Academia: January 2004 Archive Page

I have been enrolled in courses in which my professors used a powerpoint presentation every single day. When required to do a presentation in front of my peers, I also made use of Microsoft Powerpoint in order to present my information. I felt that using such a visual aid was a valuable tool to add multimedia zing to the classroom. Last week, I gave a Chaucer presentation to my Media Aesthetics class. Originally, I wanted to do a powerpoint presentation. However, after I was advised against it by Dr. Jerz, I read "Powerpoint is Evil." When I first read this article, I completely disagreed. However, once I thought about it more, it began to make sense. I'm not saying that powerpoint can never be useful, but it is more appropriate for "corporate sales pitches" (in the words of Dr. Jerz) instead of Chaucer presentations. --Jamee Rice --Learn how to 'learn something new everyday' (Jamee Rice)

Jamee's presentation very cleverly used the Pittsburgh regionalism 'yinz' (for "you") as a way of introducing Chaucer's language. See: Chaucer could have actually related to "Yinzers!"

[I]t is the most common thing in the world for a new English teacher to demand that her students throw out everything they've worked so hard to learn and then start completely from scratch. New semester, new teacher, new rules.

I say we have no right.

I tell my students that, too--we have no right!

How, you might wonder, do I square this conviction with the fact that I explicitly tell my students that they must not write the way a lot of other teachers have taught them to write?

Well, I throw myself on their intellectual mercy, as it were. I appeal to their intelligence as readers. "What sort of writing do you like to read?" I ask them. "What sort of writing do you actually find out there in the real world? Does it look anything like what you were taught to write in your English classes?" -- Tina Blue --AP English Blather (Teacher Blue)

Via Mike Arnzen, whose comments are also well worth reading: "In many cases, AP English writers are also allowed to skip college writing classes...and end up being the very same English teachers that reproduce this problem! Additionally, many composition teachers were skilled enough to 'test out' of composition when they were undergrads, so most of the composition teachers I know NEVER TOOK composition..."

I'm Exhausted... Thank You, Students!Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Thursday is a marathon day for me... class at 11, 2, and a 2 1/2 hour marathon at 6pm. My first class is "Seminar in Thinking in Writing," during which I asked the students to work in groups to come up with sample thesis statements. Ordinarily pretty dry stuff, but the subject matter was the myth of the American family, and I and my RTA Michelle Fairbaugh tried to get them to look beyond a surface-level critique of family ideals of the 50s. I pushed a little harder than I have in the past, in my effort to get students to research (and understand) opposing views rather than simply think of a research paper as an exercise in finding support for what you already believe. Of course, because I pushed, that meant some students pushed back -- and I thought the result was very productive.

Even before Intro to Literary Studies met, I saw a flood of postings on NMJ responding to the "Flash Fiction" exercises that I asked them to do. We didn't have any time to talk about flash fiction in class, because the discussion on Bernice Bobs Her Hair simply wouldn't end. I'll let Tiffany Brattina describe it for you. Since some students prefer a more contemplative environment, I'll have to find a way to vary the class structure and make the quiet ones feel like their contributions are valid... but I personally prefer a lively classroom with multiple conversations going on at once. I'd like to keep that energy!

While my evening lit class wasn't all that lively when it came to discussing e.e. cummings (we had one of those horrid three-minute-pauses-that-seem-to-last-for-an-hour when nobody in the class wanted to speak), they may have been tuckered out by the good discussions we had on "A Jury of Her Peers" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (see Melissa Whiteman's blog about poetry reading as a game. This is the first time I've tried a blank slate/new critical approach to teaching poetry, but it seems appropriate for a survey course that is mostly being taken as an area requirement... I'm interested in seeing how it turns out.)

Yesterday we had some excellent presentations on Chaucer in my Advanced Studies in English: Media Aesthetics course. I had actually been dreading the Chaucer days because I thought the discussion would be like pulling teeth, but these advanced English majors are an impressive bunch.

So... I'm exhausted! I'll probably update this with links to more student blogs, but for now, I'm all tuckered out to smithereens.

And so to bed...

Update, 30 Jan:

Some students who posted their responses to reading and/or writing "fifty word fiction" (found via a search for "fiction"): Diana Geleskie, Amy Blake, Gina Burgese, Amanda Cochran, Johanna Dreyfss, Lori Rupert, Stephan Puff, Karissa Kilgore, Tammy Moon, Jason Pugh, Tiffany Brattina, Paul Crossman.

(I should note that I encouraged them -- but didn't require them -- to post their fiction online; I assume that it was the interview with Mike Arnzen that really got many of them inspired to try it.)

Canterbury Tales: A Quick Link RoundupLiteracy Weblog)

Online Google searches for Chaucer typically point to watered-down "study guides." There is a real need for good online material on Chaucer, and there are good sites online that attempt to more than serve the lowest common denominator.

A student backed out of an oral presentation topic late yesterday, so I'm trying to fill in the gap a little.

• When tackling a new topic, I often start my search in Wikipedia, but the page is loading very slowly...
• I found a good bibliography on the structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and a
• course website on "Chaucer's Narrative Art," but since I wasn't planning a trip to the library, I'll just blog the links for future reference.
• Luminarium has some quality links to Chaucer work (including audio clips)
• Brother Anthony of Taizen's Introduction to The Canterbury Tales
  • (Brother Anthony writes:)At Chaucer's death, the various sections of the Canterbury Tales that he was preparing had not been brought together in a linked whole. His friends seem to have tried as best they could to prepare a coherent edition of what was there, adding some more linkages when they thought it necessary. The resulting manuscripts therefore offer slight differences in the order of tales, and in some of the framework links. The tales are usually found in linked groups known as 'Fragments'. The customary grouping and ordering of the tales is as follows (the commonly accepted abbreviation for each Tale is noted in parentheses):

    Fragment I (A)
       General Prologue (GP), Knight (KnT), Miller (MilT), Reeve (RvT), Cook (CkT).
    Fragment II (B1)
       Man of Law (MLT)
    Fragment III (D)
       Wife of Bath (WBT), Friar (FrT), Summoner (SumT).
    Fragment IV (E)
       Clerk (ClT), Merchant (MerT).
    Fragment V (F)
       Squire (SqT), Franklin (FranT).
    Fragment VI (C)
       Physician (PhyT), Pardoner (PardT).
    Fragment VII (B2)
       Shipman (ShipT), Prioress (PrT), Chaucer: Sir Thopas (Thop), Melibee (Mel), Monk (MkT), Nun's Priest (NPT).
    Fragment VIII (G)
       Second Nun SNT), Canon's Yeoman (CYT).
    Fragment IX (H)
       Manciple (MancT).
    Fragment X (I)
       Parson (ParsT).

    There is great variety in different manuscripts but I and II, VI and VII, IX and X are almost always found in that order while the tales in IV and V are often spread around separately.

  • Brother Anthony critiques the value of taking too literally the "contest" framework of the narrative. "Is this Tale the best Tale? The Host's proposal of a contest invites the reader to judge all the Tales but at the same time requires the reader to reflect on the criteria by which the Tales are to be judged. What is the purpose of tale-telling, indeed of all discourse? Sentence or solas? Wisdom or pleasure? The value of a tale becomes more and more related to the value of life, and the Parson is not simply a kill-joy when he declares: 'Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me' (you get no fable told by me) and instead offers a treatise on sin and salvation. Chaucer leads the reader to the point where the ability of any fictional tale to tell the truth is challenged, though not necessarily as radically denied as the Parson would wish. The Parson himself is a fictional character, after all, a part of a Tale."
  • "Modern editions are usually based on one of two manuscripts, both written by the same scribe: the Hengwrt Manuscript and the Ellesmere Manuscript. The former, in the National Library of Wales, is the oldest of all, probably copied directly from Chaucer's own disordered papers, but it lacks the Canon's Yeoman's Tale and the final pages have been lost. The latter, now preserved in California, is more complete, and beautifully produced with illustrations of the different pilgrims beside their Tales, but it shows the work of an editor who has removed some of the roughness from Chaucer's lines. "
• Brother Anthony of Taizen's Introduction to the General Prologue
  • "More recent criticism has reacted against this approach, claiming that the portraits are indicative of social types, part of a tradition of social satire, "estates satire", and insisting that they should not be read as individualized character portraits like those in a novel. Yet it is sure that Chaucer's capacity of human sympathy, like Shakespeare's, enabled him to go beyond the conventions of his time and create images of individualized human subjects that have been found not merely credible but endearing in every period from his own until now."
  • The title "General Prologue" is a modern invention, although a few manuscripts call it prologus. There are very few major textual differences between the various manuscripts."
  • While I distinctly remember being taught that the pilgrims were introduced in order of their social prominence (see Klein's notes, III B), Brother Anthony notes what had always troubled me -- this order breaks down very rapidly. It won't help us understand medieval society to take this list of pilgrims as an index to social ranking.

In this assignment you will be required to read/play and answer questions about a book from the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series of ?gamebooks.? The series was published 1979-1998. Many people assume that electronic literature (interactive fiction, hypertext, what-have-you) is simply a souped up version of CYOA. The purpose of this assignment is to take a closer look at that assumption based on what you know about the history and theory of cybertext. --Matt Kirschenbaum

--Choose Your Own Adventure Assignment (MGK)

Wow. Not only do I love the assignment, I'm in awe of the web environment in which it is presented.

I recently posted a rant against bloated commercial courseware that locks curricular content in a proprietary database; and about seven hours ago I recently posted a comment prompted by a thread I found via Liz Lawley's website, but I didn't know that Lawley is a MoveableType courseware genius.

Torill Mortensen has a post today referencing the ongoing debate about gender balance in the blogosphere. Are there more men, or more women? Are the men or the women more visible? --Liz Lawley --Academic Women and the Blogosphere (Misbehaving)

I found this discussion interesting, especially in light of Andrew Orlowski's sneering dismissal of bloggers as mostly teenage girls.

At our small school, which until recently was all female, social networks are tight. There are about 80 student blogs on our MoveableType installation, of which I'd say about 50 represent students who are currently in my classes (and therefore are forced to blog). One student recently estimated that another 50 students regularly read the blogs of their friends. If this is true, most of them are lurking.

The online social networks typically mirror the offline social networks -- at least, so far as I can tell from my position as a faculty member. The students who regularly comment on each other's blogs tend to sit together in the classroom, although I don't think that group identity correlates with posting frequency. Nevertheless, a critical mass of female students who have been forced to blog for my classes has decided to turn their academic tool into a social one. Some see their roles as welcoming newcomers, answering questions about personalizing the plain-vanilla designs I set them up with, and helping newbies properly interpret comments that come across as snarky or offensive to the uninitiated. And, as we have seen elsewhere in the blogosphere, we have had our share of personal spats that spill over into the blogosphere (though of the two major incidents I can think of, both ended peacefully, with new or renewed friendships).

As a group, the male students who blog for my classes don't participate in this social network. One male student is a bit of a troll, but in the classroom he is personable and cheerful, and those who know him don't find his online persona troubling.

Another three male students who aren't in any of my classes have also requested blogs, and two of these are among the most prolific bloggers on the site. Besides myself, two other male faculty members are blogging as well. Because they are outside the dominant social network, these male bloggers are more likely to post a stand-alone essay on something that the female-dominated social network isn't already discussing. While I have been writing more commentary in my blog in the last year or so, it still leans more towards "professional link log" than "public journal." And because I'm not in a position to give a grade to any of these "outsider" male bloggers, the only way I can encourage/reward/praise their best blog entries is by linking to them. If it is true that men are more likely to blog for professional reasons, and if professional blogs are more likely to have more outbound links, perhaps I am part of a mechanism that inflates the visibility of male professional bloggers.

I don't have any numbers to support my theories, and at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon I'm not about to start looking for any. Time to pack up and head home.

Open Source in EducationVarious, via KairosNews)

KairosNews has a few good links to articles about the open source movement. "Open Source and Education: A Sea Change?" is a roundup of links to recent "rumblings" on open-source content. Most exciting is the Chronicle of Higher Ed's report on a multi-million-dollar effort to create an open-source course-management tool.

Charlie's post links to a page that is in the Chronicle's "temp" directory, so I won't repeat it here... you can find it on the KairosNews entry. Charlie notes with amusement the reaction of the chairman of Blackboard (a commercial provider of course-management tools), who uses the standard FUD defense in order to scare potential users away from open-source (and thus protect his revenue stream).

I don't like using commercial course-management tools because I don't like the idea of putting so much work into a database that is only accessible as long as we have subscribed to the service. I understand that Seton Hill has recently churned through two or three of these course management tools, requiring faculty to re-learn a new system each time. We're currently using J-web, but I only use it to post a link to my online syllabus, to post final grades, and to take attendance. But even then I find it limiting... there's no way to differentiate between an excused absence and an unexcused absence. If I cancel class for a day, or want to take attendance at an extra-curricular event, there's no way for me to add or remove columns. If a student comes in late or leaves early, there is no way for me to record a partial absence.

Now, if there were a way that I could use XML to label the various components of my online syllabus, and then run a utility that would slurp up all that data into the standard course management interface that the students are familiar with from their other classes, that would be useful.

"Let me see if I can state what is bothering you. I could tell you before the test what to study, what material you should memorize to do well, but I'm not doing that." She smiles a little and says, "Yes." I continue, "I could do that, I could tell you, exactly, all that you need to know. I could tell you what to memorize. But I don't. And you can't understand why I don't." She smiles more broadly. "Yes. Yes! That's it. Why don't you tell us?"

This illustrates what I believe is an underappreciated and growing problem in higher education: a large number of undergraduates, as well as even some graduate students, believe that the instructor's main function is to tell the students what to memorize. And if the students duly so memorize, they believe they deserve A's. --Craig M. Newmark --No Surprises? (The Irascible Professor)

Thanks Josh (who suggests this in a comment attached to "A Student's Plea: Give Me Something Known").

I just had an hour-long conversation with a high school senior who has been accepted to Seton Hill University in the fall, but is still considering his options. He's being recruited for a sports team, and is also interested in broadcast journalism. SHU doesn't have a broadcast program; there is no TV or radio station, so at first I thought the interview would be pretty short. But this student also seemed attracted to the entrepreneurial focus of our school. The fact that men's athletics are expanding so rapidly here (SHU was only recently converted to an officially coeducational institution) means greater access to leadership positions.

I told him that a big school with an established journalism program would be able to prepare him more efficiently to step into the profession, but a specialized broadcast journalism professor teaches a class of thirty freshmen exactly how to do broadcast journalism would be something of an assembly line education. Of course the large school will have access to more resources, but being a big fish in a small pond has its own benefits.

I hope I was able to tap into this bright young man's entrepreneurial instincts and a love for learning. I told him that multimedia projects involving streaming online video would fit very nicely into the new media journalism program (but that he might think in terms of a series of related documentaries rather than a weekly TV show), and he floated the idea of setting up a live webcast of home sports games. Sounds technologically feasible, but I told him he wouldn't just be able to walk into a studio and flip a switch -- we'd have to talk with the tech guys and create a plan from scratch. Somebody who is willing to do that -- to think beyond the parameters of a pre-packaged lesson plan -- is a student who is ready to learn.

I wanted to tell you that I am scared to death of your class... Give me something known. I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. I don't take hints. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me. I am not good at reading between the lines. I was never taught in school how to do that. I need help in that area. I don't always remember everything I read. When I study for a test... I have to recite things in my head 50 times before I remember it. What I am trying to say is I am going to give this class my 100%. I will do my very best. It just might not be THE BEST compared to everyone else. I will need a lot of help. -- A student in my American literature surveyA Student's Plea: 'Give Me Something Known'E-Mail)

I was touched by the honesty, passion, and determination in in this student's plea (excerpted here with permission). During the first class meeting, I tried to emphasize how a college-level literature course differs from a high school English class; I am not looking for papers that accurately summarize major plot events, or essays that spit back at me my own lecture notes.

In a literature course, I am of course trying to teach content; I'd like students to know who F. Scott Fitzgerald is, to recognize why A Streetcar Named Desire struck the right cords at the right time, to apply the social and spiritual messages in The Secret Life of Bees to their own lives, and to understand some of the major cultural and historical forces that have shaped American culture in the last century (feminism, Freudianism, Marxism, etc.).

In order to have the kind of deep, thoughtful conversations that build communities and lead us to personal revelations, we will of course have to read the darn texts about which we are supposed to be talking. And my student asks a legitimate question... how are we supposed to read literature? Lurking behind that question is a deeper one... why do these authors make their messages so darn hard to decipher? Why don't they just condense their message down to a few sentences, so that we can read it quickly, think about it, and then move on with our lives?

"Give me something known," my student writes.

In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot responds to a very similar statement.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

The question is, who knows it? And when and where was it known? For a long time, it was "known" that the Earth is flat, that women have inferior intellects, that the Bible sanctifies slavery, etc. Pythagoras and his followers were greatly troubled by their discovery that the square root of 2 is irrational, because it upset what they "knew" about the cultural function of numbers (to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world).

"I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me."

But what if someone doesn't want you to know something? What if someone is generating lies, using half-truths to influence your mind?

I have written about Michael Moore in the past; he's a brilliant filmmaker and political activist. All documentary films persuade a particular point of view, and Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" is a masterpiece. Everyone "knows" that "Bowling for Columbine" refers to the bowling class that the killers attended shortly before their spree. But did they attend bowling class? When challenged, Moore claimed that the reference to bowling in the title was a silly distraction. Perhaps more telling is this... have you heard that George Bush held up a plastic turkey for the TV cameras during his secret trip to Iraq? The Washington Post reported that it was indeed a real turkey, roasted and decorated just the way Grandma would have done it.

A contractor had roasted and primped the turkey to adorn the buffet line, while the 600 soldiers were served from cafeteria-style steam trays, the officials said. They said the bird was not placed there in anticipation of Bush's stealthy visit, and military sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines.

No reporter ever called the turkey plastic -- it was a real cooked bird, but its purpose was decorative. Look at how Michael Moore introduced the subject.

it turns out that big, beautiful turkey of yours was never eaten by the troops! It wasn't eaten by anyone! That's because it wasn't real! It was a STUNT turkey, brought in to look like a real edible turkey for all those great camera angles.

Nowhere does he call the turkey "plastic," but later he writes that " fake stuffing in the fake bird was just the right symbol for our country" under Bush. While it's defensible to call the turkey a stunt turkey, it was still a real turkey -- not a fake one, just as a stuntman is still a real man. I don't have any information on whether that stunt turkey was eaten or not, and my guess is that neither does Moore.

Moore could simply have written "Bush sucks," but anyone can do that; his method of creating a scene, convincing his readers to become enraged at the scene, and then prompting them to come to a particular conclusion is far more effective than the simple expression my student longs for.

I won't spend any more words writing sweeping romantic generalizations about what literature is, or why the books we study are supposedly great (actually, I choose some that are mediocre; there's even a complete flop on the syllabus). Neither I nor my students has the resources to determine whether George Bush's statement X is a lie, or whether Michael Moore's video clip X is a misrepresentation. We don't have access to the White House or to Moore's cutting room floor.

But we can agree to focus on a particular text that is finite and known; F. Scott Fitzgerald isn't going to write another chapter of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" anytime soon. We can all read this primary text, which is the complete and total authority of all things relating to the world of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and then practice, in a civil and responsible manner, the skills that permit us to compare our interpretations, to probe our disagreements, and to examine the biases and cultural values that condition us to react a particular way to our shared texts.

I can give some practical tips on how to read literature... write notes in the margins; underline unfamiliar words and look them up; read once to get a basic sense of what's happening, scan looking for patterns and ambiguous areas, and then read again with the intention of testing a thesis. For instance, a few years ago when I re-read Bernice Bobs Her Hair, I noticed a racial thread that was extremely obvious once I started looking for it. (I'll have to leave that for later, since my class is about to begin.)

Technology in American Drama NewsE-Mail)

I recently received this announcement from my publisher: "I'm pleased to let you know that your book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950, has been named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title."

A little googling reveals that this award is given to about 3% of the 20,000 or so academic works submitted each year to Choice (a library selection journal).

In a related development, my Amazon.com ranking for this book has now rocketed to 1,679,643 -- I'm rapidly gaining on
Distributional ecology and abundance of dung and carrion-feeding beetles (Scarabaeidae) in tropical rain forests in Sarawak, Borneo (1,652,252).

I'd get mic'd up and have a projection screen behind me the size of a drive-in theater, to use for overheads and analyzing film clips. It was like being a rock star or something -- the performative aspect of teaching took on a grandiose dimension. I'd make a silly joke and the room roared. I'd ask questions and have a field of faces to choose on at random. I could see thirty heads nodding in agreement when I made a point. It was a thrill. A daunting experience, but a thrill nonetheless. --Mike Arnzen --Working the Huge Room (Pedablogue)

My colleague discusses the dynamics of teaching a large class. We don't have huge classes at Seton HIll, but when I have on occasion addressed large audiences, the energy I could sense from the room really is palpable. It's important to focus on that energy, and to have a backup plan so that when it starts to fade, you can quickly shift gears and gain their interest again.

When she got home she found her inbox stuffed with new messages, many of which were junk mail. One message was titled "BBC World service proposal," but Onwueme said she just skipped over it. | The BBC sent a second e-mail, which she also did not take the time to read because it had the same vague title. --Susan MacLaughlin --Professor lands international radio deal (UWEC Spectator)

Tess Onwueme, a playwright from Nigeria, is a former colleague of mine from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The Beeb was trying to ask her if they could broadcast a radio performance of her play, Shakara, The Dancehall Queen.

I always taught one or two of her plays whenever I had a drama class. I would tell the students that we would have a guest lecturer who "is an expert in the plays of Tess Onwueme." When Tess walked in the door, often wearing a bright purple or red turban, I'd tell them who she was. The students always got a kick out of her visits.

She also makes a great plantain dish, the recipe for which my wife has bugged me a few times to request from her.

A student at McGill University has won the right to have his assignments marked without first submitting them to an American, anti-plagiarism website.

--McGill student wins fight over anti-cheating website  (CBC)

As a former resident of Canada, I couldn't repress a smirk at the CBC's need to identify the website as "American" in the lead. (The site is TurnitIn.com.)

Approximately twenty-five years have passed since the production of the first widely-distributed computer games; but the medium still appears malleable and novel, and its criticism remains a new and open field. Much work remains to be done, and many questions have not been asked. What vocabulary will be necessary for a literate engagement with the media of interactive entertainment? What, if any, are the distinctive formal and cultural characteristics of games as distinct from other media? What are, and will be, the standards for critical judgment and interpretation of games? --Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism | Princeton, March 6, 2004KairosNews/UPenn CFP)

Assuming the SHU powers that be grant my funding request, I'll be attending this conference to present a paper on the history of Will Crowther's original version of what became known as "Colossal Cave Adventure." Crowther's version is presumed to be lost, but I've collected what I can about the version of the game that was found, modified, and re-released by Don Woods.

The paper is part of an article commissioned for the history section of the IF Theorybook, as editor-in-chief Emily Short nicknames it in her e-mails. Maybe Interactive Fiction: History, Craft, and Theory would be a more accurate title. But that would involve a horrid academic colon.

The conference organizes say they don't have a web presence, so I'm just blogging the announcement in KairosNews that prompted me to send in my proposal. The conference is being held by the English Department at Princeton.

Private vs. Public

Anyone can read this: professors, classmates

Don't write about your love life or last weekend'sactivities unless you want your professors (or Dr. Gawalek) to read about it

Take caution when complaining about classes or classmates

Also, watch what you write -- don't link to pictures of you doing anything illegal while at Seton Hill. Someone will invariably turn you in.

--Julie Young --Getting the Most Out of Your Academic Weblog (Work in Progress)

Julie also offers sections titled "Academic=Thought", "Foster Discussion", and "The Upside".

"Dr. Gawalek" is Mary Ann Gawelek, the academic vice president here at Seton Hill University.

While blogging's earliest advocates operate on the "information wants to be free" principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | "Information is power" is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you're hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there's also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one. --Neil McIntosh --Why blogs could be bad for business (Guardian)

A few months ago, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event. The university president, JoAnne Boyle, was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I was part of a little group of people who were treated to a funny story about a well-known donor who called with some crotchety advice about one of the big topics on campus. When we all finished laughing at the punch line, I asked for the donor's first name again, because I hadn't caught it, and someone kidded me, "So, is this for your blog?" We all chuckled, but JoAnne's face turned white, and she quickly went off to charm someone else.

A little while later, as she was giving an impromptu welcome speech, she noticed who I was sitting with, and said, "The reporter who's the bane of my existence is sitting next to the faculty member who's the bane of my existence!"

Everyone turned around to see me recovering from what was almost a spit-take.

I don't think of my own blog in terms of power... goodness gracious, I'm just trying to teach a few things and enjoy doing what I do. I noticed that Alexa, a website ranking service, has placed jerz.setonhill.edu above www.setonhill.edu, and has recently replaced the screen capture of Seton Hill's home page with a screen capture from my own curricular home page. (My curricular website gets 57% of the traffic to the *.setonhill.edu domain, and the main site gets 29%, at least according to however Alexa measures it. The blogs.setonhill.edu subdomain gets 12%, by the way, which is up from 8% the last time I checked.)

I don't really know what any of this means, but, like businesses, universities also operate with a rigid power structure; administrators know things that faculty members don't need to know; tenured faculty members know things that their nontenured colleagues don't need to know.

Since I know that some of my students read my blog, I've found myself screening my blogging, since I don't want my blog to give away the "big twist" I want to throw into my lecture. And one day last term when I was very sick, a student blogged about how mentally befuddled I was. That student wrote sympathetically, but what if she hadn't?

Many of the students who started blogging for me last semester will be blogging for me again in different classes this term. I've learned a few things about instructional blogging... for one thing, I need to get the students reading each other's blogs more. We spent perhaps too much time counting the number of comments each blog entry generated, and not enough time getting students to link to each other's conversations. I'll be introducing three classes to blogging this week, and I plan to move pretty quickly from the basic "show me that you can post a link" to writing thickly-linked texts, with well-chosen links that not only demonstrate the student is keeping up with other blogs, but that gives readers a map to good reading online. We'll see what happens.

The entrenched business culture may not adopt blogging beyond the basic public relations and customer service approach. But a university's function is to educate -- to pass on skills and knowledge, by giving students the intellectual tools, in a microcosm of the society that awaits them after they graduate. Progressive educational philosophy emphasizes empowering the student. A weblog forces students to come into contact with that outside world a little earlier, which can be a burden. But with that responsibility comes power.

I'd rather the university president not think of me as the bane of her existence because of my blog, but at the same time, it's nice to be noticed.

My first scholarly monograph, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, has rocketed to the 1.6 millionth bestseller (up from 1.8 millionth a few weeks ago) on Amazon.com. (Stop presses! -- now it's zoomed up to the 1.49 millionth! Take that, Distributional Ecology and Abundance of Dung and Carrion-Feeding Beetles (Scarabaeidae) in Tropical Rain Forests in Sarawak, Borneo, still mired at a pitiful number 1.596 million.) A big movie deal now seems inevitable. Buy it now and you can say you knew me before I was rich and famous. --Jack Lynch --Jack Lynch's Home Page (Rutgers)

Lynch is the author of one of the great free online writing resources, the "Guide to Grammar and Style and the "Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms."

Several university students said Thursday that they fabricated survey results factored into in a judge's decision to move Scott Peterson's capital murder trial out of Modesto.... [T]hey made up every answer on all the surveys they submitted because they found it difficult to gather legitimate data.

They did it, they said, because they were short on time and money. They were required to participate in the survey for 20 percent of their grade and were given no money for dozens of lengthy long-distance phone calls, they said. --Stapley and Cote --Allegations arise in Peterson trial survey (Modesto Bee)

I'm blogging this as another in a long series of reasons why my students shouldn't trust the results of every survey they encounter. The poll, a student project due last month, has not been identified as having been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Instead, it was submitted to the court by the professor who assigned the poll. The lawyers who objected to its legitimacy had sufficient reason to be suspicious.

Stephen Schoenthaler received an "outstanding professor" award from California State University, Stanislaus in 2002. According to that press release (praising "research as well as teaching accomplishments"), the U.S. Congress had recently appropriated half a million dollars for a large-scale test of his research supporting a link between crime and diet.

Schoenthaler announced the poll assignment two days before Thanksgiving break, which obviously ticked off some of the students; maybe they were even further annoyed when they saw him in the media, taking credit for their work. Schoenthaler doesn't seem to have a curricular web page, so I wasn't able to find the syllabus or a response from Schoenthaler (other than his telling the Bee reporter he was shocked).

According to this article, Schoenthaler "has said he hoped to provide a public service and perhaps save taxpayer money." That's a very noble goal, but requiring his own students to pay for it? Not so noble. Still, these are apparently senior criminal justice students; they should know that two wrongs don't make a right.

In a statement released yesterday, the CSU-Stanislaus president wrote, “This is a very serious matter. We have immediately initiated an inquiry to examine these allegations according to our policies and procedures. We will conduct an extensive review to compile the information necessary to determine exactly what happened and the appropriate course of action. Scientific misconduct and academic dishonesty are serious breaches of professional ethics and research standards that are not tolerated at this university.”

Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?

Consider these questions:

• What have you created that you'd like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What's on your wish list?

--George H. Williams --Sharing Teaching Resources (George H. Williams)

My sister let herself into my hotel room and sat on the edge of my bed. I said: "This was awful. I threw up in front of two members of the search committee." Her response was kind and gentle: "It could have been worse. You could have thrown up on two members of the search committee." --Lisa Ann Gosed --A Galling Interview (Chronicle)

He never learned to use the MLA citation method, but today he's a successful engineer who supports the local arts council. | What counts as intelligence depends almost entirely on context. I find that my students are as smart, diligent, and idealistic as they have always been -- as I was. But what they know, as a generation, is inevitably different from what my profession defines as knowledge. --Thomas H. Benton --When Our Students Don't Respect Us (Chronicle)

Benton offers a good analysis of the professorial ritual of lamenting the inadequacies of our students. I confess I've done my share of this, just as when I was a student I lamented the self-centeredness and unavailability of my professors. But I've also done my share of defending the strengths of my students; I have yet to encounter a student who absolutely *cannot* switch into a more formal mode when required. (The student who inappropriately uses smileys or IM acronyms has usually mistaken the assignment for something much less formal.)

When I used to teach technical writing to engineering students, I quickly realized that by teaching basic writing skills (or, in the case of the many international students, basic English skills), I had the opportunity to contribute something to people who would one day design the highways and bridges and airplanes that I and my family would use. It was precisely because of their need that I had a job; and in my present position, too, my special skills mean that I can make a difference.

Jerz Course Books -- Spring 2004Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For those who are interested, here are links to the required purchase books for my classes; in a few days I'll post the full syllabi:

• Seminar in Thinking and Writing II (no new books)
• EL 150: Introduction to Literary Study
  
• EL 267: American Literature 1915-Present
  
• EL 309: Advanced Study in Literature -- Media Aesthetics

Update: Whoops, I posted those links hastily and got called away before I could check them. They should all work now.