Academia: May 2004 Archive Page

How can we ask our students to read great literature and then criminalize them when they respond, on occasion, with the angry bitterness of Hamlet?

Clearly, we're not dealing with the proverbial "isolated incidents" here. FEAR ITSELF is loose in America and it needs to be addressed, strongly, powerfully, by all of us who teach composition and encourage written expression. --John Lovas --[Criminalizing Writing] (Jocalo's Blog)

An important set of observations...

When in grad school, I used to have recurring dreams that I was reading and re-reading a page of some academic book. I guess my dreaming mind doesn't have a buffer large enough to store a whole page of text -- each time I re-read it, my dreaming mind re-wrote it, reflecting my developing understanding of whatever I thought the author was trying to say.

I'm having that experience now, after more about 10 days of blogging during the kids' naps, with no time in the office to sort through and organize my thoughts. I thought I had an appointment in the office last Monday, so I didn't bring my PDA charger home over the weekend, and the battery has been dead for over a week now. I even resorted to pulling out a reporter's notebook and jotting down lists and ideas the old-fashioned way, while my daughter was briefly engaged with The Wiggles or tearing the stuffing out of one of her dolls.

Anyway, knowing that a little darling may wake up at any moment, let me try to address this topic...

In high school, I worked off some stress during the last semester of my senior year by writing a serial short story in which various members of the drama club got "offed" in spectacular ways. I don't remember whether I did it before or after, but I also tried my hand at a comic strip.

Young Americans are growing up in a society that encourages them to express themselves. Thankfully we've ditched the Victorian tendency to think of children to be perfect little china dolls, but we're still not culturally equipped to deal with what happens when children express darkness and angst. Fairytales (in their pre-Disneyfied, somewhat gory, and often morally ambiguous states) served an important cultural function: they attracted the darker energies of children, in the context of bedtime stories where adults were fimly and lovingly in control.

That's no longer the case -- kids are developing huge social networks under the noses of their parents. I don't think this is, in itself, a bad thing, but it's certainly incumbent upon the parents to take as much interest in kids online activities as any other activity. For a growing segment of society, the distinction between online culture and offline culture is blurring.
The story of the teen who used a chatroom to arrange his own (attempted) murder would be an incredible case study, but the ethics of publishing all those private communications would be too complex for me to want to think about.

Well, I'm hearing toddler thumpings from next door, so my musings are going offline for now.

BTW, John, I do think you should write titles for your blog entries -- but the content is, as always, great.

Yes, graduates, as much as you love your Mom and Dad, you're realistic enough to understand, deep down inside, that they are the two most annoying human beings on the planet. And so the time will come -- I give it six weeks -- when you realize that you can no longer continue living with them. And so you will summon your courage, take a deep breath, and ask them to move out. It's only fair! They've had the house practically to themselves for years! Now it's your turn! Let THEM go work at Starbucks. --Dave Barry --Good news! You can go home again (Miami Herald -- via Kentucky, for some reason)

Now that's a graduation speech!

A student who admits plagiarising his way through his three-year degree course plans to sue his university for negligence after he was caught out on the day before his final exam.

Michael Gunn was told by the University of Kent at Canterbury earlier this month that a routine review of his English literature degree coursework "has revealed extensive plagiarism from internet sources". --'Plagiarist' to sue university (Times Higher Education Supplement)

"It's not about the money," says the admitted plagiarists's mother. Hmm...

In a society devoted to "reality shows" and rampant commodification, it had to happen some time. Late last month an independent scientist auctioned off his services as a co-author on eBay, with the promise of helping the highest bidder write a scientific paper for publication. The offer even had the added allure of a linkage with the legendary mathematician Paul Erdös. --Richard Monastersky --Hot Type: Thumbing His Nose at Academe, a Scholar Tries to Auction His Services (Chronicle)

Neckties worn by doctors can and do carry dangerous pathogens, a clever new study released yesterday reveals. It suggests a bedside visit by a well-dressed physician could dole out disease along with comfort and care. --Helen Branswell --MDs' neckties 'a health hazard' (Toronto Star)

Students might be surprised to know how nervous some experienced teachers can be at the prospect of a new class. I have taught at least 40 classes, but I still find teaching stressful, particularly after the summer break or a sabbatical. As the first day approaches, I'll begin to worry: Will my voice tremble? Will I sweat profusely? Will I forget my lesson plan? Will I lose their confidence right away? --"Thomas H. Benton" --Shyness and Academe (Chronicle)

Blogging something like this during the school year seems just too confessional. I know some of my students are still reading my blog even though classes are out, or my future students might find this post in my archives.

My teaching persona is extroverted, and I am generally extroverted with my family, but in a social context, I'm an introvert. That's not exactly the same thing as being shy, of course.

I did attend three Seton Hill parties in four days last week (and managed to drag my wife along to two of them, thanks to my wonderful parents, who came up to babysit for us).

You are a student. That should be enough to depress you in these tough economic Liberal dominated times, but you are troubled by a weightier burden - ITEC802. What you though would be a nice little romp in the woods has turned out to be tougher than finding weapons of mass distruction.

You want your life back. --Dave's Stupid Adventure Game Final (IETC 802, Macquarie University)

A final exam in this programming course is to create an interactive fiction game... the excerpt is part of the game's prologue. The original file is a PDF.

Here?s the dilemma and confusion. Asking students to conform to a print based logic in an electronic world is not teaching anyone to think on one?s own. Indeed, this kind of pedagogy translates into a continual academic stubbornness, a refusal to recognize the communication shifts we have experienced and are experiencing currently. Telling students to write according to the logic of print (whether the writing is on paper or not ? I am talking about the logic not the medium) is to force students to reject the communicative practices around them: IM, the Web, Film, TV, music, etc.
The other serious problem here is that the refusal to recognize the remix is also a refusal to recognize the nature of texts we often value and admire in English Studies (and the university in general). The Wasteland? Remixed. Shakespeare? So remixed. Las Meninas? Remixed Velasquez. Pick a Medieval text at random. It will be a remix. Newspaper stories? Always remixed (I remember my own newspaper experience at several publications? we would go through other papers looking for ideas). Literature reflects a Borges universe where every story is remixed and mixed. Spun around on a literate turntable and wondered over. --JRice --Remix etc. (Yellow Dog)

It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source. It's one thing to read Shakespeare, and then write a creative work that riffs on Shakespeare. It takes perhaps a bit more skill to read, say, The Jew of Malta alongside The Merchant of Venice, or any of a number of standard revenge tragedies alongside Hamlet, and note what elements of a common story Shakespeare kept, and where his artistry made the common story into his own dramatic work. It's something else entirely to be shown a creative work, or a marketing pitch, or a political speech, and -- without an authority figure telling you what sources the author consulted -- independently seek out the influences that were remixed and remediated in order to produce the new result.

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

One problem with remix culture is that the products of remixing are meant almost exclusively for audiences that are familiar with the sources. I had a roommate who sometimes wrote poetry or short stories that quoted long passages from popular songs. Since I usually hadn't heard of those songs, they didn't have the emotonal effect my roommate wanted them to have, so they fell flat for me and I wasn't really able to get the full impact he wanted his creative writing to have. Since he was mostly writing for himself, he didn't need to cite and explain every cultural reference, but if he were giving a speech to a local city council meeting or writing a proposal for a scholarship, it would be his responsibility to make sure that his audience understood all his references. One way to do that is to identify the source of those references.

I don't know much about music, but I have heard on NPR references to composers who "quote" each other. You can't interrupt a symphony to identify the source of a certain passage, so I recognize that some media are better suited to the kinds of explicit citation that college composition courses require.

In the early 90s, Johnny Carson did a comedy bit about psyops campaign against American troops, where the troops were warned that back home, their wives were being seduced by movie stars like Homer Simpson. A serviceman overseas must have heard about or watched that show, but changed the name to "Bart Simpson," and passed the story on to a reporter. A legend was born.

I don't expect students to arrive at college knowing everything they need to know -- if they did, none of us would have jobs.

Remixing is one thing when it comes to the creation of cultural artifacts -- but when it comes to examining facts about the world, and making decisions that may affect people's livelihoods or even their lives, the culture of the remix is sloppy and dangerous.

I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice.

Last night I got word from our ISP that blogs.setonhill.edu will be down sometime this weekend.

The reason is that the physical machine on which our blogs reside is being transferred from one owner to the other.

The new owner plans to continue service as usual, so if all goes well, your blogging pleasures will be briefly interrupted, but should continue as usual.

I'm backing up the site in another window as I type this, and the ISP is burning a copy of the whole thing onto a CD which will go along with the machine, but it wouldn't hurt if you backed up your own site, too. --Blog Outage Coming (Really) (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

FYI... since the announcement won't actually be visible on the site when it goes down.

When recruited athletes make up such a substantial fraction of the entering class in at least some colleges, is there a risk that there will be too few places for other students, who want to become poets, scientists, or leaders of civic causes? Is there a possibility that, without realizing what is leading to what, the institutions themselves will become unbalanced in various ways? For example, will they feel a need to devote more and more of their teaching resources to fields like business and economics -- which are disproportionately elected by athletes -- in lieu of investing more heavily in less "practical" fields, such as classics, physics, and language study? Similarly, as one commentator put the question, what are the effects on those students interested in fields like philosophy? Could they feel at risk of being devalued? --James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen
--How the Playing Field Is Encroaching on the Admissions Office (Chronicle)

An old article, but on a subject that weighs on my mind from time to time.

Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).

Some stats Henry shared:

• 100% of entering college freshman play games
• 65% call themselves regular game players
• 48% said games keep them from studying "some" or "a lot"
• 32% play during classes

With that many students playing, said Henry, maybe the teachers should join them. --Education Arcade, day 1 (Water Cooler Games)

Glad to see Ian is braving "The Dangers of Academic Blogging" to give his ground's-eye view of what looks like an important conference. Perhaps Wired will have more later, but at the moment I'm not impressed by its coverage.

One panel featured Wagner James Au, James Paul Gee, Warren Spector, and Brenda Laurel. What a line-up! I'd also like to have heard what Royal Shakespeare member Tom Piper had to say about a collaboration with MIT.

I listen in part because I am intrigued and seduced by what I don't know: by the Greek tragedies I will never have time to read, by the symphonies I will never have time to appreciate, by the questions I will never have enough philosophical training to ask or understand in their richest contexts.

Like many of my colleagues, I often dream about sitting in on courses that spark my curiosity. Just about every semester I toy with the idea of taking an introductory piano course, or brushing up on my Spanish or French. I have even spoken idly of shedding my responsibilities and pursuing whole new degrees, maybe in zoology or art history or anthropology. --James M. Lang
--The Benefits of Eavesdropping (Chronicle)

It's not so much the content of this essay that moved me to blog it. It's also really, really good writing... and as I see the light at the end of the grading tunnel, and contemplate my plans for next term, I really appreciate this reminder of how exciting teaching can be.

From the "Throwing it Out There to See What Sticks Deptartment" here are some very raw thoughts about the various types of Weblog posts for teachers and students and where they fit on my very indistinct blogging scale:

• Posting assignments. (Not blogging)
• Journaling, i.e. "This is what I did today." (Not blogging)
• Posting links (Not blogging)
• Links with descriptive annotation, i.e. "This site is about..." (Not really blogging either, but getting close depending on the depth of the description.)
• Links with analysis that gets into the meaning of the content being linked. (A simple form of blogging.)
• Reflective, meta-cognitive writing on practice without links. (Complex writing, but simple blogging, I think. Commenting would probably fall in here somewhere.)
• Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked and written with potential audience response in mind. (Real blogging)
• Extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on previous posts, links and comments. (Complex blogging)

--Will R. --Blogging Thoughts...Again (Weblogg-ed)

A very useful off-the-cuff taxonomy.

I'd disagree that "This is what I did today" is necessarily not blogging. How many of us have reached for a kitchen knife when we know we've got a little plastic box with screwdrivers of different sizes in a box somewhere in the basement? In a pinch, I'll use a rock if the rock is handy and the hammer isn't. Thus, a blog can still contain some traditional journaling (and some postings of assignments and traditional "lists of links") and some and still be valuable as a blog. The problem is if the educator doesn't do (or hardly does) any of the advanced things that blogs really are good at doing.

Update, 08 May: Will follows up with a good explanation of his position.

A student survey recently found that nearly two-thirds of students spent 15 hours or fewer per week doing coursework, and about 20 percent of both freshmen and seniors claimed to spend fewer than five hours per week. --Computer virus eat your term paper? You're not alone (Bellingham Herald/AP)

A puffy little piece like this just hits the spot as I struggle madly to find anything else to do besides mark papers. (Back to work!)

As a graduate student in 1980, Ms. Buckles became captivated by computers, and spent three to four hours a day using e-mail, a form of communication little known at the time outside universities and government. Although she didn't play Adventure, she saw it as an emerging literary form that deserved attention, and she began interviewing people about their experiences. "When I started, I thought, 'This is so fascinating,' " she said. "I knew I was a pioneer." --Michael Erard --Let Down by Academia, Game Pioneer Changed Paths (NY Times (will expire))

The "big finish" to my Princeton videogame conference paper was a reference to what Buckles is doing now... we corresponded briefly via e-mail after she surfaced on ludology.

I wouldn't call Adventure a video game, but I like what Erard has done with the story of Buckles's dissertation. I do think the chief weakness of her study is that she wasn't writing from the perspective of a player, and I can certainly imagine why her German literature professors were puzzled by her choice of a subject. Still, she was a trail-blazer, and it's nice to see her get some attention for her hard work. A sobering final thought, which puts my recent conversation with Eyejinx into context:

Established game researchers are familiar with the gantlet. "The response to Buckles's work from her literature professors was rather typical, I am afraid," Dr. Aarseth said. "And probably still is."

At the same time... it's overwhelming how much attention the sleepy field of text adventure studies (which used to be an obscure corner of literary research) is suddenly getting, now that it's part of the prehistory of today's video games.

I remember people saying that I would miss high school so much when I left. They were wrong in my case. I don't miss it.

I didn't belong there--I never did, but I can say that I belong at Seton Hill. I have loved every moment, learning not only from books and blogs, but from people--faculty and friends alike. Somewhere along the way, I discovered that my place is here. The squirrels, planners, disks, Diamond Age "discussions", blogging, heart-to-hearts with pals, hugs that you desperately need, laughing until your sides ache and your eyes get drippy--adding one more line to Karissa's list of funny quotes, comments that make your blood pressure rise in anger at the Paul, Michael or Puff that wants to see you get spitting mad. Every day was an adventure. I wanted to come. I didn't want to miss class (even when I accidentally did). --Amanda Reflects on Year One at Seton Hill (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

Wow... it sure looks like we are doing something right here at SHU! Since I still have stacks of papers to grade, I'm not quite into the sentimental memories of my first year yet, but when I get there, I'll certainly re-read this entry.

And while I'm feeling warm fuzzies about the success of blogging at SHU, I'd welcome your thoughts about taking the good with the bad and ugly. (The student's blogging is fine -- it's the juvenile, offensive language in the comments I'm talking about.)

Excuses remind me of The Trouble with Tribbles from the early Star Trek series: a space trader, Cyrano Jones, gives Uhura a purring ball of fluff known as a tribble. Charmed by the creature, Uhura takes it back to the Enterprise. However, as McCoy soon learns, tribbles are born pregnant and the more they eat ... and they eat constantly ... the more they multiply. Soon the starship is overrun by the furry creatures. --Beverly Carol Lucey

--The Excuse Machine (The Irascible Professor)

A grumpy professor and a reference to Trek Classic. This one was irresistible.

What's even funnier is the red-lettered statement at the bottom of this article...

Unfortunately, we had a disk crash on one of our computers earlier this week. Part of our mailing list was lost. If you have recently joined the list, or if you are on the list and don't receive a message within the next few days, please send us your information again.

Excuses, excuses!

Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game StudiesJerz's Literacy Weblog)

In a comment attached to my blog entry on The Muse of the Videogame, Eyejinx makes an excellent point, an excerpt from which is below:

Unless and until those involved in game studies seriously work with the development process (and perhaps the developers themselves), any proposals for how to go about making games remain in the realm of theory.

In the meantime, as a nascent field of study, those involved in game studies should, perhaps, strive to identify where their work falls in the criticism/craft divide.

I'd agree that theorists often make impractical suggestions, but choosing a starting point that privileges production and development over theory is naturally going to find a theoretical piece lacking. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- academics do write mostly for each other, and specialists in any field tend to develop an elite language, partly out of necessity, but partly as a social signal. (And if you think I'm only talking about the ivory towers, don't forget the 1337 h4xx0r culture.)

Most people who aren't professional athletes have a favorite team; most people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag have some idea of who their favorite actors are, and can recognize and be moved by a good performance. On the other end of the scale, theorists may call for the production of certain texts that don't exist, but that would need to exist in order for them to fully explicate their theories... thus, in literature, we have a tradition of visionary authors writing traditional books about imaginary books (Borges and "The Garden of Forking Paths," Stephenson and "The Diamond Age," even Douglas Adams and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").

People who study the history of the American Revolution aren't necessarily trying to write a how to manual for future revolutionaries... Likewise, if I were to write a paper examining the development of the cave setting in computer games, or the development of inventory-based puzzles, or the rise and fall of text adventures, I wouldn't feel any obligation whatsoever to tell my readers what to do in order to produce these games.

On another note, the best practitioners aren't automatically the best teachers, so I wouldn't be so hasty to elide the difference between teachers of the craft and practitioners of the craft. Obviously theorists need stuff about which to theorize, but their discourse does not necessarily need to be focused towards teaching other people how to create more of the kind of thing that they study... a theorist might instead focus entirely on the effect a particular work had on its surroundings, and if the article or book in question did a good job with that, I certainly wouldn't fault it for not overtly addressing ways to help game development companies make more money.

Plato wrestled with similar issues -- his "Ion" is a dialogue between Socrates and a "rhapsode," a sort of actor/orator/composer who insists that, because he tells good stories about generals, he'd make a better general than the professional soldiers. (We are meant to laugh at this overextension -- after all, since Plato isn't a professional rhapsode, so what does he know about what a rhapsode would say? At the same time I think it's meant to be satire at the expense of the contemporary military leadership.)

It's a simple truth nowadays that among the people whose lives are being affected by computer games include many who aren't computer programmers, who have never taken a course in computer programming, and who aren't very good at the kind of logical, iterative, procedural creativity that programming requires. Having said all that, I do introduce my students to Inform (the most popular language for creating text adventures), in order to get them to appreciate the effort that goes into creating, beta-testing, and perfecting a computer game.

While the computer game industry is, at bottom, driven by money, what might be called the "theory industry" is stacked with people who are very intelligent, who have been trained their whole career to think in abstract and theoretical terms, and who are completely mystified by things that computer gaming designers take for granted. These non-programmers and non-designers are the ones who hired me, the ones who sign up to take my classes, and the ones who decide whether to publish the articles I write or the books I propose, and they're an important part of the audience for all the game study scholarship that's coming out.

I was recently told by a theatre history specialist that, although my background is English lit, my book on American Drama from 1920-1950 was worth recommending as a theatre history text. Art history and art practitioners, mathematicians and math teachers, politicians and speech writers, creative writers and copy editors... The intellectual life is full of uneasy pairings.

It’s because of the existence of literary criticism as a profession that people can major in English literature (which amounts to reading novels, poems, and plays, and talking about and writing about them). It’s because of the existence of film criticism as a profession that people can major in film studies (which amounts to watching movies, and talking and writing about them). And because the students are lining up to take these courses, schools can fund “artist in residence” programs, where established authors or filmmakers can do their thing, free (for a while, at least) from the pressures of producing something that will make money. If literature and film programs limited their focus to doing nothing but producing the next generation of creative writers or filmmakers, these programs wouldn’t have nearly the cultural capital that they do; in the market economy, producers need consumers, and educated, critical consumers are probably better for the long-term health of a genre. (I’ll save the elitism/populism debate for another day!)

Sadly, commercial publishing threatens the very system it exists to support. When expensive commercially published materials cannot be bought, when university presses cannot afford to publish monographs for junior faculty, everyone suffers. Students and scientists cannot gain access to badly needed materials; scholars cannot get tenure for lack of that first published monograph. The modern university, modeled on the ideal of the Greek temple where thinkers and learners pursued knowledge so that society could reap its benefits, is losing ground to crass commercialism. At risk is the very culture of the academy. --Fat Cat Publishers Breaking the System (Syllabus)

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.