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Okay, after I've created accounts for my students in Movable Type and one of them changes her password and then forgets it, how do I get it back for her? Or how do I reset her password?
Update: MT-Medic did the trick for me.
Just thinking out loud: Let's say you're a blind person, and you would like to access public domain literature on the web, the kind of stuff that is made available to sighted readers by folks like Project Gutenberg or the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia (two very different enterprises, but you get my drift). You could acquire a screen reader program, which will read text out loud right off the screen. But let's say you want to hear it in a more 'natural' sounding voice, rather than in a somewhat robot-like voice.
KF writes of discovering a possible comment spammer technique: using Google to search for phrases like "remember info," "post a comment," "comment," etc. You know, the typical, default stuff that appears in the comments section of an MT-based blog.
So if you change these phrases to something non-standard, it seems you would be less likely to be hit by the automated scripts that search for them and then post comment spam.
Just a thought.
I don't mean to neglect you, dear reader, it's just that you'll get somewhat light blogging from me as I try to sort out the busyness of my life.
Link and comment: go check out the DISC website, which I helped create back in the MITH days along with Jason, Eric, and Amit Kumar. DISC "is an international, interdisciplinary, user-generated, digital forum providing support, collegial networks, and information that sustains a disability studies academic community and promotes disability studies in a humanities focus."
Disability studies and "adaptive technologies" should, imho, be the next big focus of digital studies and human-computer interaction in that this focus forces us to confront our own assumptions about how technology works to meet the needs (natural? culturally constructed?) of humans.
Plus I think there are some really cool gagdets in the future for all of us.
Dictionaraoke: "Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary."
Lots of stuff running through my head about my research into eighteenth-century Methodism and their communication practices, but I just can't get it into words on the blog right now. Still wrestling. Hopefully I'll be able to share and solicit feedback soon. I always appreciate when others do the same, like recent entries from Matt and Kari, even if I don't always have something to say in response. This kind of exchange is, I think, blogging at its best.
By the way, I'm also envious of all the bloggers palling around in Toronto this past weekend at the AOIR 2003 conference.
I've been enjoying reading Mike Watt's tour diary as he, Jerry Trebotic, and Pete Mazich (dubbed "The Secondmen") play some shows opening for the Flaming Lips and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's not exactly a blog, in that he does not use special software to update, but he does write dated entries pretty regularly and has been doing so for a number of years. He writes with a disarmingly personal voice and uses some cool lingo.
I keep meaning to write about this. Jeff's wife, Monique, is a vegetarian, a real one, not a fake one who eats fish, like I do. For their son, Sam, they bought some chicken nuggets shaped like little dinosaurs.
"Isn't that sort of disrespectful to the chicken?" Monique asked. "I mean, if you're going to give your life for someone else's food, shouldn't you at least get to look like yourself?"
As I have mentioned before, my friend KB did her Two-Day Colon Cancer March this weekend. Forty miles in two days. Woo-hoo!
Did any of you happen to catch Radiohead on the David Letterman show last night? Is it just me or did they seem kind of ... grumpy? Life is so hard when you are a financially successful, critically acclaimed musical group. Oh, the humanity! Maybe CNWB is right.
I used to be able to just power my way through a stack of papers, averaging one every 20 to 30 minutes. Now I find myself pausing to think about the point of the assignment for the umpteenth time, looking back at already graded papers to compare them to the one in front of me, re-reading the opening paragraphs. Have I lost my grading mojo?
Is grading papers always a grind? What kind of assignments in a literature class would result in papers that are not, first of all, likely to be downloaded off of the web and that, second, fully engage both halves of a student's brain? I try different things from one semester to the next. I'd like to assume that my students already know the mechanics of writing an essay, but often this is not the case, and this failure to construct, say, a fully developed paragraph gets in the way of my knowing what they are trying to say. I swing between concluding that some students just lack the necessary writing skills and concluding that I have failed to explain the assignment adequately.
I will say this, however: In the past I've been frustrated by what are supposed to be argumentative papers that instead provide detailed summaries of the text under consideration. This assignment, however unfamiliar it might be to students, is succeeding to varying degrees at getting them to focus on interpretation and the strategies of persuasion. I'd like them to see that one text might support multiple interpretations of a particular issue, but that this does not mean that anything goes. Some interpretations are better supported by textual evidence than others. Some are more persuasive than others. Some, finally, just don't hold water.
Sometimes I fear that I'm the only one who struggles with these teaching issues and that everyone else just effortlessly gets their students to write interesting, well-constructed essays and then just effortlessly glides through grading them. We usually talk the most about our successes, not what feel like our shortcomings.
Just ordered a bunch of Curious George books and the new Outkast release from Amazon.com. More later.
Never promise to blog more on a topic later, as this promise will hang over your head like the sword of... you know ... err... well, like a big sword. I'm well aware that I promised to have more to say about the film All the Real Girls, about Harold Love versus Adam Fox, about Rick Springfield, about the title of my book. And I never wrote up my thoughts on the film American Splendor.
Sorry! I hope to get to them at some point. For now, consider these promises rescinded.
Last night my guitar lesson was an hour long because the next student didn't show up and my teacher was on a roll. We covered a lot, and I'm not sure exactly how much I'm going to retain. Maybe thirty minutes is enough after all. It's interesting to be the student again after years without taking a class.
The scales have become much easier with practice. After twenty years or so of doing what I'm used to doing on the guitar, it's rewarding to learn how to do something new and actually be able to get better at it fairly quickly. One problem I hadn't anticipated, however, is a stiffness in my wrists. Like Matt, I've experienced repetitive strain injury from keyboard use, but never from playing the guitar. I want to nip this in the bud, so I'll be paying more attention to my posture, to warming up before I start playing with any speed, and to doing the stretching exercise my teacher taught me last night.
The exercise is a very graceful, yoga-like move in which you start with your hand curled into a fist in front of your heart and then gradually lower your arm, open and turn your fist, and raise your arm away from you until it is parallel to the ground with your palm away from you and your fingers pointing to the ground. The you drop your shoulder a bit and tilt your head in the opposite direction. You can feel the stretch from the tips of your fingers all the way to your shoulder.
I just posted this to C18-L, but I'll post it here, too, slightly revised:
I'm interested in discussions of why some texts in English print the word "God" as "G-d"? This occurs in Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews (1742), to name one example, and it was a student question with regard to this text that provoked my interest. I understand that the name of God is treated with great respect by some religious traditions such that they will not commit it to writing, which could be destroyed or damaged.
I understand, for example, that some interpret the third commandment given in the Book of Exodus in this way, but clearly not all who consider it imperative to follow the ten commandments do. Why would printing the word "God" be considered a violation? Imagine, for instance, that one printed "All praise be to God" or "May God forgive us." In what ways would these be considered using God's name in vain? If it's acceptable to say these things, why is it unacceptable to print them? And why is using instead the hardly indecipherable "G- d" considered a loophole?
...and sometimes it might be a combination of things.
I'm feeling a bit better about my students' papers after talking with my classes this week. I make a habit of doing "mid-semester course evaluations" and then talking over the results with my students. We covered writing assignments during this discussion. When I went back over how the different writing assignment for the course are related (something I had already done at the beginning of class but, well, we all know how fleeting those initial moments of explanation are), I could see little light bulbs turning on above some of their heads. The first thing I'm having them do is an adaptation of an assignment used in the University of Maryland's freshman writing program: "What are the issues?"
Rather than make an argument themselves, students must write up an analysis of class discussion of a particular text. They are to identify the issues that emerged, the claims that were made with regard to a particular issue, and the arguments used to support those claims.* At the beginning of the semester, I talked about these elements of discussion and instructed them to be aware of what was going on as we talked about class texts. However, I did not continue to put these elements in the foreground, assuming students would remember to keep them in mind, and this may have been a mistake.
This is the first time I've ever tried anything like this in a literature class, and I suspect most students have never been asked to write anything like this. I believe their unfamiliarity with the assignment is why these first papers are not as good as one might hope. I'm not just trying to teach them content or interpretation but also argumentation, and I think what might be their inertia in taking seriously the idea that argumentation is important might come from the weight of previous classes in which (I'm assuming based on no evidence) less emphasis was placed on that particular skill.
I had written previously about coming up with a framework "[t]o give students (and myself) a clearer framework for understanding how they can participate and are participating in a class discussion." A valuable follow-up discussion ensued. However, I did not import this framework into the classroom in part because it seemed like it might be too cumbersome. Maybe I should rethink that.
Jason writes, "I'm sure you've communicated your expectations, but could their subsubstandard work be a product of poor writing skills?" I think to some extent, yes, there are those who have poor writing skills, and this is evident in their writing. The biggest problem ususally being short, undeveloped paragraphs and a lack of coherence between one paragraph and the next. However, it is also apparent that some of them just did not get the assignment. They reported on what the different issues were, and perhaps also what claims were made, but they provided no analysis whatsoever of the effectiveness of the arguments underlying those claims. So it is at the level of analysis that I need to provide more instruction, I believe. In other words, to answer Francois' question, the difficulty lies in "shifting from reporting or describing a position, to analysis." I was off the mark in describing the problem being that the papers read like the students didn't care about them when they wrote them; that's really not the issue.
Finally, I've decided that there is some value in assigning a paper that puts students off their balance, that confuses them to some extent. When you assign a paper of the type that students have written many times before, there are two risks. First, they might say, "Oh, yes. This. I've seen this before." and write a pro forma fulfillment of the assignment. Second, there are more likely to be many examples of such papers online, waiting for download and submission. I doubt that either of these is likely to happen with this first assignment.
* The next assignment will be to find a recent scholarly article on one of the texts we've read and provide a summary and analysis (again: what issue is at stake? what claim or claims are made? what arguments are used?). The final assignment is to write a longer paper in which they themselves make an argument regarding one or more of the texts we've read. They are all connected in that they are meant to build an awareness of what kinds of issues are relevant to literary studies and what kinds of argumentation are most effective.
You might remember my anxiety concerning the Krispy Kreme donut location on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta. Well, it has re-opened. 24-hour drive-through window, baby.
Hot donuts now!
Two of my colleagues are earning recognitition lately. Bob Stewart has been named the Best Local Writer by KC's alternative newsweekly, The Pitch. And Michelle Boiseau's newly published collection of poetry, Trembling Air, will be celebrated at a party Monday night at The Writers' Place (3607 Pennsylvania).
I was talking to a friend about teaching, and in the context of his experience in the classroom he quoted a comedian's line about doing stand-up: "It's never them." In other words, if you bomb, it's your fault.
So far this semester, I have difficulty getting students to write good papers, by which I mean papers that feel like the students cared about them when they wrote them. Class discussions are great, and then the papers come in and ... not so great. What am I doing wrong? I can provide more information if anyone wants to engage in a dialogue about this.
How do you get your students to write good papers?
T-Bone Burnett is perhaps now best known as the producer of the soundtrack to the film O Brother Where Art Thou?, but he's had a long career as not only a producer of other people's music but a musician in his own right. From what I've read, he's a pretty devout Christian (see, for example, this article). I do not share his faith, but I find that his spiritual concerns emerge in his lyrics in interesting ways. Some time in college I picked up a bargain-bin cassette copy of his 1983 album Proof Through the Night, which now appears to be out of print, unfortunately. I can't find the cassette, and I can't find transcriptions of the songs online online, so I'm trying to remember what they sounded like and figure them out from memory. It's a great album. If Elvis Costello had more of a country sound, this is perhaps an album he'd make, and the track "Shut it Tight" is one of my all-time favorites:
I find it hard sometimes to say the way that I feel
I do the very things I hate to do
I act like a child and I'm afraid of what is real
And so I try to cover up the truth
I stumble like a drunk along this crazy path I walk
I have a hundred thousand questions too
I'll go to any length to prove that nothing is my fault
Then later on I will deny the proof
I don't like to win but then again I hate to lose
And in between is something I can't stand
I don't care what you think and I hope that you approve
I am just an ordinary man
Sometimes I want to stop and crawl back into the womb
And sometimes I cannot tell wrong from right
But I ain't gonna quit until I'm laid in my tomb
And even then they better shut it tight
As I've said before, I need to work on patience. I hate to fail. I hate to feel mediocre. I hate to be rusty. But I try to step outside my comfort zone and do things I do not yet do well. It's the only way to get better. This takes humility, in addition to patience. I'm thinking about my teaching, my research, my guitar playing, my meditation ... my life in general.
I'm thinking about this, in part, from reading Edith Frost, an honest-to-goodness working musician, blog about practicing:
I need the practice, for my voice and my hands too. My left hand gets really shaky trying to hold the chords down. I'd be worried about arthritis except that it's always been that way when I haven't been practicing.
And Liz Lawley has been blogging her frustration in writing a paper for an upcoming conference:
There are so many people out there who have said what I want to say better than I can say it myself. And I’m by turns left appreciative, envious, grateful, bitter, and enriched by what they say ... But the problem with reading wonderful things, for me, is that they often don’t inspire me to greatness. Instead they leave me wanting to get down on the floor and cry out “I’m not worthy!” Which probably isn’t a terribly healthy response.
I appreciate the frankness found in other people's blogs because it teaches me that I'm not the only one who faces these issues. I sometimes worry that writing about when I'm feeling down or frustrated will create a negative image of me. But the other side is that someone reading my blog might find encouragement in my working through issues that they are also experiencing.
Finally, there's this bit from the Bonny 'Prince' Billy tour diary, in which readers send him questions to answer:
q: I am teaching myself keyboad and guitar. I feel that I have a good ear. I am 34 years old and consider music to be good therapy. What I would like to know is some pointers on how to be better disciplined with practice and to keep my fingers from getting tied up together when playing.
a: trust that every time you practice you are getting better; it will seem just as hard because the challenges will grow proportionate to your ability.
I like how the answer ignores the part of the question about "discipline" and instead emphasizes self confidence and optimism. Just keep doing it. Trust that you're getting better.
Original entry and discussion to be found below the following.
Edit (June 7, 2004): I have my word. I am a word.
Edit (May 24, 2004): Wow. I spent an hour talking with a reporter from the Associated Press about my involvement in Jackson's project. I gave him contact information for several people to talk to, including Rob Poulos. I also tried to emphasize the ways in which "Skin" engages with cultural anxieties about permanence and impermanence, and that these anxieties are heightened in a digital age, where words seem to vanish from the screen as soon as we shut down our electronic reading devices. I brought up William Gibson's Agrippa, the disappearing digital poem, as an example of an earlier work engaging with the same kinds of anxieties. I discussed the recent increase in scholarly attention to the material forms that writing takes and has taken, explaining that when I wrote to Jackson I expressed my interest in becoming a word for "Skin" in terms of the experimental forms pioneered by William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
As of this writing, the article has appeared in USA Today, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Kansas City Star, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Sun Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Omaha World Herald, The Seattle Post Intelligencer, The Miami Herald, The San Jose Mercury News, The San Diego Union Tribune, Salon.com, The Indianapolis Star, The Daily Times (Pakistan), New York Newsday, The Orlando Sentinel, The Tuscaloosa News, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and several other newspapers.
But when the article came out, my name wasn't even mentioned. I'll think twice before I invest that much energy in speaking with a reporter again.
Original entry: Have you already read about this?
Writer Shelley Jackson invites participants in a new work entitled "Skin." Each participant must agree to have one word of the story tattooed upon his or her body ... From this time on, participants will be known as "words". They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.
Wow. I have to say that I'm very tempted to participate.
Lots of conversation about teaching. Some duck observation. Some incompetent bowling. Such was my sojourn in the Ozarks.
Oh, I also had this ... interesting conversation:
So, you're a vegetarian?Uh-huh.Well, what do you eat?Anything but meat.Do you eat chicken?!!!I return to KC with a head full of responsibilities and deadlines. Oh dreary Sunday, do not taunt me with your blue skies and sunshine.
As the sun comes over the roof of my apartment building and, descending towards the west, warms the windows, the frames creak and pop as their temperature changes and they expand. My cat gets to nap all day, but in all likelihood he's probably a bit bored.
When I said I was going away "this weekend," I should have said "Thursday through Saturday." I'll be away from the blog (and email) for a few days.
Unless I find a terminal at the retreat. In which case I'll provide you with breathless, up-to-the-minute updates.
Word is that the title of the Sonic Youth song "Teenage Riot" (off of 1988's epic Daydream Nation) was inspired by an offhand comment from J. Mascis, then of Dinosaur Jr.
I recently stumbled online across his latest musical project: J. Mascis and the Fog. You can download a few free and legal mp3s from Epitonic ("Same Day" is particularly good) and a whole lot more from their official website. If you're a fan of non-stupid riff-heavy rock, this is the music for you.
I'm not sure if having these mp3s now makes me more or less likely to buy a CD, but I think I'm more inclined to go check out the album featuring "Same Day." There's nothing like this being played on the radio right now, so I don't know how else I would have heard this. Major record labels and commercial radio are clearly now just an irritating appendage to music, rather than something that fulfills any sort of useful function. Well, I guess this has always been the case, but it's only gotten worse. I hear the same dozen songs or so over and over and over. And as I've said before, it's not that I'm a snob about popular music, but why are we forced to hear such a limited range of artists and styles? It's frustrating.
So check out Epitonic, a website that bills itself as "your source for cutting edge music" and find something you otherwise might not have heard.
By the way, Mascis' guitar of choice appears to be a Fender Jazzmaster, but I did find a picture of him playing a Telecaster, albeit one that's a lot more glammed up than mine. Strangely, there's something reassuring about musicians you dig playing the same instrument as you (e.g. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood plays a Tele that looks a lot like mine). Silly, I know.
I've not received any comment spam (or abusive comments) in my blog, but I've seen that others have. I did get a pneis enlrgaement* spam comment in one of my course blogs, but nothing here. In response to this phenomenon, which several people have been writing about lately, Matt thoughtfully asks a broader question about comments in general: do they skew how a blog is read? "[T]here’s a way in which open comments on every post alters the reception of the blog as a whole: the worth of an entry is implicitly measured by how many comments it garners." Can we do without them, he wonders, relying instead on TrackBack? Of course, then maybe we'd just switch to an (un)conscious system by which an entry's worth is related to the number of TrackBacks it receives. Anyway, it's this kind of questioning that keeps me returning to Matt's blog: comment spam leads to a larger consideration of the effect of comments versus TrackBacks on reading practices, or posting "hot" and then editing leads to the coining of a new term, "blog flutter." Some of us are more suited for digital studies than others. Comments like these evidence Matt's admirable acumen for digital studies.
However, I would ask also whether the number of comments (or TrackBacks) an entry garners affects how it's written. I received no comments on my course proposal entry or on my ASECS paper proposal. I'm not complaining, mind you, it's just that I have this sense that the autobiographical stuff I write is of more interest to you, dear reader, than the entries about my teaching and research. So while lately I've been feeling like I should be writing what I tend to refer to as "substantial" entries (about, as my banner describes, "literature, technology, culture, education, academia") as opposed to what I refer to instead as "self-indulgent autobiography," I assume that many readers come to the blog for the latter more than for the former. Or for a mix of the two.
I'm still not ready to "out" myself as a blogger to the C18 community, which might lead to a different kind of community of readers on my blog. We'll see.
*intentional misspelling to avoid undesired google hits
You might think that there is no posh resort in the Ozarks. You would be wrong. (Wait a minute. I live near the Ozarks?) This is where I'll be this weekend, taking part in the first retreat of a year-long Missouri University System program called "New Faculty Teaching Scholars."
