In yesterday’s NYTimes, Matt Richtel has an article entitled “Blogs vs Term Papers,” in which he sketches a debate about college writing. Cathy Davidson responds brilliantly, talking at length about her own experience with teaching methods that stray from the traditional academic writing still taught in many places.
Even Richtel’s piece points out the false binary in blogs vs term papers (why not both?), but another false binary, introduced in a quote, goes largely unexamined:
“She’s right,” [William H.] Fitzhugh says of Professor Davidson. “Writing is being murdered. But the solution isn’t blogs, the solution is more reading. We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.”
So, it’s blogs vs term papers, or blogs vs. reading, as if requiring blogs precludes assigning reading. And reading what, by the way? Articles? Blog entries? Novels? Academic essays? Comic books? And the prejudice remains that blogs are always short, sloppy, personal, ill-researched, and term papers aren’t.
I am having my students keep blogs this semester for the first time in many years. The blog entries I will require them to write take the place of short response papers they used to hand in to me. My rationale is that, if they feel they are writing for a public audience they will write differently, and be responsive to that audience in a different way. Their classmates will certainly read their work, and the general public also has access to these blogs. And guess what? They’re also writing more traditional papers.
I don’t believe that anyone thinks assigning blogs is avant-garde at this point, and I think the only way anyone could strongly oppose them is to come up with headlines like “Blogs vs Term Papers” and fall into stereotypes about what blogs do, as if the only function of a blog is to act as a 14-year old’s diary.
What I have found so far is that most of my students have never heard of, let alone kept, blogs. With a few exceptions, the few that have them use them for their English classes.
My hope is that they will treat them as a space for their own writing, for experimenting with prose and trying out opinions, and for seeing their own writing as potentially valuable to others. I also hope it will teach them to be accountable in their writing and consider an audience beyond their stodgy professor. Finally, I hope they will take ownership of their new blogs and keep them after the class is over.
In assigning them blogs, I recommended WordPress but told them they can use whatever they like, including Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous or whatever. I also gave them the following advice about anonymity:
Everything you post on your blog is public. You may use your real name on your blog, but you do not have to. You might prefer to use your first name and last initial, or a complete pseudonym. So long as I and your classmates know it’s you, you can use whatever name you like. Think hard about this, but know that with most blogs, you can change your display name whenever you want, so your decision is reversible.
(The anonymity bit is prompted in part by the strange experience my class had last time we did blogs.)
I know I have created for myself a total mess in allowing different platforms and levels of anonymity, but I have learned from experience that students have different levels of awareness about online identity, and I want them to make informed decisions since these are, after all, their blogs, not mine.
I am going to put together a list of all the blogs from the class, but I am not sure I will publish it publicly, because, frankly, I don’t know what the FERPA implications are. If you have any insight on this, let me know.
I realize that this blog post has become quite rambling and fragmented, but isn’t that part of the point? I wouldn’t submit this to a journal, nor would I consider this scholarship in any traditional sense. But neither is it a pointless diary entry about what I ate this morning (if you’re interested, I will tell you). And writing this blog entry doesn’t mean that I cannot or will not write more sustained and organized argumentation around this topic. I simply haven’t chosen to at this point, in this venue, and I think that’s ok. If that’s all my students learn in their blog entry assignments, I will be satisfied. After all, they still have to write a longer essay for me.
It’s been over a week since Hastac 2011, which was an invigorating and eye-opening experience. First, some highlights, and then my reflections.
Highlights
The day before the conference officially started, there was a workshop on alternative academic careers (or alt-ac, as it is popularly called). This workshop was quite informative and well-attended, given the tight job market and increasing number of people interested in working in the academy in a position other than full-time tenure-track position.1Some people expressed concern that alt-ac meant failure, while others stated that they simply prefer an alt-ac position. Brian Croxall showed some cover letters and resumes for these types of positions and pointed in directions to find listings.
Beginning of the first day brought Cathy Davidson, who talked about attention blindness and the need to collaborate to compensate for each others’ blindness. I highly recommend watching the video of this lecture, as well as those of the other keynotes. Although many feared that the entertaining introduction by Daniel Herwitz might overshadow the actual talk, Cathy Davidson presented an engaging and thoughtful talk that really set the tone for the rest of the conference. For a more detailed description of this and the other keynotes, go to the blog roundup page for the conference and look at Karen Petruska’s incredible liveblogs. I don’t know how she did it.
Daniel Atkins’s talk, just after Davidson’s, on cyberinfrastructure, was also quite informative and tightly packed with info.
After this came concurrent lightning talks at 1o minutes apiece, and ronudtables where people presented work and invited discussion. Later in the day was a discussion of academic publishing with Dan Cohen, Tara McPherson and Richard Nash. This was quite provocative, as all three of the speakers have a strong history of promoting alternative publishing practices. The video of this is well worth watching, especially for Richard Nash, who I trust will be as captivating on video as he was in person.
Day 2 began with keynotes by Siva Vaidhyanathan and Josh Greenberg, followed in the afternoon by a trip to North Campus and the Duderstadt Center for poster sessions and a tour of the 3D Lab, which has an incredible audio studio, a 3D video facility, 3D printing, electronic music studio, and, the most amazing thing I have ever seen, the Virtual Reality Cave. They had a representation of Yost Ice Arena that you could virtually walk through with special glasses and a controller. It was very lifelike. The best thing is that all of the technology there is open to all students, facutly and staff.
Reflections
I am glad I attended the pre-conference alt-ac workshop. I am on the job market now, looking both for tenure track and alternative positions. I have had trouble articulating this position, because I feel that if I let it be known I am looking for alt-ac, potential TT employers might see me as not serious, or as about to give up. Conversely, I fear that alt-ac employers will view my actively seeking a TT job as treating them as a second choice. Neither of these is true. I am truly looking for both, and will take the position that seems best for me, whether ac or alt. It was nice to see that others had the same attitude, and some of the advice on how to advertise my skills was invaluable. I have long felt that my graduate education has trained me for once specific job, and that I don’t know how to move into any other position, but I have since come to realize that I have a fairly unique set of skills that are transferable to any number of jobs, and that I need to figure out how best to explain them to those who can use them.
For me, the biggest draw to the conference was Cathy Davidson. I have been working on the concept of “attention” in various ways in past several years, and her latest book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn touches on many of the concepts I’ve been trying to explore (I will post a reaction to the book at some point in the near future). Her talk, as I said before, really set the tone for the conference, and became a challenge in some ways to introduce a greater degree of collaboration in the humanities.
The conference was unlike traditional conferences. It had the feeling of a mixture of show-and-tell and real discussion of pressing issues in digital humanities. After attending two Great Lakes THATCamps and now this, I almost dread going to a traditional conference where people read about very specific topics for twenty minutes, three times per panel, 10 panels per day. I leave these (un)conferences thinking about how we might revamp conferences like MLA or SCMS to be more dynamic and user-friendly. I’ll let you know what I come up with.
It is important to note that alt-ac refers to jobs that are still affiliated with the academy in some way, and not a job that is entirely not academic. Examples include university libraries and academic publishing. [↩]
The Washington Post has a good roundup and discussion of some of the funnier Rick Perry “Strong” ad parodies. To those, I would add this (NSFW) ad from funny or die, and the Bad Lip Reading ad:
The article points out that the ad is aimed at the Christian conservative base, and acts as a “dog whistle” to those voters, but it has inspired countless parodies at the hands of the “Millennial generation, showcasing their expertise in creating new media and their education in the use of humor as politics by years of watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.”
I’m not sure if making political video ads is confined to the Milennials, who, as the article points out, are overwhelmingly politically progressive, but I do think it marks an interesting shift in the ways these things get disseminated, as well as a difference in political strategy between left and right.
The right has long had talk radio and other news outlets, and the mode of rhetorical attack has been Rush Limbaugh-style derision and ridicule, and an appeal to “traditional” values, which usually refers to a particular (evangelical) Christian ideal of a simpler more homogenous past that never existed.
The left has never been able to harness the same sort of passion, as progressive issues don’t lend themselves well to yelling, talking over callers, or ostracizing others. Parody and satire have become the tools of the left, led, as the article suggests, by the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. How else to counter the claims and rhetorical devices of the right than to make fin of them and point out their flaws?
This is nothing new, but the participation of anyone with video editing software and a microphone changes everything. In 2004, when Howard Dean’s campaign essentially ended after the awkward scream after the Iowa caucuses, it was the mainstream media that started the meme.
This was an instance of pure appeal to affect. His downfall had nothing to do with policy or politics, but with this endlessly repeated scream broadcast on every channel, and then on the internet. Parody videos work the same way. There is no way to counter Perry’s stance on logical grounds, as his is an appeal to emotion. Parody works the same way to belittle the message and the messenger.
Eight years later, the internet leads the charge. The Rick Perry ad was made for television and aired on major networks. The parodies are distributed via Youtube and other video sharing sites. Where in 2004, parody videos existed but were on the margins, in 2011, they have much greater potential to undermine well-orchestrated policital media campaigns.
As the campaign season continues, I would expect to see many more of these, probably from both the right and left. With the Supreme Court demolishing any limits on campaign financing, we will see unprecedented tv and radio spots. Given that environment, I wonder if we will see the mainstreaming of parody such as this, if a political group decides to air these sorts of ads instead of (or in addition to) the straight attack or advocacy ads we are used to.
1. I often have people tell me they don’t understand Twitter. That’s ok. The same people sometimes say they don’t follow current events because they don’t know how to sift through the information to find what’s important. Well guess what? The two issues are related. More on that in #4.
2. I subscribe to hundreds of blogs via RSS, a technology that even fewer understand than Twitter, but which is more indispensible (less dispensible?). In Google Reader, I can see all the blogs I subscribe to, and I try to go daily, but sometimes I’m busy.
3. Lately, I’m busy with Twitter. Twitter has taken over some of the function of my RSS feed, just as it has taken over some of the function(s) of the blogs I read and write.
4. Back to the original point, and the advice I give to Twitter newbies. On Twitter,I have a done a pretty good job of assembling a group of intelligent, informed people who care about the same things I do. This is where I get the majority of my news, as well as pointers to interesting blog posts and articles. It’s great. I love it.
5. But my RSS feed has been getting neglected, which means I am missing things that don’t get tweeted from people/topics I care about. When I have a few minutes at my computer, I almost always go to Twitter, where I may have gone to GReader. I don’t mean for Twitter to take over my reading time, as these should be complementary activities. From now on, I resolve to set aside some time every day to read the blogs in my reader, in addition to my Twitter feed.
Q: Does anyone else have trouble managing the information coming at them? Have you neglected your RSS feed? What strategies have you employed to deal with this stuff?
Three episodes into Allen Gregory, I am not sold, but I still hold out hope. Reviews of the show have ranged from lukewarm to hostile. Take, for example this, from AfterElton.com:
Ugh. What a terrible show. Allen Gregory is described by the show’s creators as “precocious”. A more appropriate word would be “obnoxious”.
They also said he was being raised by two gay fathers. He’s not; he’s being raised by one gay sexual predator and his victim. Every female character is belittled. The only decent parent, Jeremy, is belittled. Bullying and sexual predation are played as good clean fun. And if you’re going to make an AIDS joke, then by God it had better be a funny AIDS joke. I’m being paid to watch Allen Gregory. What’s your excuse?
All of this is true. The main characters are reprehensible and cruel. The father, in particular, is an amalgam of the worst cultural cliches of the urban upper class. In the second episode, he hires actors to play his adopted daughter’s friends because he does not approve of her real friends. Does this sound incredibly unrealistic? Well, it is, and so is Allen Gregory’s crush on his 60+ principal is entirely ridiculous, or his unbelievable maturity for his age. It is this level of exaggeration, of complete out-of-touchness with reality, that dulls critiques like the above and gives me some hope for the show. It is like condemning The Simpsons because Homer is a lazy, alcoholic, abusive, neglectful father. After all, he chokes his child!
True, this show is no Simpsons, which I chuckle at every weekend out of a sense of decades-long habit and a bit of nostalgia for when it was cutting-edge. It is not as quick or sophisticated as Futurama (but nothing is as quick or sophisticated as Futurama) , not as raunchy as Family Guy or South Park, not as full-throttle as Robot Chicken. The visual style is subdued, stylish and realistic. The pace is slower than any animated series I’ve seen recently, perhaps since King of the Hill. It tries the same trick Family Guy does with Brian and Stewie: make a child (or dog, in the case of Brian) unrealistically intelligent and articulate without remarking on it. It’s hard not to respond when Allen Gregory arrives at school with sushi and white wine, acting as if it were totally normal.
I agree with critics that the main characters lack all empathy, and are, in fact, quite creepy. The hope I have for the show is in the conflict that could arise between AG and his elementary school peers. If the writers decide to further contrast what are essentially class differences, and find a way to lambaste AG’s father by setting him in relief with the pathetically sincere kids at school, the show might find teeth. It has the potential to tap into the growing class consciousness of the occupy movements and the rising awareness of the disparity between what are now being called the one-percenters and everyone else. I don’t expect — or even want — the show to do explicit political commentary, but the upper class make good villains these days, if handled properly. Rather than comparing this to other animated series, we might think about it in terms of All in the Family, where it is clear that the racist dad is the butt of the joke.
Ultimately, I don’t think Allen Gregory will succeed. If it stays as it is, I will stop watching it. I really liked the first two episodes, but by the third, I started wondering if I could watch the same jokes week after week. I forgive The Simpsons for it out of the intertia of my affection for the show, but Allen Gregory doesn’t get the same benefit. I’ll give it a few more episodes to see if it can make use of the bizarre building blocks it has set up and make something grander. I’m holding my breath.
Digital Humanities Now has established a new hierarchical system for peer reviewing articles. There is the raw feed, which is everything published in DH, based on things like RSS feed and twitter searches. This alone is a valuable resource, but the editors also pick noteworthy articles:
Out of the sea of scholarly production, this site curates work that has gotten the attention of the digital humanities community or is worthy of such attention, based on critical editorial review.
But wait, there’s more:
The best of these selections receive further attention, as the editorial committee assesses how much each work resonates and makes important intellectual contributions to the field. Readers participate in this additional layer of open peer review, implicitly or explicitly promoting articles for inclusion in the quarterly peer-reviewed publication.
The cool thing is you can subscribe to any level, whether unfiltered or vetted by editors.
I like this idea in part because it contains the possibility of true peer review, and it can do it in a much faster way than traditional publishing. It seeks to capture the buzz around a topic or article, and assess the potential interest to a broader audience based on real-time feedback from interested scholars, rather than from one or two readers over the course of many months.
Most readers here are probably familiar with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which started yesterday. Well, a few people have decided to co-opt or adapt it into something else. Charlotte Frost at Phd2Published suggests AcBoWriMo for Academic Book Writing Month and James Smith at MITH suggests NanoDHMO for a digital humanities project.
I like the spirit of these projects. As someone who often self-censors or automatically says “no” to things, I like the idea of just doing it, no matter how crazy it sounds, and worrying about editing later. As much as I like these two ideas, though, I’m sticking with NaNoWriMo. Maybe the other projects should try for different months. It would be kinda cool to have a different crazy project each month.
Sometimes I click on links from twitter and other places, keeping them in unread tabs for a time, and then, when I get to them, I forgot where they came from. Here are two that deal with political/social awareness in clever ways. Thanks to whoever pointed them out.
The first is Phone Story, a mobile app that leads the player through commanding children to mine for rare elements, manage unfair labor and deal with the eco-waste of mobile phones. It seems very clever. Interestingly (and not surprisingly), this is banned from the Apple Store, but available on Android (another reason in support of my switch to Android).
The other is Slavery Footprint, a very slick site that includes a survey that tells you how many slaves work for you, based on your lifestyle. It is punctuated with facts about forced labor throughout the world, and pleasant to go through. The methodology is spelled out and open to verification.
Prompted by Jeffrey Eugenides’s new book The Marriage Plot (which I have begun and am enjoying so far), Steven B. Johnson ruminates in the NYTimes book review and on his blog about his own prose style in college at Brown in the heyday of semiotics and deconstruction. Although he points to some positive practices that remain from that education, he makes fun of his own writing style and talks about the years he took “detangling” his prose style. In response, Alex Ross posts some of his own embarrassing early prose at the New Yorker in an essay entitled “Worst College Essays 1989″.
These essays suggest that the difficult prose of poststructuralism is a vestige of an earlier period, confined to the 1980s. Both authors also suggest that they have outgrown that style over the years. I have been looking back at my grad school writing, and reflecting on what was expected of me in the 2000′s, and nothing seems to have changed. I wonder if all that difficult theory is a hazing process, or something for young scholars to cling to for security, or just a rite of passage into academia or the broader intellectual world. Is it a function of youth? I’m not sure, but I do know it did not end in the 80′s, and I wonder what passages we will point to in a few decades to indicate the seeming absurdity of our own discourse.
I understand what Harrisurg is doing, and I agree that we could all benefit from a step away from social media, and that reflection on how and how often we use them is essential to understanding how we communicate and how we occupy our time. I understand and applaud the impulse, but the top-down approach bothers me. Sure, for some this will raise awareness, but for most students and faculty, this will be nothing more than an inconvenience. Instead, we should encourage a voluntary day/week/month of giving up/slowing down SM, which I think might raise awareness and teach moderation, without being authoritarian about it.
Harrisburg is careful to state that the ban “is not intended to be a punishment nor is it intended to be an indictment of social media,” but what else could it be? If my local municipality decided not to serve alcohol for a day, to encourage abstinence and to make me reflect on my alcohol use, I’d be pissed off, and I would definitely get the idea that it was an indictment of alcohol. They wouldn’t do that with vegetables. Words like “abstinence” and “abuse” figure prominently in the announcement, leading me to believe that the object is not for people to say, “Gee, you taught me that social media is really important to me,” but to say, “Yikes. I am addicted to this activity and need to curtail it.”
I would be interested to hear from other places (schools, families, individuals) that have done something similar, and how it worked (works) out. I would also love to hear form students of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, but I might have to wait a week for that.
