Media: July 2004 Archive Page

It's not just the dainty pressing of keys we're talking about, and none of those pansy wrist pads are involved. We're talking real, blood-circulating, bone-strengthening snapping on the machine. We're talking about the sweep and thump of the carriage after each line, the bing of the bell adding a little music. We're talking exercise not just for the fingers and hands, but for the heart and mind. Simply put, I type to stay physically fit and to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

I use typewriters because I like their names. Don't throw your high-tech Millennium terminology at me, like Microsoft (something very small, and very soft?), Multiscan 1705, SyQuest, Aip drives, Ram Doubler 2000 or Trinitron 300 ES (a bad sci-fi movie?). Give me the old names, those regal, elegant names that are fun to pronounce and have small, manageable numbers: Remington 2, Royal De Luxe 5, Penncrest Caravelle 10, Smith-Corona Classic 12. --Bill Meissner --Tribute to the Typewriter (The Classic Typewriter)

Traditional Methods are Tools, Too (PILOT Reflections)

One often hears that computers and other online instruction methods are only tools, and that they should complement, rather than replace, traditional methods of instruction. But aren't traditional instructional approaches also tools?

I just finished a week of teaching a Vacation Bible School, and I absolutely love sitting on the floor with first-graders who are raising their hands and almost red in the face, pleading to be called on. It's hard to imagine what can beat that traditional interaction!

Still, today's young people -- who use e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages to maintain, instigate, and sometimes curtail personal relationships -- may not think of e-mail as the cold impersonal thing that it appears to be when it's something you only use for work.

Teaching the Gifted Student (PILOT Reflections)

I was a little surprised to find "gifted students" on the list of subjects to discuss in an accessibility and inclusion workshop.

On the one hand, gifted students are a joy. They do the readings. They participate in class. They ask thoughtful questions.

On the other hand, gifted students can be a burden. They can monopolize class discussions. They might expect that simply being bright ought to be enough to earn them an A. They might send you multiple e-mails arguing over the half point they missed on a quiz. They demand that you justify the A- they got on a reflection paper, and insist that you list all the things they did "wrong". They never had to work this hard in high school, so you're obviously out to get them. Heaven help you if you should have to give them a B!

Gifted students aren't necessarily more mature than their peers. Sometimes high-achieving students hold scholarships that require them to keep extremely high GPAs, so it's not fair to dismiss hyper-awareness of grades as if it were motivated by pride and pettiness. It's very likely that they really do have a lot of additional pressure, beyond a desire for perfectionism or a competitive streak, to maintain the high grades they see as a sign of success.

One of the first classes I took in my Ph.D program was on the history of the English language. I knew I was learning a lot, so I was shocked when I found myself getting grades like 83 and 85. I made an appointment with the professor, and while I hope I didn't come off as belligerent or rude, I was eager to know what I was doing wrong. Little did I know that in the marking scheme at the University of Toronto, a grade from 80-89 is considered an "A", and 90-100 is an A+.

I sure felt like a grade-grubbing dweeb.

In school, I know I hated being put into groups with deadbeats who didn't carry their weight. Gifted students need additional challenges, but I think they rightly object to doing additional work simply because they are gifted. In a composition or literature class, I don't think I need to provide extra assignments to challenge gifted students. Writing is never finished the way a mathematical equation is solved or a list of anatomical terms is memorized.

While grade compression has diluted the meaning of an "A" from "top-notch, outstanding work" to "You didn't make any significant mistakes", for short assignments and exercise, I will single out the exceptional work of gifted students, to let them know I am paying attention. I grade most exercises on a four-point scale, and tell students that a 4 counts as an A, but I return their grades on slips of paper that include numbers from zero to five. It is possible to get a grade higher than a 4, but I give out 4.5s and 4s only very rarely. A few students will end up with quiz averages higher than a 4.0, but if they do, they've worked for it, and their other work is probably top-notch, too.

In the spring semester I changed the way I enforced late penalties for papers. If a student hands me a completed, properly-formatted and stapled paper at the beginning of the class period, I add a "decorum bonus" of 1/3 of a letter grade. If the paper is crumpled, unstapled, or unpaginated; if the student bursts into class 10 minutes late, with the pages still warm from the printer; if I find the paper slipped under my door a few hours after class, then the student loses the 1/3 decorum bonus.

It's kind of like doubling the price of your wall-to-wall carpet one week so that you can advertise a 50% price cut the next week, but this method permits me to grade a little more realistically. A student who is used to a 4.0 average might make some mistakes in an otherwise good paper. I can give it an A-, knowing that the true perfectionist will have turned it on time and in the proper format, and thus the grade will be bumped to an A. I don't appear to be an overly harsh grader, and the student who feels the world owes him or her a 4.0 doesn't burst into tears, yet the A- reinforces the message that the student could be doing better work.

After I've marked the first few freshman composition papers, it's usually pretty clear who the gifted writers are. Last year, when my Seminar in Thinking and Writing class had settled into a pattern that involved the five or six most active students doing all the talking while the rest listened, I told the core group of active participants that they had already distinguished themselves as active students who would probably get great class participation grades, and pointed out that if they keep raising their hands or talking among themselves, the whole class will stagnate.

I tell students who have already distinguished themselves as active participants that I will henceforth evaluate them on their ability to get the other students in the class to participate. That strategy has worked to a point, but whenever the gifted student gets excited about something, the old pattern returns. When my dean visited my classroom last term, she approvingly noted the teacher-student dynamic, but indicated that she would like to see more peer-to-peer interaction. My colleague Terry Brino-Dean asks students to fill out a self-assessment form every few weeks, which gets the students to focus on their efforts to foster classroom discussion.

My "Writing for the Internet" course has to accommodate students who are experienced bloggers and HTML authors, as well as students who can barely e-mail. While a student who is experienced with HTML is not necessarily gifted, and while a student who is not comfortable with technology may still be gifted, the diversity of opinion makes me realize I'll have to add more self-paced modules.

My last batch of student evaluations included complaints from students who thought the course moved too fast, as well as students who thought the course moved too slowly. I've asked a student who has already taken the course to serve as a mentor, which should help me give more specialized attention during labs.

In addition, I can ask the students who already know the material to help me teach it to those who don't. They'll have to cultivate a significant sense of ownership over the material if they are responsible for their peers's learning. (Of course, I'll help the student prepare, and I'll be ready to step in if the student stumbles.)

Teaching Students with Psychiatric Disabilities (PILOT Reflections)

When I was a grad student teaching a freshman writing class, a student wearing a leather jacket and miniskirt put her fishnet-stocking-clad leg up on the table and blew spit bubbles through her front teeth, popping them with her finger while talking to me about her assignment.

Maybe that was some sort of sorority initiation, but I still have nightmares about it. Another time, again while I was a grad student, on the final day of a class that I found very enjoyable, just when a small group of about four or five students were lining up to say good-bye to me, a student who had missed six of the last seven classes started screaming in my face because I wouldn't accept a paper that was four weeks late.

Student (holding hand knee-high): "I have a son!"

Jerz (cautiously): "Congratulations?"

Student: "It doesn't matter whether I have a son or not!"

Due to advances in medicine and a shift in attitudes towards institutionalization, more people with psychiatric disorders are attending college. I have had students walk out of the room when it was their turn to give an oral presentation and attack me verbally during class for my alleged slowness in solving the individual student's advising problem (something that had no relation to what the other 24 people in the room needed to hear).

Sometimes a student will gripe, or slam a fist on the desk, or stop out of the room. While it's never pleasant to be on the receiving end of such misbehavior, most students in the class can recognize when their peers step out of line. All I have to do is remind myself that this is crunch week, and I'm much less likely to take such crabbiness personally.

I don't mean to suggest that all students are psychotic and all instructors are helpless victims. Instructors do sometimes use their position of power in unethical or at least morally questionable ways. But in this post I'm reflecting on my own experience with students who seem mentally unbalanced.

I twice taught a student with a severe speech disfluency (the latest, or perhaps simply more accurate, term for what I would have otherwise called a "speech impediment), once in a lit class and once in an advanced tech writing class. The student was mostly fine speaking one-on-one, and often spoke up in class. I once asked her (in private) if she found herself stuck in a stutter, and I thought I knew what word she was trying to say, should I say it for her? She said no, just let her work her way through it. In the lit class, she was supposed to give a five-minute oral presentation. She asked whether she could use a computer to present something instead. I said yes. I imagined she would have handouts with activities for small groups, tied together with a slide show presenting the major themes, and then at the end of her oral presentation sum up what happened. Instead, she clicked through a small number of slides, then sat down.

It was really my fault. I completely misunderstood the nature of her speech disfluency.

Although she wasn't actually talking during her presentation, she was still nervous, and thus she couldn't manage a computer-based classroom activity, which is even more psychologically demanding than reading from a script. The next time she had to give an oral presentation, we spent more time planning an acceptable alternative.

When a student asks me to make an accommodation, I don't mind being a little flexible. I see nothing wrong with permitting an alternative format or giving extra assistance, as long as the student gives me reasonable lead time. But when it comes to excusing students from the consequences of late papers and bombed assignments, I have to be on guard. I don't want to reward a bright smooth-talker who has coasted on a talent for charming him or herself out of hard work. At the same time, I don't want to put up a barrier to block a student who finds it difficult to ask for help.

If the student claims to be in a crisis, I always respond as if I believe the student 100%, even if I secretly have doubts. I let the student know that whatever caused them to miss the deadline on that paper that was worth 20% of their final grade has got to be serious. Their first priority is to take care of that problem. Since I'm eager to accommodate students with legitimate excuses, the grade they get in my class should be the least of their worries.

A student who is really in a crisis will usually be relieved when I tell them that, once the current crisis is over, they can contact the dean or a university counselor, who can contact me so that the three of us can figure out what steps to take.

If the student continues to press me for specifics ("Can I reschedule the oral presentation I missed two weeks ago?"), then I'm generally less convinced the student is really in a crisis. A student who knows he or she has no good reason for requesting help will probably give up at this point. But a student with very low self-esteem, who blames him or herself unnecessarily, might also give up.

I do remind students that the university wants to keep taking their tuition money, so it's in our best interest to offer all sorts of services to keep students in school. If staying healthy means dropping a class or taking an incomplete, then so be it. If the student says he or she would rather not get anyone from the university involved, I point out that their problem (whatever it is) has already affected their grade in my class, and they're asking me to be involved by adjusting their workload somehow. When a problem starts affecting your education, that's a pretty good indicator that you're not handling it on your own.

When the student expresses reluctance to get the university involved, I point out that by missing work and coming to me to ask for an exception, they have already asked the university to become involved.

Since I'm not a trained therapist or counselor, and can't diagnose or treat their problems, I want assurance that the student is talking to somebody with the necessary knowledge.

It occurs to me that I don't want the dean to perceive me as passing the buck to her in order to avoid making a judgment call. Perhaps I should leave the dean out of it until I really need her input. I should ask the student to consult with an academic services counselor before approaching the dean.

Dyslexia in Freshman Composition Courses (PILOT Reflections)

While Seton Hill does offer an Honors section of "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" (the two-semester freshman comp and "welcome to college life" course), its other students of various abilities are mainstreamed. Students take a test during orientation, and may be placed in a one-credit lab course or a three-credit developmental course, either of which they take along with the regular STW course.

I've taught technical writing to students who were very shaky in their knowledge of English, so I do have some experience recognizing ESL issues. That means I am able to help work with students on their higher-level thinking processes, even though the drafts they give me may have small word-level errors.

But a student with dyslexia in a freshman composition course faces a difficult challenge. We can provide the student with a peer note-taker, we can audiotape lectures and discussions, and the writing center can offer one-to-one tutoring. But plenty students whose education is affected by dyslexia don't identify themselves as dyslexic, and thus don't seek out help.

A few years ago, I had a pair of exchange students in a literature class. Both participated ardently in classroom discussions, but one crashed and burned with every writing assignment. She was in tears in my office, when I noted that I am not an expert at diagnosing LD, but that I noticed what looked like coping mechanisms -- a fluency at talking through her ideas, a reluctance to draft and revise, a reluctance to stick to an outline, a resistance to structure. She wanted to think of herself as a free spirit who thrives on adrenaline and inspiration, rather than someone who has serious difficulty concentrating and planning. Since she didn't identify herself as LD, I told her that my hands were pretty much tied -- I couldn't excuse her from the work or change the criteria I used to judge her.

A few months after the class ended, I got an e-mail saying that when she was back in her home country, she did in fact get tested, and was diagnosed with dyslexia. A counselor showed her a whole new bag of coping mechanisms that were making school much easier for her.

It was one of those e-mails that you save in your "Why I Became a Teacher" file, to consult whenever you feel your enthusiasm flagging.

On the other hand, one student who relied upon an in-class note-taker started skipping way too many classes. I got a note from his academic tutor, informing me that he was having difficulty following my verbal instructions, and asking me to type them all out. This was during a period in class when we were going over student writing samples that I hadn't seen before, so there was no script that I could write out in advance. I wrote back, asking the tutor whether the student had discussed his attendance record, and suggested that the reason he was having difficulty following my oral instructions was because more than half the time, he wasn't in class to hear them. Once the tutor heard my side of it, she backed me up.

Asking the student to come to a one-on-one conference, and then sending a tape of that conference to a developmental tutor would not only help the student, but would also be an opportunity for the developmental tutor to advise me.

In SHU's "Seminar in Thinking and Writing," in-class discussion, the time- and stress-management lessons that students learn the hard way, and the bonding that occurs in extracurricular activities mean that even a student who is not demonstrating good progress in writing assignments may be gaining something from the class, and may be contributing significantly to the class culture. While students may be surprised by the extent to which college writing differs from the high school writing that earned them As, SHU offers many resources to students who are struggling.

I don't consider myself a gate-keeper, whose job is to flunk those students who aren't worthy of a college education. Still, the high-functioning students with learning disabilities that did not seriously affect their success in high school need to be encouraged to take advantage of the full range of resources that the university makes available to them.

Varying Instructional Methods (PILOT Reflections)

I wonder if I'd do a better job varying my instructional techniques if every college classroom came equipped with a first-grader to act as an early-warning system, ready to flop over on the carpet and moan at the first sign of boredom.

I love writing workshop days because there's usually little prep to do. On the rare occasion when I prepare a formal lecture, I do tend to take up the whole period (and sometimes more). After spending a week teaching first-graders in a Vacation Bible School, I learned very quickly the value of varying one's instructional approach.

Instead of a day-long writing workshop on Monday and a day-long lecture on Wednesday, split each day in half. That would also accommodating students who can't type or sit for extended periods.

Missing Class (PILOT Reflections)

Preface: Did I Miss Anything, a short poem by Tom Wayans.

Amusing: A FAQ page that I put up is the top Google hit for "missed class".

Students sometimes miss class for extended periods due to illness.

I once had a student who was a group leader in a technical writing class. She passed out assignments to her team members, then didn't show up for six weeks. This student was in regular contact with me, but her group members had little reason to believe that she would actually come back. I think I can understand why they wouldn't feel particularly motivated to work on their group project.

Whenever a student mentions a health problem, or a problem with a family member's health, even before I ask for documentation, I typically tell the student that their grade in my class should be the least of their worries. I don't mind making exceptions for students who miss class for reasons beyond their control.

Obviously, asking a dependable student to take notes, encouraging the student to keep up with the readings as much as possible, and inviting the student to participate in online activities as much as possible is a way to keep the student from dropping completely out of the classroom community. And since I design the in-class activities to reinforce the concepts that will become even more important in final projects and term papers, missing even a "fun" class can affect a student's grade later on.

Mobility as a Learning Needs Issue (PILOT Reflections)

My father has a neck injury that acts up whenever he is immobile for a long period of time. Concentrating or racing the clock aggravates his injury. Getting to sleep can also be a problem.

He has experimented with different seating postures, but what seemed to work best was if he happened to drop off to sleep in the middle of the day in front of the couch, don't wake him up -- it might be the best sleep he would get that day. His desk job with the U.S. Government was seriously impacting his health, although he could split wood with an axe and work like an ox outdoors.

If I knew a student had a similar mobility issue, I would try to schedule several different activities during a class period, letting the students know the general timeframe (so that a student who was feeling discomfort would know when the next change of pace is due). My students seem to welcome "circle games" and other activities that get them out of their seats, though I'm also aware that students who haven't done the readings welcome any change of focus, so I ration these games so that I'm not doing more than one in any given week of classes.

Circle games work well for classes that involve a lot of discussion, but classes that involve a lot of computer work would be a little harder to accommodate. Establishing small breakout groups, where students can pace, sit on chairs, sprawl across tables, or even use a cluster of couches in a lounge area would help.

If a student has mobility problems that prevent him or her from typing, then tape-recording lectures and using a human note-taker can help with the intake. Output, particularly in a timed classroom exercise, would be another issue. My own handwriting is atrocious, and in the academic crunch times, my carpal tunnel syndrome acts up. My previous department chair had a budget line for technology to prevent repetitive strain injury and other occupational injuries, so he sprang for Dragan Naturally Speaking, a voice-to-speech software package.

I seeded it with my dissertation, a few other academic articles, and the contents of my "sent" e-mail folder, so that it would have a good sense of my vocabulary. My personalized copy knows to capitalize words like Miller and Rice, since I'm less likely to talk about agriculture than about American playwrights. I rather enjoyed leaning back like Commander Adama dictating his log on Battlestar Galactica -- my words appearing as if by magic on the screen.

Getting thoughts down on the page is relatively easy, but using only voice commands to format and edit can be tricky. Navigating the web by voice is also a pain. The "fun" factor wore off quickly, and I felt like I wasn't "breaking even" until I was using the software for more than a month.

Editing the text once it's on the page can be very tedious -- I would generally switch back to the mouse and keyboard, but that's not an option not available to students with significant mobility impairment. It would make a tremendous difference to let the student know which assignments should be formatted and punctuated properly, and which can be just tossed off without any editing beyond what is necessary for clarity.

Asking that the student use voice-to-speech software is only part of the solution -- we can't have one student dictating her answers into a laptop while everyone else in the room works quietly.

Depending on the degree of mobility impairment, perhaps the student could use a trackball or other pointing device to complete an online quiz. If the purpose of the quiz is simply to make sure the students are doing the readings, I would probably try to rely more on multiple-choice and fill-in-the blank. For the essay questions, perhaps we could just converse in quiet tones while the rest of the students are writing.

Accessing a Map of the United States for a Visually Impaired Student (no answers -- just musings) (PILOT Reflections)

If I wanted to use a map of the United States in a class that includes a visually disabled student, what would I do? For a low-tech solution, I'm sure there are Braille maps, or 3-D maps that show terrain and so forth.

In "Cathedrals," a much-anthologized short story, a rather cynical sighted man who learns about the power and beauty of cathedrals while trying to describe them to a blind man. While the story employs the stereotype of a blind person as having the unique ability to "see" what the sighted characters cannot, it's an excellent metaphor for examining writing, teaching, art, architecture, and humanity in general. At the climax, the sighted man and the blind man draw cathedrals together -- that might be a way to help the student conceptualize the boundaries of the map.

I recall playing a computer game in the early 90s that let you terraform a planet. There was a lot of information to track. You could trigger what I think the interface called a "song," that would play a note to indicate the average temperature (or population density or water depth or whatever) in each horizontal band, from the north pole down to the south pole. If you left that "song" playing in the background while you tended to other matters, a sharp change in the "song" meant something was happening on a global scale.

I imagine that if I found a web page that has a good clickable image map, with alt text tags that can be fed to a screen reader, I'd be in good shape. I might download that map and personalize it with my own data.

I don't rely on maps to teach English, but I have used maps as part of a lesson in visual rhetoric. For instance, one an get a false sense of the geographic landscape of the United States through maps that show huge swaths of sparsely-populated counties voting Republican, while heavily populated areas that take up only a pinprick of space on a map vote for Democrats. (See this analysis of the Schwarzenegger vs. Bustamente contest for governor of California.)

How would one transmit that to a visually impaired person?

If it's not practical to make a physical model, one alternative would be to use sound. When the user mouses over a region, a different sound could play. Maybe the sound of a braying donkey for the Democrats, a trumpeting elephant for the Republicans. The volume or number of animals could vary to indicate relative differences. This would take some technical doing, of course.

A much more sophisticated version of the same thing is the subject of a Microsoft research project at the University of North Carolina called the Blind Audio Tactile Mapping System (BATS, though that acronym should be BATMS, shouldn't it?) I wasn't able to find a quotable prose description of the project, but I gather that it uses 3D surround speakers and "iconic sounds" such as the chirping of birds to represent a forest. If there is a forest west of the user's simulated position, the sound of birds might come from the left speaker. The volume of the iconic sound would represent distance, and perhaps the number of different birds would indicate the size of the forest. You'd be able to tell you are in the middle of a forest if there are bird songs playing all around you.

Something that is within my technical capabilities would be a textual version of the same thing. Imagine a text adventure game like this...

You are in the state of Virginia, where the lush rolling hills and soaring oaks dig their roots into the soft clay. To the northwest, hills rise to form the Blue Ridge Mountains. The land flattens out to the east, as it falls towards the Atlantic Ocean. In the northeast, the climate gets a little muggy and smoggy near Washington, D.C. (on the other side of the Potomac River).

Route I-95 leads north, through the District of Columbia and on to Maryland, and south to North Carolina.

>go ne

Northern Virginia

You are in northeast Virginia, a tangle of commuter highways and parking lots.

A mural that is part of the scenery in Emily Short's text adventure game "Metamorphoses" offers an excellent study in the granularity of textual representations of space. I recently played through Andrew Plotkins' "Shade" for the first time too -- it's a game set in one room, but the room has three distinct areas: a central living room, a bathroom alcove and a kitchen alcove. Depending on what object you interact with, the textual description differs, emphasizing those objects that are near other objects you have recently interacted with.

Hmm... something like that could be really interesting. There is a community of visually impaired computer gamers who play text adventure games (among others). I wonder if a class project like this would be a good way to introduce my students to interactive writing. One more thing for me to investigate, if only I had world enough and time.

I couldn't simply slap something like this together if I learn that a visually impaired student has just added into my class. Realistically, I'd probably check with a librarian to see whether we have (or can get) a tactile map.

After spending a bit of time on Google, I can see that Canada seems to be putting some resources into making maps accessible to the visually impaired. I might ask a few people I used to know at the University of Toronto whether they can point me to a website with online maps that might be useful for visually impaired users with screen readers.

Since my first instinct is always to go for the high-tech solution, I'll force myself to consider a low-tech alternative.

While I personally am not very into hands-on crafts, the presence in the class of a student with visual impairment would be an excellent motivator for having the class build a tactile representation of the information in question. Assuming that I wanted to present a map showing the rural nature of Republican political strongholds and the urban nature of the Democrat strongholds, we might photocopy an ordinary flat map onto several large sheets of paper. I'd ask the students in the class who identify themselves as Democrats to come up with an iconic tactile sensation (soft fuzzy fake fur? would that offend animal-rights activists) and likewise the Republicans (maybe fur would better represent the hunters' rights activists). Glue strips of this material on the map. Perhaps the more populous states could be built up with cardboard cutouts.

All these activities would be perfectly appropriate to a course in media studies. I can imagine that a student studying Faulkner, or Tolkien, or James Joyce would benefit from peer-manufactured tactile maps... such an activity would be great for the day students turn in a major paper, since most will have stayed up all night working on it and would appreciate a change of pace. If we're running low on creativity, I could at least ask a work-study student to glue yarn onto the contours of a basic line map, and use pushpins and other physical objects as icons to represent various features.

Including the Student with Moderate Hearing Impariment (PILOT Reflections)

I know a smidgen of sign language. I once rode a bus from Virginia to Texas, and happened to sit next to a hearing-impaired young woman. (Hmm... I was young at the time, too.) I learned to sign the alphabet when I was in third grade, and she could read lips, so we had a good starting point. I learned the basic concept of ASL very quickly, so much that sometimes when I didn't know the right word, I would guess, and either I guessed right, or I was close enough to understand. The sign for "forget" is sort of wiping a thought away from your forehead and throwing it away, so it makes sense that the sign for "remember" is grabbing a thought and putting it into your forehead.

My two-year-old daughter likes repeating the sign language gestures done by Maggie Stewart, the actress who plays Mayor Maggie on Mr Rogers' Neighborhood. (When Ms. Stewart and some of the other cast of the show were recently at a local theme park, Ms. Stewart sort of clicked out of auto-pilot, put down her autograph pen and spent some time signing back and forth with my daughter. The fact that my daughter toddled up to her and, in sign language, called her "beautiful" and "wonderful" probably helped get her attention!)

But there is no way that I could learn enough ASL to translate my lectures if I learned a few days before class started that a hearing-impaired student had signed up for one of my classes.

Using blogs as a way of discussing class material will help level the playing field, so to speak, but I'm going to work against my tendency to see blogs as the solution to every instructional problem.

While I depend upon the classroom bonding that takes place during informal class discussion, that bonding can take place through more physical and visual activities.

I've picked up some other tips that seem pretty obvious, but which I might not think of in the middle of a class:

• Show DVDs with the titles turned on.
• Don't turn your back to the class (to write on the board, for example).
• Speak slowly (that will be a problem with me!)

I already often send follow-up e-mails after introducing new material. Perhaps the hearing-impaired person would benefit from being able to read this material first, so that the classroom experience is less fatiguing.

At my previous job, a student did a senior project on the humor of hearing-impaired persons. An example she gave was that after Clinton's sexual history began to affect his presidency, the sign for "Clinton" changed in the deaf community, taking on some of the elements of the sign for "slippery" or "slick" (or maybe it was "waffle", I don't remember -- something else mildly critical). And I'm also familiar with the play/movie "Children of a Lesser God," which operates from the premise that sign language is a beautiful culture in its own right, one that risks being destroyed if the world at large forces the hearing impaired to adapt to the culture of the hearing world.

I'd be careful not to expect the hearing impaired person to give "the deaf side of things", just as I wouldn't single out the lone non-white student or the lone male student to give a minority report. Still, if I were teaching a literature or media class, I would try to include "Children of a Lesser God" along with, say, "The Miracle Worker" (the story of Helen Keller).

Depending on the future educational and career goals of the hearing-impaired student, I would consider how strictly I would ask him or her to conform to standard written English. I'd probably be lenient in a literature or media production course, but I'd have to educate myself on the syntax of signed English, which, when translated into written English, can be structurally very different. Asking this student to participate in informal typed conversations, via e-mail or via blogs, may help the hearing impaired student recognize the differences between standard written English and transcribed signed English.

If the student has moderate hearing impairment, and can understand conversational speech but may miss offhand comments made by students in the back of the room, then I might restructure classroom discussion so that it is more ordered. Students speaking into a microphone may begin with prepared statements, and then a panel will give their responses. Students could then break up into small groups, so that everyone gets the chance to participate in a freer discussion, but the hearing-impaired student doesn't have to strain to listen to comments lobbed from the back of the room. Students might be asked to write up a conclusion from their breakout sessions, and post it to a central location.

Actually, now that I think about it, if the students who start with formal statements were required to submit them in advance for a grade, so that they could be reviewed in advance by the hearing-impaired student, that strategy would also help students who feel uncomfortable speaking in class, who have difficulty taking notes, who regularly miss class due to extracurricular or health obligations, etc. (That may be a good example of Universal Design.)

Universal Design in Education (PILOT Reflections)

At the local Shop 'n Save grocery store, after you swipe your credit card through the slot, the green LED's light up with the message, "$9.95. Is this OK?"

But there's no "OK" button on the credit card machine.

There is, however, a well-worn arrow, scrawled in black ink from a felt-tipped pen, next to the "Yes" button.

The word "yes" does make sense as an answer to the question "Is this OK?" but obviously, many people who are asked whether something is "OK" instinctively look for the "OK" button. One checkout clerk can sense when the customer is confused -- she asks, "Is that OK?" and when you nod or say OK, she reaches around and, with an expert sense of direction, pushes the proper button that completes the sale.

While the customer is only inconvenienced for a second, when you consider how many customers the average checkout clerk sees in a day, and how many clerks there are in all the stores that use this particular machine, it's amazing how much time is wasted because the designer of the credit card machine made a bad decision.

Taking a traditional course and adding a few accessible online components to it is kind of like taking a black ink marker and scrawling an error on a poorly-designed credit card machine.

My students sometimes approach revising their papers the same way. Once I noted that a passage was “redundant,” and the student’s revision was to insert the word “redundant”, completely out of context, right where I had marked it. Other students will respond to my marginal questions, again, putting their response into the paragraph exactly where I asked the question.

To use yet another metaphor, if we stick an internal combustion engine on a horse, we don’t end up with a car – we end up with a horse that doesn’t perform as well as other horses, and a would-be car that doesn’t come close to performing like cars.

In education, Universal Design calls attention to the fact that instead of figuring out how to touch up the lessons that we’ve been using all along, in order to make them work for students with varying learning needs, it makes sense to go back to the drawing board, and re-visit the whole matter, planning the whole course so that students of all levels can benefit from it. That's a tall order. In the past, students with special learning needs simply didn't have access to college, because their potential wasn't recognized earlier on. I'm not an expert on the history of education, but mainstreaming special-needs students has significantly altered the culture of the classroom. I have been impressed by the respect my students showed to students with severe reading issues, or speaking issues, or other challenges. I'd like to build on that goodwill, and make the educational experience better for all students.

Since "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" is a shared course, I don't have the freedom to tear it apart and build it up again, but I can rethink my educational strategy. I used to teach freshman comp as a computer-intensive course. Three out of five instructional hours were spent in a computer lab. Last year, my classroom didn't have Internet access, so I taught it as a traditional class -- in part because I didn't want to become dependent upon technology.

Promoting Instruction and Learning Opportunities with Technology (PILOT) project (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I’m taking training in acessibility via Seton Hill’s Promoting Instruction and Learning Opportunities with Technology (PILOT) project. I’ll be blogging some of my thoughts on the "inclusion" unit of this online course.

• Revising Seminar in Thinking and Writing (with an eye on inclusion)
• Universal Design in Education
• Including the Hearing Impaired Student
• Seeking a Map of the United States for the Visually Disabled: A Remediation Thought Exercise
• Mobility as a Learning Needs Issue
• Health Issues: Students Missing Class, or Restricted from Writing or Sitting
• Varying Instructional Methods
• Dyslexia in "Seminar in Thinking and Writing"
• Teaching the Student with Psychatric Disability
• Accessibility and Gifted Students
• Traditional Methods are Tools, Too

This site is about TV Licensing? (the "television licensing authority") . . .

. . . and how they treat those who do not have television.

I have not had a television for many years. One would think that would be an end to it, but it isn't. One cannot simply refuse this entertainment service, without appearing to be dishonest in the eyes of TV Licensing? (a.k.a. the Television Licensing Authority or TVLA). The non-viewer does not fit into their framework. To TV Licensing? there are licence-payers and licence-dodgers and the non-viewer (with whom they really have no business) is treated as a suspect licence-dodger. Whether there should be a licence-fee at all (or the present organisation to collect it) is a new and interesting topic; however, this site is primarily concerned with how the mechanism of BBC funding unfairly affects those who do NOT have television.
--How the British television licensing system unfairly affects those who do NOT have TV (Marmalade.net)

In the UK, an impressive public broadcasting system (the BBC) is funded by expensive licences extracted from TV owners. But not everyone watches TV.

Suggested by "Non-viewer in the UK" in a comment posted to "The Disgrace of the BBC."

Academy Award-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith, who created the memorable music for scores of classic movies and television shows ranging from the "Star Trek" and "Planet of the Apes" series to "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "Dr. Kildare," has died. He was 75. --Oscar-winning composer Goldsmith dies (CNN/AP)

Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and other characters from history may soon be able to speak again, as scientists perfect techniques to recover the sound from recordings that are far too delicate to be played. --Maggie Shiels --Getting back into the groove (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

The NEA’s recent “Reading at Risk” report, which concludes that there has been a 10% national decline in what it calls literary reading since 1982, with the drop-off even more precipitous among younger age groups, is surely of concern to anyone who cares about the future of literature and a literate populace. While the report suggests there are potentially a variety of factors responsible for this decline, it especially notes that we live in an era of pervasive electronic media.

We at the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) share the NEA’s concerns, but we see the screen as well as the page as a natural venue for literature and imaginative writing. --Matt Kirschenbaum --Reading at Risk: A Response (MGK)

I added the hyperlinks for your convenience.

Those of us who love e-text can get carried away by our own hype, but reading and writing online is a subset of literacy, not its antithesis (as the NEA document seems to suggest).

The university also will create a Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes online music site from which students can download songs and course content from faculty, including language lessons, lectures and audio books.

Lisa Merschel's Spanish class will use the iPods to listen to textbook exercises and Spanish songs. Sally Schauman plans to have students record field interviews on the ethics and science of urban water conservation. --Duke to Provide Freshmen With IPods (AP|MyWay)

Warner Brothers is developing a film based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Newcomer Matthew Sand will write the script for the film version of the story, about a knight who takes up the sword against a monster.

The eighth-century tale centers on Beowulf of the Geats, who is called to slay Grendel, a monster that is attacking a Danish kingdom. The poem is known to have been an influence on J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, the trade paper reported. --Beowulf Goes To Movies  (SciFiWire)

That's the full article.

For the Old English scholars out there... does "weblog" count as a kenning?

The father of the World Wide Web was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on Friday, and said his revolutionary invention was the result of being in the right place at the right time. --A royal occasion as Web inventor is knighted (Independent)

The study followed about 1,000 people from the age of three into adulthood, and found that those who had consistently spent more than two hours a day watching TV between the ages of five and 15 were at increased risk of being overweight, having high cholesterol, and poor cardiovascular fitness. --James Meikle --Limit child TV viewing to an hour each day, study urges  (Guardian)

This is a news story based on an academic publication, so I'd need to read the whole study in order to answer the questions that pop into my head.

We don't get cable, and my kids watch almost no broadcast TV -- it's all videos. My sister or in-laws will fill up a whole tape with "Between the Lions" or "Zaboomafoo" off of PBS, and send it to us for presents.

When Peter was small, we carefully rationed his TV to about a half hour a day, but Carolyn has a huge library of videos available to her whenever she asks. Whenever she asks for a video, I will try to get her to sit to read one or two books first, and often she'll forget about her demand for the TV and ask for another book.

Sometimes I show her home movies... does that count as TV?

Peter watches less TV than Carolyn, but he's playing computer games instead (mostly educational).

My wife kept maxing her library card out, so she got a card at a different library, too.

(BTW, the library cards are mostly maxed out with books -- we have a corner of the living room that we set up like a bookstore, with the newest books cover-out, not spine-out, so the kids will pick them up when they're bored.)

Webloggers are turning a profit, sometimes unexpectedly, reports the Chicago Tribune Online. Blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo, Wonkette, and RightWingNews are securing enough advertising to turn a profit. A firm called Blogads has been connecting advertisers with bloggers and enabling them to reach an 18 to 34-year-old demographic that is dwindling from traditional media outlets. Recent surveys conducted independently by Blogads and TalkingPointsMemo finds Web logs reach an affluent audience. Blog ads are also much cheaper than the cost of those on major sites or search engines. "In my experience, and this is often attributed to a smaller and more targeted audience, ads on blogs and smaller niche sites tend to perform better," says Carlo Alvarez, director of media planning at Special Ops Media. --More Weblogs are turning a profit (Online Journalism Review)

When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper. --Adam L. Penenberg --Searching for the New York Times (Wired)

The NY Times is a great paper, but you have to register to read articles, and they quickly dissapear into paid archives. So it's not making a dent online. There are ways to get around it, but I haven't found it worth the trouble. It's also possible to get Salon articles for free (if you sit through a long commercial), but there's plenty of other good stuff online that will be less annoying to read.

With assertiveness, we’re looking at the extent to which the question is designed to favor or invite a particular answer. For example, if a journalist asks the president, “Are you going to run for reelection?”—that’s relatively neutral. Another way is to say: “Mr. President, many of your supporters are calling for you to run again. Are you going to run for reelection?” Obviously that question is pushing for a yes answer. Here’s another way: “Mr. President, aren’t you going to run for reelection?” It turns out that anytime you put a negative into the interrogative—“Don’t you think?” “Isn’t it true that . . . ?”—for some strange reason it heavily tilts the answer in favor of yes. So now we can code yes-no questions and ask whether they have linguistic features that tilt them one way or another. In that way, we’ve been able to chart the evolution of more assertive styles of questioning over time. With adversarialness, we’re interested in the extent to which the question contains information that either disagrees with the president or is somehow critical of him, or holds him accountable for his actions. For example, “Mr. President, why did you decide to do such and such?” That’s a mild accountability question. The more adversarial version is “Mr. President, how could you do X?” Obviously, it implies that there is no acceptable explanation. Dwight Eisenhower never got a question like that; that form was virtually nonexistent as a journalistic practice in the 1950s. It’s not common today, but it’s now part of the journalist’s repertoire. --Steve Clayman, interviewed by Alan Burdick --Discover Dialogue: Conversation Analyst Steve Clayman (Discover)

In traditional print journalism, the imperative is to filter, then to publish. The filtering is possible because of a daily printing cycle and large editorial and production staffs. With large, capital-intensive printing presses and a prohibitively expensive distribution system, newspapers in fact require large staffs. Organized hierarchically, these staffs funnel the information out from a center. For bloggers, the imperative is to publish, then to filter, or to be as concerned with unmaking and testing public opinion as forming it. The ethos for news and information blogs, then, is based more on values such as immediacy, transparency, interconnectivity, and proximity to the events. As a heterarchy, diverse bloggers post, cross-link, blogroll, and trackback to interact in a network, pulling ideas and knowledge from the edges. --Brian Carroll --Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere (Into the Blogosphere)

I'm slowly working my way through this collection of academic articles on blogging....

I’m not sure whether the distinction between “media” and “media formats” is a hair worth splitting. And I stumbled over “to their near vanishing point” because a vanishing point isn’t near – it’s on the horizon, far away. Should that be “near-vanishing point”? Phrasing it as “nearly to their vanishing point” avoids both unnecessary complexity and pedantic hyphenation.

As for the mission of journalism… journalism only has a mission of informing the electorate in societies where there are such things as electorates, and where freedom of the press is permitted. If you define journalism as only the kind of news reporting that takes place in a democracy that supports the freedom of speech, then you limit the kinds of social change that journalism (and/or blogging) can bring about. For much of its history, journalism has been published mostly in partisan papers that made their biases clear.

I’m not saying that objective reporting is not a good and noble goal, but it’s also true that an important mission of a news reporting institution is making enough money to pay the bills (and then some, from whence comes the profit). In light of Carroll’s statement of old media’s economic traditions and policies, perhaps instead of a democracy metaphor, a revolutionary metaphor would be more appropriate.

Since I doubt that Hunt made special reference to blogs in 1996, I gather that Carroll is applying what Hunt wrote about other media to blogs. Thus, by extension, any medium would seem to convey the sorts of values held by the creators of the content. If that’s so, then I’m not completely sure what is gained by applying that observation to blogs – though to his credit Carroll seems to address that same question in his description of how Rogers and Malhotra expand on Hunt. Fair enough.

While professional journalists work as part of a vast hierarchical team, I’m not sure I would accept Carroll’s characterization of the “lonely blogger, a single node in a vast heterarchy”. By virtue of being a node, the blogger isn’t really alone. Comments, cross-blog discussions, and e-mails from readers tend to reinforce bloggers. Those who aren’t sufficiently motivated by the kinds of responses one gets from blogging tend to drop out of the blogosphere, meaning that a certain kind of person whose writing generates a certain kind of response tends to keep producing more of that kind of writing. A journalist isn’t tied quite so closely to the love (or hate) that comes via reader feedback. At any rate, the image of being part of a network and being lonely work against each other, particularly a few paragraphs later when Carroll mentions “what Hunt called the communal ethos of websites”.

To say that a newspaper staff “funnel[s] the information out from a center” once again causes me to stumble as I read. A funnel just doesn’t work that way – it uses gravity to push grains or liquid down into the center. I think Reddy was right when he says that the conduit metaphor is so ingrained in the English language that we can hardly think of communication without it – but if we want to use metaphors (“filter” and “network”) it makes sense to avoid mixing them.

I’m not sure that one can easily say that blogs are heterarchical and be done with it… to paraphrase George Orwell, some blogs are more heterarchical than others. The culture of the A-list bloggers, and what they deem blogworthy, does affect search engines to a degree disproportionate to their numbers.

I agree with this: “Blogging and journalism do not have to be dichotomous; the two divergent schemas for understanding ethos do not have to be mutually exclusive,” but since the title of the article seems to presume a culture clash, I’m not entirely satisfied with this formulation.

I was very interested to read of Sipe’s blogging of the John Allen Muhammad trial for the Virginian-Pilot, though I’m not sure it’s clear that the blogging was the cause of the paper’s boosted circulation during the trial – the relationship may merely be associative (though Carroll seems to have done more work on that, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here.) But that brief discussion comes close to the end of the article.

I do like Carroll’s closing observation, complicating Winer’s bet with Nisenholtz (that by 2007, Google will rank blogs higher than the NY Times).

Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau's book "Walden." The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading.

After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of "Walden," I was asked by the Walden Pond Reservation police to pack up and leave and threatened with arrest. I left.

The park supervisor (Denise Morrissey, 978-369-3254) told me I could not pass out free literature without a permit. And she would not give me a permit because, as she explained, the state park gets money from a concession by the Thoreau Society, which operates a store that sells "Walden"--and I was competing with them by giving away free copies. --Eric Eldred --Free Walden (Internet Archive)

I'd try to peek through the gaps between his fingers, attempting to piece together images through the tiny trickles of light and color that broke through the gaps between his knuckles. But that didn't work very well, so I'd have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks.

And this is how I was corrupted, you see. Not because of the movies, exactly. But because I had to account for what I wasn't seeing, based solely on everything that lead up to the darkness, and everything I heard while it encompassed me. I had to imagine what led from one of Dad's "cuts" to another. --Mike Arnzen
--What Corrupted Me (ReallyScarry.com)

My colleague writes about his father's habit of taking him to scary movies and covering his eyes during the most extreme parts affected his development as a creative writer.

Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, writes in his preface to this report:

Reading at Risk merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted -- our society'smassive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information. -- most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio make fewer demands on their audiences, and indeed often require no more than passive participation. Even interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification.

The funny thing is, the report does not document such a shift. There are no results pertaining to the effects of video games or the Internet on literary reading, only rhetoric without foundation.

The executive summary similarly asserts:

Literature now competes with an enormous array of electronic media. While no single activity is responsible for the decline of reading, the cumulative presence and availability of these alternatives have increasingly drawn Americans away from reading.

The report later admits that ?frequent readers watch only slightly less TV per day than infrequent readers? and that ?[i]n some cases, TV watching may have a positive impact on literary reading.? The conclusion is that ?television does not seem to be the culprit.? But one must be found?

--Nick Montfort --Reading at Risk from Library - um, I mean Internet (Grand Text Auto)

My wife read about the NEA report in the local paper, and hit me with it before I read about it online, so I was unprepared to respond.

Thanks, Nick, for noting the F.U.D. factor here.

The first adventure game was called Adventure and ran on IBM mainframes. It became known as Colossal Caves or The Hobbit, and was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons. --Theo Clarke --The Infocom Adventure (Strategy Plus)

The Hobbit? WTF?

A transcription from a book, the full publication data of which is not given.

See my "Colossal Cave Adventure" page.

We thought a lecture about game criticism was most likely a recipe for disaster.

Straight off the bat, Matteo Bittanti, a teacher at the European Institute of Design, in Milan, proved us wrong. The very first thing he said was, "Hello. I am here to talk to you today about videogame criticism. Because right now, it's bullshit." Brandon Sheffield --GDC Conference Report V: Make Better Criticism: A Mature Form of Cultural Analysis (Insert Credit)

See also Preserving Videogame History.

Unlike the film industry, where anyone can write a script and submit it to the film studios, there is no real equivalent in the game industry – they are simply not set up, in the main, for that kind of approach. A writer does not produce the "screenplay" for a game and then a studio makes the game. A development studio creates a proposal for a game, then brings a writer on board as the project requires it, sometimes at the point of developing the proposal itself. --Steve Ince --My Fingers are Blistered and Bleeding: Writing for Games (GIGNews)

Via Grand Text Auto.

A US inventor has come up with a hi-tech way of allowing the deceased to talk from beyond the grave - by fixing video screens to their tombstones.

Robert Barrows says people could leave video messages before they died, to be played to friends, loved ones or the just plain curious from the grave side. --Video diary from beyond the grave (BBC News)

Hmm.... the web story runs without a picture of the invention, and the inventor was speaking on radio, where he wouldn't be expected to show a sample.

Okay, BBC News, let's google for Robert Barrows...

Bigfoot -- - Major Bigfoot Expedition Seeking Participation From Corporate Sponsors and Journalists

And on "barrows.com", "An adult male Bigfoot is shown here eating the entrails of some kind of animal...."

While a talented inventor may also happen to believe in bigfoot, an while these may be two different people with the same name, a good reporter ought at least to investigate. Is it any coincidence that "barrows.com" is the home page for an advertising and marketing company? The website proudly displays its 1996 web design aesthetic (gotta love those HTML frames) and is happily "optimized for Netscape 2.0".

Cf "The Final Curtain" (a hoax by Joey Skaggs, who every year sends out a press release about a huge "April Fools' Day Parade" -- tricking sloppy researchers into showing up with their cameras and notebooks.)

Whoops, my two-year old has just removed all her clothes and marched through the kitchen in a bid for attention from me. I seriously hope she outgrows that stategy in a few years, but clearly I need to log off.

"Art often gets taken down when the school is painted and they don't get put up again. So many valuable and important works were forgotten in boiler rooms, locked closets, bicycle rooms," Bernhardt-Hidvegi said.

[...]

"We went through every building, every classroom, every basement, every boiler room, every closet, and under every stage" in Philadelphia's schools and about 200 of the most significant pieces were moved to storage, Paquin said. --Art Treasures in Philly Schools (WPVI-TV)

These finds are worth $20 to $30 million dollars, according to the article. Wow!

One never knows what one will find in an attic, as some student reporters learned at Seton Hill a few months ago...

Weblogging is no panacea for writing instruction, nor for engendering greater course participation among students. But our initial study has convinced us that weblogging as a general writing activity is worth pursuing in college courses, and that understanding the wide range of generic knowledge students bring to weblogging will help instructors orient and motivate students in the use of weblogs. Our specific findings and claims are:

• Journal weblogging is likely to remediate a familiar print genre that has positive connotations, but the prevalence of this online genre will likely cause a certain amount of generic interference for instructors asking students to write notebook or filter weblogs.
• Notebook weblogging is more likely to succeed as a genre within a collaborative weblog than when assigned as an individual weblog project. Notebook weblogs might take as their guidepost online discussion boards rather than print notebooks.
• Filter weblogs have the potential to be an intellectually rich genre for students to work with, but their complexity is buried beneath a deceptively simple presentation of link(s) and analysis.

--Brooks, Nichols and Priebe --Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs (Into the Blogosphere)

I've seen many news articles and some academic essays that include a statement like "Blogs are many things, not only A, but also B, C, D and E," but where the athor proceeds as if a "real" blog is mostly A. So it was refreshing to read this article, in which the authors examined blogs as remediations of familiar academic/writing genres such as notebooks, journals, notecards, and freewriting. There's been plenty of scholarship on each of thouse genres.

Still, spending too much time examining how blogs can help us do what we already do may downplay the ways that blogs can open up student experience beyond the classroom. My students are energized when, from time to time, a professor from a different class at our school, a student at a different university, or the author of the text we have been discussing drops by to weigh in. My own talk at CCCC '04, on "Forced Blogging," did some preliminary investigation into the social networks that comments made visible (my students don't use Trackbacks, but that's in part because so far I haven't introduced the concept in any classes). The serendipity, the surprises, the community that formed in a core of committed bloggers (some of whom are still blogging over the summer, purely for pleasure) was very rewarding to some students, and generated a critcal mass that kept me from feeling that I was obligated to read and comment on every student assignment.

I am planning to introduce blogs, in a very minor way, in this fall's freshman comp course; it's a two-semester course, and we share a common syllabus, so there really isn't room to carve out a major assignment.

This article is a useful reminder that freshmen will probably not be that interested in what blogging can do for their academic writing, particularly at the beginning of term, when many are still expecting to be able to "coast" on the survival techniques (lots of plot summary and personal opinion) that helped them get through their senior English classes.

In order to demonstrate what blogs can do for students, I could, for instance, assign students to write a "filter" blog entry as advance preparation for an oral presentation. We know that Google is just too tempting to ignore when launching out into unfamiliar fields, and as writing teachers we know what happens when students quote from "onesidedextremistwebsite.com" and "specialinterest.org" -- they look for information that confirms their own biases.

I'm puzzled as to why, in the Fall of 2002, fewer students claimed weblogs motivated them to write "for your class assignments" than claimed that weblogs helped them write for "any school-related task". Aren't class assigments school-related tasks? Did students interpret the second question as referring to "any other school-related tasks"?

And, as with any survey that asks people to give their personal responses, I'd like to have seen some qualitative data to back it up. Did students who claimed that weblogs helped them stay motivated actually write more entries? Get better grades in the course? (The authors note, "We have no benchmark for measuring the success of weblogging relative to freewriting or note card taking as a motivating activity, but the initial results suggest the activity is worth pursuing, the pedagogical understanding and techniques worth developing." Agreed -- I'd love to read more in that area.)

The authors note that that in one survey set, students were permitted to chose more than one genre, so there was some motion towards collecting more information, but reducing the question to a binary "do you like subenre A or not" reduces the amount of data one can collect. I would have asked students to respond on a seven-point scale, rating their response towards weblogs in general, and each of the subgenres in particular. Perhaps those who are most likely to dislike blogs in general will like subgenre A best (or dislike it least), which may provide some insight for how to motivate students who aren’t excited by the social and networking possibilities of blogging culture.

But these are all quibbles – I’m glad I found this article. Some of the statements about the value of individual blogs vs community blogs will bear further investigation. I'd like to know what steps the instructors took to generate community, what the on campus culture is like, etc.

I wanted to try out the effects of democratization and subversion on this process of keeping a klog, and in doing so, possibly learn ways workplace practices could one day be further affected by the force of these software systems.

I also saw a visible (and documentable) clash of cultures between old and new media?perhaps made even more acute than it might be at more ?typical? large corporations because the primary, external ?product? or knowledge commodity of Time Warner embodies almost in its entirety the assumptions of broadcast or mass media, often unreflexively, as stated or even unstated truisms. --Christine Boese
--The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution (Into the Blogosphere)

The author notes that her own involvement in the blogs she is studying means the information she presents isn't unbiased, though she argues that being involved is the only way she could have come by this information. The brief digression on the invisibility of the cyborg gives us convenient point to latch on to her narrative.

I think I would rather read a good piece of investigative journalism, or a long blog entry, that presents insider information in this manner. Reading academic prose online can be very slow-going, but the academic essay is a genre with its own conventions (though those conventions developed over centuries, for the convenience of print readers). I think I would have appreciated, in the abstract, a few brief nuggets that show the kind of thing that is going to be investigated -- linking patterns? Fact checking? Harassment of bloggers at the hands of government authorities? The quote from the first day of Kucera's blog isn't enough to satisfy my curiosity, though the fact that Kucera mentions Boese does cement Boese's credentials as an insider. The excerpts from "The Other Side" seem to function more as chapter headings than integrated parts of the article -- I'm thinking particularly of the transition from Boese's brief comment on the Google toolbar's pop-up blocking ability to a blog entry discussing war panic in Erbil.

Regarding Boese's credentials, I was personally more interested to learn that Boese "was working for CNN Headline News, writing the afternoon on-screen headline ticker Mondays through Fridays") -- a detail that suggests Boese has a firm grasp on audience and rhetoric. Still, from the obligatory "what is a blog" paragraph, we find: "blog is defined as a regularly updated webpage using blogging software."

I respect Boese's desire not to get too bogged down, but it should be possible to signal "I don't want to go there" without resorting to tautology. (I "blogged" for years just by writing ordinary HTML, and doing a lot of cutting and pasting. I then created some PERL and DOS batch files to automate some of that cutting and pasting, and that gradually developed into my own home-grown PERL/XML blogging software, though I mothballed that when a student who needed an extra credit project designed for me the blogging software that I now use. But that quibble shouldn't detract from Boese's excellent examination of the tension between blogging and journalism.)

While it's true that there hasn't been much scholarship on blogs, there has been some that Boese misses in her overview. We are all still applying the tools we learned in our own separate subfields to the "new" subject of blogging. The rapid development of the Internet in general and blogging in particular means that we'll always be playing catch-up -- though Boese's description of what she calls "techophobia" at CNN makes me wonder whether the business world is any different. More collections like Into the Blogosphere and BlogTalk (I hope they publish a BlogTalks 2.0 anthology) will help us coalesce and synthesize (and that's, in fact, why I'm going to try to blog something on so many Into the Blogosphere articles.)

To continue the general scholarship tangent... much of what has been said about Usenet, MUDs, and other forms of Internet communication can be applied to blogs -- though it's very true that journalism seems to have noticed the wider effect of blogs before, say, the rhetcomp community or the bloggers themselves. Journalists pride themselves with getting "out there" on the street, ear to the ground, while academics spend more time mastering a more narrowly defined subfield in their chosen area. (That's supposed to be a nice way of admitting that academics have to fuss about in libraries a lot.)

Just as the committee-authored "official" blogs of politicians are group-thinked into a thin gruel, due to the pressures traditionally placed on the creation of "official" statements, a newsroom blog brings with it pressures that the average social blogger (or student forced to blog for course credit) doesn't face. Broadcast writers were not only used to thinking the audience as passive recipients of their product, "they also constructed THEMSELVES as passive recipients of media products, despite the fact that they were actively writing and shaping those media products every day at work. The anonymity of the “voice” with which they were conditioned to write seemed to preclude finding a voice with which to speak up on a klog."

I like "first person idiosyncratic" – Boese’s characterization of a blogger’s point of view.

At Seton Hill, many of the same students who are active in the student paper are also committed bloggers. Some have posted strong personal opinions about topics that they might later have to write about (objectively). One reporter was trolled anonymously on her personal blog for an article she wrote. Since we’re a small school, our paper only comes out about once a month, but we’re planning to ramp up the online version of the paper. Since the online paper is published within the same subdomain as the student blogs, Without getting sucked too far into the “are blogs a new form of journalism” debate, I’m continuing to watch this subject closely, so that they as individuals will understand their obligation to keeping their credibility in the eyes of the public.

Since it’s been years since I’ve spent much time in a newsroom (what with all the fussing about in libraries) I welcome Boese’s insights. She applies to newsrooms Michel de Certeau’s concept of the “wig” -- a diversionary tactic, in which workers pursue their own agendas on company time (without actually pilfering, or being unavailable for “real” work should they need to reprioritize).

Google actually has an official policy, in which employees are expected to spend 20% of their time developing their own personal projects. Of course, Google will own the intellectual rights to whatever the employees come up with, and I doubt the 20% free time extends to groundskeepers and cafeteria workers… given Google’s proven ability to mutate with the times, I think that particular practice is worth investigating in the context of the questions Boese raises.

Before you read on let me note Gmail is still the best free web mailer around, in fact you won't find any other even playing in this league. But hey, we come to expect that from Google. Some things however we do not... --Philipp Lenssen --Looking Back on Gmail (Google Blogoscoped)

Blogging away for the common good or just to keep from watching whatever crap is on TV right now. --Michael Moore --My First Blog Entry (MichaelMoore.com)

This is a welcome development... I'll be very impressed if he enables comments!

Thanks for the tip, Mike.

In the current rejection of the close-up in mainstream cinema, filmmakers seem to have learnt nothing from the past. The 1950s epics now seem stolid, and most of DeMille is unwatchable. In a few years' time, The Phantom Menace, George Lucas's first Star Wars prequel - which was filmed almost entirely in medium and wide shot - will look like one of the most boring movies ever made. Entranced by his ability to show Hieronymus Bosch-like scenes of myriad complexity, why would Lucas do anything as boring as bring the camera close to the faces of his actors? Future audiences will be un-impressed by such CGI showreeling and will be perplexed by the film's lack of foreground. --Mark Cousins --Cinematic truth lies in the close-up (Prospect Magazine)

While Jar Jar was painful to watch, I completely lost interest in Star Wars the moment rockets popped out of Artoo Detoo's legs and he flew around the droid factory.

Okay, okay, maybe his rockets don't work underwater, which is why he didn't use them to get out of the swamp on Degobah, and maybe there was too much sand on Tatooine, which is why he didn't use them to fly to Obi Wan Kenobi.

I'm sure someone has retconned this oversight somewhere.

Does this mean that future weblogs should favour image over text? To do so would be to the detriment of the medium as it is the combination of words and images presented over time that make the visual blog what it is. Yet the contributions that images can make within weblogs should not be underestimated -- they act as a way of catching our attention and turning a glance into a sustained appraisal but as the examples discussed in this paper show, images are more than mere decoration. A rapport is quickly established between images and words in weblogs where one supports and enhances the other. If blogging continues to develop as it currently is -- with images becoming an increasingly common element, it seems reasonable to expect that visual blogging will evolve from being a subset of the phenomenon and will strike out on its own -- a medium in its own right. --Meredith Badger --Visual Blogs (Into the Blogosphere)

As a textual person, I'm uncomfortable with Badger's formulation of the Internet is something that "we tend to glance at". Glancing (or skimming, or, as Jakob Nielsen would call it, scanning) is one of many strategies that we use when we access information on the Internet. If we do glance, at least some of the time we do because we are looking for something to read (or consult, or archive, etc.). I think she conflates the Internet with the World Wide Web, since usenet and e-mail existed on the Internet as primarily textual media long before the arrival of the WWW (and blogs).

Being made uncomfortable is often a good thing, so I’m not complaining about it. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of being asked to think of blogs as something to "view" rather than something to "read" -- although I noticed that Badger still refers to us as "readers" of blogs.

In my BlogTalk article, a section called "Metaphor, Language, and Genetics" touches on multimedia blogging in the context of a visual "fisking" of a politically charged news article. I appreciated reading what a visual rhetorician was able to bring to an examination of blogs. I do find it odd that the article uses the term "photoblog" only in the title of a cited work. Instead, Badger introduces "vlog" late in the article.

I'm not sure what to make of Badger's claim that the Internet destabilizes images, since she makes that claim just before introducing a series of photos, in which each one reveals a bit more about a narrative that unfolds. Is it the images that are destabilized, or the reality the image is purported to depict? Isn't narrative about telling, while images are about showing? Perhaps I'm just too unfamiliar with the rhetoric of visual discourse to know whether these hairs really need to be split.

Blogging from a mobile phone equipped with a camera opens up a new dimension entirely. Weblogs that present images with little or no commentary are certainly worthy of examination for the insights they reveal about digital culture. But the culture of blogs includes quoting, refuting, aggregating, and networking. Until we have widespread tools that can automatically sort and file information found in digital images, it seems to me that text is still a better tool for finding patterns and trends in digital media.

And while it's wonderful to contemplate what people CAN do if they had access to vlogs; blogs that show thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing images offer one perspective. But since textual blogs range from juvenile angst-fests to turgid academic prose, it’s also fair to examine the range of what people do with vblogs. That includes a range of emergent vulgarity, offensiveness, hilarity, and crudity such as found in the regular "Photoshop contests" on Fark (example: Photoshop Tim Burton's version of Willy Wonka. The virtuoso digital processing often found on this site offers visual equivalents of the fisking, quoting, mis-quoting, and aggregating at work in the textual blogosphere. Fark even has a whole set of visual in-jokes, some of them generated by combining a recent image from the news with a pop culture reference. Others are purely in-jokes (I’m thinking of “cliché kitty” and “Domo-kuns). The "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" meme of a few years ago is a good reference point, as is the image of the World Trade Center tourist (to which was added an image of an approaching airplane – a darkly comic attempt at dealing with the trauma of 9/11).

A minor note: a typo in the URL of the photo of "Kaycee" -- the URL should be http://www.logboy.com/jr/kaycee/BKhoop.jpg.

Um, has anyone here actually used MT?

The 'multiple blog' feature is pretty literally that - it's not just a mangling of category usage. Each blog has it's own config, users/permissions, templates, and so forth.

For a single user it may not be a big deal, but in a school or business environment it's a great help. And that's even considering it has pretty weak user/perms management overall. It would be a great thing to have in WP but if the infrastructure's not there, it's not there (yet?).

So while it may be possible to simulate it, that's not the same thing, esp for the majority of people who aren't going to hack PHP to make it happen.
--Multiple blogs are a reality surely? (WordPress)

A reality? No, they aren't... and stop calling me Shirley.

I was just checking to see whether WordPress has made any progress towards implementing multiple blogs. Many people who commented on this thread are thinking of multiple blogs in terms of "One blog for my professional stuff, one blog for my personal stuff, one blog for what I'm reading right now."

Yes, it's easy to fake that by creating separate subcategories within a single blog, but that won't work when we're talking about a single administrator and scores of separate users (or, in the case of the U of M, hundreds of users).

I expect I'll be stuck with MT in the fall. I'd rather stick with MT than take on the added burden of installing WordPress 90 times and having to deal with remembering 90 passwords, and having to install updates 90 times -- in addition to teaching 90 users how to blog using different software.

For the time being, I can still keep using the free installation of MT I've already got, and soon I'm going to present to my boss a budget for our software expenses (that would include the cost of upgrading MT to the paid educational version).

We shall see.

Blogging and other electronic forms of rhetorical delivery and performance will not retain their power and ability to help white people in particular overcome our institutional and other kinds of racism, as I have strongly claimed here, if the Military-Media Complex, the five communication conglomerates in the U.S. as well as others in, for example, Italy and Germany, continue to replicate ideologies unknown to them by consolidating media and therefore rhetorical power via their monetary influence over the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Presidency (both major parties), and other governmental units. --Kathleen Ethel Welch --Power Surge: Writing-Rhetoric Studies, Blogs, and Embedded Whiteness (Into the Blogosphere)

I've read this sentence six or eight times and I still can't get my head around it.

In "continue to replicate ideologies unknown to them by...", to whom does "them" refer?

And is the list of items following "by" restrictive or illustrative (that is, "unknown to them by X Y and Z, but possibly known to them by other avenues", or "replicate ideologies by methods X Y and Z")?

I'm not sure that the thesis "X can advance racism if we don't resist it in our own X" gains much additional rhetorical power if you insert "blogging" or "academic publishing" or "posting quibbles in the comments fields of blog entries". The general statement "Racism is bad, we should resist it," to which I heartily assent, pretty much covers blogging. Blogging may be an excellent platform for re-enacting the consciousness-raising exercises of a previous generation, though it may be that the average college student today already has much greater access to alternative sources of information than the college student of a generation ago.

If racism is deeply rooted in human culture, then it is no surprise that it might be found in hardware and software (along with everything else that humans do). But from what I know of lawsuits concerning racial preferences at Microsoft, or stories about offensive graphics in clip art, I'm not sure that cyberculture is any more racist than any other human endeavor. Opening the Internet up to everyone entails opening it up to racists and bigots, but we can always hope that a rational person, when faced with a ranting diatribe on one side and a reasoned rebuttal on the other, will choose to be persuaded by reason. Ideological "fisking" can certainly help in that area.

The meme that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," supports the belief that cyberspace can at least possibly be a space where communities can break through the old biases and prejudices, so of course I see the value of reminding bloggers of the possibilities.

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others. --Into the Blogosphere

Putting aside the issue of whether popular culture is distasteful, no one wants to preside at the opening of the Department of Beanie Baby Studies. --Nick Montfort, interviewed by "Mat". --Interview with Nick Montfort (E Boredom)

Brando revolutionized American acting with his Method performances in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On the Waterfront" and went on to create the iconic character of Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather." --Marlon Brando Dies at 80AP|MyWay)

A Sudden Case of 'Routine Maintenance' in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Our local amusement park has a ride based on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The trolley takes you past large-scale mock-ups of various sets from The Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and yes, Trolley goes through a tunnel.

"Come along, come along, to the castle hug-and-song," you're supposed to say to the characters at each stop along the ride.

Okay, the animatronics are a bit lame, but my two-year-old rode it four times in a row the last time she was at the park.

We went back for another go the other day, and after waiting in line for a half hour we were told we would be in the last row of the next car.

Then I noticed a flurry of activity in the loading area. A trolley rode away with nobody on it, and park attendants carrying mops and buckets walked out onto the tracks.

A few minutes later, the park mascot appeared out of nowhere, shaking hands with the people who were first in line. That's strange, I thought... wouldn't it make more sense for the park mascot to cheer up the kids who are farther back in line, in order to keep them happy?

When a full trolley returned from the ride, the kids were unloaded from it, and a bunch of park attendants started leading them in the Hokey Pokey, something in my mind realized: "This is the booby prize -- the ride is busted and they're trying to keep parents and kids from freaking out."

The park attendants would only say "The ride is temporarily closed for routine maintenance. You can wait here if you like, and you'll be first in line for the next ride, or you can enjoy the rest of the park."

My wife was very confused, until I told her that "routine maintenance" must be themepark-ese for "technical difficulties".

Can it possibly be routine to let people wait for a half hour and then send them away? Wouldn't it make sense to stop admitting people to the long ride first, if a scheduled maintenance is coming? And what kind of an amusement park schedules routine maintenence during the middle of the day?

When pressed, the park attendant only said, "King Friday has laryngitis." Again my wife was confused, until I translated for her: audio problems.

We decided to stick it out, eating our lunch in the line. About twenty minutes later, everyone else had bailed out, and we were first in line when the ride re-opened. I had brought along my new digital video camera (a Father's Day gift), and recorded the whole adventure.

It was actually perfectly pleasant... the park attendants recognized us from our previous visits, and we had brought along a picnic lunch that we would have had to eat sometime.

(See also "It's a Didactic Day in the Neighborhood".)

It's a Didactic Day in the Neighborhood: Mister Rogers and Educational Ideology (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I recently lamented that my kids are growing up without Mister Rogers -– a very sweet public television show that features an infinitely gentle father figure who wears cardigans and talks directly to the camera. (We don’t have good reception of our local PBS station.)

Someone gave us a copy of a Mister Rogers show. My wife suggested that I watch it. So the next time my daughter asked for "Mister Roberts!!" I sat with her to check it out. I found an interesting exercise in didactic drama -- a creative performance designed to teach a specific ideology.

If you've ever seen the show, you know that Mister Rogers talks without a trace of condescention, irony, or "aren't I cute, buy my stuff" attitude (like a certain purple dinosaur and even, I’d have to say, a certain fuzzy red monster).

There isn't a trace of razzle-dazzle in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood -- but I was surprised that the piano chords that signal the arrival of Trolley and the start of a trip to The Land of Make-Believe still make my pulse race after nearly 30 years.

In this particular episode, children from the local school (where the student body is all puppets, of course) have been invited to attend a field trip to the castle, but a rather stuffy and somewhat arrogant inventor (also a puppet) shows them an invention called a Learning Machine, which is a helmet that teaches you everything you need to know, replacing the need for teachers, school, field trips, and everything else.

I couldn't help but think of Doctor McCoy's encounter with The Teacher in the so-bad-it's-good Star Trek Episode "Spock's Brain" (where Leonard Nimoy spends half the time voicing lines as a brain-in-a-box, and the other half as a zombie operated by a remote control gadget... but I digress).


At any rate, when Mister Rogers informs us of the backstory, he mentions the Learning Machine with distaste. Other human (non-puppet) characters in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe express their amazement that anyone could possibly choose a machine over a field trip. Ironically, in order to support this claim, Lady Aberlin (had to look that one up) and a male character whose name I didn't catch drive a battery-powered go-cart, which the children won't get to ride if they never come to the field trip. And, of course, Mister Rogers is using television to deliver his anti-technology message... but that's beside the point.

The climax of the fantasy sequence features the inventor, wearing his "learning machine" helmet, and the teacher informing the students that they should vote -- do they want a field trip, or the learning machine?

I was perhaps over-sensitive to the dogmatic nature of the scene. It was, after all, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood... and I confess I was surprised to see how strongly it seemed the deck was stacked against technology. The inventor spoke as a stuffy academic, while none of the children actually seemed to like the learning machine. Prince Tuesday said, "My father would probably want me to vote for the learning machine," but his father, King Friday the Thirteenth, is usually presented as benevolent but pompous, so that was hardly a ringing endorsement.

Just when I was getting a little annoyed at the straw man argument being presented, timid little Daniel Striped Tiger speaks up... why do we have to choose between the learning machine and a field trip? Why not use the learning machine, but also keep teachers and field trips?

It was a simple solution... of course, budgets and limited space in a curriculum and the cost of teacher training and so forth are way too much to bring into a show designed for preschoolers.

But I've got to hand it to Fred Rogers -- who also provided the voice of Daniel. Not only is Daniel wiser than any of the other puppets, he also appears to be wiser than Mister Rogers (who frowned and shook his head when he mentioned the learning machine when introducing the Neighborhood of Make Believe segment).

It takes real humility and true faith in the intelligence of your audience (even if they are preschoolers) to make a sweet but dippy puppet wiser than you are in the show that bears your name. It's much easier, on the other hand, to use dippy puppets (or straw men) to present the "other side" -- the one you want to attack.

Update: See also, "A Sudden Case of 'Routine Maintenance' in the Neighborhood of Make Believe".)