Academia: July 2007 Archive Page

Sometimes called the reptilian brain because its basic structure dates back to our reptile ancestors, the brain stem is largely devoted to our most primal instincts, far removed from the complex, higher-brain skills that allow us to understand humor. And yet somehow, in this primitive region, we find the urge to laugh. --Steven Johnson --What's So Friggin' Funny? (Discover)

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of "publishing". Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy. --University Publishing in a Digital Age (Ithaka)

Filing away for the ol' tenure application.

Update, 01 Aug: IHE report; McLemee analysis.

When he was editor of a daily newspaper in 1964, "nearly 90 percent of the households in that town subscribed to the paper, and people would get up in the morning and read it," Mr. Lavine says. With one radio station and one television station nearby, he says, "there were only three places you could go to find out whether the world had survived overnight. We assumed that what we were doing was right because everyone turned to us."

But those days are gone. Now journalists must understand what their audiences are interested in, as well as the best way to grab their attention. The dean believes that Medill is uniquely poised to straddle the line between journalism and marketing since it consists of both a school of journalism and a program in integrated marketing communications. --Katherine Mangan --Journalism Dean at Northwestern U. Develops Curriculum With Increased Emphasis on Multimedia and Marketing (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

Not knowing what they could and should do to plan for the future was a constant refrain among the undergrads. Whether or not college faculties and administrators are comfortable acknowledging that a majority of students have enrolled because of their belief that a college degree will lead to an attractive and secure career, the fact remains: Some professional level of advisement is an expectation by virtually all young people on campuses today. --Howard and Matthew Greene --The Next (Real) World: Are you preparing your students for it? (University Business)

Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years.

* User-Created Content. It's all about the audience, and the "audience" is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small tools and easy access have opened the doors for almost anyone to become an author, a creator, or a filmmaker. These bits of content represent a new form of contribution and an increasing trend toward authorship that is happening at almost all levels of experience.

* Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest. Social networking may represent a key way to increase student access to and participation in course activities. It is more than just a friends list; truly engaging social networking offers an opportunity to contribute, share, communicate, and collaborate.

* Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives. Feeding our need for instant access, mobile phones are our constant companions and offer a connection to friends, information, favorite websites, music, movies, and more. From applications for personal safety, to scheduling, to GIS, photos, and video, the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing rapidly, and the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.

* Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world--or diverge wildly from it--present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s.

* The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing. New tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike. Although this area is farther out on the horizon, we are beginning to see what new publications might look like--and how new scholars might work.

* Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing. They are still quite difficult to produce, and examples are rare; but steps are being taken toward making it easier to develop this kind of game. In the coming years, open-source gaming engines will lower the barrier to entry for developers, and we are likely to see educational titles along with commercial ones. --The Horizon Report 2007 Edition (PDF) (New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative)

I'm glad to have found this document, as I start to pull together materials for my tenure bid.

Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner of Silver Spring and Max Simon of Potomac -- both 18 -- cry out, "Just like in 'Lady and the Tramp'!"

And Schwartz could take it no more. "Stop!" he yells.

"Try to think less about which movie scene you are reminded of and more about the way people really act in real life. Everything isn't related to a movie!"

Really?

To most of the workshop students, life has become totally visual. They are members of not so much the Me Generation as the Eye Generation.

"I really don't like reading a story. I like seeing it," says workshop student Craig Patterson, 17, of Grove City, Ohio. "I almost always prefer the movie version of a book. Movies can capture the beauty of an image more than books can." --Linton Weeks --The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It (Washington Post (will expire))

Hmm... a reporter sits in on a summer film class, and is shocked --- SHOCKED!! -- to learn that the students who are motivated enough to pay for it are likely to think in visual terms. What is this world coming to?

To be fair, the subhead is "Students in Film Class a Microcosm of a Visually Oriented Culture," so the WashPo makes it clear these are not random students. And even among English majors (who one would think are more likely than the average student to be interested in reading), I do often notice that even students who are excited by writing often approach a first-person narrative as if they are describing a movie. Thus, they write "A big smile spread across my face" or "I gave him a puzzled look," conveying the interior state of their first-person protagonist from an external, visual point of view. Most have never considered alternatives, such as quoting dialogue ("You remembered the violets!") or the protagonist's unvoiced thought ("Was Smitty trying to use a 20-gauge reamer on a blown gasket? God, what I wouldn't do to get away from these clueless hicks!"). If you plan the story to SHOW why the protagonist likes violets, and even if you don't actually stop to explain what a 20-gague reamer is and why a hick would think it was appropriate to use on a blown gasket, when the protagonist's reaction to the violets or the reamers convey information about character, setting, plot, etc., then the details have done their job.

Sites like the Blake archive mark an important point of departure from expensive clothbound volumes available in university libraries -- and unique items in private collections -- to high-resolution facsimiles freely available to anyone with Internet access. Even the nonspecialist (like me) can easily spend hours appreciating Blake's aesthetic achievement beyond reading the unadorned transcriptions of his poems one might find in an anthology.

The editors have performed a great service for the general public, but what about the exacting standards of literary scholarship? Does the Blake archive meet the expectations of professionals?

[...]

Yes, young scholars, you may cite the Blake archive. --"Thomas H. Benton --Authoritative Online Editions (Chronicle of Higher Education)

It isn't clear whether Linden Lab simply took the Woodbury island offline, or actually destroyed the software behind it. Dori Littell-Herrick, an assistant professor and chairwoman of the animation department, said she believed it was the latter. If so, the university would need to build another island if it re-established a presence in Second Life.

Ms. Littell-Herrick suggested that Woodbury's island could have attracted unruly avatars because it was more open to outsiders than other college sites in Second Life. And while the island is gone, no Woodbury faculty or student avatars appear to have been barred.

"We need to see what went wrong because obviously getting shut down was not the result we were looking for," she said.

Edward Clift, an associate professor and chairman of Woodbury's communications department, who is responsible for the creation of Woodbury's island, railed against Linden Lab's action in an interview with the Second Life Herald.

"The destruction of the Woodbury 2.0 campus is, in my view, an egregious shot across the bow of academia," he said. --Andrea L. Foster and Dan Carnevale --The Death of a Virtual Campus Illustrates How Real-World Problems Can Disrupt Online Islands (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

And yet, outside the anthologies and beyond the campus, these outlooks have influenced public policy at the highest levels. Their endurance in public life is a rebuke to the humanities reading list, and it recasts the putative sophistication of the curriculum into its opposite: campus parochialism. The damage it does to humanities students can last a lifetime, and I've run into far too many intelligent and active colleagues who can rattle off phrases from "What Is an Author?" and Gender Trouble, but who stare blankly at the mention of The Public Interest and A Nation at Risk.

This is a one-sided education, and the reading list needs to expand. To that end, here are a few texts to add to this fall's syllabus. They reflect a mixture of liberal, libertarian, conservative, and neoconservative positions, and they serve an essential purpose: to broaden humanistic training and introduce students to the full range of commentary on cultural values and experience. --Mark Bauerlein --An Anti-Progressive Syllabus (Inside Higher Ed)

Just filing this for future reference. I taught a lit-crit class for the first time last term. It was organized around a core of four or five literary texts that we kept reading and re-reading under different critical lenses, so there wasn't much room in the course for a free-floating political diatribe that was unconnected to primary reading. I did add "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which wasn't in the anthology, but is on Bauerlein's list.

As a journalism teacher I have a professional interest in objectivity, so it was natural for me to seek an anthology that was organized with contrast and multiple perspectives in mind, rather than one that promoted institutional branding. Still, that course was already fairly intense...

We are starting up a new "Writing about Literature" course, which is for all English majors (lit, creative writing, and new media journalism), so it makes sense to offer a very broad range of ideas in that course, while I taught the "Literary Criticism" course in order to prepare students to deal with criticism in grad school.