Over the last 50 years, we’ve had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media – interactive visual media in particular – poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of…
Professors, in general, have the luxury of appearing moderate and open to competing ideas, but insecure students often research the opinions of faculty members to ensure that they will be on the correct side of any apparently open dialogue. The powerless seize on small expressions of political opinion from the powerful and embrace these views…
You can’t consider yourself a moral person and at the same time allow the field of education to replace well-designed instruction on tough and important material (what it takes to sustain a democracy, how to read accurately and with deep comprehension) with superficial coverage of dumbed-down subjects. You can’t spend your life in silence, smiling…
Since my graduate school background is in literature rather than composition studies, I may be stumbling along a well-trod path, but a conversation I had with a colleague in the hall lit off a lightbulb in my head. Today in my Seminar in Thinking and Writing class (our version of freshman comp), students shared sample…
Shizzam! This, my friends, is entry #201! Hard to believe that only 8 months ago, I wrote my very first entry here on the Seton Hill University blog system. I don’t think I could say enough positive things about blogging: 1) I get to be part of a large r community of like-minded individuals –…
In terms of their reputation within respectable society, comics hit their nadir in the early 1950s. Slowly, however, the pendulum started to swing the other way. The careers of two Catholic intellectuals, Marshall McLuhan and Father Walter Ong, illustrate how comics re-won respect in the post-war era. In the 1940s, long before his fame as…
Writing Teachers Writing New Media (Jerz’s CCCC 05 Notes) “What did you guys do to earn walls?” -overheard during the (long) setup for this presentation. Hoping to find an opportunity to continue the discussion of the intellectual property issues Lawrence Lessig raised on Thursday, I attended “Writing Teachers Writing New Media,” where three young presenters from…
A Blogger Went to CCCC… And Here’s What He Did CCCC (Jerz’s CCCC 05 Notes) The challenging acoustics in the Moscone Center seemed to work in Douglas Dean Hesse’s favor, as he opened his keynote, “Who Owns Writing?” by belting out an African-American spiritual. During the opening session, when Sharon Mitchler asked attendees who are affiliated…
Conference on College Composition and Communication 2005, San Francisco (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Due to a labor dispute at the San Francisco Hilton, the Conference on College Composition and Communication was moved just a few weeks ago. The Moscone Convention Center made their space available at the last minute, after the organizers determined that a significant number…
“Americans have always been informal, but now the informality of precollege culture is so ubiquitous that many students have no practice in using language in any formal setting at all,” he says. The remedy is “to restore the family dinner table to the teaching of writing – that setting which can be a very rich…
They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it’s the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it’s the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be…
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of “web log.”) Until recently, I…
Humans specialize in distraction, especially when the task at hand requires intellectual heavy lifting. All the usual “Is it lunchtime yet?” inner voices, and external interruptions like incoming phone calls, are alive and well. But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not…
Many students having difficulty understanding Shakespeare would be surprised to learn that he wrote in modern English. But, as can be seen in the earlier example of the Lord’s Prayer, Elizabethan English has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. Many familiar words and phrases were…
Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether current copyright law imposes inappropriate burdens on users, including subsequent creators, of works for which the copyright owner cannot be located (hereinafter referred to as ?orphan?’ works). The issue is whether orphan works are being needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination inhibited. If no one…
When I recently asked a group of librarians how they thought Google organized its search results, the first suggestion was that Google counts the number of clicks on the links, and adjusts its rankings accordingly. Most of the people in the room seemed satisfied with that answer, but one person volunteered the clarification that Google…
So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation…
Is not rhetoric, taken generally, a universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments; which is practised not only in courts and public assemblies, but in private houses also, having to do with all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike, and is in all equally right, and equally to be esteemed-that…
Orality, Literacy, and Writing Technology (U Penn) Images of Orality and Literacy in Greek Iconography of the Fifth, Fourth and Third Centuries BCE — compiled by Andrew Wiesner, who also points to James O’Donnell’s Some manuscript images of the technology of the word in the Middle Ages I’ll look through these in more detail later. Similar:Summer…
You wouldn’t buy a car or a house without asking some questions about it first. So don’t go buying into someone else’s data without asking questions, either. Okay, you’re saying… but with data there are no tires to kick, no doors to slam, no basement walls to check for water damage. Just numbers, graphs and…