Academia: April 2004 Archive Page

Because she does all of her teaching online, Ms. Achterhof can handle many more courses, at many more colleges, than she could face to face. She is an adjunct professor of business and management at four institutions, in three states, moving among her teaching duties with the click of a mouse while her black Labrador lies curled at her feet. She hardly ever sees a campus, spending much of her time at home here in a 100-year-old cottage next to a small lake. --Dan Carnevale --Part-time professors, in demand, fill many distance-education faculties (Chronicle)

Interesting... "Carnevale" means "farewell to the flesh."

My last two classes talked me into holding class outside today. There wasn't much we could really accomplish, especially during the evening class (which was supposed to run until a few minutes ago, but I let 'em out a half hour early -- sshh, don't tell my boss). Last term I started a ritual of snapping a picture of my class on the last day... I'm not sure what it accomplishes, but it gives a good sense of closure. (It never feels right saying good-bye to a class when I'm about to hand out the final exam.)

Almost done...

About 45 percent of all faculty members are now part-timers. Each year thousands of people with new doctorates in fields like history and English fail to find the tenure-track jobs they are chasing. In English, for instance, fewer than half of the new Ph.D.'s win tenure-track jobs initially, according to the Modern Language Association.

When confronted with those numbers, the apologists, as the Invisible Adjunct calls them, maintain that there will always be jobs for the good ones. --Scott Smallwood --Disappearing Act (Chronicle)

This link might disappear soon. Via Torill.

Under the guidelines, which go into effect in the fall for Princeton's 4,600 undergraduates, faculty are expected to restrict the number of A's to 35 percent in undergraduate courses; for junior and senior independent work, the percentage receiving A's will be capped at 55 percent. --Princeton faculty approves grade-rationing plan (CBS/AP)

--Primetime Cheating (Pedablogue)

My colleague Mike Arnzen has already created the blog entry I was about to create, so I'll just link to him.

Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don?t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone?s there yet, but many are; many we don?t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some textbook or uninformed instructor asking them to write about ?a controversial issue? or their favorite shirt. Take it to the Web. There you?ll find the bizarre ideas and beliefs many of us hold linked together in Shaviro?s imagined connected world (Sci-fi? Life-fi as well). There you will create something to write about. --J Rice --More Blog. Less Talk. (Yellow Dog)

Colorado-based independent scholar Marie-Laure Ryan, author of Narrative as Virtual Reality and editor, most recently, of Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, who has offered comments here at GTxA, spoke about the ludology vs. narratology debate, admitting that she was preaching to the converted, not to the heathens...

She took on the anti-narrativst arguments advanced by Aarseth, Eskelinen, Frasca, and Juul and offered convincing answers to them. All right, I admit: I was already convinced. She suggested that a cognitive approach to narrative, which saw story as a world that had characters and objects undertaking meaningful actions, actions that had consequences in a system with rules and laws, was particularly amenable for use in understanding some computer games.

My basic reaction was, Yes! --Nick Montfort --Montfort on Narratology vs. Ludology (Grand Text Auto)

Nick Montfort also makes a few good-natured jabs at his ludologist friends in this post, a summary of part of a narrative conference sponsored by the University of Vermont and Middelbury College. Once again, at a conference geared towards literature, it's not surprising to see the narratological approach to computer games dominant. I like Nick's observation that if we focus too much on finding a theory that accounts for Tetris, we risk specializing in Tetris Studies.

Update: "May all future discussions be both ludolicious and narratasty." --Andrew Stern

Speaker #n will present a statistical analysis of the activity on a student weblog community in order to identify possible correlations which may advance our understanding of the pedagogical value of weblogs. The community is a group of personal blogs, all hosted on the same server and sponsored by the university. Activity on the site will be monitored during the summer break, during which all students will have the ability to continue posting to their blogs.

While most members of this particular community are undergraduates who are required to blog for course credit, but the server does not, at the moment, host any "class blogs". Those students who blog for credit do so on their own personal blogs, where they are given free reign to blog on whatever they wish, in addition to their academic blogging. A small number of faculty and students who are unconnected to the classes where blogging is required nevertheless keep blogs on a voluntary basis. About 5% of the bloggers in the group are responsible for about 50% of the activity on the site, and the voluntary bloggers are well-represented in this list of active users. Preliminary analysis of the ratio between number of posts (top-level entries created by registered bloggers) and comments (brief responses, which can be added to the main entry by any web visitor, including random web surfers) reveals several interesting details: male bloggers wrote less frequently than the female bloggers, but typically attracted more comments per post.

Other areas to examine include the relationship between the blogroll (a sidebar containing a list of a blogger's favorite weblogs) and the classroom seating chart, and the usual computer-assisted textual analysis subjects such as word count, word frequency, and average word length. In order to present this information, an analysis of the peculiar ethics of this particular research situation may prove illuminating. All students who blog for class are informed of the inevitably public nature of their work, which makes the invention of pseudonyms almost pointless (since Google would easily help the curious audience member identify the "real" author of any quoted passage). Information such as average number of posts per month, or average number of comments attracted by each post, is already public (even though only the weblog administrator has push-button access to an up-to-the minute master list). Other factors which may be examined for possible associations include the degree to which the student personalizes the blog templates (leaving it "plain vanilla," modifying it in simple or complex ways), the average number of links per post, and the average number of inbound, on-site, and off-site links per post.

Discovering Metrics for Evaluating an Academic Weblog Community [First Draft of CCCC 2005 Proposal]Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

First draft of my component of a panel proposal for next year's CCCC (I am "speaker #n".)

I was resisting putting in buzzwords such as "emergence" and "network," since I think of this as a practical exploration of just what it is possible to learn once we learn to read all the data that's being encoded in the networks the students form when they link to each other and post comments on each other's blogs.

I can't really come up with a cuter humanities-style title for the paper, not until I've actually got some results to work with.

I was thinking of "Mene, mene, tekel, uparshin," if only to remind me to look for signs that weblogs aren't the heaven-sent answer to every single thing that might possibly be less than perfect in academia.

Crunch Time: Seton Hill Blogs Bursting at the Seams

Blogalicious... bloginator... "blog rally"... my students have been fiercely you-know-whatting, in order to fulfill the broad, very general requirements of their blogging portfolios. These range from the typical "write a blog responding to book X" or "blog about classroom activity Y," to "disagree politely with one of your peers" to "write a blog entry that sparks a discussion on your blog". One prompt, "Blog about how your English major affects your work in non-English classes," has sparked some soul-searching in the "Intro to Literary Study" class, which I think is welcome in this foundational course for all our English majors (lit, creative writing, and journalism).

• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m.at a speed of 35mph.
• The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

--how not to write metaphors (Schoolzone)

This list of howlers is prefaced with the note, "These are (allegedly) metaphors from actual GCSE essays." A lot of the items on the list are not metaphors but similies (only the latter of which uses "like" or "as"). But they're still funny. In the right context, many of these would actually be very good.

One of them, however, is a faded derivative of Douglas Adams's descripton of the hovering Vogon spaceships: "The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't."

Knowledge is different from capital, and from material goods, in that there is no inherent scarcity to knowledge. A piece of knowledge, once produced, may be replicated almost for free, distributed around the world in the blink of an electron, fed almost as easily to one person as to one billion people. Oh sure, there are some pragmatic issues: knowledge can be expensive to create, and as those of us involved in distance and online learning will attest, distribution is not free. However for the greater good, people in a society - and across societies, in a global society - pool their resources, funding public universities for the production of knowledge, and a public education system for the distribution of knowledge. --Stephen Downes

--Unrest in the Ivory Tower: Privatization of the University (USDLA Journal)

A good article from 2001, which argues that the more loudly traditionalists argue for preserving the quirkiness (and inefficiency) of university culture -- particularly in the humanities -- against the streamlined marketing philosophy of the marketplace, the sooner the marketplace will win.

It turns out, in the wider world, that people do not want to spend their time and money (a) meeting someone else's needs, (b) paying for work that doesn't need to be done, (c) not knowing the results, (d) not knowing what is being produced, and (e) more than they can afford. If this is the picture of academia that the traditionalists are defending, then it is doomed, and if by falling it must fall into corporate hands, then their own logic has as its inevitable consequence the privatization of education.

Why has openness so far been neglected in the field of Composition and Rhetoric? Most likely because until recently, open source has been publicly viewed as the domain of hackers, a fringe movement which has gained recognition as an effective software developmental model only in the last few years; indeed, some in the information technology industry, thanks largely to the success of Linux, now see open source as more effective for creating software than proprietary, closed source production models. The concepts of open access and open content are themselves also fairly new. The open access movement, for example, has gained most of its momentum since the Public Library of Science initiative began in September 2001. Similarly, the latest developments in intellectual property which shape a more gloomy prediction for access to digital texts?for example, the 2002Why has openness so far been neglected in the field of Composition and Rhetoric? Most likely because until recently, open source has been publicly viewed as the domain of hackers, a fringe movement which has gained recognition as an effective software developmental model only in the last few years; indeed, some in the information technology industry, thanks largely to the success of Linux, now see open source as more effective for creating software than proprietary, closed source production models. The concepts of open access and open content are themselves also fairly new. The open access movement, for example, has gained most of its momentum since the Public Library of Science initiative began in September 2001. Similarly, the latest developments in intellectual property which shape a more gloomy prediction for access to digital texts?for example, the 2002 Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act?are so recent that they have yet had opportunity to exit the publication cycle, despite advanced interdisciplinary conversations in electronic venues which have moved beyond the analysis available in Composition and Rhetoric scholarship. --Charlie Lowe --Prospectus: 'The Future Is Open' for Composition Studies: An Alternative Intellectual Property Model for the Digital Age (Cyberdash)

This is Charlie's dissertation prospectus. Sounds very exciting. Charlie is always refreshing and stimulating (except when he's obsessing about Drupal ;) ) because blogs or wikis or content management systems or individual media objects are, for him, never an end in themselves; they are just one piece in a puzzle that includes multiple different technologies and, most important, the mindset that generates the need for those technologies (and which also generates the resistance to technology that threaten the status quo).

Questions (by whom, I don't know) had been raised about my collegiality and some had reached the ears of the search committees where my applications were under review. I racked my brain for the comment or incident that could have sparked such rumors. Had I inadvertently said something in a seminar or a conference that offended someone? I've never been arrested for brawling, malicious mischief, or damaging property. I remain undefeated in schoolyard fistfights because I've never had one. I could think of no professional circumstance where a teacher or a fellow student watched me fly off the handle.

And then a light came on. I had lost my cool in front of hundreds of witnesses by signing my name to a penguin mugging. --Jon T. Coleman

--Haunted by Penguins (Chronicle)

Coleman deals with the repercussions of publishing an article in The Chronicle in which he admits he was so angry about his (unsuccessful) job search that he assaulted a plastic penguin named Lighty. Bloggers -- and anyone else who writes about their profession in anything other than a strictly professional way -- should take note.

Some of my students insist that they should be free to write whatever they want in their academic blogs -- and indeed, I don't restrict them at all. But early this term I did ask a graduating senior to address all my classes on blogging ethics and the potential drawbacks of being too confessional (or, as Coleman might put it, "honest") in one's writing. Coleman's most recent article doesn't mention that Lighty was the victim of a "drunken rage" (emphasis added) which certainly makes for a more dramatic opening. The original article mentions his continued rage, with the added observation, "now I can bench press 350 pounds". I recognize the humor in the essay, which is part of a genre in which authors are known to embellish details in order to heighten the emotional experience for the reader. Still, if you construct an image of yourself as that angry, I don't think it should be a surprise if people start treating you as if you have a bad temper -- even if you don't.

I'm sitting in class
and it hurts my ass
I stare at the clock
and watch the time pass.
Tick tock; Tick tock
the professor; I mock.

The class is like hell,
unfortunately no bell
to ring to ring to let
me be free
I can't wait
I have to pee! --Amanda Hoffer --Cover slam...whaaaaat (Hoffer's Log)

Amanda says she wasn't writing about my class... her sense of timing was impeccable, drawing a lot of laughs from the riveted students. One of the many excellent performances at tonight's "All-American Poetry Cover Slam," part of my "American Lit 1915-Present" course.

By the way, I responded by reading "Did I Miss Anything?", which predictably got mixed reactions (the education students loved it!).

This was another one of those days when I remember why I wanted to be a teacher. I also feel we had a good day in "Intro to Literary study," though the students there weren't feeling quite as relaxed about poetry -- I've been asking them to wrestle with "Prufrock," and of course they have other work to do as well. Still, all in all a good day.

Researchers are finding players can make sharper soldiers, drivers and surgeons. Their reaction time is better, their peripheral vision more acute. They are taking risks, finding themselves at ease in a demanding environment that requires paying attention on several levels at once.

While there are countless examples of children vegetating in front of the box, real learning is going on as well. Children who go online to play the World War II shooter fantasy Medal of Honor Allied Assault might last all of 14 seconds if they just hit the Normandy beaches with guns blazing. To succeed, they must come up with a plan - either by typing messages or talking through headphones to teammates whom they may never have met. --Daniel Rubin --Ahead of the game? (Philly.com)

This reporter still equates videogames with juvenile behavior -- the "cute" conclusion equates studying videogames with never having to grow up. Other than that, this is a good article, which very quickly moves beyond soccer-mom fears about computer games.

Part attention to detail, part science, part Vulcan mind meld, exegesis allows a critic to enter and extend the context of a work of art, whether it be through the useful reductions of Sunday book reviews, the half millennium of minutiae that have accumulated to make Shakespeare ?The Bard? or revelatory reappraisals in the manner of D. H. Lawrence?s resuscitation of the writing of Herman Melville....

[W]henever I see a critic taking such liberties I?m not sure if I?m in the presence of genius or insanity, but I sure do laugh a lot. Which is, I?m pretty sure, the intention: among other things, the humour of a Camille Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum or Dave Hickey makes conspicuous the subtle, easily ignored dramatic irony that informs all criticism. The idea that art?an enterprise whose primary function is to reveal the members of a culture to themselves?cannot be understood by that culture without Virgilian assistance seems, on the face of it, absurd, and this particular brand of exegesis, while often way off the mark (if not simply off the wall), nonetheless acknowledges its supplemental relationship to the text in question; its humour is inviting, yet also invites its own dismissal. How sad, by comparison, is the critic who seems unaware of the inner workings of his own profession, who acts as if he is the only one who sees Waldo in the picture and can point him out to you.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sven Birkerts. --Dale Peck
--The Man Who Would Be Sven (MaisonNueve)

Ouch! A choice quotation from Peck: "[Birkerts] can take the tiniest premise and stretch it out like a child smearing that last teaspoon of peanut butter over a piece of bread, unaware it’s spread so thin that it no longer has any taste."

I know Birkerts best as a bibliophile digging in his heels against the tide of digital culture, but Peck presents him as a kind of neo-modernist resisting the tide of postmodernism.

Can't resist adding this one... "The sentences grow simultaneously more turgid and cliché-ridden, all of which serves to obscure the fact that he is for all intents and purposes talking out of his ass."

I feel guilty for enjoying this essay so much... While I disagree with his mistrust of technology (which has lessened in recent years) I find him invaluable as a cultural critic who reminds me that I can get carried away in all that is (to me) so obviously wonderful about the Internet. But it is pleasant to read, in Peck's analysis of some of Birkerts' more complex allusions, another reminder of the need for clarity, even in intellectual essays.

Okay, one more quote...

His work, lacking even the take-it-or-leave-it premise of the significantly wackier readings of avant-garde theorists like Paglia or Koestenbaum, calls to mind the Talmudic and Biblical connotations of exegesis, in which rabbinical scholars and priests attempted to channel their congregants’ faith by means of interpretation of the scriptures, much of which interpretation claimed to be as divinely guided as the words it supposedly explained. This is exegesis of the give-a-man-a-fish kind. Its purveyors do not want to teach anything, lest they find themselves out of a job.

Ouch!

You may feel excitement or dread -- or a combination of the two -- if you have been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It's a tall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you're likely to wish you had at least three semesters in which to cover everything. --Mindy McAdams --Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course (Online Journalism Review)

I won't teach the "Newswriting" course again until Fall 2005, but I will be teaching a new one-credit "Media Lab" course that will be for those students who want academic credit for working on the student paper. Our first job will be beefing up the website for The Setonian Online, which at the moment is essentially an archive of our print content, poured in to an HTML template. We can do better than that, though, if I can manage to tap into the enthusiasm and talent my students have so far shown. This should be exciting.

The logic of the remix has made its way into consumer culture - we know that. But what we haven't yet identified is how to integrate that logic into the university (what I wrote about in my ctheory article). It took hundreds of years before the university completely adopted the logic of print as an organizing principle, and only in the late 1800s did the composition program evolve out of this logic. We can imagine assignments and pedagogy based on the remix ("adding a different and unique spin" to previously constructed arguments, writings, images, etc.). But what about the entire composition curriculum? How would a remix composition program function? What would it look like? How would students become remixologists instead of "precise" and "identifiable" figures (products of topic sentences and linear argument)? -Jeff Rice --Sprite Remix (Yellow Dog)

Check out this news item from Userland CEO Scott Young who started getting calls from Chris Allbritton's NYU students yesterday who were doing a story on blog software companies... --Student Journalists Outed Via Weblog (Weblogg-ed)

One more hazard of edublogging to worry about!

Most of what is being said regarding blogs in composition has been said before. Looking at the ?Guidelines for Using Journals in School Settings? approved by the NCTE on Commission on Composition on November 28, 1986 drafted by [Toby] Fulwiler, it seems that the basic assumptions of learning through blogging have been stamped as legitimate. Jeff Ward --Journals [and Blogging] (This Public Address)

Jeff's bulleted list is a great reminder that few things are really brand new. Of course, traditional journaling in academia doesn't introduce the student-author to the benefit of links, searchable archives, near-instant feedback from readers, etc. So there's still plenty of room for new research into blogs.

The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files. Middle-class students raised in a high-tech, service-sector economy are several generations removed from the manual labor of factories or farms.

The saga of the discovery of the cave paintings can also show students how history is written and revised. The first cave found, at Altamira in northern Spain, was stumbled on by a hunter and his dog in 1868. The aristocratic estate owner, an amateur archaeologist, surveyed the cave but did not see the animals painted on the ceiling until, on a visit in 1879, his five-year-old daughter looked up and exclaimed at them. Controversy over dating of the paintings was prolonged: critics furiously rejected the hypothesis of their prehistoric origin and attributed them to forgers or Roman-era Celts. The discoveries of other cave paintings in Spain and the Dordogne from the 1890s on were also met with skepticism by the academic establishment. Funding for the early expeditions had to come from Prince Albert of Monaco. The most famous cave of them all, Lascaux, was found in 1940 by four adventurous schoolboys who tipped off their schoolmaster. Thus children, with their curiosity and freedom from preconception, have been instrumental in the revelation of man's primeval past. --Camille Paglia --Magic of Images (Arion)

When Paglia writes and talks, she jumps from one thought to another, sometimes making tiny hops, often making grand and heroic leaps. If she were in my freshman composition class, I'd tell her to drop some of her supporting points in order to explore the others in more depth; I'm not trained in the visual image, so I'd appreciate a little more explication.

This particular text, with the words separated spatially from images they describe, disturbs me -- I have to scroll back and forth between the words and the images. What kind of a web desiner would separate the images and lump together at the end? I'm sure they weren't separated during the original talk that this printed document was based on. A baffling design choice.

Anyway, this is more than the usual "what's the matter with kids today" article that older academics can't resist writing from time to time.

Unfortunately the economics of journalism push it into entertainment. Opinions (called columns) are cheaper than news as on columnist can crank out an opinion (based on the news of others) every day without leaving the office. Editorials ditto. Big colour pictures are cheap. Add a few token journalists that crawl around writing "in depth" stories about whatever place they are in when the story is due and you can call it a paper. The need to get linear inches from each live journalist employed, even if they didn't uncover anything of interest that day, encourages storytelling - the making of a story out of nothing at all - which is what we get. --Geoffrey Rockwell --Journalism and Storytelling (grockwel: Research Notes)

Lawley is not alone in looking to blogs as a potential escape from the "course as online powerpoint slide" stranglehold of today's commercial course management systems. Charles Lowe of Cyberdash.com recently published an account of his own experience using open source weblogs (PostNuke) to support his online writing class; in a companion piece he compares PostNuke to Blackboard, and finds Blackboard lacking.

And he is not the only one coming to this conclusion. Laura Gibbs, in her blog post "Blackboard, Students and Publishing on the Web," pretty much captured the differences between a blog-based online learning experience and one provided by the traditional vendors when she said "Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students." --John Kruper --Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille's heel?  (The Electric Lyceum)

At Seton Hill, we actually have two different systems -- one for administering grades and course registration, and the other for content management. While I find our CMS cumbersome, next year I will probably use it to let students upload copies of their papers. I don't really have that much of an opinion about our registration/grade reporting tool, since I've used it only a couple times -- just to log on, enter midterm or final grades, and leave. Yes the interface is clunky and stupid, and yes it's insulting that the web-based program expands to take over my whole screen, so that I can't open my spreadsheet gradebook in one window, and copy and paste the grades in another; instead, I have to print out my grades, switch to another window, and type them in from the printed page. Stupid. Annoying. But I so rarely need to use that program that I don't get worked up about it.

While the MoveableType back end is much better designed, because I use it all the time, even the minor annoyances consume far more of my time than the major annoyances in SHU's course registration program.

Another thought... while it's possible to set up a course so that a student must participate in Blackboard forum or post on a blog, the motivation to do is smaller, since the penalties for not doing so (or simply for not doing so today) are infinitesmal compared to the penalty of not getting any courses at all. How frequently do students need to add or drop courses, anyway? Yes, that's important technology to provide, but the tools to let students do that don't have to be perfect, because students have to register for classes if they want to be a student -- just like I have to report the grades, or I'm not doing my job. The interface can be less than beautiful if it gets the job done.

While I can see that the administrators -- who are usually the ones making the decisions regarding the purchase of courseware and registrationware (sorry for the dorky neologism) would think otherwise, I would prefer that my teaching not be leashed to software optimized for the occasional (once-a-semester) administrative needs of registration.

My students can still register for courses using the university's system if I ask them to blog. But Kruper makes a good point -- if my specialty were teaching human anatomy or French verb forms, I wouldn't have nearly the motivation to learn all this technological stuff. There would be other technological solutions that would appear to meet other, more immediate, needs.

To cut to the chase:

• The game industry currently doesn't believe in "game research". You're either working on a shippable product, or you're bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation.
• There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can't be invented through a sequence of incremental, shippable products.
• Academia currently has no funding mechanism (and potentially, no tenure mechanism) to support research inventing new game genres (research that often, along the way, involves solving some hard, first class technical problems).

So neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore these hard to reach regions in design space. Who will?

Michael Mateas --Whither Game Research (Grand Text Auto)

Mateas focuses on interactive drama.

The only way to get the industry to take risks on games that explore the missing themes of human experience ? heartbreak, betrayal, anticipation, jealousy, despair, eternal hope, grief, and so many others ? is to nurture students who are inspired and who are capable of inspiring others with their vision.... If academics can help instill inspiration, then the industry will find itself compelled by its undeniable humanity to take risks on unpredictably useful projects. And I'll bet many of those projects will also become massive commercial successes.

So what's the downside? This is a long-term project. I cannot commit to a return-on-investment proposition for inspiration, for talent, for art. This isn't just about reaping convenient rewards from university-funded experimental projects, getting cheap labor through internships, or plucking brilliant designers out of short-term certificate programs. --Ian Bogost --The Muse of the Video Game (IGDA)

Before proceeding, the reader should fully understand that, within the University, esteem is defined in a special way. If something in held in high esteem, that thing has been judged likely to improve the University's rank in the greatly feared annual college survey published by US News & World Report. This rank is, of course, of great personal concern to the University's Administrators; if the University's rank rises, so too do their Careers; yet if the rank should fall, they are Toast. --Bryan Pfaffenberger --Prolegomenon to a Concise Model of the University (PfaffenBLOG)

Great satire. I interviewed Pfaffenberger once or twice in some capacity or other when I was at U.Va. (sorry, I don't feel motivated to dig through my paper archives to verify). He's a humanities professor who studies technology.

One jarring aspect of proposals to reform scholarly publishing is that, all too often, they implicitly consider 'journals' as a single homogenous entity, to which one universal publishing model can be applied. On the contrary, diversity is everywhere. In any discipline, journals range from high quality 'must reads' with high rejection rates ? which in turn result in higher costs per published paper ? to publications which add little value to the articles as submitted, and are read by few apart from the authors themselves.

Journals are also published by a range of patrons, from individuals, and commercial publishers, to learned societies who use publication revenues to support their community in other ways. Likewise, a journal might be run largely by scientists working for free, or by professional editors. Some are electronic only, some have print editions. The list goes on. Any discussion of publishing models must surely take into account this heterogeneity. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. --Declan Butler --Access to the Literature: The Debate Continues [Introduction] (Nature)

Part of a forum on ways that new technology and the open-source philosophy are challenging the traditional methods of distributing (and making money off of) scientific knowledge. Via KairosNews.

A new development in composition appears and those interested in that development use CCCC as a place to find each other, to learn just how much interest exists in the new development. Often the SIG tries to map the field, figuring out what's in and what's not, trying to locate the work in relation to other work.

For instance, in 2001, we indexed 32 sessions under the heading "Internet/Web," but the term blog (or even weblog) never occurred. Lots of "cyber" and "virtual" and "digital", but no blog. So blogs seem to be new--and some of us think they could be important for courses in first-year composition. --John Lovas --Blog Three Hundred Four [Blogs and CCCC] (A Writing Teacher's Blog)

A very informative post, not just about the growth of blogs in the rhet/comp field, but also about the structore of the 4Cs (the big annual conference for writing instructors).

Just-in-Time HandoutsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

After looking at my teaching evals from last term and talking with the boss, I can see I need to spend more time discussing my assignment expectations. I'm teaching mostly freshmen, which means they are perhaps more needy than the students in the upper-level tech writing classes I used to teach every term. But I'm a freshman too.

I rarely create paper handouts; if I'm going to design instructional material, I'd rather do something that can go right on my curricular website. The world at large simply doesn't need to know what I expect my students to do in Exercise 3, but my students do. I usually first show them the skeletal description of the assignment on the course web page, perhaps clicking them through one or two of the online handouts describing the assignment genre or major issues that are part of the assignment. I might write a refresher on the board the week before the assignment is due, and invite questions. If I get any e-mailed requests for help, I'll reply to the whole class.

My teaching strategy typically invites students to try to solve certain problems on their own first, after which they submit an ungraded draft for peer-review and/or my own review. I will then hold a more detailed workshop, focusing on a handful of issues arising from my examination of their rough drafts. Now that I have a better idea what parts of journalism, blogging, web authorship, or literary study SHU students find the most challenging, I think I'll be able to be more pro-active next time around. But for now, some students protest that, if they had known what I wanted in advance, they would have given it to me in the first place, and then they wouldn't need to revise it so much.

I do try to emphasize that as a writing teacher I am not so much interested in the efficient generation of perfect product, but rather my job is the much harder task of training them to develop a good process -- which includes the revision of multiple drafts (even if the original draft was pretty good).

Still, students want more guidance. I believe I've noticed that SHU students may have a little more trouble following oral instructions than I'm used to facing in the classroom, but perhaps that's simply because I'm teaching mostly freshmen, upon whom study guides and worksheets and checklists were lavished in high school.

A few times in the past few weeks, I've noticed that the students were hungering for a handout that I hadn't yet written, and that I wouldn't have the time to write in order to get it to them early enough to help them meet the deadline. Since I've given three talks in the past three weeks, I'm feeling a little more frazzled than usual, but I tend to overprepare my handouts because I'm always trying to add to my collection of online instructional tools.

The world at large doesn't really need to learn how Jerz wants his EL150 students to complete Exercise 4...

Here's where the "just-in-time handout" comes in. It's not pretty, but it's the process, not the product, that counts.

When students seem to have more than the usual amount of questions about a topic or assignment, I've started opening a blank word processor at the teacher's station in the front of the room, typing subject headings, and then asking the class to help me fill in the details. When the class period is over, we've collaborated on the rubric (see the "presubmission report handout" (for Intro to Lit Stud). It's far from my best handout -- it probably won't make much sense if you weren't there in the class as we were constructing it -- which only shows just how much effort goes into preparing an instructional resource for the Internet. I tell myself that it's OK for me, once in a great while, to create a handout that's just for the students of one class, and that is' OK for me to use the Internet like a photocopier, simply to distribute that handout without turning it into a respectable online document.

As I lead the class discussion and insert student comments in the proper spaces in the outline, I wonder if perhaps more students are doodling instead of taking notes. Further, sometimes I wonder whether that typing student contributions into a word processor is fundamentally different from doing the same thing with marker on the whiteboard. And if I already knew what parts of which assignments my students would find challenging and which they would find easy, maybe I wouldn't need to spend class time fielding so many questions and tweaking assignment parameters.

The wisdom bourne of experience is something I'm lacking in my first year teaching in a brand new program. Fortunately, I'll see many of these students again, and I'll get to the same courses again with new students. I'll learn what works.

Update, 05 Apr: This entry has generated some discussion on Pedablogue, Mister B.S., and CultureCat. Thanks for the great conversation, everybody.

Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kind of work that it requires for students and faculty. This article presents a qualitative case study of a Web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a taboo topic: students' persistent frustrations in Web-based distance education. First, this paper will analyze why these negative phenomena are not found in the literature. Second, this article will discuss whether students' frustrations inhibit their educational opportunities. In this study, students' frustrations were found in three interrelated sources: lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions on the Web, and technical problems. It is concluded that these frustrations inhibited educational opportunities. This case study illustrates some student perspectives and calls attention to some fundamental issues that could make distance education a more satisfying learning experience. --Noriko Hara and Rob Kling --Students' Frustrations with a Web-Based Distance Education Course (First Monday)

One of my upcoming projects is putting together an online course, "Computer Game Culture and Theory." While I assume that students who opt to take that class will have a high level of technological aptitude, I'll still need to be aware of, and compensate in advance for, the ways that my particular teaching style will have to change when transferred online.

I tend to over-prepare online handouts, adding to them year after year, adding ever more examples and explanations. One year when I filled out the syllabus in advance, with links to every handout and sample assignments to download, the students felt the website was confusing and overwhelming. The next year, I prepared all the handouts and supporting documents, but only added them to the online syllabus gradually, as the students felt a need for them. This caused a different problem, in that students felt a little frustrated that long detailed handouts appeared after they struggled with a much shorter set of instructions and produced a rough draft that, they felt, would have been better if they had known, in advance, the kind of document I "wanted" them to produce.

It's human nature to ignore the instructions, so I'm not surprised when students don't read the eight-page, densely hyperlinked handouts I sometimes foist upon them. In a face-to-face situation, I can very easily talk my way through any online instructions that are vague. I think I may have been depending too much on orally presenting information. Hmm... it's ridiculously late, but I just had a thought. (See next blog entry.)

Small academic organizations looking for publicity but lacking the funds for a web designer, teachers interested in exposing their students to feedback from real-world audiences, and individuals who simply like to write may all find weblogs valuable, even outside the setting of a composition classroom.

We already see barefoot and pajama-clad students in the classroom; I think it's high time to make the classroom more visible to the student 24/7, preparing them for the life-long learning habits and intellectual attitudes towards life that our catalogs and recruitment brochures promise they will acquire by the time they leave.

Bloggers who are excited about their work tend to intersperse required blog entries with personal ones, reading and commenting on blog entries written by students who are not in their classes; this can energize a whole community. Several students directly compared blogging to discussion boards, and explicitly stated that they did not put as much effort in their discussion boards because they knew nobody outside the class would ever read their work.

While blogging has percolated past the computer programming, new media, and journalism departments, and is making inroads in composition and literature, the potential for blogging in first year experience, recruitment, retention, and alumni relations is almost completely untapped. (Collaboration, anyone?)

(A "Teaching and Learning Forum" at Seton Hill University.) --Dennis G. Jerz

--The Blogosphere: What's in It for Me? (An Introduction)Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just presented to a small group of faculty, staff, and administrators. Mike Arnzen also presented his professional development website, Pedablogue.