the most cake

I've moved

2008-01-03T10:59:00.000-08:00

What is going on with this blog?

2007-12-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

Most likely it will be moving, though I have not started the new year, new blog yet. First I wanted to experiment with the "new" customizable templates, because I never really played around with the "new" version of blogger in nor out of beta. But ultimately, all of my other blogging is done via wordpress, and I am finding that I prefer it. I especially like edublogs and am considering starting this personal/academic blog there. I thought to stay here for reasons of readership, but since my sitemeter reports that I don't really have much of a readership (not that there has been anything here to read), I figure it won't hurt too much to start over somewhere new (and improved!).

I took an entire semester off from this blog. During that time I began a meditation blog, administered a blog for the ENG105 faculty at CSR, and of course maintained my course blogs.

Currently there has been an interesting (and motivating) discussion taking place in the WPA listserv regarding "time toward PhD completion." Within that discussion has come the reminder that habit in writing is super important and that daily writing is crucial. As a writing teacher this is obvious to me, yet as with doctors who tell us to eat right and exercise and then are themselves complete couch potatoes, I have been one of those dissertation writers who has not been taking my own writing advice to heart. I feel the pressure when I make time to write that it has be a large amount of time and that it has to produce something momentous (or close to it). But, that isn't always going to happen, and it is better to write a bit each day than to have a few sporadic pressure-filled marathon writing sessions. Daily writing is actually where blogging was supposed to come in -- public accountability always helps too.

A few folk on the listserv have suggested this site -- PhinisheD -- so I plan to spend some time checking that out and commiserating with other ABDs.

So I guess this has kind of turned into a new year's resolution post: to return -- more diligently -- to writing and completing my dissertation and to return to this blog (or this blog at a new location) as part of that more diligent dissertation writing process/habit.

Finally, I have also given some thought to what I want this blog to be. It started out a little over three years ago (!!!) as my attempt to move my work and my voice outside the "ivory tower" and reach a larger audience than my dissertation committee. The blog was to be an account of the research and teaching and teaching as research that my experience as a PhD student was/is comprised of. For the most part I believe that is what this blog has been -- along with the occasional (or more than that?) asides. I realize that some readers prefer to read academic blogs that are strictly that, and I have considered making my own blogging fit more into that strictly academic "genre." However, I've come to the realization that that blogs I most enjoy reading are "mixed bag" blogs -- the ones that move between pedagogical practice, writing theory, most recent movie viewing, and dinner menus. I'm sure it is the voyeur in me, as I believe it is for many of us working, writing, living, interacting in these online spaces who are also reality TV junkies and fans of memoir and the personal essay, etc. Anyhow, I'm feeling fairly certain that this blog will remain a blend of the personal and the academic. A post I read today is of this opinion:

The mix of professionalism, critique, personal obsession. This is the juxtaposition that drives the best kinds of writing.

online writing workshops?

2007-08-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

I spent the morning kicking around the web through a variety of websites, google searches, JSTOR articles, compfaq and CompPile searches, etc. in search of some specifics on online/virtual/electronic peer review (or writing workshops). I spent about an hour and a half. It was an exhausting search and didn't yield the kind of results I was hoping for: suggestions for specific technology, logistics, results. From the tidbits I was able to find, I learned that research favors asynchronous over synchronous peer review. This is making me re-think my original idea, which was to use chatzy, in favor of using wikis. Still, I haven't quite figured out exactly how I am going to do this: have students post a page that is their essay, and then use the discussion section to answer workshop directing questions? Should students be able (in true wiki) fashion to intervene in the original text? My impulse is to say yes, as the author can view the history of changes, but what are the drawbacks to this idea? I'd definitely like to do more reading about this. I've gone ahead and ordered myself the book Virtual Peer Review: Teaching and Learning about Writing in Online Environments, despite it being in hardcover and way to much money for me too be spending right now.

In my online travels I also came across some references to designing hybrid courses, so I'd like to look further into those as well.

Note to self (but meant to be read by anyone interested)

2007-08-16T06:45:00.001-07:00

Do NOT assume that just because you've been assigned a hybrid course of which one credit is digital that you'll be assigned to a computer classroom that allows you to teach the technology necessary to making the digital aspect possible. Such assumptions will hurt you, when, a week before classes start you suddenly check the classroom space and see rows of tables as opposed to computers, and you nearly have a heart attack. These are things you need to ask for and agressively pursue. Please remember this in the future.

RSS for the Fall

2007-08-07T05:52:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning toying around with ideas for how I want to integrate RSS into my classes this Fall. All three of the classes I'm teaching are hybrids -- a new idea that CSR is working with that has one credit of a four-credit course as a digital credit. In some ways I'll just be doing what I've been doing -- having students blog, work with wikis, etc. -- only I'll be able to have that extra credit hour a week to work in these digital arenas as opposed to doing it on top of all the traditional f2f reading and writing that goes on in the classroom. I'm also hoping that students won't be quite as shocked by and resistant to the online work now that it is "officially" a part of the class (though I've always included it in my course descriptions, students have always expressed surprise over the required blogging).

Over the past couple of semesters, I've experimented with different approaches to teaching students RSS. First semester we used flock. Second semester I had them use google reader. My concern is that students aren't checking their readers regularly. This is most important in terms of the class blog, because that is the space with the greatest number of updates and the material pertains to class, assignments, etc. For reading the blogs of their peers, it's okay to sit down when they're ready to comment, login to google reader, and start flipping through posts (although my problem with this is that it isn't the best way to really learn RSS and see the ways in which it can help manage all the web-based content out there).

So recently I've decided to take a bit more seriously the claim about email being for old people. Last week I was teaching a group of students between ninth and tenth grade as part of a program called Summerbridge (Philadelphia). We had a sesssion where we met with some admissions counselors, one of whom started talking to the kids about how they tend to communicate. I was actually surprised that all nineteen of the students present have a myspace/facebook account (they seemed so very young to me). Anyhow, the conversation led me to think about ways to integrate RSS with myspace/facebook as part of my upcoming hybrid classes -- with the thought that since these are the spaces that students visit each day, then these are the spaces in which to incorporate any class announcements or updates. The question left ahead of me: How?

For myspace I chose the SpringWidgets RSS reader (widget). And for facebook I finally found the application, myRSS, for feed subscriptions. I think these will work well for staying abrest of the class blog updates (for those who have myspace/facebook accounts). The questions I'm left with: Are these widgets/applications the best way to utilize RSS? Probably not. Are they appropriate for keeping the subscriptions to all of their classmates' blogs? Probably not. What about students who don't have a myspace or facebook?

Ultimately, I think I will have them use google reader as a supplement to these additions on their social networking site of choice. I don't want any of this to seem too cumbersome, because I really want students to see the ways in which RSS can help make their learning, researching, etc. processes more effective and efficient (and more interesting and diverse to some extent). For now I'll continue to play around with various ideas, and on the first day of class, I'll really need to get a sense of how many students have these accounts (and utilize them regularly) that will certainly affect and direct my thinking and practice in terms of RSS (and other digital practices) for this Fall semester.

summer movie watching

2007-07-13T05:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I stayed in bed, drinking tea and watching Zizek. I called it work.

Last week we saw Once. I was truly taken with this movie. I think I've thought about it every day since I've seen it. The film is so completely driven by music that D and I could sing the songs upon exiting the theater (which we did). I believe that I keep thinking about it because of how much was kept from the viewer, how much was held back. But Daynah Burnett's review for PopMatters explains it better than I can:

Still, and even though its ethos is decidedly bohemian, the film never lapses into romantic idealism. At no point do the leads make you swoon or root too hard for their union. Rather, they hold so much back from themselves and each other, it’s as though as you don’t know them, but only glimpsed them in passing.

This summer we've also seen Waitress, which is tough to watch without thinking about the murder of writer, director, acctress Adrienne Shelly. And Knocked Up -- hil-arious.

We also watched Lovely and Amazing, which I had never seen. I liked it -- better than Friends with Money (both from Nicole Holofcener).

headache

2007-07-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

national grid has been working on our street since early May (maybe it was late April?). By "working" I mean digging up the street, dumping pounds of gravel in front of our houses, spray painting our sidewalks and lawns, drilling holes, letting their noisy trucks run all day long, asking to get into our basements, and just generally being loud and disruptive. I'm not exactly sure what they are doing, but they describe it as "upgrading the natural gas infrastructure in your neighborhood." From what I can tell, this involves changing the gas lines in a way that gives national grid access to our gas lines outside of our houses (as opposed to inside). While there is no mention of this being "experimental," so far we are the only street (as far as I can tell) to have this work being done. Now, mind you, our street has somewhere around twenty-five houses total. Please note that they have been here since April. How, I wonder, do they intend to do this "infrastructure upgrade" to the entire city? By what year do they expect to finish? But that, of course, is not my headache -- that one is theirs. My headache has to do with the fact that I listen to this racket day in and day out as I am trying, TRYING to work. Yes, some days I leave and work elsewhere, but I don't like being forced to leave my house simply because I can't hear myself think. Not to mention that for about a month and half I had to be guided out of my driveway by the work crew, as on one side of the driveway was a giant hole (that a national grid truck had fallen into, creating an even bigger hole) and on the other was always an eclectic array of gravel, tractors, trucks, orange cones, and the like. Right now all of this drives me particularly crazy because I have only one hour before I have to get ready for an appointment. An hour isn't enough time to really travel somewhere to work, but it is certainly enough time to work from home. If only...if only that jackhammer would stfu (I have no idea if that is really an acronym that anyone actually uses, but I just did).

Naturally this is the first summer ever that I've taken off time from teaching to write and research. Of course.

Well, it feels kinda good to write about it. I haven't been blogging much with the exception of posting bits and pieces of research project, as I attempt to design it. Ranting through writing = good outlet.

my research question

2007-07-11T08:12:00.001-07:00

Right now it seems that my research question is: What is my research question? It's maddening.

I'm struggling with it, but this is what I have so far (as with all my work thus far -- special shout out to my friend Kate for looking over all the first attempts, so that my web persona can be just the tiniest bit less vulnerable):

1. To what extent are faculty and students aware of the options available when choosing instructional technology and of the long-term cost considerations (fiscal, ethical, ideological, and otherwise) involved in adopting software for use in higher education?
a. What are the options and alternatives (particularly in terms of proprietary software options in contrast to open source models) available to faculty and administration when choosing instructional technology software such as course management systems (CMS), ePortfolio programs, and assessment software?
b. What are the fiscal, pedagogical, and ideological factors involved in the decision making processes on the part of faculty staff and administration when choosing software for their institution?
c. What are the ethical and political implications (if any) that influence the decisions made by faculty, staff, and administration when purchasing and utilizing proprietary software?

The first question I see as a kind of overarching question of the project. The sub-questions seem to actually be the questions that would have to come first. If that makes any sense at all. (Once again, I'm a bit too close to tell at this point). The other thing I'm stuggling with are the nuances between ideological and political and ethical (and even then, I guess, fiscal and pedagogical since those are both political and ideological...and...sigh). This part feels unruly to me right now. I'm still working it all out, but feedback is welcome. I should just make this a workshopping blog.

draft of survey -- for students this time!

2007-07-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

Here is a draft of the survey that I will give to a random selection of students enrolled in writing classes at each of the three chosen area colleges. It is similar the faculty survey that I posted the other day. Feedback is welcome!!!

SURVEY FOR STUDENTS (in writing classes)

The following survey is designed to gather information about the extent to which instructors and students are informed about the course management software (CMS) available to them as a technological aid in their courses. In gathering feedback from instructors and students regarding their knowledge about these programs and their awareness of possible alternatives, I hope to better understand the kinds of decision making processes that are involved in attaining these programs for use in higher education and in writing classes in particular.

Participation is entirely voluntary, and you may choose to leave the study at any time without consequence. All information obtained from this study is strictly confidential.

The survey is brief and should take only ten to fifteen minutes of your time. Thank you for your participation!

Please circle the appropriate answer. If you choose other, please specify.

1. You are enrolled at a:
a. Four year state university
b. Small, private four year liberal arts college
c. County community college (part of the state system)

2. What year are you?
a. First year
b. Second year
c. Third year
d. Fourth year
e. Fifth year
f. Non-matriculated

3. Describe your relationship to technology:
a. Innovator – I program/design my own software
b. Early-adopter – I am always one of the first to have the latest gadgets, games, software, etc.
c. I have used a computer since I was very young and understand its functions quite well
d. I use a computer to go online, instant messaging, and basic word processing
e. I primarily use(d) a computer for school purposes but not at home and not for much more than basic word processing
f. Feel a lack of knowledge about technology and therefore tend not to use it

4. What course management software (CMS) have you used during your time at this college? Circle all that apply.
a. BlackBoard
b. WebCT
c. Angel
d. Moodle
e. Sakai
f. A program designed by your instructor
g. A website designed by your instructor
h. A class blog
i. A software program designed and built by your institution
j. None
k. Don’t know
l. Other_________________

5. What course management software (CMS) does this class use?
m. BlackBoard
n. WebCT
o. Angel
p. Moodle
q. Sakai
r. A program your instructor designed
s. A website designed by your instructor
t. A class blog
u. A software program designed and built by your institution
v. None
w. Don’t know
x. Other_________________

6. If you chose none AND have experience using a CMS for a different course, can you please comment on the difference(s) between a course utilizing a CMS and the one that doesn’t:

If this course is NOT using a CMS, please go to questions 11 – 13.

7. Which functions do you use most often? (number in order of use with one being the feature most frequently used; please put zero if you don’t utilize the function at all)
a. My Grades ___
b. Online text/quiz ___
c. Discussion/chat ___
d. E-mail ___
e. Accessing lecture notes ___
f. Checking course announcements ___
g. Accessing course documents ___
h. Journal/Blog ___
i. Collaboration/Wiki ___
j. Other ___________________ ___

8. If the CMS has given you technological problems, have you utilized the college’s technology support?
a. Yes
b. No
c. I have not had problems with this program
If you answered “yes,” were they able to help you with your problem?
a. Yes
b. No

9. Overall, do you consider this program to be a tool that helps you with your writing?
1 2 3 4 5
not at all very much so

10. Do you find the interface easy to use?
1 2 3 4 5
difficult easy to use very easy to use

11. Do you think you write more in a class that uses a CMS (including e-mails, chat, posting messages/discussion, etc.) than one that doesn’t? Please rate on a scale from one to five with one being much less to five being much more.
1 2 3 4 5
much less about the same much more

12. Your institution’s CMS costs approximately how much per year?
a. $3,000 – 10,000
b. $10,000 – 20,000
c. $20,000 – 40,000
d. $40,000 - $60,000
e. $60,000 – 75,000
f. more than $75,000
g. I don’t know

13. To what extent are you familiar with open source e-learning or CMS platforms (such as Moodle or Sakai)? Please rate your familiarity on a scale of one to five with one being not familiar at all to five constituting a solid understanding of open source models:

1 2 3 4 5

14. Please elaborate on any questions above that you felt were limiting:

Draft of survey

2007-07-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Here is a draft of the survey I am working on to give to faculty at the three colleges I've chosen to focus on. Who knew that it is so freakin' difficult to design a survey!?!? I, for one, had NO idea. Until now. So, if you've never actually designed a survey, please refrain from casting stones (or, for that matter, please refrain regardless of your survey-making status), but I am open to suggestions. If you could ask a question to faculty regarding their CMS use, what would you ask???

SURVEY FOR FACULTY

The following survey is designed to gather information about the extent to which instructors and students are informed about the course management software (CMS) available to them as a technological aid in their courses. In gathering feedback from instructors and students regarding their knowledge about these programs and their awareness of possible alternatives, I hope to better understand the kinds of decision making processes that are involved in attaining these programs for use in higher education and in writing classes in particular.

Participation is entirely voluntary, and you may choose to leave the study at any time without consequence. All information obtained from this study is strictly confidential.

The survey is brief and should take only five to ten minutes of your time. Thank you for your participation!

Please circle the appropriate answer. If you choose other, please specify.

You are teaching at a:
a. Four year state university
b. Small, private four year liberal arts college
c. County community college (part of the state system)

What course(s) do you primarily teach?
a. First year writing
b. Other (than first year) writing courses
c. Literature courses
d. Other________________

What is your employment status?
a. Full-time tenured faculty
b. Full-time contract faculty
c. Part-time/adjunct faculty
d. TA/GA

Describe your relationship to technology:
a. Innovator
b. Early-adopter
c. Tend to adopt technology when it becomes the norm and have a good grasp of how to make it work for you
d. Tend to adopt technology when it becomes the norm, but skeptical of it
e. Tend to adopt technology when it becomes the norm, but unsure of how best to use it
f. Feel a lack of knowledge about technology and therefore tend not to use it
g. Do not see its role in the classroom

What Course Management Software (CMS) do you use?
a. BlackBoard
b. WebCT
c. Angel
d. Moodle
e. Sakai
f. A program you’ve designed
g. Your own website
h. A class blog
i. A software program designed and built by your institution
j. None
k. Other_________________

If you chose none, please describe your reasons for not utilizing a CMS: _______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

If you are not using a CMS, the survey is completed. Thank you for your participation. Those of you using a CMS, please move on to the following questions:

Which of the following most closely describes your reason for choosing this particular program?
a. I wasn’t aware of other options
b. This is the standard at my institution
c. My institution requires I use this program
d. My institution strongly encourages me to use this program
e. I prefer this program to others
f. Ease of use
g. Other_____________________________________________________________

If you choose to use a CMS that is not the institution’s standard version, are you given technological support if and when needed?
a. Yes
b. No

Which functions do you use most often? (number in order of use with one being the feature most frequently used; please put zero if you don’t utilize the function at all)
a. Gradebook ___
b. Online text/quiz ___
c. Discussion/chat ___
d. E-mail ___
e. Posting lecture notes ___
f. Announcements ___
g. Course documents ___
h. Journal/Blog ___
i. Collaboration/Wiki ___
j. Other ___________________ ___

Overall, do you find your pedagogical practices to be well supported by the CMS features available to you? Please rate on a scale from one to five with one indicating that the program does not enable you to enact your pedagogical practices and five indicating that the tool actually makes your pedagogy more effective:

1 2 3 4 5

If you answered with a one or a two, please describe what features or options would better enable you to enact your pedagogy:

Regardless of whether you use your institution’s standard CMS, please answer the following questions to the best of your ability:

Were you involved in deciding whether or not the school should purchase this particular software?
a. Yes, I sat on a committee
b. Yes, I was asked to vote or give input to the committee
c. No, the software was already in place when I came here
d. No

Are you aware of who ultimately made the decision on your institution’s standard CMS?
a. Yes, administration decided
b. Yes, it was the vote of a committee
c. Yes, information technology or educational technology services decided
d. No, I’m not sure

Your institution’s CMS costs approximately how much per year?
a. $3,000 – 10,000
b. $10,000 – 20,000
c. $20,000 – 40,000
d. $40,000 - $60,000
e. $60,000 – 75,000
f. more than $75,000

To what extent are you familiar with open source e-learning or CMS platforms (such as Moodle or Sakai)? Please rate your familiarity on a scale of one to five with one being not familiar at all to five constituting a solid understanding of open source models:

1 2 3 4 5

Do you use your CMS in any way as a tool to aid in student writing? If so, describe how you use this product.

Please elaborate on any questions above that you felt were limiting:

technology and ideology

2007-06-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

In her (now outdated, but interestingly not really so much...) essay , "Ideology, Technology, and the Future of Writing Instruction," Nancy Kaplan points to some gaps in research around pedaogical tools such as textbooks and technology. On pgs. 13-14 Kaplan notes that no empirical studies "assess the textbook as pedagogic delivery system, let alone analyze its ideological implications" (emphasis mine), and studies of computer writing tools have tended to focus on effects of the computer or word processing program on the cognitive processes of the writer as opposed to focusing on the ideological nature of the technology itself. My project is less interested in the effects and effectiveness (or not) of electronic writing tools and more interested in the process by which we come to decide on particular versions of software. I might touch upon the effectiveness (or not) of these pedagogical tools -- especially if and when I might make a case for alternatives -- but overall I am more interested in getting at the considerations, awareness, conversations (or lack thereof) that go on around what is at stake (and for me this means what is at stakes in terms of corporate capitalism and its hold on higher education) when we make these choices.

It's like this: Wal*mart is an option for purchasing my daily needs. The price is right. The location is right. They carry what I need. They have a large selection. They have friendly people at the door waiting to give me my cart. Okay, so maybe these are the qualities I'm looking for when I choose where to shop. But, in terms of long (and short) term economic effects on me (as a citizen and taxpayer), on the workers (few of whom even have insurance), on society as a whole, I might not want to shop at Wal*mart -- even if it does have everything I'm looking for.

"When a technology is as pervasive and profoundly shaping as print has been, it is often difficult to perceive the full extent of its entitlements and exclusions. Its formations and empowerments seem simply natural and right. When a new tool emerges, however, the conflict it engendered by its emergence can illuminate previously obscured relations" (14-15). Kaplan explains that the conventions of a book have not only shaped the text itself, but also the world. She uses indexing as an example. Indexing has become the "natural" way by which we shape, organize, categorize knowledge, and she goes on to point out that there are digital equivalents that "are rewriting the world, restructuring what is knowable, by whom, and for what purposes" (15). The Michael Wesch video, "The Machine is Us/ing Us" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE -- is an example of just that. We now organize knowledge in the form of tags, social bookmarking, etc. Ultimately the point here is simply that the tool is not just a means to an end, the tool itself shapes and structures the world. And ultimately, I want to ask, What kind of a means is it? What are the factors that shaped the technology that is then shaping us and our students? (Is it Wal*mart? Or some other lesser evil?)

In his 1985 College English article, Richard Ohmann asserts that technology cannot inherently create new ways of thinking as if "'the technology somehow came before someone's intention...'", reminding us that "'technology...is itself a social process, saturated with the power relations around it, continually reshaped according to some people's intentions' (681)" (qtd. in Kaplan 23). From this perspective, Ohmann sees capitalism at work and technology giving a hand to those with power, money, and need to maintain the(ir) status quo. He accuses the "computer revolution" of expanding the reach of the elite, "meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce that have been the hallmarks of monopology capitalism from the onset" (Ohmann 683). Andrew Sledd's 1988 article, "Readin' not riotin': The Politics of Literacy"raises similar questions about the alleged empowering effect of technology. He argues that "the plan is to produce a few experts in the service of established power who will refine and program the technology, often for surveillance, plunder and massacre" (499). In the scope of my project I believe I'll be making some similar claims, but I'm also hoping to achieve a less grim outlook (than Ohmann and Sledd). While I would never make the rhetorical choice of "massacre" and "plunder." I do see the creepy surveillance function of many of these programs, but I don't view all electronic/digital tools as functioning in quite this way (one of the arguments in favor of an open source model as it puts firm dent in that surveillance feel). Kaplan is also more forgiving, willing to look at these technological tools as "enabling pioneering efforts, helping us to actualize for all what the few now possess" (25). Still, she cautions, "electronic texts don't simply materialize out of thin air; they must be created, housed, and displayed by means of systems--hardware and soft. Those structures and interfaces affect users' expectations and aspirations, shape our values and our sense of our own potential" (25). Limitations and exclusions we come across in terms of these programs might very well be "grounded in the political and economic arrangements within which systems are designed, developed, and disseminated" (26). System designers, programmers, technology managers have decided what is and is not possible in the scope of these programs. They have determined the structure of the electronic environment for all of us.

As an example of the relationship between a tool and its pedagogical uses, Kaplan uses the blackboard. While the blackboard has a range of potential uses, it limits the writing process in terms of favoring certain transformations and discouraging others: "for example, the blackboard is best at word-for-word subsitutions...worst at a complete reordering that would require erasing everything and starting over" (27). The amount of text the blackboard can actually hold also limits what we can and can do with it as a writing tool. Interestingly, the monolithic CMS, BlackBoard, takes its name from this centuries old pedagogical tool, creating a sense of convergence between old technology and new. Also, the e-learning version of BlackBoard, like its namesake, affects and shapes the writing that takes place there. All the elements of both BlackBoard and the blackboard shape how we use them. As Kaplan puts it, the technologies themselves "shape users' perceptions of what texts are and can become: who can write them, read them, distribute them and to whom" (28). And one of my problems with BB is that it creates a (too) limited and closed sense of each of these things. The fact that only students from the same class can read and write the documents contained therein merely replicates the same type of thinking about purpose and audience that the students are already doing when they create a print text for class.

I have a new dissertation

2007-06-13T05:44:00.000-07:00

I know it sounds crazy (or maybe it doesn't; it does sound crazy to me -- even though I'm the one doing it). I met with my committee (well the two local members) on Friday and proposed my new plan to study proprietary software programs -- those utilized as writing "tools" -- as emblematic of the corporate University. Right now it's all just starting to come together. I'm focusing on three schools:

a community college
a small, private four-year liberal arts college
a state research university.

I'm focusing on the following products:

Blackboard/WebCT = CMS
Angel ePortfolio2 = ePortfolio
ETS customizable essay scoring services – turnkey and Engine only = assessment tool for writing
ETS Criterion = assessment tool for writing

I will possibly look to add more ePortfolio programs to my list. I'm open to suggestions.

I will essentially be doing a reading of these products (and in doing so a reading of education as commodity) utilizing the "circuit of culture" presented by Stuart Hall (et al). Because the circuit focuses on different moments or processes and the interaction between them, the project will not only include a rhetorical analysis of the marketing of these products but will also look at the people involved in deciding on the purchase of these programs as well as those who end up utilizing or consuming these products. I'm interested in what specifically is involved in the decision-making processes that go on when institutions are debating over or deciding on these programs. And more specifically I want to know the extent of awareness that exists around these decisions as choices that are feeding the problematic relationship between higher education and corporations. I want to know how much awareness admin and faculty have of freeware and/or open source models that do the same thing that these programs do. This information will be attained primarily through interview and survey. I will also look at usage -- how the consumers (primarily teachers and students, but also administration) use these "tools" -- differently than or similar to their intended usage.

That's my "new" project in a nutshell. It's not as drastically different from the original as I'm making it seem here, but it does present a whole lot of new research and reading that I did not do for my exams.

2007-06-04T10:12:00.001-07:00

Blogging, like exercise or anything else that takes/is work, becomes more and more difficult to get back to the longer you've been away from it.

I've been away from both blogging and other related academic work for a couple of weeks now, and it has been rough getting back into them.

This morning I reread Paula Mathieu and James Sosnoki's essay "Enacting Cultures: The Practice of Comparative Cultural Studies" from Robert Yagelski and Leonard Scott's edited collection, The Relevance of English. And rather than (re)invigorating my own project, it only served to deflate me/it.

In this essay Sosnoski and Mathieu address a particular complaint against cultural studies and its alleged lack of pedagogical success: "its reliance on 'cultural critique' as a pedagogical technique" (325). By this they mean the way that cultural critique is imposed upon students and viewed by them as a "moral imperative" (326). In this way, they argue, 'cultural critique' is not rhetorically an effective technique. They point to advocates of cultural studies, such as Libby Miles, who complain that this technique ends up being "formulaic and flat" (qtd. in Sosnoski and Mathieu 327).

Sosnoski and Mathieu study the complexities of the problems with this common form (cultural critique) of cultural studies pedagogy. One problem is based on students entering the classroom determined "to resist or refuse any teaching they find 'political,' 'feminist,' or promoting what often gets misnamed 'reverse racism'" (327). Sosnoski and Mathieu argue that this resistance isn't necessarily due to an inherent conservatism, but rather is driven by the dominant culture -- corporate controlled media -- that "constructs a conversation that labels pedagogies that ask students to be critical of social and cultural practices as merely code words of the plotting advocates of critical correctness" (328).

Sosnoski and Mathieu argue that students view 'critique' as requiring that they renounce their daily lives and associated cultural practices, and through an understanding of this student perspective we can begin to understand how this pedagogical approach can be viewed as a "moral imperative." Sosnoski and Mathieu seek to "introduce students to a form of cultural criticism that makes productive use of students' everyday experiences and critical abilities rather than merely inspiring their ire" (328).

Nothing here so far is particularly "new" or "different." Sosnoski and Mathieu are addressing, and even tentatively aligning themselves with, common arguments against a cultural studies approach/pedagogy. And, on the other hand, Cultural studies, which is itself often conflated with or misconstrued as critical pedagogy, does also share some similarities with critical pedagogy and these types of pedagogical approaches are often put under the canopy of radical, emancipatory, or liberatory pedaogy. Critical pedagogy has its roots in Freire who would indeed find Sosnoski and Mathieu's goal of making use of or starting from the everday lives and already in place critical abilities of their students as an admirable goal and one inherent to critical pedagogy. The question of course is how does one do this while simultaneously avoiding the pitfall of the "moral imperative" that Sosnoski and Mathieu are so concerned with.

The proposed "answer" (according to this essay) comes in the form of a cultural studies-oriented first-year writing course created by Mathieu and Jennifer Cohen. In order to escape the primarily negative function/outcome of critique, the pilot composition course, "Reading, Writing, and Enacting Cultures," asked students to examine current university culture (in this case focusing on its electronic presence by comparing the web page of their university and its coverage of a topic of the student's choice to that of another university).

Asking students to perform this concrete comparison allowed them to begin criticism as a place of their own interest and choosing. Also, rather than asking them to 'critique' by using an existing theoretical model, their criticism was derived from comparing one cultural site to another. Rhetorically, comparison allows students to look critically at a practice without forcing them into an impossibly negative space, which often results in resistance or cynicism. (333-334)

Comparative criticism (as opposed to other existing theoretical models) is not restricted to current conditions; it can also address possibility -- i.e. the future. By asking students to "imagine better ways to teach and learn" through the 'imaginative' essay on an ideal university, Mathieu and Cohen claim to have escaped "the purely negative space of critique" (334). They believe that "helping students articulate desires for a better world and to initiate discussion about different views of the ideal is a worthwhile political and pedagogical goal" (336).

In the essay's final section, "Don't Stop at Criticism: Enacting Culture," Sosnoski and Mathieu address the idea that writing pedagogies that have emerged from a cultural studies perspective tend to cast students as merely ananlysts. They point to Alan France as an example of a scholar who has critiqued textbooks that solely ask students to "analyze the culture around them as a sort of cultural critic by closely examining and picking apart texts," leaving students in an analytical but passive position (337). Mathieu illustrates ways in which the course she and Cohen created urged students to take action by making Web pages to publish their views. Some of these writings now exist as actual links on their University's official Web page.

Here is an example of a cultural studies based writing class that is critiquing campus culture. It is essentially doing what my own project argues a cultural studies based writing course should consider doing. This is how I ended up deflated. How is my argument different? How do I distinguish my argument from arguments already being made?

1) It seems that the choice of studying and analyzing campus culture was a somewhat arbitrary choice for Mathieu and Cohen (although I don't know that this is the case, as they don't detail their exact decision making process); whereas I tend to argue that it should be not just one choice among many, but the very starting point for a cultural studies based writing classroom.

2) I would like to call more attention to the ways in which corporate influence in education is not so obvious, more transparent -- for example, in the form of proprietary software, academic labor, writing practices that contribute to the creation of a labor force under capitalism. So that the exploration doesn't begin and end with what is lacking, missing, underdeveloped from one University website to another, but how decisions being made -- corporate ones -- are directly and indirectly affecting the campus that students inhabit both part-time and full-time.

3) My project is based, in part, on a gap identified by Richard Ohmann in his Afterword to Left Margins -- the pedagogical project that Ohmann noted missing from the cultural studies collection in 1995 was a critique of campus culture. Mathieu and Cohen's class helps to fill such a gap, but it is only one example. Where are the others? Are there others? These are questions I might also grapple with. One example alone can't necessarily fill a gap.

Doing Nothing

2007-05-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

I am almost too good at "doing" nothing -- to the point where the guilt feelings that accompany it are a bit overwhelming. I was raised in house where it wasn't unusual to "do" nothing. My mother always jokes that she is going to open a business that involves teaching people how to sit around in their pajamas, drinking tea, and not doing much of anything at all. We were all very good at just "hanging out." I was never bored on summer vacations. I never yearned to get back to school simply so that I could get out of the house. I loved the idea of endless days of nothingness.

Of course it is different now. I am an adult and do in fact have many things that I must *do*. However, so far this week I have never made it out of my PJs before noon, and I'm always starting my second cup of tea around 10:30 or 11. It is with that second cup of tea that I sit down and write, so that I am at least doing "something."

After I hit "publish," I'll probably head back to my oversized, comfy chair in the living room and continue on with nothing in particular.

My mother would be proud!

first day of summer vacation

2007-05-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I turned in my grades (finally!) shortly after noon. At about 4:30 I was abruptly hit with a terrible sore throat and runny nose. My body has been so wound up with stress that the minute I let my shoulders move away from my ears a bit -- bang -- I'm overcome with a summer cold. I'm pretty bummed about that as it really delays the start of my summer plans, which involve a lot of intense physical activity (including cleaning) and moving around. So I didn't get to tackle my overhaul/spring cleaning of the our front enclosed porch today, but here is what I did do:

This morning I read Convergence Culture until lunch.

After lunch I went out in the yard and planted the last few annuals that I had not yet put into the ground. It was exquisite out. And I forgot for moment how miserable I feel -- except for the fact that my nose kept running.

I came in and flipped through the latest REI catalog, allowing myself to daydream about summer adventures on bikes and in the woods, on the trails, etc.

Went back outdoors with Cheyanne, set up a lawn chair, and sat down with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which I've never read before and is one of my summer fun books. I got about three pages into it, and it began to rain. Got up, put the lawn chair in the garage with my cell phone now folded into the cup holder.

Not too bad for the first day of summer "vacation." I'm trying to really recover quickly here and not let this cold take over my life. I have Ultimate frisbee scheduled for tomorrow night and a big gym workout planned for Thursday...and maybe a yoga class on Thursday morning, so I really can't be sick for too long.

Tomorrow I have plans to help stuff envelopes for Pride at the local gay and lesbian community center. Seems like a worthwhile, yet somewhat mindless task to take on immediately following the end-of-semester mayhem.

I have definite intentions to get back to blogging this summer, as I'll be starting to write the chapters of my dissertation, but for the next week or so, I'll be taking it easy. Any blogging I do will be about my attempt to gorge myself on pop culture, as I ease myself back into my diss work.

HELP w/ citation

2007-04-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

I have no idea where I got this quote and citation from:

“The computer classroom has often been hailed as…a social-democratic space, helping to promote a liberatory pedagogy by fostering student resistance, empowering students by decentering the classroom” (Walker 119).

I can't remember anything about reading this, where I got it from, who "Walker" is (jill? Henry?). If anybody recognizes the article? essay? book? this might be from, please contact me.

---
Update:
Walker, Janice R. "Resisting Resistance: Power and Control in the
Technologized Classroom." In _Insurrection: Approaches to Resistance in
Composition Studies_. Ed. Andrea Greenbaum. Albany: SUNY, 2001. 119-32.

Thanks to all those who came to the rescue!

How do you stop procrastinating?

2007-04-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

For two days now I've been procrastinating, paralyzed, putting off my prospectus revision. It is due to the department tomorrow, and it feels too big. I can't even get myself to open the proper documents, because it feels impossible to pull it all together by tomorrow.

Intead

I've been looking at houses online, reading Cary Tennis columns on Salon, (re)reading e-mails, watching Clancy's "take" on Take 20, rearranging my netflix queue, getting cups of coffee and cappucinos, writing silly blog posts, reading articles on Kurt Vonnegut. I need to

stop.

But how?

Timeline of Cultural Studies

2007-04-09T10:26:00.000-07:00

Timeline of Cultural Studies
This timeline comes primarily out of the narratives of cultural studies as told by Raymond Williams in “The Future of Cultural Studies,” Lawrence Grossberg in “The Formations of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham,” and Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” The connections between cultural studies and composition have been made with the help of Diana George and John Trimbur’s chapter on cultural studies in A Guide to Composition Pedagogies edited by Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick. As each essay stresses, cultural studies is not a stable entity, so every account of its “story”or history is provisional (making this a more difficult timeline to create, as timelines force chronology, than the previous critical pedagogy timeline). With that caveat – here is my timeline:

30s/40s/50s: Raymond Williams in his (1989) piece "The Future of Cultural Studies" (edited transcript from a 1986 lecture) focuses on the influence of cultural studies on adult education during this time period. (This is Williams' "alternative" reading of the history of cultural studies, which he says is normally sited through texts). Williams also points to traces of "what you could now fairly call ' Cultural Studies'" in the works of Leavis and Scrutiny (153).

Appearance of "mass culture" after WWII through "the rationalization, capitalization and technologization of the mass media" (Grossberg 24) is key to the emergence of cultural studies.

1956: British New Left emerges against the backdrop of the Hungarian Revolution -- as Hall points out it (in "Cultural studies and its Theoretical Legacies”) was a moment in which a certain kind of marxism was disintegrating, and this fact problematizes the view of British cultural studies as a marxist critical practice. Notion of this as the founding moment is cultural studies is, according to Hall, a mistake/misreading. And, according to Hall, "there was never a prior moment when cultural studies and marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit" (265).

According to Lawrence Grossberg, the New Left developed, in part, to confront the ways in which traditional marxism failed to address "the beginnings of late capitalism, the new forms of economic and political colonialism and imperialism..." (25).

1957: Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy

1958: Raymond Williams: Culture and Society

1960s: Brought in subcultures that resisted some aspects of dominant structures of power and became part of the focus of work being done in cultural studies.

1963: E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class

1964 (or 63?): Richard Hoggart founds the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham

1968: Stuart Hall becomes director of CCCS

1969: England establishes its first "open" learning university. This Open University signifies a shift, according to Williams in that tie between cultural studies and adult education; however it is at this moment, sites Williams, that "what became Cultural Studies occurred": Whereas students (in adult ed) had been demanding that education/discussion be in relation to their own experiences and situations and that they retain some right to decide on their own syllabus; the Open University "deliberately" interrupted this. So it was on the one hand popular access, but it also inserted "a technology over and above the movement of the culture" (157). Williams defends the more "more basic right" of these people "to define the questions" (157).

1970s: British cultural studies advances within "the problematic of Marxism" (Hall "Cultural studies and its Theoretical Legacies" 266). Problematic = a struggle, an actual problem.

Ideas of Gramsci radically displace ideas of Marxism within cultural studies (Hall "Cultural studies and its Theoretical Legacies" 267) – Centre trying to produce an "organic intellectual." Gramsci also served a "middle-ground" for those who feared readings of Althusser that took him to “the post-structuralist realm of the necessary lack of correspondence” (because those ignores the materialist question of the role of ideology) (Grossberg 28).

This Gramscian position “defined cultural studies as a non-reductionist Marxism which was concerned with understanding specific historical contexts and formations, which assumed the lack of guarantees in history and the reality of struggles by which historical relationships are produced” (29). Grossberg describes this as a “conjuncturalist theory,” which does not assume all practices equate to culture (anti-totality/humanism of Williams) and recognizes real structures of power. It sees history as being produced by individuals as they struggle within determinate conditions.

Cultural studies emerges as "a disciplinary formation" in the confrontation between the humanistic Marxism of Williams, Thompson, and Hoggart and the anti-humanism of Athusser's structural marxism.

Political and theoretical work being done on gender and sexual orientation “interrupted” the work of cultural studies.

The New Right emerges in Britain, and the "traditional left seemed incapable of offering coherent strategies and responses" (Grossberg 26).

80s/90s— Thatcher regime managed to undermine the infrastructure in Britain, while the left is distanced from the majority of the population (seen in academics/students—in part) and unable to secure ground from which to organize opposition.

These political and historical concerns placed cultural studies in some cases on one side—for example, when it criticized post-structuralism and psychoanalysis for abandoning materialism—but most often CS placed itself between two extremes—for example, Hall’s call for a space for CS between structuralism and culturalism.

1980: Stuart Hall: "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" -- reading Williams and Althusser against each other

1986/1989: Raymond Williams: "The Future of Cultural Studies" -- ultimately, Williams does not really see the sense of approaching cultural studies in terms of an intellectual history as it may obscure from us "a historic opportunity for a new Cultural Studies formation" (161)--whose time is now. "Cultural Studies has been about...taking the best we can in intellectual work and going with it in this very open way to confront people for whom it is not a way of life, for whom it is not in any probability a job, but for whom it is a matter of their own intellectual interests, their own understanding of the pressures on them, pressures of every kind, from the most personal to the most broadly political..." (162).

Williams focus on cultural studies’ role in adult education is a point of convergence between cultural studies and composition, as Diana George and John Trimbur point out in their chapter on cultural studies (2001 Tate, Rupiper, Schick 78-9).

Richard Johnson: "What is Cultural studies, Anyway?"

1987: Martin Allor describes the term cultural studies as a "cultural commodity" (Grossberg 21).

1988: John Trimbur: "Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Writing"
Ties in with Williams' account of cultural studies' work in adult education, as Trimbur sees composition emerging out of the need to "represent students and adult learners stigmatized as uneducable because of cognitive deficiencies, the culture of poverty, or the restricted codes of oral culture" (Tate... 80).

1989: Lawrence Grossberg, in "The Circulation of Cultural Studies," describes cultural studies as an ambiguous term used to refer to what had been previously thought of as "critical theory" (i.e. competing theories (lit theory and anthropology; communication and pop culture) of the relation of between society and culture, ideology and art, etc.)

80s/90s: Cultural studies appears on the scene in composition studies (Reagan-Bush era reaction much like critical pedagogy).

1991: Schilb, John. “Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Composition.”

1992: Stuart Hall: "Cultural studies and its Theoretical Legacies"-- is not telling the definitive story of cultural studies, not the only way of telling this history of cultural studies. Hall wants to point to certain theoretical moments and what those moments have been like for him. Cultural studies has "no simple origins" (discursive in Foucault's sense of the word). Cultural studies "has a number of different histories" (263).
Entering the era of "post-marxism"

James Berlin and Michael Vivion, eds: Cultural Studies in the English Classroom -- cultural studies restored rhetoric as central to the curriculum displacing the previously privileged (by English departments) poetics.

Lester Faigley: Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition

1993: Lawrence Grossberg: "The Formation(s) of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham" -- Grossberg traces a somewhat brief (with a fairly narrow focus) history of the conception of and debates within cultural studies. He spends a lot of time making clear his point that since its inception cultural studies has been an unstable and changing “field.” While there is no single cultural studies position, it is important to understand its history, its projects that have shaped its identity. He refers to this as cultural studies’ “unity-in-difference.” He offers two histories of cultural studies -- the "normative" or "standard" account and the "war of positions" account -- ultimately arguing that the development of cultural studies is not linear. A linear or teleological account of cultural studies "ignores the continuous debates within and between the positions offered" (31). Grossberg chooses eight theoretical problematics or sites of warfare and then lays out five positions illustrating a more fractured and uneven trajectory of CS:
I literary humanism (Williams and Hoggart)
II effort to define a dialectical sociology
III Centre position (culturalism) -- studies of youth subculture and encoding/decoding mass communication
IV structural-conjuncturalist position
V a postmodern-conjuncturalist position

1994: Composition textbook: Signs of Life in the USA

1995: Karen Fitts and Alan France: Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy

1996: James Berlin: Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring English Studies.

Timeline of Critical Pedagogy

2007-04-05T06:13:00.000-07:00

I am being asked, as part of my prospectus to include a genealogy of both critical pedagogy and cultural studies. In moving toward this goal, I have started to create a timeline of critical pedagogy in order to gain a clear(er) picture of the historical trajectory (a BIG thanks to my friend Shari for her help with all of this).

Here is what I have so far (with the italicized portions being my vague thoughts):

Timeline of Critical Pedagogy

late 19thC./early 20th C: much of American critical pedagogy has its roots in the progressivism of this time period, exemplified in the work of John Dewey and his philosophy of Pragmatism. Dewey's educational philosophy included an emphasis on student-centered learning and participation in democratic life that is also at the heart of much contemporary critical pedagogy.

1970: Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- the "go to" text for critical pedagogy

1980s: radical educators in the US speak out about education as "sorting mechanism" (McLaren qtd. in Tate, Rupiper, Schick 94) and as an apparatus of reproduction of the ideology and power of dominant groups; boom in critical pedagogy scholarship during Reagan-Bush years (Tate, Rupiper Schick 95).

1980: Shor's Critical Teaching and Everyday Life = critique of community college system

1983: Giroux's Theory and Resistance in Education

1985: Giroux and Aronowitz: Education under Seige

1986: Giroux and McLaren "Teacher Education and the Politics of Engagement: The Case for Democratic Schooling" -- argues for school as "democratic public sphere"

Problem is that twenty years later, after working in various classroom spaces with critical pedagogy, the university's potential as "democratic public sphere" is being infringed upon by corporate interests and a corporate administrative mentality. It is not enough to simply say this space should be democratic, so lets enact that in our classrooms; first we need to carefully make note of the ways in which the space within which our classroom exists (and even that classroom itself) might not be democratic, where and when are the moments in which we do not exercise control or have a voice in our education, our teaching, and so on because of corporate interests.

1987: Shor's Freire for the Classroom: teachers from varied disciplines contributed essays to this collection illustrating the applicability of Freirean pedagogy in their classrooms

In this text, Shor points out that "it's a tricky business to organize an untraditional class in a traditional school.". This difficulty in implementing critical pedagogy when the majority of students are accustomed to receiving some form of traditional, mainstream education is taken up more recently by William Thelin in his works on "blundering", and is an idea that has also become a part of the debate between Thelin and Russel Durst (Jeff Smith, in his article, "Students' Goals, Gatemkeeping, and Some Questions of Ethics), seems to be making an argument similar to Durst's .

1988: Giroux's Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life -- points to "cultural production" as opposed to reproduction b/c Giroux (and Aronowitz) see schools not as merely reproductive apparatuses, but also as sites of resistance (Tate... 96).

The 90s bring in a more cautious approach to critical pedagogy. Hurlbert and Blitz's collection illustrates educators debating and arguing over all aspects of critical pedagogy (in stark contrast to Shor's 1987 celebratory collection); Maxine Hairston expresses great concern over a composition instructor's ability to handle political topics in the classroom, and Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff provide a critique and an alternative ("teach the conflicts") that they'd still justify as radical or progressive.

1991: Hurlbert and Blitz's collection Composition and Resistance

1992: Maxine Hairston makes her now famous attack on critical pedagogy, arguing against the idea of the politicized writing classroom

1993: Jennifer Gore's The Struggle for Pedagogies -- she lays out the differences between Shor's critical pedagogy and Giroux's critical pedagogy, and in so doing, critiques Giroux's scholarship.

1995: Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff's "A Critique of Critical Pedagogy" is included in Michael Berube's and Cary Nelson' Higher Education Under Fire -- in it they site the ways in which critical pedagogy implemented can fall into the "banking model" Freire warns us against.

1999: Pepi Leistyna Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception

Russel Durst: Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition

2000: Amy Lee: Composing Critical Pedagogies

William Thelin and John Tassoni, eds: Blundering for a Change: Errors and Expectations in Critical Pedagogy

2001: Joe Hardin: Opening Spaces: critical pedagogy and resistance theory in composition

Andrea Greenbaum: Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies

2005: William Thelin: "Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms"

2006: CCC "Interchanges" Durst/Thelin

Robert Yagelski: "'Radical to Many in the Educational Establishment': The Writing Process Movement after the Hurricanes"

I know I am probably missing a lot. Any suggestions? Offerings? Addendums? Additions?

Now the goal is to actually turn this into a genealogy with the goal of illustrating silences around or gaps in attention to the situatedness of these pedagogical practices, these critical pedagogy classrooms in the corporate university.

giving student feedback -- an observation

2007-04-05T05:28:00.000-07:00

This semester I've been giving a lot of feeback to my students via e-mail. I do this for two of their assignments in particular: close readings and group presentations. After a group presents I try to come straight back to my office and type up all the notes I took during the presentation and send them to each group member (along with individual feedback on his/her particular role in the presentation).

What I've been noticing is that students respond! I get an e-mail back. Sometimes the e-mail simply thanks me for my feedback, some point out the specific ways in which the feedback was helpful, some make clear their understanding of a point I've made, some defend themselves, and so on. I love this!

I know this is nothing truly new or earth-shaking. Instructors, including myself, have been responding to students electronically (in various forms) for a long time. Last semester, though, I tended to respond electronically in the form of comments on their blogs. I still do this, but I notice a big difference when I write them an e-mail. Students rarely (to never) pick up the dialogue that I attempt to start when commenting on their blogs -- even with all the in-class time spent talking about the potential for dialogue through these online spaces; however, for whatever reason, they seem much more compelled to hit that reply button. Maybe the "email is for old people" mentality hasn't quite hit my campus yet...?

Day Two: CCCC

2007-04-02T06:18:00.000-07:00

Dennis Jerz from Seton Hill and Sally Chandler from Kean University brought along some graduate students and put together a panel/session called “When Student Experts Remix the Discipline: New Media in the Composition Classroom.” And there was pretty good turnout, considering that these graduate students were “up against” the likes of David Bartholomae and Gerald Graff in the Grand Ballroom.

Student 1- Mike Rubino presented on multiple-authored blogs and collaborating in academic environments. He pointed out differences between academic discussion blogs, which seek to toss around various ideas on a shared topic and focused message blogs, which have a singular message they want to get across to the readers.

Student 2- Matthew Harabin presented ways to teach with EBay in order to develop students’ analytical and critical thinking skills.

Student 3- Amanda Cochran studied blog desertion, focusing specifically on why college students desert their blogs. She argued that this is not a “bad” thing, that it actually shows a “wising up” of these students, as they take in horror stories about bloggers who end up being punished (lost jobs, incarceration—such as the Egyptian blogger arrested over his critiques of religion, etc.) over something they’ve written. Students also showed concern over their blogs being inaccurate representations of their writing skills. This “moving on” she argued is a positive representation of students’ understanding of new media. She described students “moving on” to “gated communities” like Facebook and MySpace.

I guess I don’t see MySpace or Facebook (though I have never used the latter) as “gated communities” per se. Anyone has access to them, and there is ample information about the possibility of losing jobs (or not getting hired for one) on account of a myspace profile. Now I am not weighing in on the controversy here over whether or not this is fair or an invasion of privacy or what kind of “space” (public or otherwise) that myspace might be. I’m just not sure that a “moving on” to myspace or Facebook can accurately be described as a “wising up”, but I found the topic of blog desertion interesting. A couple of audience members described it maybe not as desertion per se, but rather as a kind of moving on. I also wasn’t entirely clear on Amanda’s distinctions between academic and social blogging. Isn’t all blogging supposed to be social?

Student 4 – Nadia Lahens presented on fan fiction and entertained the audience with a quote taken from Anne Rice’s website: “I do not allow fan fiction….” Rice goes on to say that writers of fan fiction must obey her wishes (I don’t have the exact quote for this).

During the discussion one audience member mentioned that we all laughed at Rice’s comment, but that to some extent her comment is understandable – that we are all somewhat protective of our own work. I personally laughed at Rice’s comment because it’s not as if Anne Rice created the vampire story herself. Her lack of recognition of her own “remixing,” her own version of fan fiction, is what made me laugh (an annoyed kind of laughter...more like a grunt, I guess).

Finally, Sally Chandler presented on youth culture in the (composition) classroom with a focus on remixing and its reliance on parody. She discussed the differences between digital and material space: digital space is immersive, interactive, symbol mediated, and information intensive. The mindset is or has to be different when working in a digital space as compared to material space. How, she asked, does this affect our teaching of writing? This difference is the same as differences based on race, class, gender that we’ve spent years addressing. Chandler drew on an example from last year’s Cs. She attended a panel on remixing as writing where the panelists showed that students see remixing as standard. Some audience members, however, was concerned about plagiarism and argued that patchwriting is not remixing. The panelists stood their ground, arguing remixing = writing, while Chandler was left agreeing with both sides. Ultimately she argued that we need to re-imagine what constitutes the writing process. Often times our reactions (as illustrated by the reactions of last year’s audience members) are material world reactions where economy is based on scarcity, but, as Chandler points out, the information is economy is not – where the more something is used/circulated, the more it is worth. We need to reassess our view of the writing process based on our use of new media literacy.

CCCC07: Outtake One

2007-03-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

My lovely traveling partner for this year's conference, Megan, was, very unfortunately, too sick to go. This is really much more unfortunate for her, having to deal with a long-lasting and hard-hitting cold/sinus infection, than it was for me, though having her there would have been wonderful.

My first night there, I checked into my hotel, got settled into "my pod," and checked out the little French restaurant/wine bar next door. I dined alone -- a glass of wine, some tomatoes and basil on French bread, and a salad. I was the only person in the crowded (people were waiting for tables) place who was alone. Next to me was a group of four women. They were having a great time, their volume rising with each glass of wine. They clapped and cheered loudly for themselves when at one point they decided to order yet another bottle. Toward the end of my meal, a couple of them leaned over to me and said, "We are *so* impressed with you." I wasn't sure what they meant exactly, but they explained to me that only one of the group of four ever had the "guts" to dine alone, and she had been encouraging the other women to try it. I mentioned that my traveling partner had gotten sick, and we struck up conversation. They inquired into the reasons for my NYC trip, and I tried to explain the conference. "Is that like writing?" they inquired. Somehow we got on the topic of the Food Network, a shared TV addiction. Eventually the conversation returned to dining alone. I mentioned reading many articles about the possibilities involved in dining (and doing other public ventures) alone, as people are more likely to approach you, etc. They agreed, and said, "Yeah, like we approached you." Then they made some sort of joke about a lot of good that does you...unless you're a lesbian, and they broke into hysterical laughter. For any reader who doesn't already know, I am indeed, a lesbian. But, did I have the courage to speak up and say something? Did I respond with, "actually, I am a lesbian." No. Did I mention, that it has never really been a dream of mine to be approached by four straight women in a pretentious little French wine bar in NYC? No. Did I happen to express to them that most lesbians would be a bit unfazed by four straight women? That in fact, what I noticed most were the few topics of conversation we could share -- TV, food, work, etc.--not the fact that they were women and I am a lesbian. No. No, instead I laughed lightly and shifted the conversation. And went back to my "pod" and slept on the fact that while I had the "guts" to dine alone, I didn't have the courage to speak up for myself.

CCCC07: Day One

2007-03-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: What follows is primarily aimed at summary of the presentations that I attended at this year’s Cs. I’ve done this for a couple of reasons: 1) is to keep the arguments and insights fresh in my mind—an archive for myself and 2) is to allow those who did not attend (including those not in the field) to get a glimpse of what went on. The italicized portions that follow the summaries are my reflective thoughts and/or questions regarding what I heard. If I’ve misrepresented anyone, please “speak”-up and let me know; it was certainly not intentional. Of course many of the presenters have their own blogs with more nuanced descriptions of what they presented (if the not the presentation itself), and I’ve tried to note that as well.

The first session I attended (Thursday morning) was “3Cs: Capitalism, Commodification, and Consumerism”:

Mike Edwards presented his paper, which covered an alternative discourse of the economic – one that doesn’t always assume scarcity, that doesn’t necessarily doesn’t look at the working class (student) as some kind of victim of capitalism, one that doesn’t assume all transactions are inherently capitalist transactions. He argued that working class (student) identities tend to be constituted by lack with the pedagogical adjustment generally being access (either to technology or even manners), but he presented the idea that the remedy is not just the handing out of resources; students need skills to utilize these resources. He turned to Resnick and Wolff’s conception of class as an economic process of appropriating value and looked at the ways that “use” and “appropriation” can be seen differently than in a strictly capitalist sense (for example, “use” of reading text could be for getting things done, learning, or appropriation and remix into new texts). He pointed out that digital technologies can facilitate these processes. In the third part of his presentation he presented the way that information goods take on more value as they circulate and that the networked writings of our students can do just that. Finally, he showed (literally, via a nice little powerpoint chart) the way that capitalism is: transaction always = market; labor always = wage; and enterprise always = capitalist (okay, his chart makes this much more clear); he turned to Gibson-Graham for an alternative: market as fair trade, for example; labor/wage as self employed, for example; and capitalist enterprise as state. In other words, nonmarket, unpaid, noncapitalist, but all economic activities.

Next up was Sean Murray who presented on the infiltration of capitalism/commercial culture into our lives and classrooms, and in particular on his concern with the ways in which the commercial world has commodified our identities. Sean is interested in a pedagogy that has students read the way in which their identities are influenced by corporate power. He then wants to link those readings of the point at which self and culture meet to social injustice on a large scale. He situates composition as being in a unique position of both plugging into that corporate culture but also being a site of resistance. He ended by expressing his reservations about such a pedagogy, which included his concern over implementing a simplistic, naïve (his words, not mine) narrative of unveiling “truths” with the goal of an alleged freedom (“the truth will set you free”); his awareness of pushing an (blatant anti-consumerism) agenda on students; and his fear that he is interfering with what Bill Readings calls Thought (with a capital T), which views T/thought as a question not an answer.

Finally, Dr. Lonni Pearce did a Marxist influenced reading of Working Assets as an example of a “socially responsible” company. She pointed out the conflict and tension between politics and consumption evident from the company’s website and marketing materials – a tension between the motives of capitalism (you can shop, talk, etc. and…) and the company’s representation as a political action group (…and save the world!).

At the start of his presentation, Mike situated himself as “a big fat Marxist.” I am wondering how his use of Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff can reconcile with that positioning or label. I think many Marxists might disagree.

Sean named many common reservations that get expressed concerning critical/radical/liberatory pedagogies. They’re certainly similar to reservations I sometimes have regarding my own pedagogies and my own “agenda” (and subsequent fears of “pushing it”). Sean’s presentation left me with a number of questions – the biggest one being, how specifically he makes the leap from these personal readings of self as influenced by corporate capitalism to issues of social injustice. To make this move seems to me to require a kind of pushing of the agenda on students. And, what issues is he specifically looking at on a more global scale? I’m also curious to know what experiences he’s had in terms of students who are well aware of their construction by media and commercialism--the students who are aware of the implications of their graphic tees and choose to make those purchases, construct themselves in these commercialized ways. Many students seem to be okay with this role. Sean did point to all of this in his conclusion, but I’m just wondering then how he deals with these reservations.

The next session was on plagiarism:

Clancy Ratliff gave a very engaging and entertaining presentation of plagiarism in the blogosphere. She presented anecdotes on bloggers having been plagiarized – the most hilarious ones having been her own (that is, her writing/blog being plagiarized, not her as plagiarist!). Her interest ultimately turned to copyscape an online service that helps authors detect whether or not their material has been copied (or quoted) elsewhere on the web. Clancy argued that ethically Copyscape is different than turnitin because with copyscape the author is actually paying the service to “defend” (copyscape’s word choice) his or her written material, intellectual labor, etc; whereas with turnitin there is often (arguably) coercion of students involved, turnitin makes money on these student texts, the students don’t see any of that money etc. Clancy would like to do a larger and more careful analysis of copyscape. She also pointed out that institutional views of plagiarism extend into the blogosphere (she had rather clear examples illustrating this, which can be found in her posting on her presentation).

Next was Rebecca Moore Howard who continued her work in looking at the rhetoric used to describe plagiarism and plagiarists. For this presentation she focused specifically on the rhetoric (specifically tropes/metaphors) used to describe plagiarism as it happens in the blogosphere (and compared it, at times, to the metaphors used for print plagiarism). She wondered, in approaching the project, whether or not people online are thinking differently about plagiarism. Apparently the answer is not really. Howard showed examples of blogs discussing the topic of plagiarism in terms of policing, crime, “assumed guilt,” cases, vampirism (yes, one site actually describes plagiarists as textual vampires, sucking blood and life), hunting (in which case the teacher/reader was the “hunter”, thereby making the student “prey”…and what happens in this scenario, Howard, asked…), and the metaphor of wearing ones dirty/used underwear. A couple of the sites she described treated plagiarism as crime that needs a team of investigators to investigate it (here she gave credit to a research assistant who made the connection to CSI culture). She pointed out the way that this discourse creates on online environment of vigilante culture.

One of the sessions I most looked forward to was on the global economy and class identity. The presenters were Min Zhan Lu, Tom Fox, and Joseph Harris with Bruce Horner as respondent.

Lu made the argument that given the globalizing of the free market we need to rethink class, and in doing so we need to rethink the way(s) in which we respond to our students’ careerist desires. In redefining class, Lu focused on class as bodily interaction and class as a matter of space. She noted that for those holding power territorial markers matter less and less; that class division has become the unequal distribution of extraterritorial mobility. She suggested approaching matters of class from simultaneously a local and global perspective and designing a pedagogy that enables students to acquire the specialized skills of the “new” global perspective. One route she described was a writing project that focuses on the tension between the socially constructed desire to chase supra-mobility and the more localized work sites of those who are bound by family and other factors. This writing project could detail the role of the globe trotter as depicted by mass media and ask questions of our (students) own globe trotting (or not) desires and tendencies.

Tom Fox gave a lively and impassioned presentation on the evils of textbook companies and subsequently textbook adoption (as made by committees, districts, policy makers etc). He informed us with alarm, “Companies huger than my imagination own education.” He drew the lines between arms fairs, textbook companies, education (including professional development). His suggestions: work in organized groups to empower teachers; continue to engage in a Rhetorical War of Positions on textbook adoption. He ended, “Corporate reform of education is coming to your campus soon.” (If it hasn’t already).

Joseph Harris presented on his own institution, Duke, and its recent controversy over the lacrosse team. He focused on one aspect of the situation and that was a signing of “Listening Statement” by 88 Duke faculty members who came to be both known and attacked as the Group of 88. At the heart of the criticism was the idea that faculty should not dare to criticize the culture of their own institution, that a faculty’s place is in the classroom (and only there), the assumption that faculty shouldn’t comment on the lives of students that don’t affect them. His suggestion: do study campus culture and invite ways of improving it.

I've run out of steam here in terms or recording some of my reactions, thoughts, questions, and I still have to get down day two, plus some "outtakes" from my adventure in NYC. More on all of that later....

---
update: Mike has blogged on his presentation, as well as on some of the same sessions I've summarized above.

Survived: Part II

2007-03-19T04:46:00.000-07:00

I made it through the second written exam and finished up with my oral exam on Friday. I emerged into the St. Patrick's day weekend snowstorm with some sense of relief and a big headache that lasted and lasted and lasted.

The next day I rolled out of bed and immediately started shoveling. I shoveled for an hour and a half--until it was time for my tennis match. The bubble was 101 degrees, and I ran around, with my headache, getting beat badly, while I mostly concentrated on trying to breath in the oppressive heat.

That evening D and I went out for what was supposed to be a lovely dinner at McGuire's, where we were treated terribly--or barely treated at all (maybe a better way of describing it). The food was good, but definitely did not warrant the $100.00 tab and shitty service. After that we met up with some of my wonderful friends for drinks.

Yesterday I attended the anti-war rally. Today my headache is finally gone.

survived: Part I

2007-03-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

I (barely) made it through exam one. Here is a rundown:

What suprised me most: How *physically* grueling a process it was (though I had a friend mention this aspect to me, I had no idea how much it would affect me). Most of the three days I felt like I'd been through a tremendous workout (only worse--if that makes any sense)--my hip hurt, my legs ached, knots in my upper back into my neck, my fingers and hands ached and had pins and needles. This is NOT a body that is accustomed to sitting around for long periods of time.

The questions I answered: I answered one question on Althusser's theory of ideology and subsequent debates within cultural studies around historical materialism and ideology; and whether or not I thought anything could be garnered from Althusser for the future of cultural studies. The other question was about the role of the writing classroom within capitalism--whether or not it complicates any straightforward sense of economic determinism; in what ways it might mirror capitalist relations of production; whether there is a distinction between the space of the writing classroom and that of the university.

What I ate and drank: as much coffee and sugar as I wanted (I'm sure that really helped with the body aches and pains).

Breaks: one walk, one half hour of jeopardy, breakfast/lunch/dinner, some dishes, some laundry after cheyanne got sick on D's favorite blanket, a bit of crocheting, helping D with her puzzle (that was her exam weekend project)--I think I added a total of about six pieces (out of 1,000); one hour of L Word

What I did as soon as I clicked "send": went to the gym; came home and tried to go for a walk, but the snow squalls and wind made it really tricky; went and bought a new stove (only ours is in white, and we didn't buy it at home depot, and we didn't pay that price for it)!

The worst part: knowing I have to do it again this weekend.

the exams are coming

2007-02-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

and in turn my blog has been neglected.

I start my first exam on Friday (as in *this* coming Friday...as in three days from now) morning. The second exam the following Friday, and my (teleconference version of) orals on Friday, the 16th. My oral portion will be a teleconference as one of my committee members is now on faculty at a school in Texas.

It may sound crazy, but I'm not sure of the best way to "prepare" for these exams. I've mostly been busy clearing space. Taking care of NUTs (nagging unfinished tasks), grading up a storm, etc., so that when the exam questions arrive in front of me, they'll have my full attention. I can't say I'm not scared. But I'm almost beyond that point. I've thrown up my hands. There is not much more I can do.

I don't know that I'll be blogging much or doing much blog reading over the next couple of weeks, but I'll try to do brief updates after each exam. I'm sure my NetNewsWire will announce something like 2,000 unread articles and blog entries by the time I return to my "real life."

Until then....

What's so wrong with the word scrotum?

2007-02-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I let things like this bother me so much. Cases of censorship and/or controversy over silly things crop up all the time. I try not to let them get under my skin so much, but it just infuriates me that there are people in this world who are so...so...(the least offensive, but totally nondescriptive, word that I can come up with is) clueless! I know that calling people clueless isn't terribly articulate. This is why I generally try not to respond when people get all riled up over the naming of anatomical parts. Scrotum is just a word for the skin surrounding a male's testicals. I'm not sure why, to quote Frederick Muller, a middle school librarian, “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.” Why is that so difficult to explain? Or as Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., puts it, “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview. And why is that? Because we'd rather have nine, ten, and eleven year olds referring to their body parts by other names? These reactions just get so lost on me. And I'm irritable as it is. I just had to sit hear and watch the evening news while reader after reader (well, I'm using the term "reader" lightly as they didn't read the whole book just the one passage) recoiled at the word scrotum.

Okay, well here is a much more carefully stated and well thought out response to the lunacy.

there's hope for me yet!

2007-02-16T16:39:00.000-08:00

Today I met with a member of my committee who agreed to help me with what at first seemed a potentially overwhelming idea to create a survey for faculty and students regarding use of proprietary software. The logistics still seem a bit overwhelming, but the support will help a lot. The results will become part of my third chapter addressing proprietary software as clearly representative of the corporatization of the University. Not only did she help me with that, we just had some really productive conversation and brainstorming around my project that helped to clarify pieces of it for both us (I think; I hope). In addition(!), I’ve completed more than the asked for number of exam questions. Not only that(!)—but I’ve completed them before the agreed upon send-out to committee date set by my chair. Granted I still need to spend tomorrow going back over them, tweaking and such. I also still want to get a question in there that addresses the difficulty of a strictly materialist theory in a classroom that is devoted to creating the written word, which then, undeniably (at least in mind) needs to be treated as material. Discourse as material. Somehow I need to work in a question that deals with these issues around discursivity and materiality (and their seeming or alleged inability to meet).

Other than that, I feel like I might be coming down with some dreaded cold or flu type thing. Hopefully it doesn’t turn into anything as I have a “big” poker game scheduled for tomorrow night. Or maybe I’m just exhausted from the exhilarating nature of my day. Let’s hope.

snow day

2007-02-14T14:26:00.000-08:00

I thought to opt for a more creative title for this post, as I am quite certain that thousands of other bloggers share that headline with my today, but I decided nothing could be more appropriate than that.

As promised today I will blog about my profession -- what I *love* about it that is. <3 It that even right? Is that the little heart symbol / emoticon that I see my students make? It looks funny. I think I did it wrong. Okay, well, I love that as part of my profession I learn crazy little emoticons from my students as they attempt to add inflection and clarify meaning in blog posts and e-mails.

Of course, the obvious...I love snow days (rare as they are).

I love when students ask me for recommendation letters. This is fresh on my mind, as I've had two students from last semester recently ask me for recommendation letters. Although it is work to write these letters, I love the fact that my students recognize the fact that they succeeded and the fact that they recognize my recognition of their success. Okay -- the less wordy version -- my students know that I'm proud of them and endlessly impressed with them, and I'm glad that they know that.

I love having interesting and lively classroom conversations with a group of saavy (often young, but not always) folk. They know so many things that I don't know. Sometimes I joke and say that their blogs are my link to the outside world...only I'm not really joking.

I love that when I curl up in the big chair in our living/bedroom (don't ask) with a cup of coffee and a book I am getting paid for that work. What a deal!

I love walking college campuses. There is an energy about most schools that I've been at -- an energy that translates into collective curiousity about the world (or at least that is how it feels when I'm walking across campus watching the bustle of briefcases and bookbags).

I love having access to multiple libraries and online databases.

I love being around like-minded people and being in a place where I can talk to (in a generally civilized manner) the ones who don't think like me, and if all goes well, we both come away with something new to think about.

In all honesty -- it is actually a little painful for me to get this mushy and idealistic -- even if that was the whole point. I want to go back to #2 on the list -- the snow day. Here is what I do NOT like about snow days. On snow days I feel like I'm going to get tons of work done. I'll be all caught up on grading AND have crafted some exam questions by the day's end. This is what I think going into it. But instead, I sit down to work and have to get up and shovel. Sit down to work and need to put more coffee on. Sit down to work and have to get up to go to the bathroom because I've had soooo much coffee, hot chocolate, and tea all day.

D stayed home from work today, and we were out every hour or two shoveling and snow blowing. Actually, she has been out a total of four times today, and I've only been out twice. AND, she did go around the neighborhood helping out the neighbors with her snowblower -- because that is the type of girl she is. But I did keep the coffee coming, and I made oatmeal muffins. I also went out in the backyard this morning and made a giant heart in the snow as a happy valentine's message for D. Of course by noon there was no longer a trace of it. All in all, I've done the baking and hot drink drinking and shoveling and snow playing that one is supposed to do on a snow day, but my work hasn't exactly progressed the way I'd envisioned. So that is my issue with snow days -- they create an illusion of extra time.

Presentation on uses of RSS in the classroom

2007-02-13T05:23:00.000-08:00

Today I am presenting for the Provisions series at CSR -- a lunch time series for faculty to come together and discuss pedagogy. Today's theme is "teaching with technology." Here is what I'll be offering:

Using RSS in the classroom

RSS: Real(ly) Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary = a webfeed delivered as an XML file to an aggregator or feed collector / reader.
General Benefits (for education):
➢ Organizing and streamlining the abundance of content on the web.
➢ Allowing for an approach to reading the combines both scanning (picking out interesting and relevant materials) and synthesizing (making connections between the relevant and interesting materials).
➢ Developing reading skills important for both our students and ourselves as we all become more inundated with information.
➢ Gives students the opportunity to evaluate and weed out content on the web.

For Students
• It stays much more current than a textbook: Students can subscribe to topic-specific sites that relate to the course, allowing them to stay aware of recent developments in the field. These feeds can help them with research (both finding topics and finding further information). Students can also contribute to the collection of feeds by seeking out relevant sites on the web and sharing these feeds with the class.
• Ease of reading and commenting on peers’ blogs: In a class that uses blogs, RSS can make more efficient the exchange of ideas and knowledge that makes blogs a worthwhile pedagogical tool in the first place. Students can subscribe to the blogs of their classmates and easily see when they’ve been updated.
• Think differently about writing for a digital world. Using RSS in a classroom where students are writing for the web offers the opportunity for students to think about how to craft writing that might be delivered and initially read in the form of a news feed (ofton only a headline and brief “blurb”).

For Educators
• Making announcements: Do you always remember something after class that you wanted to say during class? Keep a class blog site for announcements and assignments. Every time you update it, students will be able to view the update via their RSS aggregators.
• Reading students’ blogs: In a blogging classroom, RSS eliminates the need to go to each individual student blog; instead, they come to you. You can read through students’ blogs in half the time. You can also use RSS to keep track of comments left on student blog posts.
• Get updates on the latest news in your field: Google (news.google.com) or yahoo (news.yahoo.com) news advanced search will give you a feed to subscribe to that will update your reader whenever your search topic has new articles locatable on the web.
• Combine with a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us to create feeds for specific tags. If you create a unique tag for a specific class, then any bookmarks you (or anybody) adds with that tag will be automatically fed to both your RSS reader and your students’.

Readers:
Bloglines
NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite
Google Reader
RSS Owl
Flock
Blogbridge

Resources:
• Blogs for Learning article by David Parry: “The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is Crucial for a Blogging Classroom”
• Will Richardson’s online guide to RSS: “RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators”; and his blog Weblogg-ed; and his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms Corwin Press, 2006.
• Wikipedia entries on RSS and web feed

Just added....
O'Reilly's XML and RSS page
From teachinghacks.com -- RSS ideas in Education
For a great non-technical explanation: "How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way"

calling all women academics

2007-02-09T06:01:00.000-08:00

Please consider posting (or simply just writing down or sharing with a friend or...) what you love about your profession as a part of happy woman professor day -- Feb. 14th!!! (via d. hawee's blog)

two questions

2007-02-07T05:28:00.000-08:00

My committee has asked for my participation in creating (my own) exam questions. It may not seem like it, but it is a pretty intense process. The questions have taken me well over an hour (each) to craft. I'm not yet sure if I'm on the right track in terms of what they are looking for, but here is what I have so far:

1. "Althusser's Marxism is in the last analysis a reductionism, where ideology plays the role that the theory of mediations plays to Hegelian Marxism" (Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism 161). For Althusser there is no practice except by and “in” ideology: “what thus seems to take place outside ideology…in reality takes place in ideology” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” 175). So it can be said that for Althusser the “last instance” is ideology; whereas for Marx it the productive forces and the relations of production. For Marx the dream/illusion or “false consciousness” constituted by the ‘day’s residues’ of individuals materially producing their existence needs to be interpreted in order to discover the reality of the world. And it is those relationships of production at the level of the infrastructure or economic base that have become one of the central components of historical materialism. Althusser, however, claims to “go beyond” the representation of base/superstructure to focus on the “point of view of reproduction” (136). This might be described as one moment in the “crisis of historical materialism” to which Stanley Aronowitz refers. Althusser’s movement away from Marx’s historical materialism without, as he says himself, wanting to “reject the classical metaphor” outright became important to the emergence of cultural studies as it encountered structuralist and poststructuralist thought – As Stuart Hall puts it, “Nevertheless, the refiguring of theory, made as a result of having to think questions of culture through the metaphors of language and textuality, represents a point beyond which cultural studies must now always necessarily locate itself" (“Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies” 271). What exactly is the crisis of historical materialism to which Aronowitz refers? And how do divergent views of materialism within cultural studies answer to or seem to stem from this crisis?

2. In “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” Stuart Hall addresses Antonio Gramsci’s influence on cultural studies. Most important for Hall is the way(s) in which Gramsci "displaced some of the inheritances of Marxism” (266-7). Without a doubt Gramsci’s theory on hegemony has influenced the way various cultural theorists think about ideology. While, as Lawrence Grossberg argues, there have been (mis)readings of “the conjuncturalist form of cultural studies” as defining “the problematic of cultural studies within the ideological” (“The Formations of Cultural Studies” 56), for Grossberg (drawing on Gramsci), “Hegemony is a historically emergent struggle for power called into existence by the appearance of the masses on the political and cultural scene of civil society” (57). In this way, hegemony is not purely ideological, and it encompasses a conjuncturalist conception of historical specificity. In “Beyond ‘Doing’ Cultural Studies,” Eric Weiner distinguishes hegemony from ideology by saying it is not the process of establishing “false consciousness.” On the other hand, he does see it as somewhat similar by describing it as the process through which "discursive absences are generated, and those parts of the narrative that are left in place are represented as the whole" (65). He describes their relationship as hegemony being the “underbelly” of ideology. And Hall also seems careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water as he tries to hold onto the problem of the class structuring of ideology by drawing on Gramsci and arguing that "ideological struggle does not take place by displacing one whole, integral, class-mode of thought with another wholly-formed system of ideas." How do definitions of hegemony both relate to and break from definitions of ideology? And how might this affect a pedagogy of cultural studies or critical pedagogy?

wiki wars

2007-02-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

I am using wikis in my class for the first time this semester. It has been interesting so far, to say the least. I haven't been using them for anything "fancy." We haven't even gotten to the point of creating links, headings, subheadings, and sections -- elements that seem common to the "genre." I've experimented with a couple of different approaches / assignments.

So far I have a couple of different purposes for our class wikis: 1) I want to use the wikis to help create guidelines for blogging that the students contribute to more and more as they read more blogs and better understand the genre and become bloggers in their own right. 2) I want to create a constantly changing and evolving definition of culture (as the class is Writing about Society in Culture). Every time we read a theoretical essay on culture or an online definition of it or any text that addresses how a person or field tends to define culture, we revise our class definition.

The first time I had them working in groups (after writing individually their thoughts on a reading regarding culture). Each group would then work on a revision of the defining culture wiki. But a couple of groups started to get into a bit of a struggle over the defintion -- editing much of the other group's work. This, by nature, is how a wiki works and we discussed this in class. But, I fear that they are learning that collaboration is a struggle for power in some way; that the idea of a democratic, collaborative space in which to share knowledge is more about getting in the last word.

I'm thinking that I should have them start using the discussion space to better negotiate the edits being made. We talk about wikipedia and how these kinds of changes and edits happen on this larger scale. And, what I have been doing, is coming together as a class to go over the (for the moment) "final" version and ask students for additional ideas, changes, etc., which we then negotiate as a class. But if anyone has better ideas for negotiating these wiki wars that appear to be breaking out, please feel free to share....

grading made easi(er)

2007-02-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

This semester I purchased a grading/gradebook program. I've always used an excel spreadsheet to keep track of grades but never kept up on entering the formulas as I went along, so the end of the semester has always held an additional element of madness for me. Some may disagree entirely with keeping grades in a spreadsheet or figuring them with such strict mathematics and argue that grading should be done more holistically, which is fine for them and something I buy to an extent. But, having been in the position of having students come back to me the next semester questioning the grade I have given them, I find having the spreadsheet makes these conversations much easier. Anyway, I demoed only a couple of programs and settled on Easy Grade Pro. So far, I really like it. My favorite thing about it is the check mark. Yes, you can simply hit the check mark button for all those freewrites and low-stakes assignments that you just want to mark as completed. The program really allows you to create specific systems of marking and grading that allows for some of those not-so-straightforward types of grades. You can also attach footnotes to specific grades -- something the little lines of a gradebook or spreadsheet don't allow so easily. Also, previously I kept attendance only on paper, but the attendance sheet that automatically lists each class meeting day of the semester (you can create one based on only the days that your class meets) "forces" me to keep track of it the computer. The program adds up absences and latenesses as I go along, so that when the end of semester comes -- voila! -- no more madness. (As if...).

morning blogging routine

2007-01-31T06:21:00.000-08:00

My morning/blogging routine is a funny thing. I think that often bloggers read before they write. In fact, I think many writers (at least academic ones) read before they write. That's how we get ideas to share, items to respond to, etc. So tend to read and read all of my favorite blogs and news sites, and then when it finally comes time for me to write/post, I suddenly feel too tired. I've taken too much in. I can't sort through it all. I've been in front of the computer too long. I don't know what I want to write anymore. The obvious thing to do here would be to write first. The problem is that I generally have my bowl of oatmeal or cereal an cup of coffee in front of me when I start this whole process, and it is much easier to read than to write when my hands and mouth are filled with breakfast.

This morning I spent some time updating my "blogroll." Last night I just read around and explored some new (to me) blogs. For some reason I found myself really drawn to blogs that belong to academic/teacher mothers. I guess because it gives me hope that if they can do it, I can do it too! (Even if I have NO idea *how* they do it). A couple of my favorites: professing mama (formerly known as ABDmom, so it is kind of cool to follow her through the whole grad school to assistant prof. process) and crunchy granola.

I met with my director yesterday. Today I will send out potential exam dates (March) to my other committee members so that we can all coordinate. My committee wants me to formulate my own exam questions, which they can then tweak and/or revise as potential exam questions. I think it is a great exercise, and I understand the pedagogical reasons for doing the exam in this manner; I am just daunted by the task. I will start writing those on Friday (and will hopefully post ideas and/or the actual quesetions themselves here). I thank all bloggers who have posted their exam questions and/or exam process, as it is helpful to have these models.

i've lost a very important blue notebook

2007-01-27T09:28:00.000-08:00

Hopefully it is simply misplaced. It is a simple, thin, blue, Mead notebook that contains pages and pages of handwritten notes on texts from my reading lists. I know it has ALL of my notes on Balibar and Macherey's "On Literature as an Ideological Form" and many pages on Michael Apple's Ideology and Curriculum. I know it contains much more than that, but those are the texts I'm concerned with at the moment. These notes are obviously from back in the days of studying/reading before I had devon, but now I'm trying to get all my notes and books and photocopied excerpts and articles in alphabetical order by list on my shelves, and I need to find that damn notebook.

suddenly i see?

2007-01-27T06:32:00.000-08:00

We've all, no doubt, heard the kt tunstall song (over and over). Maybe even seen it featured in The Devil Wears Prada in the scene where the determined Anne Hathaway character strides through the streets of NYC suddenly transformed into a fashionably hip woman, and we see the look in her eyes: she gets "it." Suddenly fashion makes sense to her; suddenly she knows *this* is what she wants to be. I mean, suddenly she sees it, that is.

Anyway, lately, whenever I hear that song (tunstall performed it on Ellen last week), I wonder if most academics have this "suddenly seeing" moment. A moment when it just all makes sense, and we become 100% certain that this is what we want to do/be, and we stride through the halls of our institution (well more likely, the halls of numerous institutions while on this very long journey) on a mission...a clear mission...?

I've been wondering this, and then came across this. Lately I've been calling what I do (PhD work and teaching) my "career." I don't know that I was conscious of this word choice or if it even means anything per se, but it was interesting to read this post about the differences between work, career, calling, and vocation. I certainly can't imagine walking around calling this my calling.

i thought i had blogged yesterday

2007-01-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

Talk about feeling badly about the failure of my 21 straight days of blogging -- check out this guy. He is writing and recording one song over the course of a 24 hour period every day for a year, and he's sticking with it. Apparently if he fails to achieve this goal for even a day, then the project is over.

But all in all, I simply haven't been blogging every day because this is "supposed to be" a blogging adventure that documents my life in academe, and all I want to do lately is blog about anything but that. I guess that is also okay; avoidance, I would say, is also a part of this life in an institution. Right?

Yesterday, while at the gym, I picked up a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly and read an entertaining (I guess this is where the name of the magazine comes from) interview with Norman Mailer. Maybe this is typical of an EW article, but I guess I was surprised to actually get engrossed in an article while at the gym. Of course, it also made me long for the days of reading novels (even if Norman isn't actually reading any himself).

Finally saw The Good Shepard last night. One of the comments on IMDb is "finally a film that doesn't assume you're an idiot" (or something to that effect), and I'd have to agree. I don't consider myself an idiot at all, and yet my head was aching by end. Having never really been a viewer of any type of spy films, and, as it turns out knowing little about CIA operations, I found myself confused, worried, frightened at various points. It also made me feel that D and I should read aloud A People's History of the United States -- a few pages every night.

what list are you on?

2007-01-24T05:52:00.001-08:00

blogging with my students

2007-01-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

I've obviously failed miserably at my 21 days experiment. But blogging with my students is a great opportunity to help me keep on track.

My ENG106 students are working on their first contributions to our class blog. They're writing responses to Toni Morrison's "Recitatif." And I could just smack my own head, because I just realized that I forgot to discuss the title with them before they started writing. Ah well...such is the excitement of a classroom -- it's always live.

In other news...I had one committee member tell me (via e-mail) that my project is coming along nicely. A marked up copy is waiting for me in my campus mailbox. I'll revel in "nicely" for a few days before I actually pick it up and see exactly what that means.

There is really nothing else to report. Now I really feel like a student -- struggling to fill that eight minute timed freewrite.

quotes

2007-01-19T11:47:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine, after taking her exams, told me that she spent most of the first day just getting together all the quotes she planned to use. I thought, what a great idea; I should get a head-start on that. So I've been going back to various texts and collecting quotes in devon. Obviously, at this point I don't know what my questions will be, so I am simply gathering quotes that I feel will be most relevant to my project as a whole.

Problem is that a lot of the time I just really like the quote (or the idea contained therein) but can't really see how it connects to any of the arguments I plan to make. I've spent about three days (only about an hour or two each day) harvesting quotes from Stanley Aronowitz's The Crisis in Historical Materialism. I know I've spent too much time and taken waaay too many quotes from this book (there are just so many that appeal to me). One from today that totally doesn't seem to connect to my project, but that I like anyways:

"Feminist struggles have the possibility for contributing to a new configuration of classes within contemporary society because they go beyond the limits of economic self-interest" (112).

Ms. Dewey

2007-01-19T05:26:00.000-08:00

I decided to check out ms. dewey -- a search engine (I believe created by microsoft). When I arrived at the site, however, I was a little suprised to see Ms. Dewey is Papi -- the l word's new character, who was just introduced last week. Her name is actually Janina Gavankar. Most surprisingly is that when I put in the search terms: papi and l word and ms dewey, well, Ms. Dewey seemed to recognize herself, saying something about how she likes to take a laptop to work with her so that she can keep up on herself. Pretty hilarious.

technology...powerful classroom tool or...

2007-01-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

infuriating, morning-ruining, unreliable, ineffective let down.

uniblogs failed me big time. For the past couple of days it has been quirky and unreliable -- at various times I haven't been able to login, or once I've logged in it doesn't let me do anything. Not to mention it is soooo slooooow. Once I managed to get up one post, it has been impossible to even update my class blog with a simple post. Today was the day to set up my students with their usernames (in ENG106) and their own blogs (in ENG251). Well, if uniblogs was giving me this much of a headache, I couldn't imagine how my already skittish and skeptical students would do (and if you can't login, there is really not much point in having a username or a blog).

I spend all morning trying to get uniblogs to cooperate with me, with no luck. With ten minutes left on the clock before I have to leave the house, I am frantically trying to figure out my best alternative.

I left the house, and got almost all the way to school when I realized that I forgot a document at home that I hadn't saved to my flashdrive, and that I didn't know the password to one of my blogs (it was the mumble jumble of numbers and letters that I hadn't yet changed to something that actually makes sense to me). I would need the password to implement my newly forming plan, which was to have students attain their usernames and blogs directly through wordpress. I had to turn around and head home, and then realized I needed enough time to print out the document as our printer is out of ink. It's a sad, sad story, I know.

I began with such good intentions wanting to support edublogs and its sister uniblogs, but these technological tools failed me at the wrong time.

At the last minute before class I threw this site up on wordpress, but I still need to return to it and add what was on the original site. I changed the instructions for my ENG251 students so that they would utilize wordpress instead of uniblogs.

Today when I got back home, I discovered something is so very wrong with my computer. I don't know what, but it's running at a snail's pace...no, worse than that, and sounds like it is panting and heaving and never quite catching its breath.

Update: Now I've tried to post this entry three times, and it appears that blogger is having some issues. One could say it's not really my day....

today's workout

2007-01-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

Because it is freezing and rainy and icy and gross outside, I refused to join D at the gym today. Instead, I decided to workout at home. I did this workout. I know a lot of people say that it is tough for them to get a good workout at home, but let me just say that doing this jumping workout today suddenly makes spin class seem less tortuous. Most of the moves I couldn't do for the required amount of time. One minute of "killer" push-ups??? At first I thought it must mean do one killer push-up, and I thought *maybe* I could accomplish that.... With moves named cancan and hopscotch it sounded like a lot of fun. Overall, the workout took me about 25 minutes to complete (longer than it should have), making it a perfect exercise activity for those exam study days when I want to save some time by NOT driving to the gym but am in desperate need of an exercise break. That is if I am ever brave enough to try it again.

D got me a physioball for christmas, so I can also use that on days when I can't make it to the gym. I also want to get a medicine ball and a jump rope.

lazy sunday post

2007-01-14T14:07:00.000-08:00

1. football is on. go pats!

2. went bowling. (it is rainy and icy outside)

3. played tennis with complete strangers and D. it was fun.

4. played with photobooth on the computer; cracked ourselves up taking hilarious pictures (i considered putting one up here, but i'm just not that brave).

5. now we are in our pjs and sweatpants and stuff. hunkered down. more wintery mix to come.

6. trying to take some down time before the semester starts on tuesday, but i'm not very good at it.

i'm not sure why i numbered this, as this is in no particular order.

The Energizer Teacher

2007-01-13T06:44:00.000-08:00

There is a kind of interesting discussion that has been taking place on the WPA listserv. It was prompted by the new movie Freedom Writers starring Hilary Swank and began as a critique of this type of representation of teachers (particularly young, white and female) who give up their own life in order to "save" the lives of their disenfranchised students. These teachers are portrayed as completely self-sacrificial -- having no life outside of school and their students' lives. The listserv has gone on to name numerous similar representations with teachers of various races and both genders (though the question that initially began the discussion was looking for representations of minority teachers, teaching a body of primarily white students). While the discussion is primarily focused on race -- something I also find interesting (the person who posed the question could only come up with To Sir with Love, which was also the only film I could think of) -- I am very interested in this idea of the self-sacrificial teacher who is willing to give up "her" marriage and personal interests in order to better "serve" her students. (Granted, I have not seen Freedom Writers, so I'm working primarily from what people have been saying about it and previews, but I've certainly seen these representations in other films).

Lately I've been going around talking about the amount of energy it takes to teach. Something any and every teacher is well aware of. And I've started thinking back to a time when I was adjuncting, teaching five classes and working an additional job and taking a graduate class. (Apparently the teacher whom Freedom Writers is based on was paid 27,000/year and took two additional part time jobs). I keep thinking...wow, how did I do that? Right now the three classes I teach seem to take over my entire life. Five just seems overwhelming. However, I've always said that I'd love a community college job, and those tend to be a 5 - 5 load (sometimes more). When interviewing for them, I simply thought, I've done this before, and I was quite happy. But I was also something else: single. Not only was I single; I lived in the middle of nowhere (Newfane, VT with a population of under 1700) in a tiny (very rustic -- you could see the dirt from the ground between the slabs of wood that made my floor) cabin with no heating source except a wood stove. I had very few friends, and certainly fewer whom were easily accessible without all wheel drive. I worked out -- mostly by myself, but sometimes with the two friends who lived closest to me -- at a gym near one of the colleges where I taught. Yes, it seems I was living the life of a monk. And so teaching five classes simply was my whole life, and I quite enjoyed it. But life now is very different. I live in a city. I have two separate communities of friends. I have a partner, a house, a yard, a dog, heat that turns on by itself. I have a mall nearby. I play tennis, take spin classes, yoga classes, play Ultimate frisbee. (I'm beginning to sound like a bit of a yuppie). I meet up with friends at coffee shops, run into people I know at the movies. One person on the listserv said that one of the first things he learned in an education class is that a good teacher has a rich "outside" of school life. So it would seem that all of these things should be good for my teaching, and I'm sure that in many ways they are. But I haven't quite gotten the knack of having this rich outside life and not feeling overwhelmed by teaching. Part of me truly feels that my students should have a piece of my brain at all times: when I'm falling asleep at night; when I'm listening to D talk; when I'm out to a movie with friends -- during all of this I'm still brainstorming how to reach so-and-so, how I'll do such-and-such the same or differently, or I'm thinking about their blog entries; how I am going to respond to what they're thinking, etc. And even with the amount of energy I put into teaching, I'm still no Freedom Writer teacher; I'm still no Dead Poet's Society teacher. I'm just getting by, at the same time as I'm trying to do everything I can to ensure my students learn and succeed.

So I guess that ultimately my thought is that I have been convinced by these portrayals of the self-sacrificial teacher; that it really does take complete devotion to teaching and to the lives of students to be a "super"-teacher. How else to be a super-teacher? I read the listserv, and rationally I know the ways that these images and narratives are problematic. I know that the poster who wrote about having the rich outside life is probably right. But I'm still not fully convinced. A part of me continues to believe teachers need to take vows of celibacy, a vow of poverty, and forsake all that is not directly beneficial to their students.

Then I found this book and thought it might be helpful to read it. But then I read the customer reviews, which say things like:

Graduate students thinking about making careers as professors should read this book carefully, especially if they have or would like to have children. Each author in the edited volume describes her valiant attempt to have a family life and an academic job at the same time. It's not a pretty picture. The narratives are personal and powerful. Several are horror stories about the inhumane treatment of new professors who are also new mothers.

Although this book is most relevant as a cautionary tale for women entering academia, it is also a "must read" for anyone interested in the history of feminism. The memoirs of some of the senior female academics, pioneers in their fields, reveal awesome courage. This is the printed mentor that I've seen other books purport to be.

My one concern is that the book's bleak honesty may discourage some graduate students, or create the impression that it is better to wait until after tenure to start a family.

Horror stories? Courage necessary to a female academic? Discourage graduate students?

2007-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

I've spent the morning deleting spam from this blog. So that was fun. Blogger is really annoying me lately, and I'm considering moving this blog over to edublogs/wordpress. I don't know -- maybe I just need to explore this new out of beta blogger more thoroughly.

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly realized I have not decided what am I going to have my students use as an RSS aggregate this semester. I'm definitely switching from flock because it just seems that the main benefit of flock was the way it integrated with wordpress, yet this payoff was not necessarily worth the initial hassle of having everyone download a browser they'd never used before--although I did have students tell me at the end of the semester that they now use flock regularly as their browser. I am trying to decide between google reader and bloglines. I've haven't really dedicated myself to playing around with them as much as I wanted to, but at the moment, google reader seems to make a bit more sense--simply because my students will be utilitzing uniblogs to publish their blogs (they won't need something like bloglines that does it all).

The latest College English landed on my porch yesterday. I'm wasn't terribly excited by any of the articles, but became kind of interested in the argument being made by Patricial Webb, Kirsti Cole, and Thomas Skeen in their article, "Feminist Social Projects: Building Bridges between Communities and Universities." The article responds to critiques of service learning projects that describe them as atheoretical. The authors claim that feminist theories could bring a critical perspective and legitimacy to service learning projects that would allow us (and our students) to take into account the systemic aspect of social problems -- as opposed to service learning simply being grounded in an ethos of volunteerism and philanthropy. This somehow how seems important to/related to my own project, which, in a sense, critiques service learning (at least implicitly) through its critique of critical pedagogy -- my own perspective also being to focus on a systemic analysis of systems (in the case of my project -- specifically, the University); however, these authors seem to have a plan (something I tend to lack) for a feminist approach to service learning that moves beyond a critique of existing structures to strategies for change.

Break in Review

2007-01-11T06:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I managed to do two of twenty-one days of blogging. I'm going to make myself start over every time I miss a day--otherwise I'll never get twenty-one consecutive days, and my "experiment" will be inaccurate.

Over break I *finally* around to finishing/reading Janice Erlbaum's memoir, Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir. It's the type of fast-paced read that I couldn't put down, but even with the speed with which I read it, her life really came alive for me, leaping off the pages so that I too was was in that chaotic, (sometimes) dark whirling cloud that was her teenage years (and/or NYC in the 80s). The book left me feeing strangely dissatisfied with my own life--in part because my own life suddenly seemed so boring, but also because I so enjoyed reading a book that I picked out, that wasn't on an exam list, that I wanted to read just for FUN. Reading Girlbomb made me resent being in a PhD program and made me want to be able to read for FUN all of the time. It also made me want to write. Oh yes. When she sits up in bed after just having sex with one of the "boyses", and she gets her cigarette and her journal and gets down to writing--I want to get back to that (well minus the boyses and the cigarette part). Alright, all in all, it simply made me sick of academic-ese and made me want my own language back.

As for movies, we saw the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut up and Sing, and I must say that it was one of the most moving movie experiences I've had in about twenty years. I remember in the "old days" when folks would clap at the end of movies or react strongly during the movie--that was part of the movie-going experience--sharing that viewing with other people. But now we seem to be all closed off, keeping our emotions to ourselves. But during this film, the audience reacted during the movie--actually clapping in the middle of the movie and then again at the end.

We also saw Charlotte's Web. Joel Siegel absolutely loved this movie, nominating it as one of his top ten picks of 2006. I'm not sure that it was that good, but it was really fun to see one of my childhood favorites brought to life in such a visually pleasing way.

Beloved Professor

2007-01-09T09:59:00.000-08:00

I recently found out that one of my professors from graduate school passed away on December 23rd. I took the news very hard, as she was the one professor out of my countless years of schooling that I was absolutely comfortable with. She was the professor that I yearned for all through my undergraduate experience. She helped set me on the path that I am on today.

It is eerie to get such news. In part because she was quite young--so it was completely unexpected. But also because she was simply one of those people who I knew (or felt) would always be there for me. Even if some time passed between contact with her, she was always willing to hear about my life and share a bit of hers.

She was just a wonderful woman, feminist, teacher, rhetorician, friend, and mentor. I will miss her more than I can ever express.

Dr. Teresa Hunt -- in memoriam.

New Semester -- New Blogs

2007-01-08T19:48:00.000-08:00

I spent most of the day prepping my ENG251 class -- Topics in Prose Writing: Writing about Society and Culture -- for next semester, and I finally have the class blog site up. I've decided to have this semester's blog hosted through edublogs. This means that it is still a wordpress blog, but I chose to use edublogs for a couple of reasons: 1) bad behaviour should help reduce spam. 2) James Farmer convinced me. In fact, I plan to have my students host their individual blogs through uniblogs this semester.

The features on the ENG251 blog that I'm most excited about: del.icio.us sidebar widget that reads only those links that I've tagged as ENG251 ( thanks dave )--meaning all the online class readings can be easily accessed from the sidebar (and will automatically update as I add more); easy access to the class wikispaces space--which will also update as we build additional pages; RSS sidebar widget for those sites that are important to stay on top of.

The syllabus is posted in a most incomplete form, so that needs updating. There's much more to do, but that is the beauty of a blog--it makes the progress part of "work-in-progress" so simple (and fun).

21 days of blogging -- experiment

2007-01-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

"They" say that if you do something consistently for twenty-one days, then it becomes habit. So, being the inconsistent blogger that I am, I've decided to try blogging at least once daily for twenty-one days--to see if, at that point, I just won't be able to stop blogging once I hit days twenty-two and so forth. I figure that as the semester begins, and I ask my students to become bloggers, I should really be able to call myself one as well. Not that I believe you need to blog daily in order to call yourself a blogger, but I should be posting at least as much, if not more than my students (who won't be daily bloggers, unless they choose to be).

I know that Donna at Why Not Blog? blogged every day for the month of November. Her final post in November adresses both why I don't beat myself over not blogging regularly--sometimes I just don't have much to say. But, on the other hand, she reminds me/us of why it is also useful to blog daily--so that we actually blog about all those things we carry around in our heads with the little label "blog this" attached to them.

helping out my brother

2006-12-13T19:06:00.000-08:00

My brother is working on his MBA and created this mini-documentary with some of his peers: It chronicles the story of the Meheba Entrepreneur's Society & Institute (MESI), a micro-finance institute that three students put together at the Meheba Refugee Settlement in Zambia, Africa.

The site this is posted on will actually pay money once the video gets 20,000 views and is rated at 3+ stars. At 20,000 views, the site will pay $100 and then $5 for every 1,000 views after that. That means that if we can get this video to 2,000,000 viewers, $10,000 can be earned. The money paid from the site will be donated to MESI to help fund additional loans for even more refugees going forward.

So, please consider, visiting the site and viewing the video. Also, please rate the video 5 stars! The higher the rating, the more exposure the video will get on the site! If you have two computers, watch it on both!

Poverty Reduction Begins With ME! - video powered by Metacafe

dribs and drabs

2006-11-29T07:41:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been completely avoiding my "scholarly" work life. I can never figure out what to call my "not teaching" work life. I hate the bizarre distinctions--as if teaching is not scholarly or academic or research-oriented.... Basically, I've just been avoiding revising my prospectus. Every time my "writing time" comes 'round, it makes me feel sick to my stomach, so I've been (understandably) putting it off. Today I *finally* finished revising the chapter two section!!! Since the intro and chapter two were the worst, I feel relieved. I now only have two more chapters and the conclusion to work through, but there are only about a total of sixteen comments from my director total, so I see a light. Yes, a light. But then again, I still have to go back and put some "finishing touches" on the introduction when. Today I finished chapter two with thirteen minutes left on my pester, so I decided to blog--something else I've been avoiding, since this is my "academic" life blog.

I need to keep reminding myself that when I finally am able to get myself to sit down, open my prospectus and focus on the revisions, it is not that bad--kind of exciting even--but overcoming the nausea to get to that point is always a difficult factor.

Part of my ongoing struggle in terms of this revision has been to articulate (more clearly) the reason that I see the University as a starting point in scrutinizing one's own critical position. Here is something I wrote a couple of weeks back that became in exercise in articulating that part of my argument:

I have been looking forward to getting this month's issue of College English and checking out William Thelin's latest article, "Student Investment in Political Topics." I figured the article would be closely related to my dissertation, but at the moment it resonates most strongly because the past couple of weeks of ENG105 have been devoted to my students choosing topics for their final paper, which will be a piece of cultural commentary/criticism. And I've been struggling with remaining a bit laissez-faire, while also guiding them toward actual cultural critique(s).

Thelin writes, "Our students have a better chance at financial comfort by developing an awareness of the cultural contradictions of capitalism and engaging in the concomitant political action than by competing against one another within the current system" (143). I agree with him and find myself making a similar argument when addressing the importance of looking at the corporate University as an object of study. I believe the "contradictions of capitalism" are alive and well in the University and that this localized context provides for an opportunity for students to look closely at issues of globalization and capitalism in a way/place that hits close to home. Thelin, however, sees a localized context as problematic (in agreeing with Donald Lazere), arguing that "having students focus exclusively on local issues does those students a disservice, as it denies them the opportunity to 'understand the political and economic forces to which they are captive'" (143). In terms of my own projcct's argument, I do not see the local context of the Universityas the "exclusive" focus of the classroom, and even so, I don't see it as doing a disservice because in my mind it does just what Lazere and Thelin fear a localized context and local issues fail to do: provide them with the opportunity to understand the political and economic forces that affect them daily (their education and their future). The University as corporate is the most immediate political economic force to which they are most certainly--in many ways--held "captive." And often "held captive" in ways that that don't even realize. After all, the food court is just where they get food, right? The fact that the are eating Sbarro's and Buger King for four years has no long term of extended effects, right? And those classes they take with a professor whose salary is in part funded by Pfizer? Those classes won't affect them beyond the scope of the University, right? Or the sweatshirts they buy their friends and families as gifts from the campus bookstore...? Part of Thelin's argument is based on the quote from Wayne Booth that opens his piece: "The most valuable political act any teacher can perform is not to impose particular political views but to teach students to see the words that society tries to inject into them unseen." And the University is certainly a part of that appartus that injects words and images into its students in an "unseen" manner. Teaching them to "read" the University seems to me as important as Thelin's project of teaching them to read Parade's list of the world's worst dictators. I'm not arguing that studying the purchasing habits and profit margin of the campus bookstore will necessarily be more enlightening to the students' understanding of global issues than Thelin's example, simply that it is as reasonable a context (if not more relevant to the students' daily lives) than any other we choose as the focus of critical pedagogy writing classroom.

these days...

2006-11-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

these days (a.k.a. the last four to five weeks of the semester)...

I eat twizzlers while grading to avoid taking up smoking.

I don't get my hair cut.

I don't go to the grocery store;

therefore, I don't cook;

therefore, I don't eat "real" food.

I lean on sugar...heavily...to get me through each day. (It's gross).

I don't return phone calls.

I try to keep track of what the various stacks in my office actually mean.

I start thinking ahead to all of the things that I'm going to do "right" next semester.

I do the dishes (which really only consist of cereal bowls because there is no cooking going on) every few days.

I stare obsessively at the pages of my planner, as if suddenly an additional block of time will appear...or maybe a whole additional day of the week.

I see my exam date becoming further out of my reach (again).

I go back and forth on how many days I can actually allow myself to travel for thanksgiving.

I contemplate how I can get through to the next semester with my limited clothing supply, seeing as I can't seem to make it to the dry cleaners, and most my other laundry piles up while the occasional load I do manage to throw in often sits in the dryer for days at a time.

I write lists, thinking that will somehow make sense out of the chaos that is my life these days.

revising break-ups

2006-11-13T07:36:00.000-08:00

A good friend of mine is going through a difficult break-up. I know she would do (and has done) the same for me/us, so D and I have been there for her quite a lot over the past week and a half--providing her with a bed to sleep in, a place to vent and ears to vent to, and substantial (if repetitive) advice. The only problem is that much of the hell that has broken lose in this slowly ending relationship has taken place in the middle of the night. For some reason, this break-up feels as though it is suddenly becoming my/our own. D and I wake up exhausted, having been up for many hours of the night. Time that I would have spent reading and prepping has now been given over to listening. Of course, I know this won't last, and any friend of mine who is in a heap on the floor (though this particular friend is much stronger than that...but close to it at times) is not going to stay there if I/we can do anything about it.

The interesting part of this for me is that it is one of the moments that causes me to be a bit more empathic toward my own students. I often get stories/excuses about lost sleep over helping a roommate or friend. My all too common reaction (though not the one I express to the student) is to let the friend or roommate take care of him/herself so that you can take care of you and your school work. But right now I'm seeing all too clearly the ways in which we do and can (and maybe even should at times) allow the problems of those close to us become our own problems as well.

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I have really been struggling through this most recent revision of my prospectus. I've spent weeks simply (re)working the introduction, and trust me, the amount of time is not reflected in the quality of the introduction. I've now forced myself to momentarily move on to the first couple of chapters, but this morning alone I spent nearly an hour on a paragraph--a paragraph that still appears pretty weak to me.

One of the central questions plaguing chapter one is: How does the quest for disciplinarity work against the counterhegemonic potential of rhet/comp?

I make this claim that

Finally I will argue that composition’s quest for disciplinary recognition has been a distraction—a distraction from our classrooms, a distraction from the current conditions of the corporate University, and a distraction from the ways in which our potentially counterhegemonic position has been subsumed by the popularity of cultural studies/critical pedagogy, or at least when it is used as yet another step in achieving disciplinary recognition, which becomes another step into the corporate world of higher education.

This thought first occured to me while reading the WPA listserv. At times (this was a couple of years back) I felt that so much of the conversation was focused on achieving a certain status as a field that all talk of pedagogy was put on the back-burner. But overall, I'm not sure (yet) how I am going to go about supporting this claim. (Oh! Another moment of empathy for/with my students!)

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On top of all this the coffee shop where I tend to accomplish a lot of my work is playing some mix that just happens to have ALL of my favorite songs on it. I'm not quite sure how they knew, but it is a little distracting.

I love Halloween

2006-11-01T05:01:00.000-08:00

I just love Halloween. It is such a festive holiday. It is such a holiday of rebellion. Very rarely are we given clearance to go out, look like somebody else, and wreak havoc. Even if I'm occasionally sickened by the bags and bags of halloween candy stocked on store shelves--stuff that, as D puts it, "People shouldn't even be eating." Oh, but what do I do? Fill a plastic pumpkin with a mix of twizzlers and chocolates and bring it to school for my students. Ah, yes, my ability to take a stand against corporate America seems to wane with each passing year. Now that is frightening!

Yesterday I wore halloween socks to work and dressed in all black. I had my students work collaboratively on writing "The Worst Ever Halloween Essay." Then in the evening, D and I donned crazy wig/hat combos and painted our faces and took "the kids" (her niece and nephew) trick-or-treating.

Today though it is back to reality, and the truly scary piles of student papers awaiting my time and attention!!!!

Blogged with Flock

weekend

2006-10-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

On Thursday night D and I attended the first Frequency North reading of the year. It was a fun, lively, and pleasant evening. My lovely friend Tara performed, and her boyfriend made an appearance as Captain Danger, frontman for the house band of the Million Poems Show. Janice Erlbaum read from her new book, Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir. D bought the book, started reading it last night, and I don't think she has put it down since. I have to say, in the almost four years we've been together, I've never seen my girl not be able to put down a book, nor have I seen her tear through a book at this rate of speed. It's been lovely because we haven't had the TV on for two nights in a row! I just don't know what will happen when that back flap hits the final page. It will be a sad moment for both of us, I'm sure.

On Saturday night we saw Ember Swift play at Caffe Lena. Caffe Lena is truly one of my favorite places. You go into this cozy little, cooperatively run venue, get a totally intimate show, eat warming vegetarian chile, and snack on freshly baked chocolate chip cookies while sipping chamomile tea. It really doesn't get much better.

On Sunday I set up my laptop and my bag of books in the cafe at Borders. Typically you'll find me in the various little independently owned coffee shops around the city. And typically I bitch that the corporations have to charge their customers for wifi, but the independents offer it free. BUT, I have found that working at Borders lends to my productivity because of the fact that they charge for wifi. When I'm not knocking around the web, feeling sorry for myself and searching for some kind of answer about my project to fall out of the blogosphere, then I'm actually focusing on the document in front of me--my prospectus! Currently in its eight hundredth revision (and coming soon to a committee near you--really!).

Blogged with Flock

Foucault and the local (to the rescue?)

2006-10-30T06:49:00.000-08:00

Q: What can be gained from scrutinizing one's own critical position / contextuality? Why is the corporate University a starting point--not as an end?

I just have to rely on and align myself with Foucault on this one.

A: "Intellectuals have got used to working, not in the modality of the 'universal', the 'examplary', the just-and-true-for-all', but within specific sectors, at the precsie points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexaul relations). This has undoubtedly given them a much more immediate and concrete awareness of struggles. And they have met here with problems which are specific, 'non-universal', and often different from those of the proletariat or the masses. And yet I believe intellectuals have actually been drawn closer to the proletariat and the masses, for two reasons. Firstly, because it has been a question of real, material, everday struggles, and secondly because they have often been confronted, albeit in a different form, by the same adversary as the proletariat, namely the multinational corporations..." (Power/Knowledge 126).

Blogged with Flock

owning marginality

2006-10-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

In thinking about the practices that contribute to the corporatization of the University, I started thinking about Wesley Shumar's arguments in College for Sale:

Shumar points out the way in which academics resist being classified as temporary, part-time, adjunct, etc. because it delegitimizes them. At the same time, by not naming this delegitimization it allows it to continue. "Denial of power makes it possible to participate in commodifying processes unconsciously. I believe those processes must be brought to consciousness" (11). As much of critical pedagogy and cultural studies seeks to name the object of study and unmask or unveil anything that might be hidden from view, it seems that this consciousness of the power structures at play within the University should be a focal point for the critical pedagogy/cs writing classroom. A point even the most well-meaning of us might need to be reminded of....

I once had a student in a required course for the English major. Apparently it was her goal in life to become an adjunct instructor in an English department. I was not initially aware of this particular student's long-term goal, but when she was interviewing another adjunct instructor as part of an assignment for my class, she was made aware of the conditions in which we work. The adjunct whom she interviewed went into detail about the stress associated with the temporary nature of our positions, the little money we make, the way(s) in which our position leaves us out of decision making processes and can hinder what we might do and/or talk about in the classroom. The student was shocked, having had no idea about these conditions. And I was shocked too--shocked because I found it so brave that this part-time instructor (who also had this student in one of her classes) would step-up and own our marginality, rather than masking it, keeping it from students. She gave up the secret that I myself, even with my in-class discussions about unions, labor practices, and Marxism, had never broached with my students.

square into a circle

2006-10-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

There are days, with this project, that I feel I'm trying to force a square into a circle. And I fear that when I realize I can't do any such thing, then the whole foundation of the project will crumble, and I'll be left with nothing. Hopefully these are common feelings for this process.

So I've chosen a few comments from those that my director gave me on my revised prospectus, and I've been setting them up as kind of freewriting prompts and forcing myself to write on them:
The first comment I chose to focus on had to do with rhet/comp's adoption of critical pedagogy and cultural studies and the relative inattention paid to the university's structure. My director asked whether this lack of attention "speak to their assumption that the university's structure mirrors that of the larger society as a whole." So he wants to know why I argue for the specific context of the corporate University as so crucial--why I think it should be a starting point, not an end.
I set myself up with this prompt:
What might be gained in scrutinizing one's own critical position/contextuality? In particular that of the corporate University?

And I guess that it just is, isn't a good enough answer.

Comp Convo on blogging

2006-10-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

At CSR we have a bi-weekly series called "Comp Conversations" organized by our WPA. Some weeks she presents on a specific topic, and other weeks various faculty members present. I'm using the term "present" loosely here, because as the name indicates, the sessions tend to be casual conversations shared by faculty and adjuncts alike. It's a chance to talk "shop," which for us is pedagogy.

This week, I'm up. My mission is to talk about blogging in the writing classroom. I put together a resource sheet for those who attend, but given the nature of the topic, it seems crucial that there is a place where they can actually click on all of the links I am providing. So here it is!

Various uses for Blogs:
List and explain class assignments; keep class news, announcements updated
Create a class blog with all of the students as the authors contributing to one blog
Continue with class conversation in writing
Use as a place for brainstorming and figuring out ideas
Create photo essays
Have students keep track of and link to current events or other material relevant to the course and/or their studies.
Post reading responses so that they can be shared with rest of class
Give students a forum that they may already be familiar and comfortable with (myspace, facebook users, etc.)
“Theme” blogs—student blogs on a single topic for the semester, creating connections (hyerlinks) between posts

Blogs allow for readership from the “outside” world, pushing the students to think about audience and rhetorical context, as well as creating an opportunity for dialogue that we so rarely get in other forms of writing.

Resources:

edublogs: this site is a free source for hosting both your own blogs (as an educator as well as students blogs) using wordpress

flock: flock makes blogging easy as it integrates with programs like wordpress, blogger, livejournal, etc. Flock also provides an easy to use RSS reader.

AcademHacK: this is a blog about tech tools for academics. The site sets out to prove that technology should make teaching easier and more effective.

HigherEd BlogCon: “HigherEd BlogCon 2006 seeks to engage the Higher Education community in a conversation on the use of blogs, wikis, RSS, audio and video podcasts, social networks, and other digital tools in a range of areas in academe.”

Blogs For Learning: “Blogs for Learning is an online resource designed for students and instructors who are interested in instructional blogging. The goal of the site is to provide information and resources surrounding the technical, legal, and pedagogical aspects of blogging in the classroom.”

BlogBridge: essentially an RSS reader that helps you categorize and organize the blogs you read.

bloglines: allows you to subscribe to blogs (RSS), share your favorite blogs with friends, colleagues, etc., and publish your own blog as well.

Blogs on blogging:

Weblogg-ed

Good Blog News

Nice article from a few days ago in The Seattle Times: Living: “Teachers are reaching out to students with a new class of blogs”

“Never in 25 years of teaching have I seen a more powerful motivator for writing than blogs,” [Mark] Ahlness said. “And that’s because of the audience. Writing is not just taped on the refrigerator and then put in the recycle bin. It’s out there for the world to see. Kids realize other people are reading what they write.”

Nice way to start the week…

incorporated subversion
BlackBoard and Blogging

A colleague at an Australian University showed me some details about where they’re going with Blackboard and blogs and oh dearie dearie me… it’s not a pretty place!

Specifically their “blog journal… [&] e-portfolio for teaching in the Autumn semester” is somewhat limited by the fact that:

“each blog will be subject bound (and it even has less functions than Blogger back in 2001) so at the end of the subject it all vanishes…..there’s no publicly published works - all secured behind the limits of students enrolled in that subject… [and more]”

Dontya just love the fact that they’re using a ‘blog journal’. I’m surprised they frickin didn’t call it a ‘blogg journal’ or my alltime favourite ‘BLOGG’ like it’s an acronym ;)

As my contact also points out the University in question is also somewhat seriously strapped for cash, and yet evidently has no problem heaping it out for these tools rather than taking the lead of many other excellent institutions and using open source tools.

And no, it’s not my place… As it happens some pretty exciting things are happening here in the OS social software sense… hope to be able to write more on that soon, it’s surprising where perseverance + time can sometimes get you!!!

Why Not Blog?
      Teaching Literature with Blogs
      The Urge to Link

(my blogs!): the most cake
Expos-i-story
      my blogging in ENG105 philosophy

(dan nester’s blogs): Daniel Nester’s Teaching
ENG105 blog Spring 2006

LCC2400 (thanks dave

Examples of a blogging portfolio:

4040 blog

My First Attempt

What some students have to say…

“Well okay I haven't released my name or anything, but now I'm more open to expressing myself andtalking about me and what's important to me. I have even decided to keep my blog after the class is over.” -- Pen and Ink

fear

2006-10-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received a marked-up copy of my prospectus. I read the e-mail from my director, but have yet to open the actual document (that is what I'm supposed to be doing now). The e-mail refers to two "big-picture" revisions that I should be thinking about: 1) The intro: The intro should serve to introduce a coherent set of problems rather than duplicating the chapter sketches the come later, as I get to each individual chapter. 2) Unpack what I mean by "corporate University."

I actually thought my intro was the strongest part of my prospectus, so I'm a bit disappointed by the need for some major revision. At the same time, I can see his point and am willing to give it a go.

In addition, I need to make clear what I mean when I talk about the "ruins" (Bill Readings' term). How am I defining these ruins?

The rest of the bad news: The e-mail expresses concern the the amount and type of comments on the document might be overwhelming (hence the unopened attachment).

The good news: My ideas for qualitative research on the use of proprietary software by writing instructors sounds promising. And, finally, "To my mind, this version indicates that you're ready to schedule the exams."

In my mind I feel that I've done more revisions of this prospectus than the average person. Last night I had nightmares about the whole process. In the week that I haven't been working on this project and have only been focusing on my students/teaching, I have been quite happy. Now it's just all about over-coming fear and focusing on the light...at the end of the tunnel, of course.
Okay, I'm going to go open it now.

short growing season

2006-10-14T06:01:00.000-07:00

I know that the Northeast has a short growing season, but in the three seasons that I've been gardening (pretty limited experience, but still...), I've never had such an abundance of green tomatoes. Yesterday we attempted to "rescue" these tomatoes from impending frost. Not sure what we'll so when they all turn (if they all turn) at once. Salsa anyone?

Call for Comments

2006-10-13T06:27:00.000-07:00

In thinking further about the issues that have been cropping up with my students' blogs, I've decided that it might help if their blogs were able to gain more "outside" readership. While a couple of students have had the experience of readers who aren't their peers or teacher leaving comments, most have not, and I find that their sense of writing for a larger audience is dwindling. This is something I will address in class, as one of my original goals for the project was to have students think about a reading audience that extends beyond the immediate classroom. At midterm this point seems to need reiterating and further discussion. But in addition to talking with them in class, I would love it if anyone reading this post might consider browsing, reading, and possibly commenting on my students' blogs. You can find them listed under blog roll @ our class blog site: expos-i-story.

I also think that if students come to the realization that additional readers are actually reading their blogs, this realization could further their investment in this type of writing/this forum, rather than seeing it as merely an exercise to fulfill an ENG105 assignment. In addition, I think this will further illustrate and meet the goals of the open source model that this project is based upon.

While some might argue that this isn't the most "natural" way or that I'm "manipulating" the "open-sourceness" and goals of this project (or maybe these are my own arguments), this is often the way we find blogs to read--by cross-posting/referencing and following links. This is representative of how the sphere works. Something else that I believe iis important for my students to think about as they continue to produce entries and read around on the blogs of others.

Thanks to any and all who are willing to read/participate!

what else? mid-term review continued

2006-10-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

As I vowed earlier in the season, I really have been enjoying the Fall. We even decorated for Halloween!

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I started a new vinyasa yoga class. This week was my second week. I took the class two days ago, and I'm still sore. It's been interesting for sure. I've been away from yoga for nearly two years and have only ever practiced ashtanga. This class's instructor talks about how part of yoga is breaking habit, so it has been effective in that sense, as I try to concentrate on this new style that is similar to ashtanga, but clearly not the same. It is much less flowing, and that for me is proving to be incredibly difficult. The difficulty comes in holding the poses for a lot longer than I'm accustomed to.

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I've gone to see two movies in the theater. I have to admit that when I'm swamped with work, one of my favorite breaks is heading over to the Spectrum, getting a green tea and maybe a piece of banana bread, and sitting in the dark theater next to D, and getting lost in film. Unfortunately I would rather have been studying than watching The Black Dahlia. I'd read the reviews, but it still picqued my interest, and it was one of those films about which I just wanted to decide for myself. I thought that at the very least it would be a great escapist film--something I need between revisions of my prospectus and grading student papers. I won't bother to repeat too much of what all the scathing reviews have already said, but it was laughably bad. It is probably the only film in my life that I'd paid to see and wanted to walk out of mid-way through (my fellow movie-goers convinced me to stick it out to the end). I get what the film was trying to do, but it failed miserably at campy, at kitschy, at imitation 1940s film noir...and on and on....

The other film we saw was half nelson, which actually turned out to be much better than I expected--much less predictable than I thought it would be.

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Today I just discovered yet another study break--watching the little dot that is Scotty and Fiddy travel across the country. Oooo...looks like they just made it through Montpelier VT. I'm jealous.

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And saving the best for last...my project. Well, my revised prospectus is in the hands of my director who happens to be falling behind on grading, commenting, responding, all of that. I'm not sure what that means for my proposed November exam dates, but for now it feels good that it is a little bit out of my hands. Although, this is also a weird space to be in. How to study between now and then? I plan to work on making sure my lists are completely accurate and in doing so figure out what I need to review, what notes might still need to be imported to devon, etc.. That is on the agenda for later today.

ten minute mid-term check-in

2006-10-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

Can it really be nearly six weeks since I've blogged? Not that I haven't been completely wrapped up in the blogosphere, but it seems that reading through and commenting on three sections of student blogs has taken away from my own blogging time.

In the past week or so it seems that my students are really lagging behind with their posting. They are either not posting at all, or their posts are not as developed as they were in the beginning. I talked to them about this today in class. I also asked them for (anonymous...well except for the results of the handwriting analysis) feedback on the class in general. A few of the students say they are experiencing problems with Flock, so today in class I decided to have everyone post their freewrite to their blog, so I could double check these issues and try to help out. For the most part the issues seem to be either sporadic--as in, they can post *most* of the time, but not always and for seemingly no reason--or just inexplicable. I have one student running PocketFlock and has been since the second week of the semester, and suddenly now it is running incredibly slowly--not loading his RSS feeds properly, making it really difficult for him to comment on the blogs of his peers. Other students have had trouble with Flock freezing or not opening at all. Ultimately it seems as though I may have reconsider the use of Flock in future semesters.

Aside from Flock, the feedback about the blogging portion of the class has been really, really mixed. I'm trying to be okay with this, but I'm just not sure I'm reaching enough of the students with this one. I find it a valuable project and have tried to articulate that to them, though not all of them seem to see it that way. And I actually really enjoy reading what they have to say. Again, Dave has said that about 80% seem invested, and I want to be okay with that percentage. I want to say that with that percentage, I would do this all again. But the divide between those who LOVE it and are invested and those who HATE it and find it incredibly stressful is HUGE. This weekend I'm sending out e-mails to individual students who seem to be strugging, with the hope of offering advice to get everyone on track (again).

Other than that, I'm thrilled to say that I received numerous requests for MORE in-class freewriting. Not a problem. Coming right up!

no time for anything...except to take this personality quiz

2006-09-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

You Have A Type A- Personality

You are one of the most balanced people around
Motivated and focused, you are good at getting what you want
You rule at success, but success doesn't rule you.

When it's playtime, you really know how to kick back
Whether it's hanging out with friends or doing something you love!
You live life to the fullest - encorporating [sic] the best of both worlds

Do You Have a Type A Personality?

balancing act

2006-09-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

I found this post helpful in reminding me that it is possible to balance teaching, having a life, and writing a dissertation. I'm still pretty much in awe that people can throw (poor word choice) having a baby into the mix!!!

fun home

2006-09-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

I'm so psyched that Alison Bechdel of Dykes to Watch out For fame (or as much fame as you can get writing a lesbian comic strip) has a new book out. It's actually a memoir/graphic novel. Turns out that Bechdel grew up in a funeral home with a closeted gay dad. Though a dark tale it might be, I'm sure it is packed with Bechdel's incredibly smart humor. I'm a huge fan of Bechdel's, and as someone who has been missing Six Feet Under since that final episode, I'm hoping this will satiate my desire for quirky, dark, funeral parlor humor and gothic coming of age stories.

dream about Blackboard: a.k.a. avoiding some tough revisions

2006-09-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a dream...or was it a nightmare... about Blackboard. I don't remember it clearly, but I do know that in the dream I was *forced* to log into CSR's blackboard site for some documents that I absolutely needed and there no other way to get them. I remember I was very confused because it had been awhile since I'd been on there, and I could not navigate with ease. I was very frustrated and hated blackboard.

Translation = scary stuff.

the project runway life hack: a.k.a "make it work"

2006-09-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

I am going to apply what I'm calling "the project runway life hack" to my draft/revision that I must have done by tomorrow evening.

When the contestants on Project Runway get their challenge assigned to them, they often need to have it done in two days (just like my critical pedagogy chapter/outline draft!). They spend the first day looking at fabric, buying fabric, changing their minds, draping the fabric in different ways, maybe changing their minds again, receiving feedback from Tim and occasionally their peers. But on day two comes "make it work time." The runway show is upon them and no matter how much they want to add, subtract, rework their project, they can't. They have to take what is there and "make it work."

That is my plan. Today I'm allowing myself to get caught up in discussions related to my project that aren't necessarily part of my lists. I'm taking notes, adding things to the draft, rethinking what I've added, reading some more...maybe the reading makes me change my mind.... But tomorrow. Tomorrow is "make it work" time. Take that draft, focus on that draft, and make it suitable for its runway walk... or a read through by my diss director.

(Oh yeah...the key here is...whether or not it is perfect. If I need to tape a seam for now, then I'll have to tape a seam for now...).

fall

2006-09-14T18:03:00.000-07:00

I vowed to *really* notice fall this year--to notice the color of the leaves, to feel the chill in the air, to breathe in the wood stoves and fireplaces. So often it all slips past me, as I launch myself into the new school year.

The past few weeks of Ultimate frisbee have been cut short, as darkness falls a few minutes earlier each day. The players seem to be dropping off as well.

Tonight it is raining. Rain makes me feel cozy. But also lazy. I try not to fight against the dwindling hours of daylight, but my productivity seems to drop off drastically. Most noticeably--I have not been very active this week. Tomorrow we'll hit the gym (for the first time this week). I hope to mountain bike over the weekend (Sunday). And I really should find a yoga class to join. I'll probably have to wait for my second "real" paycheck for that though. I got my first one today. It's amazing how fast the government can burst *that* bubble.

Today I bought a new paper journal. It has been a long time since I've journaled on paper. I spend so much time writing in other forms that it has come to seem like an additional task, but I think that my anxiety (and crabbiness) rises in relation to the amount of time that I spend away from pen and paper.

The garden is abundant, but sometimes I miss the farmers market. Every Tuesday from 4-7 is the farmer's market in my neighborhood. Each week I pass it on my way home from work. My instinct is always to stop, but then I think--what will I buy there? Tomatoes? I'm giving those away myself. Leafy greeens? We've been eating lovely mixures of broccoli and swiss chard. The only thing I could really purchase there are the sweets, and considering the fact that I baked both chocolate chip cookies and banana bread over the weekend, it seems that we don't need more of that either. (Especially not more of that!!).

Tonight I spent far too much time in front of the TV--avoiding working on my revision that I have to send to my committee director my Saturday night. But, I tell myself, it's the rain and the darkness, and I haven't yet settled into my "new" routine. But I did put on water for Mint Magic tea. And tomorrow night our Friday night "date" will involve going for coffee and reading. This is what we do in the fall. It's starting...again.

nudity, community art, and composition

2006-09-12T13:16:00.000-07:00

My students recently posted freewrites about lies in response to the epigraph from Mary Karr's memoir The Liar's Club. After looking at what some of them chose to expose in this particular genre/medium, Dave reminded me of this community art project--postsecret. Today I opted to show them this website as a lead-in to having them write about what it means to write in a particular rhetorical situation and what that means for what they decide to include and/or exclude in their writing. In other words, I wanted them to reflect upon the context(s) in which people choose to share secrets and lies in writing and why these choices are made.

So I explain to them the concept of this postsecret project (which has also resulted in a couple of books, not just the blog site) and I scroll through a few of the online "secrets." Of course the first one turns out to be about having cyber sex with dad. I don't know what to do and consider not actually looking at the posts--just leaving it at the concept, but I want to show them a little about the types of secrets that come out in this venue, so I carry on. I see a picture of a woman's naked breasts coming, and I abruptly stop (though I know they too saw what was coming) and have them freewrite. It's fine and all, but I wonder at myself. I mean most of these students have probably seen full frontal nudity (at least of women) in movies. They should be old enough to handle looking at art, and yet I stop before showing them this part of a community art project. I feel like I just encouraged a double-standard somehow. Or I acted like a naked woman is an image we should not view.
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As far as the blogging goes: One section has a particularly HUGE computer literacy gap that--today--has become very difficult to manage. While some students don't know how to copy and paste (for example how to copy a URL to create a link to it within their blogs), others have already completed the assignment at hand. This is a tough classroom situation to navigate. I can't really move ahead when there are some who are behind and frantically trying to catch up. But, at the same time, those who understand are sitting there bored, half asleep--in short, feelingl like they are not getting their money's worth. The situation gets much more complicated when you take into account that fact that maybe only a portion of the "bored" contingency truly understand, while others have simply shut down.

Today I was talking with a colleague who likened it to her experience teaching in classes that had large population of ESL students. It comes down to a language/literacy gap.

my project makes sense!!!

2006-09-09T05:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I met with my dissertation committee chair. When he summarized my project it made sense to me. It sounded really promising. It sounded cohesive. It felt--in short--like a miracle! I wanted to try to capture here that summary, but already--in my head--it doesn't sound nearly as well put together as when he articulated it.

"Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people." --Arundhati Roy

I want this to be the epigraph to my dissertation, or at least to one of the chapters....

Okay, it makes sense, but maybe not yet to me...?

technology...or my life as of late

2006-09-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Lots of problems with technology in the classroom today. Today I dislike technology. It feels like it is making life more difficult rather than easier. And I'm not...at the moment...feeling the payoffs. Right now I'm blogging along with my ENG105 class. We are doing this in lieu of in-class freewriting. For the first section I actually followed along with the prompt I gave them and posted by freewrite over at expos-i-story.

The main problem today has been with laptop users who downloaded Flock on Tuesday and at the time subscribed to the blogs of their peers. Today, however, I had at least four users so far whose feeds only gave them an error message. None of the feeds were working properly!!! It slowed class down tremendously, as the only way I could get it to work was to have them clear out all of the feeds; save the OPML file for their class to their desktop and import the feeds to Flock. They're working now, but I fear it will happen again.

In the first section I was really into demonstrating the "magic" that is RSS, but after they all posted their in-class writing, many of them couldn't get their reader to update, so they couldn't see the new articles magically load. That was a frustrating disappointment as well. And they kept asking me when will it update, when will it update. For PocketFlock users we tried closing out of PocketFlock and going back in again. That worked to an extent, but many of the blogs still hadn't updated. For Flock users I told them to hit refresh, but it only worked for one person. I can't make sense of any of this.

Two minutes to post time.... Back into teaching mode.

youtubing teachers

2006-09-06T05:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Inside Higher Ed has an article about students putting up videos of their professors and teachers on YouTube. I just find it bizarre that this article about the potential for rights being violated--intellectual property rights, privacy, etc.-- included links to the videos. Not that I didn't click on the links and waste many minutes of my morning in the time-suck that is YouTube.... Still, I thought the article could have done more to explore the "other side," but all it had was this one overly simplified comment:

Among the issues being raised are whether this form of expression — however upsetting to faculty members — is an example of students acting on their feelings and expressing themselves, something composition instructors in particular tend to encourage.

And this idea is taken from discussion of this issue over at the blog digital digs. But again, these blogs that say they don't want to give too much attention to the issue (or the actual videos themselves), give the links to them. We are, after all, the reality show culture, so we want to see "the reality." Show me this stuff really is happenin'. And I am a product of this as well.

Jeff Rice in his blog Yellow Dog provides an interesting perspective on this genre of YouTube videos by exploring the conditions within which the teachers are situated. This perspective seems relevant then to the series of comments left under one of the videos where the teacher is screaming at his students during "the pledge." A number of comments are all about how and why this video represents why teachers should be hated and should *not* be respected, but the last comment questions the previous ones, asking what the problem is with a teacher trying to make "a bunch of arrogant jerkoff kids stand during their country's national anthem." And while I'm not sure about making anyone stand during the national anthem--that seems to be missing the point--this comment seems the only one with even minimal awareness of the teacher's situation.

the technology sweat

2006-09-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

In the past I've tended to avoid a lot of technology use in the classroom. I have done some small projects like having students edit and write articles for wikipedia, but wikipedia, of course, is already set-up for us. Today's class, however, involved one hundred minutes of computer use that included downloading, posting blog entries, creating links, subscribing to and reading RSS feeds, etc. (For more complete coverage see Dave's posts on classroom blogging over at academhack).

Teaching something that you're not incredibly certain of and comfortable with is tough. Technology, of course, always runs the risk of not quite doing what you want it to do (or maybe a server goes down something...). Anyway, as I'm working on maintaining this open source model of ENG105, I can't say that BB wouldn't have made life a *little* easier, BUT the added pedagogical benefits of doing it this way are worth it. And, as Dave has reminded me, it's the first run-through. We're still working out the quirks. In terms of the pedagogical benefits for the students, I find that BB simply acts as a mask--it obscures real life writing conditions. Writing, as we might tell our students, does not happen in a vacuum, particularly writing that is done online; however, BB is a vacuum--closed off from the rest of the campus community and the rest of the world. It's kind of like buying vegetables at Price Chopper as opposed to getting them from your backyard...or at least the farmer's market.

Today was mostly successful--except for the fact that PocketFlock doesn't allow the option of importing feeds. I had collected and saved the feed for each student's blog in an OPML file with the hope of passing that file along to each student to import to her/his version of Flock, but anyone using PocketFlock wasn't able to do this. In the second section we had everyone (as the majority in that class are using PocketFlock) manually add the blogs to their Flock news reader. This was quite time consuming, however, and we've now decided to build specific versions of PocketFlock that already contain that appropriate feeds.

More importantly though is the fact that students appeared to be "into it"--truly invested in gathering the feeds for their peers' blogs and launching their first couple of practice posts. I'm looking forward to maintaining this energy and exploring the rhetorical situation that is...blogging!

inside higher ed.

2006-09-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a rather disturbing article about the report from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which was approved by the members of the American Council on Education in early August. That is, until last week when Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector division, decided she didn't like the inclusion of references to open source software and open content projects in higher education.

The report's original paragraph (with which Elliott took issue):
The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.

---

In terms of local news...that is, my project. I've decided that I want to create more of a two-way street. So far I've mainly been criticizing critical pedaogy for its relative ignorance of/toward the corporatized University as discussed by many scholars including Bill Readings (his specific rendition of the corporate U as University of Excellence is key to my project), Wesley Shumar, Stanley Aronowitz, Michael Apple, and Leslie and Slaughter (to name a few). But in thinking more about this I find it interesting that Readings so clearly wants to distance himself from both critical pedaogy and cultural studies, and yet I think he may have had a rather narrow view of what critical pedaogy does and can do. There are critical pedaogogues out there doing work much like the work Readings wants to see in his "scene of teaching." Joe Marshall Hardin seems to me one example. At the end of Opening Spaces, Hardin spends a good deal of time rejecting oppositional, resistant, and emancipatory discourses and pedagogical approaches, claiming they only serve "to support the hegemony of dominant ideology in a perpetual dialogue of left versus right" (113). To me this seems quite relevant and similar to Readings' idea of a community of dissensus, which "would seek to make its heteronomy, its differences, more complex. To put this another way, such a community would have to be understood on the model of dependency rather than emancipation" (190). This gets a little confusing here because Readings' idea of "dependency" could be mistaken with Hardin's (and Laclau's) formulation of right and left as "dependent on each other; they serve as two sides of the same coin" (107). But all in all, I feel that if Readings had the opportunity to read and/or interact with Hardin (and others like him), he might have a slightly different view of critical pedaogy and cultural studies.

worried? or just plain paranoid?

2006-08-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

My students' first blogging assignment is simply to create their blog. The assignment is now posted. I'm hoping it is not too rudimentary, but of my sixty students only around three or four of them have ever blogged before.

---

Today at the end of class I was talking to a student about blogging, while the next class was coming in (not sure what class it was). The instructor overheard me and asked if I am using the new blogging feature in Blackboard. I told him no, that we're using wordpress. He proceeded to tell me a bit about the new BB feature. I told him that I am familiar with it, and that it is "quite nice." Why did I say that? I don't think it's "quite nice." I think it limits student creativity and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Finally I said to him, in barely a whisper, that I'm opposed to Blackboard/proprietary software in general. I whispered as if I have to keep my class plans and pedagogical philosophies on the "down-low." But when I read things like this, I can't help but worry. I mean I've never received explicit instructions from CSR to use only their server/software, but then again it just seems to be assumed that EVERYONE at CSR uses BB. The entire campus community uses it to communicate. Using BB has just become so naturalized. It's frustrating. And it's ridiculous to feel like I need to sneak around to give my students an open source model of education and to simply give them some amount of creative control over their blogs (which BB gives them none).

first day of school

2006-08-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Not a lot to report. Completed one (of three) section of ENG105. My first time teaching in a computer lab, but I'm excited about adding technology to my courses, so it makes sense to have this kind of access. I asked the students to indicate on their questionnaires if they blog--only two out of twenty do, so for most of them this will be an entirely new experience.

I've already caught the start-of-semester-cold, which made it rough to talk at length today, but with three-quarters of the class new to college, I wanted to be particularly thorough in my explanation(s).

I still think wordpress was a solid choice for student blogging, but I'm having my own difficulties with it in that it won't really allow me use code or HTML of any sort. It will only allow me to modify and create using its tools, so I'm having trouble embedding google calendar into my sidebar. I've created the class schedule for the year at google calendar so that they'll have an online version that they can access. For now I've provided links on a separate page. I also need to figure out the best way of posting PDF files.

On Wednesday and Thursday I'll be assigning the students to set-up their wordpress blogs, so I'll have more of an update then.

Tonight it is all exhaustion...and it is deceivingly hot outside, but still I have Dar Williams' "End of the Summer" in my head. It seems that every year at this time I walk around humming this song to myself (hopefully just myself):

The summer ends and we wonder where we are
And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car
And you both look so young
And last night was hard, you said
You packed up every room
And then you cried and went to bed
But today you closed the door and said
"We have to get a move on.
It's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
We push ourselves ahead."

triage

2006-08-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

I guess I am in what could be described as triage mode in terms of studying for exams. I've tossed the strict text/day study shedules and now keep referring to this map, which I keep playing with, altering, updating, etc. I am using it as a "kind of" outline to writing the second and third chapter sections of my prospectus--trying to ensure that I adequatetly provide the history of critical pedaogy and the connections between critical pedaogy and composition that will be crucial for my dissertation. I'm also using it as a guide to the texts that I need to quickly review, read through, harvest quotes from, etc.

For this revision/studying/review task I am also using a combination of what my friend Tara has dubbed "Tasks Not Time" and the use of an alarm/timer to take breaks that don't extend into long projects. 43folders has suggested this life hack called (10+2)*5. It has seemingly worked for many folk, but for me it is a little too ADHD/manic for me...or at least for this particular task. I can't possibly work on writing my prospectus in ten minutes increments and expect to produce break-through thoughts and any amount of sustained, serious inquiry, so instead I implement Tara's "TNT." I'm sure she could explain it better, but essentially it involves covering up the clock and focusing on the task at hand, getting in the "zone," and spending a seemingly unknown amount of time working on that. As I start to get tired, I set a last minute goal for myself (this is my addition to TNT)--something like getting a particular thought down on paper or reading one more paragraph or page. Then I allow myself my "break." This is where the ever-helpful timer comes in. In fact, I downloaded Pester, which has proved invaluable. My "breaks" involve still working, but not working on my prospectus--so I might deal with email for ten minutes or blog (as I'm doing now).

---

Updated "map":

Exercise in mapping and classifying:

Lineage of Cultural Studies: Hoggart – Williams – (rereadings of/with/through Gramsci and Althusser) – Hall (slightly more marginal figures: Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Angela McRobbie, Jorge Larrain, Stanley Aronowitz)

Compositionists working with Cultural Studies: James Berlin, Richard Ohmann (kinda), Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Alan France, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Bruce Horner (?), John Trimbur

Lineage of critical pedagogy: Freire – Shor – Giroux – Ann E. Berthoff (compositionist) – McLaren – bell hooks

Compositionists in critical pedagogy: Amy Lee, William Thelin, Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Andrea Greenbaum, Joe Marshall Hardin, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Richard Miller, Russell Durst

Texts to review/read through:

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2003.
Fitts, Karen and Alan W. France. Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
Giroux, Henry and Peter McLaren. “Radical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Beyond the Discourse of Critique and Anti-Utopianism.”

organization obsession

2006-08-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

So I've been playing around with flock's blogging option because I'm probably going to have my students utilize flock for both RSS reader and blogging. It feels strange to launch my posts from this unfamiliar text window--strangely, makes me feel like I'm going to forget something, but it is surprisingly clean and easy.

---

Lately I've become obsessed with "life hacker" stuff, getting things done, etc., reading sites like 43 folders, but as I think often happens with these organizational techniques, I start to spend more time looking at options to become more efficient than I do actually doing things. I get on the computer and all I want to do is clean, sort, file, see how fast I can read through my RSS reads, download programs, interrupt myself by figuring out how to deal with interruptions, etc. It's bad. Instead of streamlining my reading, I seem to be adding more and more sites that will "help" me get things done more quickly and efficiently. But is is working I wonder?

Still, as the fall semester rapidly approaches I find it important to get organized. So now I'm thinking about the kinds of folders I will need to purchase...maybe today?

So far I have yet to find any suggestions for what to do on those days when you just *cannot* concentrate. Those days when your mind wanders repeatedly, when you've been on the same line of text since for an hour. My approach is to generally set a very short period of time for myself. Yesterday it was fifteen minutes. I told myself that if I simply read for fifteen more minutes I could leave and take the rest of the day off!!! I ended up reading for about twenty-five minutes.

My BIG distraction is biking. I've become obsessed with biking...and...of course...thinking about biking. I'm in the market for a mountain bike, as I'm increasingly frustrated with riding in traffic and think that unless I'm commuting or doing a long ride somewhere without a lot of cars, I should be off-road.

So I've added some bike blogs to my reading as well, and oil is for sissies is my favorite so far.

blogging project for fall

2006-08-08T07:42:00.000-07:00

I am busy experimenting--getting ready to finally use blogs as a part of the first-year writing courses that I'll be teaching this Fall. I am trying to decide between hosting these blogs directly through wordpress or hosting them through edublogs, so I've set up two blogs to play with, experiment with:

expos-i-story

an exposition of writing

I will be documenting the experience--getting set-up, logistics, the pedagogy, etc.

more testing

2006-08-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

here is blah blah blah

testing flock

2006-08-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

After the bloodiest day for Israel in the Middle East Conflict, the Israeli death toll has topped 75. Twelve soldiers were killed Sunday in the town of Kfar Giladi and three civilians were killed in Haifa. As the world awaits an official comment from Tel Aviv on a long-awaited UN ceasefire proposal, we go to Haifa to speak to Erez Gellar of the Israeli relief service Magen David Adom. [includes rush transcript]

Democracy Now!: radio and TV news

Friday dog blogging

2006-08-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

the picture we don't see

2006-08-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

Read this haunting, beautiful piece from salon.com
How Lebanon rescued me by Alia Malek.

I think it does a wonderful job of counteracting the images we are so often given by the media. Even without photos, it paints the picuture we don't often get to see of the Middle East.

in praise of thought as material/action/activism

2006-08-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, after, earlier today, struggling with alix olson's definition of an activist, I returned to an article by Eric J. Weiner, which I'd forgotten all about: "Beyond Doing Cultural Studies," and he reminded me:

Unfortunately, thinking theoretically as a political practice has been denigrated by those on the right and the left and must be re-legitimized as a form of pedagogical praxis. On the right, the logic of the bottom line encourages thought primarily as it applies to accumulating capital. On the left, the production of theory is seen as both a luxury of privilege and an excuse for not engaging in 'real' political work.... Common sense tells both that meaningful 'work' is constituted by the production of material things and is essentially pragmatic. (59)

How susceptible I am to this line of thought--the naturalization of theory as not "real" of thought as not "work"...even when I think I'm not.

alix olson--on the one hand--mac specific programs on the other

2006-08-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

I have designated this morning as play around with the computer and try to increase productivity morning. This of course came after watching an episode of work out.

So far I've downloaded: text expander; quicksilver; flock; and net news wire. I think that is all...well, in addition to DevonThink of course. I maybe went a little overboard, setting myself up for frustration in terms of the learning curve, but so far I am quite enamoured TextExpander. It's pretty magical. For example, I get so tired of typing out critical pedaogy and cultural studies over and over in my work. Now I need only type the abbreviation CP or CS and voila out comes critical pedaogy and cultural studies. Flock and NetNewsWire are programs I'm playing around with in order to potentially utilize them in the Fall when I start using blogs in my classes. All of these programs are mac specific, and this all is thanks to my friend Dave over at academHacK (and he has some references to PC equivalents as well).

On the other side of all this computer use and my great enthusiasm for the ways in which it could/can make life easier, is the fact that it also makes me feel a bit ADD, raises my anxiety, and might contribute to depression...? Sometimes I have so many applications running that I forget what I'm doing. Sometimes I surf in haphazard fashion when I should be doing something else entirely. I feel like the fragmented individual that so many have written about. Two mornings ago I went to the library--sans computer--I just read, stayed focused. It felt nice.

Technology offers so many overwhelming possibilities, and I feel the need/want to take advantage of them all--until things like uploading photos to flickr stays on my "to do" list for weeks at a time. Blogging ends up there often as well. Each day it seems I have more little post-its in various places that say "blog this."

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In other news...

We went to Brattleboro this weekend and saw alix olson. She was wonderful, as always--even funnier than I've seen her before. I think this is because she is really striving to find happiness, joy, laughter amidst the anger and frustration that art and activism can embody. She had this great metaphor about having a duplex inside of us. In one side is that activist--angry, enraged, paying attention, and frustrated. On the other side of the duplex is the happy, nature-lover, who says lets go canoeing, life is great and wonderful. Often the duplexes are in conflict, but we are the landlord--they have to work it out...somehow.

She also defines an activist as anyone who even *thinks* about what is happening the world today. I struggle with this definition, because I don't know that I agree with it, though I'd like to, as I constantly struggle between the academic/activist parts of myself. I feel like academe is a much safer haven than "actual activism," but again, Olson would disagree with this split--maybe I should take that to heart a little bit.

Exercise in mapping and classifying

2006-08-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

Lineage of Cultural Studies: Hoggart – Williams – (rereadings of/with/through Gramsci and Althusser) – Hall (slightly more marginal figures: Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Angela McRobbie, Jorge Larrain, Stanley Aronowitz)

Lineage of critical pedagogy: Freire – Shor – Giroux – Ann E. Berthoff (compositionist) – McLaren

Compositionists in Cultural Studies: James Berlin, Richard Ohmann (kinda), Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Alan France, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Bruce Horner (?), John Trimbur

Compositionists in critical pedagogy: Amy Lee, William Thelin, Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Andrea Greenbaum, Joe Marshall Hardin, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Richard Miller, Russell Durst

This is not so much a comprehensive mapping, but rather an attempt to organize the scholars, theorists, pedagogues whom I will be most often addressing. Still, am I missing anyone? Other versions of these maps/histories?

Now, the difficult part is to revise my prospectus so as to incorporate these histories and make clear the relationship(s) between cultural studies and critical pedagogy and composition.

quote of the day

2006-07-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite quote that I read today. Taken from "The Writing Class" by John Carlos Rowe.

The rhetorical power of postmodern capitalism is its capacity to translate its products into different discursive registers and achieve even a limited proliferation that opens markets for yet other acts of representation. In this context, the traditionally defined proletariat is defined less by the theft of its physical power [ala traditional Marxism]—labor power per se—than by its exclusion from the diverse media through which the economy produces its effects. The primary basis for formulating class interests and articulating class consciousness would thus have to begin with redefining what we mean by rights to the mass media and the technologies they embody. Such rights or competencies would have to be understood today as the political and economic refunctioning of the narrowly educational rights to cultural literacy.

I love the way Rowe manages to pack into one powerful punch—the debate around cultural literacy, the debate over theories of class, a reformulation of class theories, and a critique of mass/corporate media control. Rather than simply falling into the trap of seeing cultural literacy issues as purely social issues, Rowe ties them to the economic.

---
Today I ended up getting wrapped up in this article, and while I had difficulty getting through it, ended up taking almost three pages of notes. I didn't get to the other two scheduled article/essay. And I have to get ready for tonight's tennis match. Hopefully I'll have enough energy when I get home to cover the Bizzell piece.

debate: student blogging: proprietary vs. open/free

2006-07-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday I attended a workshop at the institution where I will be employed full-time this coming year. The workshop was a Blackboardtraining, focused specifically on some new additions that CSR has purchased for this software (though these additions were purchased from a different company—Learning Optics (?)): “journals” and “team sites.” “Team sites” are supposed to be the equivalent of wikis, and “journals” are supposed to emulate blogs.

While I am philosophically opposed to using proprietary software, I have been using Blackboard and WebCT over the past few semesters, because with teaching four courses/semester and working toward exams, I had little time to construct an alternative. This coming semester I want to begin having students blog and assumed I would use wordpress or blogger for this purpose, but thought I should check out this workshop anyway. Unfortunately, the lure of using Blackboard is strong once again—the “journals” option is so eeeaasyyy. There is very little “set-up” time involved. No teaching students how to use RSS feeds in order to easily read each other’s blogs. Etc.

Here is what I am wondering/thinking about: If the students don’t know the difference between keeping their blogs on blogger versus keeping their “journals” on blackboard, does it really make a difference in terms of where they keep them? The way this question is worded is kind of a cop-out—a kind of “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” concept. I guess the more important question should then be—do we make explicit our choice and explain the difference to them?

Overall, I believe all of this sounds a bit weak on my part—like I am trying to rationalize the easier route. I’m not. I just want to know a bit more about how or if we should involve—in a pedagogical way—the debate around proprietary vs. open source/free source/open knowledge. And also to get the views of others on the differences between using University sanctioned (but closed/privatized) software and other open/free versions.

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In other news...
Yesterday: did 31.3 miles on the bike--Lake George, NY

plan of study--two more weeks

2006-07-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Week Three 7.24 – 7.30

Monday 7.24
France, Alan “Assigning Places: The Function of Introductory Composition as Cultural Discourse”
Rowe, John Carlos “The Writing Class” from Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture ed. Mark Poster
Bizzell, Patricia “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies”
(also finish notes on Judith Goleman’s Work Theory)

Tuesday 7.
Crowley, Sharon Composition in the University

Wednesday 7.26
Ohmann, Richard The Politics of Letters

Thursday 7.27
Grossberg, Lawrence “Formations of Cultural Studies”
Althusser, Louis “Ideology and Ideological State Apparastuses”
Adorno, Theodor “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

Friday 7.28
Williams, Raymond Marxism and Literature

**Saturday = catch-up, catch-all day—finishing notes, organizing lists, etc.
also, go see alix olson at the Hooker-Dunham Theater in Brattleboro, VT
**Sunday hit my old stomping grounds--The Brattleboro Food Coop on our way back home…. And back to work.

Week Four 7.31 – 8.6

Monday 7.31
Marx: Capital

Tuesday 8.1
Marx: German Ideology

Wednesday 8.2
Eagleton day
“Base and Superstructure Revisited”
“The Contradictions of Postmodernism”
“The Rise of English”

Thursday 8.3
Jameson, Fredric “On ‘Cultural Studies’” from Social Text no. 34 (1993)
--- “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
Williams, Raymond “The Future of Cultural Studies”

Friday 8.4
Morley, et. al Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues….

**daily goal of 2-3 pages single spaced summary and integration of other notes, blog entries, etc.

brief update

2006-07-18T06:46:00.000-07:00

Stayed at parents' house an extra day--so difficult to leave the water in a heat wave--so I've really thrown myself off in terms of my study schedule.

Yesterday after traveling back home, I did twelve miles on the bike.

Today I will devote myself to Amy Lee's Composing Critical Pedagogies. Plus at some point I'd like to read the latest College English cover to cover.

Oh...and I thought that while I was visiting the 'rents, I would be able to finish House of Leaves. No such luck. I still have to read it in spurts, which is not ideal for this particular novel, but regardless, it really messes with a person. I swear the book writes itself while I'm sleeping or something.

call for a critical critical pedagogy

2006-07-14T07:33:00.000-07:00

As Berlin argues in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, no category of investigation can ever “be given an unquestioned first place in analysis” (76). Here he is borrowing from Teresa Ebert’s idea of “resistance postmodernism”—meaning that even modes of investigation (and my interest is primarily those of composition pedagogies) need to realize their situatedness; that their methods are never transhistorical/universal, but historically specific. My fear for much of composition theory/pedagogy is disciplinary/intellectual stasis. It is not enough just to examine and offer critique, which is what, I contend, too much of cultural studies and critical pedagogy does, but instead it is necessary “to inquire into the power relations requiring such suppression” in the first place” (Ebert qtd. in Berlin 75). In this instance Ebert is referring the suppression caused by/created by hierarchy and binaries (the focus of much postmodern inquiry), but I believe this can be extended to the work that cultural studies and critical pedagogy attempt to do when in their “unveiling” mode—the uncovering of social injustice. The goals of critical pedagogy are, according to Amy Lee, to do this kind of rewriting that Ebert points to in her rendition of “resistant postmodernism.” Lee writes, “Critical pedagogy does not propose that we tell students about democratic possibilities or espouse radical empowerment. Rather, it proposes that we work toward these goals with our students, reflecting on and working to alter the conditions that impede them” (106). This is also what Ebert insists “resistant postmodernism” can do—work for “equal access for all to social resources and for an end to the explitative exercise of power” (75). But too often, I’ve found, cultural studies and critical pedagogy get caught up in mere ideology critique; thereby inadvertently (I believe) avoiding the conditions of the historical moment. Because I believe that the University as TNC would certainly impede both “democratic possibilities” and “radical empowerment,” I hold critical pedagogy, particularly that critical pedagogy of the writing classroom, as responsible to and as in need of responding to the bureaucratic University that Readings lays out for us. And instead critical pedagogy, with its explicit reference to the act of critique and/or critical thinking and/or analysis, ends up adding to the vocabulary that is, what I describe as the “vocabulary of ‘excellence.’” That is, “critical,” has become empty in much the same way that Readings has described “excellence” as empty—lacking a referent or signified. “Critical” and “excellence” are both terms we, particularly in academia, assume to be uncontestable ground. But “excellence” is the language of accounting, which is the language of businesses and corporations—pointing to critical pedagogy’s complicity in the University in “ruins.”

But all of this also points to the ability of critical pedagogy and cultural studies to help us read and respond to the “ruins.” As Berlin puts it, “resistance is always possible, since the contradiction between signified and signifier…continually provoke opposition to hegemonic ideologies” (75). It is this continual opposition that we can see as a possibility for Readings’ idea of the open-ended dialogue and community of dissensus. For example we have our signifiers—“excellence” and “critical” let’s say—and then we have the actual conditions of the University as corporatized—and possibly in the conflict and struggle between these signifiers and the actuality of the University’s contemporary situation we can create the resistance to excellence that Readings so strongly calls for.

history

2006-07-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

In going over all of these Berlin texts for the past few days it is interesting to note that while I often feel resistant to reviewing the history of English Studies, rhtetoric, composition, and their relationships (because I feel like I'm missing out on the pulse of what is currently happening), it is so important (and often scary) to remember the ways in which history repeats itself in our field. Frightening to note the lack of change in attitudes and the debates.

i hate disclaimers

2006-07-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

So I’ve spent a day and half (yesterday and today) getting off track/schedule. Yesterday I hardly made a dent in the coverage of Cultural Studies in the English Classroom that I wanted to accomplish. I did spend a lot of time reading blogs and writing. The night before, I had sat up reading my new book, and in it she talks a lot about simply accumulating pages (much in the vein of freewriting); she encourages a lot of writing in order to think and putting down on paper (or screen) every glimmer of an idea. These are all things I know, of course, but sometimes reading a book like this is like giving yourself permission to actually do these things. My committee members have also given me this advice/permission, but it seems that for much of this experience I’ve remained paralyzed by the thought of writing.

I also know that many of the blogs I read are comprised of seemingly well thought-out and carefully constructed entries containing bits and pieces of that particular writer’s project, and maybe that will come, as I’m further along in my own process and have accumulated all of these pages of text that Bolker talks about, but for the moment, yes, this is my disclaimer; this is that start of glimmering ideas and following them no matter how seemingly silly and/or irrelevant; and this is what I thought about yesterday:

At this point much of the argument that I want to be making about cultural studies and critical pedagogy (within composition studies) is, that even with their Marxist roots, they seem primarily interested in ideology critique (the idea of “unveiling”) as opposed to focusing on the present conditions of the corporate University within which they are working. But what does the classroom in ruins—the classroom that acknowledges those ruins—actually look like? What does it mean to have a classroom that creates present value in writing? Maybe it is that the text is no longer a reader or writing handbook, but the campus and its policies—the construction of the campus itself—or a study of NAFTA, or of corporations and their increasingly trans-national tendencies. I’m just not sure…. Does picking some sort of social investigation equate to a cultural studies approach? But what about giving that investigation value in the present? This seems to be the point at which publishing student texts comes into play, but that also has its own ties to capitalism and the system that is the corporate University. Another aspect of acknowledging the “ruins” would be to work toward changing the immediately oppressive circumstances within which we work and teach: “such as the way part-time faculty and students are successfully silenced within our own departments” (CS in Eng Class 21).

I also have this idea that creating a composition classroom in keeping with a Marxist/materialist philosophy would be to have (harken back to) a current-traditional approach (and this is not a positive/answer). Here are some similiarities between Marxist though and current-traditional rhetoric:

the “real” is located in the material world and truth exists prior to language
rhetoric as science
truth is to be discovered through “correct” perception, through an objective examination of the material world

Here really is the problem with notions of Marxism within rhet/comp theories: Current-traditional rhetoric does seem to share these philosophies with Marxism, but of course the outcome, as Berlin tells it in Rhetoric and Reality is that “the doctors or lawyers or engineers or business managers—having been certified as experts, as trained observers, in their disciplines—felt they were surely correct in discovering that economic and political arrangements that benefited them were indeed in the nature of things” (37). Then we have the expressivist rhetoric, which could potentially be looked at as resisting the corporate structure of higher education, but which ultimately is complicit in it through its focus on “rugged individualism,” autonomy, and the private. These are two of the approaches to writing that have withstood the test of time and are the basis for much of what is thought within composition studies even today. Though there have been the alternatives: social/poststructuralist/rhetoric of pubic discourse, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. These alternatives have come along to say—hey, what about the cultural and the social, and with CS and CP’s ties to Marxism, I expect them to say—hey, what about the economic? Only, they often fail to acknowledge the most immediate economic structure within which they are located, and that is the corporate University.

The similarities too between the social constructionist/poststructuralist/rhet of public discourse that Berlin describes in Rhetoric and Reality and his definition of cultural studies in Cultural Studies in the English Classroom are also striking:

preparation of students for participation in the democratic process
“While social reality is bound by the material, it is everywhere immersed in language…. [Reality] is the result of the interaction between the experience of the external world and what the perceiver brings to this experience” (R&R 47).
While subjectivity is understood differently than this (last bullet) within CS (where the subject is comprised of multiple constructions shaped by myriad signifying practices), CS is described as the “study of the ways social formations and practices are involved in the shaping of consciousness, and this shaping is seen to be mediated by language and situated in concrete historical conditions. Signifying practices then intercede in the relations among material conditions, social arrangements, and the formation of consciousness” (CS in English Classroom ix).

So ultimately the social turn of the 80s with its poststructuralist bent (e.g. Bartholomae, Bizzell) is entirely relevant to the social turn that can be described through the rise of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Yes, CS may use the vocabulary of Marxism, but it has a particularly poststructuralist slant, which might be part of why it has been taken on by composition studies (and probably also explains why I am drawn to studying/working with it).

goals

2006-07-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

Today I came up slightly short of my goals; yesterday I was right on:

Yesterday
--three articles
--three pages single spaced notes/musings
--tennis match

Today
--3/4 of Rhetoric and Reality
--1 1/4 pages of notes
--threw frisbee ("disc") for about an hour

I am leaving Friday morning open as a kind of "catch-up"/"catch-all" time.

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For my birthday I received a Barnes & Noble gift certificate (online purchases only) from two of my friends. I went ahead and purchased myself a copy of Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, as recommended by culture cat, who gives a number of helpful tips for the dissertation writing process.

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TVland: Very, very excited tomorrow kicks off Project Runway

reading/study schedule

2006-07-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

I've set up a two week schedule of readings/texts for my comps. I guess this week is Berlin week...

Week One 7.10 – 7.16

Monday 7.10
Bartholomae Day
“Inventing the U”
“Writing with Teachers…”
“Interchanges”

Tuesday 7.11
Berlin, James Rhetoric/Reality

Wednesday 7.12
Berlin, James CS in English Classroom

Thursday 7.13
Berlin, James Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures

**go home for mom’s b-day Fri.-Sun.

Week Two 7.17 – 7.23

Monday 7.17
Lee, Amy Composing Critical Pedagogies

Tuesday 7.18
Durst, Russell Collision Course….

Wednesday 7.19
Fitts and France Left Margins….

Thursday 7.20
Crowley, Sharon Composition in the University

Friday 7.21
Greenbaum, Andrea. Insurrections

Saturday 7.22
Hardin, Joe Marshall Critical Pedagogy and Resistance Theory in Composition

Sunday 7.23: bike ride

**daily goal of 2-3 pages single spaced summary and integration of other notes, blog entries, etc.

So far it is proving more difficult than the way I had romanticized it. This is actually the first time--since I began studying for exams (a long, long time ago)--that I've had a block of time when I'm not teaching and able to dedicate myself completely to my research/exam/diss project.

I find that I start each text with a burst of energy, taking copious notes, finding a good amount of useful (relevant to my work) information to highlight, think about, comment upon. And then, I am not sure if it is me...or just every text I have on my reading lists, but about half way through, I am completely uninterested and/or lost and/or falling asleep. This happens much too often with my reading, and I have way too many half read texts lying around my home. I am not sure if it is simply burn-out, or is it that most texts of this kind are strongest in their first and last quarter?

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In other news, I’ve taken up Ultimate Frisbee…or, rather, Ultimate, as those true Ultimate players call it. I’ve been biking, playing tennis and Ultimate, and lifting quite a bit. My “down days” are spent mowing the lawn, gardening, etc. I hope to keep this up and avoid running all together.

the most cake

I've moved

What is going on with this blog?

online writing workshops?

Note to self (but meant to be read by anyone interested)

RSS for the Fall

summer movie watching

headache

my research question

draft of survey -- for students this time!

Draft of survey

technology and ideology

I have a new dissertation

Doing Nothing

first day of summer vacation

HELP w/ citation

How do *you* stop procrastinating?

Timeline of Cultural Studies

Timeline of Critical Pedagogy

giving student feedback -- an observation

Day Two: CCCC

CCCC07: Outtake One

CCCC07: Day One

Survived: Part II

survived: Part I

the exams are coming

What's so wrong with the word scrotum?

there's hope for me yet!

snow day

Presentation on uses of RSS in the classroom

more exam questions

calling all women academics

two questions

wiki wars

grading made easi(er)

morning blogging routine

i've lost a very important blue notebook

suddenly i see?

i thought i had blogged yesterday

what list are you on?

blogging with my students

quotes

Ms. Dewey

technology...powerful classroom tool or...

today's workout

lazy sunday post

The Energizer Teacher

Break in Review

Beloved Professor

New Semester -- New Blogs

21 days of blogging -- experiment

helping out my brother

dribs and drabs

these days...

revising break-ups

I love Halloween

weekend

Foucault and the local (to the rescue?)

owning marginality

square into a circle

Comp Convo on blogging

fear

short growing season

Call for Comments

what else? mid-term review continued

ten minute mid-term check-in

no time for anything...except to take this personality quiz

balancing act

fun home

dream about Blackboard: a.k.a. avoiding some tough revisions

the project runway life hack: a.k.a "make it work"

fall

nudity, community art, and composition

my project makes sense!!!

technology...or my life as of late

youtubing teachers

the technology sweat

inside higher ed.

worried? or just plain paranoid?

first day of school

How do you stop procrastinating?