Writing: March 2004 Archive Page

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)

He was the greatest director of his generation. Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny!" Lolita's heart-shaped sunglasses. The Dr Strangelove cowboy riding the nuclear bomb like it's a bucking bronco. And on and on. So many images have implanted themselves into the public consciousness, surely because of the director's ever-burgeoning attention to detail.

"Why don't you just accept," says Jan, "that this was how he worked?"

"But if he hadn't allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he'd have made more films," I say. "For instance, the Space 1999 lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial." --Jon Ronson --Citizen Kubrick  (Guardian Unlimited)

An excellent essay on the archives of director Stanley Kubrik. The story unfolds bit by bit... very clever.

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?"

Of course, the notion that these Web sites have to "count" toward tenure and promotion is one that most directly pertains to a relatively small audience: tenure-track faculty members, particularly those seeking tenure, promotion, or other institutional recognition. These Web sites have value (and thus "count") for an audience that is much larger than this, an audience that includes teachers working in non-tenure-track positions, those teaching at schools where the tenure requirements have little to do with scholarship, graduate students, Web readers interested in the topics of the sites, and so forth. I also think it's important to say that the creators of these Web sites put together their pages for reasons that exceed the question of how it might (or might not) fit into their own cases for tenure and promotion, much in the same way that most of us who are trying to publish our S/scholarship in journals and books are presumably motivated by more than simply how it looks on our cv. Steven Krause --Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites  (CCC Online)

As it happens, when I was printing out the final copy of my 4C's paper before I left the house (in the wee hours of the morning), I ran out of paper, and pulled the staple out of my printout of "Where Do I List This on My CV?" in order to use the blank sides of those pages.

Oddly enough, that's also my provisional answer to your question -- self-publishing isn't enough, and neither is any cutting-edge new media project. Publishing in traditional academic genres about new media activities does take time and energy away from those new media activities, but I don't think we really have any choice -- at least, not until we have succeeded in explaining to the reigning generation of scholars why what we do is valuable, and why doing it the traditional way is less valuable. We're not there yet.

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?s the 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?

[T]he main thing that's hard to do in IF is build a story where there's a lot of internal character development as opposed to external action. There are some ways to approach it, but they're all challenging, and there aren't very many examples of IF where people have done it successfully before. Whereas if you're writing a book, you can just sit down and write some lines of internal monologue for your protagonist, and it's not inherently different from writing a fight scene or dialogue or anything else. --Emily Short, interviewed by Bill Loguidice --Interactive Fiction and Feelies: An Interview with Emily Short  (Armchair Arcade)

It is still dark when I get up, the suitcase carefully packed the day before. I will be away almost a month, the preparations have been exstensive, at work and home. The little plane takes off, and carries me into dawn.
--Transit - but going where? (Thinking with My Fingers)

A lovely, haunting little travelblog from Torill.

"The Windmills of Your Mind" is too crazy to be anything but a piece of its crazy time, and it is almost airily psychotic: "Is the jingle in your pocket/Or is the jingle in your head?" A question like that made a lot of sense in 1968. --Mind the Windmills (http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com)

Boynton has collected a few reviews and reflections on that odd "Windmils" song, which, if you know it, is now probably lodged firmly in your brain. (Sorry about that.)

Miss Dyson, a student careers adviser, thought she was sending a private email to Alex Hewson, her boyfriend. By accidentally clicking on the "reply all" command, however, she distributed it to everyone on his original recipient list.

The message went to 30 friends of Mr Hewson, a PR executive with the firm Carat International. Many then forwarded it to their friends. --Roya Nikkhah --Red faces as email to boyfriend is seen by thousands (The Telegraph)

This story is a good example of how electronic text complicates the old categories of public and private communication.

I do think the headline suggests the content of the e-mail is a bit racier than that suggested by the quotations in the story.

From Yahoo! News:

Update: Torill responds.The Importance of PunctuationJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Bork bork bork!

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?s adult 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.

I reworked the draft, adding some charts and tables to demonstrate that the program wouldn't require any new dollars. But mostly I substituted abstract nouns for concrete ones, stuffed sentences with nominalizations, and replaced active verbs with passives, violating the rules of writing that students in the M.F.A. program would be expected to follow. --Dennis Baron --New Programs, New Problems (Chronicle)

Note: I added the above links.

I'm not part of Seton Hill's MFA program, but as the "new media journalism" specialist I was hired to take a leadership role in getting the NMJ program off the ground.

Planning for the program was well underway when I was hired, so my role was mostly writing up or otherwise wrangling together syllabi to flesh out the 8 or so new courses in the NMJ curriculum. Two of the courses hit administrative snags that John never fully explained to me, aside from glancing in the direction of the administration building and giving a sad little sigh every time I brought it up. For a sample syllabus on "New Media Aesthetics," I had offered a special topic course on "The Documentary Film" because I thought it would fit better in a journalism program, because I thought it would be easier to explain that course to non-experts, and because it's a genre that interests me; but cinema also fits in with art and communications, so the proposal set up a red flag.

John was very encouraging when I suggested that I supply a version of the syllabus that focused on digital culture instead.

He handled all the final paperwork details for the new slate of courses. As the deadline approached, I sent him an e-mail with about 12 files in different formats, and he filled out all the forms, checking the right boxes and, I presume, providing the right amount of administrativese.