Literacy: April 2008 Archive Page

In case you didn't know, Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) is back. (School Library Journal)

The CYOA books allow middle graders to experiment with nonlinear storytelling, "a developmental step that some kids need." Choice-points in the stories force youngsters to visualize and mull over plot possibilities, letting them take control of the reading experience. Individual volumes in this versatile series treat many different themes, take numerous approaches, and incorporate varying levels of complexity, making the titles suited to a wide audience. Sure-fire successes with reluctant readers, the books can also encourage youngsters who have the skills but have stopped short to move "past their point of resistance." And of course, more accomplished readers love them too.

Pew / Internet (PDF):

Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.... Yet despite the nearly ubiquitous use of these tools by teens, they see an important distinction between the "writing" they do for school and outside of school for personal reasons, and the "communication" they enjoy via instant messaging, phone text messaging, email and social networking sites.

Inside Higher Ed:

1998 was the last time that John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, used a traditional print textbook. He assigned it to his graduate-level introductory course in information systems. The book cost about $150. He also assigned supplemental reading -- trade press articles, online case studies and the like. Student feedback was clear: The textbook cost was too high, and they valued the supplemental material more.

He agreed on the price complaint, calling some versions "oppressively expensive." So Gallaugher stopped assigning the textbook and began developing syllabuses from existing online materials, including his own. He's posted PowerPoint slides and podcasts of his lectures online ever since.

In recent years, I have gravitated towards using a collection of brief, specialized texts, including online resources wherever possible, rather than one big textbook that's so thick I either feel like I have to assign extra chapters out of guilt (after all, the students paid for the whole book). 

Of course, often I want the students to study a specific living author, or a 20thC author whose works are still under copyright.  But buying the author's own book is different from buying a behemoth that includes a few pages about the author's work.

An article about an entrepreneur who stretches the definition of "book" (International Herald Tribune):

Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, "the most published author in the history of the planet." And he makes money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are "The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea" ($24.95 and 168 pages long); "Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers" ($28.95 for 126 pages); and "The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India" ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Parker a compiler than an author. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject -- broad or obscure -- and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

Yesterday was my daughter's sixth birthday. My wife told me that there was a horrific meltdown at the store when the ice cream cake they picked up did not match the picture in the catalog.  Screams, tears, and a half hour of sobbing.

Last night, I told my daughter the story of The Birthday Party of Smart Carolyn from the Moon (Smart Carolyn is the character my daughter identifies with in the Captain Rod Gearhart steampunk stories I tell her at bedtime).  Smart Carolyn was disappointed that her Moon birthday cake wasn't what she expected, and had a temper tantrum in the Moon supply depot.  I told her about the Moon supply clerk who had traveled to five different supply posts searching for the right color frosting, and who felt very, very sad that Smart Carolyn from the Moon didn't even say thank you. 

My daughter sniffled a little in the dark, and then she continued the story for me: "And then Smart Carolyn from the Moon got over it, and realized that the store clerk had tried her best, and that's what was really important. And the cake was delicious."

So this morning I was in a pensive mood when I came across this blog, "Lies I've told my 3 year old recently."

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

The very last one on the list is the reason I blogged it. But I didn't include it here... go read it over on Heading East.

For a second, I really wanted this to be true. Great satire from The Onion.

According to Mead's website, the ruling lines in the grad-school-ruled notebooks will be placed 3.55 millimeters apart, making them "infinitely more practical" for postgraduate work than the 7.1 millimeter college-ruled notebooks. In addition, the standard 1.5-inch top margin normally provided for dates and headers will be halved, and the left-hand margin will be eliminated entirely.

"Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."

"When you're in grad school, every millimeter counts," he added.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It's the kind of place where someone can say, "That reminds me of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric... inventio, dispositio, elocutio, actio, and... uh.. .what's the other one?"  and it's likely that the others will get the joke.

While walking around the city after the conference was over, I had a vision of a future 4Cs conference that made me giddy. I'll tell you about it in a little bit. First, let me talk about the conference.