is being broken. The self-contained, private, individual self of print culture is, McLuhan might say, "imploding," or turning him or her self inside out. Neither article draws on McLuhan or Ong or any of the scholarship that has really tried to trace the historical changes in orality, print, literacy, electracy. Manovich is well used to talk about blogs as personal databases. I will definitely need to come back to this issue later.
Byrne, Joyce, Pope McLuhan, in Gutenberg Galaxy, wrote about Pope's Dunciad in a way that made me think of Byrne's True Stories. Donald Theall wrote about Pope and James Joyce in 1954 -- "Joyce's interest, like Pope's, is in providing dynamic models for the changes taking place within the sensibility of man in the contemporary world". And he goes on to write: "In other words, if Joyce's approach is to be followed, Pope and Joyce are looking at the "chaosmos" and constructing "map[s] of the soul's groupography" from opposite moments of a historical span" (Virtual McLuhan 183). In my words, Pope is coming to understand the ramifications of print culture in The Dunciad , Joyce is coming to understand the ramifications of electric culture, and Byrne shows astute understanding of the intensification of electric culture through the invention of the computer chip. The movie is billed a "totally cool multipurpose movie," and Byrne pokes fun at the multi-purpose architecture of the late 20th century -- the box -- but as sympathetic as I am to the notion of literature (or film) as being tools for living, maps, instructions, etc., the actual playing out of those functions is much harder to pin down --especially if so few people read Pope or Joyce, or see Byrne's movie.
Theall on the Tetrad Donald Theall in Virtual McLuhan makes a detailed and convincing argument for understanding McLuhan within the context of Modernist writers like Joyce and Pound, and does a particularly nice job of explaining how to read and write tetrads. "The question then becomes how to read these complex, multiplex, semiotic constructions. Essentially there are two ways to read (and for that matter to construct) a tetrad as well as any McLuhanesque percept and/or affect: first, reading (or constructing) it as a poetic construct, permitting it to have all the necessary ambivalence in the interactions of the four components, including in each tetrad all of its complementary and supplementary quotes and comments; second, imitating ("matching" its structure) by merely inserting relatively flat single-directed, or at best dual-directed elements into each of its positions as many who imitate the tetrads do. The latter readings move the tetrad away from being the rhetorico-grammatic device McLuhan suggests they should be, turning them into what he would have labelled a dialectical device--a trivialized logical square. McLuhan's weakness, which he shares with most of his commentators and most commentators on media, is that his suppleness, dexterity, and complexity is more restricted and restrained than that of a poet like Joyce or theoreticians such as Walter Benjamin or Gilles Deleuze. " (152) I know I am guilty of having tried to use the tetrad as a dialectical device, and before reading Theall, I struggled to understand the poetic dimension of McLuhan's tetrad. But some colleagues and I are going to try and play around with what Paul Levinson calls "spiraling tetrads" -- tetrads about reading and writing weblogs, about how the effects might differ (or be surprisingly similar) if one weblogs for academic, creative, and / or personal purposes.
McLuhan links from Bernard J. Hibbits Hibbits is the Associate Dean for Communications and Information Technology at the School of Law, U of Pittsburgh. His list of McLuhan articles, projects, courses, research centers, and other McLuhanisms is clean, useful, and contains quite a few new resources for me. I was actually on the hunt for McLuhan - William Gibson connections in order to keep my Gibson-Byrne ideas afloat. Michael Doherty has a nice piece on the connection from CMC, 1995 [ancient history, I know, but I'm reading McLuhan, right?]. He resists turning McLuhan into Nostradamus, he notes McLuhan's preference for the artists, and the sci-fi writer in particular, as a visionary or antanea of change, he pushes the notion that "cyberspace" is a concept that functions as a tool for helping us make sense of where we are going, but that is is also more than simply instrumental and invokes a whole way of thinking / being. One line seems worth medition in the context of True Stories: "While Gibson's world of the Sprawl is still a fiction, scientists and phrackers alike adopt the words and concepts of his novel as a vocabulary with which they can talk about, and tools with which they can build the future. " True Stories is a much better analysis of what is going on in our world, but doesn't offer a vocabulary or a vision--perhaps. This point might be the one worth pushing--the appeal of Gibson's vision of a world not yet here, probably never here, compared to Byrne's vision of our world, viewed perceptively, insighfully, as a mosaic. And perhaps satirized. Gibson's lack of satire and humor might be part of his appeal ; )
True Stories, David Byrne I watched David Byrne's True Stories the other night. I watched it a few years ago when I was teaching a class called Social implication of Computers, but I haven't seen it recently, and not in the context of thinking about McLuhan. So many resonances: * the mosaic approach: many stories, only one story line (also a kind of database-narrative synthesis along the lines Manovich discusses); the musical number, "Puzzling Evidence" is itself the mosaic approach to cultural analysis in very condensed form. * communication as tactile, phatic, a global consciousness: the "radio head" character grabs people's noses to pick up their signals, and sings about a kind of global consciousness (his band is even cleverly titled "Los Globos"--for all you Los Lobos fans out there!) * the electric age as creative, as reducing the space between work and play, as a new religion, illustrated by the Computer Guy and Spalding Gray's character (the visionary businessman who brought Vericorps to Virgil, Texas). * the turn to voodoo, the new primitivism in the search for love * the world's laziest woman: surrounded by technology, immobolized by it but not necessarily saddened or distressed by it, and ultimately TV leads her to Lewis Fyne, her future husband (because love is for sale). I could go on, but I also have to think about tone and irony in this piece. I was just reading about McLuhan's satire as cynical, a bit angry, and James Joyce's satire as more carnivalesque and celebratory. Byrne's tone in the movie generally seems whimsical, but as the Computer Guy is explaining how creative the "new scientists" are, you see about 5 of them in the shot, all wearning almost identical clothing. And Spalding Gray's character seems to take considerable pleasure in the massive changes he sees going on around him, but he says to Byrne something like "you wouldn't want to raise kids in this world, would you?" And the one story line that gets resolved is Lewis Fyne's quest for marriage after he sings "people like us don't want justice, don't want truth, we just want someone to love". Byrne has certainly been labeled "angry" at times in his career, and I'm not exactly sure what he thinks of the affable Bear, Lewis Fyne. The Name of this Site is Talking Heads: refers to "Vericorps" as the "industrial heart of Virgil," a label which misses the point of this "true body." Nice review, though, from an obviously pro Talking Head site.
Rhetoric Notes by Dale Sullivan Dale Sullivan will be joining our department in two weeks as the new department chair. I will have to ask him what he thinks of his many digi-selves online, including the one from NIU who collected many useful Rhetoric Notes. I found the bibliography on writing assessment written by Janet Pariza to be particularly useful as I try to wrap my head around assessing first-year English.
Dakota Writing Project Michelle Rogge Gannon and the folks at the Dakota Writing Project have a slick weblog up and running. I should contact the UND Writing Project people and see about getting us online.
Slayers, survivors, other TV metaphors Betsy, Mark, and I were talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer at lunch today. They were talking, and I was listening. They talked about doing reception analysis of the show: why the popularity among teenage girls and young women, the popularity within the lesbian community, and -- I suggested -- the popularity of the show with our retiring colleague, Steve Ward. I didn't have much to say because I am trying to think my way out of the box of literary analysis and cultural studies, and into the box (or tetrad), or circle, of poetic/rhetorical invention (Ulmer) or simply probes (McLuhan). I had been thinking the other day (but not blogging) about "Survivor" as a show that works in the Internet age because of its "participatory" quality and because culturally we seem to be tiring a little bit of the familiar, mass produced television genres. We seem to want people and not actors on our TV sets these days, although obviously that is a complicated category nowadays. But I was also thinking about "survivor" simply as a metaphor, and the kind of power the show is drawing on, the kind of resonance it makes even among those, like me, who haven't seen an episode. Sorry I can't really complete that thought, but I am now also thinking about "Slayer" as metaphor: the similarities and differences between slayer and survivor, the sense of agency communicated, the resonance of the archetypes of both. What about "friends" (from Cheers to Friends)? All of these shows put the people first, the survivor, the slayer, the friends, and presumably reflect or more likely construct identities that people buy into (viewers, after all, being the content of the TV). On the big screen, superheroes are back (again, still, did they ever go away), but the Matrix as metaphor puts the ground, rather than the figure, at the heart of the metaphor. The movie becomes "neo" against "nature" -- the other shows pit people against people, people against demons (the unknown?), and people both with and against people (the comic obviously dealing with the daily rather than the epic / dramatic). Gotta go read McLuhan's From Archetype to Cliche some more.
Imagining a MOO I was working on a paper, and somehow started thinking about my Electronic Communication course, spring 2004. I started thinking about that class as the "homesteaders" of a great plains e-space, and about getting them to contruct Ulmer-influenced mystories in this MOO. No big deal, right, but might be an interesting entree into MOO ville for me. Why would you go into a MOO and build rather than make a web site? I always bump up against these questions when I think about using MOOs. Here are some ideas: Barn-raising. Sure, we can help each other build websites, but in a MOO, students can literally make some shared objects, help each other decorate their places, talk to each other online, etc. Community building. If 10 students put up 10 websites, here there and everywhere, there is no collective archive of the course, and more than likely, most of the sites will disappear within a few years. Maybe that isn't all bad--Mark Federman has been writing about the dangers of "digiselves" coming back to haunt us over on the McLuhan blog. But if each class is a potential settlement, it might be interesting to see what towns stick around, how people move to set up new towns as their own town dwindles and dies. Okay, let me spin this a little further: my mind is churning. What if we sent out a "homesteader's act" for a MOO space (sort of been done, I know), and treated it as a social experiment--can an online community be grown and sustained for 30 years (look at material on the Well). What sustains a community? education, economics, faith, recreation / arts, families, diversity? People would need distinct roles, not just be in the community: librarian/database manager, educator, priest, etc. Does the place need to be such a robust place? What would go into it: some brochures, some plans, some visions. It could be history and futurology at the same time. Look at the civilizaton games, look at the Sims--how can this compete?
Collection of essays about music The online journal Enculturation devoted a spring '99 issue to writing/music/culture. The essay on Marvin Gaye looks interesting and almost approachable for undergraduate students, although most of the essays are pretty dense and theoretically informed. I'll have to come back later for more details.
Computers and Composition Online: 3 essays I just took my first tour of the re-designed Computers and Composition Online. C&C had been publishing some companion pieces to their print journal, but now the Online version is presenting itself as a journal in its own right--at least that is the impression I got. I had to filter the first three essays I looked at because they are in separate sections of this new journal, but they are all, more or less, about the same thing. In the professional development section they have a piece about "The Journal and Writing Place." Something of an info-mercial by the developer of what looks like a very sophisticated blogging space. Over in "Virtual Classroom," is Barclay Barrios "The Year of the Blog," which, of course, is about blogging in the writing classroom. Blogs have challenged me (and others) to think about what kind of online space we want our students to be writing in. Essay # 3 happens to be "Teaching Writing in the Space of Blackboard," the e-writing space bloggers who teach seem to consistently define blogging in opposition to. Nasty sentence. Sorry. All three are in intereting essays--I just wonder why the C&C editors have them in such distinct categories within the journal!
Richard Cavell and McLuhan I first came across Richard Cavell's work on McLuhan and acoustic space in a special issue of the Western Journal of Communication; my wife also had an essay in that issue on "space." Last year (2002), the U of Toronto P published McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. The book starts with a description of a film that McLuhan made in 1973, and I have been reading in other places that McLuhan was influenced by the Russian filmmaker, Eisenstein. Putting these two facts together, I can't believe that Greg Ulmer, who thinks modern scholarship needs to be more like film or television, and who draws extensively on Eisenstein, felt compelled to distance himself from McLuhan very explicitly and immediately in his first two books. I need to do a little Ulmer-like wandering to re-connect the dots for him (well, for me, I guess).
What is blogging pushing aside? I've been thinking and worrying about this question for the past two days, although maybe I am just worried that I can't really stop blogging. Technologically, weblogging pushes aside email and word processing. But it really pushes aside formal writing, essay development, the kind of writing I am supposed to be doing. And as long as I treat writing as a technology with specific manifestations, I am continuing to write (maybe writing more), but not in the genre my employers probably think I should be writing. It pushes aside time, or uses it up, in ways that I enjoy but may not be appropriately productive. That will be the long-term question: does all this blogging eventually lead to higher productivity and visibility? In the spirit of one well-linked blogged, I am doing a lot of thinking with my fingers. If I could just get 100, 000 visitors a day, I might be able to argue for the scholarly importance of my notebook.
Review of two books about McLuhan In a 1999 issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication, Nancy Shaw reviews Method Is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan through Critical Theory. By Paul Grosswiler. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998. 244 pp. and McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse. By Glenn Willmott. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. 262 pp. I haven't read these two yet (although parts of Willmott's book), but the review, and the books, do a nice job of trying to "retrieve" McLuhan from the dustbin of "technological determinist." I see from the review that Raymond Williams seems to have been particularly influential in slapping that label on McLuhan--not surprising, of course, that the criticism would come from a Marxist / materialist. Shaw's review says that the authors rescue McLuhan from this charge by drawing on other theorists, but it still seems to me that McLuhan's own explanations of why he wasn't a determinist need a better listening. What could be more determinist than a materialist / Marxists who believe in a base-superstructure relationship?
Donald Theall and McLuhan Just picked up Donald Theall's Virtual McLuhan. From the dust cover I learned that Theall was McLuhan's first graduate student, and from Google I learned that Theall has amazing e-text versions of Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses. From an epigraph in one of Theall's essays, I learned that I have my reading cut out for me: "Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists." Marshall McLuhan
Photocams and Weblogs Same issues as the Virgina Postrel article (Wired, 11.07, July 2003) has a short piece about phonecams, "a cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts." This piece isn't online, so I'll quote some more. "Weblogs are giving way to photoblogs, and these are morphing into phoneblogs. . . . They may not consider themselves writers or photographers, but they're using the gadgets to broadcast the days of our lives, every wherer they go, through improvised frame-by-frame stroyboards. " -- story by Xeni Jardin Good description of remediation, although I'm not sure that the current technologies obsolesce other technologies in quite this linear a fashion. McLuhan didn't make this point as well as Bolter and Grusin--convergence keeps more technologies in play, and in either competition or a symbiotic relationship. I'm unlikely to move from blogging to photoblogging because I like to write and my environment isn't photogenic. Or, I'm likely at some point to pepper my weblog with photos, but keep working with words. That will be a bandwith issue.
The Aesthetic Imperative Interesting short article from Wired about the growth of beauty industries, and concern for aesthetics in the information economy. Virginia Postrel draws on a study by Richard Florida to note that people choose low paying jobs like hairstylist over higher paying, more demanding jobs because of "flexibility, freedom from supervision, stimulation, creativity, and the immediate satisfaction of their customers. " Hairstylists, English professor -- same thing! Postrel doesn't connect the huge growth in manicurists, nail salons, and stone fabricators (who make granite counter tops) to the huge growth in expendable income among a certain segement of the population. Sure, many more people are choosing to be hairstylists, but presumably there are jobs only because more people have more money than ever to spend on stylin' cuts. She thinks that by "matching creativity and desire, the economy will renew itself," but I just don't see the hairstylists driving the economy. Maybe I'll have to read her whole argument this fall: The Substance of Style. Finally, she goes after the image of the creative genius: "Creative individuals no longer need to be isolated, romantic souls who've given up worldly success for the sake of their art." Right on. I read on her blog that she prefers Buffy to Dickens--gotta like her sensibility! Postrel's got a solid website and blog--and a degree in English from Princeton.
Weblog teaching tips Clancy Ratliff, who started the weblog discussion on KairosNews, also asked for help on her personal blog, CultureCat. I could have stuck this entry with the last, but I'm up to four notes without a freeze up: go Jaguar!
Lev Manovich on the web I've probably linked up to Manovich before, but I am also testing my Jaguar Update to see if my Tinderbox will be a little more stable. Be sure to check out Manovich's extensive collection of essays online. Still finishing his Language of New Media and while he wasn't writing about weblogs, he noted the tendency to turn "data collection" into a hobby. Yeah, that's why I am doing this even though nobody reads this blog. It's just a hobby.
Mark Poster's home on the Web In writing about Mark Poster the other day, I neglected to check for a web presence. His site is basic, but very clean, two articles online (CyberDemocracy and Postmodern Virtualities), interviews, out of print books, course materials, and a full list of publications.
Discussion about teaching with weblogs Over on KairosNews, a short discussion about teaching with weblogs is evolving. The observations and practices are certainly in line with our own--there are not magic bullets, Charlie Lowe notes, and ESOL students, one commentator mentions, have trouble with free writes. Suppose I should go jump in.
Ulmer: Internet Inventions Ulmer's Intert Inventions just arrived; I think I will be using it in Electronic Communication, Spring 2004. His preface should make sense to my students. He says that when he switched from poli sci and economics to English as an undergraduate at the U of Montana, he had a very hard time (impossible, really) explaining the use-value of poetry to his father (engineer) and his political friends. The "EmergAgency" is a an agency, a project, to make the humanities relevant and useful in the 21st century. Ulmer online. Mark Poster's What the Matter with the Internet? seems to be interested in a similar question and the issue of how the humanities can use and make sense of the internet. In opposition to instrumental views of the internet, Poster explores transformative uses. "One can merely put forward existing cultural figures of the self--race, class, and gender, or citizen, manager, and worker--to test the role of new media in furthering their positions as they see themselves and as they are. Such a framework is instrumental and overlooks systematically the constituitive character of media not in some form of technological determinism but as a space that encourages practices that, in turn, serve to construct new types of subjects" (3-4).
What's the Matter with the Internet? Reading Mark Poster's What's the Matter with the Internet ? today. Despite the title, Poster is optimistic that the Internet is the kind of technology that has the potential to reshape democratic spaces / practices in (north) america. The internet distinguishes itself from print and broadcast media by (direct quotation follows) 1. enabling many to many communications 2. enabling the simultaneous reception, alteration, and redistribution of cultural objects 3. dislocating communicative action from the posts of the nation, from the territorialized spatial relations of modernity 4. providing instantaneous global contact 5. inserting the modern/ late modern subject into an information machine apparatus that is networked. (16). This would be a great list of "enhancements" as one one node in a McLuhan - esque tetradic analysis, but the multiple factors that are needed to account for or energize social change seem to be more effectively accounted for in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone . Poster argues for a radical restructuring of the subject based on these enhancements, but watching and listening to college students for the past 10 years, I see excitement and activity primarily about #1 (instant messaging), and fear of #4 and #5. When I (or my friends and colleagues) teach #2, students are often very excited, but they doesn't seem to lead to #3. I'm not convinced that many people want to speak out or be heard, and people from this region seem particularly interested in going unnoticed / unheard. Putnam has a great section about the telephone, and ultimately the ways in which it is primarily used to maintain f2f relations--much like IMing.
Language of New Media: Reversal of touch I'm reading Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media and seeing lots of interesting overlap and intersection with McLuhan (who gets only a couple of respectful but brief mentions), and Bolter and Grusin's Understanding New Media which gets only one respectful paragraph. Being the symbiotic scholar that I am, I might work on a synthesis / review of these three books some time for Tekka or another 'zine, but for Note 1 (undoubtedly more to follow), I want to connect LM's work to McLuhan's visual and acoustic spaces, and his tetrad. LM summarizes the work of Benjamin and Varillo in terms that match up with McLuhan's broad picture of western civilization. B & V both agree that we are making a move from a culture that privileged the visual over the haptic, the distant over the close or intimate. This line of argument seems a bit counter-intuitive because "visual culture" is a hot phrase right now, but if we can hold onto the kinds of things that we associate with the rise of print/book/visual culture--science, objectivity, positivism, isolation (personal, regional, national isolations--we can understand the new "graphic culture" (a phrase McLuhan sometimes uses)--as embracing inter-relatedness (or intersubjectivity), relativism, a "global village." LM says of this movement "We may be tempted . . . to read the lack of distance characteristic of the act of touching as allowing for a different relationship between subject and object. [But] Benjamin and Virilio block this seemingly logical line of argument, since they both stress the agression potentially present in touching. Rather than understanding touch as a respectful and careful contact or as a caress, they present it as an unceremonious and aggressive disruption of matter. Thus the standard connotations of vision and touch become reversed" (175). In Mcluhan terms, then, LM has invoked the tetrad, the "reversal" or "flip," the tendency of any media to be taken to its extremes. In other words, some see respect and care in touch, and others like B&J see danger and agreession in touch, and both are "right". Both are focusing on only one aspect of touch, and only one aspect of a technology / media. Listservs and chatrooms can reach out and touch/connect people, and they can lead to rape in cyberspace. Very few scholars / commentators pay much attention to this and / and dimension of technology, it seems, preferring instead to champion or denigrate change. Using McLuhan's tetrad as a tool for analysis encourages sustained analysis and suspension of quick judgement.
McLuhan sites, including clips Two new-to-me Mcluhan sites: 1. The CBC archives with video and audio clips. (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) 2. The McLuhan Global Reasearch Network. I think I have visited this site before. Course available starting June 17th, 2003--maybe I'll be there.
Writing About Music A quick google search for writing about music turned up a number of good sources. Here are two. The Dartmouth composition center has extensive suggestions for writing about music, and suggests that students are typically asked either to write a short review or a longer, researched essay (what I would call "commentary"). Samples of student work are included-- Dartmouth students have to write about really serious music topics! From Robert Seiler at the University of Calgary (I got my Master's degree there!), a really helpful set of notes that first emphasizes the importance and complexity of listening to music, and then summarizes Aaron Coupland's suggestion that music be experienced on the sensuous plane, expressive plane, and sheerly musical plane.
Moby, the Prolific One I've missed my blog. Phone line was out for about a week and a half, I was moving, the end of the semester was crazy--I have new admiration for those who can blog amidst adversity. And then, to start my summer blogging in preparation for fall courses on music, new literacy, and other miscellaneous topics, I read a May 24 weblog entry from techno-muscian Moby saying he has averaged 1.375 blog entries per day since 2000.
PowerBox: Plato and Community Literacy? (275) PowerBox Productions is a multimedia company (one person show?) that has interesting resonances for Intro to Writing Studies. The site's header quotes McLuhan, a featured exhibit is the "Magic Cave" (inverting Plato's dark cave, perhaps), and PowerBox productions seems very concerned with education children, working with community organizations, and bringing multimedia expression to those who might want to explore it.
Popular genres and the study of literature In Cliche to Archetype, McLuhan and Wilfred Watson write: "Today [1970] the entire world of rock poetry and of related forms of jazz, of song and speech and dance, has created a complex world of genre which no professor of literature can ignore if he has any concern about maintaining contact with his students. The interests of literature are not really served by ignoring its rivals." (87) McLuhan is entirely overlooked in the scholarship on genre, but he clearly understood the ecology of genre as part of the ecology of media. His notion of "retrieval," which is now being revived via Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as "remediation," is at the heart of an understanding of genres not as static, but as always working and reworking existing forms and content. Although McLuhan himself slips on / into the phrase "new genres," the implication of his work a radically "new" genre is impossible. One more note on genres and the electric era. "Realism is specialism and fragmentation. That is why electric circuitry, in creating new integral patterns of social organization, also re-creates iconic patterns of daily life, as well as in the arts." (89) Hypertext, as "fragmentation," is realism and not particularly "electric," perhaps. Fantasy, which dimishes realism, is "electric" and holistic. McLuhan oftens says the west, in the electric age, is becoming more eastern (more holistic, more ying and yang-ish), while the east, in being "modernized," is becoming more western and fragmented, more specialized.
Service Learning In Writing Courses (275) The always fabulous resources at Colorado State University include what amounts to an online guide to service learning in writing courses. This site starts with background information and definition, suggests syllabi, and takes into account students' concerns.
Domain knowledge for reading and writing (275) The Spring 2003 issue of American Educator is dedicated to the issue of reading comprehension, explanations for the significant gap among socio-economic groups and reading ability, tips for effective vocabularly building, etc. Great issue for anyone in English studies or English education. Many articles talk about the importance of strategic and well-informed "intervention" through literacy progams along the lines we are considering in Introduction to Writing Studies. One paragraph from E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s essay "Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge--of Words and the World," really jumped out for me as relevant for teaching composition at the college level. "immersion in a topic not only improves reading and develops vocabulary, it also develops writing skill. One of the remarkable discoveries that I made over the many years that I taught composition was how much my students' writing improved when our class stuck to an interesting subject over an extended period. The organization of their papers got better. Their spelling improved. Their style improved. Their ideas improved. Now I understand why: When the mind becomes familiar with a subject, its limited resources can begin to turn to other aspects of the writing task, just as in reading. All aspects of a skill grow and develop as subject-matter familiarity grows. So we kill several birds with one stone when we teach skills by teaching stuff." (28)
DL Update: USACE and US Geology (320) A student who shall remain nameless sent me some great info: Dr Brooks, The link below is to the United States Geological Survey website. It has the most up to date information, that I have found, on water levels and such for devils lake. They have also done various different studies on wildlife. From their main page I did a simple search for 'Devils Lake' and got many different topics. While the information isn't as easy to find as some of your other links, I thought this might interest you. http://www.usgs.gov/ Dr Brooks, As of last week some time, I believe April 8, the USACE released a new Intergrated Planning Report and Environmental Impact Statement. Upon reading through through the summary, much of the information was the same as the february 2002 report, but they have included a significantly better explaination of the cost-benefit ratio (including very helpful graphs and tables). They have also included a slightly better summary of the Environmental Impact Statement. This Report is located in the same spot as the old report.
Service Learning resources (275) A quick PALs search for Service Learning turned up 80 hits, including Service Learning and Higher Learning by Robert A. Rhoads (an e-book you can access right from PALs), and the much different Service Learning in Higher Education by Barbara Jacoby ; ). Both are very recent and look inteteresting to me. Thomas Deans Writing Partnerships: Service Learning in Composition would be the book that is most directly relevant to our study, and I notice no one has checked it out yet. Amy Rupiper Taggart (my colleague) has not published her dissertation from last year, but she looked closely at three institutional models. Deans doesn't appear to maintain a high profile web site, but here is a nice review of his book.
Seeing through McLuhan's eyes (275) Two random notes on seeing the world through McLuhan's eyes, or at least seeing the way the world talks about and uses technology. 1. I was sitting in a Dr's office and saw a talk show; the guests and audience were debating whether it was appropriate or not for a publisher to have made "bubble gum cards" or "trading cards" of victims and heroes of 9-11. Most people liked the idea of commemorating the lost and the heroes, but were disturbed by the medium / genre, and disturbed that someone could make a profit off the venture. A spokesperson for the card company said, "in this case, the medium is not the message," but of course he was wrong. The medium continued to be the message, and even though the manufacturer wanted to send a different message, the history and power of the medium / genre could not be overcome with one gesture. 2. In Wired, April 2003, designer Bob Greenberg succinctly a kind of media ecology: the ways in which new media "remediate," change, push-around other media: "MTV combined film and music with faster editing and graphics, which really grabbed a younger demographic. It was really an extension of film language, adapted by television. The web is a new language, the first new one to come along since the introduction of film. The difference is that it's global and it's local and it cuts across age groups. That's why the impact of the Web will be much greater. The Web is MTV on steroids." In tetrad terms: Enhancement. When asked what the downside of "the web changing everything" is, he says: "I particularly notice the loss of the individual creator. There used to be one person sitting in front of millions of dollars of equipment--now there are eight people working collaboratively. This is one reason I collect outsider art‹to remind myself of the importance of singular vision. You have to have a point of view. " In tetrad terms: Obsolescence.
Developing Surveys (275) (320) For a comprehensive discussion of who uses surveys, how to use surveys, how to design and distribute surveys, visit the Colorado State Writing Center site. For a shorter introduction to writing and designing surveys, visit the resources provided by a high school teachers in Logan Utah. For the one-screen, bare-bones introduction and overview to surveys, visit this site prepared by an educator in Australia.
Devils Lake Updates (320) From the DL Journal, March 26, 2003 State in support of outlet By Gordon Weixel - Journal Managing Editor For the fourth consecutive session it appears the North Dakota State Legislature will support a Devils Lake outlet by providing bonding authorization for construction costs. Senator Jack Traynor, R-Dist. 15, doesn't expect SB 2193 to face any opposition when he carries the bill, with its House amendments, to the full Senate within the next week. Traynor notes legislation funding a Devils Lake outlet has been passed by the North Dakota legislature in 1997, 1999 and 2001. The bill allows the State Water Commission to bond for up to $20 million for a Devils Lake outlet. The SWC recently approved $7.5 million to begin construction on a state version of the outlet this year. Estimates place the total construction cost at $25 million. The money could also be used as part of the local share of a federal outlet project. The Army Corps of Engineers put the cost of it's Pelican Lake outlet at $186 million leaving the local sponsor to come up with about $70 million. "The State Water Commission has indicated it's not concerned about the additional $5 million it may need for the state's outlet project, it doesn't expect to have to use the bonding authorization this biennium," Traynor explained. But while most of the focus of an outlet is on the state's project, Traynor doesn't think the state should totally give up on the Army Corps of Engineer's outlet. "I don't know if we should close our eyes to the federal project. If the lake overflows as the Corps' model indicates the damages will be absolutely catastrophic, which means to me damages in the billions of dollars," Traynor says. "If the federal project costs $180 million, but reduces the chance of a natural overflow by 50 percent, it might be a good investment. That's why we shouldn't give up on the federal project." (for complete story see March 26, 2003 Journal) 03/26/03 Other links and ideas to follow: An MPR story about DL from 1999: A really clear letter FEb. 15, 2000, from the ND State Engineer, DAVID A. SPRYNCZYNATYK, to the people of winnipeg. Address biota transfer and boundary water treaty. Three recent letters in Forum: one by Jean Legge, a Save the Sheyenne member, arguing that the outlet construction should be stopped and that the State isn't properly implementing its four prong plan to water management, one from Michael Connor, manager of the DL Basin, explaining that all four prongs of the SWC's plan are being implemented, and one from Donald Schwert (a professor at NDSU in Geology, I believe), saying that they lake has overflowed its basin borders only once in the last 800 years. Visit the Forum's website to search for these letters to the editor.
Networked Learning and Online Home-Schooling (275) Sarah Brown is working on a paper about the education of Charlotte Bronte, and her paper has got me thinking about the ways in which the current home schooling movement is in part connected to the emergence of a digital, electronic, networked culture. Another student, at University-College of the Cariboo in Kamloops, BC, Canada, has explored some of these connections in a paper about "Networked Learning and Online Home-Schooling." To the extent that the printing press fueled public education, the separation of church and school, the privileging of the rational individual over the spiritual communal identity, it makes sense that people are withdrawing from the public system if they are seeking communal and familial values via education. The irony of the current technological-digital revolution is that it largely supports "organic" and "anti-technological" thinking. Maybe.
A recent article by Deb Brandt (275) The Teachers College Record, March 2003 v105 i2 p245(16) Changing Literacy. D. Brandt. Abstract: Current discussions about literacy often focus on how economic changes are raising expectations for literacy achievement. The emergence of a socalled knowledge economy or learning economy requires more people to do more things with print. Less attention has been given, however, to how the pressure to produce more literacy affects the contexts in which literacy learning takes place. This article looks at the literacy learning experience of an autoworker turned union representative, a blind computer programmer, two bilingual autodidacts, and a former southern sharecropper raising children in a hightech university town. It uses the concept of the literacy sponsor to explore their access to learning and their responses to economic and technological change. Their experiences point to some directions for incorporating economic history into thinking about cultural diversity and for using resources in school to address economic turbulence and inequality beyond the school. I found this abstract via InfoTracs--no other returns for the search "sponsor of literacy".
McLuhan on the Photograph (275) (399) Today, I started thinking about the visual culture and language class I will teach in the fall of 2003 (399) because I have to decide on some books. While I won't use McLuhan's Understanding Media, I did read his chapter on the photograph. From Understanding Media (1964). "Photography was almost as decisive in making the break between mere mechanical industrialism and and the graphic age of electronic man. The step from the age of Typographic Man to the age of Graphic Man was taken with the invention of photography" (171). ["The graphic age"--I haven't seen McLuhan use that before. His use of "visual culture" to describe print culture is often confusing. The graphic age might be a more useful label.] "If the phonetic alphabt was a technical means of severing the spoken word from its aspects of sound and gesture, the photograph and its development in the movie restored gesture to the human technology of recording experience. In fact, the snapshot of arrested human postures by photography directed more attention to physical and psychic posture than ever before." (174) "The photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture. Thus, the traditional figures of rhetoric were individual postures of mind of the private speaker in relation to an audience, whereas myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture" (174). [I was reading an online essay in Enculturation about the remediation of style, and the author drew on classical rhetoric as a means of making sense of the new style. If McLuhan is right, the new styles of visual communication that we will / might be teaching need to draw on myth and archetype, not classical rhetoric, to work effectively, appropriately, in our graphic age. ] "Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and condenscension to "pop kulch" and "mass entertainment" (175). [It seems to me that the literate of today (the specialized, highly literate English professor and students) has to make a case for what should be read and valued in literature, as well as figure out how to meet and use the new media on its own terms.] "In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose "meaning" belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters" (176). [see above: the mythic basis for visual communication] "The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes." (177) "To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible, then, without grasping its relations to other media, both old and new. For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur" (181).
E-fuse: tips for everyone (275) (320) This website is designed primarily to help others build websites, but it has tips on writing that are relevant to most writing situations, and it has a section on leadership and group dynamics that will be relevant to anyone working on a group project.
Community Literacy Centers (275) It's spring break--time to blog! Starting to assemble resources on community literacy. The Carnegie Mellon Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh is one we will read about, and perhaps is the most famous in the country. The Center's focus is working with youth collaboratively to help them realize their goals. The Lindy Boggs National Center for Community Literacy is based at Loyola University in New Orleans, and seems to act as a major information resource for community literacy professionals. A model like this one might be more appropriate than setting up a center off campus.
McLuhan on writers (275) This screen is an essay by Peter Montgomery from 1984 about the influence of various writers on McLuhan's thinking: "Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce, and Percy Wyndham Lewis were Marshall McLuhan's beacons in the dark confusion of the modern technological explosion. " The piece does a nice job of devoting a paragraph to each, although Wyndham Lewis gets more attention than the rest.
A webtext with McLuhan, Plato, and friends (275) Robert P. Yagelski's "Computers, Literacy, and Being: Teaching with Technology for a Sustainable Future" is a long essay, but within it you will find a set of pages entitled "Plato Lives: Writing and the Western Self," and within that grouping you will find a screen entitled "The Sensual Reconfiguration of Communication". Yagelski summarizes McLuhan's ideas about a techology changing our sense ratios (from oral to visual for example), but he also offers a challenge to those ideas, drawing on philosopher David Abrams. The content of this essay should be relevant to IWS, and the screen on McLuhan is in itself a reasonable model for the essay I am asking you to write. Yagelski summarizes McLuhan (you would probably want to summarize a bit more than he does), puts McLuhan in a context, then offers a challenge to McLuhan via the argument that McLuhan, Ong, and others have not thought enough about the influence of the natural world on the self. They have focused, instead, to heavily on technologies. The "so what?" element is pretty strong--Yagelski and Abrams are saying that if we are going to use / develop theories of the self, they should account for nature's influence, not just technology's influence.
Information Graphics (275) (320) Learning to communicating visually, and specifically learning how to create effective information graphics for my courses is probably my #1 professional development goal right now. But ironically, my first blog entry is about a very cool, text-heavy weblog devoted to information graphics. This weblog lead me to the website of Edward Tufte, information design guru, and then I had to track down Robert E. Horn, the author of Visual Language and the inspiration for the information graphic assignments in these courses. He has an essay on his site, "What kinds of writing will survive in the future?" This might become required readings in my courses.
Multimedia and page design (320) Bonnie Skaalid's website pulls together a wealth of information about design theory, website design, multimedia design, page design, and other related materials. If you only visit one screen, I recommend the "Multimedia and Web Page Design" screen. Its principles are relevant to print design as well: * Simplicity * Consistency * Clarity * Balance * Harmony & Unity
McLuhan and the Middle Ages (275) A succinct essay by Franceso Guardiani on the ways in which McLuhan sees the modern era as a renaissance of the middle ages. The key insight: "we have re-entered a world of multisensorial perception that recalls the world of our pre-modern forefathers." This essay is part of a short-lived web project on McLuhan studies. Essays by McLuhan and other scholars can be found here.
Paper in the 19th Century (275) Project Muse is a good source for scholarly articles about literature and culture. I found a relevant, although detailed and challenging scholarly essay about the value of paper in the 19th Century. Kevin McLaughlin's "The Coming of Paper: Aesthetic Value from Ruskin to Benjamin," makes the insightful argument that the increasing importance of paper in the 19th century (for beaucracy as well as literature) challenged prevailing notions about what was "valuable." "value in economics and aesthetics is a matter of lasting--of persisting in time--and paper, as noted, had long been seen as an ephemeral medium, a medium lacking in substance or weight. Paper was thus troubling because it challenged the traditional identification of value with substance. What comes to the surface with paper in the nineteenth century, then, is an alternative understanding of value, one with important, and complex, affiliations to a widespread discourse of virtuality that, as several historians have shown, emerged in nineteenth-century natural and social sciences" (second paragraph) Those of you taking Brit Lit II should find this essay particularly relevant.
Team Work Tips Five tips -- principles might be more accurate -- from the Harvard Business School's publication "Working Knowledge:" 1. The team must be a real team, rather than a team in name only; 2. it has compelling direction for its work; 3. it has an enabling structure that facilitates teamwork; 4. it operates in a supportive organizational context; 5. and it has expert teamwork coaching. These concepts are both helpful and illuminating--no wonder it is difficult for students to consistently produce successful group projects when they have relatively short periods of time to form their teams (i.e, they are likely teams in name only), and the "direction" of the work might not always seem particularly compelling.
McLuhan one liners (275) I was thinking about my claim that readers should look for the nuggets in The Gutenberg Galaxy, when I remebered that I had read about a McLuhan quote generator. Traces of the website can still be found, but it is no longer active. I did find a collection of audio-clips--not so helpful in our sound-disabled campus clusters, but a site you might want to check from home. I found the clips via a project posted in 1999 by an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University; he was asked to wrestle with McLuhan, too, and found it no simple task. Is that fact consoling? Check out his links! You should definitely go to matx.ca -- Canadian, and a Mac-user. We are practically brothers.
Scannable Resume PowerPoint Presentation (320) The Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) has a 21 slide PowerPoint presentation on the whys and hows of producing a scannable resume. Don't even think about producing a scannable resume without reading this file. CareerPerfect is a job site new to me, but they provide plenty of tips on creating a keyword resume that can then be put into the appropriate form--for scanning, for emailing, or for submission to a job-tracking service.
JStors: for Orality and Literacy I hadn't gotten around to searching the databases that NDSU subscribes to, but tonight I visited JSTORS (I'm not putting the link in; enter the site by going to the NDSU Library first so that you come in as an authorized user), which has electronic versions of journals in Anthropology, Education, Literature, and Philosophy -- to name the four disciplines I searched). I got 167 hits for "orality and literacy"--many of the articles seem very promising! Have someone in your mosaic tile group check this database out!
Interview Tips (320) I got the following Practice Interview questions from job.interview.net [now defunct], but this short list only scratches the surface of possible questions. Practice Interview 1.What are your strengths? 2.What are you weaknesses? 3.Could you give an example of both your strengths and weaknesses? 4.What steps have you taken to address those weaknesses? 5.Do you see yourself at a computer or at a desk? How do you feel about being out on the street meeting people? 6.How does your previous job translate into the position you are currently applying for? 7.What from your previous job makes you qualified for this job? 8.How does your education translate into the position you are currently applying for? 9.What do you think about our interview process?
Images of Literacy (275) My son rented two movies for this weekend: Digimon--The Movie and Bravel Little Toaster to the Rescue. I was pretty interested in Digimon because I wanted to see how the movie represents the Internet, and I was not disappointed! Many things to say, but most interesting were the frequent sequene of shots of children all around the world huddled around a computer, all watching the same digimon internet battle and emailing the "digidestined" kids who were battling. The movie projects an image of world-wide access, and Internet activity as thoroughly social--both face to face social interaction and email interaction. The Brave Little Toaster caught me completely off guard. There is a phenomenal song and dance routine in the movie about the Internet: how it can make everyone smarter, but smarter is only worth while if it also makes us all better, and if we are smarter and better, we can unite the world in peace and harmony (Coke can't do it alone, anymore, I guess). These two movies got me wondering about how older movies used to represent television, and as far as I can tell, movies didn't deal very extensively with the presence of television until the early 1980s. I'd welcome titles of movies that are about television. The movies also got me wondering more generally about how existing technologies represent the new technologies, and I found this website with images (mainly on pottery) of Greek representations of reading and writing from the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries, BCE.
Websites for Jobs The National Association of Colleges and Employers has a website every college graduate should check out: job listings, advice for students preparing resumes, cover letters, getting ready to interview, thinking about job fairs--you name it. NACE also has a magazine that you can pick up at NDSU's Career Center.
Walter Ong and Dennis Baron (275) Thought I would personalize the authors we will be reading this week. I've already given Plato and Phaedrus their own page, but Walter Ong and Dennis Baron deserve an introduction. Walter Ong is considered one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, but there is surprisingly little good material about him on the web, and he hasn't put any material on the web. His book, Orality and Literacy, is frequently taught in courses about the history of writing, history of rhetoric, or even history of literature. I used it in Electronic Communication a year ago. He and McLuhan crossed paths early in their careers, and you will see Ong's name come up in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Dennis Baron is the department chair of English at the University of Illinois. In addition to "Pencils to Pixels," he has made a number of his essays available on his website, including one on "How to Write a Paper." He is an example of a professor who combines linguistics and writing instruction in his teaching and research.
A college education in a website I came to William Harris's essay on Cicero first--a clear, thorough summary of Cicero's life and work that makes a valuable distinction between Cicero's ornate speeches and more relaxed prose style. I traced back to find that Harris has more or less collected a life time of teaching and writing (Classics professor emeritus, Middlebury College, VT) on his website. If you read nothing else, at least read his bio‹a brief history (including politics, of course) of American higher education in the second half of the 20th century.
Blog research sites Not surprisingly, blogs about doing research on blogs are starting to pop-up. Will Richardson's Weblogged (see roll) led me to a couple tonight: "blogresearch" is a collaborative site where, among other things, the possibility of landing an NSF grant to research blogs in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is being discussed (good idea--NSF has the cash!) "collogatories" seems to be taking a similar approach, and discussed the value of weblogs for education on Dec. 17 and 18. My colleagues and I collected some reasonable data on our use of weblogs in first-year English, fall 2002, 5 sections. We hope to get the data into presentable form before too long; it will be interesting to see some research reports to supplement the speculation about weblogging in education. I did promise myself that I wouldn't lose so much time to weblogging this semester (Spring 2003), but if tonight is any indication of how things are going to go, I am in trouble. Finding weblogs that are filtering material so close to my own teaching and research interests quickly sucks me into a vortex of blog-hopping.
History of Handwriting The Parker pen company has put together an attractive, easy to use web site with time lines (the history of writing and the history of the Parker company), descriptions of writing devices, and information on their annual handwriting competition. The history of writing stays focused on handwriting and does not look at the invention of the printing press or computer. The design of the two timelines is worth checking out--both a very different, but visually and textually effectively.
Gutenberg Galaxay node Semester is wrapping up, I'm starting to think about next semester's courses (spring 2003), wondering if I can sustain my weblog. This is a transition entry--relevant to my class on technology and literacy, as well as the spring class, "Introduction to Writing Studies." I found a very brief summary/commentary on Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy in "The Electronic Labyrinth," a project from the early 1990s about electronic and hypertextual writing. The "Labyrinth" authors write: "McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He [McLuhan} writes: the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. (136)" The Labyrinth authors doubt that a return to language (called "secondary orality" by Walter Ong, or sometimes referred to by McLuhan as a return to tribalism) will bring about a return to diversity, and use the homongeniety of American popular culture as their example. Most readers of McLuhan are concerned about his apparent technological determinism (technologies invent selves) and concerned about some of his conservative, utopian, speculations. I don't have good answers to these issues yet--his work, however, is always provocative and engaging.
Weblogs, What's the Use? I asked my students to answer this question about 1/3 of the way into the semester (after having researched the topic, weblogged a bit on their own, read some weblogs, etc.). Having slowly neglected this blog over the course of the semester, I have to answer this question for myself. 1) This weblog might be a valuable record of a course. It certainly shows early enthusiasm and gradual exhaustion--an accurate representation of the course (and a typical semester, to be honest). What I will do with this record has not been determined. 2) The blog contains many valuable links. My students turned up some great sites relavant to the topic "new literacy," and I certainly found a truckload of interesting sites on my own. Will I get back to any of those sites? Another good question. Will I ever have time to draw on any form of personal archive, or will I just keep running as fast as I can to stay a few days of my classes and my next tenure review? Okay, my life isn't that dramatic. I'll get back here. 3) The weblog hasn't been particularly valuable for my own writing, yet. If my collaborators and I stick with the project, we will reap more rewards from our work. Cindy and Sybil report similar blog fatigue. Okay, same theme for all three. What do I need to do in order to make blogs work? 1) A categorizer. Other blogs have them, I have to figure out how to make one work here. 2) Comments. I'd like to hear from readers, if there are any. A form of motivation for me. Just read that I could incorporate them in Tinderbox, but need to get that figured out. 3) RSS feeds. I've been trying to figure this out, but still struggling. I was talking with a friend last night about writing in a networked culture/space, and I got rapping about writing in spaces like a Tinderbox blog/website. Our writing spaces will increasingly be a hybrid of our own writing and collections of other feeds. Mark Taylor uses Chuck Close pictures to illustrate the complex new grids of networked culture--that image seems particularly relevant to a site that draws content from other places. Another friend maintains one of those personalized Yahoo pages--not sure if they have any room for people to write. They just feed content. What's the theme here? Improve the archive (categorizer--oh yeah, search engine too!), but mainly improve interactivity. Make this a space I want to come to see other people's writing, not just my own. Familiar ideas for those who reflect on e-writing; gotta see what I can make happen.
21st Century Literacy Website I'm a little embarrassed to say that I missed the 21st Century Literacy website as I was putting the course together, but I guess that says something about how much information in available on this topic. More than one individual can make sense of. But thanks to the collaborative nature of the course, Chad dug this one up. Don't miss the definition of "new literacy" provided on the site!
Kenneth J. Gergen, next author Kenneth J. Gergen, author of "Self in the Age of Information," our first reading for unit 3, has a slick website. You can find out about him, courses he teaches, and read many recent manuscripts. I was particularly interested in seeing this assigment in one of his courses: "Semester Production Each student will prepare" a production" on a topic of his/her choosing by the end of the fall exam period. Although this production may be an essay, the concept of production is intended to broaden the possibilities of expression. Thus, while a scholarly paper would be quite acceptable, one might chose to write a play, to create a pastiche of connected writings, or abandon writing in favor of creating a video, producing a web page, creating a photographic sequence, generating an interactive electronic experience, or some other form of production that enables effective expression." Obviously this is similar to our "stretch" assignment--I'm interested in hearing what you think of the options Gergen suggests. Should I use a "production" assignment instead of a stretch assignment?
Literacy defined I've become a blogosphere blemish--the once a week contributor. I'm ashamed, but continue none the less. This weekend, I read an essay by James Paul Gee, whose work came up in the Moje and Young essay and in the Snyder essay. He is a highly respected linguist. Before defining literacy, Gee defines "Discourse" as not only a way of talking and writing, but a way of thinking and acting. He also says most people have at least two dominant Discourses in their lives--the Discourse of home, and the discourse of work, or what he calls primary and secondary Discourses. We are never explicitly taught the Discourse of home--it is the language and way of thinking and acting that we pick up from our family, our place, our socio-economic position in the world. Secondary discourses we can pick up when we start to go to school, they have the potential to "liberate" us, and Gee defines literacy as "the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse." (529 in Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook; originally published in the Journal of Education 171.1 (1989): 5-25. His definitions seem to me a very clear and effective way for thinking about "new literacy." The explosion of affordable and accessible technologies of communication do not require that we become literate in all technologies, but in a fairly short time there has emerged a need to pick up mastery or fluent control of more secondary Discourses, or more kinds of literacy. We can dabble in these new literacies, and never achieve matery or fluency, but if we do adopt this new Discourse, we begin to see the world differently, and perhaps act differently. I have a friend who has been teaching his students Flash, and interviewing them throughout the process (a bit like our classroom study). He says his students definitely start to see how the Web and television "work" (how certain effects are created), and they become very reflective and analytical about their own work. He is pretty convinced they are picking up a new Discourse.
Two notes: Leadership and flash I was reading Chad's blog entries (getting caught up), and thought--I wonder what a metacrawler search on "knowledge management" and leadership would turn up. Wouldn't you know it: a weblog: ManagementFirst: Leadership. Updated earlier today, it has nice filters of some interesting articles, including one about the role of narrative in leadership--appealing to English teachers! Flash aficionados might get something out of Lev Manovich's "Generation Flash." Pretty heady stuff, but his argument is similar to others we have read about new literacy--that the generation flash isn't interested in critique, but is interested in making and doing. I am always sympathetic to this argument, although it runs counter to the other great cultural story of the TV/ MTV generation being passive couch potatoes, materialist, and without political savvy. What say you, Generation Flash?
Digital Divide Okay, pulling three filters from basically the same root source suggests I'm not doing much web roaming these days (true), but for Monday of next week, we will be taking some time to look at the digital divide. The Web tools Newsletter has two newsletters with links to rich resource materials about the DD. The first newsletter looks at the DD in developed nations, the second looks at DD in developing nations. Not much need for you to search beyond these two documents--both were produced in Aug. of this year (2002). Follow links to reports and essays that interest you. I am out of town this weekend--don't rush back to see postings until Monday of next week (maybe later).
Learning to Unlearn Another "Web Tools Newsletter" entitled "Learning to Unlearn and Relearn," with many links to sites on information literacy. The newsletter starts with some links to Alvin Toffler, a futurist who made a splash in the 1960s, and touches on one my new literacy heroes, Marshall Mcluhan. I had to check out "Measuring What Matters" by Tom Hespons because he says we need to learn from Star Wars. "One of my favorite scenes in the "Star Wars" trilogy comes from "The Empire Strikes Back." Luke Skywalker runs into a difficult challenge while training under the Jedi master Yoda, and he ultimately fails to use the Force to his advantage. Yoda's advice to Luke was somewhat cryptic, but sound. "Unlearn," said Yoda. "You must unlearn what you have learned." Cullen and Derek posted good filters on the relationship between old and new literacy. Cullen's filter is linked to the source--can you add a link or just post the URL, Derek?
Weblogs: Can't believe I missed this one This "Web Tools Newsletter" from July of this year (2002) would probably have been a good document to read at the beginning of the course. This site alone is one of the most comprehensive summaries of weblogs in education I have seen. We ended up finding many of these sites--Jay Cross's "Blogging to Learn", Chris Ashley's "Weblogs: A Swiss Army Knife," "Schoolblogs" --and we were found by Will Richardson and his Weblogg-ed. I actually stumbled on this newsletter after reading their most recent newsletter about the importance of involving undergraduates in research. While I have asked all of you to be apart of our study, I would also be willing to include any of you in the "writing up" that we will probably begin towards the end of the semester. Just let me know if you are interested.
Numeracy I have mentioned numeracy a few times in class and on a few handouts, but this if the first filtered essay on numeracy. Lynn Arthur Steen's "Numeracy: The New Literacy for a Data-Drenched Society" is a concise essay that defines numeracy in the context of new literacy, and defines numeracy in the context of a curriculum. This is worth quoting: "However, numeracy is not just an expanded list of topics to be added to the mathematics curriculum. The test of quantitative literacy, as of verbal literacy, is whether a person naturally uses appropriate skills in many contexts. Educators know all too well the common phenomenon of compartmentalization, in which skills or ideas learned in one class are totally forgotten when they arise in a different context. Students need to learn numeracy in multiple contexts‹in history and geography, in economics and biology, in agriculture and culinary arts." The theme of interdisciplinary or situational application is coming up in many of the readings about new literacy because we can't simply keep adding more and more content to our curriculums. It seems to me that we need to get more radical about rethinking the way we structure education-- k-12 and college.
Leadership readings I know that Chad is interested in "new literacy for leaders" and I am interested in desinging an English 120 class focused on leadership, so here are a few notes towards that subject. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse and Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley are recommended readings on leadership by Dr. Roger Casey, Dean of the Faculty at the Olin Library, Rollins college. "From both authors, I have learned important lessons about change, renewal, and paradox, which to me are the three most important challenges facing any leader in any organization," says Casey. The Rainforest Market Place lists three books under the category Books about Leadership and Activism: 1) The World is Burning: Murder in the Rainforest; 2) Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries; and 3) The Environmental Crusaders. Wired Magazine has some features that roughly fit into the category, "essays about leadership." The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden describes the kind of optimism that will be needed to tackle the challenges of the next 20 years. Sherry Turkle's "Who am We?" might influence your thinking about leadership--maybe it is just one role, one window we keep open, along with all the other identities we posess.
More of the Radical, Seymour Papert First, I have to admit that it is hard to maintain this blog. Five days since my last entry. Family visited on the weekend, up to my neck in work and other things. But, I'm glad to be back. I miss it when I am not blogging. I hope you didn't miss me too much while I was gone ; ) I have just finished reading zero draft for the "My New Literacy" essay, and I was surprised that everyone who mentioned Seymour Papert's essay "Obsolete Skill Set" defened the "old Rs" and traditional education. Is everyone getting a good education in the always-above-average classes of MN and ND? Do people fear the radical rethinking of any institution, and particularly a conservative one like education? Papert expressed some of his radical views before congress in 1995. You might want to check out some of his other material online--I think the guy is pretty interesting. Mary Sellan's article, "Information Literacy In the General Education: A New Requirement for the 21st Century," is another academic piece that will challenge you--particulary with its vocabulary--but it is also another piece that is very clearly organized, and contains some very valueable information. The first section of the essay is entitled "The New Definitions of Literacy" and it provides specific examples of how different disciplines or majors are chaning their sense of literacy. Sellan says historians are exploring electronic publications with The History E-Book Project (http://www.acls.org/ex-epub2.htm), scientists are starting to represent their concepts visually and dynamically, rather than through text only approaches, and that creative writers are expanding their notion of writing (For example, Donna Leishman's retelling of Little Red Ridinghood (http://www.6amhoover.com). Sellan does not offer a succinct definition of new literacy, prefering instead to say that the definition is in flux but can be seen operating in various ways in these various fields. She also says "The use and understanding of information and technology are central to the intellectual development of every undergraduate, contribute to a successful academic life, and are part of the fabric of everyday life with the increasing use of home computers." Writing note--the last paragraph of her introductin is a perfect forecast of her essay. She identifies the four topics of her paper, and then uses sub-headings that restate exactly what she forecated.
Digital, Computer, and Information Literacy in Health Services I know nobody in class is planning to major in Health Services or related majors, but this particular web page on digital, computer, and information literacy explains a module from a whole course called "Knowledge Management in Health Services." This site and this course is a good example of how a specific field and occupation is trying to teach its practitioners the kinds of skills and "competencies" [key buzz word!] they will need to be literate in the 21st century. This kind of application of new literacy skills to a specific field is the sort of thing I am asking you to research over the next 2 weeks. Try search terms like "digital literacy" and your planned major, or "technical literacy" and your major, or even "knowledge management" and your major. Good luck.
International Visual Literacy Association The existance of an International Visual Literacy Association might give you an idea of how long people have been thinking about visual literacy as a key component or "competency" for literacy in general. This site can give you a definition of visual literacy, a link to a pretty good online link farm for visual literacy, a link to the Journal of Visual Literacy, and a link to a more traditional bibliography of primarily print sources.
I'm Feeling Lucky: New Literacy I thought I would kick off the Unit 2 blog entries by using Google's "i'm feeling lucky" button when I searched for "new literacy". And boy, did I get lucky! Instead of starting with a complex, multi-facited, researched-based site, I found a very straight forward, 4 paragraph, reflection called "Literacies." The author (I'll get to her below) talks about how she felt highly literate until recently, and that the new information technologies are causing her to question her own literacy. She is also worried about the gap being created between the new literate and the new illiterate. She doesn't know what to do about these changes--she is just begin to explore the issue--so she ends with questions including this one: Is the new literacy creating an illiterate society? Check it out‹she refers to books and articles that might interest you. This web page poses some problems if you want to use it in an academic paper. The author hasn't put her name on the page, and although it appears to be hosted on an academic server, it also seems like the author is a student. That isn't bad, but it changes the "status" of the webpage. I figured out the author's name by using "view" then "source" on the page, and looked for the author's name near the top of the sceen -- Terri Franklin. The URL says tfranklin, so I am confident in thinking that the person who owns the account also wrote the page. I figured out that she is/was a student in the University of Illinois's "Technology Studies in Education" graduate program by first going to her own root URL http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/, and then following the link there to the TSE home page. Having figure this out, I feel like the status of the page is pretty solid--done by a graduate student, probably in 1999 or more recently based on the dates of the sites she links to.
George Lucas Education Foundation My son is a huge Star Wars fan, so I can't help filtering this site: George Lucas's Education Foundation, Edutopia Online. The site emphasizes emotional intelligence, project-based learning, innovation in education, among other things. While focused on K-12, they also have a page dedicated to higher education. Thanks to Will Richardson and his Weblogg-ed for the link.
Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed (vol 2) I got email from Will Richardson this morning--he hosts a wonderful site about uses of weblogs in education, Nate did his presentation on Will's PowerPoint slides (still online--check out the link), and Will blogged us! Many links to "Best Practices" and other education weblogs. A veritable gold mine.
Getting Started I only heard from a few people today, so I don't really know how the drafting process is going for most of you. If you find yourself stuck, or unable to move from your weblog to actually writing a draft of the essay, take a look at these tips for getting started. Where the tipster says "shuffle the 3 X 5 cards," you get to copy and paste your blog notes in any order you want. Move them around, see what makes sense. Maybe it would make more sense to start with Jo Ann Oravec than with Rebecca Blood--especially if you want to focus on the issue of information overload. I noticed that Nate thinks weblogs only contribute to, and don't help him handle, information overload.
Making Arguments The Writing Center at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has an excellent set of notes and observations about how to make an argument. These notes don't talk about the different kinds of arguments (causal, evaluative, proposal), but they do talk about the importance of making a claim, providing evidence, considering counter-arguments, and considering your audience. In other words, this web site talks about some of the nuts and bolts things that are going to happen within the shell of your argument.
Other NDSU Blogs I've mentioned the other sections of 110 at NDSU that are blogging. If you actually want to check some out, Cindy Nichols has compiled an easy-to-use list of her two sections. Browse--you probably know some of these people.
Reducing Anxiety Yesterday, I read the introduction to The Writing Cure : Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education by Mark Bracher. Bracher argues that many writing blocks, avoidance, and resistance, are often connected to subconscious elements in the writer's psyche. He writes about the importance of reducing anxiety in writing classes, and the importance of the teacher helping students pursue their desires, tastes, fantasies, and interests. I fear that weblogging, and the first assignment, "Weblogging: What's the Use?" has created more anxiety than I anticipated. I typically do what ever I can to reduce anxiety in writing classes, and I thought that the sharing of information and ideas via weblogs might be a good mechanism for reducing anxiety. Looks like I was been wrong about that one. Let me know what I can do to help aleviate some of your anxieties--hearing from you, and helping out, will in turn aleviate some of my anxieties. As for the second part of Bracher's advice, let me remind you that the second unit of the course is about defining your new literacy, and pursuing a project of interest to you. If weblogging has been inhibiting, rest assured that you will not need to continue posting after the first unit.
Asynchronous Discussions Derrik and Chad said in today's class that they would both prefer--and contribute to a "forum" or "community weblog" , rather than continue to maintain a personal weblog. That certainly makes a lot of sense to me--contribute directly to a conversation, rather than surf among sites to construct a conversation that may not really be sustained. They also left class with plans to do some research on "forums" or "bulletin boards." I did a google search for "asynchronous discussion in education" and turned up many promising links. The first article I read, "Using Asynchronous Discussion Tools in Engineering Education" [a PDF file--you'll need Acrobat Reader] by Karen Kear from the Open University in the UK, reports some findings that I think will interest you. * When discussion boards are optional, many students do not participate; they say they can't make the time to partipate. *Most of those who do participate read, rather than post. *When required to participate, students who are initially skeptical sometimes see the value in participating. *Students report that they do learn from each other, and often learn better from each other than from the instructors/tutors. [from pages 4 and 5] Although this article is written specifically about Engineering Education, I think it might be applicable to most disciplines and majors.
Gratuitous visual Many students mentioned that they like a visually interesting weblog, including pictures. I just posted a notebook entry on an essay about using visual elements in communication. I'm still a bit of a digital immigrant (rather than all you natives out there) when it comes to using visual elements effectively, so I am just going to paste a picture I like in here and see if it spices out the ole blog. 
From Analysis to Design I just read an essay, "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing," by a professor of English at Michigan Tech, Diana George. The essay isn't about blogging, but it might be relevant in the next unit of the course: Defining MyNewLiteracy. George traces the history of the use of visual communication in writing courses not unlike our own, and shows that while visual elements have crept into textbooks and into assignments, those images have typically been seen as simply objects for analysis, prompts for writing, or as a way of dumbing-down the content. But George (and other scholars) believe that we now need to start treating the elements of visual communication much as we treat the alphabet or printed words--the basic units of communication. "For students who have grown up in a technology-saturated and an image-rich culture, questions of communication and composition absolutely will include the visual, not as attendant to the verbal but as complex communication intricately related to the world around them" (32). This essay appears in College Composition and Communication 54 (2002): 11-39, a journal that is read primarily by teacher/scholars in English departments.
What can I do? I was doing a little surfing, thinking about filtering some sites that might be useful for class, but I'm not sure at this point who needs what. There are many, many articles about blogging, a huge % produced in the last year. If anybody is having any trouble finding articles from journalists about blogging, just let me know and I can give you some tips. Finding materials on blogging and education is going to be more difficult, but you might think about more general topics: technology and education, technology and writing, journal writing in education, note-taking in education. In other words, one way to think about the potential benefits (or limits) of weblogging in education is to find out what generally works in education, and determine whether weblogging will provide some of those same opportunities. Will it provide even more opportunities. Think creatively, think inductively, think like a PC-Rat. Read each other's stuff. I know Matt Mitchell found some good sites and articles about technology and education.
Journal blogs (personal stuff) Thanks to Cindy (fellow blog teacher), I found two closely connected personal blogs that really grabbed my attention. Analog Cereal and Overrated are personal blogs maintained by two friends in Chicago--they report on daily happenings (places they go, people they see, bed-head they wake up with), but do so humorously, briefly. What really blew me away, however, was the design of their sites: bold, splashy, personalized. Makes me want to figure out how to customize my blog further. Paul and Chad expressed a similar desire after class on Wed. Anybody who wants to go this route should get together or exchange emails, and maybe visit the Technology Learning Center. Does anybody think it would be cool to maintain your blog for your 4 (or 5 or 6) years at NDSU, and become known as the NDSU Blog Queen or King? You would become the unofficial voice of what is really happening on campus--alternative journalism.
More weblog advice A few posts ago I linked up to Mark Bernstein's advice for writing a good weblog. I searched google for "how to write a good weblog" and came to a similar piece from the same source: A List Apart. Dennis Mahoney's "How to Write a Better Weblog" doesn't do the top ten thing; Mahoney believes that writers need to learn the rules of writing before the rules can be thrown out, and he follows this up with some good examples. His suggestion "offer something new" is illustrated with an example from the book/movie High Fidelity: don't be a critic all your life, produce something new (like a weblog). "Amuse your readers" he says--I'm failing pretty badly here, I fear. Great piece of advice: " Instead of, "The party was a riot!" or "I'm depressed today," carefully explain why. Elaborate. Parties and depression are perfectly good writing subjects. The Great Gatsby, for instance, has plenty of both. " His final suggestion also cut close to home: "Beyond Wired" means don't keep drawing on the same source, and this is my second blog about pieces from "A List Apart." Better cast my net further. His conclusion is about "successful weblogs": they are hard to pull off if success is defined by large readership. Instead, keep your goals realistic: "if your goal is to satisfy readers, satisfying yourself is a good start." I hope that all of you enjoy writing in your weblog, and that you end up enjoying each others thoughts and filters. I'm having a blast!!!
Two tips for writing blog entries I dug a little further into the Weblog site at Florida State being maintained by Charles Lowe, and found an entry of his that saves me some typing: Two Tips for Writing Online. I had been planning on making comments much like these, but Charles beat me to the punch. Implications: weblogs can be wonderful tools for teachers as well as students. Having more and more of my class information online can help up my colleagues locally (and perhaps nationally), and if others are borrowing ideas from me, they might start putting more info online so I and others can borrow from them. The Internet's economy is occasionally called a "gift economy": thanks Charles--hope I can return the gift.
Another first-year comp blog class! I found another first-year English class that is using blogging. Actually, I am a bit embarrassed to send you to their site, because they are using some high-end products to maintain both personal blogs and a whole-class blog. Very slick design. It would seem like a pretty good idea for some of us to contact some of them and see how it is woking at Florida State. Many of their blog entries will be relevant to us--their class focus is Writing about Digital Culture. Here is one aspect of collaboration that technology has really opened up--first year students at North Dakota State have the opportunity to collaborate with firts year students at Florida State.
Talking about blogging books An exchange between Andrew Sullivan (pre-eminent blogger) and Kurt Anderson (Slate writer) in which they discuss some of the new books about blogging. They aren't too impressed. Sullivan, in particular, wonders why anyone would produce a book about a thoroughly online activity. Why not just pull together the links, he thinks--all the pieces in the book are available online. I bought the books and had a more favorable response. For someone who wanted to get up to speed on the scholarship of blogging quickly, the collection of essays We've Got Blog included some pieces from the early days of the blog explosion, includes ethusiastic and skeptical articles, and although clumsy, includes a great set of links. Book-as-technology is not worthless: clearly organized, easy to read, easy to write in the margin or post stickies. Easy to hold up in class and show students, too. Easy to share with friends who aren't online much.
Mac User Meeting, or What Kevin Does on a Hot Friday night I am capable of writing entries that are slightly personal. I went to my first Mac User's Meeting -- the Fargo Moorhead Computer Society-- at Agassiz Jr High tonight. Within ten minutes I was planning my first documentary: the event was some sort of cross between a good old fashioned religious revival meeting and an AA meeting in which the addiction is celebrated. The characters were incredibly lively, wired, and articulate. What could be better than an iMovie about iMac lovers?
Rebecca Blood, "Weblogs: A History and Perspective." Rebecca Blood's essay has become one of the essays that has defined and shaped the weblog explosion of the last year and a half. Her title is pretty informative: A history: Jan. 1999: 23 weblogs. July 1999: Pitas, followed by Blogger and Groksoup. [too many weblogs to count!] "Original weblogs were link-driven sites; many still are," but the free form interface and absolute ease of use "has, in my opinion, done more to impel the shift from the filter-style weblog to journal-blog than any other factor. . . . Newcomers appear to be most drawn to the blog rather than filter style of weblogging." A perspective: Blood is obviously a big advocate: weblogging has propelled her career and expanded her horizons in a variety of ways. Blood, as blogger, says she 1. discovered her own interests 2. "more importantly, I began to value my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important. " More generally, she says a blogger will become a more confident writer, begin to act in accordance with his/her inner voice, and become more reflective and less reflexive. Filter style leads to critical evaluation of information. Free-style blogs lead to an outbreak of self-expression. Blood is worried that the potential of blogs is being undermined by the masses now blogging. She is also worried that individuals are still outnumbered by corporate entities and their power. "we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human." Blood will seem a little too enthusiastic about blogging for the skeptics in the crowd; I think she has identified the potential of weblogging, but we need to test some of her claims. I want to know if you will become a more confident writer, respond to your inner voice, become more reflective, etc.
Blog of the day I hope it doesn't embarras anyone if I highlight a weblog entry now and then. I was just checking links and reading summaries, thinking about doing my own summary of Levinson's essay for you as a "model," but then I read Cliff's summary and thought--why re-invent the wheel? He states Levinson's overall argument clearly, and then devotes one paragraph to each of Levinson's 3 propositions. When an author gives you as a reader/summarizer such a clear structure, run with it! Nicely done Cliff--great details throughout. I do not, however, want to suggest that Cliff's entry is the only viable model. Cullen's summary is much shorter, but he does a nice job of stating Levinson's three propositions very succinctly, then identifies one of Levinson's strategies (using "experts" as evidence and support). Summaries can summarize both content and form. Next week I will be asking you to present some examples of good filter blogs and good journal blogs, so keep your eyes out for good stuff, and pay attention to the range of styles being used on the web.
Blogging Notes Some blogging tips and clarifications: 1. Make sure that you just keep adding your blog entries to your original blog account--you don't need to start a new account for each item you write. 2. Start getting in the habit of writing in your weblog regularly, and start reading other weblogs. Classmates blogs are good, but most are not very well developed. Sample some of the blogs listed on blogger.com, and/or do a web search looking for blogs of interest to you. Check out the Eaton Web Portal listed on the course homepage. 3. Send me your URL: I would like to get the class blog list filled in by the end of this week. 4. Check out two great weblog entries from my friend and colleague, Cindy Nichols. The first tells you how to get rid of the ads on blogger; the second provides a good analysis of a filter-style weblog and a journal-style weblog.
Melvin E. Levinson and The Humanist Our first assigned reading, "Needed: A New Literacy" by Melvin E. Levinson was published in The Humanist in 1994. I did a pretty extensive set of searches on the web for information about Levinson, but turned up nothing on google. com, refdesk.com, the gale index of literature and contemporary authors, britannica.com, and amazon.com. I also searched Columbia University's website, where I thought Levinson used to teach, but no luck either. He taught at CUNY, Brooklyn College. Anyone want to look that one up for me ; )? I hope that you all get in the habit of searching for backbround information on people you read; if you can't find the author online, however, check out the publication. The Humanist is published by The American Humanist Association, "The voice of humanism since 1941." The website defines "humanism" as "a progressive life stance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead meaningful, ethical lives capable of adding to the greater good of humanity." That definition jives with Levinson's essay--his desire to have education lead to meaningful lives for students, informed by a "progressive" attitude. Progressive, in this context, means adapting to changes in our culture, but those adaptations, in Levinson's essay, are informed by traditional values.
A brief reflection on class Okay, last one tonight. I just wanted to say that I read your in-class writings, and was pleased to read that most of you thought that the discussion of literacy and technology was helpful. I will also try to address some of the questions that remained--about technology and literacy, and about the class in general. But the really important thing I need to do is find us a bigger classroom. I'll keep you posted.
The Living Web: tips for keeping it pulsing Blogging has re-ignited my passion for the web. The sites I have filtered here are only a small portion of the gems I have turned up. Okay, you may not think all of this stuff is gold, but I'm pretty interested in it. Mark Bernstein, who happens to be someone I pester with questions about my blog tool, Tinderbox, has published a great set of tips for writing a weblog and keeping the pulsating web going. He says "write tight," which is obviously something I need to keep working on. He also says "be sexy," advice you might prefer that I not follow. I'll let you read the rest--great stuff!
The latest take on blogging Elearningpost.com lead me to piece on blogging published yesterday in Darwin magazine. As usual, elearningpost grabbed the one paragraph about education from a much longer and more comprehensive article. I have no problem with that--I am learning, however, to follow the link and see what the whole piece is about. Jon Surmacz, in "The Blog Days of Summer" , is trying to sort out the reality and realistic possibilities for blogging from within the hype. "If we can separate the hype from the reality, what we really have here is nothing new, and it remains to be seen whether or not we've got a revolution on our hands. We have what we've always had with the Web‹the ability to publish quickly and cheaply, and the ability to hyperlink." His blog blurb on education comes from a journalism class at Berekley where students are blogging on the issue of intellectual property. The professor's take on blogging is much like my own: "Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media program at Berkeley and one of the instructors of the class, says he doesn't know what to make of the future of blogs just yet, but he hopes the class will give him an idea."
Marc Pensky, Games for learning The elearningpost.com interview with Marc Pensky would be an interesting follow-up read for those who were interested in the Pew Research Center's report on the use of technology in education. The Pew Center reported that students were bored or un-impressed with their teachers' attempts to incorporate the internet and technology in general in to the classroom. Pensky argues that video games and the internet are so prevalent in the lives of "digital natives" (people under 40) that educators and trainers need to respond to the learning styles of this generation of learners. He isn't arguing that all education needs to be turned into a game--when students are motivated to learn, they don't need a game-format. But Pensky gives a handful of good examples of games that have helped in training situations e.g., junior auditors in accounting learn the complexities of their profession through a simulation game.
Schoolsucks.com Fun, short article about term-paper sites gearing up for the new school year, from Wired. In addition to casinos and porn sites, these plaigarism sites seem to be the only online money makers says the founder of schoolsucks.com. After I made that short entry, I found two other weblogs that had filtered this same article. From elearningpost.com, Aug. 27, 2002 WIRED: Where Cheaters Often Prosper Despite inspiring nothing but scorn from educators, purveyors of collegiate prose are finding life on the dark side of online commerce quite lucrative... With the new school year about to begin, research paper companies are gearing up for peak season. It appears academicians' attempts to eradicate these hotbeds of plagiarism have done little to stifle their growth. From kairosnews.org, Aug. 27, 2002. According to Wired, the term paper mill industry has continued to do well following the dot com industry slide. Interestingly, "in a user survey conducted by SchoolSucks, 48 percent of visitors to the site identified themselves as teachers. Presumably, most were using the site to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms, although Sahr says he also gets resumes from teachers interested in working as term paper writers." Notice three different styles, and filters, at work here! I didn't do a good job of identifying the source, and I think the most significant idea in the story is that term-paper sites are making money--along with casinos and porn sites. The other two allude to the same idea, but put it very differently. The elearningpost.com prose seems a little overblown: "scorn from educators, purveyors...eradicate" . the Kairosnews.org tells teachers that teachers make up almost half of the visitors. That filter doesn't mention that some of these teachers are looking for jobs! ;) Anything to be learned from this comparison?
Architecture weblogs I saw the classlist the other day, and that got me to wondering: what kinds of weblogs are available for different majors? Do weblogs make good reading for students who are just starting out in a field? Of the sites on my blogroll, kairosnews.org is the one I read most frequently, and typically get the best links from, because it is maintained by people who teach courses like this one, and by people who do the kind of research that I do (rhetoric and composition professionals). If you are in computer science or computer engineering, I bet there are hundreds of blogs that might be of interest to you--let me know what you turn up. I did a search for "architecture weblog" on Google and turned up two blogs that seemed promising. Archlog: An Architecture Weblog, seems to be a community site that links to stories about architecture in online newspapers and publications--very accessible. I especially liked the story about Rem Koolhaas wanting the move the Charles River in Boston to accommodate his latest addition to the Harvard campus. Koolhaas is often featured in Wired magazine, and in addition to being the world's greatest architect, seems to be the official architect of digital culture. The Elegant Hack maintains an individual weblog that has more to do with information architecture (IA) than with brick and steel architecture, which is okay with me, because when I grow up I want to be an Information Architect. It seems like the most logical progression after being an English professor (so passe), and I think my fortune once said I would have three careers. Or maybe I was just thinking that I would need to keep changing every once in a while. Sorry, back to the filtering. The E. Hack is definitely minimalist in his approach to filtering--probably would tell me to back away from the keyboard, too. The EatonPortal has a long list of architecture weblogs, but none seemed as interesting as these two. Most here seem to have simply identified their weblogs as being about everything, including architecture.
What am I doing here? I have asked my students to write, and post to their weblogs, a classic five paragraph theme that answers the question: what are you doing in college, at NDSU, and in this class (English 110, Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century). No reason why I can't tackle the assignment myself. I've never seriously considering doing anything except being a college professor, being at NDSU is the product of serendipty (or so it seems), and I'm in this class because I think figuring out how to help students acquire the literacy skills needed in the 21st century is the most important task English teachers face. I don't remember precisely when I started thinking about being a college professor, but I do remember being thirteen or fourteen when I started reading the essays of Stephen Jay Gould and Lewis Thomas, and got such a rush that I knew I had to be able to find a way to write arguments for my living. I also remember one of my first visits to the University of Manitoba's campus and thought--very cool, a city within the city. The space and architecture of universities has always held tremendous appeal for me. A. Bartlett, Giamatti, Yale Professor and Commission of Major League Baseball when he died, has written about the appeal of "sacred" places like baseball diamonds and universities--I couldn't agree more. I could go on and on about why college, but why NDSU is simple: the English department was hiring in 1997, and I was looking for a job. The real question is probably "why have I stayed?" because turn-over at NDSU is a common occurance. Again there is a simple answer: no one else has offered me a job. But there is a more complex answer. As someone from the region (born and raised in Manitoba), I immediately sensed that I was "home" when I interviewed and when I first started working here. I'm close to family and friends, I'm not afraid of winter, and Fargo is a comfortable, if not always exciting, place to live. I'm also still at NDSU because the department and college have given me an opportunity to design and teach a class like this one. I've been dabbling with the complications of teaching 21st century literacy skills since 1995, when I taught a computer-intensive course, started building web sites, and saw the excitement that students felt when they put together a web site for the first time. I'm excited about exploring the possiblities of weblogs as a tool for learning because they make few technological demands on writers, and I am excited to see what students produce when they stretch themselves. I'm in this class because I think it has the potential to help me rethink almost every class I teach. The final paragraph of a five paragraph theme is the most difficult, because the essay is so short, I don't really need to sum much up. But if I bring these three points together, I would say that I think University education has to distinguish itself from high school teaching. As a professor, I need to keep abreast of developments not only in scholarship, but in the tools of literacy. This course will hopefully generate new scholarship through the research component built in, and it will give me insight into what tools students think they need. A course like this is especially important to teach at NDSU, as it undergoes a transformation from a quality state university into a world-class teaching and research institution.
Types of weblog entries Rebecca Blood identifies "three very broad categories" of weblogs: "blogs, notebooks, and filters" (6). Most of what I am asking you to do for this class would fall under notebook and filter entries, but I certainly encourage you to do as many "blog" entries as you would like. I think that term isn't going to work--she means "journal entries," and I am going to be inclined to call any post "blogging," but let me summarize her categories for you. BLOGS: "these sites resemble short-form journals. The writer's subject is his daily life, with links subordinate to the text. Even when entries point the reader to a news or magazine article, linktext give the feeling of a quick spontaneous remark, perhaps of the type found in an instant messaage to a friend" (6). These types of entries are by far the most common, although this has only been the case since the tools for easy publication have been available. NOTEBOOKS: "Sometimes personal, sometimes focused on the outside world, notebooks are distinguised from blogs by their longer pieces of focused content. Personal entries are sometimes in the form of a story. Some notebooks are designed as a space for public contemplation: Entires may contain links to primary material, but the weblogger's ruminations are front and center" (6-7). I would call this thing I am giving you a notebook entry. It isn't especially contemplative, but I am sharing notes, and I am thinking about types of entires even as I am quoting Blood. Her book is too big for me to "filter," so I am just pulling out this small chunk, sharing it, thinking about it, asking you to think about it. FILTERS: "When I think of the classic weblog, I don't think of a short-form diary or a series of stories or short think pieces. I think of the old-style site organized squarely around he link, maintained by an inveterate Web surfer, personal information strictly optional. These weblogs have one thing in common: the primacy of the link" (7-8). This kind of blogging may seem less personal, more academic, and that migth be especially true when I tell you [I'm talking to my students here, even though I haven't met them yet] to filter specific articles, but I think Blood is right to say "they [filter entries] reveal the weblogger's personality from the the outside in" (8). I can hear Neale Talbot saying, "Put your keyboard down and walk away from the computer" because this notebook entry definitely exceeds the "brevity" convention in weblogging. Here is my contemplation: I suppose I need to get better at sorting out weblog entries and classroom handouts. What started out in my mind as a quick list of entry types gave way to more developed definitions. This monster probably doesn't belong here, but I will leave it as a lesson and reminder to myself--and others--of some the contraints, expectations, and effects of a genre.
Education versus training I just wrote a little piece for our department's first-year English workshop on the importance of teaching writing as part of a student's general education experience, and not as simply a matter of giving students training, or skills, in writing. Of course students want skills--heck I want better skills--but to teach writing as only a skill, instead of a means of intellectual growth, exploration, and/or conversation, is to sell writing short. Anyone who believes that writing is "just" a skill, like throwing a baseball, is selling skills short (throwing a baseball well requires some pretty extensive practice, and actually a good deal of theory-knowledge). I wasn't impressed with my google search "education versus training," but I did turn up a PDF file with a short commentary from a professor at The Ohio State University. Robert H. Essenhigh says: "if a student tells me, in the middle of taking a core-required thermodynamics or fluid dynamics course, "Don't give me all that theoretical stuff; just give me the equation and tell me how to use it," then I know that the student wants to be trained, not educated." Taken from a letter to the editor of National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Spring 2000, p. 46. I need to go back and get the URL.
The Limits of McLuhan's Influence How the Information Highway can Transform Education: Reflections on McLuhan's Vision by Dr. Kim H. Veltman challenges McLuhan's basic premise that the "medium is the message" by noting that the difference between print biases and visual biases is a long-standing cultural difference between Greek privileging of content and time on the one hand and hebraic privileging of form and space on the other hand. The pendulum may have swung in favor of an electronic culture, a television culture, Veltman says, but we shouldn't allow that swing to erode basic western cultural values. Her anxiety, however, seems to re-enforce, rather than challenge, the premise that "the medium is the message." Connecting the pendulum swing to a simple mechanism of the human condition begs the question: why has the pendulum swung at this time, if not because of technological change? She says, " It is vital that we recognize that these two approaches represent fundamental aspects of the human condition, that it is not a question of the one winning or the other losing, but rather a challenge of both complementing one another in the way that male and female, yin and yang do. " She senses that content is being lost, history and geography are being lost, and she seems to want them back, without acknowledging the ways in which those subjects need to adjust to changes in our cultural and educational environment. Two additional, random, funny things about this paper. She looks at trends in "sociology" then goes on to cite people in rhetoric and professional communication: Lester Faigely, Charie Thralls, Nancy Blyler, and Tom Kent. Her lack of understanding of her sources raises some doubts about her "ethos" as us rhetoricians would say. She uses a McLuhan list of binary opposties that contrasts "self-expression" (print era) with "group therapy" (electronic era). I've been thinking about blogs as self-expression, but may be they are better described as a kind of group therapy. Food for thought.
The Eaton Portal The Eaton Portal is generally recognized as an important early weblog about weblogs. I haven't seen any other site categorize blogs as effectively as the Eaton Poral. Within two or three minutes on the site, I found three new blogs that I would be interested in following: only kairosnews.org is going to make the blogroll. I have to be realistic--if email is a time hog, blogs could be a blackhole.
Read this blog, then the whole article I realize I don't have any students reading this blog yet, but I found a blog + article that students should check out if/when they back-track and catch up on my blogging. NUA, the world's leading resource for internet trends and statistics, filtered a survey about college students' technology ownership, use, and spending habits. The findings are very interesting‹93% of students use the Internet regularly, and 92% of them own a PC. What the filter doesn't provide is a sense of how this information fit into the original article, which is actually about the spending power of college students, not exclusively about their technology use. The discrepancy--if that is the right word--between the blog + article is not wildly misleading, but it is highly illustrative of the ways in which blogging acts as a filter. The NUA's 6 paragraphs only extracted the information of relevance to their audience, and didn't even bother to suggest the source had a much wider context. No harm, no foul here, but take away a lesson: follow the links and get to know your blogger's biases!
Students talking about the internet A study released by the Pew Research Center this summer draws on 36 focus groups (high school students) from around the country, reporting a wide range of Internet uses, a wide range of policies in schools, and an interesting set of recommendations from students themselves. Here's a summary of student responses that is most relevant to blog-use in the classroom: "While students relate examples of both engaging and poor instructional uses of the Internet assigned by their teachers, students say that the not-so-engaging uses are the more typical of their assignments. Students repeatedly told us that the quality of their Internet-based assignments was poor and uninspiring. They want to be assigned more‹and more engaging‹Internet activities that are relevant to their lives. Indeed, many students assert that this would significantly improve their attitude toward school and learning. " I first read about this article on elearningpost.com
Understanding the Web as Media, Curt Cloninger. Understanding the Web as Media, Curt Cloninger. A really quick, smart, outline of what the web does well, what it doesn't do well. Starts with McLuhan--Cloninger really understands the importance of "the medium is the message". A. MANY-TO-MANY NETWORKING B. MULTIMEDIA C. DATABASE D. AUTOMATION (programmability) E. LIVE and/or TIME-SHIFTED F. LOCATION-INDEPENDENT and/or DEVICE-INDEPENDENT Great links and case studies. Check it out.
Weblogging is . . . creepy? I was in a meeting with a bunch of other teachers, we got talking about weblogging, and somebody said "weblogging is creepy." Her daughter has started a blog, and the idea of putting one's "diary" online made her more than a little nervous. I think many people have that reaction, and quite honestly, you aren't going to see me baring my soul much. I can see how putting oneself online can be useful, therapeutic, or even just a kick (for the exhibitionists out there), but I see the potential of weblogging in the sharing of ideas and the building of community--either within a class, or a work setting, or a wider, dispersed group of people who have common interests. By all means journal/blog/do the diary thing--but my future in blogging will be the notecard/filter. This is actually a pretty revealing entry: all work and no play make me a slave to the academic system. Would you rather read how surprised I was today when my son (3.75 yrs) bounced a basketball into his crotch and said "Ouch, my nuts!" ?
Weblogs in education Tech Tools...Blogs, by Jay Cross, is the most developed account of blogging in educational settings that I have read, although when I start following his links, that might change. Cross gives a fairly broad picture, rather than specifics about what is going in schools. Former MTV-vj is attritubed with the key insight of the piece: "The simple intuitive nature of SchoolBlogs is precisely what's required to allow students to express themselves on their own terms. Children's involvement with Websites has to be more than a posting of a few pieces of their work on a third person's static Website for a non-existent world to see. There's no ownership in that. School Blogs can give children their own soapbox, their own voice. They become habitual writers. They are in control." Ownership, investment, going public--for real--are all central tenets for engaged learning. Hope we can convince the assessment office of blogging's value. Jay has also posted this article on his InternetTime site with an additional, useful, introduction: " For me, blogs are a learning tool. On the one hand, they let me read content from a single individual, unadulerated with corporate claptrap. On the other, the blogs I maintain stick memories in my head -- the teacher always learns more than the student." Let's see how ugly these two pasted quotations will look online.
We've got blog: essay collection Two weeks until classes start--I had better start getting the blogging bug. Many of the essays in We've Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture are inspiring. Powazek's essay is there, along with Rebecca Blood's "Weblogs: A History and Perspective." They both believe strongly in the democratic potential of weblogging. Rebecca Mead's "You've Got Blog" is in here--an essay that first appeared in the New Yorker and altered me and many others to this emerging online force. Neale Talbot is a blogger who is happy to celebrate the useless of weblogging, and to yell at bloggers with 3000+ word entries (I'd better wrap this up). Nice collection of essays that give advice, and short sections on blogging as the new journalism and community sites, but nothing explicitly about the use of blogs in education. The authors are journalists and web developers, not educators.
McLuhan, on Learning "Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum. We speak of the "serious" student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor--a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers." -- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage 10. I wish I could say I am funny guy, but I'm Canadian, like McLuhan, which means I tend to be dry and amusing, and not exactly funny. But my un-funniness is not meant to curtail the pleasure, play, or humor of learning. If you aren't playing around, experimenting, or exploring, chances are you aren't learning.
Powazek, a good place to start Derek Powazek designed the weblog template I am using, so I thought I should check out his site (see blog list on left). I get there, and find a great essay (among other things): "What the Hell is a Weblog? And Why Won't They Leave Me Alone." Powazek believes in the web--"This [is] the anti-television. Digital democracy"--but he was initially suspicious of weblogs. He didn't see anything revolution in link + commentary, and he was turned off by the hype that emerged in 1999. But to really understand weblogging, he says, he had to give it a try. He did, and feel in love with the web (got the virus--same thing!) again. He started getting mail, a community, and realized that weblogs are a great place to put our little stories. We can construct websites when we want to tell big stories. He does acknowledge a dark side to blogging and the web--critics who want to tell him how to design his blog, who want to pin down the web with rules. But Powazek remains hopeful that blogging and other creative acts on the web will keep challenging the rule makers--great links to other blogs and sites!
Design by Derek Powazek This template was designed by Derek Powazek, creator of {fray}. He writes: "In my time as Creative Director of Pyra (the makers of Blogger), I got to watch which blog templates were adopted and which ones didn't. It was fascinating, and often counter-intuitive. In general, the most widely-adopted templates were the once that started off simple, and let the blogger fill in the personality. Powazek calls this template "Simplicity", and suggests: "If you feel like serif, this one is for you. Academic without being dry, with whitespace galore." |
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