Literacy: December 2003 Archive Page

I went into the office for about an hour and a half tonight. When I came back, my wife was writing busily at the kitchen table. "I've got a blog entry for you," she said. This is rather momentous -- she has very little interest in cyberculture. But here's what she wrote. (Let this be a warning to other couples who start a family when they are both English Ph.D. students.)

It is dangerous to sing children's songs at dinnertime.

Carolyn, at 20 months, satisfied with any song, happily repeats the last word of any line like a sweet echo. Peter, on the other hand...

First I try "Found a Peanut," but Peter asks too many theological questions ("Why did he kick the angel?") so I say nevermind, here's a better song, and sing "On Top of Spaghetti."

On top of Spaghetti
All covered with cheese
I lost my poor meatball
When I had to sneeze.
It rolled off the table
And onto the floor
And then my poor meatball
Rolled out of the door.
It rolled off the front porch
And under a bush
And then my poor meatball
Was nothing but mush.

Peter has been growing red in the face and teary-eyed. I stop singing. "Are you crying about that meatball?" I ask. He nods.

I try to explain that the song is supposed to amuse children, not to make them sad.

"I just can't stop thinking and thinking about that poor meatball," he says, tears rolling from his pinched, squinting eyes. "I've been thinking about it for an hour. Is an hour 60 minutes?"

"Yes."

"For who would want to eat it when it's mush under a bush?"

"Ants?" I suggest. "Or maybe a dog will find it."

"And another thing... they should close the front door. Then the meatball would just bounce on it and roll back to him."

"Good point."

"Or maybe he should remember to cover his mouth when he sneezes."

Peter seems to be regaining his composure, but a few minutes later, he bursts into full crying. I kiss his red face and try to think of other ways to soften his horror at the meatball's hard fate. [Mushy fate. -- DGJ] Maybe the boy was dawdling, and the meatball sat on his plate too long, and wouldn't taste good anymore anyway. He doesn't seem convinced. I encourage Peter to finish his pizza (he's been dawdling for over an hour), because pizza is Italian food, just like meatballs & spaghetti, and the meatball might be glad he ate Italian food.

Finally I tell him we'll write down how he feels and put it on the Internet, so that everyone knows it's not a good song to sing. This is all that will console Peter, and help him feel he's set things right.

"But you'll never be able to distract me from that meatball."

Indeed, a few minutes later, he again bursts into full crying, wailing, "Oh! If only that boy dived on the floor and saved the meatball!"

I put on The Wiggles to distract Peter, who still asks, "Are you writing yet?" while I try to clear the table. "You write down the words and put it on the Internet!"

As I write, he comments that it should have been a cancer cell, not a meatball.

"What would a cancer cell have been doing on top of spaghetti?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Probably putting germs on it."

A little while later, he supplies the title ("The Meatball: Not a Funny Rhyme") and composes the following song for parents to sing instead:

"Lucky Meatball"

There was a meatball all covered in cheese.
His father went to close the front door
And said if you sneeze, please sneeze at the floor.
The meatball was poked on a fork
The cheese fell onto the spaghetti
When the ball went up, it went into a mouth and got chewed by teeth.
The cheese was on the first noodle that the boy scooped up.
The meatball got digested into crumbs.
And the boy brushed his teeth.
He said his prayers and went to bed.

Peter is in bed now while I am typing this. "The song about the meatball... do you think it's funny?" he just called out.

"I don't know," I said. "What do you think?"

"I don't think it's funny," he said, his voice trembling. "I think it's sad. The meatball had nourishment for him."

Here you go, Internet... make things right for a little boy.

His full-time job is to keep software-loving scientists and engineers from burying their "whats" in their "hows." It's not easy, because PowerPoint's "hows" get more numerous and distracting with each new release. MORE, the original presentation software, was a 300k program that turned outlines into "bullet charts," its two-word noun for slides. The latest versions of PowerPoint want 10 megs of RAM and come with 25 megs worth of files. Nearly all of it is about "how" rather than "what." --Doc Searles --It's the Story, Stupid: Don't Let Presentation Software Keep You from Getting Your Story Across (Doc Searles)

From 1998, but very appropriate in light of all the PowerPoint links I've recently come across. Near the bottom I found this gem: "Edit aggressively. Less is more. Create a market for your next presentation by leaving the sequel out of this one." Of course, that assumes the speaker wants to present.

Hmm... much of the best advice on giving presentations doesn't address the needs of students, who aren't experts in the subjects they are asked to present on, and who are often not particularly interested in the course. I suppose from a marketing perspective that's not an audience that will pay for a book of presentation tips... but still, I'm interested in anything that will make canned presentations more bearable and educational for the other 29 students in the class (at least some of whom may, possibly, be interested...)

Found this one via Scott Adams (the Arkansas Tech University faculty member -- neither the cartoonist nor the programmer).

I love the 10 minute presentation. You have enough time to get your points across to the audience without boring them. There is enough time, but it concentrates your mind on cutting out the waffle and making it snappy. Remember nobody ever complained about a presentation being too short. --Jonty Pearce --Ten Minute Presentations (Presentation Helper)

Site suggested via an e-mail from Jonty Pearce. Some great tips on Jonty's site, though I notice with its references to testosterone and advice about bringing a spare tie, the advice isn't exactly gender-netural. The site is focused on business speeches and has some tips on social speeches (particularly those at weddings), but none of the resources seem focused on academic presentations, in which the presenter is being forced, as part of an educational experience, to present on a topic that may be brand new to the presenter, to a mixed audience of mostly peers (who need to be entertained and, one hopes, at least somewhat enlightened) and one expert (the instructor, who already knows the subject matter, and who must needs to be convinced you did your homework).

I showed my freshman comp class a video and then asked them to speak for four minutes about the video, as a dry run for a later six-minute presentation. A few students over-prepared and read from papers (zzzzzz), but most students were underprepared, tried to "wing it", and ended up finishing a minute or two early. They all did much better for their six-minute presentation, but even then, my main goal was to just to expose them to the amount of preparation a speech requires. Next term we'll spend a lot more time on the genre of oral presentations.

Hmm... I really ought to add a "Rhetoric" category to my blog.

The fact that Google now "sucks" is in a large part not Google's fault: Google simply reflects what it can see, and most of the Web is simply invisible to Google, as it now lies behind closed doors. Google's aggressive, but essentially dumb robots can only get so far. We're painfully aware that Google's lack of specificity leaves its robots chomping through thin air, dead pages, or trackbacks, more often than not. --Andrew Orlowski --A Quantum Theory of Internet Value (The Register)

Orlowski ruminates on the impact of Google Print, a new feature from Google (see BBC's coverage) that searches the contents of selected print books, along with the Internet.

It's a sure bet that the scholarly books that don't have huge print runs or huge advertising budgets won't be the ones paying Google to "feature" their results, which means that Google will be even less valuable than it already is to students seeking credible scholarly information.

I get to add another detail to my list of "why you shouldn't rely on Google" freshman comp speech (which I have to repeat in every class, at every level. Many students, rewarded by their high school teachers for their ability to summarize plot or express their own personal opinion of a text, seem to write up their whole paper first, and only then look for sources.

I ask students to submit notes telling me what they would have done more of if they had the chance, and the activity of scholarly research is often described as "finding quotes that support my argument," rather than constructing an argument based on the reading you have already done.

A student who has already polished the sentences and paragraphs, and has a few hours before being overtaken by sleep (or, in some cases, the actual deadlie) tends not to be very descriminatory when Google returns a list of hits that "look good".

Note: I'd already blogged this article when Jim e-mailed to me a suggestion. Keep 'em coming, Jim.

Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer ReviewLiteracy Weblog)

Vannevar Bush, writing in 1945, lamented that the volume of scientific knowledge being published each year forced researchers to spend unprecedented time and energy searching for relevant information (and choosing what to ignore). His solution, the Memex, was a photocopier crossed with a microfilm storage and access device. A Memex user would theoretically create links between documents, annotating those links, add those annotations to the filing system, and share the resulting "trails" with other researchers. In some sense, what Vannevar Bush was trying to accomplish with his annotated "trails" has been implemented through the weblog genre (specifically, the research blog or "edublog").

Traditional textual scholarship aims to construct a specific, ideal, "correct" text. But computer science -- the discipline that generates the technology that drives (or hampers) information literacy -- aims instead for abstraction. In the open source software development model, particularly as described by Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," individual programmers contribute their labor freely to a common project made available to the general public for free.

Given the financial pressures publishers of journals exert upon libraries, and the brewing rebellion against what some activists characterize as a cabal of print publishers, some emerging electronic forms have radically altered the dynamics of the scholar-publisher relationship, without necessarily reducing the filtering value provided by peer-review. Electronic journals such as First Monday offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship on a timeline of weeks. Even more radical is the Wiki, a form of electronic authorship that decentralizes authority and encourages all readers to annotate, expand, edit, or completely revise a common text.

In such genres, peer-review (in the form of inbound links, e-mailed or posted corrections/refutations, revision, or even deletion) is expected to happen after a text is published, thus making the process of peer review visible, instead of simply the product. Popularly-edited texts online typically summarize general knowledge, rather than offer a forum for the presentation of new knowledge or controversial opinion; further, emerging electronic genres also typically over-represent particular opinions espoused by technorati who manipulate the system (an effect which inspired the term "Googlewashing," and illustrated by the recent online prank that now causes a Google search for "miserable failure" to point first to George Bush's official biography on the White House web site). Developing strategies to compensate for these anomalous effects is a vital skill for 21st Century information literacy.

If there's a problem with PowerPoint, it's not that it makes you dumb, it's that Microsoft has never taken the time to show us how it can make you smart. --Mike Gunderloy --PowerPoint Doesn't Make You Dumb (ADT Mag)

Enough people responded ethusiastically to the NY Times article dissing PowerPoint that I thought it worthwhile to link to an opposing viewpoint.

What's that on the home page of ADT Magazine -- is that an ad for Microsoft? And what's that on the main menu bar -- a link to a whole section devoted to Microsoft's .NET?

While Gunderloy is critical of Microsoft, his claim that people simply haven't been trained to unlock the power of a piece of software is consistent with a marketing policy to sell training sessions (or books, or magazines) so that people will be better able to use Microsoft products.

Of course, the subject of the NYT article, Edward Tufte, is also selling his anti-PowerPoint brochure, so what's my point?

I'm not sure... I must've missed that slide.

Back to my grading.

On another note... I realized that I just used the word "dissing" without quotation marks or self-conscious irony, which probably means that what coolness it once had is now officially over.

Count your ideas. Be careful not to have too many. | And if a student dares to have four ideas, instead of three? . . . Toss one out. Only three ideas allowed. I've seen students fail assignments because they had the wrong numbers. | And they can't stop writing that way. Many have told me, even in tears, that they try to write differently, but they can't. | Brainwashing does that. Now, imagine the future." --Lynn Stratton --Taught to Remove all Thought (Floridian)

Is it really this bad? The hated "five paragraph essay" is a device we teach our students so that their biology and economics teachers will be able to find the answers they want the students to produce on essay tests; these professors typically don't want to see a student's rough drafts, and typically aren't intersted in helping the student discover knowledge and take ownership of its expression. (Of course, there are teachers who are exceptions.) Seton Hill University is going through a plan to identify certain courses as "writing intensive," and restrict the enrollment so that the instrutor will have more time to work with writing. (My colleague Mike Arnzen rather gutsily pointed out that, based on the administration's guidelines, all English courses should be designated "writing intensive," and we should therefore reduce the enrollment in all the courses we teach; but I doubt that his suggestion caused more than a passing chuckle from the administration.)

I don't think there is anything wrong in teaching students to write in a manner that their professors who are not writing experts will appreciate. But I spend a lot of time teaching students who have already mastered the five-paragraph essay to unlearn that form and adapt to the requirements of a news article, a memo, or a web site. Sometimes it's easier to teach students who don't have to unlearn their knowledge of the traditional English essay. I'll have to revisit this whole discussion in January.

Link found via a comment by "cgb" on Kairosnews.

Mike says that the five-paragraph format is a shortcut, and "short-cuts -- whether a five-paragraph theme or a preemptive military strike -- seldom offer lasting solutions." Amanda says that "[w]hat it generates is more a list than an essay." I agree with what Amanda says when she argues (implicitly) that it's not so much the number of paragraphs as it is that the format doesn't encourage connection-making, critical thinking, or innovative ways to write introductions and conclusions--ugh, especially conclusions... --Clancy Ratliff --On the Five-Paragraph Essay (KairosNews)

A good introduction to the flurry of bloggers responding to a recent NYT article.

Early, link-heavy blogs were, for the most part, a method of sharing links. They usually contained entries that consisted of one or two hyperlinks, the blogger's commentary on the link's content, and a place for other bloggers to make comments about the entry. These early blogs often focused on what Blood calls "the dissemination and interpretation of the news." By linking to news articles from "lesser-known sources" that might be otherwise overlooked by the "typical web user," weblog authors supply "additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary" that is often unavailable from large news sources (10/01/03). See Appendix A.

As blogging became more popular, many weblogs shifted from the original, link-heavy forms that dominated early blogs, to a free-form on-line journal where authors have begun to write more freely and frequently. Many blog entries now contain no links at all, as the new generation of bloggers share "notes about the weekend, [or] a quick reflection on some subject or another" (Blood 10/01/03). Many bloggers write bi-daily in these journals, which serve as more of an ?Update-in-the-life-of?,? than a source for news. See Appendix B.

Although weblog journals have gained immense popularity over the past four years, the original link-heavy style is still respected by many current weblogs. --Kirsten Schubert, a former student of mine, in her senior capstone paper at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. --Blurring the Borders of Rhetoric and Hypertextuality in Weblogs (The Hypertext Project)

Kirsten's blog truncated my (long) comment, so I'll post my reaction to her paper below.

To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education. --Open Access Journals in the Field of Education (AERA-SIG)

Here's to open-access online journals. I hope Google notices this link and adds my PageRank value to the value of this page. (Via the original Pedablogue.)

Works Cited

"Susan" (smgct1@comcast.net). "Oddly enough..." [Weblog comment.] N.d. "More Questionable Use of My Work." Dennis G. Jerz. Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 10 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=1998)

Poster's Lastname, Firstname, I. (or screen ID) "Title of comment, or first few words." [Weblog comment.] Date comment was posted. Title of blog entry. Author of blog entry. Name of Weblog. Sponsoring organization -- if any. Date blog entry was posted. (URL that displays the comments in context, if possible.) Date you accessed the comment.

Note: See also "Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA Style".Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA StyleJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I couldn't immediately find Susan's full name when I looked at her website, so for the above example I treated "Susan" like a nickname; the quotation marks indicate that I haven't simply forgotten to type her last name.

I think the bracketed label "[Weblog comment]" is probably necessary for clarification.

The URL for the citation should display the comments in context, rather than a link that opens a pop-up window with the comments inside (and no easy way to see the entry that prompted the comments).

As with any MLA citation, if the information is lacking, keep a placeholder there. Thus, since my system doesn't at the moment display the date when a comment was posted, I added "N.d." (for "no date") in the slot where the date should be.

Works Cited

Jerz, Dennis G. "Citing a Weblog in MLA Style." [Weblog entry.] Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 11 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=2000). 11 Dec 2003.

Lastname, Firstname, I. "Title of individual blog entry." [Weblog entry.] Name of Weblog. Sponsoring organization -- if any. Date posted. (URL to permalink.) Date accessed.

Note: See also "Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA Style".Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA StyleJerz's Literacy Weblog)

The MLA handbook doesn't, in my opinion, do a very good job differentiating between a static personal home page and other kinds of self-published websites (such as an annotated bibliography or an anthology of short autobiographical essays). Citing a weblog isn't much different from citing any web page, but students may appreciate a clear example.

I would prefer to put angle brackets around the URL, but my blogging software chokes when I try that. And I was working on a hanging indent, but couldn't get my stylesheet to display it properly. Some other day. I think I've got it now.

I thought it was necessary to put the "[Curricular weblog.]" statement there because, while my blog has the word "Weblog" in it, not all do. Possible values to fill this slot could include "Group weblog," "Professional weblog," "Personal weblog," etc. [I've actually changed that around a bit now...] Should it simply be "Weblog," and should it be there only if the blog doesn't include "blog" or "weblog" in the title? I can see particular value in "Group weblog," so that citing a post that I make to Kairosnews or New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University does not make me look like I own the blog (since many people can and do post on these sites.)

Comments or suggestions?

In response to a request by Susan. Which makes me realize I ought to do a separate blog entry for citing comments...

I'm marking blogging portfolios for my Writing for the Internet course. Here are a few gems:

• "I don't get any leftovers at school, and I miss that twice-heated home cooked goodness." -- Amy Slade
• "I'm willing to wager that writing for an online medium is letting me take the easy way out." -- Julie Young
• "The clothes are donated to the YWCA. The owners help dress you from head to toe and even does make-up and hair if needed." -- Tiffany Graham
• "I hate this feeling of stress and nothing getting done." -- Lindsay Dzurko
• "It seems that when something goes wrong here at SHU the baseball team is the first to blame." -- Brandon Whitfield
• "It is all so funny that people are still relying on these 'journalists' to report sex news, when, in actuality they are creating it." -- Amanda Cochran
• "Many cases in the news recently have exhibited the lack of consequences faced by those who commit murder." -- Jess Prokop

Student Blogging Gems (EL 230: Writing for the Internet)

Note to self... next time, have student bloggers blog at least part of their reflection paper on blogging. I'm reading some really excellent observations that I'd like to link to, but I can't because the students have submitted them the old-fashioned way, on paper.

Of course, some students are being honestly self-critical in a way that might be squelched if they were forced to blog their reflections online.

One recurring thread in their reflections is time -- they either don't have enough time to blog as they feel they should, or they are conscious that blogging is a great way to fritter away time while managing to convince one's self that one is being productive. One student reported that blogging feels like an extracurricular activity, like it is nothing at all in the same realm as reading a chapter of math. I say hurrah to that statement, though unfortuantely I can't link to it because the student didn't blog it.

Two more blog portfolios to go from this class.... but it's time for me to head home.

I hear of and see teachers who write comments on student drafts, sniffily, ?You have reached the maximum number of errors. Rewrite? or ?You don't have a conclusion here. You need to add one.? The message here is clear as a bell: Your ideas don't matter. To Hell with your ideas. Your obedience matters, or it should if you want recognition that you?re educable, that you?re part of society, that you?re productive and upstanding and Good. | It'sno wonder, then, that students talk about their education being a cycle of irrelevant and boring courses, and no wonder that the only thing that keeps them in school is the very instrumental goal of getting a degree. Instrumentality in education is neither new nor a problem as such?goals are good. That the notion of interrogating the world around them, the realities they face on a daily basis, or the ways in which they might become the authors of their goals and lives is so foreign is what leaves me despairing. --A Writing Assignment (Mister B.S.)

Fortunately, I'm not quite this disillusioned yet. Or maybe I have been in the past, but learned to adjust my teaching style so that I can focus on progress rather than the gap between the work that students do and the work that they could do (and that at least some of them do do.)

Yes, incoming students have a lot to learn about their own education, but, isn't that the point, and isn't that why I have a job?

"I worked hard in high school, but they could have worked me harder," said Belisle, now a sophomore. "Not only was I adjusting to new people, a new place to live and a new city, but I was adjusting to a new way of learning." | From the U.S. Department of Education to the company that designs the Advanced Placement (AP) program, experts have described a growing problem: High-school and college expectations rarely connect. Most high-school graduates are not prepared to enter college, studies show. And when they do enroll, many are not prepared to succeed. --Cara Solomon --College-prep expectations don't mesh with realities  (Seattle Times)

I have great sympathy for students who have been told all along that they are bright, but who have never been asked to work hard until they get to college. In fact, I think it's a tragedy that students like Miss Belisle (quoted above) weren't challenged to reach their full potential.

I remember that some idealistic part of me died when, a few years ago at my previous job, I was teaching a freshman composition course and made a reference to "when you used to do homework for high school," and the class burst out laughing. When I asked them why, they said they never did homework beyond cramming the night before an exam (or more likely the lunch period before an exam). They watched movies during English class instead of discussing books that they read outside of class, and their English papers were summaries of the plot that they remembered from the movie (or that they got from Spark Notes). The very idea that an instructor would read their essays and check them for logical consistency and critial content, rather than simply for grammatical correctness, floored them.

Last year, National Geographic published an article about dorm life, and one college student reported spending eight hours a day entertaining himself with games, TV, or the Interent, three hours a day in class, and an hour or two a day on homework. I don't care how "bright" this kid is, or how much time and effort he puts into charming his teachers -- he's not going to succeed in college for long.

I don't mean to presume that every student who isn't doing well is wasting their college tuition in this manner. Seton Hill University has numerous resources, ranging from tutors to in-class note-takers to financial aid to counseling of all sorts, to help students who are struggling. Yet I am stunned to see that some students react instead by simply not showing up in class.

There are instances when, in the interests of the majority, some censorship may be used for a period of time. Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples. | But we cannot strive for an information society without allowing the free flow of information which is a pre-requisite. We just have to become better managers, navigators and users of information – let’s just say we need information maturity. | The Information Age has opened many doors for our eager minds to explore. Now the question is not so much ‘What information do I want?’ as ‘What information do I not want?’. --Arthur C. Clarke --Humanity will survive information deluge  (OneWorld South Asia)

...Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph "persuasive essays" for the state exam, she was stumped by her first [college] writing assignment.... "I had good grades in high school, so I thought I could do well in college," Ms. Arevelo said. "I thought I was getting a good education. I was shocked." --Diana Jean Schmeo and Ford Fessenden --Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They? (NY Times (will expire))

The article critiques the Texas school system's techniques for measuring student success. Teachers who tailored their lessons to helping students ace a standardized test did their students a disservice, because all the effort placed on mastering a single test did not give the student critical thinking skills, information filtering skills, etc.