Two things:
I have a rough idea for something interesting. We will have Teaching Carnival Raw to go along with Teaching Carnival Cooked. What's Teaching Carnival Raw, you ask? Well, I'll use Feed Digest to grab a bunch of RSS feeds, mix them all together, and present them on a constantly and automatically updated page, just links and very brief descriptions. You can contribute to the Raw feed. Here's how:
Anyone have additional or alternate suggestions for doing this?
Carnival? Raw? Cooked? Wow, that's a really badly mixed metaphor. I'm open to suggestions for alternate naming.
I've noticed that people like Scott and Chuck are posting entries about their fall courses. Inspired by the genre represented by the History Carnival, I'd like to propose a monthly or bimonthly Teaching Carnival.
Although I'm not teaching this semester, focusing instead on my research, I'll host the first one on September 1 and then call for volunteers to host subsequent ones.
Any teaching issues are fair game, regardless of discipline.
If you would be so kind, gmail non.zombie with any blog entries you have written, are writing, or will write about teaching. Be sure to include "Teaching Carnival" in the subject line.
Please forward and link as appropriate.
markmcb writes "It seems that teachers may have a new way to boost classroom participation using a device called a clicker. A clicker is a small handheld device that allows its user to wirelessly respond to various prompts selected by a teacher. So when a teacher wants opinions on topics that people tend to shy away from like sex, religion, and politics, the question can be asked and the students can answer anonymously via the clicker. Everything from a simple poll to a graded quiz can be conducted using the device. In the age of cell phones and wireless computers such a technology is likely to be well-received by students, but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues."
So after you've contracted document OCD, how do you manage all the information you collect on your hard drive? Here are some useful software tools:
In sum, as any scholar of writing, reading, and publishing will tell you, the tools we use to read and write matter a great deal.
Addendum: I really wish that more academic books were available as e-books. This would not only make it easier for me to carry them around with me wherever I take my laptop (thus reducing the strain on my shoulder), but it would also pull them into what is now essentially a fulltext database on my laptop.
[composed and posted with Ecto.]
A couple of grad students at my alma mater recently wrote entries that got me thinking about tools and practices for keeping track of your research, writing, and thinking.
A few months ago, Steven Johnson wrote about the ways in which technology facilitates not only his writing, but his thinking. Now that I've started to use--in addition to a word processor--some tools for searching, organizing, and outlining, I'm really beginning to experience what he's getting at.
Below are some obsessive-compulsive suggestions for maximizing the accessibilty of your notes and documents. You should only adopt as many of these (if any) as you think might be helpful. They are only meant to be the means to help you in your research and teaching. Do not let them become an end in themselves.
Now, do I maintain this OCD system of organization? Well...no. But isn't it lovely to think so?
[composed and posted with Ecto.]
I've been thinking about writing a post on digital archives, commercialization, scholarship, teaching, and access, but Ray Rosenzweig, in "Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely" (Chronicle, sub req'd) has pretty much beaten me to it. Although Rosenzweig's focus is on teaching, he brings up a central concern of mine, namely the cost of commercial offerings of digitized cultural heritage resources: if my university cannot afford to subscribe, then my scholarship and my teaching (i.e. my students' education) are going to suffer.
Continue reading "there are archives, and then there are archives" »
A variety of things to keep you occupied this morning:
Boing Boing links to a website that started as a project by one of my students in Introduction to Humanities Computing at Maryland in 2001. Jenny Miller hits the Boing Boing big time!
An anonymous correspondent asks me to post the following:
I need feedback on a course that's not going very well this semester. I have a small class of young, very quiet students. Some of them spend the entire class fidgeting and apparently thinking about something else; my perception of their states of mind might be distorted, but I'm put off by the fact that they don't make a lot of eye contact. Rather than ask questions about the content of the course, engaging with the subject matter, they are always (take "always" with a grain of salt) asking the same sorts of questions about assignments: "I'm confused. What are we supposed to do again? I don't understand what you want. Why are we doing this?" I've taught this course a half-dozen times, and I've never had this much difficulty teaching it before. The assignments are explained in detailed handouts and by me in class discussion.
Yesterday, my buttons got pushed towards the end of class when I was trying to talk about one of the projects they're working on, and and a couple of students chimed in with "I'm confused. Why are we doing this? What do we get out of completing this?" I was quiet for a bit, looking down at my hands and then said, with ten minutes left until the end of class, "Okay, I think that's enough for today." I knew I was either going to dismiss them early or I was going to say something I'd regret.
Is there any way to salvage this course? Do I address what happened yesterday at the end of class? We have about 5 weeks left. I've tried to address their engagement (or lack thereof) with the course material before but without success. They're not surly or anti-intellectual, just more obsessed with grades than with actually learning. I'd appreciate any advice.
So...any thoughts?
Okay, academic blogosphere, correct me if I'm wrong. Here's an email I sent to my students:
On Tuesday, we talked about incorporating quotations into your papers. Many of you thought that a quote could be a complete sentence within quotation marks, without being incorporated into one of your own sentences.
I said, instead, that you should make a quotation part of one of your own sentences, and that your sentence should introduce, explain, or provide context for the quotation.
Take a look at section 3.7 of the MLA Handbook (6th edition), which says, "You must construct a clear, grammatically correct sentence that allows you to introduce or incorporate a quotation with complete accuracy" (109). Look also at all of the examples of the use of quotations in that section.
I'm not dreaming, am I? When quoting someone else in an essay, you do not simply plunk the quotation down between two sentences of your own composition, even if those sentences explain the importance of your quotation. You have to incorporate the quotation into one of your own sentences in a grammatically correct fasion fashion...right?
My students were adamant that I am wrong.
Those of us grumbling about our students as the semester ends might want to read this.
Ok, MovableType 3 has been installed, and Palimpsest is back up and running on the CHLT server. Those of you who had accounts under the old installation should be able to log in as usual; if you have trouble, please let me know. Those of you who would like to contribute to Palimpsest, send your preferred username and password to my wordherders address. Please help spread the word of this site's existence where you can.
And if you'd like to volunteer to help out with the design, let me know about that, too.
I'd like to hear from others about their experience using instant messaging as a means of interacting with students (or with professors, if you are a student). I put my IM info on all my syllabi, and I tell my students that if they catch me logged in, they can ask me questions, discuss assignments, or just talk about whatever they like. I'm logged in pretty frequently, and I find that I interact with students much more in this way than during live, in-person office hours.
Now, when I was an undergrad myself, I never made use of professors' office hours: there just never seemed to be a good reason. It seems that I was not unusual given that my students now don't really drop by very often, either. So I'm wondering:
All previous Palimpsest posts have been imported right here.
I'm working on getting this site going again. Maybe it will be back up on the CHLT server, and maybe it will be somewhere else. I'm doing a test run of TypePad.
The downside of TypePad is this: in order to have multiple authors, you need to get the "pro" account, which costs $14.95 a month. If I could get 11 participants to each pay $14.95 along with me, then we'd have a year of edu-blogging ready to go. What do you say? Alternately, do any of you know of other hosting solutions that would be cheaper?
Regardless of where Palimpsest ends up, I hereby solicity additional participants. It does not matter how experienced a teacher you are. It does not matter if this is your first semester teaching as a grad student, or your 30th semester teaching as a full professor. Let me know if you're interested.
I'll be teaching English 225 again in the Spring, an Honors Program section with an Academic Service Learning component.
I intend to focus the class on Kansas City history with special attention placed upon race and neighborhoods. Students will fulfill their ASL requirements by taking oral histories from current and former residents of the neighborhood(s) bounded by 49th Street, 63rd, the Paseo, and Oak Street. I don't yet have a full syllabus or a description, but I'll use my blog as a placeholder for relevant links as I work on the course design.
"You asked a really thoughtful and nuanced question, and I totally screwed up by making a stupid and inappropriate joke that was meant to be at my expense but wasn't, and I'm very sorry."
Well, one person has asked, anyway. Palimpsest is the teaching blog I started in January of this year. The server upon which it resides was hacked and subsequently taken offline. Word is that it should be up by the end of this week.
In other words, you can all breathe easy again.
Both of my classes had exams last week. Here what they looked like:
Here's the graduate seminar I'll be teaching next semester:
Literary scholar Nicholas Hudson has recently repeated media theorist Marshall McLuhan's assertion that "European intellectuals achieved a clear perception of 'orality' only after their own world had been engulfed in print." In the middle of the eighteenth century, British actor and elocutionist Thomas Sheridan wrote with amazed respect about "the power which words acquire, even the words of fools and madmen, when forcibly uttered by the living voice." For Sheridan, as for many of his contemporaries, the speech of preachers, politicians, actors, barristers, and even everyday people was a threatening and unruly force compared to the presumably ordered presentation of information through writing and print. The spoken word had been an essential part of human communication for thousands of years, yet the advent of the printed word and widespread literacy in eighteenth-century Britain dramatically reoriented attitudes towards speech. Students in this course will consider just how "clear" the perception of orality might have been among literate people in this period as they study developments in oral and literate practice in eighteenth-century Britain. We will learn what scholars have had to say about orality and literacy, and we will read the works of eighteenth-century poets, dramatists, rhetoricians, clergymen, and cultural commentators.
Course requirements will include class presentations, a take-home exam, an annotated bibliography, and a final research paper building upon the research completed for the annotated bibliography. This course will be rewarding to students interested in the eighteenth century, literary history, rhetoric, media studies, cultural studies, and critical literacy studies.
I'm not a rhetorician by trade, but I play one on the Internet. Making my work public, I share with you an email I sent to my class on the three rhetorical appeals. If you'd rather read someone who really knows what he's talking about, go here.
On Thursday, we'll start discussing the three rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. So I'm going to do a quick explanation here and we'll talk about it in more detail in class. When a speaker or writer (referred to from now on as a rhetor) is trying to persuade the audience, the rhetor will make use of various persuasive strategies:
Okay, I could use some feedback, if you don't mind. Do these instructions lack anything? I'm asking my comp students to do some blogging this semester. Any suggestions for revision?
Back in February, KF posted a question to Palimpest: "How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they've read the whole thing?"
I have the opposite question, I suppose: When you've assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?
In my course on "Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing," we're reading a good many secondary articles here at the beginning of the course (like Darnton and Feather). Discussion is going pretty well, but I feel like we're perhaps moving a bit too quickly through the material and that we might not be doing it justice.
One way I try to frame discussion is through some basic questions:
So what do you do?
[Cross-posted at Palimpsest.]
I gave a 5-question quiz in one of my classes today, and every single student did poorly. Let me rephrase that: every single student failed. This was not a difficult quiz, which leads me to hypothesize that the problem is that students just aren't doing the reading, although it might indicate that they are having trouble with the material. They were assigned "What's a blog?" at Blogger and this basic "Introductory Guide to HTML." Very simple stuff. Additionally, the course text covered 16 different tactics of definition for an upcoming essay they'll write in which they define a term. Consider these questions:
Most students simply left these questions blank, not even attempting an answer. Part of me feels like it's a problem of motivation. It's easy to think that the first couple of weeks are simply time to coast. "We're not really doing anything important, yet." Then a quiz comes along. "Oh! You wanted us to actually read that stuff?"
However, I need to check in with the students during my next class to see what's going on. I'll point out the universal failure and ask their thoughts on the results. The biggest mistake a teacher can make is to assume one's own infallibility.
Via Slashdot: jefu writes "This NY Times story talks about the kinds of papers that students might find (and buy) on the web. It also mentions turnitin.com a site that will scan papers and attempt to determine if it was copied. The article uses 'The Great Gatsby' as an example and notes that for the time it takes to read the book and write a paper, buying a paper seems a poor tradeoff. However, many books (or required papers) involve much more work on the part of the student, so the question becomes that much more difficult. If you have to do a report on 'Ulysses' it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book - let along understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it."
The discussion is interesting. I just like to see Slashdot readers argue about something directly related to my line of work, as in this entry I posted back in January.
I would like to try something different than MovableType for online communication involving my classes this fall. MT is great, but it's more complicated than is necessary for students who are required just to log on, type in an entry, and log out. Also, MT makes adding and editing the permissions of new weblog authors very tedious and time consuming. For me, two desired characteristics of an alternative software are that it must not require MySQL, because the server I have access to does not have it, and it should allow students to sign up for their own accounts, so I don't have to do that work. Drupal would be nice, but it was designed for MySQL (although it will work with PostgreSQL); I don't want to have to monkey around for hours to make it work. I also like WordPress because the interface is very much like a simple wordprocessor, but again, it needs MySQL.
Suggestions?
Update: After more coffee, I remembered this "Blog Software Breakdown," which I had referenced back in May. My ideal system would have flat-file data storage and open registration. Blojsom, MovableType, and Pivot meet the first requirement. Of these, only Blojsom meets the second requirement.
Update 2: Okay, Blojsom requires "Java 1.4 Servlet 2.3/JSP 1.2-compliant app server (e.g. Tomcat)." I basically know what that means, but they might as well be speaking a different language. Outside my expertise, unfortunately. I can handle XHTML, PHP, a little Perl, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Beyond that, it's like listening to the teachers in Peanuts: "Wa-wa wa wa wa-wa."
If I upgrade to MT 3.0, is the multiple-author management easier?
Update 3: It looks like Blogger is the best compromise. I'm using the ftp option to transfer files to my faculty account. Check out http://www.americandialogues.us. (Note that you can buy your own domain names at NameCheap for $8.88 a year.
This is a simple post with a simple point. It's worth highlighting to students that news reports of who said what might appear to be objective, but the words used to describe conversations and disagreements carry a lot of baggage. Consider the nuances of these different verbs:
Here you go. Man, it takes longer than you'd think. My course is based mostly on the freshman writing program at the University of Maryland. Further details to follow, as I have time.
The first thing I'm going to do, after basic introductions, is introduce them to the concept of rhetoric as the study and practice of the art of persuasion, not the common definition of "empty or insincere speech." [See, for example, the intro to Andy Cline's online Rhetoric Primer, or Jack Lynch's much more brief definition.] We'll go over the importance of audience: writers write for readers. I'll discuss the three divisions of rhetoric identified by Aritostotle, sometimes referred to as deliberative, forensic, and epideictic. [See this section of Aristotle's On Rhetoric.] Our first focus will be on epideictic rhetoric: the rhetoric of praise or blame. [See this section of On Rhetoric.] Praise or blame is something we'll be hearing a lot in the months leading up to the 2004 election, so I figure this is a good place to start. Students will choose a candidate, a campaign proposal, or an event and write (probably as an in-class essay) an encomium, a vituperation, or an apologia for a specific audience of their choice.
I'm considering using two quotes as epigraphs for the course:
Course Description
The theme of this course is "American Dialogues," and we will focus our attention on political discourse in the contemporary American public sphere. Some fear that American citizens are not well served by the prevailing political discourse, that it is more focused upon butting heads and scoring quick points with the media than it is with thoughtful consideration of the issues. We will use a variety of critical tools to consider the messages of political campaigns, the information published by news outlets, and the commentary provided by a wide range of individuals.
In this course, you will develop your skills as a careful, thoughtful, and effective reader and writer. You will become better at the kinds of reading and writing expected of you as a college student, in your professional career, and as an American citizen. You will learn what it means to identify or construct an issue to write about, to consider and reconsider that issue as you investigate it further, and to craft the best available means of support and expression given your audience and your purpose. You will learn a set of language- and logic-based concepts and a vocabulary of language analysis and rhetorical strategy. As you learn more about how language and persuasion work, and as you learn to recognize and use more features of style and argument, you have a greater range of choices to make in crafting your own writing.
I think I have a name/theme for the composition course: "American Dialogues." In browsing through various political blogs to list for my students this fall, I discovered that Katherine Allen will be contributing to Blog for America, "posting commentary on the politics of language." This might prove interesting, but no details of Allen's background are easily accessible, aside from the explanation that she works for the Rockridge Institute. Anyone know?
In her first post, Allen references two potentially useful sources: both Deborah Tannen's article "Let Them Eat Words" and the book Moral Politics by George Lakoff. (Update: Excerpt from Lakoff's book.)
The following is a preliminary list of blogs in no particular order (I'm sure it will grow). Thanks to everyone who has made suggestions. Keep 'em coming, if you have more.
More on media critique sites and sources in a later post. I'll certainly point students to Andy Cline.
Because I have to put this course together rather quickly, I could use your help, gentle reader:
I am after sources of information that reflect a range of political positions.
And while I'm discussing rhetoric and composition, check out today's post from Calamity Jane on using episodes from Law and Order in the classroom to help students understand argumentation.
I started reading Deborah Tannen's Argument Culture (Booksense) today because I am considering using it for my election-themed composition course this fall. Tannen's view of the contemporary state of argument and debate is strikingly different than that of Gerald Graff, who basically advocates acknowledging and even embracing conflict. (Granted, these are pretty different projects: one on academia and the other on public discourse.) Tannen, by contrast, questions the prevalence of argumentative conflict to begin with, asking if it sometimes gets in the way of real understanding and, importantly for my purposes, the democratic process. At the end of her first chapter, she writes
Philospher John Dewey said, on his ninetieth birthday, 'Democracy begins in conversation.' I fear that it gets derailed in polarized debate.
In conversation we form the interpersonal ties that bind individuals together in personal relationships; in public discourse, we form similar ties on a larger scale, binding individuals into a community. In conversation, we exchange the many types of information we need to live our lives as members of a community. In public discourse, we exchange the information that citizens in a democracy need in order to decide how to vote. If public discourse provides entertainment first and foremost - and if entertainment is first and foremost watching fights - then citizens do not get the information they need to make meaningful use of their right to vote.
Of course it is the responsibility of intellectuals to explore potential weaknesses in others' arguments, and of journalists to represent serious opposition when it exists. But when opposition becomes the overwhelming avenue of inquiry - a formula that requires another side to be found or a criticism to be voiced; when the lust for opposition privileges extreme views and obscures complexity; when our eagerness to find weaknesses blinds us to strengths; when the atmosphere of animosity precludes respect and poisons our relations with one another; then the argument culture is doing more damage than good.
I offer this book not as a frontal assault on the argument culture. That would be in the spirit of attack that I am questioning. It is an attempt to examine the argument culture - our use of attack, opposition, and debate in public discourse - to ask, What are its limits as well as its strengths? How has it served us well, but also how has it failed us? How is it related to culture and gender? What other options do we have?
...There are times when we need to disagree, criticize, oppose, and attack - to hold debates and view issues as polarized battles. Even cooperation, after all, is not the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict. My goal is not a make-nice false veneer of agreement or a dangerous ignoring of true opposition. I'm questioning the automatic use of adversarial formats - the assumption that it's always best to address problems and issues by fighting over them. I'm hoping for a broader repertoire of ways to talk to each other and address issues vital to us (25-26).
I hope to finish this book in the next day or so, but I'm already leaning towards using it.
Hey, you! Yes, you! Non-academic reader. This post is for you as well as my academic readers. What are your thoughts? Apropos of my previous post (and future ones), I like these paragraphs on the gap between scholars in academia and the general public from Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education:
Part of the problem lies ... in the peculiar difficulty of representing intellectual developments in the press. A vulgarized version of a theory or critical approach is inevitably easier to describe in the confines of a brief news article than the best, most sophisticated version of the theory or approach. A doctrinaire assault on 'dead white males' can be easily summearized in a column inch or two, whereas it would take many pages to describe intellectual movements that are complex, diverse, and rife with internal conflicts. Glib falsifications can always be produced at a faster rate than their refutations.
Then, too, few readers of the popular press are in a position to recognize misrepresentations of academic practices, a fact that relieves anyone who wants to debunk these practices of the responsibility to do their homework. So feminism, multiculturalism, and deconstructionism are understood not as a complicated and internally conflicted set of inquiries and arguments about the cultural role of gender, ethnicity, language, and thought but as a monolithic doctrine that insists, as D'Souza formulates it, 'that texts be selected primarily or exclusively according to the author's race, gender, or sexual preference and that the Western tradition be exposed in the classroom as hopelessly bigoted and oppressive in every way' ['Illiberal Education,' Atlantic 267.3 (March 1991): 52] ... [A]nyone who takes these views to be typical of academic revisionist thinking simply knows nothing of the reality...
There is still another reason why myths about the academy have flourished, however, and this is one for which the academy has itself to blame. Academics have given journalists and others little help in understanding the more difficult forms of academic work. As this work has become increasingly complex and as it increasingly challenges conventionally accepted forms of thinking, the university acquires an obligation to do a more efective job of popularization. Yet the university has been disastrously inept in this crucial popularizing task and often disdains it as beneath its dignity. If the university has become easy prey for ignorant or malicious misrepresentations, it has asked for them. Having treated mere image making as beneath its dignity, the academy has left it to its detractors to construct its public image for it. (34-35)
Well, I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of the academy as arrogant in those last few lines, but it's true that if we largely ignore the image that the public has of what we do, we allow those who don't like what they think we do to take control of that image.
Posting in a hurry: Okay, I'm not teaching a course on the eighteenth-century novel. Rather, I'm teaching the second of our composition courses. Like Chuck, I'd like to design an election-themed course, and I would also like to incorporate some student blogging. I'm thinking of using linguist Deborah Tannen's book Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. (Booksense) My training in teaching composition is mostly in rhetoric with a smidgen of linguistics (thanks to Linda Coleman and Jeanne Fahnestock). Thus, I do not intend to offer expertise on politics or policy issues because my knowledge of these things is no greater than the average citizen's. Instead I will focus students' attention on the discourse of the campaigns, the news outlets, and the various commentators, and I will provide students with a variety of critical tools for analyzing that discourse. My own take (not particularly original or especiallly insightful, I'll admit) is that American citizens are not well served by the prevailing political discourse, which is more focused upon scoring quick points with the media than it is with thoughtful consideration of the issues.
I welcome all input for planning this course. And, although I'm still not sure about this idea, can anyone suggest some election-themed fiction? Works do not have to be contemporary.
On the off chance that you, dear reader, are one of my students, I would like to invite you to sign up for my classes this fall:
I only have 2 students signed up for the first class and 4 for the second. Both were relatively late additions to the course calendar, which explains why registration has been slow (or else I have cooties). I had been scheduled to teach Shakespeare, but that class (which filled up with many former students of mine) is now being taught by one of my colleagues.
You can read descriptions of these courses on my homepage.
Update, August 6: Well, my English 350 has been cancelled. Instead, I'll be teaching English 225: Composition II, First Blood.
Early this morning I received this press release from the Jeremy Collier Association for Literary Purity and agreed to pass it along:
It has come to our attention that the poems of Tupac Shakur are being included on a high school summer reading list in Worcester, Massachusetts. As Michelle Malkin has pointed out, Shakur was a "drug-dealing, baseball bat-wielding, cop-hating, Black Panthers-worshiping, convicted sexual abuser who made a fortune extolling the "thug life" before he was gunned down in Las Vegas eight years ago," and students should not be encouraged to read his work. We at the JCALP have been monitoring the lives of writers for centuries, and we wish to draw Malkin's attention to additional shocking instances of deviants and degenerates whose work is currently being taught in our schools.
We call upon all concerned chosen people to submit the names of writers whose personal lives contain any questionable details. Our children, and indeed our cultural heritage, will not be safe until we have purged the reading lists of anything and everything that ... well, let's just leave it at anything and everything.
- Radical nutjob.
- Wrote filthy stories featuring rape, murder, anilingus, adultery, and witchcraft. Mocked religion and religious figures.
- Made his money in one of the sleaziest professions around, corrupted the morals of the public and encouraged thievery, prostitution, drunkenness, and the neglect of one's trade. Stole most of his ideas from others. Liked to dress up little boys as women for the purposes of entertainment. His poetry indicates that he was possibly a homosexual pedophile and had a fetish for inter-racial sex.
- A shady character involved in international espionage, was probably a sexual deviant, possibly a heretic, made his money in a sleazy profession, and - unsurprisingly - met a violent end in a drunken bar fight.
- Peddler of sensationalist tripe.
- Convicted criminal.
- Endorsed and actively worked for the overthrow of the government, wrote propaganda defending the execution of the head of state, and provided essential services for the homicidal terrorists who had managed to take over the country.
- Dangerous spy, rumored to be a whore. Perhaps the Monica Lewinsky of her day. Smut peddler.
- A flip-flopper who kept changing his religion depending on who held power in the government.
- Peddler of infantile humor. Potty mouth.
- Radical. Smut peddler.
- Held dangerous religious beliefs. Possibly a threat to the government. Wrote offensive "mock epics," probably because he couldn't write real ones.
- Rumored to be a whore. Smut peddler.
- Compulsive masturbator.
- Nutjob.
- Lived with a man out of wedlock and became his baby mama. Wrote radical political propaganda defending vicious terrorists and attacking family values.
- Supported a nation known to harbor terrorists. A flip-flopper, though. Voted for the terrorists before he voted against them.
- Drug addict.
- Radical nutjob with dangerous religious views. Attempted to convince his wife to let another woman move in with them so he could have sex with her.
- Sexually promiscuous. Rumored to be a sexual deviant. Probably had incestuous relationship with half-sister, resulting in the birth of a child. Fathered children by several women, in fact. Provided financial support for terrorists.
- Pervert.
- Sexual deviant. Convicted criminal.
- Pedophile.
- Nutjob.
- Fascist sympathizer.
- Pornographer and pervert.
- Pornographer.
- Suicidal nutjob.
- Shotgun wielding thug. Suicidal alcoholic.
- Shot and killed his wife for fun. Consumed massive amounts of recreational drugs for decades. Sexual deviant. Pornographer.
- Pornograper. Deviant. Drug user.
- Drug user.
- Suicidal nutjob.
Jason's the Shepherd for the Wordherders, and he's already posted an entry on how the changes in MT's payment schedule will affect our multiple blogs.
However, I also maintain a bunch of blogs over on Jeff's CHLT server, so I thought I'd describe how I use MT there and whether these changes will push me to adopt another content management system.
First of all, I've adopted Liz Lawley's brilliant MT Courseware hack for my classes. I'm sort of confused as to what the new pricing scheme is for MT 3.0, but my understanding is that the free version will allow for one author and three blogs. I like to leave my course websites online even after the course is finished, however, and so I'll hit the three-blog limit pretty quickly if I upgrade.
Additionally, I have frequently assigned a game of Ivanhoe, using MT as the game platform. This requires me to add, temporarily, all 30 or so students as authors to my MT installation. I don't think I'd be able to do this at all under the new rules.
For the above applications, two tasks are very inconvenient using MovableType. First, adding thirty new authors to the Ivanhoe games takes way too long; I'd prefer an HTML form that allows me to enter all thirty at once in a grid, rather than clicking my way through the same one-author-at-a-time form thirty times. Second, adding all the content for Liz's MT Courseware takes way too long; again, a grid that allows you to enter multiple entries using one form would cut back on a very onerous task.
As long as MovableType was free, I was willing to put up with these inconveniences on the backend in exchange for the elegant beauty of the frontend. But if I'm going to be asked to pay, I'd have to think twice about whether such shortcomings were acceptable.
The site's not quite ready for primetime, but tonight I've been working on a page for the Shakespeare course that I mentioned over on Palimpsest.
Watch this space for more thoughts about the course to be posted.
I've just finished Ellen Ullman's The Bug. I'm considering teaching the novel next spring in my honors section of English 225, the second course in the composition sequence at UMKC. Ullman describes the interaction between human and machine with a remarkably poetic voice, such as this passage where programmer Ethan Levin reads an email from a technical consultant and then ponders a software bug he's trying to solve:
It all presented itself as a continuum: hardware at the bottom, with all its miniature mechanics and electronics, becoming at each step upward more abstract, becoming software. It produced in him a certain vertiginous pleasure--this glimpse into the slip-space between the hard and soft, the physical and mental worlds, layer upon layer of human thought turned into chips, circuit boards, programs. And it struck him, as it sometimes did these days, how briefly physical the computer was. All software on the top, then just a small layer where it was only dumb wire and plastic and silicon--beneath which everything immediately turned abstract again: the intelligence of the circuits, "logic gates" designed with software and etched into chips, through which moved the bits of stuff human beings had named "electrons." (45)
Coincidentally, I'm dealing with my own bug as the university's "Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access" email server is only letting me log in about one out of every twenty attempts. The very patient folks in the university IT department can't find anything wrong. As for me, I miss telnet and pine, and I'm very tired of Microsoft. Apple is selling 12" iBooks for under a thousand bucks, and I'm very tempted. I'm using OpenOffice for my office-related tasks, GIMP for my image editing, MovableType for most of my website management tasks lately, and jEdit for my text encoding. Hmm. If only I could remember why I decided to go with this laptop running m$.
Matt first piqued my interest in The Bug, btw.
This is really just a "Hey, isn't this cool?" kind of post, and I guess I've had a lot of those lately. Take a look at Joseph Viscomi's chapter on William Blake's "Illuminated Printing" techniques.
“Illuminated Printing” was first published in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2003. It is republished here by permission of Cambridge University Press. While the text remains the same, the electronic version has 95 illustrations versus 9 in the printed version. The illustrations demonstrate in detail the stages of both Blake’s relief etching (“illuminated printing”) and conventional intaglio etching according to the six “Chambers” in the “Printing house in Hell,” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison of these two methods of etching will help reveal what was borrowed, altered, invented, and radical in Blake’s new mode of graphic production. The illustrations, which are linked to enlargements that have detailed captions, supplement the text but also function autonomously as slide shows on the technical and aesthetic contexts in which illuminated printing was invented, and as tutorials in the production of engravings, etchings, and relief etchings.
Fascinating stuff. Without the Blake Archive, I would not be able to teach Blake the way that I do.
The following is the description for my Fall 2004 permutation of "Histories of Reading, Writing, and Publishing," a course that I proposed back in September:
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.
–Alexander Pope
We tend to have such faith in books that we assume the printing press brought with it a wave of enlightenment, as publishing restrictions loosened and print production escalated over the course of the early modern period. As the above quote from Pope demonstrates, eighteenth-century observers were not always so optimistic. This course will explore the profound changes taking place from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth as Britain transformed into a print culture.
We will consider several questions. What are the cultural and theoretical implications of different forms of verbal communication and representation, such as speech, manuscript, or print? How did the practices of authorship, readership, and publishing change during this period? What effect did these changes have on the production, distribution, and reception of such traditionally literary materials as essays, novels, and poetry as well as of other materials such as newspapers, magazines, and dictionaries? How did these changes affect, or engender, the fields of journalism, evangelicalism, politics, and literary studies? We will address these issues through a reading of several different seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts as well as of key contemporary scholarly works. We are likely to read works by Addison & Steele, Behn, Barker, Blake, Donne, Haywood, Hogarth, Johnson, Milton, Pope, Wesley, and Whitefield.
Students can expect to complete class presentations, a take-home exam, an annotated bibliography, and a final research paper building upon the research completed for the annotated bibliography. Graduate students should expect to complete more in-depth research and writing than undergraduate students.
I've learned from this announcement that the UMKC Center for Creative Studies is asking for applications by May 1 for curriculum development for interdisciplinary courses studying the creative process. You can read the application instructions for yourself. I'm thinking of proposing a course that would be taught by me and by a faculty member from the Art & Art History Department, but I'm not 100% sure what direction to take. A course that involved printmaking and/or bookmaking would be interesting, but I'm also tempted by the possibility of a course involving new media. There are faculty from A&AH engaged in both, so...
But what would a course "studying the creative process" and involving print or new media look like? This is just a blind post asking for suggestions for further reading and research. I will post this to Palimpsest, as well.
With many of my colleagues from the four U of M campuses, I am in Columbia, Missouri this weekend attending the Teaching Renewal Conference as part of the year-long New Faculty Teaching Scholars Program. On the food front, I had a nice soy latte at the Lakota Coffee Company, some great slices at Shakespeare's Pizza, and breakfast at Waffle House. We also managed to get in a few games of pool last night at Billiards.
Update: We also took a quick trip to the Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, home of the Devil's Icebox, a geological formation caused by an underground river gradually eroding limestone until a sinkhole is created. Climbing down into the Icebox on a warm late-winter day, you find that the temperature drops significantly, a few patches of ice and snow are still present, and you can see your breath. On the drive out to Columbia, we saw a deer at the edge of a forest, and on the way home we spotted a flock of wild turkeys resting in a field. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the statue of Beetle Bailey to be found on campus; cartoonist Mort Walker is a Mizzou alum.
Palimpsest: "Open source teaching resources. Good stuff, free."
It's alive!
The nominations came fast and furious. Delegates traveled from far and wide to take part in a process to determine the future of online, collaborative creation and sharing of teaching resources. Gathered in a smoke-filled room tucked away in an obscure midwestern town, they debated into the wee hours. Sure, all the candidates had their strengths, but which would prove most likely to go the distance, to hold up to the unforeseen challenges of the future?
In the end, one candidate was the obvious choice.
The group blog on creating and sharing teaching resources needs a name. I am hereby announcing a contest in which the winner, chosen through a complicated caucus-based process, will be sent a compact disc music mix created by me, featuring fantastic tracks by artists you've never heard of. The intended audience of and participants in the blog are those who teach in English departments, although their areas of specialization within that discipline are open.
Teaching. The discipline of English. The open-source philosophy. Keep these things in mind, dear reader, as you vie with countless competitors for the international honor that winning this contest will bring you.
I agree with Mike that we should just start with a blog, "since that's the method all parties seem familiar with." If you would like to participate in a group blog on sharing teaching resources and creating resources collaboratively, email me at ghw[at]wordherders[dot]net with a username and password. I'll add you to the list of authors on a blog I've set up.
[In case you're just joining us, dear reader, here are my first post and second post on the subject.]
On the subject of sharing content: check out the OpenCourseWare project at MIT, and specifically the Literature section.
William C. Dowling, an English professor at Rutgers University, provides a nice handout for undergraduates on how (and why) to use the Oxford English Dictionary.
Via Kairosnews: First, "Open source content in education: Developing, sharing, expanding resources", by George Siemens. And second, "Not-so-Modest Proposals: What do we want our system of scholarly communication to look like in 2010?", by John Unsworth.
Noting similarities to the project I proposed, Dennis G. Jerz draws our attention to the Commontext Library:
Commontext is a completely new concept: a publisher of freely shared classroom texts. Its goal is to allow unrestricted, free access to a vast collection of learning materials produced at the highest level of excellence, including academic peer review and fact checking, and professional editing and proofreading.
Read the FAQ, which states that "'beta' phase" materials were to be available in Fall 2003, with "[f]inal, professional-quality course materials" available in Fall 2004. On first blush, however, there doesn't seem to be much content available. I also don't find the site very intuitive to navigate. Put yourself in the shoes of a non-expert web user: how easy would it be to find the information you're looking for?
It appears that the site runs on Drupal, "an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites."
How is Commontext different from what I'm proposing? Well, I don't really know, but I would return to these questions:
The answers to these questions would be a good starting point for this project. A user-friendly website that would allow users to act in response to these questions easily is what I'm imagining.
A couple of distinctions might be helpful here. On the one hand, I'm imagining contributors might share things like handouts, assignments, exercises, and syllabi. Feedback and refinement would ideally make these materials better. But on the other hand, contributors could also collaborate on building web-based resources like the ones that were mentioned before (e.g. Guide to Grammar and Style, Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms, Guide to Literary and Critical Theory). In addition, discussions of how to use these materials would be useful. A site that facilitates all of these things is what I'm thinking of.
Five years ago when a few savvy instructors rushed to integrate the Web into their teaching and put their syllabi online the idea exchange so crucial to academia was alive and well in the