Literacy: March 2004 Archive Page

"[T]he world's first consumer application of an electronic paper display module in Sony's new e-Book reader, Librié, [is] scheduled to go on sale in Japan in late April. This 'first ever' [...] display utilizes E Ink's revolutionary electronic ink technology which offers a truly paper-like reading experience with contrast that is the same as newsprint."

(See also E Ink's press release and BBC News.)

Commercial E-Paper Display

Via join-the-dots.

I look at my students: some barefoot, others wearing hats and dressed in clothes they could easily have slept in, and I think how the college classroom has become an adjunct of the dorm bedchamber. Sometimes, when I begin classes, I get the impression that the students resent my interrupting their conversations. Few of them take notes, and I unconsciously make an effort to be more entertaining.... Today's tenure process, particularly the requirement that one get high scores on student evaluations, makes it extraordinarily hard to demand as much from students and to use the fear of disapproval as a motivation. It's hard to deny there is a direct correlation between high scores on student evaluations, grade inflation, and the relaxation of standards. | From the perspective of more than a decade, I can see how much I learned from the old lions, but, if they had been required to hand out student evaluations, my younger self would have punished them with the lowest possible scores.--"Thomas H. Benton" --Remembering the Old Lions (Chronicle)

Too often, writers workshop their egos, instead. It's human nature, especially if your story is on the table and everyone's talking about it. But to get the most out of a writer's workshop, you need to think of the story on the table as your car, and everyone around the table is a mechanic looking under the hood. If you want to learn how to fix it -- or just soup it up -- on your own, you have to watch and listen. And get your hands dirty. --Mike Arnzen --Working the Workshop (Gorelets)

--Old School Moveable Type (MGK)

Real moveable type. Ever since I investigated the meaning of the name of the character "Shurdlu" in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, I've had a longing to learn how to use an old-fashioned printing press -- one that actually presses the paper. As much as I love the power of "push-button publishing for the masses," there is still something to be said about the care that must go into getting it right when one uses a real printing press.

We the "early adopters"have been playing with blogs in our classes for awhile now. We're loved them just for the sake of loving them. We've evangelized them to our peers and our students, with mixed success.

But now, blogs must pull their pedgagogical weight. It's no longer enough to just put a student blog collective online and see what happens, or to send your students to Blogger and allow them to pretend like it's the same experience as writing a paper journal that they turn in to their teacher. --Stephanie Holinka --And The Crowd Cried out for Pedagogy (Weeblog)

Another CCCC blogger reflects...

Mike Vitia Blogs the 4Cs (Vitia)

Mike Vitia has a good series of blog entries covering several sessions at the 4Cs, including the great panel by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy, of which Mike had this provocative, if vague, observation: "Most of us know that the theories of Landow and Negroponte lie broken and useless: how, then, might we begin to build rigorous theoretical models that help us to account for the phenomena described by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy?"

My "Computer Connection" section (in a distant corner of the main exhibition hall) was more interactive than I had expected, so I didn't get to cover all my material -- notably this list of "good practices" for using blogs in the classroom. Since a "real" weblog is a license to write whatever and whenever you want, an instructor who assigns the topic, frequency, or length of blog entries (in order to facilitate grading) violates the spirit that draws voluntary bloggers to their avocation.

The "forced blogging paradigm" is the resistance that results when even voluntary bloggers feel hampered by the imposition of academic rules and standards. It's also the resistance that results when students who don't really want to blog at all are forced to do so. Here are a few strategies I've found helpful.

In Class, Refer to Student Blogs. In the minute or two before class starts, I sometimes chat with students about the content of their blogs. Of course, the best bloggers will tend to get the most attention, and the result is that the infrequent bloggers will feel marginalized. That'sthe way it is in the blogosphere outside of academia, but it makes good pedagogical sense to recognize the achievements of less committed bloggers, too.

When asking a student to repeat for the class the contents of a particularly good blog entry that I feel might be useful in sparking a discussion, I find that students sometimes need their memory jogged if they are expected to talk about something they blogged in the wee hours of the morning or maybe a couple days ago. Calling the blog entry upon on the screen, saying a few words about why it seemed significant to you, and then inviting the student to click through their weblog seems to be a good strategy.

Begin Oral Presentations from Blogs. I ask my students to blog their notes for their oral presentations. In my upper-level course, peer pressure encourages students not to identify this kind of forced blogging as an assignment -- students just casually mention a thought that occurred to them while reading Plato, and then launch into their subject from there. Since I encourage them to link to their sources, it's easier to encourage them to emphasize their own ideas, rather than spend most of their oral presentation summarizing what they find on SparkNotes or other curiousity-killing "study guide" websites.

Give Flexible ?Forced Blogging? Assignments. Requiring students to post X comments of length Y every week may force some middle-of-the-road students to write a little longer, a little more frequently; but it will also encourage the Type-A students to stop when they have reached the magic number. That can kill the dynamic of a weblog, which feeds off of the feverish productivity of the A-listers. I might also ask students to write a short response to the assigned text, but give them the option of blogging it (if they have a lot to say and want to make it public) or just hand it to me on paper. Even if only or two students blogs a reaction essay, those will probably be at least mildly interesting.

Blog During Class. Not all the time? but whenever the site is sagging a bit, asking all students to blog for 15 minutes can help perk things up. Sometimes I suggest that they post only comments that contain questions for their peers, rather than create new entries. Responding to the 'Forced Blogging' Paradigm: Good Practices for Weblogs in the ClassroomCCCC 04)

While my suggested prompts regarding John Donne's Holy Sonnets and The Secret Life of Bees sit ignored, during the time I was giving my presentation on blogging at the 4Cs, and while I show the audience the SHU blog, I see that debate is currently raging on the subject of athletics at Seton Hill University.

Blogging puts students in the driver's seat. There's a great community of bloggers at SHU. The ride can be bumpy -- particularly if some students feel left out or attacked. But sometimes, the best thing an instructor can do is sit back and trust the students. They'll work this out, and they'll do it through writing.. what more can a writing instuctor ask?

[Grr... the Word file that has my abstract in it won't open on this public terminal on the convention floor. I'm retyping this from my lecture notes.]

When a curricular weblog program was made available to all students, faculty and staff at a small liberal arts university, the students, expected to blog as part of their course grade, initially expected to be told what to write about, how frequently to write, and how many words were required. While about a quarter of the students rarely if ever blogged more than the bare minimum, and therefore appreciated being told exactly what their blogging should be, other students quickly developed a sense of audience and ownership over their own blogging space; these students object to "forced blogging" assignments, reporting that their regular readers found those entries boring, or becuase the academic discourse they felt they had to adopt jarred with the tone offered by the rest of the site's content. The field of composition studies encourages students to invest themselves in and take ownership over their writing. How do issues of "investment" and "ownership" translate into their participation in a shared blogging environment? My presentation examines the tension between forced blogging and voluntary blogging. Blogging is a medium that developed to meet the needs of a specific kind of writer. As many of us who teach with weblogs have quickly recognized, not every student is that kind of writer. Incorporating blogging into our curricula requires us to address these questions.

New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University

Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in their Academic WeblogsCCCC 04)

Among those in the audience was Ann Raimes, whose "Keys for Writers" I've used for years. She's considering using blogs as an example of student writing in her next revision, and says she's been reading through SHU student blogs.

Sarah Jane Sloane, "Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom."
Cynthia Cox, "Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom"
Bonne Smith, "All Along the Blogwatch Tower"
Lisa Langstraat, respondent: "In Blog We Trust"Teaching the Blog (CCCC 2004)

I wasn't able to meet Sarah Jane Sloan, whose dissertation on interactive fiction, Interactive Fiction, Virtual Realities, and the Reading-Writing Relationship, is a tremendously valuable resource for the study of text adventure games as narratives. Sloane wasn't actually here -- she was arriving at the conference late, so Langstraat read Sloane's paper.

Sloane identified the start of the weblog culture with the 1996 Geocities offer of free home pages, and then credited Jorn Barger with the term "weblogging" in 1997. There's a great deal of difference between a Geocities home page and a blog; as far as describing the development of personal online publishing, the chronology makes sense, but the format of the blog was being used by the authors of the earliest web pages. And Barger didn't exactly coin the term "weblogging" -- in a Dec. 1997 newsgroup posting, he announced that he was going to start a log of his daily web readings, and the name of the file where he placed this log ended with "weblog.htm". His post didn't actually use the word "weblog" in its present sense, and he credits Frontier and Scripting News for the form.

All three presenters treated weblogging as experimental, all three were blogging in writing classes (two of which were, I believe, freshman composition, and one graduate writing course), and the latter two particularly followed at format of "what I thought I was going to do with blogs" followed by "what actually happened".

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up -- instructors who don't actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don't make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are "really" bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

Cox observed that, despite her explanation of what she expected in terms of the length, frequency, and content of student blogging, students tended to find their own values for the online writing that they did.

[Whoops, the next session is about to start... this blog is unfinished, but I'd better post it now.]

English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It's6:50 in the morning. After logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the ?Furl it? button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in. Next, he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. With one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student'spersonal site and adds a positive comment to the assignment post. He also ?Furls? that site, putting it in the Best Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It's7:00. --Will Richardson --Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School # (Weblogg-ed)

A good description of how one might use content-aggregating tools to link blogs in efficient and productive ways.

This paper examines metablogging in terms of Dawkins's concept of the "meme" and Reddy's critique of the "conduit" metaphor for communication.... The language of metablogging uses metaphors that emphasize communality and proximity, and thus offers an alternative to the social risks Reddy associates with the conduit metaphor. --Dennis G. Jerz --(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit' (BlogTalks)

If you're an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. --Henry Farrell --Academics and Blogging (Crooked Timber)

Beware: bloggers do love to blog about their blogs, so here goes...

1. What prompted you to start blogging?
   
   

   I had started developing a collection of online writing resources in 1996, and by early 1999 I was having trouble keeping them organized in several overlapping navigation schemes. I wanted a central location where I could post links to new or recently updated handouts, and in order to give people (presumably my own students and other instructors looking for online resources) a reason to bookmark that page I thought I would create what we would now call a filter (that is, a site with little personal commentary, the main purpose of which was to send readers off to interesting things to do elsewhere). The wayback machine archived how my protoblog looked in June, 1999.
   
   As a literature Ph.D. student teaching technical writing in a liberal arts school, I felt a desire to connect the worlds of technology and humanities. After a former colleague e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, I brazenly copied the form. On July 20, 1999, I posted something about the 30th anniversary of the moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that I was writing that entry on the anniversary -- so I added the date. Throughout 1999, I kept the A & L Daily signature "[more]" link, though I remember being frustrated by it for some time before I started using meaningful words from the body of the blurb.
   
   At first I mostly featured links to writing centers and my own online handouts, but as I realized that my page was attracting more attention from the outside world than from my students, I created one column for humanities and one for technology, and just posted whatever I thought was interesting in either column. I started e-mailing the webmasters of resources I thought were valuable, telling them that they were my "link of the day". I had already been advocating the value of what I called annotated lists of links (I first drafted that handout in 1997), but I don't think I really convinced any of my students to get excited about the possibility.
   

   All this time, I was coding my blog by hand, without any sort of automated tools (well, I did use a WYSIWYG editor). I did later create some PERL tools to automate the process of shifting entries from the home page to the archives, and I later created a form that let me add to the database over the Web, though in order to publish I still had to drive to the office and hit a button that ran a script which copied files from my hard drive to the university server. Bleah.
   
   My site didn't mention the word "weblog" until 2000, when it appears exactly once, when I linked to the Feb 2000 Wired article noting the boom in weblogging.
   
   In 2001, I blogged 10 items that I later classified under a "weblog" category. It wasn't until fall, 2001, when two students chose weblogs as the subject of term projects that I seriously considered the form, and actually started blogging about it. Technical writing major Jan Carroll created what turned into a very popular blog devoted to September 11 poetry, and CS major Chris Warren, who had already been keeping a personal weblog and photoblog (and from whom I coincidentally just got an e-mail a little while ago), wrote a term project on identity in weblogs. Both students were having difficulty finding relevant scholarship, though I noticed early on that journalists seemed to be paying much closer attention to the phenomenon than my English composition and technical writing colleagues.
   
   

2. And what keeps you going?
   
   

   I went back on the job market, this time trumpeting my weblog and other new media experience, in order to see what would happen. I ended up as Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism.
   
   

3. Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship?
   
   Yes -- at first only indirectly. My first "annotated list of links" was a bibliography of websites devoted to interactive fiction (text adventure games); at one point I added print resources and the result was published in a journal. I had an article called "On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy" scheduled to appear in "Dichtung Digital" a few days after Google announced its purchase of Blogger, so I spent the weekend updating it... Although I ended up not being able to attend the conference, my paper "(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit'" from last year's BlogTalk is being published in the proceedings.
   
   
   
4. If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not?
   

   
   Not applicable to me.
   
   

5. Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?
   

   
   Fodder for my own blog... Seriously, I also I value them as ways to connect with distant people who travel to conferences more frequently than I can (what with my two small kids, "all-but-dissertation" wife and a heavy teaching load), and as ways to connect with my students. This term I'm using blogs in three of my four classes and also supervising the development of the online student paper, so I'm thinking quite a bit about pedagogical blogging. Our school is big on getting students to use PowerPoint, but I can't stand that medium, and instead require students to blog their oral presentations. They present by going up to the front of the room and clicking through the links in their blog entry. That usually makes the oral presentation go better, since students don't have to take notes on the content; it also makes the network of student blogs richer -- I've managed to create a culture where students discourage each other from saying "I'm putting this on my blog because my teacher told me to," and students are challenging each other to make their blog entries interesting for their regular readers. Of course, some students only blog when they have to, and others probably drop my class because the whole blogging thing is too freaky for them.
   

   On a personal level, other than videos for the kids, I watch almost no TV, preferring instead blogging, reading, or computer games.
   

Very Tired on a Friday Afternoon. But it's a good tired.

I just heard that my proposal, "Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review," has been accepted for the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy this coming October.

Seton Hill University featured "information literacy" in a faculty seminar at the beginning of the year, but thought the content of that training was too basic to be of much interest or help to me. While I've found my new media activities to be well-supported here, I do expect that I'll have plenty of explaining to do when it comes to annual review time. Now that weblogs are mainstream enough that I can expect my students to "get" blogging without much trouble, I need to start thinking critically about how to present the value of blogging to a generation of scholars who don't automatically go "Wow that's so cool!" when they see a blog. Hence, this conference proposal.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I'm still working on "Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in Their Academic Weblogs," which I'll be giving at the 4C's next week... I'm behind in my blogging for the Princeton Video Game conference earlier this month, and I've haven't yet managed to unbotch my handling of the paperwork for a conference I attended last August.

What's this? Little voices from several stacks of papers are calling to me... "Grade us! Grade us!"

Back to work.

GREETINGS. MY BROTHER, THE LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION, WAS RECENTLY DEPOSED BY A VIOLENT COUP THAT DESTROYED ALL KEYBOARDS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOWERCASE LETTERS...

GREETINGS. I AM NOT THE BROTHER OF A RECENTLY DEPOSED LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION WHERE KEYBOARDS DONT HAVE LOWERCASE LETTERS.

I AM INSTEAD SOMEONE WHOSE WEBLOG HAS RECENTLY BEEN HIT WITH A VARIATION OF THE "NIGERIAN 419 SCAM".

I tell you, what with e-mail spam, pedophile-hunting viligantes, and the 419 scam, even the most far-out science fiction authors couldn't predict just how convoluted and endlessly strange the world would become, all thanks to the wonders of technology.

For decades, elementary schoolbooks have maintained that the Great Wall of China could be seen from space - but now the books are being rewritten. --China ends Great Wall space myth (BBC)

Today's computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished. It's just like "Space, we've done that!" -- a few inches of exploration and some people think it's over.....Today's arbitrarily constructed computer world is also based on paper simulation, or WYSIWYG. That's where we're stuck in the current model, where most software seems to be mapped to paper. ("WYSIWYG" generally means "What You See is What You Get"-- meaning what you get *when you print it OUT*). In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today's software concepts. --Theodore Nelson --Way Out of the Box (Ted Nelson's EPrint Archive)

Link via The Great Lettuce Head.

Nelson writes "the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper," but as Nick Montfort reminds us in his "Continuous Paper," computer culture was well-established before screens replaced the rolls of paper streaming through print terminals and teletypes.

The document quoted above is an example of Nelson's version of a two-way web, part of the "transquotation" concept in his Xanadu. His ideas challenge too many people's notions of writing, ownership, and locality to catch on in the mainstream (at least for now). The freak-your-mind possibilities of this implementation of open-source text sound fantastic. I'm sure this has been debated in the RSS/XML/Whatever debates that often gets A-list bloggers riled up. I need to get a bigger job jar -- mine's overflowing as it is. But here's a light piece about Xanadu and transclusion.

For many under 30, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" is, improbably, an important news source.

A poll released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people aged 18 to 29 cited "The Daily Show" and "Saturday Night Live" as a place where they regularly learned presidential campaign news.

--Young America's news source: Jon Stewart (CNN)

I blogged this Pew report on the NMJ@SHU site a while ago, but it's interesting to read CNN's response:

Random conversations with nine people, aged 19 to 26, waiting to see a taping of "The Daily Show" last week revealed two who admitted they learned much about the news from the program.

The word "random" downplays the obvious bias involved in interviewing people who like Jon Stewart enough to want to be in his studio audience. A good news editor would be on the lookout for things that might be easily misinterpreted.

44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files

In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation'sadult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

• 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
• 20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their computers.
• 17% have posted written material on Web sites.
• 13% maintain their own Web sites.
• 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
• 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
• 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
• 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
• 6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
• 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
• 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
• 3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
• 2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.

--Content Creation Online (Pew Internet Trust)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I'm not sure that permitting file-sharing should be in the same category as providing original content to the web, but it's still an impressive set of statistics.

Sensory Immersion vs. PainJerz's Literacy Weblog)

My son got a splinter in his hand this weekend. He wasn't too happy when my wife told him she'd have to remove it with a needle. I suggested that maybe I could try tweezers first.

"What are tweezers?" he asked.

"Kind of like little pliers," I said.

I poked the tweezers into the palm of my hand, showing him the red mark but noting that my skin didn't bleed. I then let him poke my hand with the tweezers. More red marks, but no blood. Then I let him poke his own hand. He got the tweezers turned around and poked the rounded handle on his palm... his eyes lit up and he said, "That didn't hurt at all!"

I had recently blogged a BBC article about a VR system designed to distract patients who are undergoing a painful procedure. So I asked Peter to read a poster written in an Old English style typeface. At six, he's an excellent reader, but the lettering was difficult for him.

By the time he got through the third word, I had the sliver out.