Literacy: February 2004 Archive Page

Part of Maloney's job is to evaluate books on the sleeper list and decide whether they go to the bargain basement sale or get a second chance.

"It's a really hard thing to get rid of a book," Maloney said. "A big, big consideration for us is just space. Our juvenile fiction shelves are packed right now. There comes a time when you have to say 'goodbye."'.... For the 800 hardcover juvenile fiction books on Maloney's list, the odds aren't good. Maloney estimates about 80 percent will wind up downstairs for bargain hunters. --Librarians struggle to let go of lonely books (AP/Mankatopa Free Press)

Ahh! I always thought libraries were like museums. Quick, run to the library you remember from your childhood... somebody, look in Patrick Henry library in Vienna, Va., or the Fairfax County Public Library... are those dog-eared copies of Lester Del Rey's classic science fiction still there? What about Encyclopedia Brown, or the Henry Reed Detective Agency? Or the wonderful books about astronomy, that paint Jupiter with no rings and about 12 moons? Is there still a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which I checked out on one of my first forays from the Juvenile section to the Adult stacks, and is the page still folded down in the section that describes "Typical Dreams"?

According to the article, "Sometimes, all it takes to save a book from being discarded is a single person's desire to read it."

Via Waterloo Library Blog.

The L.A. Times ('free' registration required--thus my extensive quoting) has story about how:

the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a "service" and it is illegal to perform services for embargoed nations, the agency has ruled.

This raises all sorts of questions like does tagging and indexing a blog post count as editing, does reformating an article to fit a house or blog style count as editing? And is a 'service' really a 'service' if no money changes hands? It seems some publishers, including the American Chemical Society, have decided to risk "fines of up to a half-million dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years" by editing scholarly articles they publish. --U.S. Embargos Extended to Editing ArticlesKairosNews/LA Times)

Since the LA Times requires an obnoxious registration, I'm linking to Scott's post on KairosNews instead.

Computers and Composition Online is the refereed online companion journal to Computers and Composition: An International Journal, now in its 21st year and published by Elsevier. Our goal is to be a significant online resource for scholar-teachers interested in the impact of new and emerging media upon the teaching of language and literacy in both virtual and face-to-face forums. As part of this goal, we wish to foster a sense of community and collegial sharing of ideas by providing an online space where select features, announcements, and community resources work together to promote a virtual exchange for the latest and best work in the field. --Computers and Composition Online Weblogcandconline.org)

Found via KairosNews. Not a whole lot of action on this site yet... and the mission statement I quoted above reeks of administrativeese. Is this part of an effort by Elsevier (publisher of C&C) to respond to boycotts and other acts of rebellion over the control it wields over academic publishing?

I'm a bit suspicious, but I did contribute a long comment to C&C Online a few minutes ago. Overall I think it's good it's great to see yet another effort to rethink scholarship in light of new technology.

Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web, and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about 19 million books with unique call numbers, plus another 9 million or so in unusual formats, but most have not made it onto the Web. That may change, but for the moment, a tremendous amount of human wisdom is invisible to researchers who just use the Internet.

"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian and author Gary Price. --Joel Achenbach

--Search For Tomorrow: We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?  (WashPost)

Of course, the archives of the Washington Post are part of the "dark net" -- most of the articles disappear behind a pay-per-view firewall after a few weeks.

Most of my students are working on their short midterm papers now, and a few have complained about the research exercises I have asked them to complete. I'm asking them to supply, in varying combinations, a sample thesis statement, quotations from their primary sources, a brief annotation of and quotations from secondary sources, a bibliography, and a revised thesis statement (showing how they have incorporated their research into their thesis statement). While students in my freshman comp class can expect me to read and comment on a complete rough draft, I can't supply that service to all my classes -- but the one- or two-page research & thesis exercise is still an excellent opportunity to provide feedback.

I have seen far too many student papers ruined by students who mistakenly trusted bad sources; some students first write an essay based on what they already believe, then they treat the research phase as if their goal is simply to "find quotes that support my opinion." Hint: if you've already written your opinion before you looked at outside sources, then you're not writing a research paper.

Writing is not easy.

Some of the new questions in a very young field: How do you judge a game? As you would a novel? Should we think up a whole new vocabulary for evaluating games? What do the social dynamics of online worlds — those massively multiplayer games — tell us about human behavior?

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.

Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation "Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds" seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.

"There is an interesting naughtiness in taking something that many people consider unimportant and frivolous and then creating very detailed theory about it," Juul said. But, he added: "I would say that video games merit much more analysis than novels or movies simply because they are less understood." --Nick Wadhams --Academics get serious about video games (Mercury News/AP)

It's not news that academics have been studying computer games, but it is news that the study of computer games is developing into a scholarly field of its own (rather than being situated within existing fields, such as literature, cinema, artificial intelligence, and so forth).

Besides Juul, this article also mentions Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, Henry Jenkins, and Gonzalo Frasca. It also mentions next month's Princeton conference on Form, Culture, and Videogame Criticism.

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person. --Cory Doctorow --E-Books: Neither E Nor Books (Craphound)

When the newest cheating scandal surfaces at some prestigious southern university known for its military school style "honor code," the headlines leap across the tabloids like stories on child molestation by alien invaders.

It's almost never suggested that all this might be something other than a disaster for higher education. But that's exactly what I want to argue here. -- Russel Hunt --Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism  (St. Thomas University)

Found via the Plagiarism Resource Site.

;-) Neterature: all the quirky, jerky kinds of writing that is/are on the World Wide Web -- blogs, fan fiction, role-playing game sagas, news filterese, spam poetry, prose parodies, etc.

Neterature: Usually energetic passionate innovative and irreverently funny. Not always great or even good. But the best of it is young and sassy and undeniably full of life, in ways that on-the-page writing is not so much anymore.

And it's blooming everywhere -- in e-mail and instant messages and, more and more, spilling off the screen into our daily parlance. It's changing the way we express ourselves. --Linton Weeks --iT was a dark+stormy Nite (Washington Post (will expire soon))

A good survey. Ultimately, it sides with the wistful "because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down," which is 1) an overstatement and 2) missing the point. We come into contact with lots of bad online writing, but those of us with weblogs can make it easier for everyone else to find the good writing. Bloggers are editors -- not in the sense that we fix other people's mistakes, but because a weblog archive is the table of contents of an anthology; a single richly-linked blog entry functions as a separate codex.

Weeks gives a good survey of writing culture online, but still applies old media criteria to it -- which is rather like admitting that a horseless carriage does a lot of things horses do, and a lot of things that horses can't do, but questioning them because you can't breed horseless carriages. Of course you can't -- because horseless carriages aren't horses.

A neuropsychiatrist is quoted as saying that, when you read online, "Your critical faculties are in abeyance." They needn't be. People can be trained to appreciate modern art, fine wines, and just about anything else that follows discernible principles of aesthetic and meaning.

I do find it very amusing that Jakob Nielsen is introduced as someone who teaches people how to write online. His specialty is usability in human-computer interfaces, and of course he's great in that realm. But only by trial and error have he and other usability specialists determined what kind of writing permits people to use technical documents most efficiently. Nielsen has no expertise in the use of writing to persuade, inspire, entertain, etc. He has never claimed that he has, of course -- it's this article that presents him as a writing expert.

True or false? Technical writers?

A. Write about technology.
B. Translate specialized knowledge in a manner that is adapted to readers? needs, level of understanding, and background.
C. Present information that helps readers to solve a particular problem.
D. Persuade readers to see things, ideas, and events as the writers see them.
E. ?Set the agenda? and shape day-to-day reality by choosing what gets written and for whom. --Leah A. Zuidema --Technical Writing: An Overview (Michigan State University)

I've blogged a link to Google's HTML conversion of the original PDF version.

I found this document extremely interesting becuase it was produced by an educator for an audience of secondary school teachers. (Adding to the "fun" factor is the fact that I and a former colleague of mine at UWEC are cited.)

--wood s lot

A few good finds from this Canadian blog:

• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
  E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, James Trefil
  Third Edition, 2002

• The Day of the Condour
  or How to be a Propour Canadian Spellour
  Ronald de Sousa
  repost

  I scarcely dare fourmulate this question, lest it be censoured, and--Horrour of horrours!--deter our Honourary Donours. Yet suffour me to exhourt you: four though some may harbour the thought that this minour question is not wourth the furour, or think--in errour--that I speak humourously, this issue is especially impourtant for our langourous juniours to considour -- provided, of course, they have not been savouring liquour priour to pouring over this text, endeavouring to gauge its tenour.

• The Awesome Destructive Power of the Corporate Power Media
  The Black Commentator

  If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s – flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum – can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble.

  The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of media’s role in the American power structure.