Academia: June 2007 Archive Page

--Text to Speech (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s on my PDA, and have listened to student papers that were submitted to finish off incomplete grades, a dissertation chapter that touched on a subject I know a little bit about, an administrative planning document on assessment, a 93-page article of mine that I've been developing, on and off, for about five years; and today when I drive to work briefly I'll be listening to a Gamasutra article on Zork.

TextAloud offers a free version, which was good enough for short and routine stuff, but the AT&T professional voices sound excellent -- far better than anything I had ever experienced before, and I figure they're well worth the cost of about a DVD movie each (one male, one female).

I have been toying with the idea of having my journalism students practice taking notes from audio recordings, and I figure a tool like this will let me work a little more efficiently, since I won't have to get a voice actor to record the dialogue each week. Of course, once I get a sense of what kinds of mistakes the students make, I can firm up the scripts and get someone to record them more dramatically.

I can imagine, with this text-to-speech program, setting up an RSS feed of all my student's overnight blogging on a given topic, converting it to an audio file, and then listening it on the drive in to work.

It almost makes me wish I had a longer commute.

The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes -- some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them. --Dan Carnevale --Amazon Will Digitize Universities' Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

I wonder if they will reprint books with personal annotations -- that is, if Thomas Jefferson scribbled notes in the margins of a book, would it be possible to get your own copy of the book, with Jefferson's notes reproduced along with the book text?

The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to make friends at college. I go into schools where the school is split between the Facebook users and the MySpace users. On the coasts and in big cities, things are more murky than elsewhere. MySpace became popular through the bands and fans dynamic before the predator panic kicked in. Its popularity on the coasts and in the cities predated Facebook's launch in high schools. Many hegemonic teens are still using MySpace because of their connections to participants who joined in the early days, yet they too are switching and tend to maintain accounts on both. For the hegemonic teens in the midwest, there wasn't a MySpace to switch from so the "switch" is happening much faster. None of the teens are really switching from Facebook to MySpace, although there are some hegemonic teens who choose to check out MySpace to see what happens there even though their friends are mostly on Facebook. --danah boyd --Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace (danah.org)

I personally find boyd's use of a lowercase logo for a name to be be right up there with Prince's use of an unpronounceable symbol and the star in "Wal*Mart," but I gather it makes her seem more approachable to the young people whose online habits she observes so carefully (and analyzes so well).

I handed my notes over to the class and gave them directions to plan the next three weeks of class. They had to schedule one project and one exam. The project has to run five days straight, and they'll need the information from chapter seven to do the project. They had to make sure that they leave enough days to cover chapter five and prepare for the final, which is July 16.

Then I left the room.

It was a breath-holding heart-pounding moment, one where I wasn't sure if walking out was the right move. However, I'd done it before and -- truth be told -- I was stood right outside the door, shamelessly eavesdropping. Leaving was the only way I could teach this lesson in strategy and planning because, otherwise, my students would have centered the lesson on me. Is this what you want? Are we right? They would ask with their words and their eyes, watching me for nonverbal cues when I refuse to tell them what to do next. --Miki Louch --Formulating: putting the rubber to the road (Of ferocious tigers and wild strawberries)

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today?s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them. --Scott Jaschik --When ''Digital Natives'' Go to the Library (Inside Higher Ed)

I'd love to learn more about how libraries are modding themselves in order to take advantage of the considerable digital literacies that our students bring with them when the arrive on campus.

Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

I don't want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don't want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We've all been whining about the "corruption" of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I've come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

And so as I said at the top (in my "bottom line"), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve. --Larry Lessig --Required Reading: the next 10 years (lessig blog)

Lessig is an excellent communicator and an inspiring leader. It will be interesting to see what he accomplishes when he turns from copyright reform to the broader concept of corruption.

I graduated from SHU this may and I took your American Literature course in Spring 2004. I just wanted to write you an e-mail because I came across my own blog while doing a search on the internet and I starting reading through them. I must admit, I HATED doing them during class because it was a lot of work, but what a final product. I was so impressed that I could have created something so technical and computer literate. I was astounded to see that people are still commenting on my entries, three years after the fact! How cool! I hope you are continuing to use blogs because it obviously gets out there and lets our thoughts at SHU be heard. I also would like to comment on my grade in the class and it being 1 of 2 Bs that I received throughout my college career. I still am confused about the grade, considering I had all As on my papers. I was unaware at the time it could have been a mistake and I did not want to challenge you. I just thought I must have failed the final miserably. O well. I enjoyed your class, even though I got a B! lol Keep up the good work!blogs [e-mail from a former student] (Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

I got this note from a recent graduate, and have posted it here with permission. It's always a great feeling when a student says he or she worked hard, learned a lot, and enjoyed the class.

And this student is right -- entries that my students wrote as homework are still attracting attention, especially at the end of the semester as students are working on term papers. Sometimes the comments are simply requests like "This story is boring, will someone e-mail me what it's supposed to mean," but often a visitor will post a thoughtful comment that attempts to extend the discussion.

"In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge 'as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth." --Richard Rorty, 1931-2007 (Telos Press)

I had signed up for his course on American Pragmatism, for what would have been my fourth semester in the MA program at the University of Virginia. But I finished my degree after my third semester and withdrew from all my U.Va. classes in order to work full-time.

As a tender young MA student, I found Rorty's philosophy a bit hollow, and his relativism too far along the slippery slope of postmodernism. He was the respondent when Fredric Crews gave a lecture on Christian Humanism. I learned quite a bit about the profession by watching these two learned gentlemen disagree with each other intellectually, yet remain personable and even jovial throughout the evening. I signed up for his course because I thought he would either help me to take the plunge and overcome my fears of postmodernism, or help me more clearly articulate where I disagreed with it.

Now that I have taught courses in aesthetics and critical theory, I wish I had taken that class. Advanced scholars have had far more opportunity to understand and account for their own personal biases than tender young MA students. I have learned that researching critical theory isn't terribly useful when I was only grazing through the literature looking for quotes to support the argument I had already formed even before I started writing the paper.

That is, of course, why I didn't like pragmatism -- it argued that there is no universal truth, there are only useful conventions that society clings to as long as the conventions fulfill a need. That's the kind of statement that shakes one's bedrock beliefs, but in later years I've realized it also clears the way for a fascinating examination of the humanist approach to morality, which is very important when you are asking students from diverse cultural backgrounds to assess issues of morality and universality in a text -- and, by extension, in the real world.

Last year I was a Sunday-school teacher for fourth graders, and I found myself prefacing every doctrinal statement with "The Catholic Church teaches..." and trying to encourage discussions, rather than simply giving them a list of received truths to memorize. I covered the material, of course, and from an orthodox perspective, often asking them to talk with their parents when they brought up touchy subjects like the fate of babies who die before baptism and how seriously they should take artistic representations of heaven and hell. I've never told my own children that they will go to hell if they are disobedient, for example; I have told my five-year-old that until she reaches the age of reason, it's Mommy and Daddy's job to help her listen to her conscience, and that includes punishing her when she gives into temptation. My nine-year-old knows that we have greater expectations for his ability to reason, so that if he and Carolyn make the same mistake in judgment, the consequences for him are more severe.

I might get faster responses from my children if they feared that demons would drag them away if they were disobedient, but that kind of obedience doesn't build character or develop moral intelligence.

On the last day of Sunday School, I was hoping to encourage their desire to learn more about the world, so after I said goodbye, I told them "Never stop asking questions!" Most of them kind of stared at me blankly. When one kid asked, "Why?" they all froze in their seats waiting for me to explain myself. I didn't.

While my wife and I are raising our children in the traditions of our Catholic faith, we are working hard to avoid the "Because I say so" and "Don't ask questions" approach to authority. My son has internalized the Socratic method so much that when he wants to get mouthy and talk back, he does so with rhetorical questions, thus drawing me into a conversation that (he hopes) will buy him time to figure out a way to avoid doing whatever he doesn't want to do. It's not exactly disobedience, but he is testing limits, making me supply good reasons for why he should obey.

Pragmatic? In the short term, it can be stressful and annoying. But I hope that always maintaining a close association between reason, authority, and morality will benefit my children in the long run.