Writing: December 2003 Archive Page

I thought I was busy as a graduate student, and I was.... As long as I showed up at the right place -- the library, the classroom, the data-entry warehouse -- I got through. Being a faculty member lumps the hours and the tasks all together, and there is little immediate feedback on what's important to complete. Yes, you have to prepare for class, but how well? No, you don't have to write the article right away; there's no deadline on it. As for skipping the weekly meeting of a pointless committee well, who really knows it will matter? | Managing time as an assistant professor is something for which few new faculty members are fully prepared, but it's crucial to your long-term success. -- Lee Tobin McClain --Lessons in Time Management (Chronicle)

Note to self: print out this article and read it a week or two before every semester.

I tend to over-prepare for workshop classes, often coming in with stacks of handouts that I never pass out and overheads that I never use.

Teaching a literature course requires much less prep time on a week-to-week basis (reading a dozen short poems or a hundred pages in a novel) than teaching a writing course (where you have to mark student exercises, checking their revisions against what you wrote in the margins of their earlier drafts, taking note of recurring problems and constructing new handouts for next week or next year, etc.). As long as I've refreshed my memory on the assigned texts, I can "wing it" and lead a pretty good discussion of readings in a literature class. A few students did request more structure when discussing readings in my journalism and "Seminar in Thinking in Writing" class, so I'll have to keep that in mind as I plan my courses. (I haven't had the formal meeting to discuss official course evaluations with my division chair -- I'm referring now to what I learned from short end-of-term reflection papers.)

I've got a five-column spreadsheet, on which I'm listing all the assigned readings and due dates for the four courses I'm teaching and the production schedule of The Setonian. I should probably add a sixth column and add my research/professional goals.

And by the way, I started blogging this article before I noticed who wrote it! (Lee's office is two doors down from mine.)

--Blogging Changing Journalism (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A small number of my students noted in their end-of-term reflection that they weren't all that comfortable with blogging because they expected a course in traditional journalism, not all this cyberspace stuff...

He wrote his plays in longhand. He took his time. He followed the news; he was politically brave. He wrote of the self and also of the world. He wrote for the stage and also for publication. He was theatrical; he was dialectical. He cultivated a public image; a small crowd of remarkable people intersected with the largely antisocial playwright: Emma Goldman, John Reed, Robert Edmond Jones, Paul Robeson, George Jean Nathan, Sean O?Casey, Hart Crane and, unhappily for O?Neill, Charlie Chaplin, who married his daughter. He made friends with a few important critics. He married someone who believed in his work. Winning big prizes did not protect him from savage assault. He argued with God. He hid from the world. He exhorted himself to write better, dig deeper, and he did. --Tony Kushner --The Genius of O'Neill (Times Literary Supplement)

Here's another good quote: "I can make no claim for O’Neill as one of the great writers, only as one of the greatest playwrights; for these two things, writing and playwriting, are not the same, and O’Neill’s work makes that clearer than any other’s." (Kushner is the author of "Angels in America.")

He was reading from a university mission statement and other material on its website.

"To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues" - shrieks of laughter. The university's "approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework" - uproar in the room.

The university in question was RMIT but it could have been any of them. Go to your website and read the language, Watson urged guests at a recent Deans of Education dinner. That made people laugh even more.

--James Button reviews Don Watson's Death Sentence --Fighting the death sentence (The Age)

The article and the book being reviewed are very Austrailian. The other day, I couldn't find this book in the US Amazon.com database. Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

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.

While many of my students are getting the hang of this, just as many aren't. I'm sure it's that some are simply more motivated than others, some feel more comfortable writing for an audience, others are more passionate about their topics, and some are just more confident in their abilities in general. But what those of us using Web logs are trying to articulate now are the strategies that will help students make the most of their blogging efforts while at the same time envision the ways in which they might be included in the curriculum. --Will R. --More Thinking on Student Blogging (Weblogg-Ed)

Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory: I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that is potentially of literary use, my first thought is ?How best can I describe this?? I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation. As I tell my patients, much to their surprise -- for it is not a fashionable view -- it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself. --Theodore Dalrymple --Reasons to be cheerful (Spectator)

Dalrymple is an erudite, literate medical doctor who specializes in prison services. He is also a wonderful writer.

This bibliography was originally compiled by Scott Stebelman from 1996-2000. Scott, a librarian at Gelman Library at George Washington University from 1986 until 2000, retired recently. The page is currently being updated and enhanced by Dr. Seth Katz and Jim Bonnett at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. --Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography (Bradley University)

The pages I checked focus mainly on print resources published in the mid 90s, and the index page hasn't been updated since 2001, but it still looks very impressive. It led me to a site with much of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies online.

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.

In order to compose this piece, I had to depend on a circular way of thinking. Initially, my plot was linear, but that did not work well. Rather than use a traditional pyramid plot structure, I outlined plot points, and wrote something for each. Then, I added more pages under some plot points and linked it all together. I linked absolutely everything to anything at first, and then gradually deleted links and added new to get rid of infinite loops or excessive backtracking. --Julie Young, a student in my "Writing for the Internet" course. --Rationale for 'La Tour Eiffel' (A Work in Progess)

For her term project, Julie started writing a hypertext travellogue, but soon realized that a hypertext document defies traditional notions of time (and space). Since Julie came into the course as an experienced blogger, I encouraged her to challenge herself for her final project. There wasn't time for me to offer a unit on hypertext literature, so Julie was pretty much on her own.

She conducted usability testing on a rough draft, and adjusted her linking technique and added more material after she observed what her test subjects did or didn't like about her work. As is the case with most literary hypertext, the brevity of each individual node can convey the false notion that the text itself is insubstantial, when in truth the amount of planning and fine-tuning that a mutipath story requires means that even a brief creative hypertext generally takes far more brain power than a traditional short story of the same length.

I like how she used devices such as a journal to take us back in time, and a suitcase full of brochures to take us forward. Have a look at "La Tour Eiffel."

Écrite en 1920 et jouée pour la première fois à Prague l'année suivante, cette pièce de théâtre, intitulée Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.), introduit le terme robot, qui remplacera dorénavant celui d'automate. La pièce de Capek fut acclamée dans le monde entier. -- Dennis G. Jerz (via an anonymous translator) --Le règne des robots (L'Encyclopédie de L'Agora)

An editor from a Quebec online encyclopedia just asked me to approve a French translation of my web page on RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). The request would have been more gracious if it had come before the translation was posted, but I already knew some of it had been put into Wikipedia's RUR article, and I helped edit that page, so I'm OK with this.

One problem -- I don't know French... I guess I'll ask Seton Hill's French teacher to take a look at it for me (if she has time).

I've been tweaking the original page since I first posted it when I was a grad student, and a reader recently took me to task (politely) for recommending the Toward the Radical Center translation, so I suppose this page needs even more work yet.

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...

More Questionable Use of My Work

While surfing the web today, I was surprised to find, in an OpenWiki installation on a web page published by the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management (University of California, Santa Barbara), a document containing a subtantial amout of my own work. The OpenWiki document in question states that it has been reproduced with my permission, but that text refers to the (belated) permission I gave when I discovered the first copy that Bren School made.

• Current version of my FrontPage Handout
• Copied and altered once without first getting permission
• Once again, copied, altered and this time released in an open source format without my permission

When I initially found the first copy, I saw that references to me and my institution had been removed, and the site was republished under the Bren School banner. I did give belated permission, provided that my name and institutional affiliation be restored to the document, and that a prominent link direct readers to my current version.

I did not, however, give permission for yet another copy to be made, and neither was I asked my opinion about releasing the document in an open format (which would permit multiple authors to modify and change the text even further).

The latest copy on the Bren site still offers my name, but now neither version contains a link to the current version. Life is too short to get mad, and I am a supporter of both the wiki genre and the open source movement, but this is the second time somebody at the Bren School has misappropriated my work for its instructional purposes.

Update, 11 Dec: A few minutes after midnight, about six hours after I contacted the Bren School, I received an e-mail apology, stating that the material had been removed. I'm grateful for the speedy reaction.

Often, while sifting through the mountain of daily Gothamist correspondence, we come across emails asking for advice about starting a blog. Why anyone would consider Gothamist an authority on the sweet, intricate science of blogging is beyond us -- but we are loathe to sidestep our obligation to respond. Here then, based on our blog-exploration and the evolution that is Gothamist, the first in a series of Gothamist Notes On Blogging, entitled "What not to do when you blog." --What Not to Do When You Blog (Gothamist)

While this is a good overview of current blogging trends, I find it offputting to see any definition of blogging used in such prescriptive terms.

I'd particularly disagree with Gothamist's invective against writing about yourself. Good writing is good writing, regardless of the subject. Please don't stop blogging just because the subject of your blog doesn't interest The Gothamist. Maybe you won't get many outside links if you only blog about yourself and the people you already know, but if you start linking to pages you find elsewhere online, you may develop a network of personal blogs written by other people whose personal interests intersect with yours.

Some blogs wear pinstripes, others wear tie-dye and sandals, and others just wear comfy sweats. Whether a blog is professional, creative, or simply a place for your own thoughts, good writing is good reading for whoever finds it.

The increased adoption of blogging, citizen journalism, Flash presentations and the like portend a different season of political coverage than what we've seen in the past. These aren't new developments, but they've been used more frequently in the last year by the online-news industry, and will likely be incorporated into upcoming electoral coverage. --Steve Outing --Prepare Now for Better Online Election Coverage (Editor and Publisher)

I'll be teaching "Writing for the Internet" next fall, during the presidential election. Plenty of my students have professed their utter boredom with politics (outside of their particular hobbyhorse, if any). So I'm reluctant to tie a major online project to political current events; still, there will be a lot happening in cyberspace, particularly on the Thursday before election day, when scandals are strategically the most damaging to candidates. I'll have to think about this one.

Anyway, here's a great suggestion from the article: "Candidates were asked to give their stands on a variety of issues. In the print edition, candidate responses were sorted into grids, so readers could see who thinks what with a quick glance. But online, the approach was different: Web readers decided what their own stands are, then discovered who agreed with them the most at the end of the quiz."

"The technology is simple," said Microsoft Office Research Division Head, Richard Greenwood, "students have been doing it for years. Thanks to the power of Microsoft Word 2004, anybody can turn a five-hundred-word report into a ten-thousand-word masterpiece." --Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature (BB Spot)

Not the best spoof news site, but this article isn't bad.

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?

Dr. Michael Whitlatch, professor of speech and drama, has a review published in the November issue of Choice. His review of "Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950 Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine," by Dennis Jerz has just been sent to college and university libraries. --Whitlatch Publication (Buena Vista U)

Gulp! As I prepare to mark term papers and final projects, it's probably a good thing that I am suddenly reminded of what it feels like to be judged. I wasn't able to find any online information on the periodical "Choice" -- it's just too common a word to Google; based on the context and the title, I'm guessing it's a librarian trade magazine. I'll have to wait a bit to learn what his verdict is. (On a side note... I like the BVU concept of the BVU information page.)

Whitlatch is a prolific reviewer with decades of specialized experience in the subject matter and time period I studied in grad school. He has plenty of publications under his own belt, so I'm bracing myself for some serious criticism.

A few hours ago I got my hands on Nick's book on interactive fiction ("Twisty Little Passages"), and of course I flipped it open to the works cited list looking for my name, and there it was. I feel like a real academic now. Of course, the URLs are all broken, since they point to my UWEC website, but I'm going to set up a redirect now.

And, while I'm on the subject of academic books, I wrote a long comment in response to SHU student Brian McCollum's blogged rant against literary anthologies. (By the way, I'm not the teacher he's referring to.)

Update: Rosemary Frezza writes, "I found the review of your book - it is short but very positive!" That's a relief. I'll ask the author if I can post it.

The story you are about to read is true. It involves a fugitive heiress, guns, money, and layers of Internet intimacy and deception. It is a mystery that takes place at the edge of technology. And it is unlike anything you've ever read before. --John H. Richardson --The Search for Isabella V (Esquire)

A fascinating additional layer in the "Flight Risk" story (see the abbreviated back story or the abbrv bk stry) . The site itself has lain dormant since October, and none of the entries since mid-September have attracted any comments.

Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence. --Eric Wagoner

Update: According to poster "cedar" on Metafilter: "I called the Sorocco PD at (505)835-1883 requesting any information they might have. Officer Richard Lopez returned my call immediately and let me know that Mr. Barger was not considered missing or in danger." Glad to hear it.

Update, 5 Dec: In "Jorn Barger has Left the Building," Wired offers a wrap-up that includes reaction from Barger's sister, but otherwise depends heavily on links to Metafilter. --Where is Jorn Barger?EricWagoner.com)

I've been on the receiving end of some of Jorn's scorn (though I'm sure I was only a momentary blip on his radar). I'm also aware that because of the pro-Palestine angle of his linkage he has been accused of anti-Semitism. Still, I only reluctantly removed Robot Wisdom from my blogroll when he stopped updating it regularly. His contributions to cyberspace are significant (he coined the term "weblog," for instance). Certainly any private citizen has the right to disappear from public view if he or she so chooses, but this sounds very strange.

About a week ago, I thought about writing a rather sad blog entry about the sad state of some excellent blogs, such as John S. Rhodes's Webword (hasn't been updated in since September), and Elwyn Jenkins's Microdoc News (activity across all of Microdoc's blogs has dropped drastically) and, of course, Barger's Robot Wisdom. For some reason I never got around to writing that entry, but let me try a bit now.

Rhodes and Jenkins had hopes of using their blogs to elevate their profile and thus attract business.

Rhodes worked hard to create Webword as a community focused around usability issues, and though I seem to remember his site being ranked #2 in Google searches on usability, it may have been chilly in the long shadow of Jakob Nielsen. During the dot-com boom, when so much money was being spent on poor web designs, I really enjoyed the usability evangelization (and commiseration) that went on in the comments fields. Rhodes deputized some loyal community members to help run Webword. With my recent job change from technical writing to new media journalism, I'm not spending as much time on usability issues, which makes sense because the journalism majors that I educate will probably not be expected to design the websites for which they write. (I do still teach usability in "Writing for the Internet," but since I no longer require students to design web pages for real-world clients, usability is less central to my pedagogy nowadays. Had I stayed in technical writing, or moved to a different school as a technical writer, I would have felt Webword's absence more acutely.)

Jenkins created maybe a dozen or more weblogs with slightly different themes; his aggressive appearance on the blogosphere generated some flak:

"In short, Mr. Jenkins' vaporous content is well on its way to earning him a place on most of the A-list blogrolls. From there he'll be able to make a lot of money from blogging. And Google, no doubt, will make a lot of money by inserting ads on the bloggers' pages. The only people who suffer will be those who try to use Google to find meaningful content." -- from How Bloggers Game Google, from Google-Watch (a site that is as critical of Google as Elwyn is laudatory; one of Jenkins's several content clusters includes the study of Google)

The basic principle of starting a whole bunch of blogs in order to learn what kind of an audience you attract and then figuring out how to make a living serving that audience sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy; yet I always found it hard to glimpse the "real" Elwyn in his blog (even Elwyn's personal blog is sparse). Now, the spam comments collect on the otherwise inactive ProBlog, a group blog that he and others started as a reaction to Andrew Orlowski's periodic and vitriolic attacks on the blogosphere.

I wouldn't put my own online efforts in the same entrepreneurial categories as Rhodes or Jenkins... personally, I'm delighted that my position as a new media journalism faculty member gives me the excuse to continue blogging, while also permitting me to teach the occasional literature course, in an environment that seems willing to encourage my own creative new media efforts (chiefly in interactive fiction, but blogging is becoming more and more of a creative outlet for me).

As I contemplate grading weblog portfolios, I am once again buoyed by my own enthusiasm about weblogs as vehicles for personal expression, to help students trace their intellectual development, and to get them to experience the pleasures and responsibilities of publishing their ideas in a public forum, where real people can contact them and disagree or agree (as the case may be). Of course, there is always a certain percentage of students who simply can't get intellectually involved in the subject matter, and for whom any assignment is tedious and unrewarding. I don't see weblogs magically helping the disinterested and uninvolved students, but I do see the brightest students and the students in the solid center responding positively to their blogging experience.

She does say that people who put an apostrophe in the wrong place, when they ought to know better, deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave, but it's probably mostly in fun. --Oliver Pritchett reviews Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss --Pay attention: it's important!  (The Telegraph)

America's higher education system is facing a crisis. Decades of dramatically increasing costs, in both good economic times and bad, are threatening to push the dream of college out of reach for millions of students and families. --College Cost Central: A Resource for Parents, Students, & Taxpayers Fed Up With the High Cost of Higher Education  (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce)

Boy, these guv'ment folks like long titles.

The key to understanding this flashy website is in the long subtitle -- it is not a fair and balanced resource, it is only for those who want to cut government spending on colleges. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish illustrates the persuasive, rather than informative, purpose of this site:

Only three of the questions are real; that is, only three of the questions are framed with the objective of finding out something the researchers don't already know or think they know. The others are designed to elicit -- no coerce -- responses that can then be used to support the conclusions that McKeon and Boehner have reached in advance of doing any research at all.

Here, for example, is the first question: "Can colleges and universities be doing more to control their spending and avoid large tuition hikes that hurt parents and students?" Although this has the form of a question, its core content is four unsubstantiated assertions: colleges and universities do not control their spending; uncontrolled spending is the sole cause of tuition hikes; those hikes are large (in relation to what norms or practices is never specified); and they hurt parents and students.

The real question then is, "Do you think that colleges and universities should stop doing these horrible things?" and of course anyone who understands it that way (and what other way is there to understand it?) will answer "yes" and thus provide Boehner and McKeon with one more piece of "evidence" with which to convict higher education of multiple offenses.

I'm going to have to save this example for the next time I teach about critiquing academic resources.