Rhetoric: October 2008 Archive Page

A researcher who studies World of Warcraft likens leading in-game raiding parties to teaching a class.

Raiding has taught me that being a good teacher requires laying down strict guidelines while simultaneously demonstrating real care for your students. The stronger the ties of trust and respect between teacher and student, the more weight they will bear. In the past I've cringed when my raid leaders cheerfully announced that we would spend the next four hours dying over, and over, and over again to a boss who seemed impossible to defeat. But I've trusted them, done my job, and ultimately we have triumphed because they insisted on perseverance. The visiting raid leader who took us through the Kael raid lacked that history with us -- he was too much of a stranger to ask us to dig deep and give big.

A willingness to take risks can also be shored up by commitment and drive. Our guest leader drove my guildies nuts, but impressed me with his professionalism. Does this mean that after graduate school even generous doses of sadism seem unremarkable? Perhaps. But it also indicates that I was willing to work hard to see Kael dead, even if it meant catching some flack. For them, it was a game, and when it stopped being fun they lost interest.

What I learned that night was that I believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. Obviously, I don't think they are teaching methods that should be used often, or be at the heart of our pedagogy. But I do think that there are occasions when it is appropriate to let people know that there is no safety net. There are times -- not all the time, or most of the time, but occasionally and inevitably -- when you have to tell people to shut up and do their job. I'm not happy to discover that I believe this, and in some ways I wish I didn't. But Warcraft has taught me that I there is a place for "sink or swim" methods in teaching. (Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed)

The headline immediately caught my attention.  I went to Catholic high school, and while most of my teachers were laypeople (that is, not nuns or priests), my freshman year I had an octogenarian Latin teacher who would threaten to throw erasers at us -- but always with a twinkle in his eye.  He was actually very patient and charming, but he used the eraser threat as if he were parodying the stereotype of a strict teacher. 

My Algebra II / Trigonometry teacher was not a parody, she was serious. Usually, the only praise she ever gave was moving on to the next student after you'd survived your grilling. After a quiz, she would say "Everyone who got an A, bring your paper up.  Now everyone who got a B, bring your paper up.  Now, all the rest of you."  That was a sort of reverse humiliation, since the rest of us saw that someone was able to earn an A. She called us "Sir Jerz" or "Lady Ryan," which I suppose was vaguely appropriate, since our mascot was a knight, but I'm sure her goal was to take us down a peg or two and remind us who was really in charge.  If we answered her question with a "yes," she'd say "Yes, what?" And we'd say, "Yes, sister." 

I've had plenty of other teachers who were more personable, and made me feel happier while I was in the classroom, but she really stands out in my memory. But boy, she really made me want to study.

My colleague David Stanley links to this article.

Many people, especially academic experts, have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted, because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted. Nevertheless, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. The reason is that Wikipedia's community of more than seven million registered users has organically evolved a set of policies and procedures for removing untruths. This also explains Wikipedia's explosive growth: if the stuff in Wikipedia didn't seem "true enough" to most readers, they wouldn't keep coming back to the website.

These policies have become the social contract for Wikipedia's army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them, incorrect information generally disappears quite quickly.

So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based?

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," states Wikipedia's official policy on the subject. --Simon L. Garfinkle, Technology Review

I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo's "Top Questions" is "What happened to my profile?" but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful "Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!" page, which does not actually answer the question.

Another question is "What happened to my alias profile?", which includes this heap of committee-spawned obfuscatory hooey:

If you had a profile page associated with your alias prior to migration to your new profile on Yahoo!, it will not be viewable moving forward.

I'm not sure that "migration" would be a good way to describe what happens if millions of birds are pulled from their nests and moved to a another location without warning, but whatever. And I suppose that being given a pretty much profile sort of counts as getting a "new profile," in the same way that if a bunch of pirates looted the house you rented, you'd end up with a "new house" because it no longer resembles the old one.  Because the auxiliary verb "will" already conveys "in the future," I wonder what someone thought the adverbial phrase "moving forward" would add to this linguistic mush.  It seems to be a euphemism for something like "anymore" or "ever again."

Many of the comments on Slashdot point out that Yahoo! is a free service, so it's not like we should really expect much of them.

Another writes, "Yahoo please die already, noone has liked you since '96."

Via Karissa:

Mr. McCarraher defended his client by revealing his ingenious trump card- the victim's Facebook page.

On that page was a picture of her at a fancy dress party. She was smiling.

Here are some of the lawyer's touching words in describing the victim: "What we have is a person who has post traumatic stress but is quite capable of going out and having a good time at a fancy dress party." -- Chris Matyszczyk

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

I'd like to be able to link to specific details on the map, but I don't think it's possible.

I'd never heard of the "Argument Slide" before.  The "concept visualization" cluster is probably most useful for teaching my freshman writing students.  I'm taking a quick break from marking midterms, and I only glanced at this. Filing it for later. (Via Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, where Lisa Spiro also introduces me to the term "slow blogging").

A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn't recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and cavorting, blinking and wiggling in throes of mercantile ecstasy. 

It took me about five minutes to see their new trick. So I looked around and found a more aggressive ad blocker, which, fortunately for me, blocks even more of the non-intrusive ads that I had been willing to put up with.

On Gameshelf, Andrew Plotkin offers a great discussion of flash ads. This line sums it up pretty nicely:

You cannot get me to start watching ads by making them more intrusive; you can only make me hate you more.

I will put up with text ads, or graphic ads that don't blink. I won't put up with things that reach across into the content area, that add paid hyperlinks in the content area, or that otherwise interfere with my ability to use my browser (popups, disabling the "go back" button, etc.). 

There are millions and millions of pages on the internet, and if yours annoys me, I will leave.

I'm saving this for the next time I talk to my journalism students about surveys. Language Log.

Do you think surveys asking for people's opinions about the way things are, rather than verifiable things they have done, are an even more extreme form of stupidity, resulting in nonsense like "43% of employees believe managers may be snooping on them" being passed off as news or even social science?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

Does it sometimes occur to you to just refuse to do any more surveys until the morons who make them up show some signs of getting their act together?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

A journalism student at NYU published a Generation Y-ney piece on PBS's MediaShift.

The first thing I notice when I walk into the class is that there are 14 girls and two boys. Already NYU is dominated by females, but the journalism department is exceptionally estrogen-infested. Professor Quigley begins by explaining how blogs are becoming more imprtant and asks if any of us have a blog.

One hand slowly rises. It's mine. (Alana Taylor)

It's certainly... interesting to have a student publicly evaluate a class in this manner, after the class has been in session for a few weeks.   While she is careful to distance her essay from a personal attack on her professor, she complains about the old-media stance of the course, and the program as a whole. Based on the scarcity of student bloggers in this particular classroom, it seems to me that the professor is pitching the class at the right level -- though the generic term "blog" is far less familiar to today's teens than branded bloglike entities "Facebook" or "MySpace." 

My former student, Amanda Cochran, now a grad student at NYU, reacts to Taylor's piece.

Like Taylor, I am one of the only bloggers in my graduate school class, and I'm looked upon as a novelty. As many of my readers know, blogging was an important part of my undergrad experience. We were on the cutting edge of journalism (and still are) at Seton Hill -- as it would seem in light of this report. I know about blogging. I know what I need to do to write a good blog. This ability has enhanced my resume and, more importantly, my understanding of online media and its direction. However, it is true that few other students do know about blogging and its ramifications on their future careers.

Okay, so Taylor made a point. So what? She has done much more harm than good to her career by this stunt. Taylor, looking oh-so-Facebookish in the picture posted with the piece, did invade her classroom, as cited by NYU professor Quigley. However, more importantly, no matter if she isn't a traditional journalist or not, she violated a journalistic tenet of disclosure to her subjects for a completely unworthy assignment. If I were an employer, I would think twice before hiring her -- and that's enough in this competitive business to stay unemployed. (Amanda Cochran)

Taylor had planned to write a follow-up for MediaShift, but editor Mark Glaser did so instead.

I turned into a bobble-head doll, nodding, nodding, nodding, while reading this excerpt. I've already requested it for the library.

We are at a crossroads. There are two possible paths before us--one in which we destroy what is great about the Internet and about how young people use it, and one in which we make smart choices and head toward a bright future in a digital age. The stakes of our actions today are very high. The choices that we are making now will govern how our children and grandchildren live their lives in many important ways: how they shape their identities, protect their privacy, and keep themselves safe; how they create, understand, and shape the information that underlies the decision-making of their generation; and how they learn, innovate, and take responsibility as citizens. On one of these paths, we seek to constrain their creativity, self-expression, and innovation in public and private spheres; on the other, we embrace these things while minimizing the dangers that come with the new era.

Fear is the single biggest obstacle to getting started on that second path, the one where we realize the potential of digital technology and the way that Digital Natives are using it. Parents, educators, and psychologists all have legitimate reasons to worry about the digital environment in which young people are spending so much of their time. So do corporations, who see their revenues at risk in industry after industry--recorded entertainment, telephony, newspapers, and on and on. Lawmakers, responding to this sense of crisis, fear that they will pay a high price if they fail to act in the traditional manner to right these wrongs. The choices that we are making now will govern how our children and grandchildren live their lives in many important ways: how they shape their identities, protect their privacy, and keep themselves safe.

The media feeds this fear. News coverage is saturated with frightening stories of cyberbullying, online predators, Internet addiction, and online pornography. Of course parents worry. Parents worry most that their digitally connected kids are at risk of abduction when they spend hours a day in an uncontrolled digital environment where few things are precisely as they seem at first glance. They worry, too, about bullying that their children may encounter online, addiction to violent video games, and access to pornographic and hateful images. --Palfrey and Gasser