Blogging and audience

Bill Schachner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a nice article on blogging, "Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer in the blogosphere" It begins:

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author "seems like a bitter man." In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there.

Except she didn't just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the way from England, pledging to re-examine an upcoming edition given her critique.

The article gives quite a few stories leading to real-world interaction, and although most postings do not lead to such interaction, the potential creates a forum of real writing for real audiences: another reason for incorporating blogs into writing classes.

Review of Tinderbox

Douglas Johnston writes a review of Tinderbox as a Writing Tool (via Mark Bernstein, the creator of Tinderbox). He concludes:

These small gripes and oddities notwithstanding, consider me firmly in the Tinderbox camp. In all the various applications I’ve tried, both commercial and Open Source, I haven’t come across one that’s quite so attuned to the way I play with ideas and write text. I’m not sure if I think like Tinderbox, or Tinderbox thinks like me, but I know it’s an environment which encourages creativity without distraction, and yet feels wholly comfortable to use. A winning combination, indeed.

Students reading and RSS

A few posts below, I mentioned Netvibes, a personalized web page service that allows for RSS feeds. Actually, Google and Yahoo have the same service, although Hinchcliffe said Netvibes was much better than those and other existing ones. One advantage of Netvibes is its integration with Writely.com, an online collaborative word processor. Students working together on the same paper could do so at writely.com, and whenever someone updated it, they would receive notification at their netvibes site. Netvibes already have modules ready to receive feeds from Gmail, Flickr, the weather, a variety of blogs, bookmarks, and those of one's own making. And there's a module for notes. All in all, it's an easy-to-use web resource that can promote students reading, analyzing, and synthesizing (and thus writing) skills.

Writely for collaborative online writing

Brian Lamb at Abject Learning (via Educational Weblogs) recommends using Writely, an online collaborative writing environment, instead of Word 2004 for collaborative word processing.

God vs. composition class

Two postings earlier (Oct 2), I noted how Ed Madden "disenfranchised religion from the process of democratic deliberation" with one word. In a non-ESL, university composition course at Victor Valley Community College, Bethany Haulf received a grade of F on a paper for using the word God 41 times (Leroy Standish, Daily Press). Michael Shefchik, her teacher, had approved the paper's topic, Religion and its Place within the Government, but forbade the use of "God."

Shefchik claims teacher prerogative to design class assignments, and Hauf claims freedom of speech. Putting a positive spin on both sides, I can imagine that Shefchik, like many teachers, avoids topics or content (e.g., abortion) that leads to regurgitation of concepts instead of critical examination of those concepts. I can also imagine that Hauf has a different worldview that Shefchik's, a worldview that is excluded from the privileged perspective of academia.

Question: In what ways is (ex/in)cluding cultural backgrounds of students in our schools different/similar to (ex/in)cluding religious worldviews? Is there room in diversity and multiculturalism perspectives to include strong religious positions?

The power of a word

Ed Madden (The State) writes about the difficulty of moving first-year composition students (non-ESL) from "I have a right to my opinion!" to a process of evaluating arguments, reasons, and evidence.

So we have to move on to the necessary and sometimes difficult work of deliberation. And we have to talk about how to look for common ground, how to value and maintain community and civility, even in the face of deep disagreement, and how to work together in the context of disagreement. That’s how secular democracy — from the freshman classroom to the nonprofit board to the State House — works.

What's interesting is the word "secular" in "secular democracy." With a single word, Madden has disenfranchised religion from the process of democratic deliberation. I once overheard another composition instructor telling a student that the word "myth" did not mean something was not true, only that it was an academic word referring to ancient stories. Yet, this word always carries the nuance of "fiction." Thus, by a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the instructor effectively nullified the student's world view.

Questions: How does one maintain "separation of church and state" and simultaneously respect religious perspectives? What sorts of words might ESL teachers unwittingly use that denigrate, or at least do not respect, the cultural heritages of their students?

Writing a book review

I finished the paper about the educational movement of Fethuallah Gülen (see entries for July 8 &15). I had difficulty making smooth and logical connections between character education, his movement, and other conceptual avenues. So I decided to put my Word document into Tinderbox. I broke the document apart according to concepts (including "scribbling" and "quotations") and put them into different notes. It's sort of like using 5x8 cards, but with the ability (1) to see them all on the floor at once, (2) to reshuffle the cards in different patterns, (3) to move parts of cards to other cards, and (4) to go back and forth among the cards (parts of the paper) with ease. With Word, I was scrolling up and down, looking for those parts with frustration. Now they're all visible at the same time.

Composition & Rhetoric Wiki textbook

(From Kairos News) Matt Barton has started a Composition and Rhetoric Wiki book for first-year composition and is going to involve an upper level composition course in helping. He writes:

I've decided to conduct a rather risky experiment in my Computers and English course this semester: A semester-long class project whose goal is to create a free wikitext for use as a first-year composition textbook. The course is cross-listed, with about 13 seniors and juniors and 2 (maybe 3) English graduate students with teaching experience at the college and high school level. Some of the students are English majors, but others have mass comm and IT backgrounds. In other words, this is in many ways my ideal mix for a project like this. I started working on the Rhetoric and Composition Wikitext nearly a year ago, but development has been slow. The project is hosted at wikibooks, a project specifically devoted to the purpose of creating and distributing free educational materials. I think this is a valuable service learning project that will help the class reach several of its goals--gain experience with writing technologies, develop good collaboration skills, and learn about writing and writing instruction all at the same time. I think it's going to be a fun project, and so far the class morale is extremely high. Everyone is excited about the project, especially me!

First day of class

School has begun, so this blog will focus more on my classes now. This semester, we are exploring "What is good writing?" We will research what it is, how to achieve it, and then create a web resource for future students of this class.

For right now, you need to post twice a week in your own blog. If I don't give you a topic, then write on anything of interest to you.

For the summaries next week, write about one paragraph. Include the title of the article, author, the source, the main idea, reasons for this idea, and your opinion about the article.

tag: 1430

Writing for the Web

Graeme Daniel (at wwwtools for education) has provided a large number of links on Writing for the Web.

Moveable Type is free

You can download for free Moveable Type, software for writing blogs, or you can get better support with a greater number of authors for a reasonable price.

Disinterest in first-year composition

Bud Beck (at Political Gateway) writes about first-year composition, probably for native speakers, on the disconnect between subjects in class on supposedly important topics and his students' ignorance and disinterest on those topics:

I thought about it. These adults were low paid hourly workers, many of them heads of single parent households, all struggling to make ends meet. They are not the wealthy upper or upper middle class. Tax cuts mean nothing to them and a vacation is a week in which they don't have to go to school. They are not in tune with the issues because they are too busy working and trying to make that last buck so they can hang in there one more week.

Not one of them has a moment of spare time to participate in evening vigils, nor can they take a Friday morning to oppose the privatization of Social Security. They don't travel to Washington to demonstrate and they certainly can't take a week to go to Crawford to join Cindy. They can't because they are busy trying to survive their lives. ...

A brutal fact of life, one the Democrats are missing, is my fifty students are representative of Mr., Mrs. and Ms. America. Forget the polls and forget popularity and approval ratings. They mean nothing until an issue has some sort of impact on them. They complain more about the price of a gallon of gas and a gallon of milk than the war or a judicial appointment.

Language barrier

Perhaps the biggest incentive for second language writing to become more important is business. Paul Brown (The New York Times) writes about "A language barrier to sales":

It seems impossible to believe, when you realize that just about every call to a toll-free number asks if you want to proceed in English or Spanish, but the vast majority of retail Web sites are English only.

That decision - or oversight - is costing merchants tens of billions of dollars in sales a year, according to the current issue of Forrester Magazine, published by the research company of the same name.

First-year composition and ESL students

From DeAnn, aka Flash!topian, a teacher of first year college composition:

You don't do anyone any favors when you pass an incompetent student. You make everyone's lives miserable, especially the student's. This is doubly the case for ESL students, who will show up in an advanced class, having been shoved through the preliminaries, without the basic knowledge required to understand the material. You're the teacher. Teach them. If they don't learn, send them to a tutor. If they still don't learn, gently inform them that another semester at that level will help them.

More Hispanics take ACT

Hispanic PR Wire (via HispanicBusiness.com) reports:

More Hispanic high school graduates than ever before are taking the ACT and planning to attend college. But, test results from the graduating class of 2005 suggest that many of these students are missing some of the academic skills they’ll need during their first year of college. ...

just 48 percent of ACT-tested Hispanic students achieved an 18 or higher on the English Test, indicating they are likely to earn a “C” or higher in freshman English composition

The photo touch

This weekend, I started to set up my new website, Second Language Writing, where I plan to move this blog. For starters, I used Yotophoto, a search engine for free photos, to collect pictures of writing in different languages, and then I put them into a Flickr badge. These software tools help to add a nice photo touch to one's website.

The Internet and persona

Although I've mentioned articles that talked about the downside of blogging with respect to academic search committees, Michael Bugeja in The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about how an Internet presence can aid one on the path to tenure and promotion:

"For better or worse, the Internet is playing a larger role in editorial decisions about books and in promotion and tenure evaluations. It is commonplace for external reviewers to Google Web sites or troll databases before rendering their decisions on behalf of publishing houses and institutions.

Search committees also are using the Web to evaluate the writing or scholarship of job applicants before inviting them to on-campus interviews."

The disagreement between the articles is only an apparent one. Those against blogging were against blogging that presented a less-than-professional ethos, while the article in favor of an Internet presence recommended establishing a professional persona.

Appropriate ethos is determined by audience, of course. What's interesting is that the job applicants were unaware of what was an appropriate ethos, even though they had a Ph.D. in their discipline.

Question: If such unawareness of audience is present at that level, then what level of audience awareness should be teachers aim at for first-year composition?

Tech plagiarism

Just a day after his article on not giving credit where due, David Pogue learned that the same observation on Apple's "'Give away the razors, sell a lot of blades' business plan" had been made at least three times going back almost two years. Not citing others, plagiarism in academia, apparently appears more than rarely in newspapers. Perhaps some tech columnists didn't take first-year composition in the university?

Attribution and credibility

David Pogue often has good comments on technology. In the last week, he has had several excellent articles, two on writing.

"Attribution where attribution is due." One was on checking one's sources. Although he cited his source, that source didn't give appropriate credit, perhaps unintentionally, but still it's technically plagiarism. As Pogue said, "Foolish moi!"

"Choosing words carefully." In this article, Pogue had offended the folks at Apple through his choice of words. Pogue concurred. The ability to say one is wrong is great for one's credibility, and note how well he does it with his concluding paragraph:

"In short, if the column’s opening paragraph left anyone with the impression that I believe Apple is somehow coasting on existing technologies, let me set the record straight. Innovation *is* Apple’s heart and soul. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name another company whose fresh technology ideas affect so many lives so often."

Understanding linking

On The Blog Herald, Duncan (via Anne Davis) has an excellent article on the role of links in "building traffic and gaining exposure for your blog." On accomplishing these goals, he makes some recommendations, the last one being,

"And the best of all: Link to others. Lead by example and link to sites and provide credit where credit is due. You’ll find that sometimes you get a link back! There is nothing worse than a blog or blogger that doesn’t give credit on posts where the idea is taken from elsewhere."

The notion of not giving credit resembles that of plagiarism in academia. Perhaps the concept comes to life naturally when ownership of writing is real as opposed to course requirements.

PDAs in the classroom

In a pilot project, elementary school teachers are using PDAs loaded with diagnostic software to assess students on reading proficiency for immediate feedback and adjustment of lessons. I wonder how that could be adapted for first year composition.

(Re)writing the Gülen paper

I've started working on the Fethullah Gülen (see July 8 entry) paper. Actually, I'm taking a conference paper that I wrote before and reframing/revising it. The earlier paper was simply introducing his movement. This paper intends to analyze in more depth his positions on education and the approaches his adherents have taken, compare that analysis to other figures in education and character education, and then, I hope, suggest how his approach might be adapted to a U.S. context. That means more research, more reading, and more thinking, especially thinking, so I can come up with something a little original.

Being original will be the hardest task. The second hardest task will be not to denigrate U.S. education. To show the negative is easy. Showing the negative with the positive, and even showing how those I disagree with have good intentions and in some ways good results, that is often more difficult, at least for me. However, as Gülen points out the necessity of compassion, tolerance, and dialogue, it would be ironical if I did not follow his principles when supporting them in print.

"Study great ideas, but teach to the test"

It appears that the five-paragraph essay is more important than learning great ideas. A NY Times article shows the pressures on teachers to teach to the test rather than to teach good writing. This summer, Becky Karnes, a high school English teacher, finished a graduate-level writing course on learning "better ways to teach writing to kids." Will she use what she learned when she returns to class?

"Oh, no," said Ms. Karnes. "There's no time to do creative writing and develop authentic voice. That would take weeks and weeks. There are three essays on the state test and we start prepping right at the start of the year. We have to teach to the state test."

For an excellent book on how high stakes testing and accountability dumb down the curriculum, read George Hillocks' book, The testing trap: How state writing assessments control learning.

Write online and get fired

Writing, at least publicly online, can be dangerous to your career not only in academia (see July 10 entry) but elsewhere. In a NY Times article, ex-NYPD police officer Polstein claims he was fired for comments on his website criticizing NYPD.

Others over the last several years have lost their jobs, too. Joe Gordon was the first blogger to be fired in the U.K. The U.S. has a considerable head start, going back to February, 2002, when Heather Armstrong was the first to be fired for blogging, coining the word "dooced," meaning losing your job for something you wrote on your website. Even those working at innovative high-tech companies are not immune. Mark Jen was fired from Google for his blog, and Joyce Park was fired from Friendster, a company "known for breaking new ground in online social networking and promoting self-expression among peers."

On the legalities of blogging about work, read Jaime Weinman's article. To the point, Robert Scoble says you need "be smart" about what to publish online and "don't piss your boss off."

More on RSS feeds

On RSS feeds, Elise Bauer has a good introduction to them and lists some software that can do it easily. Although I can do a single RSS feed with Tinderbox, I haven't learned how to aggregate them all into one document yet. That will be an going project. For now, I will use iBlog to do it. iBlog, although blog software, is also an RSS reader, and a good one at that.

You may have noticed in the previous posting on Blogging controversy that the font in the quotes are different from my writing. I haven't quite figured out how to get them the same. I'm using HTML codes blockquote and font. The blockquote worked, but it made the font too large, so I inserted font, trying to control the size and style, but for some reason, I can't get it to be just what I want.

Blogging controversy in academia

Yesterday, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, an anonymous humanities professor published an essay on how blogs could derail an academic career. He frowned on academics who posted personal items for a "therapeutic outlet" (including "air[ing] departmental dirty laundry"), wrote"way-out there opinions that are not peer reviewed, and spent too much time in the computer lab:

"It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job."

Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at U of Maryland, responded, and these are my reasons, too, that academic blogs also helped to network and to motivate:

"The idea was to keep myself motivated. By writing in a fishbowl, I reasoned, I would have some real, external pressure to keep at it. I would never know who was reading (watching)."

Difficulty in writing

A friend has asked me to write a paper on the educational movement of Fethullah Gülen for presenting at a conference in Houston in November. It is quite difficult as I'm not sure where to begin. I know only a little about Gülen. I suppose I'll need to read some more of his writings and perhaps connect it to the concept of character education in the U.S., contrasting it with the type of character education that is transmitted through words rather than through the example of living. Perhaps I can tie education for life, civic participation, and service to humanity to the concept of Gülen's Golden Generation, a generation of complete human beings who live for others. Obviously, our K-12 system is oriented toward material and career success. What would be the outcome if our teachers and schools were oriented toward service to humanity? Would their embodying and modeling character (rather than teaching it) have a significant effect on our students? What will be the outcome if we do not change our orientation? How can we achieve such an orientation?

Categories

Categories