crd704ige

What's at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-06-05T13:51:00.000-04:00

What's at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education:

How did this absurd situation arise? It's a familiar story of the steady infiltration of market fundamentalism into academe over the past 30 years.

Senior Lecturer vs TA With a Clicker? Who Wins the Teaching Award? | HASTAC

2011-05-28T00:27:00.003-04:00

Senior Lecturer vs TA With a Clicker? Who Wins the Teaching Award? | HASTAC:

... but, in general, the hierarchical form of the lecture relieves the hearer of having to do much more than be entertained...

If a student takes such an approach, then they're not ready to learn. Notes from class better be more than how many stars today's lecture received. Lecture is inherently interactive for the engaged student. Worse, those lecturers who are seduced by the explanation that entertainment is the primary goal of lecturing don't deserve the title.

When will we again learn the motivation of letting people fail? When did university professors take the onus of their students' success -- all of their students -- from those students themselves? And how precisely do we measure who "learned a lot more"? Does it necessarily spill over into long-term retention? Is it really a college professor's responsibility to get "real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren't getting"? What's really important isn't what can be solved in 5-15 of directed teaching. It's the questions that, after spending the 3:1 hours outside of class, students still can't shake. Lecture's not about the now, it's about the long term. Get the minds started, expose them to your fundamentals, and let them learn to model that investigation when they return to their dorms, the library, and coffee houses.

Inspired by lecture? Speak up. Join the academic conversation. Start modeling the role of an expert. But if you don't understand something? Study like hell and then ask. Find office hours and show up. Have to be entertained to learn? Watch Blues Clues. Want to have the opportunity to interact with the brightest minds, both your instructor and your peers? Apply to college.

Most importantly, understand that teaching qua teaching happens outside of the classroom, tailored not to the aggregate feedback of 30 students answering multiple choice from the last 10 minutes, but to the personally expressed feedback from one well-prepared, self-motivated mind who has given the content hours of dedicated consideration. Distant and cursory readings of 30 students will never take the place of paying attention to each one as an individual.

Honestly, the amount of the students' homework college lecturers are doing for them at this point is absolutely insane. Where are the brightest minds in the field supposed to go if they don't want to play Simon with their students?

If you're not self-motivated in college, languish on the vine. We need to [re]start recognizing those who intrinsically care about the content, about learning, and about scholars who create scholarship. Set your bar higher, folk, and reward the students who follow.

Iain Banks & Simon Morden on science fiction | Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy

2011-05-26T13:46:00.000-04:00

Iain Banks & Simon Morden on science fiction | Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy:

Too many very intelligent and otherwise well-educated people seem to have a sort of disdain for technology and – by association – for any literature that deals with it. This may be born of a sort of subtly inculcated fear, or perhaps just intellectually inherited snobbery; hard to be sure. Anyway, I think that attitude is at least unfortunate and arguably – for our whole shared culture – both damaging and dangerous.

How do you cite a Kindle in MLA?

2011-02-22T16:15:00.000-05:00

The Kindle doesn't give page numbers, but it does give "location" which is, ultimately, a more precise means of locating a quote. I believe one should give a location in a numerator and a "page divisor" in a quote, which would get you very close. How do determine your divisor? Funny you should ask...

EduKindle � Page Number Versus Position on Kindle:

This is a much bruited topic and one that creates a little bit of anxiety for us bibliophiles who have made the conversion to the Kindle. How can I tell what page I am on??? I mean, I have only spent my whole life using page numbers as the reference point for a) how far along in the book I am, and b) any references to the text that I want to make in a post, article, or other scholarly writing.
...
I got closest to a useful formula when I took the first actual numbered page of the book (not including the introduction)–that is, a page with “1″ on it, and looked up the corresponding “position” on my Kindle. As it turns out, Page 1 appears at position “95″ on the Kindle. Then, I went to the last full page of the text, page 239 (not the notes, index, or other “last” page) and checked the position: 4035. So, I had 3940 positions spread over 236 pages (the first page of text was actually page 3). 3940 divided by 236 yields 16.69 positions per page.

Using this formula I could pretty much find the page in book if I knew the position. In all my test cases, I landed within one page of the text I was searching for if I divided the position number by 16.69.

Others have said to include which chapter, but there's no real reason not to be more specific rather than less. How to get the MLA's blessing, I don't know, even if I am a member.

Sustained Silent Viewing is not Scholarship, nor Instruction

2010-12-01T13:48:00.008-05:00

As I walk through the halls on campus, I'm surprised how many classes, ostensibly covering any number of disparate subjects, are watching videos. Perhaps this has something to do with the percentage of lecturer positions in the sorts of classes taught here (often service based classes, like first year writing and public speaking), but time watching seems to me to be time away from expert interaction. As an undergraduate student, I paid not to watch a video in class, no matter how expertly selected, but to hear or interact with a recognized expert in a field of study.

How often do we read aloud in class? In literature courses, quoting is common. We want to, *ahem*, get onto the same page as a class in order to lean more forcefully onto a section of words, which allows us to see what readings those words will support. But we don't typically read something for the first time in class, beyond perhaps a few poems or quick portions of related readings we tracked down during our time alone. Reading aloud in class usually serve as quick refreshers before we attack something that's already, now freshly, in context.

Watching sustained videos in class reminds me, ultimately, of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) in grammar school. I vaguely recall SSR was a new concept when I was in school, but have it on very good authority it's still in vogue today. But when I only have three hours to spend with a teacher instead of thirty, that time should probably not be filled with modeling and practicing good behaviors for when I'm outside of those classroom doors.

I show YouTube in class, but do so, as a rule, only for spur of the moment clarifications. SSV (Sustained Silent Viewing) is not a skill that must be taught. Find videos, assign them as any other "reading", and be prepared to discuss with your class in class. Supplement if you'd like, but if you're finding you must teach by using videos made by someone else, you should ask yourself if you're the expert that the class pays you (with their time, attention, and, yes, cash that'll be repaid with 7% interest over the next 30 years of their life) to be.

Fish: The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives - NYTimes.com

2010-10-12T20:02:00.001-04:00

The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives - NYTimes.com:

And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)

It's hard not to enjoy some of what Fish writes, but he also often seems primed to provoke more than evoke. I may have to go read more Eco to clean the Fish from my palate.

(Honestly, I didn't plan the pun. I swearz.)

2009-08-18T16:05:00.002-04:00

One advantage scholars of [historical] literature [versus literature from sources that are still producing, ie, from authors that are still alive] have over some of their brethren in the social sciences is the luxury of finitude. One might want to transcribe all of an author's journals, or find all of the extant printings of a particular version of a book or pamphlet. The goal is to track down every artifact that remains about a work or author, catalog it, and then contextualize.

Contextualization has a tendency to be "reduce" finitude through its critical fads. Most any time someone from the continent has an epiphany -- my line runs me from Spinoza through Emerson and Nietzsche, up through Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, et friends, just to name the seismic shifts; the larger fads are more obvious, like moves gender and identity studies, labels for new periods (are we post-post-non-modern yet?) -- everyone scrambles to wring every last bit of nuance from using that new epiphany as a filter for approaching what was seemingly becoming more and more fini.

Even so, the fads don't make the fields less exhaustible, ironically enough. Instead, aside from situational shifts in the canon, literature largely stays literature. It would be impossible to talk about the American intellectual without going through Boston and Concord, even if one was just to say that there is too much emphasis wasted by scholars on New England thinkers and thought. And there's still plenty to say about reader response that won't be said solely b/c reader response is passe. For now.

For all the turns, the study is fixed. There is a flexible canon.

Elsewhere, I'm finding an increasing number of scholars scrambling after research, and research whose worth is measured by the bottom line. I get the feeling (though not having experienced the period from behind the curtain, I wouldn't know) that the distance between academic work for learning's sake and the financial forces that make the first possible has quickly grown much smaller. Before, research was useful to the commercial sector not because of intent, but because enough squirrels, acting as if they were functionally blind from business' perspective, eventually dug up something interesting enough for business to appropriate. Now, research often isn't funded unless its proposal includes ideas that explicitly talks about how that work will be useful, with "monetarily" only slightly under erasure.

A symptom: Inside of an institute of higher learning being able to make an aggregate case for its usefulness and then having a similarly aggregated bucket of resources (read: dollars) from its benefactor (read: state governments), individual researchers are being told to make the same argument at the micro level. "Find external funds to supplement our primary funding sources." When you aggregate, you can hide. The office of maize production is going to find out something that'll help agriculture, and can be used to argue for the funding of the institution as a whole. An individual researcher asking for money for their specific project cannot as easily or completely hide their personal political biases, even if those amount to no more than "learning for learning's sake." This also seems to make students a secondary priority, not so much because they come after research in the professors' minds (which is expected in a research institution), but because it becomes less about exposing students to great thinkers than proving the worth (and thereby receiving the funding for) of the exposure that they do get. Less about privilege, more about finding mules for money.

This is one of the reasons I particularly enjoy studying fossils like long dead authors. There's enough momentum attached to the worth of these studies, a place where it was and, to a degree, still is accepted to learn for learning's sake, that they can continue to provide something of an alternative to the sorts of zero blind capitalistic influences that have permeated so many other areas of the public university.

(Though that said, I wonder if the folks learning strings at Cambridge and Oxford in the 16th and 17th centuries were just mules to pay for the "research" of those instructors, too. The more things change, perhaps? At least then the -- at worst -- dupes were students, not the taxpayers and, now, professors themselves.)

Yahoo kills 90s era amatuer websites.

2009-07-10T09:09:00.005-04:00

Don't Wait
Please be aware that after October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable. If you'd like to save your files, you must download them now or move to Yahoo! Web Hosting. If you need assistance, please visit the help center.

That's from an email I got in my mailbox this morning. This is actually a pretty big deal. It's as if thousands of self-published books were not only going out of print, but being erased from the face of the earth, 1984 style. Many of these pages are likely linked to email addresses that haven't been good for years, some forgotten by their original creators. They sometimes have great mid-90s style web design, with animated gifs, unnecessary use of the <blink> and <center> tags, and background images that make the text of the page nearly impossible to read. Archive.org has some 36k+ archived, but there are safely many more pages than that at GeoCities.

How does one archive GeoCities?

The worst part is that, in a world where Gmail gives everyone more than seven gigabytes of storage, that Yahoo can't pony up for these relatively incredibly small sites. They're asking $4.99 for the first year of their hosting service as an intro offer, so they're simply monetizing what accounts are still active. Why not simply freeze all the sites and keep hosting until the original owner says otherwise?

I realize much of what's up is likely trash, maybe even serving up viruses years out of date, but I can't help but feel the long-term benefit of finding research materials for Tom Swift scholars, as a nearly random example of my recent googling, outweighs the benefit of getting rid of some virtual space garbage.

EDIT:

Guess I should add this is not without precedent. AOL closed down its hosting not so long ago as well. Is the best way to measure the birth of Web 2.x that 1.x is being wiped?

Dear AOL Hometown user,

We're sorry to inform you that as of Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Hometown was shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

leet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2009-03-17T16:03:00.000-04:00

leet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"After the meaning of these became widely familiar, 10100111001 came to be used in its place, because it is the binary form of 1337, making it more of a puzzle to interpret.[9]"

Identity politics meets the web

2009-03-13T07:55:00.002-04:00

From an email describing recent changes to Google's AdSense:

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

So many have noted that the net seems to provide a place for people to exist without the conventional/legacy baggage of race, gender, size, and other appearance-based stereotypes and prejudices. It appears that now, if you keep cookies and don't surf privately, Google has seem fit to start creating and applying its own labels for you based on behavior. It's the ADHD of eAdverts.

I wonder if Google would ever sell your labels to another corporation?

Streaming radio, interface, and choice

2009-02-27T07:54:00.005-05:00

I like to listen to talk radio. I admit it. Mostly sports. There's a pretty big difference between the way I listen to radio in the car and the way I listen inside. In the car, I'm a dedicated flipper. If I've got commercials on ESPN, I go to Fox Sports Radio, and vice versa. They stagger just enough that I can, sort of like late night talk shows on TV, end up listening to very few commercials at all.

At home, I don't flip the radio. Two reasons for this, I think. For one, our local sports affiliates are on AM, and it takes a while to get the antenna straight each time I swap. It's also because our radios have tuning dials inside, and it's not a one-button thing. If I had a Boston Acoustics radio with presets instead of a Tivoli and a Wal-Mart special, maybe I'd play around more.

Yet much of the radio I listen to at home is off of the 'net. We have an old iMac now sitting in the living room when I'm at home with great speakers, and often I use it to listen. The interface for streaming sports talk radio is tied directly to a single network. To swap from one to another involves navigating to another web page and running through a click or three. This is a much greater barrier to entry.

I'd like to conceive of this as a change in ownership with respect to end interfaces. I own the radio, and though my Tivoli has the geekiest of NPR badges on it, there's nothing about the innards (hardware and, here nonexistent, software) that's biased to a particular provider beyond that relatively passive badge (it was a gift, I swear!). With streaming radio, the provider owns the software, at least to a point. They might employ Flash for RealPlayer or Quicktime, but the interface is not reusable.

The web streaming audio is like cable, but cable that only provides one feed. It's designed to reduce choice, which I'd argue is partially evidenced by all the gaudy ads you'll often find on the player window. They know you can't leave. (And that's a lot of money for Haynesworth. Hope this isn't Gilbert all over again.)

I think there's some connection to mobile privatization here, specifically that the means of reception are no longer privatized by the consumer. Digital media seems to enable its own appropriation in a way the old nodes of reception don't.

Theorycrafting again

2009-02-25T23:46:00.002-05:00

Grey Matter - Twisted Nether Wiki:

Since then the blog has grown to include Moonkin related theorycrafting and general moonkin information to help people to play the spec.

Today's Vocab Word: Theorycrafting

2009-02-25T13:47:00.000-05:00

Bogost fans apparently might call this "delineating procedural rhetoric."

Posts from the Guides Category at Massively:

Apparently theorycrafting isn't just for hardcore RPGers anymore. Tipa of the West Karana blog put together an interesting primer on the hidden numbers behind kid-friendly (and adult too - don't be shy) MMO, Wizard101.

Arguing that digital is no longer exceptional but normal

2009-02-23T21:51:00.000-05:00

From Gruber at Daring Fireball:

I’ll put it in writing: the best motion picture released last year was WALL-E. Like 2001 — which WALL-E pays significant homage to — it wasn’t even nominated for best picture. But it effectively couldn’t be nominated — and that’s the real crime. Instead, WALL-E was nominated for and awarded the prize for “best animated film”.1

But why does this category even exist? Animated as opposed to what? Photographed? Animation is merely a technique. Cinema is cinema.

Playing RTS for credit

2009-02-02T20:59:00.000-05:00

StarCraft 2 The Unofficial Site - StarCraft 2 The Unofficial Site! (via insidemacgames.com):

UC Berkeley students with an interest in real-time strategy games and the competitive gaming landscape are encouraged to participate in this class

Free bookige: Wikipedia: The Missing Manual - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2009-02-02T19:58:00.001-05:00

Potentially useful for introducing students to the 'pedia.

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, released as, of course, a Wiki (in addition to a version as traditional book). Of course the first wiki version in the history is the edited book version, afaict.

Perhaps also useful (this from the book's author's wikipedia user page:

Note: I am offering two free copies of the book to school and university projects that have Wikipedia writing assignments. Please contact me via the 'E-mail this user' link on the left side of this page, or via the email address at my website, above, or by posting a note on my user talk page.

Always thought a Wikipedia editing theme would be a good one for a freshman comp class...

David Brooks, Foucaultian

2008-12-09T14:49:00.001-05:00

Op-Ed Columnist - This Old House - NYTimes.com:

If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns.
...
The season of prosperity gives way to the season of economic scarcity, and out of the winter of recession, new growth has room to emerge.

Highlighting mine.

Yes, constructing seems to be a be a better alternative than creating, though I'm not sure the Xianized bias behind the creation is quite as important as it once was.

Put your source online

2008-12-08T11:26:00.001-05:00

I'm doing a couple of projects that involve associated application development (that is to say, crappy applications speedily hacked in VB6), and thought I'd share that code by putting it on sourceforge.net. Here's my rationale, entered as part of the application.

The public description is pretty accurate. I'm putting this online to encourage those who read the research to review the code on which it's based, as well as to serve as a model for empirical rhetorical studies in the future -- the code must be as open and auditable as the textual composition.

Created, not produced

2008-12-03T11:41:00.007-05:00

Academicians (and myself; for now I'll treat the two as separate groups) have a bad habit of using terms with capitalistic connotations.

Good:

Until such a specialist is created, studies like Herring et al’s and those that are like or cite it open themselves to being undermined...

Good:

Until such a specialist is produced, studies like Herring et al’s and those that are like or cite it open themselves to being undermined...

That is, unless you want to give support for Corporate U, in which case produced does invoke the right connotations. Don't worry, this doesn't make you evil, at least not by itself.

I also really really dislike when people use "emerge" as in "Darwin says life emerged from pools of primodal ooze," (nevermind if he didn't) when what they really mean is that, "The evil beast emerged from its lair to snack on Hrothgar's thanes." Very little in human culture "emerged" in some passive selective system. That's oxymoronic. Something's usually created or, more and more likely, produced. This includes your new fangled idea. It didn't emerge. You feed it and created a room for it to grow until it sprang from your forehead. Though it may appear to have seemingly sprung fully formed form the start, we know the metaphor here is less Athena and more kangaroo fetus. *ewww* That's right. There's no passive emergence in society, folk. Quit being lazy and pick the word you mean to use.

I blame misinterpretations of Foucault for all the trendy uses of "emergence", by the way. It's supposed to be a code word for saying, "I'm a humanities scholar!" but is said with all of the conviction of Yoda in Thumb Wars telling us he's a puppet (about 15:20 in). Irony.

/rant

----------------
Now playing: The Black Crowes - Remedy

Unapologetically tootin' my horn

2008-12-01T00:23:00.007-05:00

Awl hell, I hate people who pimp themselves, but there's a time when it must be done. This time is often about 12:30am when you've wasted a weekend looking at the same daggum paper, editing it like mad but knowing that you haven't made it a whit better than when you started, with the argument your brain's envisioning hidden behind the cruft you've managed to slap down on the page.

So yeah, I've been cited dammit. F'n L, yeah. Sure, I'd gotten the same jive used in a course at Duke, but never cited. I will not be influenced by the fact that the citation is in a ~~master's thesis~~ -- it's a doctoral thesis. Hells yeah. And it's in French, dang it. Beat that.

Dans « Inviting Subversion: Metalepse and Tmesis in Rockstar Games' ÇJrand Theft Auto Series », Wm. Ruffin Bailey a observé comment le jeu pouvait être subverti par les joueurs à travers des modifications effectives du monde numérique. Les conceptetirsde Rockstar ont rendu assez aisée la tâche d'altérer le code des Grand Theft Auto, en autorisant le joueur à modifier l'apparence et même, parfois, le fonctionnement du monde numérique. En opérant sur le code, un joueur peut, par exemple, manipuler les « skins19 » (fournir à Clouaux personnages de nouveaux vêtements) ou créer ses propres modèles d'automobile, plus puissants ou plus résistants que ceux qui sont inclus dans le jeu.

Let's do a poor English translation:

In "Inviting Subversion: Metalepsis and Tmesis in Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto," some arsehole has observed how the game can have been subverted by the gamers who use modifications to change the [game's] digital world. The [parbleu, non?] Rockstar has made rather easy the task of altering the code of Grand Theft Auto, and authorized the gamer to modify the appearance and even, at times, the function of the digital world. By changing the code, a player can, for example, manipulate the skins (to furnish the protagonist new clothes) or create his own car models, more powerful or resistant than those which are included in the game [by default].

Even though he leaves out Hot Coffee, the sort of climax of the piece (hardy har har), it's close a dammed nuff. Sweet. Now I must channel that plus Mr. Daniels to complete this City Paper.

Stop chasing the law

2008-11-05T09:58:00.006-05:00

I appreciated the information Nemire was presenting in "Int Prop Dev and Use for Dist Ed Courses", yet I was concerned with the propensity of the article to "chase the law". This non-critical standpoint didn't stop at the legal system, but continued when discussing university policies as well. Here are four of the more egregious logical fallacies, with some commentary on why I believe them to be particularly misleading or damaging for uninformed readers. Overall, the lesson seems to be that people truly interested not only in not getting into trouble but providing a more equitable education system need to stop chasing the law and start acting in ways that manipulate the way the courts have to conceive of that law. I'll now pull a quick quote from Krause and Palm who, though they were talking about unionizing [graduate student] labor, seems appropriate.

Waiting for the law to change is also not an option because it relies on a misleading conception of the political process. Given the weakness of political parties, there are few effective mechanisms to hold elected politicians accountable to workers' interests as laws get made. Labor leaders have long repeated the maxim that organizing does not follow the law -- the law follows organizing. If workers do not build power on the ground, the law will not change.[1]

So let's take a closer look...

Advancement of knowledge and progress in technology drives the need for protecting inventions, new ideas, writings, music, and other media. (26)

And here the author is, in the first sentence of the abstract, doing us a solid by letting everyone know we're on board with copyright protection. Why does the "advancement of knowledge" unquestionably require "protecting"? Why not give knowledge away for as close to free as we possibly can?

Read in a more productive light, what sorts of protections does the "advancement of knowledge" require? Though the phrase "progress in technology" scares me in general when used as a reason for motivation, and the rest of the article plays into that suspicion, we can take our productive reading's cue from that arena. Here, I'm back to my favorite example of subverting copyright from within that system, Free and Open Source Software. We need to protect knowledge not from its being exposed to fellow human beings, but from those folk taking that knowledge and, through an abuse of law, making it their own, commercially. Unfortunately, that's not what Nemire means in this sentence or the balance of the article. We're looking at using copyright in a conventional means, as we'll see explained a bit more in our next three quotes.

The university is one of the largest providers of intellectual property. It is reasonable, then, to consider that the university has a stake in faculty, staff, and student activities regarding intellectual property. (29)

Did you hear the gasket pop in my head? *sigh* The connection needs to be made explicitly. I make lots of [figurative, I mean, of course!] poop, if you know what I mean. We can discuss what sort of stake that means I should have in its disposal. What specifically about providing IP, which I argue is precisely the university's raison d'etre, means they should be worried about IP created downstream?

Nemire doesn't give her comments this connotation, but I will: It is not "reasonable" in some fatalistic sense that the university should have a financial stake in the intellectual property it helps its, what, users? create, and that pulls me into a quote from a bit further along the same page.

When royalties are involved, some universities require faculty members to turn over part or all royalty payments to the university because documents were created on university time, using university technology.

We, as scholars and educators -- as those employed outside of the business world, in a position where the public trust is that we're not focusing on "Recruit. Retain. Solicit." -- have to take issue with the user of the word "because" here. The reasoning behind Nemire's "because", even if it's intended to be offered as a proxy in place of those universities that practice such viral practices, has already been undercut by the phrase "some universities". There is no universal "because" where the because only works for "some".

What's happening at those "other" universities? How is it that being "created on university time, using university technology" doesn't equate to their becoming king to your royalties? Give to Caesar, sure, but who made the university into the monarch?

The same sort of uncritical, "that's just the way it is" reasoning occurs in the following section as well, just a bit earlier than the last quote:

Faculty should have several concerns when considering intellectual property. They need to be aware that they are relinquishing their copyright when they publish academic work. It is common practice and will likely continue, as most journal editors and publishers want to own the information in their periodicals.

"It is common practice and will likely continue" does not review the law, only teach its readers to conform to it for tradition's sake. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you. I don't know. But it's a tradition. (quoting Fiddler on the Roof, a snippet of which is helpfully included above, of course)

What are the options in the law? Do you own your work when you publish a book? What sorts of contracts are out there? How can we inhabit the law?

How can we stop chasing the law and start living within and manipulating it?

[1] Monika Krause and Michael Palm. Forthcoming. "Activists into Organizers. How to Work with your Colleagues to Build Power in Graduate School", in: Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, Andrew Ross (ed.): The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008, pg. 226-7

This is scholarship?

2008-11-04T19:38:00.004-05:00

I hate to be an old fogey and all, but are we sure that necessary follows?

There is some editor-like credit that's appropriate for some types of digital administration, but I'm going to need better arguments for other cases than some flavor of "because we're there."

Scholarship is about conversation. Text is a pretty efficient means of capturing and disseminating conversation. If you can't text, can you scholar? I'm 100% about "clear excellence", but one might also have to realize that it's hard to demonstrate clear excellence if there isn't a ready-made peer group to deem your work makes that cut. I'm not sure there's an easy way to address the implied 'failing' that "Over 50% of PhD granting institutions have no experience evaluating new forms of scholarship." Very few Cotton Mather experts in this and any department, you know, and almost never more than two. Scholarship requires that you enter a professional conversation that contains the ability to respectfully self-police.

There, I've done my duty. People now have tripe about which to comment, though they won't. Am I not at 10 yet? ;^)

No, give me a real world catalog

2008-11-03T22:12:00.003-05:00

Against my natural inclinations, I finally have to admit I wish Wordcat had an option to include bookstores in its results. Why should I be limited to finding copies of books in libraries?

Okay, admittedly, what I'd really like to do is write the Napster of book chapters, so that you could post a request and have someone fair use you a copy quickly, or have the system forward you a copy if someone had previously requested the same thing. This idea (c) 2005 or so, Ruffin Bailey. ;^)

Blackbaud's Total Campus Solution: Student Information System

2008-10-29T12:58:00.000-04:00

Blackbaud's Total Campus Solution: Student Information System:

We’ve heard that those who work for small higher education institutions live by a certain mantra: “Recruit. Retain. Solicit.” Sound familiar? Sounds easy enough — but not when it’s a task that needs to be completed for each of your hundreds or even thousands of students.

Like books? Google will sell you a subscription

2008-10-29T12:14:00.004-04:00

Google settles copyright lawsuits with publishers, authors - Business - Macworld UK:

The wide-ranging agreement calls for Google to pay $125 million and in exchange gives the search giant rights to display chunks of these in-copyright books, not just snippets. This will result in broader exposure for out-of-print books that are, by definition, hard to find.

In addition, Google will make it possible for people to buy online access to these books. The agreement will also allow institutions to buy subcriptions [sic] to books and make them available to their constituents

why don't i like subscriptions? because that means we're talking planned obsolescence -- you don't own the book, you only have the right to view it for a limited amount of time.

google can only sell subscriptions because they're the only game in town when it comes to scanned, in-copyright books. who else would have the cohones to scan in and display so many protected texts? who else has large enough pockets to play ball when the authors' guild comes calling? that is to say, this is not a market that provides easy and fair access. microsoft, google, and amazon are about all i can think of that have the means and interest to put hard to find, out of print, yet copyrighted books online.

but here's the issue for me -- generally i like access to books. but by putting in a subscription service for out of print books -- that is, google has essentially become a publisher of out of print b00k5 -- books -- the copyright on these books is less likely to lapse. now they have clear value. they are being used.

Take this from curmudgeongamer to see where I'm going.

Online subscription service is bad for a public domain that's already quickly becoming a dinosaur. As Michael Palm and Monika Krause say, you really can't wait on the law to make things right.

Aural literacy

2008-10-29T11:20:00.008-04:00

Have fun. (<<< must install to read easily, give or take.)

(Cvpgher ba yrsg vf bs n ovxr ybire -- uggc://jjj.otfh.rqh/ppbayvar/pbzfgbpx_ubpxf/Ovxrf.zct)

Rira jvgu gur erarjrq rzcunfvf ba ivfhny naq qvtvgny eurgbevp, ubjrire, jr nf jevgvat grnpuref ner fgvyy irel grkg-pragrerq va bhe pynffebbzf. Crqntbtvrf gung ner grkg-pragrerq hfhnyyl vtaber gur nheny cbffvovyvgvrf bs qvtvgny zrqvn pbzcbfvgvbaf naq yvgrenpl cenpgvprf.

Bxnl, fher, ohg gura jr'er abg rknpgyl grnpuvat Onegurf-vna (Ybfg va gur Shaubhfr) fglyr zrgnyrcfvf be vnzovp cragnzrgre -- obgu cbgragvnyyl hfrshy gebcrf sbe pbzcbfvgvba; vg jbhyq frrz obgu unir orra chg gb hfr va cerggl fhpprffshy pbzcbfvgvbaf -- rvgure.&aofc; Jung fubhyq thvqr gur qrpvfvba bs jung uvgf gur flyynohf fubhyq fgneg jvgu gubfr guvatf gung ner zbfg havirefnyyl cenpgvpny.&aofc; Grnpuvat nheny genqvgvba vf hfrshy (fcrrpu?), ohg abg fb pehpvny sbe n pbzcbfvgvba pynff.&aofc; Naq fhccbegvat guvf ol fnlvat "gurl yvir va n zhfvp ivqrb" qbrfa'g znxr zr zber yvxryl gb grnpu nheny qrivprf va serfuzna pbzc.&aofc; Crefbanyyl, V'q yvxr gb chyy gurz bhg.&aofc; ;^)

Jr nterr jvgu guvf rzoenpr bs gur beny genqvgvba, ohg jr nethr shegure gung fbavp yvgrenpl punatrf naq genafsbezf ubj jr ivrj grkg naq vzntrf.

Jr nterr lbh pbhyq pbzcner qvtvgny jbexf gb beny barf fhpprffshyyl, ohg jr'er tbvat gb gerng gurz nf grkgf.&aofc;&aofc; Ubarfgyl, jvgu gur ibvpr biref, gurl'er nethvat sbe fghqragf gb gnyx fcrrpu be svyz pynff.&aofc; Abe qbrf vg nccrne yngre gung gurer'f zhpu gb qvfgvathvfu gur qvtvgny pbaarpgvba bs nffvtazragf bssrerq bgure guna "Pbzchgref znxr rqvgvat zhygvzrqvn znf rnfvre."&aofc; Bgure guna na vapernfrq snzvyvnevgl sbe znal fghqragf jvgu qvtvgny rqvgvat, gurer'f abg zhpu cenpgvpny ernfba bssrerq gb erpbzzraq guvf cenpgvpr va pbzcbfvgvbaf pynffebbzf.

Nf znal Jrfgrea cuvybfbcuref sebz Cyngb gb Wnpdhrf Qreevqn unir abgrq, Jrfgrearef graq gb or cubabpragevp, dhvpx gb nfpevor cerfrapr naq vzzrqvnpl gb fcrrpu, rira erpbeqrq fcrrpu.

YbirZrFbzrAvgcpxvat: Gung'f shaal.&aofc; Arvgure ner va gur jbexf pvgrq.&aofc; uggc://jjj.otfh.rqh/ppbayvar/pbzfgbpx_ubpxf/jbexfpvgrq.ugz&aofc; Naq V'z cerggl fher gur svefg fnvq abguvat nobhg [nhenyyl] erpbeqrq fcrrpu.&aofc; Naq V'q nethr jvgu n oevpx jnyy Bat naq fnl gung fzryy vf zhpu zber vzzrqvngr naq cerfrag guna fbhaq.&aofc; Favss gur pbybtar lbhe sngure jber be fbzrguvat nf zhaqnar nf gur pyrnavat cebqhpg hfrq va lbhe ryrzragnel fpubby naq gryy zr V'z jebat.

Rira gur cntrf' pbqr vf oynaq.

.fglyr6 {sbag-snzvyl: "Tvyy Fnaf"; sbag-jrvtug: obyq; }
.fglyr8 {
 sbag-snzvyl: "Tvyy Fnaf";
 sbag-fvmr: 16ck;
 sbag-jrvtug: obyq;
}
.fglyr10 {pbybe: #SSSSSS; sbag-snzvyl: "Yhpvqn Fnaf"; sbag-fvmr: 24ck; sbag-jrvtug: obyq; }
n:yvax {

&yg;!-- ... --&tg;

 &yg;oybpxdhbgr&tg;
 &yg;c pynff="fglyr6"&tg;3. Grpuabybtvpny Yvgrenpvrf bs Fbhaq &yg;/c&tg;
 &yg;c pynff="fglyr1"&tg;Vagrteny gb fbavp yvgrenpl vf n snzvyvnevgl jvgu vgf arj gbbyf naq grpuabybtvrf...
 pynff="flagnk17"&tg;&yg;/c&tg;
 &yg;c pynff="fglyr1"&tg;Nf jvgu nal qvtvgny zrqvn, gur nqinaprq grpuabybtvrf bs fbhaq uryc gb perngr na vyyhfvba bs ernyvfz...
 pynff="flagnk17"&tg;&yg;/c&tg;

Lrf, V jrag gurer.&aofc; V'z pevgvdhvat gur fglyr bs gur ugzy pbqr-oruvaq.

Va Zvpuryyr'f bja rkcrevrapr, jevgvat sbe ibvpr-bire aneengvbaf unf urycrq ure jevgr sbe cevag. Fur'f zber vagvzngryl njner bs gur ivpvffvghqrf bs cnpvat naq gbar, bs jura gb fybj qbja naq frg hc n fprar naq jura gb sebagybnq gur xrl pbasyvpg va n cvrpr. Fghqragf fnl gur fnzr guvat nobhg gurve bja jevgvat naq erpbeqvat cebprffrf va gurve cbfg-cebwrpg ersyrpgvbaf.

Yrg zr pevgvdhr guvf sebz n fyvtugyl qvssrerag natyr.&aofc; Cyrnfr urniraf, nyjnlf or irel pnershy jura lbh hfr fghqrag erfcbafr gung nterrf jvgu gurve pynff vafgehpgbe'f cbvag bs ivrj gb fhccbeg vagebqhpvat n cenpgvpr vagb gur pynffebbz.&aofc; Jung, fghqragf jvyy vagreanyvmr jung lbh grnpu gurz?!&aofc; Abj vs lbh unir fghqragf gung pna, jvgubhg rkprcgvba, vagreanyvmr jung lbh'ir tvira gurz nsgre univat tvivat gur gbcvp gehr pevgvpny gubhtug, V'z vzcerffrq.&aofc; Gung vf gb fnl, vg fvzcyl qbrfa'g unccra.

Sbe "nqinapr pbzcbfvgvba fghqragf" guvf qbrfa'g fbhaq yvxr n cnegvphyneyl cbbe nffvtazrag, lrg V'q fgvyy yvxr gb xabj zber nobhg gur tbnyf bs gur pynff nf Zvpuryyr vf pbaprvivat vg.&aofc; Vg fbhaqf yvxr vgf tbnyf zvtug or glcvpnyyl npnqrzvp (tbbq!), jvgu rzcnufvf ba vqragvgl naq phygheny fghqvrf, rafhevat gung jura fghqragf pbzcbfr npnqrzvpnyyl (be va gubfr sbehzf jurer gur jevgvat nccebnpurf npnqrzvp -- obbx erivrjf, rqvgbevnyf, cbyvgvpny genpgf, rgp) gung gurl guvax pevgvpnyyl naq vapyhfviryl.&aofc; Jung qb/qvq gur genqvgvbany nffvtazragf ybbx/rq yvxr?&aofc; Jung qvq jr tvir hc gb chg svyz vagb gur pbzcbfvgvba pynffebbz?&aofc; Jul vf vg zber vzcbegnag gb yrnea gb hfr vZbivr naq ZbivrZnxre guna BcraBssvpr be NovJbeq?&aofc; Ubj vf guvf "orggre" guna grnpuvat gur fbeg bs perngvir jevgvat jr pna svaq va fbzrguvat yvxr Tynmvre'f Qvtvgny Cbrgvpf gung jbhyq unir fghqragf rkcrevzrag va fvzvyne pbaihygrq jnlf jvgu grkg?&aofc; Juvpu vf zber genaterffvir (nffhzvat genaterffvba tvirf gur cbffvovyvgl sbe oebnqravat vagryyrpghny ubevmbaf)?&aofc; rgp&aofc; V'z abg n ovt sna bs, "Guvf vf pbby.&aofc; V guvax lbh fubhyq grnpu vg."&aofc; Jr'er zvffvat n fgrc be gjb.&aofc; "Guvf vf pbby.&aofc; Gurfr ner gur bcgvbaf.&aofc; [Qvfphff, vapyhqvat vqragvslvat jung'f ybfg ol sbyybjvat gur fhttrfgvba.]&aofc; Gung'f jul lbh fubhyq pbafvqre grnpuvat jung V cebcbfr."

"Jung ner lbh vagrerfgrq va Arj Zrqvn?&aofc; V unir ab pubvpr."&aofc; Avpr.&aofc; UBJ BYQ VF SVYZ?!!!!&aofc; Ogj, bzt, er:OREGUN, V YBIR Furely Pebj.&aofc; Fur'f tbg n serr ivqrb qbjaybnq ba vGharf evtug abj.&aofc; Naq Fgneohpxf?&aofc; V ybir zr fbzr Fgneohpxf.&aofc; V'z fgbccvat abj.

"Pragmatically, because I don't own a car." ;^)

IRBs and the [unjustifiable] limits of academic freedom?

2008-10-27T10:19:00.007-04:00

From Clay Spinuzzi's blog:

Alas, no. Because any self-respecting institutional research board would balk at raw qualitative data being stored on a machine or server that is not owned and properly secured by the university. My IRB, for instance, specifies that data must be password-protected and stored on a hard drive that is encrypted at rest.

Let's first admit that I'm taking this quote out of context. Spinuzzi is considering using a "clouded system" (my quote) for aggregating qualitative data -- essentially storing data in a space like Google Docs. We had some discussion about this sort of ethical issue when we thought about putting grades in a Google Doc spreadsheet. Can you really ensure its protection? As I pointed out with Google's inability to protect anonymous blogs on Blogger, the answer is clearly no, both in theory and practice.

Though I wrote the blog post too quickly, without editing carefully enough (which is to say I've a misprint in the part he quotes *sigh*), B.r.e.n.d.a.n. R.i.l.e.y. (for whom Google Alerts provided the digital version of burning ears; I'm fudging his name here so he won't feel compelled to check this out until I'm done editing this time!) commented on my earlier blog on intellectual ownership. He and Laurie Taylor wrote the article I linked to earlier that does a very good job explaining open source from an academic context.

Here's an overly liberal quote from his blog.

This attitude does depend, as ruffin seems to acknowledge, on an idea that one must give up one’s claims on “intellectual property,” at least to some degree. He writes:

Others can still use your content to teach for pay. Your dean could still throw fifteen sections of the class on the books using your open content without asking, and now he could do it even if your university doesn’t claim to own the materials by virtue of some esoteric server ownership pact with the devil.

Yep, they can! (Only in Higher Ed would we find this scandalous at all. If you work in any other industry and produce something as part of your work, the company is expected to take that thing and do stuff with it. The folks who came up with the Nike swoosh got paid for doing so, but they don’t maintain rights over it. My cousin who works in biomedical engineering certainly doesn’t expect to keep her research or control it. Only teachers argue that their teaching materials are anything other than “work for hire.”)

I could see feeling a little chagrined if someone started making bucketloads of money from them, but ultimately my teaching materials are another form of my scholarship–they’re what I’m contributing back to the commons. And our culture is so wedded to the idea that we own our ideas that the idea of losing control of those ideas makes us revolt.

My contention with B.r.e.n.d.a.n. and now the powers that be as I've selectively quoted them from Spinuzzi's blog comes from the quote, "stored on a machine or server that is not owned and properly secured by the university". Why is that -- university ownership -- an issue? Why should IRBs force us to keep our information within the university? Whose research is it?

Look, my issue here is the corporate university, right? There's not much I'm trying to hide. I'm actually all for Open Source and giving away scholarship. I think that's the daggum point, after all. What I'd hoped to point out in that earlier blog was that Open Sourcing something doesn't provide some idealistically pure level of protection, and that we should be awfully careful that we understand how Open works before adopting it ourselves. Even though we make an end run around copyright, your academic labor can still be exploited in ways that make Corporation U proud.

What I dislike is the way the university continues to place itself between scholarship and the public paying for it. I'm not working in "any other industry". I've worked in a few of those, and I'd prefer to work in a protected space outside of that system, a space that performs as a check and balance on the system that'd rather own my work and run it through a profit maximization machine than share it unconditionally. Working at the government, the amount of pork redistribution -- and the degree that such redistribution of public funds to the private sector was used as a register of success -- drove me crazy in a similar fashion. Strangely enough, working at a mid-sized corporation was the most honest work environment I've yet seen. At least they admitted they were just trying to make [every] buck, bless their hearts.

That the university might be using the discourse of ethics to position themselves between the scholar and his patrons (the public, thank you very much, at least at NC State and, I believe, Spinuzzi's UT Austin) bothers me like you would~~n't~~ believe. Blackbaud? For them (a corp), this would be a smart move, an understandable move, a justifiable move.

Only in Corporate U would ~~ethics~~ economics coming before scholarship not be found scandalous at all. Isn't it strange that the only sites that seem safe from this sort of influence, the ones in the humanities most ready to give to the public without serious compulsion, are the ones funded by private endowments or, surprisingly, Microsoft once the possibility for long-term profit is gone?

The loophole of the Creative Commons

2008-10-22T10:56:00.004-04:00

Image from here, and image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Credits for image: Cartoon concept and design by Neeru Paharia. Original illustrations by Ryan Junell, Photos by Matt Haughey. Let's continue.

Because we all know Mr. Ezra would never let commercial influence breech the walls of his sacred classroom. NEVER. Nor would we.

When do we get those free sandwiches again?

As 704 continues to try to push us away from phat clients

2008-10-22T09:53:00.021-04:00

Critiquing the Cyber Minimalist:

I've since been freed to use Gmail, and I'll never go back.

Only using Gmail is a pretty clear mistake for anyone whose work depends on their email. There are times (for me, on the train or waiting in the car or when our DSL modem goes out, again) where having local copies is A Good Thing, both to search through and to draft replies in what would otherwise be dead time. Perhaps this author is better at compartmentalizing than me, but I would be pretty geographically limited if I could only use my laptop when I had a net connection, and the dependence you cede by counting on having not only a connection but working, accessible online applications has deeper political ramifications than the Minimalist seems to let on. There's a reason Microsoft's attempt to move Office to an online subscription model didn't take hold (yet).

Yes, I’m a Google freak, and others have problems trusting a company like Google, but I don’t.
...
I don’t actually do backups for the most part. All the companies I use to store my information online backup the information themselves.

I can think of two good reasons not to trust online storage services.

The first is the most obvious: What happens when the system loses, oh, I don't know, just a few (maybe 3000?) users' emails? Lots of egg, and they're really sorry, but you're the one that's stuck. Or, more likely, what happens if Google loses, oh, I don't know, just a few of your emails? You may not have noticed it already having happened, but once you try to get that [insert need along the lines of your last picture taken with your grandmother] back and it's gone ("Did I delete that on accident?"), you'll only have yourself to blame.

Perhaps it's the database admin in me, but I always say that if you don't have a digital file in at least three places, you don't have it at all.

The second is the way that services like Gmail and iTunes Genius use aggregated data about you and others to make those companies cash. Your privacy is likely ensured, but that's because on some level neither company cares about you as an individual. You're part of a revenue stream. And your data, aggregated with others, allows them to predict your interests and use your own work to target you with more effective ads.

Let me emphasize that a bit: Online services that the Cyber Minimalist mentions use your own work (content and time) to sell you more things you don't need. They use your own work against you and others, without obvious compensation. It's hard to imagine ourselves as potential rubes because of the sort of negative connotations it brings; only idiots buy snake oil, right? I don't know about youse guys, but I'm guilty of buying NFL season tickets for three years, have a Playstation 2, buy a new Mac about every two or three years, and for a long time was a DirecTV subscriber -- and those are simply the most obvious transgressions. Don't know that I need any of that oil, and probably wouldn't've gotten them without effective pitches of some sort. I'd rather not contribute to consumerist capitalism's effective pitchmaking. Yet I still use Gmail and iTunes Genius. Fn Rube.

[Privacy] is a real issue for some people, and I won’t deny it. However, I don’t really think Google employees (or whatever company I’m using) have time to read through everyone’s files, and even if they read mine, I don’t have anything secret in my documents. If that’s an issue for you, for whatever reason, online work would be more difficult. You could encrypt files — maybe only those that you really want to protect.

Try encrypting your Gmail email. Think its content is still encrypted when you read it through Firefox? You don't think Firefox is decrypting it, do you? (Edit: Maybe it is.)

And more to the point, the Minimalist misses it here. They don't want to read your email, dangit. They want to create automated ways to data mine your content to help them sell to you and people like you. Gmail is reading your email. Not an employee but a database. Why do you think I keep getting Gmail adverts for stories on ESPN and not Ladies' Home Journal? (or is it the other way round; I can't remember...) We're being mined, put to work without representation (or even middle management!) for the companies whose systems we're consuming. BOOM!! HEADSHOT!!

Having your own private data used against you and others for corporate profit is fearsome, no?

I'll end with this...

I should have had this in the original article, but here’s the key issue: if working online would be more complicated for you, don’t do it. For me, it has mean a simplification and minimalization of my computing life, and I really enjoy that minimalism. Others have more complicated needs, or have issues with privacy, backups, security or the quality of their connections. Those people shouldn’t use an online solution, as I do, because it would be more complicated for them. And that’s the final test — what is simpler and makes more sense for your situation?

Yeah, I get it. There's some proverbial American Intellectual Independence style intertextuality here, isn't there?

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

I really don't see Henry David lighting out for the woods saying we should cyborg ourselves inextricably to the corporate and consumerist grid as an exercise in simplicity. I believe, in the end, the Minimalist may be confusing simplicity with willful, un-self-critical shortsightedness.

Update edit: So I emailed a Thoreau scholar to see if I'd misrepresented Thoreauvian simplicity. Here's my Gmail ad post-email.

It's enough to move a lesser man to tears. (And when I say lesser, I mean, you know, like under 200 lbs.)

Alexander, revisited more productively

2008-10-19T18:58:00.002-04:00

For me, the most effective critique of Alexander’s chat room experiment (beyond simply saying that there really wasn’t much digital in the chapter) was Shane’s, who, in class, if I’m remembering and attributing correctly, said the activity was something akin to identity tourism. Seems to work for me; there’s simply no way that students who can put down their state of oppression at will can truly inhabit that marginalized position, online or no. The critique got me thinking, and by briefly substituting labor for identity, I think I've found a better way to productively approach Alexander, both on the level of his politics and his engagement with digital media.

So while I’m back, workin' at the house-based sweat equity I'd mentioned a week ago (this time filling Boss Keane’s ditch rather than digging it), I wondered to what degree the sorry six hours I spend on my lot every weekend or so measured on Shane's ladder of the laboring tourist. Is my labor false because I’m paying the guy who told me this was a job I could do for him? That is, if I wanted to mail it in, I’d just pay him a few hundred more bucks to find a trencher and tell [ie, "pay"] one of his employees to follow it. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a crudload of dough, right? And I'd just be rolling those few hundred into the construction loan; it's not like I had to earn the money. Ah, vive le privilège.

It seemed to me like there are give or take two ways to approach my labor (and this house jive seems to be heavy on my mind largely because it's several hours that I don't have much to do with my mind but think). On the one hand, I am a tourist. The few hours I put in are nothing like someone putting in fifty hour weeks. I'm working once or twice a week, and even then when something more important comes up I have an easy out if I want to use it (for the record, I haven't, yet).

On the other hand, the point of unalienating labor is to point out (in an oversimplified sense) what's wrong with the way labor is marshaled now. I'm being more productive than I would be if I spent the time like I'd normally do -- running -- and perhaps there's an argument in here somewhere that those who do this sort of labor for their fifty hour weeks aren't being fairly compensated (meaning both salary and socially in a larger sense). What the exercise, pun intended, does is expose the ways our (well, at least "my") relationship with labor can be improved. (Yes, I realize I'm lazily leaving those lessons unnecessarily vague. I'm not sure I understand all of them yet, thus the dimestore Marxist label.)

Extend to Alexander's experiment with his chat room class exercise. If he'd twist the goal a bit (and, from our class' point of view, move from the emphasis on two specific sexualities to a broader social consideration), the chat room suddenly becomes much more interesting. Instead of saying, "Hey, let's flip social dominance and see what it's like to be different... [cue music]", he instead can ask how the ability to negotiate identity in virtual space changes the way that identity can be enacted and controlled. And here with Alexander's chat room, I'd, like Ruffin-digging, see two very different possibilities crop up. Either the virtual identity eternally delays the requirement of "coming out" (what I'd call "owning") an identity by restricting its performance to a safe space (and here I'd include both primary sexual social performances and secondary, like those students that find they are suddenly comfortable with flaming) or it provides an alternative conception to retroactively apply to conventional space. That is, outside of the "computer classroom," a couple of uses or lessons of the chat room present themselves. One is for those with oppressed identity politics to limit the performance of their [natural/true/etc] identity for virtual tourist spots themselves. The way the 'net enables such confrontation-avoidance/virtual closet space is an unavoidable lesson, much to Alexander's chagrin.

The second, more accepting lesson is to allow the exercise to not to flip positions and create a new hierarchy of privilege (Alexander's intended but potentially short-sighted goal), but to see what's wrong with the way identity is marshaled now. Online, there does seem to be the possibility of conceiving identity differently, thanks to 1.) a perception of anonymity, which provides a previously unexperienced degree of identity control and 2.) Alexander's until now unrelated point of how easy it is in cyberspace to find information about what was conventionally easily suppressed, which provides a previously unexperienced potential for [shared] identity formation (I think Nick's reference proves this point fairly well). In practice, the lesson is perhaps essentially libertarian, and doesn't completely fulfill Alexander's politics of liberation. Regardless, this is a more productive reading of his experiment, and I believe it does a better job of moving towards the sort of [digital-dependent] lesson his chapter was attempting to display and provides better, more productive guidance for those who might want to use the exercise for their own classrooms.

Alexander on Closets and Networks

2008-10-15T08:34:00.023-04:00

(Note: I doubt Brendon's reading, but if you are, I appreciate the link and will respond just as soon as I put a few more assignments to bed. *sigh*)

Okay, let's get something up earlier than later...

There seem to be two clear ways to respond to and critique Jonathan Alexanders "Out of the Closet and into the Network". The first is to enter, by virtue of the topic, into a political discussion about the disservice he does to identity politics by assuming that the set of "all students" can be split into two neat categories -- "both gay and straight" (216). You can have any color you like, as long as it's one of my two favorites. The second is to point out the clear appropriation of the ostensible topic of this collection. There's nothing about computers or digital media in here beyond the possibility of chat rooms enabling/lowering the barriers to a specific style of role-playing exercise.

I'll concentrate on the second critique, that there's no strong connection to computers in the classroom, as it's the least controversial. Before I do, though, so as not to shy away from the hot button topic, let me say that there's good reason Alexander's subconscious can't let go of the criticism from "the student who accused me of 'promoting sexuality'" (209, 216). If sexuality is constructed, the rhetorical classroom, made up of, I assume, students who are not primarily interested in studying identity politics, could just as appropriately benefit from a study of the construction of what we might label "hedonistic heteronormality". Why are there social pressures to latch to a member with whom one can most likely reproduce? Yet if heterosexual monogamy is so strongly socially promoted, why is it so often undercut in practice? What are the appararatus[es? ii?] of sexual normalization? Who do they benefit and why? If these socially reinforced practices are so natural, why is there such a long and complicated tradition of laws forbidding acts that do not comform? (Hello, Leviticus, but more helpfully divorce law in Deuteronomy and elsewhere, iirc, in the Pentateuch.) And, if you want to put the hedonistic spin on things, why does sex sell, and furthermore, why continue sell with sex? Why isn't marriage simply about reproduction and protection [in a very practical sense] of those wonderful machines of controllable labor, your own flesh and blooded hoodlums? Get to scythin', girls (hint: start about 24 seconds in and stop soon thereafter, according to taste, though her swinging it over her head on top of a tractor around 6:30 is an interesting political image).

Allow your students to discover the controlling ideology and the ways they already contest it, and have that discovery invite the consideration of the multiplicity of sexual practice outside of that same normalization. Guess what? They'll "discover" homosexuality soon enough. Putting homosexuality as point two in the contestation (1.) Normalization 2.) Consideration of homosexuality 3.) Hope that the lesson exposes the multiplicity of sexual roles Butler's "Lesbian Phallus", among others, suggests) instead of third (1.) Explain normalization 2.) Find ways you and other contest normalization 3.) Discover antidisestblishmentarianism positions) is like forcing a kid to dress up in 18th century garb and prance around Williamsburg for Labor Day because your parents enjoy that sort of thing. Ah, but now my own politics and personal identity crises are becoming too obvious. ;^) (And lest you think I make light of identity politics, recall that my MA project was on Cotton Mather.) Don't have students ask themselves "Will you try to turn gay?" Ask them, "How are you already !heterosexual?"

So let's move on. I'd be happy to talk about the way personal politics can all too easily influence composition courses in ways that invite ethical interrogation ad infinitum. Suffice to say Alexander is exposing a certain flavor of politics that is open to critique in ways he neither addresses or even completely admits. The following critique of the erasure of the topic of the collection in which he publishes may very well be -- and I'd suggest likely is to some degree -- another symptom of a not critical enough politics. Ruffin's non-stop mantra: Own your bias.

(Heard outside office, one prof to another: "I really enjoyed the kind of press you're picking up." *sigh* I guess that's good.)

Part 2 in progress...

Okay, I've spent too long already. Let's wrap up the second critique very quickly. I'm surprised that Alexander begins describing the benefits of a "computerized classroom" but then says that its benefits are "information, voice, and community". Is the classroom producing the very inexactly measured "sheer amount of material about homsexuality on the Internet" (211, 208) [1]? No. No it's not.

Practically speaking the computerized classroom in this piece is only affording a virtual space with the possibility of creating pseudo-anonymous facades for the homonormative (please, remove the knee-jerk negative connotations of normative activities. You're already teaching folks how to write or speak ~~the Queen's~~ Bernanke's English for heaven's sake) role-playing assignment on pages 213-216.

Or is the goal of allowing social repercussionless (minimized repercussions?), convention-deconstructing role-play the only use of computers for Alexander, or even the primary one?

There are some telltale comments in the chapter about surveillance that deserve recognition. "In examining the transcripts" (213) and "analyzed the transcripts, a procedure that should be de rigueur as it allows everyone to become aware of assumptions made during a conversation" show us what's really happening. Instead of losing "conversation" to the academic ether, we're, via computers in and enabling the classroom, capturing each word, creating audit trails for discovering, identifying, constructing (that is our goal, right, to discover construction? What, we're suddenly immune in this exercise?) bias. Computers don't just lower the barriers to entry for taking on new personae and roles, but allow us, the instructors, to silently capture, manipulate, and represent texts to further our own ends -- our professional speciality. The poor saps never saw it coming. Heck, they probably think shrink wrap EULAs are binding and still ignore them. Lemmings, them and us both. You think "gay and lesbian lives are socially monitored and proscribed" (213)? Try an online composition student's. "It is just where we think our personal lives are most natural and untouched by outside forces that we are most blind to the ways in which our society has conditioned us to think about ourselves and understand our identities." (211)

I'd love to make that a more nuanced critique, but I've spent waaay too long already. See you in class.

----------------
Now playing: The Chieftains & Sinéad O'Connor - The Foggy Dew
via FoxyTunes

[1] Look, there's s#!tloads of material on the Atari 2600. Units of measurement, please.

You Scored as Stan Marsh

You're Stan Marsh! Probably the sanest of the group, you're the mastermind behind the good plans and can easily resolve problems. To you love is amazing, and you're probably already in it. You can be a smart ass and don't have a problem saying what's on your mind. And you're probably an activist. Dude, this is pretty f#&ked up right here.

Stan Marsh

83%

Kyle Broflovski

58%

Eric Cartman

58%

Butters

58%

Tweak

50%

Shelly

42%

Kenny McCormick

33%

Jimmy

33%

Timmy

17%

Yes, I get the irony...

2008-10-08T18:35:00.001-04:00

... of making my idealistic pronouncements today while wearing a Redskins 2007 NFC Wild Card t-shirt. We all have our failings. I wear mine, well, not proudly. It's more neurotically. But I own it, dangit.

In other news, I finally got the double meaning of the title of the film, Burn After Reading. I'm kinda slow.

Wow, CCCC, Collin's right; this is wack.

2008-10-08T11:11:00.003-04:00

Collin Brooke's blog turned me on to this bizarre job description from the cccc.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is seeking applications from CCCC members for a new position as CCCC Web Editor (to be distinguished from CCC Online Archivist). The CCCC Web Editor’s term will be three years (non-renewable) beginning as soon as possible after the application deadline and ending in December of 2011. This is a volunteer position.

Actual programming or Web building is not required. Instead, the CCCC Web Editor will have the responsibility of orchestrating uses of new Web building structures made available in the coming months (e.g., blogs, Wikis, Face Book and so on), moderating new community spaces, publishing relevant information, and working with NCTE/CCCC to develop a stronger Website with new features. We anticipate that after the initial restructuring period, no more than 5 to 10 hours per month will be required of the Web Editor's time.

*boggle*

5-10 hours, no html experience necessary, but you're a "web editor" that has to "orchestrate" "blogs, Wikis, Face Book [sic] and so on"? Fries with all that?

And so on? Ftw, yo? This is ill-conceived (a real tone down from what I wrote the first time).

Blog on Open source? Seriously? Don't get me started.

2008-10-08T10:19:00.007-04:00

(Warning: Unspellchecked)

EDIT: I really should add that overall I really enjoyed the readings, and agree with them just a few steps away from wholeheartedly. My reservations I, as usual, placate via contestate[-tion] below. I mean, what's not to like about someone finally brave enough to say, "Ironically, the outrage here is not so much about not getting paid for shared knowledge, it’s the infuriating notion that someone else is getting paid." (Reilly Williams 73). This is exactly the point I sideswipe when I wonder if state supported schools should be considered not for profit today.

The problem is that such a statement is followed by this:

We just want to make absolutely sure that no one else makes a dime either. The licensing structure of the GNU operation system, General Public License (GNU GPL), seems tailor-made for such a cause.

Right. Red Hat doesn't make any money from Linux, right? If your course content is licensed under something similar to the GPL, the GNU project encourages other to sell it!

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost.
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

Others can still use your content to teach for pay. Your dean could still throw fifteen sections of the class on the books using your open content without asking, and now he could do it even if your university doesn't claim to own the materials by virtue of some esoteric server ownership pact with the devil.

The comparison needs a push back towards accuracy, and that's my major complaint with today's readings. We should strive for precision and for getting our logic just right, or we lose stakeholders in the procurement process who can see those logical holes. A lack of understanding often creates excuses for dismissal, and fair labor politics in the classroom is too important to get wrong./EDIT

So we're building a house. When I leave Raleigh each week, once I step off of the Silver Service, I'm back to being family man, and part of that is my agreement to put as absolutely much sweat equity into the house as my wife and contractor can stand. Last weekend, the job was digging a 12" ditch about 200' to put in a water line, which we'll need to put in our driveway access' concrete, if we ever get a permit. Note to everyone: Building house != non-stop fun.

Not only did the digging make it easier to go without a computer for one of my two days, it allowed me to think a bit about labor practices in these here USes. Last week, I heard Dr. Packer go on a mini-rant about how middle class (and up) society views labor. To oversimp, it's okay to pay a gym for the right to run and bike, but to grab a shovel and, oh, say, dig a ditch is day laborer work. Who would stoop so low? (and so freakin' many times. Sheesh. It is real work.) But, again, the obvious upshot is that instead of being left with an end result less temporary than working off that last Big Mac, people pay for their labor to burn into the air. Instead of growing vegetables, we pay to air condition spin classes.

So when Joe Neighbor ran by, and obviously averted his eyes from me after being curious as heck up until we got into eye contact personal space, or Joe Neighbor II on his roller blades, or Joe Neighbor III who was walking, or Joe Neighbor IV on his bike... Or Joe and Jane Neighbor V-C that slowed down their SUV to take a peak on the way in, a few obviously having gotten in the car just to watch the show, I couldn't help but lament the accuracy of Packer's words. I mean, I wouldn't expect any help, but why not? At what point did we lose the raising the barn social mentality and substitute it for an inability to do so much as engage our soon to be neighbor solely because of guilt over our motivation? (To clarify, we bought a residential outparcel give or take across from a pretty nice development's amenities center. My guess is most of the folk thought their HOA owned my lot. Whoops. Seriously, though, folk, we're good people. I swear.)

I'm dovetailing this computerless experience and consideration of labor practices into our discussion today about open source, bringing what's missing from my sorry ditch-digging (my computer, which now that I'm not gaming I really don't miss so much on the weekends) and reintegrating with heat-induced Marxist daydreams.

There are certain myths about the power of free software, and some apparently misunderstandings about its characteristics. Though Reilly and Williams mean well (and the sources they site for the history of OSS are well selected; I can personally vouch for Brendan Riley and Laurie Taylor as particularly good people, even if they are from the SEC, and their article at the earlier link (cited by Reilly and Williams) is a good intro to OSS as concept.)

Furthermore, open-source technologies facilitate a commitment to open-content, making the knowledge and information contained within and delivered by technologies, such as course management software and web sites, available to all. (Reilly & Williams 69)

There's nothing particular about open source that enables open content, beyond knowing that on no level will others be required to purchase licensed software to access it. Microsoft Word saves to Rich Text, and rich text can be opened by a number of applications, like AbiWord or OpenOffice, that are, themselves, open source software solutions. It's not like Microsoft claims copyright over your work because you composed in Word. Open content can come equally easily from open source and open content.

We should also clarify what it means to be open source. Apple, for instance, releases code for some applications or libraries but maintains copyright control over what's done with that software in ways that the GPL, for instance, doesn't. (TODO: citify)

I'm going to slap in a quick critique of part of Stolley, a few more point by points to Reilly and Williams with related rants, and then call it a blog post. I could rant all day... which would be fine if I didn't throw away my days digging ditches.

A few claims regarding OSS miss the mark. Here's one from Stolley that I'll pursue ad nauseum.

Lo-fi production technologies are stable and free. They consist of and/or can retrograde to:

Plain text files (.txt, .xml, .htm, .css, .js, etc.)
Plain text editors (Notepad, TextEdit, pico/nano, vi, etc.)
Standardized, human-readable forms of open languages expressed in plain text (XML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.)
Single-media files (image, audio, video) in open formats

Despite their humble, decades-old base technology (plain text), innovative uses of lo-fi technologies can be remarkably hi-fi, as in the case of AJAX (whose most famous application may be Google’s Gmail service).

Okay, no, no AJAX is not plain text. AJAX requires a browser that supports a slew of technologies. Here's the list, stolen from our olde standby, Wikipedia.

XHTML and CSS for presentation
the Document Object Model for dynamic display of and interaction with data
XML and XSLT for the interchange and manipulation of data, respectively
the XMLHttpRequest object for asynchronous communication
JavaScript to bring these technologies together

The entry at the 'pedia goes on to do a good job saying how a few of these aren't absolute necessities (you could use IFrames instead of XMLHttpRequest, but we all knew that, right? I used to use an invisible, zero-pixel frame in a frameset).

What's important is that you can't play with AJAX without a certain level of browser functionality, and even then the applications have to be written to shoot for those browser. Here's a list of AJAX sys reqs from AjaxPatterns.org:

A [typical guideline is: Internet Explorer 5+ for Windows, Firefox 1+, Mozilla 1+, Safari 1.2+, Opera 7.6+. Other browsers such as Netscape and Konqueror might be considered too. Whether you'll support all these browsers, or just a subset, depends on how important the diversity is, how much expertise or library support you have, and how much time you can devote to testing.

You can write code with Ajax, but that doesn't mean it'll work on each of those browsers. Take Gmail from Stolley's examples. Until about a month ago, Gmail didn't provide full functionality for Internet Explorer 6. No, seriously. IE6. As in 22% of all browser hits in Sept 2008. Don't believe me? Take the "epic fail" from the Webmonkey:

It’s great to see these two giants get along, isn’t it? When not firing antitrust accusations at each other, the two found time to improve the ancient Internet Explorer 6. Google helped Microsoft identify JavaScript performance issues that was holding the browser back from running thelatest and greatest Gmail features.

So please, don't tell me AJAX is plain text. Can I use a text editor to compose AJAX? I can, and do. But can you experience AJAX with a text editor? Absofookinlootly not. Can I even test what I've written with a text editor? No. Stolley's statement is a specious claim, and this bothers me precisely because his readers shouldn't be expected to know better. This is Kairos, after all. They're supposed to be teaching their audience about tech, not misleading them. It pains me greatly, as you can tell.

I think, finally, Stoller's lofi movement misses the point and tries to stop the changes of digital composition at a place of minimal remediation. Even though I love plain text email, prefer SQL to JDO, and think every web app should degrade gracefully, the lofi manifesto shoots too low (and is, at best, misinformed about the power of lofi standards).

Though look, there's something crucial to take away from Stolley: We need academic platforms that don't come with built-in obsolescence. I like to point to the One Laptop Per Child laptop as a possible model. It's my hope that the only serious changes that occur here are fixes to make software bug-free, or to increase networking ability, etc. I hope the hardware platform doesn't succumb to what is, at this point, a largely inane chase for Moore's Law and programmers more than happy to follow along in suit.

Plain text isn't the answer. No current platform or standard is the answer, yet. Again, we need academic programmers to identify professional needs, write software and specs with an acceptably academic political inflection (ie, outside of capitalistic pressures), and ensure the platforms created don't have the built-in obsolescence consumer capitalism counts on and requires.

(back to Reilly and Williams)

To put it bluntly, individuals
and open-source organizations use OSS to promote ideals, while corporations and institutions
use it to cut costs. (71)

-- well, of course. For-profit corporations do like to maximize profits, bless their hearts. It's the goal of OSS coders to harness the power of these corporations for Good. See exhibits Mozilla (thanks AOL), OpenOffice (thanks Sun), KHTML (thanks Apple and Google), Eclipse (thanks IBM), Linux (thanks Red Hat, IBM, Debian, YellowDog, etc etc.etc.)... you get the picture, right?

What is a "nonprofit university" anyway (71)? Can you be a state supported school and nonprofit today? In practice, we're trending towards no.

Instead, due to time constraints, inadequate technical expertise, and institutional mandates, both proactive and implied, many instructors select commercial courseware—such as Blackboard andWebCT—when teaching their distance-learning courses. (69)

we found that “ease of use” was cited over social, political, or even pedagogical concerns as one of the primary reasons for choosing a particular application or delivery method for distance courses. (72)

This is the issue of OSS, isn't it? Programmers are very good, in my experience, at writing backends for fun. The zeroes and ones fascinate. Non-specialist human interaction (that is, people using the applications without, let's say, a literacy level equal to the authors; aka "people who need GUIs") doesn't create the same feelings of fascination. If Linux were better than Windows in every way, what do you think Dell would put on its hardware? There are gaps, and Linux, last I checked, was still difficult enough to access relative to Windows that I haven't yet switched, and I'd consider myself fair political when it comes to software use. Until OSS can be as easy to use within an academic ecosystem as Windows or Mac minus the benefit of "political and social values associated with technology", it's not going to be used. Academic OSS must compete with commercial alternatives. There's no way around it. We require academic programmers. (In my limited experience, self-identified "academic programmers" very often have some serious practical limitations. All too often "academic programmer" means "code dabbler with an agenda").

PS: Shankar: You don't get to portmanteau "sprite".

Sircular, Out of the Box Reasoning

2008-10-01T09:17:00.013-04:00

First, a quick aside. I didn't see a good post to add this to as a comment, but below is a sample database schema, and not even a particularly complicated one (click to enlarge).

Leaves me wondering if Johnson-Eilola wasn't misrepresenting a database-as-only-connections a bit. Let's go a step further. What's a database minus the fragmented words? It's a structure for those words (in a poststructuralist sense). If a database depended on the existence of specific words, how could it anticipate new ones? That is, a database is a schema that is created to maximize the efficiency when you search its contents. Other applications might parse words on the web into the schema, but the schema remains the same. Combined with its engine, the database is a process which is not content specific. etc.

But I was a database administrator in another life. Let's move on...

(Ah, if I'd been the first to use the horrible pun in the title. Poor guy. I can relate to having folks use your name in what seems to them to be horribly creative ways which really aren't at all if you've been keeping tabs, well, all of your life... Picture stolen from here without permission, but it doesn't look like he bothered either.)

I have always enjoyed reading Geoffrey Sirc (an online pub somewhat similar to this one is "Stagolee as Writing Instructor"), and this chapter was no exception. Yet instead of starting in on the obvious experimental format of the piece, I'd like to launch directly into the jarringly abrupt shift in his argument that occurs a few pages into his "Activities" section, where we read...

... my challenge, I feel, is to have these young people burnish not anthologized writers' essays but their own form of powerful pensee, while, certainly, at the same time learning some kind of basic prose styling to help them avoid verbial pitfalls in formal settings. (128 emph obviously mine -R)

The shift from the theoretical near-hyperbole to wholly practical gave me whiplash, honestly. The admission of such pedestrian (overstatement) considerations inserts an entirely new, not particularly obvious pedagogical subtext to the chapter-proper that came before it. When reading it, page 123 in particular, for some reason, I littered the margins with questions of these pragmatics -- but not complicated ones. They were often, rather, extremely brief questions revealing near disbelief of the disconnectedness of Sirc's theory with the assumed practice.

Sirc Quote	Confused Marginalia
Arrangement of materials and notational jottings is a desperately important compositional skill.	why?
Archiving such work in boxes on the internet would allow others to study and re-arrange our student's notational scribbles, in much the same way Suquet couldn't wait to get in and re-arrange Duchamp's scribbled notes from The Green Box.	how?
Caesura--the stylistic device most absent in our cirricula.	b/c...?

Each of these quick scratches is loaded with follow-ups. What are the politics of his suggestions? What sort of academy does Sirc envision? Is it really a surprise that caesura doesn't have a firmer spot in our instruction? What is the use of a "compositional future" that can foreground "intellectual fascination" and the "idio-aesthetic" to the point of eclipsing conventional writing? And now that we know that pragmatics do figure prominently in his conception, the politics are that much more difficult to identify.

For me, his continued use of the curiosity cabinet (116 (bottom), 125 ("curio cabinet"), 126 (generally; here museums) as a central metaphor speaks to these politics. The curiosity cabinet, though it may have contained what seems like trash and found objects to today's viewer and did, on occasion, literally contain "animal and bird shit" (118), was not an exercise in "childlike modes of acquisition" (unless you play the progressivist science card) but colonization and imperialism. They were, instead, a means of replicating a colonial mastery overseas through a largely symbolic recreation of that mastery at home. The cabinets were a sort of Discovery Channel of the 15th through 17th centuries, allowing one to, through the presentation of hummingbird eggs, fossils, plant clippings (growing colonial species in one's garden was a similar fad representing control and hierarchical superiority of civilization over savage lands in the 16-1800s) and other artifacts that were in fashion. The cabinets were meant to quickly represent and recreate the impression of the vastness of the British Empire (and others'), not provide a ludic outlet for its collectors.

You can still see a little of this unquestioned acceptance of colonization in Sirc's use and recommendation of commercial software like Word, Powerpoint, and Dreamweaver, when each has easy to find, mature analogs in FOSS software (say Abiword, OpenOffice, and/or Seamonkey's Composer or Amaya). Can one forward an argument that Sirc's eventual interest in stopping short of an academics for the same motivation as the Cornell's box art reflects the degree that education-as-professionalization has eliminated education-for-intellectualism? Is there anything but the corporate university? (And if you followed me over the edge on that jump of logic, congratulations on your comprehension skills. I'm not sure I can follow it from that poorly written section.) Sirc's classroom, condoning the breakdown of the corporate/academic divide each time he sends students to Word, becomes a bizarre self-contradiction, and I don't mean in some salvageable heterotopic sense.

I'm also confused by what seems a clear contraction: Privileging "Any composition or work that cannot be reproduced in standard sheet form or cannot be reproduced at all" (Hendricks quoted, 118) while at the same time lauding the opportunity to "the ability to archive the mysterious wealth of the quotidian verbalscape" (123, "archiving" also on 124, about 17 lines up) which the binary medium's ability to accurately and infinitely reproduce enables. There seems to still be a naivete of how digital media works here. The introduction to Sign Here!: Handwriting in the Age of New Media (Neef et al) cleverly identifies that the typewriter's standardization of script "shifted the emphasis to the standardization of script, but it may even have increased the notion of authenticity associated with handwriting" (8). Cornell's boxes seem to have some of the same characteristics of "authenticity" that Sirc's digital box art lacks by virtue of its medium.

Ever since the invention of and spread of moveable type in modern times and of the typewriter in the late-19th century, the idiosyncracsy of manual writing has given way to standardized, replicable, power-driven letters produced by machines. (Sign Here! 7)

I believe the lessons extend to Sirc's suggested connection of Cornell box to the html eBox as well.

There's also the danger of his line of reasoning opening itself up to a critique of attempting to creating a discultural elite, a haute couture to compositional weaving. What precisely is the place of this "aesthetic of the cool"?

I'm caught wondering why his chapter is itself so conventional, and believe we are meant, perhaps, to consider the audience: Composition instructors that don't yet "get it", whatever it is, exactly. There are small pranks of convention in the chapter that don't retard comprehension by design; the pranks are so small as to be only noticed, and serve as a pain-free introduction to the feel, if not the practice, of what Sirc argues.

There are interesting lessons here, both the activities, (which seem excellently conceived and do seem to argue their usefulness on their faces) as well as in theory (the web, as currently situated, is particularly well-crafted for realizing "the potential for such open-ended text" where "no draft is ever finished," or at least not necessarily finished (120), nor is there a particularly good reason that web content needs "meet the standards of text in print" (Applen quoted on 120)). Sirc's approach, as experimental and unconventional as it might be, can be hooked into composition instruction through these openings, and be used to represent a feel rather than a process, thereby becoming useful pedagogical tools. Doing so, however, requires something of a paradigm shift in the primary purpose of instruction in composition, and such an instructional style is one that's become less and less popular over time due to a much different (or, in the case of wundercabinets, the same?) pragmatics.

I'm tired now. I have more ranting, but I think that's plenty for our blogs, right? Welcome to the ever enjoyable world of Ruffin's paper writing. Take this shite and start editing into something that approaches comprehensible... *sigh*

And then there was Web 3.0

2008-09-30T09:26:00.001-04:00

From EU will lead in 'Web 3.0' technology - Digital Lifestyle - Macworld UK:

European Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding won glowing praise for her vision of the Internet 3.0 Monday from Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Web and now Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist.
...
'Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. It signals a tenfold quantum leap in the scale of the digital universe by 2015,' she said in a statement."

Quick, time to search and replace all your paper's references to Web 2.0 and update to version 3. And a "tenfold quantum leap"?!! Sheesh, somebody go get Bakula out of retirement. That's 10 to the 10th power, isn't it?

Seriously, Larry, this is what happens when you... Okay, I'll leave out the Lebowski reference this time.

But this is what happens when academics are uncritical in their acceptance of business slang. Suddenly, your work is obsoleted because some bigwig in business decided it was time. Tell me what's the difference between this conception of Web 3.0 and what you thought Web 2.0 could have become. No, really. Now, how much ink will be spilt by everyone trying to make 3.0 their own for no good reason other than a clever marketing push.

Stay away from industry when commenting on industry, folks!

The politics of directing traffic to online journals

2008-09-29T10:32:00.004-04:00

In another class that I'm currently taking, the instructor is somewhat loath to have us access the articles that are available online in another format. Printing would not be any trouble once the article had been downloaded, but the emphasis is on ensuring that "the library has accurate data on journal usage in areas important to our programs".

My personal bias was to have [me move copies of] the articles on eReserve so that others wouldn't have to worry about issues with proxy firewalls that I'm experiencing, but the quick answer from the instructor was to forget it. No big deal, but it did get me to thinking...

This motivation/line of logic pretty clearly discourages reading journals in the hardcopy, if that's available. Each old-school visit to the periodicals areas unfairly (?) docks the journals a hit and download from the reading count, a list that's pretty important when DH Hill decides which online journal subscriptions to keep current -- proof here, as part of a serials review for 2006 at NCSU. If an journal accessible online isn't accessed, it's relatively likely to get chopped.

For me, there's something strange-bordering-on-sinister about a system that requires researchers' use of certain, carefully controlled gateways to maintain a journal's worth. One of my favorite uses for free time is to head over to the periodicals section and grab the latest issue or two of journals I think are pretty important, and to force myself to read them. I've long thought that for many of these journals with a very limited on-campus audience, it'd be more useful to have the faculty interested to pay for and keep their own local copy, yet I find myself bristling at the requirement of keeping very careful track of trends of academic research to determine what survives the cut, and to have my printed journal digestion count for naught.

The worst of this experience is seeing a relatively innocuous but real-world example how these systems of online publication are coercing NCSU faculty to manipulate student usage in order to give their favorite sources more hits. When most of the canceled journals had zero hits, I think padding a few with even a dozen can greatly skew the picture towards those journals used in classes, which does very actively encourage this sort of localized academic nepotism. The potential for this sort of nepotism only strengthens my aversion to online journal subscriptions. Sure, they're cheaper, but when you turn the facet off, guess what? Nobody gets to view the journals or, at best, you're forced to pay through the nose for ILL. It's as if the library staff had taken to the stacks and burned each copy of the journals we had paid for -- unless, of course, you're lucky enough to have had someone play and beat the system to keep your journal online.

This forced, total obsolescence and obliteration of a resource based on future economics (that is, a subscription now no longer guarantees that state of journal access in the future) again moves academia and education much closer to the tenants of consumerism than scholasticism.

Close Encounters (who is reading our blogs?)

2008-09-25T08:01:00.006-04:00

I figured I oughta keep better tabs of who is reading the blog, if anybody (am I being graded?!), and have already traced two results that make me wonder about the utility of, in practice, essentially forcing someone with my, um, style of inquiry (note: recall that phrase is our secret keyphrase for "contestational style") to post something that's indexed, searchable, and available for anyone with an Internet connection to read off of the web.

Okay, so here are my two more interesting visitors, so far...

Domain Name

(Unknown)

IP Address

198.146.87.# (Tennessee Board of Regents)

ISP

Tennessee Board of Regents

Location

Continent	:	North America
Country	:	United States (Facts)
State	:	Tennessee
City	:	Nashville
Lat/Long	:	36.1458, -86.7844 (Map)

Language

English (U.S.)
en-us

Operating System

Microsoft WinXP

Browser

Internet Explorer 7.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)

Javascript

version 1.3

Monitor

Resolution	:	800 x 600
Color Depth	:	32 bits

The TN Board of Regents really isn't someone I want reading through these incredibly tentative, but strongly worded critiques I'm writing here. The way these are written help me interrogate and understand what's going on in our readings, identifying what's troublesome so that I can give it more thought, but they aren't written in a style that's productive for audiences outside of our class to read. That's by design. I start here, then spend heaven's only knows how long researching, recutting, and reevaluating so that I can try and see what potentially productive readings I can extract from the readings for use in my own work.

More disconcerting is that the Regents visit came from someone referred to my blog via an email, and the email contained a link directly to my blog on Blair and Hoy. So somebody who already read the blog (no idea who) essentially vetted the information and still wanted to pass it along. Rarely a good thing when I'm in contestation mode.

(Aside: They were also reading at 800x600 resolution, which means they were either using a pretty danged old laptop, or they possibly don't have the best eyesight.)

Another interesting search was from blogsearch.google.com with a search term of "University of Phoenix". Here, I'm not so upset that they've seen what I think of online instruction as it's currently conceived, nor as it was presented in Blair and Hoy. Actually, I hope I get a few more of those. ;^)

Distance learning and critical thinking lit reviews

2008-09-24T10:06:00.006-04:00

Buraphadeja & Dawson was essentially just a literature review of different attempts to establish means of measuring how students think critically using online techs. Nothing too exciting there.

Blair & Hoy's article on distance learning and adults was more problematic. The article seemed to have a pretty clear political undercurrent. The English 207 class as described was pretty clearly designed for nonstandard students, even before it went online. The elephant in the room was if these students should run the asylum and been able to demand a class where there might have been more demonstration of ability than learning. I base this critique on a few statements in the article...

"As Kristine Blair and Stan Lewis (2003) have indicated, Prior Learning Assessment acknowledges that “college-level learning may be acquired from experiences outside a formal classroom setting” (p. 1)" (34)

"Another compelling factor for moving to online delivery was the success of one student, Greg, who because of work-related travel was unable to attend regularly but did submit assignments electronically for review by both the instructor (Blair) and his peers and who nonetheless produced a portfolio equal in quality to those of his face-to-face colleagues." (36)

"Some of her adult learners completed the assignments and the course quickly with a minimum of peer and instructor responses while others completed the course and each assignment more slowly, carefully and meticulously revising each assignment and requiring more peer and instructor feedback." (42)

If we want to talk about how adult students have a more difficult time in the university, could there be a more loaded class to pick than one that practically invites those that need some sort of academic remediation/enculturation? To use this class to identify trouble is circular reasoning at its finest, and obstructs possibly useful lessons. Combined with the statements, above, that do not eliminate the possibility that what was occurring was more vetting academic viability of students rather than primarily provide learning experiences, the foundation of the article is suspect.

There's another pretty clear political theme throughout, that of identifying and rewarding labor in these "service"-oriented classes. For the authors, this took the form of "invisible" labor in online classes and the use of graduate student instructors for this class.

Because Blair was a faculty member in A&S and because the course typically enrolls fewer students due to the heavy writing load and necessary personal attention, the College office decided it was too expensive to employ a tenure-line [end page 36] faculty member to teach a course with such a consistently small class size. Consequently, to keep the course on the schedule, we arrived at a compromise—a graduate student would be selected to teach the course and would be supervised jointly by Blair and by Lewis. (36-7)

The number of omissions and forced silences is deafening. Here, we've got the continued issue of the specifics behind why the course is offered combined with an administration that's generally not particularly supportive of putting departmental resources into its "instruction" (by virtue of claiming economics as an unarguable justification for removing tenured and tenure-track instructors), and we top this off with the unquestioned statement that online classes need to hold half as many students as "f2f" ones without [the authors imply] any penalty in tenure or promotional considerations. The tenure concern is hinted at early ("we call for more attention to the impact of adult online education on faculty workload" (34)) and made explicit in the conclusion ("there has been little to no change in the merit, tenure, and promotion guidelines at our own institution for online instruction despite the administrative recognition that fully online and other alternative formats (weekend courses, workshops, etc.) are vital to competing for adult and other nontraditional learners in the online educational market" (45)).

Am I the only one that cringes like hell when they see "online educational market", "competing", and "vital" in that sentence? The university was supposed to stay relatively independent of capitalism. What the hell happened? Go work at the University of Phoenix. /especially harsh vitriol

Some of the reported "adult" problems -- the email prodding for feedback, etc -- are class management issues moreso than adult or technological ones, as email (as one example) certainly can enable structured feedback just as easily its [here] off-site and passive nature disable it. Part of this class management seems to be a failure to build capacity in instructors, who say things like, "These discussion boards did provide students with the opportunity to put their virtual chairs in a virtual circle in an online classroom and discuss their writing," (38) and presuppositional phrases afterwards like "But, just as it is important to remember that face-to-face community doesn’t occur by sheer virtue of asking students to put their chairs in a circle, as Hoy’s experience with Susan suggests, an online community doesn’t happen by sheer virtue of creating discussion forums and requiring weekly postings" (40). There is no "just as". Only "different from and similar to". Simile, not metaphor.

Finally, when the authors say that "external influences on the adult learner can cause delays in completing assignments; these delays can quickly deplete the adult learner’s motivation to not finish the assignment, and sometimes not finish the course as well," they certainly haven't disproven what we all know to be true: undergraduates run into life too. In their case, we simply don't always value the interruptions with the same seriousness that we do when they are work or family related.

Ultimately what's useful in the article are more the lessons for would-be online instructors than the topic of its title. There is important, behind-the-scenes feedback that should be considered. One cannot craft a website, replicate it between instructors, grade a few portfolio assignments, and forget about it. Not that, in my experience, there's any less "invisible" workload for "f2f" teaching, between office hours, email, and even, occasionally, student chat, but one should remember that online teaching does not give anyone, even in this English 207 design, excuse to coast with their instruction.

And to close, I'd like to ask what the "other hybrid formats" are that are mentioned in this quote...

Because of the changing demographic from traditional to adult students, we shall also argue that this change also fosters a change in the relationship between teachers and students, particularly given studies, such as Barbara Pevoto’s (2003), which suggests that students enrolled in web-based courses may not succeed as well as in other hybrid formats.

Guess I should march my rear over to DH Hill and find out.

Oh yeah... Ongyod (arrested dev?)...

I hadn't thought about providing feedback via video. That's an interesting idea that I should give more thought.

I wonder how fair it'd be to assign public speaking speeches as homework to be emailed or brought to class? Finally, a rough-draft speech? I'm not sure those without webcams would be comfortable giving speeches in front of Macs in the library, but it's an interesting possibility.

Worrying about 3 megs seems so not 2007. ;^)
----------------
Now playing: The Black Crowes - Goodbye Daughters Of The Revolution
via FoxyTunes

For Blog scholars: Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008

2008-09-24T08:19:00.000-04:00

Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008:

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report...

If you study blogs, this is more than worth a look.

Another note to self

2008-09-23T21:17:00.001-04:00

Colleges Should Stand Up to the Entertainment Industry - Jerz's Literacy Weblog: "Colleges Should Stand Up to the Entertainment Industry"

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original Adventure in Code and in Kentucky

2008-09-23T21:09:00.000-04:00

note to self: DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original Adventure in Code and in Kentucky: "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky"

Peace in 30 years. Thanks, technology! (Yeah, riiiight -- Noah)

2008-09-17T10:56:00.001-04:00

From a link in Selber to the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab:

We also believe that persuasive technology can bring about world peace in 30 years.

You know, I've spent some time where doing this in 30 years might be pushing it.

Selber's neophytic digital rhetorical literacy

2008-09-17T09:12:00.024-04:00

My method of inquiry is contestation (um, duh), and Selber's chapter on "Rhetorical Literacy" creates cause for a wealth of inquiry. I'm surprised at the extreme lack of specificity in the arguments, where quotes ill-prepared to be pressed into Selber's purposes ("This [the interface] is the mysterious, nonmaterial point where electronic signals become information" (qtd 140)) or Selber simply pronounces without bothering to add so much as anecdotal evidence.

Here's one such anecdote-less claim:

Anyone who has been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information on the Internet knows that the metatext -- a heavily linked text that connects other texts and their contents in imaginative and meaningful ways -- has become an invaluable online genre... (136)

Perhaps he meant platform instead of genre? Regardless, if html has rocked the composition world as he argues, I'd like to see at least one example of how and why. Selber's trope is for the reader to, ironically, coauthor this traditional text in much more active ways than the stereotyped digital media he crafts here.

And it's on this subject that Selber doesn't seem to understand he's not talking about postmodernism, but coauthorship. Here's Selber's quote.

Lee Brasseur has characterized electronic spaces as postmodern because in those spaces writers, readers, and software designers all collaborate on some level in the formation and interpretation of online texts. (139)

The same issue of coauthorship returns on 149.

This is where the symbolist perspective enters in, a perspective that "centers on the notion that all persuasion is really to a significant extent self-persuasion, involving the active participation of an audience" (509)

Coauthorship is best and most easily explained in my opinion in Nick Montfort's excellent Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, which, granted, was published in 2003, but builds quite a bit off of the theme's in Aarseth's Cybertext. Coauthorship is pretty easy to understand with Montfort's examples from Interactive Fiction. Let's look at a snippet from Zork, borrowed from this website, as I'm too lazy to pull the game up myself right now.

>d
The trap door crashes shut, and you hear someone barring it.

Cellar
You are in a dark and damp cellar with a narrow passageway leading north, and a crawlway to the south. On the west is the bottom of a steep metal ramp which is unclimbable.
Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.

The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.
A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room.

Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
The troll swings his azxe, but it misses.

>swing sword
Whoosh!
The troll swings, you parry, but the force of his blow knocks your sword away.

>get sword
Taken.

The troll hits you with a glancing blow, and you are momentarily stunned.

>kill troll with sword
The troll is staggered, and drops to his knees.
The troll slowly regains his feet.

Few are going to mistake the writing contributed by the player as Jamesian, or even Tolkien-esque, but IF does make the concept of coauthorship easy to follow. The computer produces text: "The troll swings, you parry, but the force of his blow knocks your sword away." The player/coauthor provides their own contribution: "kill troll with sword" The computer interprets the contribution and continues, as proxy for the game's author(s), the shared composition.

(And, it should be noted, the user's contributions do occasionally become much more colorful. "Kill the **** dragon with the ***** sword, ***** it. And do it now. And don't make me **** figure out how I'm supposed to lure it to some ******** ice wall before I can go further in the game." Of course, the player's coauthor usually replies with something particularly lucid like, "I don't understand that sentence.")

This is what an html RAD does too. It's a madlib for programming html. (Which reminds me of another pet peeve: Why don't we teach more about the history of the book? Why don't we talk about about coauthorship in the codex? Not only is Heather Jackson's Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books a great introduction to the antecedents of dynamic, community composition online, but everything from page size, font selection, and paper making mediate traditional composition in ways I'm not familiar enough with to mention here.)

I can't help but believe that Selber's skimping on specifics because he's not yet comfortable enough with the material he discusses to offer great ones. Take this section, where he does try to offer one example of how digital rhetoric can be approached:

For example, on the Web, students need a certain level of domain knowledge from computer science in order to produce texts that are optimized for performance. Such technical awareness includes a basic comprehension of the client/server architecture that underlies the Internet, because the configurations of end-user computers (clients) help determine the speed with which texts are delivered over the Internet (via servers).

How does this snippet of wrongness suggest Selber's lack of digital initiation? Let's count a few of the ways...

Beyond students putting full-resolution photos on the web and then simply changing their size for display in an image tag (eg, <img src="myHUGEFNIMAGE.jpg" height="100" width="120">), speed is really no longer a practical issue. Today's front page of The New York Times is over 129 kilobytes of code alone, with another 461 KB of supporting code, give or take. That's over a third of a floppy. Oh noes!

Servers do not typically cause the bottlenecks on the Internet. When you use a modem, usually it is the weak link in bandwidth; trust me, the server and the net are almost always ready to provide their information faster than 56k. This is an infrastructure issue, not a server issue, even if speed was an issue.

Client/server is the way http tends to work. It's not the way the Internet works, even in 2004. Napster's tiff with Metallica was in 2000! Napster used peer to peer networking, which is a much different information transfer paradigm, where, to oversimplify, each node is both client and server, and the, let's say, sexual dimorphism between nodes is not nearly so cleanly cut.

ad infinitum. I'm boring you. Let's move on.

The treatment is at best an antiquated approach to html for 2004 (though perhaps useful in the days of modems and Al Gore's picture first hitting the net), and its composition strikes me about as smooth and knowledgeable as a pair of curious teenagers in the back seat of a sedan. Still, to use speed of html as your archetypal example of digital rhetoric appeals to and impresses only those whose understanding of the net is as old as the conception he describes. Better he read Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, published in 1997, and use the much more nuanced considerations it contains. (You should read it to.)

The emphasis in the chapter is on theoretical argument that misses the artifacts of praxis. Take this quote...

The Open Source Initiative (<http://opensource.org>) attests to the seriousness with which interface designers have engaged in the communal development of software. (164-5)

Yet it is precisely within this sort of software that I'd argue we most clearly see unmediated hegemony. Nowhere is -- even today -- the "cryptic command language syntax" (141) that Selber implicitly encourages removing more prevalent than in the interfaces produced by FOSS. [TODO: Add some examples] Why are these activist programmers not producing more liberating artifacts? (The answer is pretty obvious; interfaces that don't look like "cryptic command language" are interfaces that don't reveal what lies under the code in the PC's operating systems and hardware. Removing the culture bias built intothe personal computer is tough, unintuitive work. Honestly, you need a team of UI designers to run through FOSS, and they haven't popped up just yet. Why that is would be a useful research question.)

Worse for me, however, is his uncritical support for html RADs. Here's the quote.

Anyone who has hand-coded Web pages and then switched over to a visual HTML editor appreciates the point Myers makes about the level of control that powerful development tools can provide. (141-2)

Selber is not, unfortunately, saying how this control is exerted over the editor's user. FrontPage was overly popular with academics for whatever reasons, and the politics of that application are pretty obvious (see this old blog post). Even solid, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives, like the composer in Seamonkey or the now defunct NVu project, are nice, but they very much restrict their users to remediating old genres as they currently function. I love 'em for taking notes in class. Not so great for creating web applications. For that, I (and many others) use a text editor (I use VIm -- and JEdit, and TextWrangler, and ...).

To truly create a web application, which is, give or take, what Selber means to recommend at the top of 143, one must learn how to write by hand. Otherwise, you're, for the purposes of exposing the interior of the interface, retaining and enforcing the "mysterious"-ness of the boundary and losing the well-delineated learning opportunity Selber is trying to foreground, sometimes in spite of himself. As I've blogged earlier, even routine blogging can quickly become a pretty technical experience requiring at least a touch of knowledge of coding html directly

I'd also take issue with the idea that "system software" "is rather stable and hence not easily open to reinterpretation" (142). He's obviously mad. ;^) An extremely accessible introduction to how operating systems work, influence even the graphic interface, and suggest how these could be changed for the users' benefit can be found in Alan Cooper's About Face.

There are simply too many times, like in Table 4.1, where you could do a search and replace on "interface design" and put in "any dammed thing you'd prefer to be talking about, like the game of jacks." Or take the lesson he gives students about OrganDonor.gov -- "On the whole, I agree with my students that an attention to ideology could help improve the effectiveness of the Website" (152). We've moved from talking about how software is different, and how we should leave behind "romantic" notions of text (13), but then when the proverbial rubber hits ye older proverbialer road, what happens? Hypertext as static text, an approach (again, see Jackson's Marginalia) that's not wholly warranted even when we're talking about codexes. The "Nascent approaches like [those that Selber recommends] are philosophically and methodologically different from traditional approaches in HCI..." (155), but I'm not so sure they don't look a heck of a lot like some long in the tooth (though still situationally useful, I'll grant) rhetorical exercises. My issue isn't in the usefulness of what he does write (okay, well, it is on some level), but the way that the suggestions and considerations are too generic to make specifically digital claims. And, again, really no good practical examples of the application of his suggestions. Bitbucket.

At best, what Selber does is paint a picture of our (well, at least us with an ingle bias (ENGL)) audience. Here's a person who is interested in learning how technology will impact traditional academia, interested enough to open html in a text editor and to create a lasting artifact of the musings these experiments have created in him. He's likely right that it is "unrealistic to think that students" -- here students in composition classes or old-style English students -- "will be able to create [special-purpose programs [like] word-processing, spreadsheet, database, and e-mail programs [1]] in writing and communication courses", but some of us can (though it needs some bug fixing). Nor is there [theoretically] anything stopping these courses from coauthoring applications with intro comp sci courses, is there?

Students should and can become creators of "software". Selber needs our help to figure out how this works in praxis.

[1] Note how influenced Selber is by Microsoft here. His list of "special-purpose programs" lists what's included in Microsoft Office -- Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook. Nice. There's a hell of a lot of room left for inquiry here.

Using proper licenses, revisited with an example

2008-09-16T15:59:00.004-04:00

I mentioned that it was important to use the proper licenses in your classroom, and critiqued Logie for not doing the same. I'd mentioned that the Creative Commons licenses were one popular alternative. I'm honestly not sure if the way that these licenses are usually used protect the author and the "copyrighted public domain" as much as they should -- and here's one site that's both using a Creative Commons license and embodying my fear of not going very far to protect the contents of authors' submissions as they distribute scientific, peer-reviewed articles, called PLoS one. (PLoS apparently means the Public Library of Science.)

The PLoS is specifically using the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL). As I understand it, the included right "to remix" means that someone could take what you've done, change it in some trivial way (let's say change the author names to their own, perhaps?), and then submit to a new journal as long as they attribute the original author in some (minor?) fashion! Now we all know that one usually has to promise that submissions have not been submitted, much less published, somewhere else, but the overly flexible "protection" from the CCAL makes it a poor choice for academic texts. It all but entitles future users to plagiarize with the most minor of attribution.

Let me be slightly political for a second... I've argued for a measure of protection just short of the GNU General Public License (GPL) for several years, and this reasoning extends to written works. Something like the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works or Attribution-No Derivative Works licenses from the Creative Commons project seem more appropriate to me because these two stop the trivial-change co-opting I mentioned before. They both allow anyone "to Share — to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work," and the second even allows someone to do so and make money off of that work, say by publishing and then selling a collection of articles that includes your own. (Note that they don't have to tell you you've been published, however!)

Also keep in mind that licensing a work under most open or free (or potentially closed) licenses does not restrict you from licensing the same work in another way in the future. There's nothing stopping you from using Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works and then licensing your work to a for-profit collection in the future if all the authors of your work agree. You'd still have the No Commercial protection from your Creative Commons license, and the only folk that could make whatever limited cashola from your writings still exists would be the people you expressly okayed.

I do worry every bit as much about licenses that demand exclusive rights to your work as I do free licenses that allow your work to be too easily exploited, and I've noticed a few too many of those exclusive rights clauses in, say, the two bit collections I've given up stuff to. Now I have to ask them to use more of my work than fair use would allow. ST*U!

In any event, that's one real world example of a Creative Commons license for written texts living in the wild. To find out more, you might bug Christian [Casper], who has presented on the commenting function of PLoS One a bit; I'm reading what he's presented now.

Wikipedia: NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH

2008-09-12T11:01:00.002-04:00

From our talks about collective intelligence, I thought it might be interesting to point out that Wikipedia doesn't allow for anything "original"; it must all be documented. Note the sentence I highlight, below, as well.

From here:

Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought. This includes unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas; and any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position. This means that Wikipedia is not the place to publish your own opinions, experiences, or arguments. Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked: to demonstrate that you are not presenting original research, you must cite reliable sources that provide information directly related to the topic of the article, and that directly support the information as it is presented.

No original research is one of three core content policies. The others are neutral point of view and verifiability. Jointly, these policies determine the type and quality of material that is acceptable in articles. Because they complement each other, they should not be interpreted in isolation from one another, and editors should familiarize themselves with all three.

It's possible to moderate Wikipedia because Wikipedia forces its authors to write like machines. We can thank the assembly line for this shift, and this Borg-like form of collective intelligence is just following suit. This machine-like action is why Big Macs can taste the same across continents, and why Joel Spolsky says this about Starbucks:

All of this fancy optimization stuff is called operations research. It's what Michael Gerber talks about in his best-selling book The E-Myth Revisited. If you're planning to expand your business to a certain scale, you must first establish procedures and build systems to get predictable outcomes so that your employees can produce decent results even when they're not having a great day. It's a real academic field of study, and it's really hard and really important. You need to hire pretty smart people to do studies and experiments and collect the statistics and then figure out what it all means.

Starbucks is great at operations research. It wouldn't have become the company it is today if it hadn't created detailed manuals telling people how best to assemble the various chemicals that make up a modern adult milk shake. All of those independent coffee shops that have a nostalgic fixation on grinding the coffee beans right before using them, claiming this 'tastes better' -- these poor shops go out of business left and right, because they don't have the right system. They make only a handful of drinks in the time it takes Starbucks to serve a hundred."

Wikipedia has convinced the world to work at McDon... wait, Starbucks. Yeah, that sounds better. He's a lively chief mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.

Collective Intelligence, meet iTunes 8.0

2008-09-10T12:11:00.008-04:00

From ye olde Horizon Report for aught eight.

Collective intelligence is a term for the knowledge embedded within societies or large groups of individuals. It can be explicit, in the form of knowledge gathered and recorded by many people (for example, the Wikipedia—www.wikipedia.org—is the result of collective intelligence); but perhaps more interesting, and more powerful, is the tacit intelligence that results from the data generated by the activities of many people over time. Discovering and harnessing the intelligence in such data—revealed through analyses of patterns, correlations, and flows—is enabling ever more accurate predictions about people’s preferences and behaviors, and helping researchers and everyday users understand and map relationships, and gauge the relative significance of ideas and events.

(emph mine)

Wikipedia doesn't ad it up. The Genius feature in iTunes 8.0 does capitalize on your freely donated resources, using what you listen to suggest songs someone else, whose musical library is like yours, should buy. World of Warcraft counts on user content to keep itself cashing in too.

So let's call this what it is, since in more and more cases it's less Wikipedia and more iTunes: Collective Intelligence is the ability to police everyday activities and turn their now digitized and easily measured results into marketable information for capitalistic corporations without significant long-term expenditures.

QED. Though I reserve the right to edit the defn. ;^)

Using the proper licenses in your classroom

2008-09-10T09:47:00.004-04:00

So let's take the obvious extension of last night's late night ramblings on Logie and readdress Logie's suggestions that we should be, "Securing written permission can be accomplished quickly with a blanket form distributed on the first day of class." Here's a slightly more informed suggestion...

Find an approved Open Source Initiative (OSI) [style] License to use in your class, and seize the learning opportunity to inform your students of the politics behind the decision to strongly encourage its use. A number of similar licenses for written works (versus software-based works like the ones the OSI licenses target) have been released by Creative Commons.

Without going into what the licenses say (the link above and here does a good job at that), it is useful to show students how US copyright law creates an interesting secondary audience for each of their compositions. Explain how reusing their works helps future students, students in the class, and, admittedly, yourself professionally. Explain what benefits there might be from having their content used in class (makes for an interesting line in the resume, perhaps?).

But most of all encourage students to critical interface with copyright and the issues your raise however they see fit within the constraints of teaching your course (ie, they will have to turn in works for you to grade, even if it's their right to keep them private!). And own the bias that you introduce; by discussing copyright, you're encouraging its use even while attempting to subvert it. Why do you encourage using copyright in a copyleft fashion? Is it expediency? Historical cultural sedimentation [which is essentially the same thing]?

But sure as heck don't reinforce culture's already painful push to have folks sign their rights away without reading what they're signing.

Mickey Mouse and his pal Bono

2008-09-09T23:35:00.009-04:00

Okay, well, I suppose I ought blog something technically before the day we meet, in case someone needs to comment...

John Logie's "Champing at the Bits: Computers, Copyright, and the Composition Classroom" is a useful introduction to the interactions of digital artifacts with copyright in the US. Its narrative is of a United States that first privileged the long term interests of the collective (aka, "public") over the individual when protecting original works, but that the US slowly moved from that collective-privileging to a system that now favors a different sort of collective, the collective author.

In brief, copyright protection in the US moved from...

1790	28 years
1831	42 years
1909	56 years
1976	75 years, but intro of fair use exception
1790	28 years
1998 (anticipated in article)	95 years

Here's a pretty good image of the increases. Note that as things are moving, nothing after 1923 will ever hit the public domain if it's had copyright slapped on it.

Logie spends quite a bit of time exploring the way fair use works, showing the history behind the prohibition of copying more than 10% of a work for scholarly purposes, and how even fair use is dwindling in scope. There's also a decent amount of space devoted to the US signing the "Berne Convention" in 1989, which aligned the US even more closely with European copyright law, laws that traditionally favored "moral" or "natural rights" (ie, the individual's good). There's a New World Order critique feel to some of Logie's arguments, and they don't seem to be unwarranted.

Two points interesting enough to point out even in my fatigued state...
1.) Logie says that with copyright in at least one case [of Salinger's heirs stopping a biography based on Salinger's own letters (note that the Times piece contradicts Logie a bit, I think)] protecting the "content" of writings, even when the author no longer owns the artifacts, that "no student-authored text should ever be used for illustration or critique without the express permission of the student author, and this permission should probably be in writing, to protect the teacher" (140).

To get around this issue, Logie suggests that, "Securing written permission can be accomplished quickly with a blanket form distributed on the first day of class." This sort of grenading an anthill bothers me, and we should feel it important to let students know the importance of thinking critically about signing such overly-broad gifts of their works unknown even to them at the time of their conveyance. Logie's suggestion is horribly selfish, and contradicts completely with the tone of the balance of the piece.

2.) This overly strict protection of copyrighted artifacts has, I believe, given rise to the open source/free software and related movements, which essentially appropriate copyright in an attempt to actively mandate a new sort of public domain. Though the public domain is still netting a loss with the overly long copyright terms in the US now (really, should Combat on the Atari 2600 still be copyrighted? Steamboat Willie?), novel licensing schemes like the GPL are starting to reveal in very very specific sections of larger industries (like computer operating system kernels) the powers of making "progress" public.

wow. much too tired to continue. apologies.

Thoreau and the pencil making process

2008-09-03T12:32:00.005-04:00

(note to self: post *after* reading entire articles)

Thoreau didn't make his own pencil in some primitive fashion. He worked at his father's factory.

http://www.cyberbee.com/henryhikes/thoreau.html

Check out the movies and picture.

In any event, what HDT is talking about isn't to shun technology, but to live deliberately. Let me recommend Material Faith to get a better idea of Thoreau's take on "science".

More from Walden, contextualizing Baron's quote:

They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers [think Secretariat -R] ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

Deliberate, not ludological. Here's the next paragraph.

One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

quick quotes from Kim

2008-09-03T12:04:00.000-04:00

1343
Current e-education systems were built in a centralized environment (Dalsgaard, 2006; Rick & Lamberty, 2005; Weingardt, 2004) in which students need to visit a major hub site (e.g., Blackboard) to participate in communication. Therefore, students have no clue whether discussion is initiated and in progress on the hub site unless they receive a notice or regularly visit the site.

The claim of a client-server bias against students participating was an interesting thread through the article. The implicit argument seems to be that giving students the feeling of ownership in their blog(s) invites more contributions and builds community, recommending a distributed p2p style sharing instead. Certainly a sort of very basic digital structuralism.

Yet the p2p style also works at cross purposes in the sense that it makes the blogs' use more time intensive for the instructor.

So take for instance...

1346
It was discovered that 94% of the students often checked an online communication site to see whether their own posts were replied to by other peer students.

The follow up on comments is where there's no real, built-in support inside of blogs to ensure that comments develop into sustained conversations, letting other students know when a post has received them (that is, if Student A comments on Student B's blog, Student B might be alerted, but Student C most likely isn't). This is where the instructor comes in, who needs to find comments and raise those conversations in class.

Doing so would be one heck of a time intensive task for instructors. it could be automated, but that would require a great deal of coordination and upfront prep time from instructor. if different blog engines are used, that only complicates the matter of coordinating comments, yet the ability to use many engines likely contributes a bit towards that ownership for students from the first quote and, in many cases, plays on familiarity, an important issue when one deals with "non-technical Internet users".

1347
A blog is regarded as easy-to-use in terms of publishing on the Web (Divitini et al., 2005; Lin & Yuan, 2006). In the early blogging days, the late 1990s, bloggers were required to manually code their blogs by hand (Du & Wagner, 2006). However, current blog technology supports users to easily publish contents with various blogging tools (Herring, Scheidt, Wright, & Bonus, 2005). Bloggers no longer suffer from writing HTML code. As a result, the blogging phenomenon might be positively influenced by the easy-to-use that is facilitated with blogging support tools, such as user-friendly editors, permalink, trackback, blogroll, and alert system of other bloggers’ comments

I'd still argue that to be a particularly adept blogger requires understanding and using these skills. Let's not say that bloggers "suffer" from html; it is another resource for online composition. If the html code of blogging has gone RAD (rapid application development), like Visual Basic did with coding for Windows, then there are strengths and weaknesses there... yet even the image code for embedding images in blogger...

(long URLs made a little bit smaller so they don't wrap)
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_CsjDFY2tR5I/SL3vqtnU7CI/AAAAAAAAAb4/g_tgy8UoLA8/s1600-h/gears.jpg"> <img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_CsjDFY2tR5I/SL3vqtnU7CI/AAAAAAAAAb4/g_tgy8UoLA8/s320/gears.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5241609058407214114" /></a>

or slapping in a YouTube video...

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GV_uryFRPjY&hl=en&fs=1"></param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GV_uryFRPjY&hl=en&fs=1" t ype="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed> </object>

... remains pretty technical. The useage might be ctrl-a, ctrl-c, alt-tab, ctrl-v, but the code is naked.

It's also useful to more closely interrogate this quote:

In addition, a key feature of blogs is an open system. According to Hendrick and Kleiner (Hendrick & Kleiner, 2001, p. 24), the open system is defined as ‘‘a work system has permeable boundaries exposed to the environment in which they exist”.

again, what we're doing is playing on familiarity and habits to appropriate this "lesuire" activity and habitualized activity to increase engagment with academic materials.

There is a real imprecision with the use of the word "open" here. These are not so much open sites as sites/resources that allow interaction and have established standards for doing so... eg, YouTube contains by default ways of embedding videos in standard html code/web pages, as shown in the [really tiny font of the] example, above. This does not mean the content can be freely used or is open for editing, etc.

And for the final drive-by quote consideration...

1345
In addition, blogs facilitate a series of extended discussions beyond class meetings (Betts & Glogoff, 2004)

Is blogging to create these extended discussions a fair added responsibility for the students? Rather, how much should this be counted in the class requirements and how should other, conventional responsibilities be adjusted to "make up" for the resources spent here? Is a blog a week a short paper, or just note-taking? Different students will approach their blog with different conceptions of what the genre's compositional requirements are.

Us, the "unwitting purveyors of technology and technological literacy"?

2008-09-02T22:32:00.000-04:00

Though Selfe's chapter tends to be a useful critique in theory, it suffers from the same shortcomings of the system it is attempting to critique, namely in that it's no more specific in how to approach that useful subset of the topic of digital literacy it warns that we're all too likely to miss.

Technologies can be useful, and digital composition technologies do produce some advantages over the very useful composition technologies that preceded them. What needs to be done is to identify these advantages and to remove them from the cycle of consumerism Selfe implicates in government-sponsored initiatives to increase technological literacies. Ohmann has already explained the key to understanding "literacy" -- we are to substitute "measurable" or "quantifiable oppression" each time it appears in our readings. To expect the federal government to do more than use the discourse of literacy to hide its more popular discourse of pork should surprise no one.

It pained me the first time I heard the director of a mid-level government office say that its employees could rest assured they had done good work because a third of the office's budget had made its way to the private sector. This was not a qualified measurement, but the primary and, to start this speech I recall, only measurement of success. Politics as currently conceived requires such ugly practical measuring sticks.

The key, then, is to take the short-term given of the government's aid and to, as so many school districts do to some degree, leverage those discourses to benefit those that need the assistance.

Selfe's writing occasionally approaches a particularly ungainly tenor, where instead of identifying the advantages technology adds to her field of expertise, she simply repeats the mantra that its would-be users must be taught to think critically about it. What does this critical thinking look like? She also comes dangerously close to crossing the line between looking for examples of where technology and society intersect unfavorably and devolving into a speech about the inequities of race that can be reproduced generically in articles of most any topic regarding resources. At worst, Selfe implicitly links race with the inability to reach desirable, skilled employment -- what is the cause and effect in a statement like, "In other words, the poorer you are and the less educated you are in this country -- both of which conditions are correlated with race -- the less likely you are to have access to computers and to high-paying, high-tech jobs in the American workplace" (101)? This is not a reason to devalue technological, digital literacy, but another reason to define its practical advantages and ensure not that we (and who is this "we," again?) "provide free access to computers for citizens at the poverty level and citizens of color", but instead that our educational institutions intelligently foreground those advantages alongside the oppressive flipside of consumerism to every student, irrespective of race or class.

(And where is the government's "narrowly defined" version of literacy? The issue is, again, that it's too broad!

By "technologically literate," this document [from Richard Riley's office of the Secretary of Education] refers to the use of computers not only for the purposes of calculating, programming, and designing, but also for the purposes of reading, writing, and communicating...

Is that all? ;^D)

The real key to introducing students to the advantages of digitally aided composition is to remove the dependence of platform on consumption and obsolescence. The digital educational platform must be standardized and resist obsolescence. Ironically, the most technical fields are the ones that require the least consumable resources; programming a computer can be done with older computers and a free operating system. There is little to nothing stopping anyone from learning to program C or Java on five-year old, even ten year-old hardware. Nearly the same can be said for composition. AbiWord runs on a number of older systems, and contains all the benefits of what's now traditional digital composition -- grammar and spell check tools, an easily accessed thesaurus, and trouble-free error correction. What's really changed with word processors over the last twenty years beyond the hardware required the run them, attempts at subscription models, and the intersection of new file formats with copyright?

The question is how to define such a stable, obsolescence-resistant platform. The One Laptop Per Child project might provide one, albeit arbitrary, possible model platform.

Regardless, the keys for digital composition should be to identify those advantages and to teach them to students outside of the influence and control of a commercialized, consumerized state of being, and then to repeat the process with other professionalizations. If schools can be a place where students learn to take computerized resources for granted, there is no reason to imprint the need for unnecessary hardware and software "refreshes". Teach digital goods as durable goods. It's surprisingly how widely that conception proves tenable and useful.

The question is how to find digital expertise interested in the issues of composition that can create such a stable platform.

Okay, well, it's too late and I need some sleep. Back for more, hopefully more cognizant tripe tomorrow.

Projecting your hopes for adequacy [as an instructor]

2008-08-26T14:33:00.000-04:00

It will likely already come as no surprise that I'm a fan of the general thread that cuts through Ohmann and Hawisher/Selfe. Technology is a conduit for (and represents a excursion by) the corporation into what was once an independent space -- the corporation now more precisely presented as the especially complex proxy for monopoly capital (though I'm not sure I found the "monopoly" in monopoly capital beyond its ability to put business processes for a product, cradle to grave, under one roof, smartly anticipating the success of Wal-Mart as uberretailer of products created by those vertical monopolies). Both of these readings clearly recognize the importance of delineating the weaknesses of ye olde proverbial computer age, something academics as loath to do. (Good list of bank teller, "junior secretary," "check-out clerks," "fast-food counter" workers", etc on Ohmann 27.)

But why are academics loath to talk badly about technology? Why the "uncritical enthusiasm that frequently characterizes the reports of those of us who advocate and support electronic writing classes" (Hawisher/Selfe 36)? I'll pretend it's the same reason so many are addicted to pills; they project the shadow of their problems onto technology in the mistaken belief that believing in technology's potential can fix what's wrong in the traditional classroom. Hawisher/Selfe start to unveil the mistaken projection in the answers to their "lengthy open-ended questionnaires to writing instructors" given "At the 1988 Conference on Computers in Writing and Language Instruction." When asked "Do you prefer teaching writing with traditional methods or with computers? Why?", their respondents' "comments are remarkably similar to the published claims about the use of on-line conferences...", here meaning "electronic bulletin boards and conferences" (37-39).

The "remarkable similarity" is enabled because the statements have nothing to do with the technology, but everything to do with the perceived pitfalls of the current state of instruction being projected onto a digital snake-oil. Who doesn't constantly balance the desire for added "democratization," pupils who "work collaboratively," improved conference time, and a "student-centered" learning experience against the demands of ensuring students receive [self-sanctioned?] exposure to and practice with course content? who get to As Hawisher/Selfe remark, "the change [to a better classroom] will not happen automatically in the electronic classroom any more than in a traditional classroom" (44). There is nothing inherently emancipating about digital techs, as their description of the digital classroom that "can actually be used to dampen creativity, writing, intellectual exchanges" (41) shows. It's frightening to see how easily the genre of academic composition pedagogy can adopt the characteristics of sales literature. (An interesting (but impractical) experiment would be to create some analog technology with a similar buzz and see what happens... I'm sure there are many, like new book editions that are heavily recycled from the old.)

Again, digital text is, currently, much more dynamic than manuscript or typed text, but still falls several orders of magnitude below the interaction that's possible through face-to-face contact. As Dr. Keyton illustrated in her class last night (with a few apologies), "If you're homesick for your spouse, do you want an email, phone call, YouTube, or personal visit?" Or, as she asked later, "Is it easier to lie online or face-to-face?" Trite, perhaps, but these two examples do a much better job than I can logically argue that the death of the analog instructor (and their analog methods) have met an overly exaggerated end.

(Hawisher and Selfe come very close to explicitly blaming the teachers. "Unfortunately, as writing instructors" we are all too likely "to perpetuate those values currently dominant within our culture" (35). The sentence construction there is particularly dense as they nearly make the claim that instructors are to blame, and is worth rereading. Careful hedging throughout, with a strange mix of pretty straight talk.)

Instead of believing in the panacea, it is more important to see what work we want technology to do in our classrooms. There are more than a few obvious tasks that can't help but appear more suited to digital technologies, though even Ohmann's quote of O'Shea and Self ("But there is a possibility that computers will be used to enhance the educational process and equip each learner with an exciting medium for problem-solving and individual tuition." (29)) seems to push tech to more liberating ends than necessary. Tech is good for (eg)...

* Creating digital end products
* Filing, saving, and commenting on student assignments
* Taking roll!
* Saving your own notes, A/V aids, etc to make re-teaching easier (insert standard concerns about becoming too fixed in your instruction, which I've found happens no more often with instructors with good notes than none at all)

Deskill the labor where the labor should be deskilled. There's no reason to pay tuition to pay instructors to file printed papers if they're comfortable with, eg, gmail and some flavor of tracking changes.

Finally, a very quick word about creating digital end products... If there was no call for a particular composition type's/medium's analog precursor, it's an interesting argument to explain why the digital versions are needed now. That is, do Powerpoints on Melville (or whatever -- nuclear fission) really make us more knowledgeable than our predecessors, or is it still more important to simply possess a critical mind, be well read, and be ready to participate in the professional conversation?

Corporate Composition

2008-08-26T09:15:00.001-04:00

(not directly reading specific)

I wonder how well the corporate university translates to composition in the English department. In, say, pulp and paper science and technology, there are certain methods that must be learned, and your choices are to learn them by running busiwork (visions of organic chemistry labs come to mind) or by running projects Georgia Pacific would like you to run. If Georgia Pacific can give you the cash for the lab and there is absolutely no functional change in the filler for your method learning, what's the harm? (Don't get me wrong -- I think the potential for undue influence is pretty clear, but the connection feels fairly innocuous in theory and, often, in praxis.)

What's the advantage for having corporations in the composition classroom? There are analogous situations to the hypothetical GP-subsidized methods labs that appear in English departments, as in using a "real" non-profit for your fundraising assignment and "donating" the end result. Even here, the activity owns its own politics and ethical issues when you find that passively using your authority to coerce students to write for a particular cause, even one "they" select, may not protect your class' minority (here simply meaning "not majority") interests particularly well. That is, those who don't like Amnesty International but feel the peer pressure and won't admit it could be forced into an ethical dilemma. Though the same could happen in Pulp & Paper (perhaps there's a tree-hugging plant (pun wasn't initially intended) taking the course to go into environmental law and they'd prefer not to help GP in any fashion), the rarity of a student's being placed in such an ethical hotspot, in large part because of the curriculum's design (engineering is conceived to help industry, duh), minimizes the social impact of such corporate involvement.

When English departments allow corporate involvement, they have changed their presentation and reasoning behind their traditional curriculum, which has not been quite so cozy with corporations (Puritan synods? Perhaps, but much more rarely GP). If it's okay to accept corporations into the English composition classroom, does the instruction remain English instruction? Perhaps in business writing or technical writing classes, but general composition?

Again, what's the pedagogical goal of composition? To be better writers, or to be better writers for the workplace? If the latter, what does the workplace look like? Does a land grant institution owe its students this workplace-based composition? How does workplace-oriented composition mesh with the goals of the English-as-literature department? What are the practical advantages for the students of teaching them corporate composition against teaching literary composition? Do they become better communicators? Writers? What is a writer? (etc, ad infinitum)

And how many drops of corporate support are necessary before a classroom moves from belle lettres to the letters of the acronyms of these new patrons? This, of course, is the question that lurks behind every high-tech addition to the classroom, of which I'll table discussion until later, but that is the question that popped up a bit for me during the first two readings I got to (CCCC Statement and Hrastinski & Keller) this week.

"Hybrid" lexicons at best

2008-08-25T14:52:00.000-04:00

There are three sections of the "CCCC Statement on Teaching, ..." that concern me a bit. Here they are, in the order that I'm typing them.

Adminstrators with responsibilities for writing programs will
...
2. assure that students off campus, particularly in distance learning situations, have access to the same library resources available to other students

In ENG 532, I think we're to call this an example of presupposition. Can we give off campus students "access to the same library resources available to other students"? Of course not, though the sentence assumes we can. At the same time, there is a presupposition that the library should become something that can be accessed as easily off-site as on. I'm convinced this is not a particularly laudable goal either.

There's a slippery slope to identify behind this wishful thinking. It's too easy to think of digital pedagogy as a cure-all for the relatively static character of printed text. Digital technologies do facilitate giving feedback, sometimes in real time, for composition, but we're still a long ways away from digital techs allowing the same dynamism allowed through face-to-face contact. That is, the interactivity of digital technologies falls between text and actual (legacy?) co-presence. The current state, in praxis, of the mediation inherent in digital communication is too strong for it to be considered anything resembling

I'm an old fogey. University should keep its own email.

2008-08-25T14:51:00.001-04:00

From UNC's student newspaper:

Google has created a new program specifically designed for college students. The education edition of Google Apps includes e-mail service in addition to applications like Google Calendar and Google Talk, an instant messaging service.
...
Unlike a campus e-mail service, Google Apps comes at no charge. Arizona State University, which switched to Google Apps two years ago, paid $400,000 a year to maintain their old system, Keltner said.

Well, why Google is interested in providing the service for the university makes perfect sense -- most will likely use Google's own web application to interface with email, and that means lots of ad revenue. And I suppose as long as you can use POP3 or IMAP to view your Google-hosted mail, I shouldn't complain.

Still, what are the chances that Google stands to net more than $400k a year from your students? That is, could the university not invest in making its own, ad supported online interface and come out ahead in the long run? I would prefer that capitalism kept its sorry grubby hands away from academia, even if the university made the cash -- as if a capitalistic state institution of higher learning were still an option.

Quick Wesch Critique

2008-08-25T14:50:00.000-04:00

Michael Wesch's youtube post is interesting in that it tries to make key distinctions between the use of traditional manuscript against the use of hypertext, but it's misleading in a number of ways I find particularly troubling. Let's be blog-a-rific and not compose these in any meaningful, synthesized way, and just list 'em out in the order they pop from the fingers.

1.) The fade from the white page of pencil to hypertext can be interpreted in one of two ways. The first is that there is a continuum between paper-manuscript and digital cultures, and the second is that there's a stark break. You watch as the actor moves from saying that digital text is different because it moves or can be changed in some strange way, but the editing continues until linking/hyperlinking/hypertext is settled on as the key distinction. Unfortunately what we just saw in the paper-manuscript suggestion was already doing a great job saying that this is not the case. There is no Web 1.0 or 2.0. Each set of technologies, whether keyboard, text editor and browser or pencil, paper, and printed page have their own means of remediating the dynamic functions depicted in that video. Read Heather Jackson's Marginalia and then tell me manuscript culture didn't have the same functionality as digital text. Both are compositional forms where the method of composition is the same as the method of publication, both typically allow avenues for easy coauthorship by readers/consumers/audiences, etc.

The differences seem obvious enough, and they are useful ones. Digital media (with enough infrastructure -- server/proc speed & RAM, software, bandwidth) can quickly scale to allow for "flash mobs'" worth of interest, for example, whereas books with particularly impressive marginalia are much harder to share with millions at once. Yet these are differences, not strengths deserving 1980's style synthesized background music promising intellectual liberation. One allowed for the flourishing of the Tuesday Club, and the other allowed for Matt Drudge. The real difference between the two is the ability to move from a controlled, known audience to a potentially anonymous one, which I often rant about when people try to argue that privacy has been lost online. It's not so much that any of this is privacy but the expectation of anonymity... what are the ramifications for culture whose cities include the potential to walk down the street arguing personal matters with your spouse knowing that the comments aren't likely to be heard by anyone which you know personally? It would seem digital communication is only now catching up with the changes in the gross urban populations that have increasingly become the rule. Certainly the community of the shared gossip fence has died (and the gossip has likely gone digital without it).

Which moves us from unearned break number one (as it becomes clear Wesch would rather argue a paradigm shift (meaning a quantum leap) between the abilities of paper-manuscript and digital text rather than something that does the same work differently) to unearned break number two -- the video's implication that HTML and XML are such totally different animals -- he trivially makes the case that you can't consider the format without the human behind it (a concept key for understanding any digital standard, like HTML, XML, and their SGML brethren), but the impression for the uninitiated is a dangerously misleading one, which I guess I'll talk about later. In brief. to say that HTML caused a static Web 1.0 and that XML allows for a dynamic Web 2.0 where form completely separates from content is horrendously oversimplistic. Makes for a groovy video, but does not, as presented, invite needed inquiry. (And as if Web 2.0 as currently conceived is an improvement...) It also tends to overlook that html was initially conceived as a means of providing markup whose display would be regulated by the way the browser's user set the preferences. I should find an older browser, but for now you can see a few vestiges in Netscape Communicator 4.77, which I had handy.

EDIT: Here's a picture from Netscape 2.02. The operative option is highlighted (and it's in v4 as well) -- "Always use mine."

-- I'd also add that one of the biggest changes from my undergrad days to today is the rigid policing of access to academic journals. Fifteen years ago, anyone could walk off of the street into their state university and have, within reason, the same journal access that their university professors had. Now, access to online journals are very carefully tracked, thanks to the power of databases and digital delivery/publication systems, and online-only subscriptions mean that access can be stolen away at any moment, shoved back into an exclusive virtual rare book room.