Literacy: March 2006 Archive Page

As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games. Now an entire generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it - and it plays these games in different ways. --Will Wright --Dream Machines (Wired)

Universities and colleges, including my own, have made retention a priority, encouraging faculty members to rethink what they do in order to foster student success. However, this is only half the effort needed, and may come too late for many students. Like the musical Chicago’s Velma Kelly, colleges and universities cannot be a one-person act in the musical Retention; they need their K-12 partners to get in on the action. --Russell Olwell --We Can’t Do It Alone (Inside Higher Ed)

The decline of handwriting and the rise of e-mail and text messaging has been highlighted in a new survey of media consumption in the digital age.

It suggests that half of written communication is by e-mail, 29% by text message and just 13% by pen and paper. --E-mail and text 'replace writing' (BBC)

But take a look at this detail about methodology: "The IPA TouchPoints survey was based on 5,000 people who updated an electronic diary every half-hour for a week."

If the data gathering mechanism is online, that is going to skew the data in favor of electronic writing.

Changing Literacies/Changing Mindsets: Communicating Across Digital Difference (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University, and together they presented what they learned about the nature of research with a teacher who came of age in the world of print tried to teach students who had come of age in the digital world, as they all did ethnograhic research on video games.


I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University.


Joshua Burnett, Kean University, "Differences Between Insider and Newcomer Mindsets in Composition and Literacy Studies."

Yet another reference to James Gee, as part of a lists of books assigned by Sally Chandler to students Burnett and Lopez. But the students did not read the scholarly expertise first, as their teacher had expected. Instead, they considered the gamers themselves the experts, rather than academics who wrote books about gamers, and they were more interested in knowledge gained through interaction. In digital spaces, "the answer" is in a constant state of revision.

Illustrated two different approaches to research mindsets -- automatic orienting features make our own mindsets invisible to us, so that we expect others to see the world as we do.

These mindsets are inherently gendered, raced and classed. They are generally structured by the spaces in which they are acquired.

The Internet Generation and the Print Generation. Internet Gen understands online space in ways that the print generation does not. The print generation cannot understand online spaces in the same way. The print generation was already fully socialized before they encountered the internet, so their encounters with digital technology are informed by the paper-based concepts.

Student encounters with print spaces are, likewise, encumbered with traces of their encounters with digital spaces.

Categories of mindset differences in the internet generation and the print generation – the presentation worked through the criteria of space, knowledge, and self. Too detailed to reproduce the whole chart here, but it was well organized.

There is too much information in the unlimited virtual space, which requires structures for organizing information to help users find and understand what they need. New technology amplifies its powers as it is appropriated and redefined by its users. And how is the location of knowledge affected by the digital age? Student researchers expected to study games by playing games, talking to gamers, visiting gaming sites, participating in gamers' forums, and using print texts at points of need.

Internet generation authors will continue to be frustrated by the reaction of their print generation recipients. [But what about the obligations of print-generation managers to communicate in ways that their internet-generation employees can understand? --DGJ]

Jacklyn Lopez, "A Report from the Digital Contact Zone: Contact Zone Arts and the Hybridization of Literacy Mindsets."

Lopez began with a quote from Mary Louis Pratt on writing in the contact zone.

Lopez and Burnett played games and took notes on their work, and coded their own experiences. The generational difference between the researchers and their instructor led to a disagreement about the "right" way to research games. Lopez and Burnett successfully challenged and modified the print orientation of their collaborative project, suggesting that the digital experience the researchers have confers a kind of authority that balanced the authority of the teacher's position.

Lopez and Burnett developed a kind bilingualism, since they had to to teach her what they learned about game playing. [Of course, when Sally makes a mistake, her character dies immediately; but when she teases her students about not doing the assigned reading, the consequences of their misconceptions aren't as fully and immediately dramatized. --DGJ]

(Shortly after I wrote the above note, Lopez herself noted that her teacher also had to translate what the students couldn't get on their own, and notes that after the research collaboration, the print-generation teacher had picked up internet-generation techniques, and vice versa.)

[Much of Lopez's presentation involved explaining excerpts from the notes that the researchers took. I'm fascinated by the display of a student critiquing her teacher's research methods, and defining her own differences between her style and that of her peer researcher. This kind of ethnographic research is not what I'm personally familiar with, but since it's gamers who are doing it themselves, I'm finding it fascinating to watch. When I see Mary Ann Buckles doing this, or Life on the Screen, or Jim Gee, I'm conscious of what the researchers are missing. –DGJ]

Sally Chandler, "What's Different about Digital Difference?: Communicating across Differences in Technological Mindsets

The focus is really on how changing mindsets demand a response from us in the composition classroom.

Print is: linear, static, permanent, mostly linguistic, complete
Digital is: multi-dimensional, dynamic, in-process, ephemeral, multimodal, interactive.

When we contrast face-to-face communication and print communication, we see that online discourse often has more of the features of face-to-face communication than face-to-face communication does.

Digital writers expect more interaction, while print writers see that expectation of collaboration and feedback as "wrong."

Chandler remixed Lessig and Selfe, covering the ground I've heard being covered in many of the presentations I've chosen to attend. [I particularly like how she's applying it to ethnographic research, in a context in which the research was done by experienced gamers. The CCCCs certainly got its money worth when it invited Lessig to speak last year. Woe to the rhet/comp speaker who was at 4Cs last year but didn't attend the Lessig talk! --DGJ]

Chandler noted that initially, all her students opposed Lessig's concept of CopyLeft, but at the same time they admitted that they themselves had downloaded illegal material. (After a discussion with the students, more came around to seeing the value of Copyleft.)

How is teaching across this digital difference the same as teaching across the traditional categories of race, class, and gender?

At this point, the comparison points us towards the need for a new discourse, in a way that race/class/gender discourse is not new. Internet generation mindset is in many ways a product of white male military-indstrual modes, but the uses of that mode often actively contests and rewrites the dominant discourse that generated it.

In theory, the younger generation has been raised in this new culture, which leads to the possibility for (r)evolution. Digital tech is going to continue to be important, it's not clear who's going to control those concepts of communication.


As part of a lively discussion that followed the presentations, I was trying to say the world "e-mail memo" and it came out "e-mo." That’s not worth blogging as a separate entry, but it’s worth a footnote here.

The History of the Future of Writing (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

These are rough notes, typed as the presenters were speaking, and lightly edited back in my hotel room before being posted online.

Helen J. Burgess Washington State University. "Whatever Happened to My MOO?"

Administered Appalachia Moo, had fun building and coding, "absolutely no fun interacting with anybody in it." Likes coding objects.

Talking about how moos are disappearing. "I miss my moo, and I wish it would come back, but it won't."

For a while, it seemed as if Moos and VR were the next big thing. Lambda Moo, Diversity University. Usability problem, the geek problem, and the learning curve inherent in both teaching writing and teaching mooing. Blogs and wikis, in the post moo world, we're moving back towards text as narrative. "Even my mom has a blog. The question i want to ask today is, 'Whatever happened to my moo?'"

Made the intriguing argument that the motion away from moos and towards blogs is a conservative movement, a retreat from earlier attempts to consider writing as code. Blogs have become the medium of choice for journals, self-reflection.... sees blogs as a "conservative move." Said that "given that the mainstream media are pretty slow," blogs may look radical to MSM.

The truth is that "moos freaked us out." Asked to think of ourselves as objects as well as words. "We're no more or less important than any object in the moo." The move to blogs represents a retreat to familiar narrative, and expresses an anxiety about thinking of ourselves as coded objects. "We're moving back in time."

We still find narrative blogs so comforting because they don't force us to think in this manner.

"The retreat to the textual identity construction of the blog" is misleading. Blogs are composed of database objects, discreet chunks, that complicates this sense of blogs as narrative.

[In both cases, the fact that blogs have an easier learning curve means that more non-geeks access blogs than moos, so naturally the sense by which those blog authors think of their online writing will differ from the sense that smaller, more elite group of moo-ers had when they were coding their text. "Push-button publication for the masses," formerly the slogan for MovableType. --DGJ]

The blog objects can be tagged as a category and recategorized by editing a database.

The chunking and recategorization of the database-driven blog makes us relate to the blog as if it is object oriented -- though technically the databases are relational rather than object-oriented. Second Life -- in contrast, it is "true life action" animated. But the basics in Second Life are the same.

You can adjust your avatar according to sliders "so you can make your boobs go -- whoo!" – (gesturing out and in with hands… laughter).

"Looks suspiciously like The Sims Online." The Sims in Second Life are much more like MOOs than they are like games. There's no real point to them... the point is that you build. You can do anything you wanted.

For her, the interaction, building, describing and coding was more fun. "I've seen really bad implementations of writing classes inside Moos." MOOs viewed as the ancestors, not of writing environments, but coding and building environments. "And that's what happened to my moo."


Michael Day, "The History and Future of Machine Logic"

Day -- "I don't claim any originality for anything I'm going to say today." Two scenarios -- one's kind of doomsday, and one's kind of fun.

Doomsday. Most would agree writing has changed quite a bit, with students coming to us with a great deal of experience in digital media. As teachers of writing or composition, we're faced with the need to cover a lot of venues and territories, and the discipline of comp is struggling ot keep up.

Students are adept at social networking interfaces, video games, and informal e-mal. Referred to Kathy Yancey's past keynote, which emphasized the value of keeping up with student multimedia use.

Day referred to Youtube and Flickr and praised the mashups our students are producing.

Day referred to a number of automated processes for marking papers, with vendors claiming that the software does a good job of agreeing with the grades assigned by human assessors.

Software can be fooled by contentless writing that's gibberish but follows the semantic patterns expected by the software.

Day said the Texas Tech model is better, in that the human graders mark papers, though the computer makes that process smoothed. Day wonders what we're losing when students can no longer schmooze and sway their evaluators, since rhetoric is all about schmoozing and swaying.

Day paints a picture in which only the elite classes are marked by the instructors who actually teach the class. A second-tier would be a situation in which student writers are evaluated by Wal-Mart -- that is, humans who don't have personal relationships with the authors. A third tier will only be evaluated by machines.

But is it so bad to use computers to help us write?

It's not the technologies themselves, but the ways they are used to which we have to pay attention. Yes, they can be panoptic and oppressive, but what if we used it in the formative stages in their writing, not the final evaluative stage. Will ETS let us "play" with these tools?

What if the computer were "kind of a straight man, or a differently intelligenced entity" and what if the computer's role was to help us get beyond the limits of our own platitudes and reasoning, could force us out of the box, provide new word for us, new ways of saying.

What about the possibility that computers can help us find new mindsets? Help us create analogies, helping us break out of conventional writing and thinking.

Rob's Amazing Poetry Generator
Yong Poets "Just For Fun" Word Play

Echoed Lessig's consideration of your students as "The Remix Generation" and praised Lessig's talk from last year.

Computer software can help us make the stretch between the known and the unknown.

Voice recognition software and its role in the composition process... we've all had that moment when the student can say it, but can't write it out. "What if we deliberately programmed the computer to misunderstand" and transcribe something else, in order to force composers out of the box.

Introduced the concept of "Babbles" from RiverMOO -- a text game involving software that grabs a "markov chain" (? – sorry, I didn’t catch that) to construct automated orations. He amused the 20 or so in the audience with an emotive oral interpretation of this hilarious mashed-up drivel.

Like most people in the field, Day recommends that we pay attention to the ways computer evaluation can be oppressive, while being open to the ways that it can help us.


Laura Gurak, University of Minnesota, St. Paul. "Writing as Code, Code as Writing."

Began with a personal reflection on how she dropped out of school in her 20s, got an apprenticeship in the printing business, and worked in a small print shop where she learned the business just when computers were changing it.

Reflected on the time she realized she'd spend a lot of time typing. Notes that some people simply aren't meant to write. They may be wired differently, with an oral fluency that doesn't translate to writing.

Moved from a printing apprenticeship to software development.

We cannot figure out what happens under the hood in Word,. "You turn the thing on, and the Clippy comes up and asks, 'What do you want to do?' "

Suggests that for people whose primary genre is speech, it's a great thing to have the computer tell you what to do.

Of classical rhetoric -- most is dead, but ethos is still viable.

Template-driven literacy. "No technical writer really writes anything from scratch." In the real world, they will be expected to work on a huge database, writing in something called "controlled English" so it can be readily translated and localized.

Noted that the documentation for pacemakers was so expensive and wasteful because doctors in the operating room didn't want to spend time reading the instructions anyway -- they would open up the pacemaker and throw away the instructions, One solution was to put the documentation on CDs. Gurak comically mimed trying to boot up a computer while in the operating room. [I couldn’t resist, and called out: "Clippy says, 'What operation do you want to do today?' " Day chipped in with, "I can't do that, Dave." ]

Gurak says she hasn't done much on the aesthetics of code.

Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning. Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. --John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas --You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!: Why multiplayer games may be the best kind of job training. (Wired)

Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

As is always the case with a conference blogging exercise, these are my rough notes, typed as the speakers were talking, and lightly edited in my hotel room at the end of the day.

Matthew S. S. Johnson, Indiana University, Bloomington: “Communities in Playspace: Writing and Democracy in Online Communities.”

(I arrived a bit late… I’m going to ask Johnson to send me a copy of his paper so I can do it justice. He says that in the part I missed, he mostly went over composition theory, which is sort of presumed to be a priori knowledge at this conference, though there is only so much of the literary theory in which I was trained that translates into the world of rhetcomp. Thus, I wouldn't mind seeing what Johnson sees is important for laying the groundwork for the use of video game culture in the writing classroom. But since I heard him speak last night and went to dinner with him afterwards, I think I can piece it together reasonably well.)

Johnson was discussing the unique design model of Seed. Developers aren’t stopping their work once the game is released. They will continue to develop the game based on the decisions made by the players. The more players choose a certain mode of interaction (in this game, which has no single conclusion), the more likely the developers will go in that direction.

Johnson also noted the fact that the developers of “Oblivion” courted and encouraged fans to give suggestions for where the previous incarnations of The Elder Scrolls fell short.

Many developers are providing web kits that permit players to make fan sites easily. Gaming corporations do this to garner interest in the games, and even maintain some sense of control over those websites. But the consumers produce fan fiction and other related texts that enhance and build upon the gaming experience. That mass of fan-produced writing does influence the designers as they create the next iteration of the product.

Programmers stand by waiting to see what players will do, and the player actions (in the game and in the writing they do about the game) forms a feedback loop.

Gaming communities create openings that are potential merger points for compositions.


Erin Smith, Michigan Technological University. “Semiotic Domains Reloaded: Literacy and Localization in Video Games.”

An excerpt from a longer work in a publcation edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Havisher, with chapters co-written by scholars and gamers. Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language and Learning presents literacy as a social practice. We need different literacies to function in different semiotic domains. Video games, for Gee, are marked with certain characteristics, shaped by the internal and external design grammar. Within the game world, learners test their cognitive models. Video games provide an environment that can foster active learning.

The game industry provides an extraordinary example of Jameson’s claims about global communication forces. Exemplifies the logic, strategies, and contradictions of a force striving to balance global reach and local appeal. To what extent can we lay claim to cultural information in the world of the game, without considering broader contexts. Sony coined “global localism” rather than forcing local cultures to adapt to global culture. Can range from making sure you have the local slang right, to completely re-writing the narrative. Microsoft has a “geopolitical product strategy team” that pays attention to cultural factors that affect the way their products might be received.

Game developers design game from the outside, with localization in mind. Plot lines that would require too much revision to be localized in other cultures, may be scrapped, or only released locally.

Gee: cultural models are images, storylines, or metaphor that we recognize as “normal.” They remain invisible to us unless we are challenged. For instance, most military games penalize players for killing civilians, but in a game whose name I didn’t catch, settlers are considered combatants, and may be shot without penalty.

Quoted a scholar (the name sounded like “EE woo BOO key”) who notes that Japanese electronic products don’t carry a “cultural odor” that leads consumers to associate those products with Japaneseness. Schoolchildren perceive Japan as “cool” because it created Pokemon, but Japanese computer games and other characters don’t look Japanese. There’s a term for the non-Japaneseness of these characters. (Smith didn’t spell it, so I won’t even try to reproduce it here.)

Referred to a student, Eve, who wrote to the author of David Freedman, Creating Emotions in Games, to challenge his reading of Final Fantasy X. “You stray so far from the reality of the game that it makes me wonder whether you were playing it blindfolded with earplugs.” Eve has a “culturally aware” position, quotes from details in the gameplay in order to defend her critique of Freedman.

Differences in the Japanese voice acting and the American voice acting. The original team’s work on the Japanese game “could have been blown to hell” by a bad translation or a radically different voice interpretation.

If we’re going to start bringing games into the classroom, contextualize them, and it will serve our literacy goals more fully if we do.

During the Q & A, an audience member asked about the idea that the Japanese are using their electronic products to represent themselves culturally as westernized, that therefore their products do have a “cultural odor.”


Alice Robinson, University of Wisconsin Madison. “Videogame Design as a Writing Process.”

Works with Jim Gee. Robinson’s goal is to determine designer intent. Do designers intend the active critical learning results that researchers note when they study gamers?

Gunther Kress, “Design shapes the future through production.” Design is a cognitively higher activity than critique, which looks backward at a text.

As a linguist, Gee looks at rule systems. The “internal design grammar” is a “complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways.” You have to go beyond the internal design grammar if you ever want to get good at the game, and reach for the external design grammar. Players become readers of the IRD, but also a writer, since nothing happens unless you do something first. Players are demanding a lot more from game designers, demanding more from their interactive experiences with games as texts. Genre molding, mixing genres is part of the future of games.

Robinson repeated the designer/player, writer/reader, teacher/student slide that was a central part of her SIG presentation last night. Her research focus separates designers from marketers, artists, sound engineers, etc.

Quotes from one designer shows he is thinking very clearly about what people say, in a social environment, about the games they played. I think the audience responded meaningfully when Robinson invited us to imagine what our own authorship process would be like if we thought first and foremost about what our readers will say to each other. Paraphrasing the designer’s goal, Robinson said, “I want students [probably Robinson’s Freudian slip for “players” … speaking energetically from notes, she actually made this substitution several times] to have memories about playing my games, and I design my game to create those memories.”

The designer is not creating individual activities, but rather the environment. Killing a dragon is an isolated task, much like doing a worksheet. The task itself is part of a larger problem-solving effort. Designers want players to outsmart them.

[I like how Robinson moves back and forth between the designer/player relationship and the teacher/student relationship. I wonder if “problem solver” makes sense.]

If the end statement is “I can’t believe you can set everything on fire!” that means something different from putting a flamethrower in the game. In curriculum design, starting with “I want students to write a research paper” is akin to putting a flamethrower in a game.

In response to my question about the function of pedagogy in game design, she admitted that she is focusing on “the most progressive designers,” whose games are instantiations of the new literacy studies theories.


During the Q & A, Cynthia Selfe expressed concern that English teachers are “going to muck it up.” She thought about that phrase, and came up with instead the delightfully oxymoronic notion that we will "muck it up" because we, as English teachers, “tidy up” the genres that we pull into the classroom. She encouraged us to think about this genre as the students’ space, and encouraged us to respect this genre and learn from the students.

Johnson noted that he’s very careful about writing about the gaming communities that he doesn’t participate in, so that he doesn’t “take the data” that belongs to the game world.

Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish? (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Lila Harper, Central Washington University, Ellensburg. “What Can We Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses?”

Is often asked, “Why in the world are you reading so many of these theses?” For the past 3-4 years, she has read, copy-edited and checked the references of every completed MA thesis. Not normally on the grad committee, nor directing student research. With the help of a half-time assistant, she checks theses for correctness. About 50-60 theses a year. Also teaches in composition, has cross-disciplinary experience.

Initially assumed that plagiarism would not be a problem. Found a student’s thesis that included an unexplained acronym, and when searching to see whether it should be spelled out, she found the student had plagiarized several pages from someone else’s website. While communicating expectations about plagiarism is very important for foreign students, she finds problems across cultures. Graduate students often fail to clarify indirect or secondary citations. (Some faculty argued that there is no need to differentiate between direct and indirect citations.) Some students assume that one only needs quotation marks when the student quotes the entire sentence. She notes that some of this confusion is tied to the kind of style manual the student refers to. Plagiarism at the MA level is particularly troubling, since students are no longer considered outsiders who are being asked to write in the discourse mode of the insiders. By completing an master’s thesis, the student is demonstrating membership in that scholarly community.

She focuses not on the theft of knowledge, but on the value of transparency and accuracy that is threatened when full citations are considered a last-minute formality. Poor citations damage reproducibility. She noted that faculty members in the humanities often assume that handbooks from other disciplines do a good job teaching the rules surrounding citation. She found that style manuals were prescriptive (direct, emphatic guidance – thou shalt do this, focused towards researchers), permissive (which emphasizes options; Chicago Style Manual is much more optional that MLA – these are focused towards editors, describing general practices in particular journals); descriptive (in the sciences, where students are given different examples and presumably left to their own devices).

She showed examples from the MLA Style Book and Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, in which Hacker was more strict than the MLA. While she had to cut considerably from a longer article, she concluded with a list of practical guidelines. Her final statement was the suggestion that introductory textbooks use the citation style that students will be expected to demonstrate.


Joel Bloch, The Ohio State University, “Blogging about Plagiarism: Dealing with the Problems of Generation 1.5 Students in an Academic Classroom.”

Bloch began by referring to his earlier work, in which he argued for the abolishment of the criminal metaphor for plagiarism, and instead suggests a games metaphor, in which there are rules that have consequences, and the rules must be discovered through active efforts. He focuses on immigrants who came to America during their school years. He described a course that is “all plagiarism, all the time.” He describes the plight of ESL students strangled by the 5-paragraph essay they were forced to write in high school. The metaphor “we stand on the shoulder of giants” reminds us that literacy is important in learning new information. The organizational patterns of academic writing force student to make abstractions. Vernacular literature achieves cohesiveness with “and,” but academic literacies require writers to show a wider variety of connections, and to make those connections more explicit. A writing sample showed a combination of “and” and more complex linkages (I didn’t catch the technical term he used to describe those connections).

I was fascinated by his discussion of how the military leadership of Somali positioned a literacy program as a weapon against foreign influences, but I’m not typing much because I’m still waiting for the “blogging” part of the talk. I’m not quite sure what to make of his references to the movie Girl, Interrupted, which seemed unnecessary. (Of course, maybe I missed something, since I'm multitasking, listening and writing at the same time. I'm not just taking notes, I'm composing complete sentences and correcting typos, so perhaps I missed something because my attention is divided.)

He uses blogging as a way to give students the opportunity to develop their ideas in the classic process-oriented classroom, but also a way they can express themselves using the vernacular. He also has students cite each other (a strategy I also use for informal class discussions). He asked students to blog about their personal lives, with the understanding that whatever they write can be read by anyone. He compared the work ethic and family importance of the blogs his generation 1.5 students write, the social blogs written by students who attend his daughter’s “wealthy” private school. [But those girls are not writing for academic credit. Certainly the generation 1.5 students have a cultural perspective that may distance themselves from the boys/friends/pop culture topics one expects to find in an adolescent girls’ weblog community, but I’m sure that when those girls become college women writing for their professors, they will change the topics they write about for class.]

Students either worked so closely with primary texts that they plagiarized, or they moved so far away from them so quickly that they barely mentioned them. (He also asks students to blog responses to an article before contributing a more formal reflection.)

Indicated that building a whole course around plagiarism was designed to let students write from a position of expertise. Presented an example in which a West African student drifted away from the text completely, contrasted with Asian students who stuck very closely to the text.

“By using blogs as a form of continuous online discussion,” it was hoped students would use them “any way they wished.” The study focused on a single student, so he was cautious about conclusions.


Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. “Beyond Twentieth-Century Paradigms for Scholarly Publishing.”

Palmquist says the scholarly publishing crisis is “overblown.” In fact, there is so much demand for scholarly works, there isn’t enough capacity to meet it. [There was a bit of a buzz in the audience at that, but we resolved to save our questions until he’s finished. He says there are more books being published now than ever before, but of course they’re expensive, small runs.]

Noted that a small press can be put out of business if it misjudges the market for the book. “Academic publishing is essentially a barter system. We do the work, they take the risks… it works out pretty well.”

Notes that the acquisitions editors may only have MAs, which calls the system into question. A really successful book has 3000 copies. Printing and distribution technologies require 9-14 months, so books are already out of date when they hit the shelves.

Sympathy for junior colleagues in the humanities, where books are so central to the faculty evaluation process.

Argues for adopting a digital publishing model that enhances, rather than replaces, the traditional model. No change at the initial analysis (is the idea good), but drop the market analysis, replacing it instead with a faculty analysis. If it’s a good book that only 400 people would be interested in, a digital publication model can do a better job. Instead of in-house publishers doing all the editing of a book, shift that responsibility to the editors of series. Shift the copyediting to faculty, in collaboration with students. Cut down the publication time to as little as a month. “I’ve actually done it in a week.”

Estimated 10-20 thousand people see a very successful book.

He proposes a model of publishing a free digital web version, and also a print-on-demand version. Example – wac.collegestate.edu “Writing Selves and Writing Societies.” A PDF of the entire book downloaded 21,000 times. 67,000 visits to the site, 31,000 unique individuals.

“Legitimacy should be a reflection of the strength of the editorial review board.” Says there’s a fundamental flaw in the system if commercial viability is such an important part of the publications winnowing process.

Benefits of a distributed, collaborative publication mode.

1. Reduces distributed costs.
   
2. Authors retain copyright.
   
3. Supports publication of work that would not be commercially viable.
   
4. Ensures scholarly merit is the most important factor.
   
5. Reduces amount of time to get work out there.
   
6. Increases access to published work.
   
7. Ensures that the work is easily accessible for longer periods of time.

Mike Edwards (sitting next to me as I type) asked the speakers whether they had any concerns about people blogging their presentations. Harper said she hadn’t had much experience with conference bogging. Bloch said he blogged last year, so he’d be hypocritical if he complained. Palimquist said it depends on what the bloggers are writing. [I joked, “Oh, I’m slamming you completely!” and he said “Then I’ll come after your website!”]

Another audience member noted that the elite quality of opera is what gives it its cultural cache. Palimquist noted that Stuart Moluthrop and Nancy Kaplan’s earlier promises that everyone will be a publisher is a bit misleading, since “I don’t have time” to be my own publisher.

Palimquist ended with an invitation to anyone who has an idea for a good book to send it to him.

Opening General Session (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Two huge projection screens flank the dais here in the grand ballroom. One screen shows a video close-up of the program chair, Akua Duku Anoyke. The other screen shows a textual transcript of her words. There is a soft chuckle in the room when she mentions a name – Rosanne Cook – that appears on the screen as “roast Ann cook.”

As is always the case with conference liveblogging, these are the rough notes that I took while the presenters were speaking. I've lightly edited them, but please don't consider them a professional transcription.

The announcement that there are 900 newbies led to applause.

The word “pedagogy” came across on the transcript as “pedestrian Gojy.”

(I should note that the transcripting is really working very well – just because I note the amusing glitches shouldn’t be taken as criticism. I just enjoy pointing out the limitations of the technology.)

Joyce Rain Anderson introduced the Scholars for the Dream awards, a program to bring under-represented groups to present at the CCCCs for the first time.

The 2006 Exemplar Award was presented to David Bartholomae, who got a standing ovation. Bartholomae says he told his brother, “It’s like a geezer award.” “I’m of that generation that says the 4Cs was our graduate school.” His graduate training offered no coursework in composition or pedagogy, and it did not take education of freshman seriously. Bartholome points to the successful growth of CCCCs, but worries that in the focus on creating graduate programs and rhetoric and composition theories, perhaps the central importance of freshman writing education has been lost. Why should freshman English remain an area of primary importance: By turning our energies to the upper divisions, and research, we are confirming the deans’ bias towards research, rather than teaching. Freshman comp asks us to ask, what is the place of reading and writing in a general sense, as they might be practiced outside the canons of advanced study? IF we turn away from freshman English, we lose the opportunity to think about the relationship of being accountable to the public. Bartholomae notes that one can make a successful career focusing on lower-division classes and freshman writing. (Another standing ovation.)

Rebecca Burnett presented the 4Cs Memorial Scholarship, honoring former CCCC chairs who have passed away, and supporting four graduate student conference presentation.

Joe Janangelo, the local arrangements chair, introduced and recognized some of the key people who worked to organize the conference. He spoke touchingly of mentors past, encouraging us to thank the mentors who surround us, including people we encounter in the elevators, the assistants who do our photocopying, the people who clean our offices, our partners, and children.

Kyoko Sato, NCTE president, recalled the “thin, white, diaphanous material wafting up from the concrete floor” that partitioned the convention hall last year. She spoke of the commonalities between secondary education and college teachers. She noted “slight edginess” of the CCCCs personality as opposed to the general NCTE personality (but quickly qualified that as a good thing), and expressed her interest in encountering theoretical terms. Her mention that NCTE has opened a satellite office in Washington, D.C. in order to make NCTE concerns more visible to the government. (There was a short burst of enthusiastic applause, which seemed to surprise her.) As part of the NCTE efforts, the states are being encouraged to look at Reading First, and to create a range of assessments, decreasing the testing burden. (Louder applause.) Sato invited us back to Chicago in 2011, to celebrate CCCC’s 100th birthday.

Sharon Mitchler, chair of the 2-year college commission, noted that community college “is where the action is.” (Applause.) She previewed panels of particular interest to 2-year college teachers. She also asked members who are currently teaching in 2-year colleges to stand, and then asked those who had taught there in the past, to stand. A small but significant number stood. Then, she invited everyone who has ever attended a 2-year college to stand – and by this time, half the room was on its feet.

Conference on College Composition and Communication -- Day 2 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Here are links to the blogs I wrote on the second day of the confernce. I'm posting them past midnight -- all this took place on March 23.

• Opening General Session
  
• Jay Wootten’s CCCC 2006 Address: ‘’Riding a One-Eyed House’’
  
• Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish?
  
• How Writing Centers Respond to Writers’ Needs
  
• Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies
  
• Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing, and Composing
  
• Wiki SIG (Special Interest Group)
  
• Dinner with Engineering SIG

See Conference on College Composition and Communication Day 1.

Conference on College Composition and Communication -- Day 1 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It's a little after midnight on March 23. The fancy-schmancy hotel where the conference is taking place charges an hourly rate for internet access, so I didn't liveblog. But here are my entries for the first day of the conference.

• Preface
  
• Leeroy Jenkins Meets the CCCC Program
  
• 900 Newbies
  
• Newsweek Educational Program
  
• 1UP: Perspectives from Scholars/Practitioners of Video Games

See Conference on College Composition and Communication Day 2.

Victims of poor high schooling, of whom we have plenty at my university, often come to my classes asking, "Is this an 'opinion paper' or a 'research paper'?" I tell them that that is a spectacularly bad question based upon a false dichotomy; that I'm interested neither in mere feckless opinion nor in the random accumulation of facts, but rather in reasoned argument based upon a secure empirical and philosophical foundation. --John D. Arras --It's a Simple Game (Chronicle)

A great quote: "I generally believe that PowerPoint is the spawn of Satan. It breeds passivity in the students and it disconnects the speaker from the audience."

I use slide shows only rarely -- when I want to show students a typographical mistake in a sign, for instance. I'm working on a special slide show that uses images to teach the difference between active and passive verbs. I've probably put far too much effort into it, which means I'll feel motivated to use it again in the future to justify the effort I put into it, even if it turns out to be no more effective as a teaching tool as a traditional workshop with a pre and post quizzes.

Next slide, please.

Taking our previous analogies for punctuation, what happens when it isn't used? Well, if punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead.... The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without there is no reliable way of communiating meaning. Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play. --Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & LeavesDash It! We're All Trussed Up: Eating, Shooting, and Blogging (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

When I first taught this book in Intro to Literary Study last year, some student responses were negative. Truss adopts an insider tone, preaching to a choir of fellow "sticklers." I worried that, since many of my students already feel inadequate about their punctuation skills, perhaps they felt that Truss was mocking them -- and that, through my selection of a book, I, too was mocking them.

There are other books that speak more directly to a young American audience, but I liked this book so much I wanted to give it another try.

On Monday, when I introduced the students to the book, I gave a little speech about the importance of punctuation, and noted that it's not their fault that they've gotten this far without being forced to learn it. I tried to reassure them that I understood this was new and challenging material, and I reassured them that even if they don't know all the rules explicitly, they've developed an intuitive sense of punctuation. So most of the rules will simply codify knowledge that they already know on somelevel.

Still, I pointed out that if SHU were to graduate English majors who can't punctuate, then I'm not doing my job.

As students blogged about their reading, Elyse paid me a high compliment when she asked, "Does this NOT remind you of Professor Jerz?" Amanda and Denamarie said they had steeled themselves to hate the book, but they found themselves pleasantly surprised. Andy said the book "does an excellent job of making 'boring material' (no offense) something fun and interesting."

Kevin even made a paper badge that said "U.S. Punctuation Patrol" and wore it to class. Erin and Sarah both said they wanted to keep reading, and Amanda actually did keep reading.

A few students reported feeling paranoid about punctuation mistakes they might make on their blogs. That led to a discussion of formal and informal writing rules, and my expectation that a blog is somewhere between formal and informal. I'm pleased to stand by and observe as they notice their own proofreading skills sharpening. Nobody has ever accused me of a lack of enthusiasm, but I think I was even more enthusiastic than usual when I related the release of endorphins in the brain when one catches a punctuation error to the rush that one gets when besting one's own score in a race or finishing a really good book. I said something like, "If you're an athlete and you beat your own record, you feel a little rush of pleasure because your DNA is telling you that you've just done something that's likely going to increase your chances of survival and making it more likely you'll pass on your genes to your future children. If you feel that same little rush of pleasure when you catch a punctuation mark or finish a really good book, that's your cells telling you that the literary skills you're developing in this class are making you more likely to be successful in the world."

Somewhere in there I managed to co-opt the lizard-brain hunting instinct (as opposed to the lizard brain-hunting instinct) and connect it to proofreading. I saw heads nodding, so I think it went pretty well.

Now I wish I had given them more chapters of Truss to read back-to-back. As I said, last time I got a bit of resistance when I introduced this book, so when I put the schedule together this year I figured I'd give them some time to absorb the first part of the book, and I'd gradually start increasing my expectations in the area of accurate punctuation. Now I worry it might be harder to restore the momentum, since Truss was hilarious in the introduction, but the body of the book doesn't sustain quite that level.

I tried to shift the last part of class time to a discussion of their literary criticism papers, but coming down off of that punctuation speech, it was a bumpy ride. I ended up letting them go early.

In complex reading passages, organization may be elaborate, messages may be implicit, interactions among ideas or characters may be subtle and the vocabulary is demanding and intricate.

The ACT isolated reading complexity as a critical factor by analyzing the results of the 1.2 million high school seniors in 2005 who took the well-known ACT college entrance test. Based on that test, only 51 percent of students showed they were ready to handle the reading requirements of a typical first-year college course.

The literacy of today's high school graduates has become an enormous concern for colleges and employers.

In the United States, reading is largely treated as an elementary school subject, with diminishing focus in later grades. But with each alarming report on college readiness, adolescent literacy is gaining attention. --Ben Feller --Study: Reading key to college success (AP|Boston.com)