Essay Exams

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Writing

I’m wishing I was at Computers & Writing right now, but yesterday was final exams for the junior-year writing courses I teach. Three and a half hours to answer a broad writing question that offered the opportunity to cover very nearly all of the readings in the course, with essays written and submitted on laptops. Big chunk of the final grade, which I don’t like, but the ideology of the need for a final exam in all subjects is something that will not go away easily here.

I coached the process as much as I could beforehand:

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Learning LOLKitteh

preterite Cats, Friday Fun

The Ratliff compels, and one obeys.

Well, OK: Clancy wrote, “Mike, you HAVE to do an I Can Has Cheezburger? image,” but while I can read and parody LOLKitteh, I’m far from being a native or even adequate speaker.

I’m doing my best to learn LOLKitteh, certainly, particularly given its recent emergence as one of the fundamental philosophical discourses of modernity. My efforts, however, yield slight return. Tink and Zeugma regard me indulgently as I practice the tense-shifts and contractions, but when I attempt to engage them in LOLKitteh, they flee to the litterboxen.

As Clancy has demonstrated, though, LOLKitteh allows us to speak of that which other discourses and other interlocutors (our friend and colleague Joanna Howard comes immediately to mind) forbid. There is, for example, the practice of interrogating so-called ‘flavor’ as sociocultural and affective construct.

Two cats, Tink and Zeugma, interacting

However, my lack of LOLKitteh fluency has stymied attempts at adequately describing the above interaction.

Your captions are welcomed.

Benkler’s Production Grid

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In my CCCC presentation, I tried to mash together Yochai Benkler’s diverse motivations for production, my own thoughts about the work > appropriation > ownership > use > work cycle, and Gibson-Graham’s tabular charting of the various market, alternative market, and nonmarket forms of economic activity, and to apply that mashup to the composition classroom. Right now, I’m planning out how to turn that mashup into an article, and I’ve gone back to Benkler and re-stumbled across yet another table, on page 43 of The Wealth of Networks. Benkler charts three types of strategies for “Cost Minimization / Benefit Acquisition” across three domains: the public, the intra-organizational (he calls it “intrafirm” but I want to open up that term to more explicitly include noncapitalist or alternative capitalist enterprises), and the semi-private. His three strategies are those of rights-based exclusion (in other words, profiting from copyright and associated strategies), nonexclusion-market (producing information from which to profit, but not via exclusivity), and nonexclusion-nonmarket (e.g., reputation economies and the like). I think Benkler’s taxonomy is helpful, particularly in considering the domain/context/scope of activity, and I want to work to map it over Gibson-Graham’s and my own subsequent elaborations, but I also think it’s somewhat incomplete, particularly in light of Benkler’s own work on non-market motivations for information production.

Which is what I’ll be working on as soon as I see the light at the end of the end-of-semester forced march.

Computers, Pedagogy, and Priorities

preterite Computers, Education

Laptops are useless, technology is the devil, and computers make our students stupid.

Or at least that’s what the New York Times would have you think.

Alex Reid, Jenny Edbauer, and Will Richardson have all commented on the NYT’s recent piece of slack-jawed mouth-breathing idiocy, non sequiturs, and logical fallacies concerning technology in the classroom. They were rather more charitable than I’m inclined to be.

To be fair, reporter Winnie Hu makes slight attempts to offer balance and critical insight, observing the problems with “how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums” — but the piece, overall, is a hatchet job; a slimy luddite screed that blames technology for the ways in which it’s used and inadvertently highlights just how stupid and reactionary teachers and administrators can be when it comes to computers. In her observation, Hu is quite right: schools throw money at technology, imagining it as a quick fix, without a thought to how it might be used. Unfortunately, the rest of her article completely buys into precisely that mode of thinking, lamenting the vast sums of money expended and the apparent negligible results. In a lame and myopic attempt to indict what she sees as the problems with teaching with laptops, she describes how “Northfield Mount Hermon School, a private boarding school in western Massachusetts, eliminated its five-year-old laptop program in 2002 after it found that more effort was being expended on repairing the laptops than on training teachers to teach with them.” Where, one might ask, does the problem with priorities lie?

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At the Met

preterite Asides

Saturday night, twenty-two of us went to see the Franco Zeffirelli production of Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera (click for a larger version):

the group, in uniform

At intermission, we were taken backstage and allowed to watch the mechanics and massive coordination involved in changing Zeffirelli’s glorious sets, and met and talked with the charming soprano Erika Sunnegårdh, who sang in the title role.

It was a pretty good Saturday night.

Decades and Connections

preterite Academia

Like Jeff, I recently received an invitation to my high school’s twenty-year reunion. I’m ambivalent about it: somewhat curious, but also not eager to spend a lot of money for a lame DJ and chatting with folks I mostly don’t remember. With my military service, I’ve taken a career path somewhat different from Jeff’s, but it’s interesting to think about what happens in twenty years.

Twenty years ago, I was a high school senior at Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Maryland, and then a college freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Twenty years ago, my first-year writing course was in Linda Flower’s composition curriculum, and my freshman psychology course — “Cognitive Processes: Theory and Practice” — was taught by John Hayes.

Twenty years ago, the American military was explicitly protecting economic interests in the Persian Gulf by escorting oil tankers when an Iraqi jet fired two missiles at the USS Stark and killed thirty-seven sailors.

Twenty years ago, Ira Shor described in Critical Pedagogy and Everyday Life the faceless, agentless agency of “a wildly growing and uncontrollable machine-economy [that] rushed across the land transforming everything it touched” and “created and peopled an educational frontier” in the form of the community college system (2); a system that some critics have suggested reinforces hierarchical structures of economic inequality.

Twenty years ago, Michael Joyce wrote the seminal hypertext fiction afternoon: a story. Bootleg copies circulated around the Carnegie Mellon dorms on 3.5-inch diskettes, where I encountered it. I thought it was something like a poetic interactive fiction, like Zork or Planetfall or Suspended. I also thought it was one of the most beautiful, puzzling, intricate, and compelling things I’d ever read in the way it went back and forth and traveled multiple times, multiple iterations, through various forking paths and nodes that changed in their meaning and nuance when I returned to them.

Twenty years ago, Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize in economics for his careful examinations of the ways technological development influences economic growth.

Twenty years ago, I was taking a freshman philosophy course from a professor I don’t remember. It was called “Philosophic Methods and Morals,” and it included a significant focus on logic and Turing Machines We analyzed and created various rule-bound (hypothetical) Turing Machines with read/write heads that moved back and forth on various tapes (paths?) depending on the symbol in each cell (node?). Working with these abstract computers was challenging, time-consuming, labor-intensive, but oddly fascinating in its crystalline intricacy.

Twenty years ago, C. Paul Olson wrote an essay called “Who Computes?” for the edited collection Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power wherein he pointed out that “the computer as a tool does fundamentally reorganize material relationships and organizations of production and our thoughts about what production is” (183, emphasis in original). Charles Moran points out that composition still has not adequately responded to the economic critique Olson sets forth in the essay, but the way Olson demonstrates that better machines reduce work by replacing labor-intensive processes with capital-intensive processes (184) was a starting point for my dissertation.

CCCC07.P04: Pedagogic Violence

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Conference Notes

The full title of this session was “Pedagogic Violence and Emotions of (Self-) Assessment: Anger, Mortification, Shame,” or, as panel chair Elizabeth Weiser summed it up, “The Happy Panel!”

Amy Robillard began her presentation, “The Functions and Effects of Angry Responses to Plagiarism,” with some questions to the audience: “How many of us have suspected plagiarism?” All hands went up. “Felt insulted by it?” All hands. “Felt angry?” Again: all. Robillard offered an anecdote from a course she had taught wherein a student turned in a paper with one passage in a noticeably lighter font than the rest of the passage. She Googled the passage and discovered that the student had actually plagiarized three separate passages in the paper from weblogs. Robillard described her anger at the attempt at deceit, and her anger at the student’s implicit presumption of stupidity on Robillard’s part; the presumption that Robillard would somehow be dumb enough not to recognize plagiarism when she saw it. This anger, Robillard suggested, helped her to maintain an identity as a writing instructor sufficiently expert to make the distinction between that which is plagiarized and that which is not. But of course, she acknowledged, she could have missed it as well, because it was the font color that spurred her curiosity — and that acknowledgment led for Robillard both to a possible anger at self for writing teacher and to the question (itself carrying an inherent affective teacherly freight) of how many plagiarizers go uncaught.

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Rattlechest

preterite Asides

Sick with the burbly chest-cough. I want to post my last CCCC notes, but I keep getting too tired, doing curriculum stuff, trying and failing to read. Tea’s no good, and all the leftovers suck when you feel like this, even the gumbo, which has good fresh okra and shrimps and peppers in it, and which I’m not even interested in right now.

Cadets: “You don’t sound so good, sir. Maybe a short class today?”

On the good side, Tink and Zeugma seem to like that I have something approximating a nocturnal purr/gurgle, and curled up with me the last couple nights.

Blacksburg

preterite Academia

Of which one cannot speak, one must thereof be silent.

I don’t know what else I feel I can say. It’s the shocking global numb; the instant inadequacy of words.