Academia: May 2007 Archive Page

Are you a skilled programmer or Web developer? Are you interested in applying your talents to the challenge of creating a better-informed society? Do you want to learn how to find, analyze and present socially relevant information that engages media audiences? Do you see possibilities for applying technology as a way to connect people and information on the Web or new delivery platforms?

If your answers are "yes," consider coming to Medill for a master's degree in journalism. You can earn your degree in just a year. You will learn new skills that will open doors to new opportunities that might help build a better democracy. And a new program at Medill offers you a chance to win a fully funded scholarship. --Medill offers journalism scholarships to programmer/developers (Northwestern)

Sounds like a great program.

Though Ferguson couldn't figure out how to make his 1938 scenario work, there was a better expert who could: His 13-year-old son, who was a whiz at strategy games. Rather than rush out to attack Germany, his son carefully set up robust trade agreements with France first to make sure the country felt diplomatically obligated to go along with the fight. Presto: France fought, and Germany fell.

Ferguson became so delighted with Making History that he has joined forces with Muzzy Lane to design a new game. Due out in 2008, this one will model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran.

It'll undoubtedly be controversial. But it will also, he expects, be humbling. The power of counterfactual thinking is that forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. When we think about historical events, we have 20/20 hindsight -- so we forget how confusing and uncertain they were at the time. In 1943, nobody really knew how strong Germany was, or what Stalin was thinking. In modern conflicts, we often have a similarly false sense of surety -- too much confidence in our ability to predict the outcome of major events.

When we play with sims, they knock us off our pedestals -- because crazy things usually happen we don't predict. Yet the chaos is useful, because we can run the same situation again and again, changing one little thing each time, until we've war-gamed it deeply and understand it better than ever. --Clive Thompson --Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games (Wired)

We should be jumping for joy every time a student plagiarizes, because that means our existence as teachers of composition is validated, as we have something to teach them - citation, research, the need for critical thinking. We should get down on our knees and thank the Internet for making it easier to plagiarize, because it means we will be employed for the foreseeable future, stemming the metaphorical digital tide. We should be eternally glad that plagiarism is seen as a problem that needs fixing, because if all incoming students cited their sources fairly and accurately and did clever research out of the box, then there wouldn't be much for us to do. We should leap to the opportunity to teach here. Plagiarism is a blessing, not a curse. --Mike Duncan --Objections to Turnitin (Bad Rhetoric)

Plagiarism as the felix culpa of rhetcomp. I'm not very comfortable with the idea, but it did make me think.

I do use the service... recently I noticed a suspicious paragraph, and when I used turnitin.com to print out the documentation in support of the wrist-slapping I was planning to implement, I found four or five other uncited paragraphs from the same source -- something I wouldn't have caught otherwise.

I tell myself that this student has learned an important lesson, and that it's a good thing I caught this problem early, on an assignment that wasn't worth 1/3 of the course grade.

"As for my own point of view, I see creative writing not so much as a form of self-expression (or in the case of problem students, acting out), but of learning to express one's 'otherness,' in the sense of being able to use one's imagination to devise stories or poems out of, as Keats called it, one's 'negative capability.' That is the ability not to be yourself and not to put your own limited self-interested point of view into one's creative writing. And to hold contradictory emotions and ideas together in your mind at once without judgment. To be as Emily Dickinson called it 'a nobody.'"

"In that sense, a threat of violence directed specifically toward a member of the university community in a creative writing class represents a student's failure of imagination, and should be seen as cry for help or cry for attention," [Alan] Soldofsky [director of creative writing at San Jose State] said... --A Very Scary Story (Inside Higher Ed)

It's rare to find so much specialized language quoted in a publication with a general readership. I agree with his point, but even though the audience for Inside Higher Ed is more educated than the general reader, I were this reporter I'd have used a bit more summary as a buffer between shorter chunks from Soldofsky. (In passages near the beginning and end of the sequence that features Soldofsky, the reporter does summarize.)

Using games to entice, entertain, and engage introductory programmers has been successful; many of the approaches, however, use graphical programming. This either requires a complex game engine or toolkit for students to program or a lot of additional effort for students to get the game looking the way they want. Taking a page from the game studies literature, the current paper reports on gaining the benefits of games without the graphics, of traveling back in time to the days of the great text adventure games. --Brian C. Ladd --XYZZY: Finding New Magic in Text Adventure Games (Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education)

I'm always glad to encounter new scholarship on text-based games, but the "back in time" rhetoric here is rather dismissive of the incredible artistic and programming advances that the post-commercial interactive fiction community has made.

This is a Microsoft-sponsored conference, held on the "Disney Wonder Cruise Ship."

And I, for one, welcome our new digital cultural overlords.

Seriously, though, engineering papers are a very, very different genre than the academic papers I've been writing lately. I actually presented at an engineering conference when I was a graduate student, presenting a method for sequencing writing assignments. This was nothing new so far as the rhet-comp field is concerned, but at the time the concept of writing across the curriculum was new to a lot of engineering teachers, and I did what I could to present it to them in a genre that they would find familiar.

This activity is set in a research group that is developing an antivenom for spider bites. In the opening scene, Nelson Pogline, a talented graduate student, dies unexpectedly at a university reception. As a detective, you must use chemistry concepts to determine if this was murder and if so, solve the case. You can interview suspects using Quicktime movies, investigate the crime scene for clues with Quicktime Virtual Reality images, and analyze the evidence from the crime lab. --Mixed Reception (chemcollective.org)

Haven't checked this one out yet.

DeSena presented solutions for teachers to prevent the plagiarism plague engulfing a Web-based culture. "All too often teachers emphasize the content (the information) students will cull and hopefully learn. But it is our obligation as teachers to encourage them to respond to the expert or scholar, to answer his or her underlying claim," she wrote. To do this, teachers need to emphasize primary sources over secondary, to embrace students freewriting, honing in and transforming the first draft into formal writing, cultivating a thesis, creating an outline, and learning how to paraphrase. --Meghan Gill
--Sparta teacher fights plague (Straus Newspapers)

There is little new in this article; nevertheless, I appreciate a pedagogy-based discussion of the root causes of plagiarism, rather than a commercially-supported, detection-and-punishment-based solution.

The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence

into this:

--Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online)

Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a preposition or other small word that one can usually guess from the context. Such words are so common that they are easily recognized, even when the eye is focusing on the next word in the line. So there is less back-tracking of the eyes.

The article is packed with statistics that show that students comprehend better when they learn texts formatted in this manner.

The researchers are selling an online service that reformats text on the fly, so naturally the research is going to emphasize the benefits of such a service, so keep that in mind.

The economics of book printing dictate that books are less expensive (and therefore accessible to more people) if the print fills up as much of the page as possible. But there is no such restriction on electronic text. As monitor screens get wider and wider every year, I have often wondered what to do with all that blank space on either side of the legible columns of text. This looks like a useful option.

Over the summer, I'm planning to create some new online handouts for my journalism class, so I'm blogging this for future reference.

Some linguists are worried that the proliferation of text messaging among students may hurt the development of formal English. Johnson does not agree.

"I don't buy it," Johnson said. "I think students can distinguish between different contexts. What they would say with their friends is different from what they would say to an instructor."

Text messaging may be an important tool to help students learn the difference between different English and behaviors that are appropriate for different situations.

"Sure, text messaging can help teach that difference," Johnson said. "I would put the emphasis on explaining the importance of context."

In fact, Johnson says that text messaging may have a positive effect on language, especially with English as a second language students. --Teaching through Text Message; Cell Phones Emerge as Learning Tool (Rebel Yell)

I tend to agree. If instructors teach that text-message lingo and academic English are two points on a sliding scale (not necessarily the most extreme points), that's a good way to help students learn about the importance of audience and rhetorical context. I try to make it very clear that my expectations for blog entries are slightly more formal than in-class timed writing exercises, but I really don't mind shorthand or typos in the comments that students leave on peer blog entries.

Of course, I do ask students to demonstrate that they are capable of leaving an in-depth comment from time to time, and naturally I hope that when students are doing any sort of course work that they will be practicing the appropriate writing skills.

When we refuse to "budge an inch," excoriate "rotten apples," or admonish slackers to "sink or swim," we speak in his voice. Although the arts sections of newspapers teem with products from self-anointed "artists" who will not survive their publicity budgets, Shakespeare after roughly four centuries still pleases general audiences, challenges intellectuals, and provokes academics. How can we not presume that such a stupendous orchestrator of character and insight operated with a coherent, multifaceted theory of human nature?

On the other hand, our ignorance of Shakespeare the man - he left no diaries or letters in his short life of some 52 years - and the clashing multiple versions of some of his texts, have always dovetailed with a contrary belief that his greatness arises precisely from utter openness to the varieties of human behavior, emotion and thought, his ability to render in concrete scenes and daring metaphors more non-reductionist nuances of the heart and mind than an army of writers centuries later.

This Shakespeare soars as the universal artist because his plays and poetry offer a kaleidoscope of the human condition while speculative bios, short on fact and long on inference, end up too dull an instrument to cut him down to size. He's a channeler rather than a source of wisdom. --The readiness to deconstruct is all (Philadelphia Inquirer)

I wish this article had come out a week earlier... I would have discussed it in my Lit Crit class. (It's still a good read.)

To Do (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

5: The number of proposals I've sent off in the last 24 hours. (Well, one I had drafted weeks ago, and another consisted of me answering the phone and saying "Yes," but still.... )

Feels like a pretty good day.

To do:

• Share with colleagues draft of revised senior portfolio for English majors (lit, creative writing, journalism) (10 May)
  
• Submit draft to administration (10 May)
  
• My own annual report (whew!)
  
• Additional work on major interactive-fiction article I've had to set aside due to teaching demands
  
• Prepare award certificates for Setonian staff members (05 May. Still have to sign them, though. 06 May.)
  
• Weird Romance (05 May.)
  
• Submit grades for graduating seniors (07 May)
  
• Submit grades for everyone else (15 May)
  
• Say good-bye to the graduating seniors who were freshmen when I arrived at Seton Hill (12 May)

That last item won't take the most time, but it will be the hardest.

Vetting Comments Strangers Post to Class Blogs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I always enjoy telling my students when I start noticing comments that people who aren't in our class start posting comments on the course weblog or individual student weblogs.

Sometimes the poster is someone who took the course in the past and is recalling with fondness (or horror) a particular assignment. Other entries attract comments from other people on the Internet who happen to be interested in the same subject.

Here is an example of such a comment (posted to a 600-word blog entry that discussed the nature of heroism in Huck Finn) that I don't bother to approve:

im writing a paper why is huck the hero??

But here is an excerpt from a 700-word comment (posted to a student's entry about Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"), which I did approve:

My take was that it is blindingly obvious that he is a first draft of perfection, but like the Misfit, a flawed one. He talks the talk, but Jesus never said anything about the heart as a car or anything mobile - it was a mustard seed that grew IN PLACE, like a house, like the Kingdom of God.

See Also:

• Approving or Ignoring Comments on Old Student Blog Entries
  
• Blogging Now Begins Young

One thing that I feel very strongly about since I began my post-secondary literary studies, is that high school teachers tend to teach the students all sorts of things that need to be un-taught when they get to college. It drives me crazy! Shouldn't we be teaching students skills they can build on when they get to college, not skills and habits they have to break in order to be successful in post-secondary education!?! So, one of my goals when I teach is not to teach my students things that they need to be un-taught later. That might mean expecting more out of my students than the average high school English teacher, but I think in the end it will benefit them greatly. --Lorin Schumacher --Lit Crit's Usefulness in Pedagogy (LorinSchumacher)

Lorin is a sophomore English and education student at Seton Hill. As part of a student Tiffany Brattina's blogging carnival on education, Lorin blogged this thoughtful essay.

The picture shows Stacy Snyder of Strasburg wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic "Mr. Goodbar" cup. The photograph taken during a 2005 Halloween party was posted on Snyder's MySpace Web page with the caption "Drunken Pirate."

"The day before graduation, the college confronted me about the picture," Snyder said Thursday. "I was told I wouldn't be receiving my education degree or teaching certificate because the photo was 'unprofessional.' " --Brett Lovelace --Web photo haunts graduate (Lancaster Online)

The kicker? Snyder is 27 years old.

The denial of degree happened last year; the news hook in this story is that the former student has now filed a lawsuit.

Certainly she showed poor judgment by putting that photo on her profile. Since my only alcohol consumption is about one glass of wine per year, my own attitudes about drunken photos are biased.

Snyder surely learned in her education classes why parents hold the teachers of their children to such high ethical standards. It looks like the school system where Snyder was doing her student-teaching may have been involved. According to the lawsuit, "Conestoga Valley officials told the college their students wouldn't be allowed to perform student-teacher requirements there if Snyder was not punished."

For good reason, universities don't publish information about disciplining students; neither Millersville University nor a Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education would comment on this story. We don't know whether this were just the latest in a long string of unprofessional incidents, in which case it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. If this were an isolated incident, then denying the education degree seems very harsh.