Humanities: 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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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)

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).