Canned Goods

[edit: pics added 5/24]

As are most folks, I’m in recovery from the conference.
I spent yesterday in Frankenmuth, MI with K., taking as many snapshots of us posing with a variety of tourist-trap sculptures (if only I can find a cable so I can transfer the images from the camera–bad packing list): a fiberglass giraffe; the giant mouse head on slice-o-cheese; 9 ft tall angels (at the world’s largest Christmas store). Not sure why we get pleasure from this sort of activity.

Anyway, I met a lot fun and brilliant folks this week (and was able to put faces with many for whom I only through blogs). I greatly appreciated the mentoring and support in our community (all the encouragement/info from Bradley; I’ll start some home brewing as some as, well, I’m done with grad school). I’d especially like to thank Scot for putting up with up to 2 hrs of driving a day introducing me to his peeps.
As a ped-head, hearing so much theory floating around reinforced how valuable it is to what I’m working on, even if I can’t escape the pull of the pedagogical imperative.

As far as the conference itself, it was the best I have attended. My only major complaint is Why have Sunday panels? And this goes for all the big cons. Not only are people leaving for home, but there are organizational meeting running concurrently. Low attendance sucks. No attendance is worse. Why not start a day earlier or reduce the number of panels to avoid this? If it weren’t for a couple friends/colleagues (Scot and Annette) and Jody Shipka (thanks for coming!), I was about to thank the first two panelists for their presentations and walk out. I’ve done the present to just the other panelists before. Why bother?

All in all, great trip, good beer (loved the DBC IPA), and I wish I had had more time to walk around and see everything Detroit has to offer.

As usual there’s all that teaching to be done, but luckily I’ve made it a bit easier this week with students presenting their favorite projects from the semester–and they are, so far, wonderful. Yes, many of the Photoshop and Flash projects may not be the Flashiest, but, as one of my students smartly put it, there are a lot of intangibles that go into the production of a final product. With the work they’ve done, I know they have fulfilled the basic goals of the course:

—to reconsider how we typically define writing,
—better understand the workings of the web, and
—to have some of the technical and social skills that will allow them to produce in a variety of media.

One of the most exciting projects of the semester, in my book, has been their Wikipeida entries. We all learned more about how this community works to collectively construct knowledge.

Also, I’ve been really busy with a few presentations and putting a couple proposals together (when will I get to my prelims?)

Last week I co-taught/led a Writing Center OGE (ongoing ed) workshop on multimodal writing: “It’s Not All Linear Text Anymore: The Least We Should All Know to Help Writing Center Students Compose Multimodal Texts in New Media Landscapes”. I had a great time talking about how/why we work with new kinds of writing in the Writing Center. AND, the process of drafting my ten minute prez helped to prepare me for another talk, this Monday, for the department’s Board of Visitors about how I and my students are using technology for new ways of producing and circulating writing. I have to thank Matt, one of my students, for allowing me to show his research paper-turned blog article. They were very impressed and clearly understood that his remediation of is original text to the blog was essential to achieve his purpose because of its ability to easily embed video. Without him, and the work of my other students, this prez would have left me using new media objects produced by others else where and would have been nowhere near as impressive.

Conference props — the biggie being for Cs, I’m lucky enough to be on a great (proposed) panel with Samantha Blackmon & Alice: “Changing Writing, Alternate Realities: Games and Game Theory in the Writing Classroom.” And I recently submitted to the Writing Across Borders con at UCSB.

In addition to (proposed) self-promotion, the reason I mention these activities is because my experience, I hope, is an example for my students that I can talk about in the classroom: I wrote so much more than ended up in the final products. I easily had 20-30 mins. of material for the BoV prez’s 5 minute slot (ended up going 10, of course, with discussion). This process gave me the opportunity to see what I was thinking and choose from what I felt would be the strongest example for this particular audience.

Now, on to my Computers & Writing paper/prez. I guess I’ll get back to my prelims in June.

WiscWiki 2007

This past Friday I participated in the first WiscWiki Conference which included 20 faculty and IT staff from around the entire UW-System (more were not able come to campus but are involved on the site). Some of the disciplines represented: Communication, English (Comp-Rhet & Lit), LIS, and ESL.

There was a range of experience with wikis represented, but only a few had extensive experience, and surprisingly, I seemed to be one of the more experienced—if not in actual wiki usage, then in knowledge about about wikis. My Wikipedia project will soon be up in the wiki, but basically my students will choose terms we’ve encountered during the semester and write Wikipedia entries for them. There are a few benefits for students (in my mind):

—learn the basics of wiki-markup syntax
—consider the strengths and weaknesses of writing in collaborative spaces
—consider the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia, specifically, as a source of information
—consider “objectivity” in encyclopedic writing (see debate 1 and 2 surrounding Wikipedia and creation of Conservapedia & Citizendium)

I’m sure there are more goals I missing, but that’s the point of attending the conference and contributing to WiscWiki—take advantage of collective intelligence.

We began the conference with 5 min intros by those who’ve used wikis. My story was about how there seems to be a fiction regarding ow tech savvy our students are. For example, when I started talking to my students about wikis and using Wikipedia as a resource, I showed them how easy it is to edit many of Wikipedia’s entries. I chose the Web 2.0 entry and changed the first sentence to read that I had coined the term rather than O’Reilly media.

The general reaction is difficult to describe, but shock wouldn’t be far from what I saw. Even students who had heard about Wikipedia being editable, they hadn’t really thought about what that meant—how easy it is to do. So, in my attempts to give students the knowledge and skills to navigate the new media landscape, it seems appropriate and important to give students opportunities to compose in these spaces—to see how it works from the position of producers rather than consumers.

More about the conference:
Wiki hosting: basically, in the UW-System, establishing wikis is a grassroots effort. Those with the tech proficiencies can create, maintain, and host wikis. I was lucky enough to make contact with people supporting the use of Moodle for course management (it uses erfurtwiki) and take the time to help a noob set it up. One example is Matt Livesey’s advisement wiki at UW-Stout; he set it up and maintains it, but it isn’t a part of the University (fear, lack of control are factors). Also, once a university or system decides to support a wiki platform, there needs to be a service model & service team ($$$$)

Risks of free collaboration wikis:
–student work getting changed
–student privacy concerns (FERPA)
–vandalism
–spambots
–protecting the university’s rep

Some steps to take:
–Using MediaWiki may be the best platform option in that that is what Wikipedia uses, and they frequently update the software.
–demonstrate to administration how wikis solve problems that cannot be solved any other way

There was more that happened that I think is best left to be developed on WiscWiki (for the sake of space here and efficiency [my time—prelims, con paper/proposals are calling]).

I’ll end with touching on the session I moderated: authorship models. Here are some of the questions we discussed:

—In terms of authorship, do wikis do something new, different than the ways in which knowledge is constructed elsewhere? Or do wikis simply model what’s already happening but in a more public space?
—What authorship models work the best in particular situations? (Inside and outside the classroom // wiki-based and non-wiki-based)
—Why do they work, in each locale or situation?
—What are the similarities and differences between outside-of-school (workplace or community) authorship models and in-school models?
—Is any text ever single-authored? How can we talk about similarities and differences in authorship models with our students?
—How do collaboration models in f2f or e-spaces allow different personality types to participate? (we talked about “shy” students and diminishing effects of being judged [I’m not sure how judgment by others changes in e-spaces])
—What makes a collaborative group well?

One of my reservations when talking about any school assignment is Where does motivation/fun fit in? I don’t have a complete handle on this, but it seems that fun is what’s missing from the discussion of authorship models. It also bugged me in the community building session: why would anyone want to be a member of a community in a classroom, especially a gen ed required composition course? How is it possible to make community happen in the classroom, if FUN is the essential component? If fun is essential . . .

From the WPA-list, a great resource I recommend to anyone wanting another way to become more familiar the happenings in the field, as posted by Charlie Lowe under “teaching with drupal”.

I’m thinking about this as a project for my next new media and participatory culture course . . .

I can’t believe it’s been more than a week since I blogged, but I’ve been buried in prelims reading and taking notes via Word. Annette has set up a wiki prelims that I’ll participate in by uploading my notes. But I wonder what changes will have to be made to my notes in the migration.

Anyway, since I just gathered another stack of texts from the library, I thought the moment right to ask these questions: “Must I read everything? And what does everything mean? I’ve seen a pattern in responses from those I’ve spoken to face to face. Basically, with the prelim exams changes here, we now have to read a core list of 40 items, with a list of 40 our own making–the old system required, I believe, 150 items from the standing lists. Of course, with all the writing required in the portfolio system we’ll leave, presumably, with a fuller understanding of the core list items (and our own). But is that really the case?

The old binge and purge exams apparently led to a lot of “read the intro, read the conclusion, and read a chapter from the middle that interests you.” And, you could always slide by without readings many titles. The new system, I think, is prone to similar problems. And, I’ll only speak for myself, here.

Under the new, write-a-couple-essays/portfolio system, it would be easy to simply not read many of the texts on the core list. In a 20 page essay, it’s difficult to include everything, and the faculty understands that you won’t necessarily include every core text in either of your essays. In many cases, I could easily get away with reading some review essays and using the B/ST.M Bib. I’ve used both to prep for reading.

I’ll admit to not reading every core list text all the way through; I’m getting the gist. I ask if this enough simply because during my reading I have been resistant to read a significant portion of a core list text (or two), but once I get going and thinking about the faculty question, I see why this item is on the list and understand what I’d miss if I simply read a review (or two).

These concerns go beyond my prelims in the direction of my future research and the need for interdisciplinary study. Can we ever read everything? If not, how much is enough? Who gets to judge? But, I agree, the has to be some kind of system set up to prepare us–for us to prepare. But what happens when those that don’t read everything get through?

We’ve all read the essays, where after, the author is taken to task by others. Then the others are taken to task by still others. Usually, all because someone missed some piece of information.

I’ve gone on too long already, but I’ll end with this thought, one I got by blogging about my prelims today—perhaps we and our students tend too often to see the work we’ve done (the results we obtained) and the work we draw upon as more than contingent (if that’s the right word for what I’m thinking). I can only do my best to do my best and keep working toward something more ___________ .

Whew. The faculty candidate search is complete and the committee made it’s recommendation–accepted by the department’s executive committee. I’m happy to report, I’m happy with the results. I, and a few others, had particularly strong feelings about the who should be selected (and were vocal about it), since it could have very well ended in a substantial reshaping of the program.

I can understand, only somewhat, how difficult this process was for the committee and the students in the program. I tried to make it to as many of the events as possible, missing everything for one candidate–relying, then, on evaluation of the application documents. And I have research interests that easily match up with all the candidates, so I made my decision based on what my weakest area of study was and advocated for that person. For me it was about balance in the program and my education.

I don’t feel like I should say more than that. I’m not sure why, though. Spilling beans, stepping on toes, etc.?? Of course, the person hasn’t accepted yet.

But all these behind-the-scenes, administrative, committee happenings are difficult to understand, I guess, without actually being a part of it. They don’t offer courses in this stuff.

I was visiting Scot’s class today; they were discussing Hayles’ Writing Machines & Lexia to Perplexia. The conversation got around to Cyborgs–thinking of ourselves as cyborgs. One student gave Star Trek as an example; maybe he was embarrassed to admit it or possibly, he didn’t know they were called the Borg.

A few seconds passed (felt like minutes) before I burst out, enthusiastically, “Robocop.” No response, except for from Scot, who quoted the movie poster: “Part man, part machine, all cop.” It’s possible they don’t know the reference. The movie’s from 1987. 20 years. And most of the students range? 20-22.

About this time last year, Scot and I were showing “The Merchants of Cool” to our EN100 sections, and part of the response from students was how dated the material was to them.

Keeping up with the times is work:

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2006/10/22/keeping-up-with-the-times.aspx
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/4161/1/
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Update/keeping-up-to-date.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4022/is_200311/ai_n9312474
http://qna.live.com/ShowQuestion.aspx?qid=E5314A2561624F80AB3F801C45354355
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/footshooting/IVthe_times.shtml
http://cjournal.concordia.ca/journalarchives/2005-06/mar_9/006445.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/k/keepingupappeara_7773960.shtml
http://www.guitarnoise.com/article.php?id=13
http://www.ahns.info/opinion/docs/cassisi.php
http://chr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/39/2/247
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/cat/2004/00000009/00000001/art00004
http://www.springerlink.com/content/fh45w27l20588235/
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6083432.html

Scot sent the link to this video on one of our listservs–from someone’s blog post. I haven’t had a chance to ask him about it, but since this is perfect for my 201 students to watch, I’ve posted it here.

[ADD: just got word that Jenny originally posted this. Very cool. Do you imagine this sort of project could be a CV line?]

[ADD 2 (feb. 7): “A LESSON IN VIRAL VIDEO
Professor gives his class a real-world demonstration of how to
use often-viewed sites to quickly spread content.
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/07/web” (WPA-List post)]

This semester Thursdays are no longer simply Thursdays; they’re Prelims Thursdays. Actually, that’s a pretty sucky title. But I don’t have time to think of a better one. Got to work on the faculty question: “In what ways is writing organized by circumstance? And how do our answers to that question impact our theories, practices, and pedagogies?”

There are a lot of ways to answer this question, and one way is with a literacy autoethnography–the kind of assignment we sometimes give our students (write about a literacy experience . . . mine usually starts with getting Ds in handwriting). It’s an idea, but I’ve written about some of these experience as reflections in my coursework. I don’t think I’ll end up going that direction. After making the lit review move (with a bunch of Literacy Studies research), I’m hoping to move into new media literacies by pulling out some Gee and the New London Group (situated learning and multiliteracies) so as to focus on the acquisition of Discourse.

One of the other moves I need and want to make is to problematize my own use of new media technology in the classroom. People are learning to work with new media technologies within social networks–Harry Potter fan fiction on Muggle.net, Photoshop image manipulation on Worth1000.com, machinima on Machinima.com. That’s what’s missing from my classroom, situated learning.

As a MA student/TA I made service-learning a part of my FYC curriculum because I wanted students to have real-world (or post-college) rhetorical situations in which to write with non-profit agencies in the community. One of the problems: Even though they had a dozen sites to choose from, they had a dozen sites to choose from. Were they interested in what any of these agencies were doing? On the rare occasion a good match was made (a mother worked with the YMCA because she was concerned that the Y and the community didn’t offer any recreational opportunities or events for teens; the age group of her daughter), there was intrinsic motivation to work on the project, and my deadlines and those of the Y were the extrinsic motivation. But most students were rarely invested in the work/writing they were doing. It was just another assignment.

So what makes these assignments, the Photoshop visual argument or the Flash juxtaposition of word, image, and sound any different? Why am I teaching Photoshop and Flash?

Gee’s differentiation between language and literacy acquisition and learning: “acquisition is good for performance, learning is good for meta-knowledge.” Ah. So my students are gaining meta-knowledge? On the surface my course may seem like software tutorials (a criticism that has been made), but in conjunction with all the readings and discussions we have about language and literacy & new media and networks, the aim of the course isn’t apprenticeship into a Discourse but rather meta-knowledge, which Gee sees as liberatory. Talking about grammar, form and superficialities is good for developing meta-knowledge but not for “getting people to actually acquire Discourses . . . .” Is meta-knowledge the best we can ever hope for in comp? Is that enough?

Maybe we need to talk about the goals we have for our Intermediate Composition courses at the next meeting of the 201 instructors. Are we shooting for acquisition or meta-knowledge? How would our approaches affect our pedagogy?

“Sadly, I’m writing today about the passing of Teresa Kynell-Hunt, one of my mentors from Northern Michigan University. Three words which I’ll use to describe her — brilliant, classy, tough. I can’t say enough about how much I respected and looked up to her.

I received the news on Christmas, but there aren’t any details available at the moment.

She was much more than the following but here is a recent professional bio from Baywood Publishing:

Teresa Kynell Hunt is Interim Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs at Northern Michigan University. She holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric/technical communication from Michigan Technological University. Past chair of the NCTE Committee on Technical and Scientific Communication and Executive Committee member of the ATTW, she has authored a variety of articles, including the Nell Ann Pickett Award-winning “Technical Communication from 1850-1950: Where Have We Been?” She is the author of Writing in a Milieu of Utility; coeditor (with Michael Moran) of Three Keys to the Past: The History of Technical Communication; coeditor (with Gerald Savage) of Power and Legitimacy in Technical Communication, Vols. I and II; and coauthor (with Wendy Stone) of Scenarios for Technical Communication: Critical Thinking and Writing. Kynell Hunt is a member of the Peer Review Corps of the Higher Learning Commission and consults externally on assessment and accreditation.