March 2005 Archive Page

"Reality is dead," says Marx; however, according to d'Erlette[1] , it is not so much reality that is dead, but rather the futility, and some would say the fatal flaw, of reality. However, the economy, and thus the rubicon, of postmaterialist constructivism which is a central theme of Tarantino's Jackie Brown is also evident in Pulp Fiction, although in a more self-fulfilling sense. Many theories concerning predialectic structuralism may be revealed. --Postmaterialist constructivism and predialectic structuralism (Posmodern Essay Generator | elsehwere.org)

Just having a bit of fun, while re-reading Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2.

A Shanghai online game player stabbed to death a competitor who sold his cyber-sword, the China Daily said Wednesday, creating a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons. --Online Gamer Stabbed for Selling Cyber-Saber (Reuters|My Way)

But it wasn't the stabbing that created the dilemma, it was the victim's act of selling the sword (which the article says was "jointly won" by the victim and the alleged murderer).

Note that this article says person A stabbed person B, not that police have charged person A with the stabbing death of person B. The author of this article carefully sources the claim, but I'm uncomfortable with the phrasing (even if the suspect has already entered a guilty plea).

And isn't the issue here virtual property in general, not specifically "virtual weapons"?

Imagine someone coping with real discrimination -- a black tanner, say, in 1897 Alabama. To expand his business, he needs capital and access to markets beyond the black business corridors in the south. Every white lender has turned him down, however, and no white merchant will carry his leather goods, even though they are superior to what is currently on the market. Tell that leather maker that an alternative universe exists, where he can obtain credit based solely on his financial history and sell his product based solely on its quality -- a universe where race is so irrelevant that no one will even know his own -- and he would think he had died and gone to heaven.

For allegedly discriminated-against minority and female writers, the web is just that heaven. --Heather Mac Donald --Diversity Mongers Target the Web (National Review)

Well, that assumes that the minority and female writers have equal access to the technology and skills that would prepare them for success on the internet. It also presumes they have equal access to the time it takes to build up a reputation that leads to paid work.

Mac Donald notes that women don't tend to write about politics as often as men, and that some minorities might not have the verbal skills that would enable them to make excellent writers; she also raises the spectre of quotas, which was probably unnecessary.

Whether solving mysteries in text-based adventure games or slaying dragons by phone in multi-user role-playing games, many players still name the written word as their weapon of choice. --Jacob Ogles --Keyboard Is Mightier Than Sword (Wired)

Rather than wallow in text-only nostalgia, this piece places text games in the context of modern 3D gaming, so it's a refreshing take on a familiar subject.

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It's a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country. --Joshua Davis --La Vida Robot  (Wired)

Awesome story of hope, education, and transnational geekdom.

And how's this for a teaser quote?

When Luis lowered Stinky into the water for their run, Lorenzo prayed to the Virgin Mary. He prayed that the tampons would work but then wondered if the Virgin got her period and whether it was appropriate for him to be praying to her about tampons. He tried to think of a different saint to pray to but couldn't come up with an appropriate one. The whir of Stinky's propellers brought him back to the task at hand, extracting a water sample from a submerged container.

Beautiful. Just beautiful!

In terms of their reputation within respectable society, comics hit their nadir in the early 1950s. Slowly, however, the pendulum started to swing the other way.

The careers of two Catholic intellectuals, Marshall McLuhan and Father Walter Ong, illustrate how comics re-won respect in the post-war era. In the 1940s, long before his fame as a media guru, McLuhan was exciting the imagination of bright, young students by confidently linking together disparate phenomena, from modernist art to medieval theology, into a single worldview. He gathered around him a circle of fledging scholars, including a young priest named Walter Ong, who were eager to join in his quest to make sense of the modern techno-communication landscape — what we now call, thanks in part to McLuhan, the media. -- --Intellectual Marijuana: comics and their critics (JeetHeer.com)

Originally published in The Toronto Star.

Take her money and cut and paste a paper together from the internet that was so obviously plagiarised that she'd be guaranteed to get caught. And then, if I was able to get the information out of her, I'd report her to whatever her school was, and who knows, maybe even pump her for double money in exchange for not turning her in. Either way, I'd eventually be writing the story up in this blog, and sending her the link to it.

Is this harsh? Eh, I don't think so. She got the syllabus saying she'd be kicked out of school for plagiarism, so she shouldn't be surprised. Plus, I have a nice little English degree that I did all the work for myself, so I find it a little offensive that this girl for whom money is no object is buying papers like that. --Nate Kushner --Laura K. Pahl is a Plagiarist (A Week of Kindness)

Very painful to read. I can't say I agree with Kushner's approach, either, but then in my profession I have an obligation to correct and instruct, rather than publicize violations. Kushner could have accomplished what he says is his goal -- teaching Pahl a lesson -- simply by sending a private e-mail to the university. He didn't need to publicize it in this manner. It's hardly a secret at this point, so my link to the blog entry isn't going to add much to Pahl's troubles.

Because Grinnell is a small college, it'sclear that many students make postings that assume a lot of knowledge on the part of readers, and the postings range from serious to silly -- with many appearing to be the kind of thing a college student might write after a beer or three.

Another Grinnell student sent an e-mail message saying: ?The post looks very bad when read out of context, but it was all written with tongue firmly -- very firmly -- in cheek, and no one who knew him at all well doubted that it was a joke. Unfortunately, someone with no sense of proportion or context (probably an administrator, although no one has claimed responsibility for the atrocity) contacted the police about it, and Paul was arrested. --Scott Jaschik --Terrorism or Stupidity? (Inside Higher Ed)

A good article that examines the context in which a student posted a call to violence.

Columbia is introducing a new journalism curriculum. But it is doing so in a separate program, maintaining its old program, which has many of the characteristics Bollinger criticized. The new program is a one-year M.A. degree that draws more heavily on the liberal arts and broad areas of study, rather than the traditional, one-year M.S. program at Columbia, which focuses on specific skills like news writing. --Scott Jaschik --Columbia Rethinks Journalism Education (Inside Higher Ed)

As a journalism instructor at a liberal arts college, of course I'm biased, but I think this is a good step. Students can already learn the skills in internships and during their cub reporter days. What they don't have when they're on the job is the luxury of time to reflect on their achievements, and to scrutinize and dissect the forces that influence a journalist's ethics.

In 1999, I wrote about the conference in my first online journal, but since I composed entries under a pseudonym, I wrote in vague terms and ended up saying very little. Whenever I met another blogger, the encounter always felt somewhat clandestine; blogging was something we did in a back room and certainly not something we would talk about in mixed company. In 2005, however, bloggers kept their laptops open and wireless connections buzzing. Little was deemed unworthy of posting in cyberspace. --Nels P. Highberg --Blogging the C's (Across the Disciplines)

A good roundup of the blogging culture at the 4Cs. Highberg laments that it's becoming impossible to attend all the blogging-related sessions at the Cs. That's actually a good thing, since it means that plenty is happening.

--Chess Tournament Photos

I've added a few pictures to the blog entry about my son's chess tournament.

Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It's also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, blinking graphics.

Our study refuted these stereotypes. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites. --Jakob Nielsen --Usability of Websites for Teenagers (Alertbox)

I haven't checked Nielsen's website in a while.

I wonder if parents of teenagers are less likely to be web literate than younger people (who grew up with computers) or older people (such as retirees, who have the time to learn about those parts of the web that interest them)... thus, the parents of teenagers feel that their teens are web geniuses, because teens can do certain things that they are motivated to do. Teens may not have social needs and interests that drive them to learn the professional web skills that are the kinds of things that Jakob Nielsen and other web design professionals are interested in studying.

Just a thought.

Most biologists who have considered insect societies see them as models for studying altruism, with the workers looking out for the common good. But according to Wenseleers, the new work suggests that the more appropriate image is that of oppressed workers in a police state. --Susan Millius --Cops with Six Legs (Science News)

While I spent an enjoyable Easter Sunday afternoon watching the classic giant ant movie Them, I'm hardly an expert in insect behavior. This article is a fascinating case study in how metaphors condition us to see what we want to see, rather than the evidence. Consider this excerpt, which hints at a Shakespearean plot:

One queen lay immobile, as if feigning death, for 14 hours, and thus outlived all others of her kind. However, when she finally moved, she acted aggressively toward the workers and the rightful queen, and the workers killed her too.

This article, while clearly designed for the popular audience, features a hefty reference list, as well as hyperlinks to academic articles behind a subscription firewall.

The Nerd Watch Message Board is up and running! Visit an online community of LCD wristwatch collectors to socialize and share information about digital watches. --Nerd Watch Museum (Pocket Calculator Show)

I had a calculator watch in high school. It had a touch screen. This was in about 1984 -- it was awesome. I daydreamed about being able to play text adventure games on a watch, and I even sketched out what the interface would look like.

A girl who hadn't spoken to me for three years asked me to borrow it for a final exam. She returned it to me busted, and sort of mumbled something approximating an apology.

For some reason, I didn't really mind. She had given me the excuse to smash the broken watch to bits. I photocopied the pieces, and inserted the photocopy in my journal.

I won't go into all the details, but this girl had caused me some adolescent angst (not of the romantic variety, more of the misunderstanding-and-gossip variety), and I felt good about my decision not to get angry with her for it. In fact, four other girls who watched me smash my watch were fascinated by the whole thing. While I don't know that there was anything particularly macho about smashing a nerd watch, I still had an entourage of girls following me around and asking me for pieces of the wreckage. All in all, I think it was a fair trade.

Mistake: A student raises her hand to announce that there's a typo on a handout.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: Saying "I did that on purpose just to see if you guys were paying attention."

Constructive Response: Reward the student who discovered the typo. Ask the whole class to correct the error on the handout by hand. Then have them look for more typos, turning the moment into an editing exercise. --Mike Arnzen --Competence is What You Do When You Make a Mistake (Pedablogue)

Some of my offices have had peculiar shapes: 6 feet wide and 30 feet long with a sloped ceiling (once part of an attic); 8 feet square and -- if you peeked above the suspended ceiling -- perhaps 50 feet high (a ventilation shaft).

I once had an office that was like that strange floor in Being John Malkovich -- I had to duck to enter the door. I still have nightmares about one building that did not seem to have a single right angle; my office induced back pain, nausea, and existential dread. Working there was like being in a German Expressionist film from the 1920s. I was starring in the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

I once had an office -- a cubicle really -- in the physical-plant building of a major university. Gigantic machines rumbled all around me. My coffee mug sometimes vibrated off my desk. I used to pretend that I was an oiler in the engine room of the Lusitania. The room was well below ground level, and, during the rainy season, the entire floor would flood, sometimes to a depth of 18 inches. There were high water marks on the cinder-block walls from previous inundations. Mold ascended the fabric sides of my cubicle until, finally, it looked and smelled like a forest floor in the Pacific Northwest. --"Thomas H. Benton" --The Worst Building on the Campus (Chronicle)

In 1982, testifying in front of Congress before the Supreme Court had ruled, MPAA President Jack Valenti said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." --John Borland --FAQ: Betamax--tech's favorite ruling (ZD Net)

A good primer on how the US Supreme Court's 1984 ruling in favor of VCRs factors into this week's P2P hearings.

Writing liberated the life of the text from the moment of performance. It allowed the poet to reflect on and manipulate traditional forms and subject matter. Recording the chronicles of oral culture led to the development of prose, a purely written use of language. By the fifth century, the transition of Greek society from oral to scribal habits was well underway. Athens began to provide public gymnasia and palaestras so that teachers could set up their own schools for the sons of wealthy citizens. Short texts were written on scrolls or wax tablets as an aid to memorization and oral recitation. Reading was done out loud, and writing used capital letters with no spaces between words. As literacy became increasingly widespread, and more and more of the cultural heritage was documented in writing, the need to preserve and re-create over and over the traditions and memory of the society became less urgent. --Twyla Gibson --Greek Education and the Transition From Oral to Written Culture (The McLUhan Program in Culture and Technology)

A collection of excellent resources, from a set of essays designed to highlight the University of Toronto's contribution to media studies. A good summary of Havelock's observation that Greek culture underwent a slow transition from orality to literacy, and of verse as a memory aid that facilitated the oral transmission of great quantities of cultural information.

This Yahoo! Search service finds content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license. While most stuff you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors that want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions. --Yahoo! Creative Commons Search (Yahoo!)

Slashdot is aflutter with suggestions that Yahoo! is giving Google a run for its money. The CC search is great news for those who wish to share their intellectual property.

I simply can't explain the concept of the creative commons to my wife... when I mentioned that Lawrence Lessig seemed vaguely interested in a particular idea that I mentioned to him after he gave a speech at the 4Cs, my wife urged me to write it down quickly so that he doesn't steal credit for it.

Gray, a part-time worker at the Clackamas County library information network and the Tigard Public Library, sold at least $10,000 worth of library materials online in the past six months, according to the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.

According to Jim Strovink, a sheriff's office spokesman, Gray would check out books, then tap into the library computer system and record them as returned. --Oregon man searching for work accused of stealing from new job (Seattle Times/AP)

From a Slashdot post that places this story in the context of several other related issues.

Appearing as part of a sextet of high-profile directors promoting 3-D and digital cinema at film industry convention ShoWest on Thursday, Lucas said he hadn't yet committed to a precise schedule but hoped to have the first film ready for the 30th anniversary of the original "Star Wars" movie in 2007 and that he would then rerelease one "Star Wars" film per year in 3-D. --Lucas plans 3-D Star Wars (Reuters UK (will expire))

An international study of about 100,000 15-year-olds in 32 different developed and developing countries suggests that the drive to equip an increasing number of schoolchildren in the UK with computers may be misplaced.

In a report to be given at the conference of the Royal Economic Society in Nottingham this week, Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of Munich University say the research shows diminished performance in students with computers. --Robert Booth --Pupils 'do worse with computers'  (Guardian)

Since computers and the internet are part of the subject matter I teach, not just the tools I use to teach, I can't imagine teaching without computers. Occasionally I ask students in my lit classes to read from their blog entries, and occasionally I click through web pages devoted to complex upcoming assignments. But my freshman comp class meets in a room that doesn't have a teacher's station. Most of my contact time with students is spent doing traditional discussion and workshops -- though I like to prime the pump, so to speak, by having students blog their initial responses to readings, and read their peer's responses.

A bit of hope: "students with more than 500 books in their homes performed better in maths and science than those with none."

Of course, I doubt the researchers went to these students' houses and counted the number of books. In addition: the study gathered data in 2000.

I have many questions... was it having a computer that caused the drop in achievement, or having broadband/unsupervised access to the internet? I've known several students who've come close to dropping out, or who have in fact dropped out, because they spent too much time playing computer games and couldn't get their act together when it comes to studying.

The article says the paper has not yet been presented at a conference, and doesn't offer a link to the full version.

About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files, according to the most recent survey of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

[...]

Current file downloaders are now more likely to say they use online music services like iTunes than they are to report using p2p services. The percentage of music downloaders who have tried paid services has grown from 24% in 2004 to 43% in our most recent survey. However, respondents may now be less likely to report peer-to-peer usage due to the stigma associated with the networks. --Music and Video Downloading Moves Beyond P2P (Pew Interent & American Life Project)

Readers are using aggregation services like Google News to save time and find news they're interested in from one location. But the digital melting pot of news has raised questions about the need for standards that go beyond technology. --Stefanie Olsen --Tough week prompts closer look at how Google gathers its news  (SFGate.com)

Visiting the Four Seas During the 4Cs (Jerz's CCCC 05 Notes)

On my last night at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (known as “the 4Cs”), after the blogging special interest group, some of us walked through Chinatown in the light rain. What did I spy but a restaurant named “The Four Seas.”



I ogled Daisy’s digital camera (she used it to take the picture), and learned how to use chopsticks, which was much easier than I ever thought it would be.

John Lovas dropped Daisy and me off back at the Moscone Center, where we amused ourselves watching our elders do the Electric Slide at the rock-and-roll party (an annual event sponsored by one of the publishers). Charlie pointed out that the cash bar was rather expensive, and led a few jaunts around the corner to a jazz bar, where the drinks were apparently a little cheaper. (I never got into the habit of drinking, but having nothing better to do, I tagged along.)

[University of Florida] students will not be able to forward their university mail to another account, such as America Online or Hotmail, beginning in the Fall after a technology committee decided in private that too many students weren't receiving important university messages. --Stephanie Garry --[University Forbids Email Forwarding] (Independent Florida Alligator)

What's a namber? A namber is a word that acts as a mnemonic for a number. For example, 65 is drum, and 181 is push.

A namber address uses an arbitrarily-chosen list of nambers to represent each of the numbers from 0 to 255 in order to assemble four words to represent any IP address. Metafilter.com's namber is earth.frog.brown.tooth, and mysteryrobot.com conveniently provides translation and forwarding to the real IP address. --What's a namber? (Metafilter)

Don was sitting at a booth toward the back and waved as he saw me come in. The half-empty glass in front of him indicated that he'd gotten a head start on happy hour. It also portended the tone of our conversation.

"You hear that Arthur Miller just died?" he asked as I slid into the booth.

"I did. What about it?"

"Well, he ain't really dead. His spirit is alive and well and thriving in me. That's because I'm a living, breathing, sickening manifestation of Willy Loman. You, my friend, are looking at a pathetic loser."

I didn't take that as a sign of a happy man. --Mark J. Drozdowski --Death of a Fund Raiser (Chronicle)

Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging Practices (Jerz's CCCC 05 Notes)

The first panel I attended, Wednesday evening.

Lanette Cadle, Bowling Green State University, presented "Their Own Space: Adolescent Girls and the Personal Weblog."

"At Livejournal, girls rule."

67% are women, and the site features over 2 million active blogs. Yet women are under-represented in online research. Cynthia Gannet discusses the gender split between the historic concept of the journal and the diary. Cadle sees LiveJournal as a remediation of the traditionally feminine form of the diary.

Cadle referred to Bolter and Grusin's Remediation (which I've used as a textbook in my Media Aesthetics class.)

She referred to the tradition of passing around diaries at slumber parties, and suggested that accessing online journals (merely?) speeds up the socialization that paper diaries already enable.

She offered this taxonomy of diarist entries:

• Daily Log
• Vents and raves
• Links
• Comments
• Quizzes
• Memes
• Images

New to me: The "friends cut" -- a threat to drop someone from your "friends" list unless they post a comment. A quick way to find out who's actually reading your blog.

She studied the public, friends-only, and private entries from blogs written by girls 15 and 16. (During the Q & A I asked for more details about how she found these girls - they are all friends of her daughters, who mediated for her.)

She suggests that our students know about technology, but they may keep quiet. Case study: a young blogger who dislikes writing in school, doesn't get credit in school for the technical skills she's developed.

Students are developing a habit of writing, reflective habits,

Blogs enact "Women's ways of knowing."

Blogs accelerate the process of identity construction, while maintaining the fluidity of that identity.

***

Daisy Pignetti, University of South Florida, Tampa

"The Public (Blogo)Sphere: Civic Discourse and Grassroots Endeavors"

Since Cadle examined teen angst diaries, it seemed fitting that Pignetti examined political blogs - the intensely personal and the intensely political being the two kinds of blogs that the mainstream media typically examines.

Pignetti noted that the GWBush blogs have all rebranded themselves as GOP sites. This seems to short-circuit whatever grassroots push there was for Bush.

Meanwhile, the "Deaniacs" who were "desperate for change" have also adjusted their online activities.

According to Pignetti, this campaign more than any other achieved a sense of Habermas's public sphere.

She noted Joe Trippi's reason for using the internet "You had trust in strangers again."

The feeling among the Deaniacs is that blogging encourages us to try to walk in each other's shoes, which is an appealing notion for grassroots organizers.

Pignetti finds this attitude a bit idealistic for a blog used for political purposes. Nevertheless, the loose organization of the Dean campaign fits well with blogging.

She cited Dan Gillmor's assessment of the Deanblog is a "genuine community." The organization took huge risks, trusted people from the edges to run the campaign.

"So," Pignetti asked, "why didn't it work?" It's not egalitarian there (in the Bush camp), but they won. How can we start using technology to make it more democratic and a more egalitarian space?

Moving over to the Bush blog, Pignetti noted that the site doesn't permit interaction... not even in "grassroots" category. Nearly every post was signed with titles, Bush twins blog mostly listed their events, again prohibiting comments, with "posts that read a little bit more like press releases than a diary form."

The Bush sites feature no blogroll, no posts included links. A ZIP code search permitted Bush supporters to meet other supporters in their neighborhood, but the site itself did not facilitate (or record) such contacts.

Conclusion: If egalitarian discourse is more important, but the current winning model is more elitist... turn to Habermas to find out what we can use with this technology. (My eyes glazed over here… Habermas is on my "I really should read" list, but I confess it's not very high on that list.)

The political blog gets attention from the mainstream media...

Education is required, for journalists, bloggers, liberals and conservatives. Dean's campaign was a turning point, and in 2008 technology will be even more important, including blogs, but also including tech we don't know about now. This new technology will help blogs morph into something else, leading to new possibilities for personal reaction.

My thoughts:

While it's true that the Bush site doesn't feature a true blog, neither did the Kerry site. Just because the Bush campaign doesn't itself support grassroots activism doesn't mean that the conservative bloggers aren't finding other ways to use the power of the internet. (Consider Dan Rather.) And it wasn't Bush that defeated Dean, it was the Democrats, who nominated Kerry instead. I'd like to see these issues examined, should Pignetti expand her talk for future publication.

On her blog, I have followed Pignetti's interest in the Dean campaign, which she expresses both through scholarship and her own political activism.

In the classroom I strive to maintain a neutral pose on most issues, which sometimes infuriates my students since I won't give my opinion. I tell them that I do have political convictions, that I did vote, and that I think certain things are right and certain things are wrong. But I'm more interested in getting everyone in the class to think about alternatives, other ways of "knowing," and respectful conversations. I tell my students that it is impossible for a human being to be completely unbiased, but that if we are aware of our biases, and we make a conscious effort to account for them, then we can be fair. (At the very least, we'll be more aware of biased news coverage.)


***

Clancy Ratliff, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, "The Parental is Political: Gender, Punditry, and Weblogs."


Ratliff mentioned that the community norms of blogging are traceable to the norms that had formed around forums and other electronic spaces. But she suggested that blogs provide authors with a little more opportunity to talk with people who disagree with you. Discussion boards focused on feminism or environmentalism tend to have a homogenous community "with a little wiggle room" where debate might take place, but where radically opposed opinions aren't likely to be prominent.

By contrast, a blogger typically features a a blogroll may have links to people farther on the left than you and on the right... but a traditional e-forum would assume that someone voicing a different opinion is a troll.

Ratliff mentioned the recurring online meme, where are the women political bloggers? She observed that bloggers have found that "being sexy gets you readers," and referred to gendered terms such as link whore and link slut.

She suggested, without wholly embracing, a few ways that men and women are generally considered to differ: women are more reflective, men are more like pundits, making pronouncements. Because men use more violent images and more sports metaphors, they may tend to spark rebuttals more than women do.

Other reasons why there may be fewer female political pundits: women use pseudonyms more than men (thus they may be out there in the blogosphere, but because they aren't identifying themselves as females, they are uncountable).

Women aren't perceived as blogging about politics… but Ratliff mentioned a Bitch Ph.D. blog that made a political point through telling a story about a mother's encounter with rats. At first glance, it appears to be a personal anecdote, of the kind found on the "mommy blog," but it is political, even if it doesn't mention legislation or name names (as a more overtly political male blogger is presumably more likely to do).

(Incidentally, James Lileks has a habit of blends political punditry with personal material more closely associated with the feminine diaristic style of writing would probably be productive. He alternates between venom-dipped fisks and charming stories about his daughter "Gnat." Some of the writing he did right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks were extremely powerful rhetorical constructions that clearly resonated with scores of bloggers who linked to his work.)

This line was in my notes. I don't know what it means: "Hrring, Computer Mediated Communication" Was that supposed to be "hiring"? (Any ideas, Clancy?)

Ratlilff noted that in most online communication contexts, the minority gender conforms to the majority gender. Thus, she queried the stereotypes of the informative male and the interactive female.
Like Pignetti, Ratliff concluded with a gesture towards Habermas - but thankfully for me, went on to note that Habermas finds that the public political sphere emerges with the decline of the monarchy, and that competing private interests has led to the decline of the public sphere.

A few personal notes:

I've seen Clancy speak before, but this time I was struck by how clearly her rhetorical training influenced the delivery of her speech. She started off with a careful preview - what I call the "blueprint" - telling her audience she is about to say. I don't think I've ever heard her say "umm" or lose a thought in the middle of a sentence, which is something I fear I do far too often. During a brief period of time when carpal tunnel syndrome forced me to dictate my comments on student papers, I found that my classroom presentation style improved dramatically.

Last year, when I first met Clancy, after having interacted with her for a long time on KairosNews, she said that she expected me to be "a big burly lumberjack guy, with a full, thick beard," and attributed her expectation to my opinionated writing style. (Since then I've grown a beard, though I like keeping it trimmed.)

Brief Reflection on All Three Sessions
The private, the political, and gender in the SHU blogosphere

I'm increasingly seeing students who come to my classes with years of experience blogging in a social context. They sometimes struggle to learn the proper register for writing an academic blog, but so far all the students who have identified themselves as committed personal blogger have been able to develop the additional skill that enables them to write more professionally when necessary.

We have a blog for the College Republicans, but no opposing group has requested a blog. One student recently presented a liberal opinion, using a few rhetorical questions in his post, and including an attack on the Catholic church. When a few conservative bloggers responded with answers to those questions, he felt he was being attacked, and deleted their comments. A different student (whose opinions are moderate-to-liberal) gently pointed out that deleting opinions that you disagree with is missing the point of having a blog in the first place.

Most students at SHU, and most student bloggers at SHU, are women. The male bloggers who are the most active on the site include two professors and one student who has never taken one of my classes. Most of the "bloginators" (the committed bloggers who write far more than the syllabus requires) are women. On average, the men write fewer entries, but for some reason they attract a disproportionately higher number of comments per post.

A great panel, and a wonderful way to start off my CCCC experience.

Calling All Bloggers -- Friday Special Interest Group (Jerz's CCCC 05 Notes)

Friday evening's "Calling all Bloggers" special interest group, organized by Charles Lowe, was an energetic and productive hour.

I facilitated a breakout session on institutional blogging, where we discussed ways that blogs might be useful for building an instructional archive to be used by the dozens of writing instructors at Weber State U, or for a service-learning project at Western Kentucky U. We commiserated a bit about over our observation that, while some students take to blogging immediately, some students aren't sufficiently motivated to do any kind of work, regardless of format.

The time one spends trying to motivate the disinterested detracts from the time one can spend challenging the motivated, and since teachers are human and we don't like to feel our efforts are unappreciated or wasted, our natural tendency is to want to spend time with the motivated students.

I was pleased to find former National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) chair and accomplished blogger John Lovas was in attendance. In response to a subgroup's concerns about the role blogging could and should play in hiring, promotions, and tenure, Lovas suggested that we lobby the NCTE leadership to produce a statement that guides hiring and promotion committees in the assessment of blogs, wikis, and other developing modes of scholarly dissemination. This November, the NCTE meets in Pittsburgh, within commuting distance from Seton Hill.

Thinking on a very different scale, I suggested that educational bloggers start developing the habit of occasionally dropping by and posting comments on blogs written by the students of our colleagues. Students often report feeling very proud when they get their first comment, or their first comment from a stranger.

While I was fairly proud of my clever suggestion, Lowe's was even more brilliant. Yes, if we band together and help each other's students realize that they are being read, we can try a similar tactic to convince our non-blogging colleagues that blogs can be an important part of scholarly discourse. But he suggested that we start a habit of reviewing each other's blogs in journal articles. Tech-friendly journals such as Kairos and CCC Online are the natural places to start, but if more traditional journals start getting submissions in which scholars review blogs, at the very least we'll be putting the subject before the gatekeepers of our academic discourse.

The Maltese Falcon: Questions I Wish I had Asked My Father (Jerz's CCCC 05 Notes)

This was a personal and literary reflection by Jo Hammett, the daughter of noir detective novelist Dasheill Hammett. The novel and movie The Maltese Falcon are set in San Francisco, so a conference session on the subject seemed appropriate.

After the commanding performance of a master storyteller like Perl, making the transition to Hammett's low-key presentation was difficult -- especially because the acoustics of today's sessions were no better than they were yesterday.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed her identification of the voice and personality of the narrator in what seems at first glance a novel told through Sam Spade's senses. I just might include a noir novel in my next 20thC American Lit class. It might be just the thing to help reduce midterm stress.

Breaking the Cycle of Hate: A Teacher's Journey (Jerz's CCCC 05 Notes)

I met Sondra Perl on the shuttle ride from the airport. She told me her presentation would be on her experience talking about the Holocaust with writing students in Austria. Since Seton Hill has a National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, we exchanged cards and I told her I'd suggest her name as a possible future speaker.

Her description of her journey from an angry woman, uncomfortable with her identity as an ethnic Jew in Austria, among those whose parents were Nazis. She asked her students to reflect on their attitudes towards their own past, and in the process found that her own reflective process taught her much more about herself than she expected. She did not experience the horrors of the Holocaust first-hand, neither did her parents; yet she was taught from an early age to hate Nazis, and by extension, all Germans and Austrians.

The most emotional part of her talk, for me, came in response to a question from an audience member. While she herself does not see how it is possible for the generation that lived through the Holocaust to forgive, she says she feels it's the obligation of the second generation to start taking steps so that the third generation does not perpetuate the hatred. For instance, she described one of her adult students inviting her to dinner with her in-laws -- an elderly couple who had been members of the Nazi party.

Perl said she couldn't think of how to start the conversation, other than asking the couple to tell their story, which they did. The dinner was well underway when one of them asked why they were so curious about life in Austria during the war, and Perl and her student replied, in German, "We are Jews."

The old mother-in-law put her head down and said nothing for a while. Then she said, "It happened."

While that simple statement cannot undo the wrongs of the past, and didn't seem to satisfy all of Perls's emotional needs at the present, Perl was insightful enough to recognize the momentous value of that admission in the eyes of the teenaged granddaughter who was eating dinner with them.

This young girl saw Jews and Nazis breaking bread together -- a powerful image capable of restoring one's faith in humanity.

My notes stop at that point -- I sat there, stunned by the sheer power of hope.

Writing Teachers Writing New Media (Jerz's CCCC 05 Notes)

"What did you guys do to earn walls?" -overheard during the (long) setup for this presentation.

Hoping to find an opportunity to continue the discussion of the intellectual property issues Lawrence Lessig raised on Thursday, I attended "Writing Teachers Writing New Media," where three young presenters from The Ohio State University (Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Jason Palmeri, and another presenter filling in for Rita Rich -- sorry, I didn't catch his name) discussed the physical spaces in which their students created digital work, describing the ways they changed a writing lab in order to facilitate digital collaboration, and describing the resistance they encountered, as well as their successes.

I arrived a few minutes late, but the session actually didn't get started for about another 10 minutes. The presenters wanted to have two screens going at once, one for a traditional electronic slideshow, and another to show student multimedia presentations. While it all worked out in the end, the beginning was very rocky.

The presenters spoke in glowing terms of the online archive of digital creativity their work produces, and were justifiably proud of their students’ contributions. I noticed that a few presentations gave credit to the original source of remixed material, but the presenters themselves did not address any copyright or intellectual property issues.

During the Q & A, I asked what steps they had taken in order to deal with intellectual property issues. The presenters admitted that they hadn't been systematic about it. After learning that none of the presenters had attended Lessig's talk, I mentioned a few of Lessig’s points, particularly his criticism of both extremes of the intellectual property debate.

A young woman sitting in front of me huffed, "Screw the motion picture industry!"

Though I presume that she had not attended Lessig's talk either, her dismissive and naive attitude precisely illustrated what educators are up against. Lessig argued that extremism begets extremism – that the draconian efforts to control digital property spark equally extreme acts of defiance, and that neither extreme is a sensible, sustainable course of action.

When I taught Writing for the Internet last term, I let my students know that I expected them to cite all the material they took from other sources, but next time I think I might require them to use material that they scanned themselves from out-of-copyright sources, material that they can prove they've requested and received permission for use, or material with an appropriate creative common license.

While the "fair use" clause supports the use of copyrighted material for critical and satirical purposes, young people are so inundated by the committee-produced, financially-driven culture that dominates their televisions that perhaps it would be a good idea to encourage them to look at the creative commons, and instead of creating a work that remixes content that has been bought and paid for by Hollywood, instead remix the creative output of other people like them.

Finally getting around to blogging some notes about sessions I've attended. I don't know if the overall quality of the conference has improved or if I just really know how to pick 'em, but all the sessions I've attended so far have been great. The first session I attended was "Evaluating Academic Weblogs: Using Empirical Data to Assess Pedagogy and Student Achievement." -- Clancy Ratliff --CCCC, Day 1, Session 1 (CultureCat)

Clancy Ratliff posted a generous and thoughful summary of the session I chaired. Rather than post my own notes, I thought I'd just link to hers. (I've got detailed notes from your session, Clancy... I'll post them as soon as I get the chance.)

Since blogs became the next big thing, an increasing number of companies have come to see them as the next great public relations vehicle -- a way for executives to demonstrate their casual, interactive side.

But, of course, the executives do nothing of the sort. Their attempts at hip, guerrilla-style blogging are often pained -- and painful. --Amy Joyce --More pr than no-holds-barred on bosses' corporate blogs (Detroit News)

I gave a talk on exactly this theme to a group of local university PR professionals, earlier this month.

In 1992, IF enthusiast Volker Blasius started the IF Archive, which brought together remaining text adventure files and fans from across the Internet. Paul O'Brian, who runs a newsletter for IF fans, says the archive brought text gamers together. "The fact that people can go to one predictable, reliable space ... has given the community a focus to organize around."

For the past decade, Granade has unleashed the text-gaming community's creativity by running IF Comp, an annual competition involving 40 to 50 new entries. "There started to be this recognition that there was a renaissance occurring in amateur IF," says O'Brian, the 2004 winner for his Luminous Horizon. "Because there's no longer a customer out there or a profit to be made, that has opened the form up artistically." --Adam McDowell --Actually, there weren't any pictures at all (Canada.com)

Nothing new here, but it's still great to see a decent treatment of the IF genre in mainstream media.

A Blogger Went to CCCC... And Here's What He Did CCCC (Jerz's CCCC 05 Notes)

The challenging acoustics in the Moscone Center seemed to work in Douglas Dean Hesse’s favor, as he opened his keynote, “Who Owns Writing?” by belting out an African-American spiritual.

During the opening session, when Sharon Mitchler asked attendees who are affiliated with two-year colleges to stand, about a quarter of the room did so. Many were wearing ribbons on their nametags identifying themselves. Interesting facts: 11 million students in 2-year college, and half of all composition students are in two-year colleges. I was motivated to find out more about a breakfast Saturday morning, in which the “Fame and Shame” awards will be given out for the best and worst media references to two-year colleges. (When I learned that the breakfast cost $20, my enthusiasm faded somewhat… I’m flying out Saturday morning, so I’m not sure whether I want to pay that much money to add another item to the last day of my schedule).

I was fortunate that my session Thursday morning was held in a mid-sized room with proper walls, as was the blogging session I attended Wednesday night.

One of the presenters from Wednesday’s night’s blogging session was among a group of young minority scholars honored with a travel grant during the opening session. Blogger and Florida State U University of South Florida graduate student Daisy Pignetti is studying how presidential candidates, especially Howard Dean, used weblogs in the lead-up to the 2004 election. I’m a regular visitor to her blog.

Is the role of “Digital Troubleshooter” new at the 4Cs? Maybe I just noticed it this time because two people I know were walking around with ribbons attached to their badges. The geek in me wanted such a ribbon, so I could wander heroically from session to session, sowing order and technological harmony in my wake.

Thursday afternoon’s “Writing Multimodalities within Literacy and ‘Electracy’: A Conversation with Gregory Ulmer” took place in a huge ballroom room with a vaulted ceiling, divided with a flimsy curtain maybe eight feet high. This meant that the very audible speaker on the other side of the curtain was also having an unplanned conversation with Gregory Ulmer. Both were using microphones, and both stepped closer to the mic and spoke up in order to be heard. Briefly the speakers even fell into a rhythm, one speaking while the other paused, creating a kind of Dueling Banjos effect. Amusingly disorienting, but impossible for me to process. Since the session was being recorded for a future podcast, I decided to duck out.

When I checked my e-mail, I found my academic blogging site had been hit with 300 comment spasm in the last 24 hours.

I was headed to a session in which Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher were scheduled to speak on digital literacy, when I ran into an old friend with whom I had a long, overdue, and much-welcomed conversation. I’m sorry I missed the session, but glad I caught up with a friend.

I brought a half-inch stack of business cards, and they’re almost all gone. I wish I’d brought more.

I spotted Lawrence Lessig sitting alone in front of the room where he was scheduled to speak on “Is Writing Allowed?” Andrea Lunsford was to introduce him, but there Lessig was, sitting rather glumly. After 15 minutes or so, I asked myself, if I call myself a geek (and I do), then why am I just sitting here, while Lawrence Lessig is sitting there twiddling his thumbs and actively scanning the audience, almost as if he were seeking a little human contact?

When I approached to say hello, he did the “extending hand in greeting in such a way as not to prevent an involuntary furtive glance at the nametag” thing. I started off with something really eloquent and memorable, like “Um… I’m a blogger? And so, uh, I really like your work?” I have no idea how those question marks got into my voice, but there they were. When I told him that I had just seen Lunsford a half hour ago, and that she mentioned she was going to introduce this session, he seemed relieved that he wasn’t forgotten. Just then Lunsford herself showed up, so all was well.

I’m still at the conference as I write this. I'll post more about Lessig, and also Hesse and some of the other presentations, as I can find the time over the next few days.

Conference on College Composition and Communication 2005, San Francisco (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Due to a labor dispute at the San Francisco Hilton, the Conference on College Composition and Communication was moved just a few weeks ago. The Moscone Convention Center made their space available at the last minute, after the organizers determined that a significant number of CCCC attendees would feel uncomfortable crossing picket lines.

Related Blog Entries:

Wednesday
Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging Practices

Thursday
Opening and Hesse Keynote (below, in this entry)
A Blogger went to CCCC... (general impressions)
Evaluating Academic Weblogs: Using Empirical Data to Assess Pedagogy and Student Achievement (I'm cheating by linking to Clancy Ratliff's notes on the session I chaired)

Friday
Writing Teachers Writing New Media
Breaking the Cycle of Hate: A Teacher's Journey
The Maltese Falcon: Questions I Wish I had Asked My Father
Calling All Bloggers
Socializing with Bloggers (Update, 03 Apr: photos added)

The Conference Without Walls

The weight and substance that the CCCC organizers ascribed to those picket lines is neatly mirrored by the flimsiness of the barriers set up within our part of the sprawling Moscone Center. Many of the smaller sessions are held in a single huge space, with areas marked off by banners on poles – mere formalities that signify walls, like the ethnic zones set up to reduce tribal tensions in a refugee camp, or the blue laser beams that illuminated the space once occupied by the Twin Towers. Many of our sessions have no walls and no ceilings.

What a perfect metaphor for what we would like education to be – diaphanous, permeable markers that permit access without excluding it. The purple-and-white curtains facilitate collateral discourse, as curious faces peep through gaps to find out what is going on that's so funny or so musical or so applause-worthy in the next room?

Very nice in theory, but sadly the convention center is a huge subterranean echo chamber.

Convention officials have tried to remain cheerful about the circumstances. Perhaps other parts of the center are better, but noise from neighboring sessions, from the tables set up for casual conversations, from the vendor booths, and from dozens of people yammering into their cell phones all merges into a uniform dull roar – like the "boum" of E.M. Forster's Marabar Caves – that makes the presenters hardly audible.

Testing and Shaming

During the opening session, Randy Bomer, president of the National Council of Teachers of English, drew applause when he made a passing reference to what he called "the president's Testing and Shaming Law."

Encouraged by the reaction, Bomer continued: "I don't know if you've seen an eight-year-old lately, but they're very small."

Bomer said that he reads "progressive political blogs" and that he assumes many in the audience do too. In his opinion, progressive bloggers are "in the dark" about the value of educational testing. He characterized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as "designed precisely in order to leave children behind." Adding an essay to "the big test" (the SAT) may lead to more formulaic writing, as teachers teach to the test, giving students less time to write the essays on which they will be evaluated. He presented standardized testing as a barrier in the educational pathways of students.

I really wonder how different the Bush administration's sense of the role of writing instruction is from the sense held by many academics in any field other than composition. Many universities assign freshman comp courses to part-timers and graduate students, which has the effect, even within English departments, of marginalizing those who specialize in composition.

Receiving the 2005 CCCC Exemplar Award, Erika Lindeman, author of Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (what she humorously described as "a significant piece of plagiarism – now in its fourth edition,") credits the success of her book to her observation of writing teachers – most of them graduate students. She made it a point to greet newcomers, and described the 4Cs as a welcoming environment.

Something in her tone made me think she was comparing the 4Cs to some other large annual professional conference – though she did not name names (*makes fake cough that sounds like "MLA"*).

The Classroom Without Walls

When I was in elementary school during the 70s, for part of each week I spent time in "The Learning Center," a huge room dotted with activity stations where, I presume, we were supposed to work at our own pace on activities that interested us. I remember liking my visits to the learning center, because they didn't feel like work. The noise and activity which has signified freedom and flexibility – and, of course, we weren't tested on what we learned. The only station I remember was a plastic box that held tabbed, color-coded cards with stories on one side and questions on the other. The first stories were easy, but they got progressively more complex. After a while, the activity surrounding me became a liability – I found it hard to concentrate on the work. Something drove me to finish all the cards in the box, but when I did, and looked around for the next activity, I didn't know what to do. There was no final exam. I think a teacher probably pointed me at a shelf of books.

My own experience in a test-free, unstructured environment was not particularly negative, though I'm not sure what I got out of it. Something in that stack of colored cards motivated me to want to finish, just as I wanted to solve Rubik's Cube, and just as some of my students blog like crazy because they get excited when their entries attract comments. But other students wandered around aimlessly, trying to look busy.

In his chair's speech, Douglas Dean Hesse spoke of the danger of extremist points of views. While Hesse expressed concern that this new focus on writing productivity emphasize correction and production, rather than critical thinking skills, he also noted that the 4Cs and the NCTE may feel like they missed an opportunity to shape a national debate on writing, when the press picked up on the National Commission on Writing's report, rather than any NCTE document. Acknowledging the worry within composition circles that a national standards test may lead teachers to emphasize grammatical correctness rather than the quality of the thinking process, Hesse noted that NCTE members who criticize any particular testing scheme seem to appear oddly opposed to writing.

Hesse referred to called for compositionists to "ungate our separate intellectual estates," and attribute good motives to those who differ from us. After his talk, I asked him to explain what he meant by that phrase. "If you're a social constructivist," he said, "God forbid that you'd consult with… anything that looks like its belletristic or artful." As an example of an attitude he wanted to move beyond, he referred to the argument that "we really need to be writing for political action," and the feeling that any attempt to do otherwise "rather more a wholly romantic thing" unworthy of our attention.

Hesse did not himself use the echo chamber metaphor that I've applied to this blog entry, and I'll stop short of taking that metaphor the whole distance and applying it to the balkanized landscape that Hess invited attendees to survey.

I'll also stop short of defending any externally-applied form of standardized testing, but I will say that Bomer's comments sounded a bit smug to me, and Hesse's made much more sense. I teach composition at Seton Hill, but I also teach journalism – a public mode of writing that brings with it obligations of fairness, objectivity, accuracy and accountability. Real people's lives can be hurt by a journalist's mistake, which is of course why a newspaper needs editors and copyeditors and an ombudsman and a corrections page.

My function as a journalism instructor makes me a little more accepting of the concept of externally-verifiable standards in writing (if only because my students won't get jobs if they can't hack the rather strict writing requirements), and far less comfortable with a philosophy that advocates teaching writing as political activism.

At any rate, Hesse suggested that we would do well to impute positive motives to all sides of the writing debate – something that Bomer wasn't so interested in doing when he invoked the image of the federal government as a bully for daring to test an eight-year-old.

"It's Pi Day because the date is 3/14 -- the first three digits of Pi," said Howard Greenspan, who oversaw a Pi Day Party online with a Pi drop at MathematiciansPictures.com, a Web site that sells Pi paraphernalia. --Jan Paschal --Pi Day Gives Math Mavens Something to Celebrate (Yahoo/Reuters)

Seton Hill celebrates Pi Day with a pie-in-the-face auction.

I'm told that I'm much in demand as a target participant, but last year I was at the 4Cs (the big annual college writing conference), and while I was on campus today, this year SHU's Pi Day celebration was moved to a day when I will be out of town (again for the 4Cs).

I'll file this under "science" because I don't have a "Math" tag. I was considering maybe a more general "Geekery" tag, but then I'd have to file half my entries under that.

--Personalized Google News (Google)

A great little addition to Google's incredibly useful news aggregator. I deleted the "sports" section, and added sections containing keywords that I always find myself googling. The search I created for "weblog" isn't very useful, but I'll play with the interface later.

There doesn't seem to be a way for me to access this from a different computer -- it seems to be driven by cookies. Still, it's a nifty addition.

Update, 15 Mar: I see now that there is a permalink available at the bottom of the page. Even better than a login procedure.

Our students, especially the ones who are required to be in our classes and are, therefore, required to blog or do whatever else we ask of them, are generally going to be concerned about the grade they get - possibly even more concerned about the grade than about what they learn. --Nancy McKeand --Evaluating Blogging (Random Thoughts)

Nancy is reponding to a comment I left on her earlier post, "Blogging is like an avocado."

The demand is such that the niche has grown from text-based games coded by hobbyists to between 30 and 50 professional audio-game developers who sell 3,000 games a year, experts estimate.

Most of these games run on ordinary PCs and are often joystick- or keyboard-controlled. The player dons a pair of headphones, and elements of the game are delivered in stereo to help players shoot aliens on the left or avoid a tank on the right. --David Cohn --The Blind Fragging the Blind  (Wired)

No matter how disgusting, shocking, horrifying or abberant the person, the topic or the interview, your demeanor is ALWAYS one of neutrality. Then, don't betray that trust - ever.

The first glimmer of judgment, shock or negative emotion the person glimpses in you - they'll shut down. They may keep talking, but not about anything worth writing about. I laugh every time I see broadcast media do a confrontational interview. What do they get? Nada. Zip. Zero. There's the emotional soundbite of the subject saying "No comment," or cursing...but gee - that gets old. --Amanda Stossel, in a comment. --Interviewing: The Ignored Skill (PoynterOnline)

Blogging clearly isn't going to help that proportion of people who aren't really up to their job, or who are prone to inarticulate flaming, or both. But then, those people tend to have career problems anyhow. Put it another way: not blogging won't protect you from career-limiting moves, and if blogging provokes one, well, you were probably going to do it anyhow.

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.

2. You have to get noticed to get hired.

3. It really impresses people when you say ?Oh, I?ve written about that, just google for XXX and I'm on the top page? or ?Oh, just google my name.?

4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.

5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.

6. Knowing more also means you?re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.

7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.

8. If you?re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.

9. If you?re in marketing, you?ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.

10. It'sa lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

    --Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career (Ongoing)

1) How would you describe yourself in 25 words or less?

Succinctly. --The Same 10 Questions I Always Ask -- with Michael Arnzen (Horror.about.com)

My colleague in the office next door gets off to a wisecracking start in this interview. I always enjoy reading his writing.

"Americans have always been informal, but now the informality of precollege culture is so ubiquitous that many students have no practice in using language in any formal setting at all," he says. The remedy is "to restore the family dinner table to the teaching of writing - that setting which can be a very rich semiformal setting for the exchange of ideas," he says.

Yet if writing has become less formal, it may correspond more closely with adolescents' worlds: "The experience of writing has to be authentic," says Steve Peha, president of the education consulting company Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., in Chapel Hill, N.C. Still, the new SAT would make him nervous. "Sitting there with the test booklet, pencil in hand, and with 25 minutes to write a fairly cogent essay on an unusual conceptual topic is pretty daunting. I'd be nervous - and I write for a living." --Christina McCarroll --Teens ready to prove text-messaging skills can score SAT points (CS Monitor)

One thing that would improve college teaching immensely would be mandatory drama and speech classes for all new faculty. Forget the expensive technology. Teach them how to use their voices, how to modulate their tones, how to string together an exciting narrative without notes. Teach them to make the passion that is surely inside them manifest in their words and in their movements. Teach them the forgotten art of the genuinely engaging lecture. --
Hugo Schwyzer --A short post wherein Hugo reveals his Luddite tendencies (Hugo Schwyzer)

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory?never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. --Henry David Thoreau --Solitude (Walden | Thoreau Reader)

I am still trying to sort out how much of the difference with this conference was due to the Hawai'ian setting as opposed to the presence of my kids. Obviously it's configurational, and in that way it makes little sense to try to distinguish the independent impact of either of those factors in anything except a purely analytical sense. But having some sort of ideal-typical specification might be helpful for planning purposes, and this won't be the last conference where my family comes along; hence the exercise seems worthwhile. --Conferencing with kids (This Academic Life)

The photocopier is churning out the handouts right now.

In a few hours I'll be packing the wife and kids in a car and heading off to deliver a talk. Nowhere as exotic as Hawaii, though.

I hope I'll get some sleep in the car, because I've got sick kids, and my own immune system is strained from a bug that I haven't shaken since last December (I've been sick since the very day I turned in last term's grades, and midterms are due in a week).

Oh blog, me, babe! Don't miss a word of it!
Many a blog has brought love to my door
Netted by sparkling poem, or flash of wit -
The chatroom kind, of course, and little more.
What need of tangled flesh on messy dates
The weight of expectation as it starts
Its gentle journey southwards, then abates?
The strain of those repeated broken hearts?
Love's old economy is gone for good
Desire is met through ethernet, our span
Is all the world by cable, though we should
Still try to be as sticky as we can.

But now I'm worried if your e-mail spells:
You only want me for my URLs? --Rebecca MacKinnon --You only want me for my URLs? (Weblogs at Harvard Law)

Fun, silly stuff. My Intro to English Lit class will be writing a sonnet in a little while, so I'm saving this for later.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta is out and it's revolutionary: New technology, better interoperability, and even easier to use. But it is still in beta. Tell us what is good and what needs fixing. --Open Office 2.0 Beta

I haven't checked this out, but I've been looking for an alternative to MS-Word's horrible HTML output -- something that I can use in my "Writing for the Internet." I already know that next time, I'll bite the bullet and teach students to create HTML with a text editor, something I've always avoided since the thought terrifies some of my students (in that class, overwhelmingly freshmen humanities students). I don't want to overwhelm them with the distracting design options of full-fledged options such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. So I'll have to check this out and play with its conversion settings.

I'm just blogging this so I can find it again when I have time. Meanwhile, I'm still looking for appropriate software for this class.

Good communication is not necessarily about using an expansive vocabulary. It is about properly using the words and punctuation you already know. --The Commonly Confused Words Test (OK Cupid)

It's a good thing for my sense of professional pride that I scored as an English Genius, though according to the site I got one answer wrong.

Probably the one on when to use "toward" or "towards" -- I know I guessed on that one.

To blend in, I sat at the $10 craps table and started to lose the magazine'smoney with dispatch. I mean, I had to sit at a table so a Borgata Babe would give me a drink and I could check her out?er, I mean, interview her about the ethical implications of the new weight policy. It'samazing how quickly a reporter'sexpense budget disappears when he'scovering a vital story about the workplace rules for America'scocktail waitresses (cha-ching!) in a casino (cha-ching, cha-ching!) --Gersh Kuntzman --Babes Up in Arms (MSNBC/Newsweek)

Shouldn't there be a period outside that last closing parenthesis?

The real reason I blogged this, besides the good writing, was on page two of the article:

Employers can hire or fire whomever they want to hire or fire. If I run a company and don’t want an office filled with thin people or people who like papaya, I don’t have to hire such distasteful folk. In fact, I don’t even have to hire blacks, women, Catholics, senior citizens, Native Americans or any member of the established “protected classes” – so long as my reason for not hiring them is not because they are black, female, Catholic, old or Native American.

Of course, this is a column, not a legal document or a peer-reviewed scholarly article. But Kuntzman's realization underscores the point I made about weblogs and the workplace: weblogs are just the latest way that people can get themselves in trouble.

The emergence of cyberbullying has intensified adolescent angst. It allows bullies to unleash put-downs, nasty rumors and humiliating pictures in e-mail and blogs that can strike victims at home and at any time. The damage can be devastating, psychologists say, even as it is not always obvious to parents and teachers. --Jon Swartz --Schoolyard bullies get nastier online (Yahoo!/USAToday (will probably expire))

Kids who grow up in a cyberliterate world are going to need to develop the social skills that will let them cope with the trolls and griefers that will always be there. It's a social skill to know when to say nothing, and to recognize the value of taking the high road.

It may seem appealing to a kid whose status is marginal to shore up his or her status in a group by joining in when the group attacks. But it takes maturity to refuse to sink to the level of one's attacker.

The solution is certainly not to tell the students to stay offline, though I know I'm not in any rush to let my kids into chat rooms.

Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said employees often "don't realize the First Amendment doesn't protect their job."

The First Amendment only restricts government control of speech. So private employers are free to fire at will in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory or in retaliation for whistle-blowing or union organizing, labor experts say.

A few companies actually do encourage personal, unofficial blogs and have policies defining do's and don'ts for employees who post online. They recognize that there can be value in engaging customers through thoughtful blogs.

"There's always a risk, but you always have that risk anytime you put an employee on the phone," Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said. --Anick Jesdanun --Firms Taking Action Against Worker Blogs (AP/My Way)

The telephone quotation puts the issue into the proper context, but that headline is a bit alarmist. Bosses and other authorities can clamp down on disrespect without silencing dissent.

At SHU, most students treat their academic weblogs as just another kind of homework, but others blog far beyond what the syllabus requires, even when classes are not in session. They do so for the same widely varying reasons that people blog everywhere else.

It's Spring Break now, and Lou asks for encouragement as he hunkers down to write a romance, Moira marvels that she's spending her break chortling through a required book on punctuation and grammar, Amanda and Karissa take the time to warn their readers that they'll be away from a computer during most of the break. I can also tell from the server logs when a particular URL is being passed around via e-mail and IM.

For some students, the blogs mean something more than just the place where Jerz wants them to post homework. After the server that hosts our blogs was attacked a few weeks ago, and I had to take the blogs down for a while, student Mike Rubio wrote in a column in the school paper, "these recent attacks have caused most of us (or at least the few of us who adore the art of blogging) to realize how much we miss them now that they are gone. | I am hoping that Jerz will nominate a head of Blog-land Security to oversee the protection of our Moveable Type-fueled freedom." In fact, some students get so attached to their SHU blogs that they resent blogging homework, and struggle to find an aesthetically pleasing way to integrate their academic voice with their personal one. (I've posted about the forced blogging paradigm before.)

There are already laws about copyright infringement, libel, defamation of character, and so forth. There's nothing that's illegal to do in blogs but legal in other media, or vice versa. A student who disrupts a class meeting or says something hateful in the cafeteria has committed an act that exists at one point in time. An employee who posts offensive signs around campus has put them in one particular place, from which they can be removed should they be deemed inappropriate. In such cases, the harm is easily confined. But a blog that contains inappropriate content continues to communicate it to each new web visitor.

Last week'sblog on the state of videogame writing, and the possible solution offered by New Games Journalism, attracted plenty of debate, but many of you wanted to see a few more examples of the NGJ style. --Keith Stuart --Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism (Gamesblog)

I've been kicking around an idea for a games-related writing project that combines my interest in computer gaming history with my role as a journalism teacher.

I'm a great fan of The Soul of a New Machine, as well as Levy's Hackers and Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line. Those only touch on computer games, but they're all rich explorations of the computer geek culture that was one of the influences on today's gaming culture.

At any rate, I'm blogging this now in order to remind myself of these examples over the next couple weeks, so I have time to reflect on what I'd like to put in a proposal I'll need to write before the end of the month.

This might be just the hook for me to hang the hat that I hardly knew I was holding.

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. None of these is read by the guy who is running the country... into the ground. --Newspaper Humor: A Classic Recycled (Editor & Publisher)

I've seen this before, but I just finished scanning through a workbook I'll probably add to my syllabus when I teach "Newswriting" this fall, so I've got journalism on my mind.

Dozens of parents flooded the Methuen school system with phone calls yesterday after a local newspaper reported that a fourth-grade girl had returned from the February school break requesting to be treated as a boy.

The child's parents told school officials that he had always considered himself a boy, rejecting feminine dress and name, and they were agreeing to raise him as a male. --Tracy Jan --Methuen school faces parents' queries on student's gender issue (Boston.com)

This article raises an interesting question for a journalist.

In order for the article to make sense, the reader has got to know that the student is biologically female, but the reporter's use of the masculine pronoun makes the second paragraph more confusing than it should be.

If the editor chose to use the feminine pronoun for the sake of clarity, that would be akin to making an ideological statement -- rejecting the request that the school superintendent has apparently granted. But doesn't the use of the masculine pronoun also suggest an ideological statement?

If I were writing this article, I would probably find a way to introduce this non-standard pronoun usage via a quotation:

"We only want what's best for him," said so-and-so, referring to the fourth-grader.

In professional medical literature and in academic gender studies, I wouldn't find this kind of grammatical play unusual, but in a newspaper for the general reader, it would probably we worthwhile to include some signal like that.

Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I'm talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it's true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are peers and superiors. In academia, the people who observe and evaluate you on a day-to-day basis are distracted 18-year olds who don't understand what your job actually is. Occasionally you go present a paper at a conference, but most of the people there are strangers; very rarely a colleage in your actual department will be aware of work you've done and compliment you on it; periodically an article or whatever comes out, which is nice, but very long-distance and the feedback you get from that is mostly also long-distance and comes from strangers or bare acquaintances. It's a weird gig, and I swear to god a major part of the reason we all feel so alienated and anxious is because we don't get feedback or praise from people who count on any kind of regular basis. --"Bitch. Ph.D." --What's wrong with academia, part two hundred and twenty-four (Bitch. Ph.D.)

This post from "Bitch" has attracted over a hundred comments so far.

The "thank-yous" and other student comments I get via e-mail and the quality of the work that comes across my desk provide a kind of feedback, and so do the evaluations students submit at the end of the year, but each student is understandably focusing only on his or her own classroom experience. The homework assignment that Sam Student most hates about the course may be the thing that Linda Learner finds most helpful. The classroom activity that Linda finds most boring may be precisely what Sam needs most. This kind of thing is particularly challenging in our American Lit survey courses, since those courses are packed with students who are required to take it, and I feel like in order to accomodate the gen ed students, I'm doing a disservice to the English majors who may be capable of more advanced, more independent work. (That course is morphing into a writing-intensive course that's capped at 18... I'll be teaching four sections of it next year, two at a time, so I'll be reflecting on this deeply over the summer.)

When I used to teach a large number of courses that involved term projects, I often passed out informal midterm evaluations. Students often complained I was always lecturing them about procrastination and that the pressure of deadlines was too great. But at the end of the term, after many of these students did in fact fall victim to the procrastination trap, some of them complained at the end of the course that I was too lax with deadlines. Sometimes you have to eat your vegetables, whether you like them or not.

I do like it when students mention a particular classroom activity or teaching strategy that they feel was particularly helpful (or otherwise), though students who are doing poorly in my classes sometimes tend to complain about weblogs. Truth be told, many of those students who complain that weblogs take up too much time are also the ones who don't do the reading, who don't come to class, who turn in their papers late, etc. The newness and strangeness of the weblogs can be convenient target for their frustration.

On the other hand, students who don't participate in class (due to ESL issues, shyness, difficulty with or disinterest in the subject matter of a required gen-ed course, or personal obligations that keep them off campus) are often extremely punctual and responsible when it comes to posting online responses.

We really shouldn't be in here...Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Saturday afternoons my wife and I have been taking the kids to the local high school for swimming lessons. Carolyn, who turns 3 next month, is in the first class with toddlers, and Peter (who just turned 7) is in the class for older kids. He can swim by himself, and today impressed us by floating on his back for about 20 seconds. He's also trying to do an underwater flip.

Today was my turn to get into the pool with Carolyn. When our session was over, I handed the wet girl to my wife, and dripped down to the men's locker room to change.

Two women were in the men's locker room, helping their daughters change clothes. I knew I hadn't gone into the wrong room, though I looked around the room just to be sure. There were some boys getting ready for the pool, but they all probably had their swim trunks on under their clothes, so they were just stowing their clothes to get ready for their session. Some of the boys were old enough to figure that something was wrong.

The women muttered a polite apology, and started tittering to each other. "We really shouldn't be in here, should we?"

But they didn't seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere.

I went into a stall and changed. When I finished, one woman was leaving, but the other was still there.

On my way out I said, "If I had done what you did, I would probably be arrested."

"Ha ha," the woman laughed, "I know."

"I didn't say that to be funny, ma'am," I replied.

I still have no idea why they were in the men's room.

They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it's the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it's the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be (apparently) easily assembled into something new. Maybe it's the appearance of neutrality in the list, its lack of point of view. Or maybe, hatred of reading, hatred of learning, fear of librarians, fear of looking stupid, the absence of a teacher's or a librarian's interference. Or, a recognition of the limits of print sources; hurriedness; desire for anonymity or for "interactivity." Or maybe it's the joy of accumulation, the reassurance of hoarding. In the end, probably, the glut of information itself is a reward. --Donny Smith --Search Engine Interfaces (Kairos)

I recently spent a day shadowing my daughter who is a freshman in a local public high school. The high school that she goes to is considered one of the better high schools within the district (made me cringe to think what must be happening in the schools that are considered bad). An interesting twist on my attendence is that this was the same high school that I graduated from; however, as the saying goes, 'this is not your father's high school'. --"Michael_the_Archangel --Bill Gates Urges High School Restructure (Michael_the_Archangel)

This blog entry isn't really about Bill Gates, but rather about what a father learned by visiting his daughter's high school. Via joannejacobs.com.

"We never envisioned that we were going to be playing video game music," conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya said, drawing appreciative laughter from audience members, many of them in their teens and 20s and decked out in everything from tuxes and gowns to jeans and T-shirts.

It was a scene many orchestras would envy at a time when classical groups continue to struggle financially, and when some are branching out to try new formats as a means for survival. --Martha Irvine --Video game concerts draw packed crowds (AP|MSNBC)

To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral - librarians, lexicographers, academics - that's precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock's place in postmodernism? What's more, the software that made Wikipedia so easy to build also makes it easy to manipulate and deface. --Daniel H. Pink --The Book Stops Here  (Wired)

This article personalizes the nameless, faceless contributors to Wikipedia. As one expects from Wired, it comes down in favor of this new use of technology, but what I like about the article is its focus on the addictive quality of Wikipedia.

He read a few entries on Greek mythology and found them inadequate. The Edit link beckoned him like a street pusher. He clicked it and typed in a few changes. You can do that?! "I just got hooked," he tells me.

That's part of its success.

Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts--for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a list, a semicolon should be used only between independent clauses--that is, clauses that can stand as complete sentences on their own.) That is the rule, she explains, but she violates it frequently. She thinks this makes her sound like Virginia Woolf. And she admits that her editors are continually removing the commas that she tends to place before conjunctions.

Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation? --Louis Menand --Bad Comma (The New Yorker)

A rather scathing review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which I'm teaching soon in my Introduction to Literary Study class.

In one study, Martha Carr, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Georgia, looked at first graders who were learning to add and subtract using "manipulatives," like counting with their fingers or with beads. Midway through the year, she noticed that most boys were abandoning the manipulatives and were doing the problems in their heads by recalling the answers from memory. Most girls, meanwhile, continued to use the manipulatives.

At first glance, such a result might suggest that boys have a natural advantage in arithmetic. But the difference had nothing to do with ability, Ms. Carr says. "Basically," she explains, "a lot of the boys were guessing."

The boys had stopped using the manipulatives because it took too much time, and the boys were vying to answer first. "There's this competitive one-upmanship, and that supports the move toward retrieval," she says. By the end of the year, boys and girls were doing the problems equally well, but boys could answer the problems from memory, while girls were still using the technique they had been taught.

In general, girls tend to follow instructions better than boys do, which made the girls less likely to change strategies on their own, says Ms. Carr. So it was the boys' competitive nature -- whether learned or innate -- that caused them to make leaps in learning. --Rich Monastersky --Women and Science: The Debate Goes On: Primed for Numbers (Chronicle)

This is a complex subject. Here's an excerpt describing a different study:

The researchers found that, in general, mathematically gifted females had broader abilities than did mathematically talented males. Girls tended to show more balance between their math and verbal SAT scores, while boys had more of a tilt, scoring higher on the math section and lower on the verbal.

That "quantitative tilt" turned out to be an important factor, the researchers said. Students with exceptional math abilities were less likely to major in math or science if they also had high verbal skills.

There's certainly nothing new about student blogs - there are millions of them floating in cyberspace. What separates these online journals from the rest of the pack is that they are university sponsored and featured prominently on a school's admissions pages. These journals are photo heavy and focus on a few events every few weeks. But one has to ask - how real are these journals? And are they simply mouthpieces for the school?

"A kid who is going to see this diary is going to approach it with a healthy skepticism," says Paul Marthers, dean of admissions at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who is still weighing the pros and cons of a school-sponsored online journal. Some of the difficulties, says Mr. Marthers, are choosing the right people to represent the school, deciding whether or not the diaries are a passing fad, and whether prospective students are going to assume freshmen were "coached" on what to write. --Lisa Leigh Connors --Diary of a college freshman: now accessible online (CS Monitor)

Thanks for the link, Mike.