Student Blogging

My ENG252 students have started blogging.  I showed them the polldaddy plug-in, because it is an avenue for field research that I thought might be interesting for their projects.  One student has already posted a poll.  Give it a look and cast a vote.

Teaching students how to blog is hard work.  It’s like teaching any other kind of text I suppose, and I tend toward a modeling approach (despite some reservations about unrealistic expectations), so it (will) involve(s) a lot of analyzing other blog posts as texts.  Last week I spoke to them about not “reinventing the wheel.”  That is, not just taking content that is already online and copy and pasting it into their own blog posts.  Even though they are using blogs as a commonplace book — a place to collect resources for their projects — I want them also utilizing them as a space for analysis of these sources.  I also spoke about the beauty and ease of citing sources through links online, but integrating those links seamlessly into the text of the blog post is a skill that will take time to learn.

 

With Our Students, We Shall Write…

On Thursday, my ENG252 Writing for New Media class will begin four weeks of daily blogging.  I, obviously, have a blog too.  One that I haven’t written in since the school year started ten weeks ago (how is it that I still feel so new at all of this!?).  One that I should be writing in at least one to two times per week.  I’m not going to get into all the self-flagellating rhetoric about blogging vs. not blogging or the necessity of maintaining one’s writing practice as a new faculty member (or an “old” faculty member for that matter).  Dr. Crazy writes quite nicely about the realities of producing writing (or not) as an academic and advises us not to beat ourselves up when “life gets in the way.”  Regardless, though, I think that when one “demands” something of her/his students, it is time to stop making excuses and step up to that proverbial (cliché) plate her/himself.

Back in the summer, before I embarked on the insanity that is one’s first year in TT position, teaching three preps, two of which s/he’s never taught before, I made myself a schedule.  Yes, it was idealistic and therefore a bit unrealistic but it included writing time in it.  That writing time has since always taken a backseat to prepping and responding to students’ various needs (e-mails, feedback on essays, etc).  As a writing teacher, the majority of my writing time goes to writing back to students, guiding them through and over their own writing hurtles and difficulties, which include getting started and making time for writing.  At what point, I wonder, will I start taking some of my own advice, and “just do it”?  This week is already jam-packed with student writing conferences (there is a theme here, isn’t there) and meetings.  Oh meetings–the cursed requirement of the TT-life.  But here I am, getting started, getting words on the page, and that is, after all, what I ask my students to do.

Brief Start of School Year Remarks

In my last post, I described how “my LAC” isn’t focused on utilizing technology so as to reduce the cost of tuition. I was brought back to this thought during the President’s address on President’s Day last week. His speech was focused on the future of higher education and he drew from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s The College of 2020 Report (which itself cost $295, but that maybe a story for a different post?). One of his concerns was with the ways that technology is allowing for the increased use of hybrid (less face-to-face time) courses. He sees this as one of the more pessimistic outlooks for the future of higher education. And yet, the speech was also punctuated with the realization that as a small, private LAC our tuition is much higher than many schools, and that, in fact, we are up against the lower tuition offered by many of the other state schools and community colleges in the area. Again, I think this is a moment for reassessing the “pessimism” that is defined by a future of refigured education based on the networked classroom. I believe there are ways for a small LAC to think optimistically about how technology will help it a) “compete” against federally and state funded (however limited that funding has become) institutions, b) offer a more solid and nuanced education that will meet the needs of 21st century students (as Alex Reid recently points out, we are no longer in a 1990s classroom), and c) make it’s education accessible to a wider student audience (one of the concerns expressed during my interview was with the school’s homogeneous population). Utilizing technology in innovative ways surely isn’t the central or primary answer to the concerns over the economy that are felt by students and parents and echoed throughout the President’s speech, but there are cost-saving measures to be taken and made.

On the optimistic side was a prediction about the importance of teachers and how we teach as being central to the success of our students (kind of obvious, I guess), but always a good start of school year reminder. Three key remarks/suggestions from the Dean of A&H that accompanied this:

• Meet your students where they are at
• Help your students to know how they learn
• Be sure to have office hours that are accessible and on syllabus
• Connect outcomes with your assignments (or the other way around, I guess is more likely)

Let the 2011-2012 school year begin!

Productivity Data

In a recent Inside Higher Ed article, Rick O’Donnell addresses the controversial aspects of “faculty performance data” and makes arguments for why they matter. He begins by stating three interrelated (though, as he points out, often seen as exclusive) issues that are interfering with the success of higher education: 1) increased tuition costs, 2) changes to the structure brought on by technology and for-profit college, and 3) the value of education (that is, how much students are actually learning and getting out of their postsecondary experience). In an attempt to see the relationship amongst these three issues and to do something about it, “advocates of higher education productivity” have made an effort to “create blended classroom/online courses to improve learning at lower cost.” Reading this fact was nothing new for me, but it made me think about how my future institution — a four year, private liberal arts college — uses hybrid courses.

The focus at my future LAC is not on using technology to make tuition costs more effective, nor is it really on using technology to make education more accessible. Instead, it seems, the interest in hybrid courses is based on the idea that this is the current trend in higher education and therefore we should “get on board.” Now this isn’t necessarily a problem. I believe it is important to know what’s on the horizon in education and to carefully consider the pedagogical benefits (or costs) of bringing a digitally networked culture to the classroom. But I was just struck, in reading O’Donnell’s piece, that there are probably many schools (in particular, I’m guessing, small, private LACs) that are using this trend to actually bring in more students and therefore more tuition funding. If the school can present its progressive technological prowess, this becomes a selling point to parents and students who often believe (and not wrongfully) that strong tech skills are the answer to future employment and success.

I believe that LACs (or any other institutions) that are not already thinking about how using hybrid courses can make college more affordable are going to be left behind and end up with falling enrollments. It seems that this might be a conversation that needs to start happening at my future site of employment.

While I was struck (in a way that had not much to do with the main argument he was trying to make) by O’Donnell’s point about using hybrid courses in cost-effective ways, overall I was not buying his argument(s). He moves on to connect faculty performance data with universities’ financial security and success. He brushes off concerns about micromanaging faculty through the collection of individual faculty-data by saying that “real” successful scholars are not “afraid” of “scrutiny” and “accountability.” He writes, “In fact, excellence tends to attract excellence….” This, he argues, is the path to weeding out mediocrity. Clearly, he has not read Bill Readings, who would blanche at the sight of accountability and excellence being the basis of this argument (and used multiple times in quick succession without any critical pressure placed on these terms–as if their definition were self-evident).

My question: Is this really about fear of “scrutiny” and “accountability” on the part of faculty? Or is this actually about concerns with how one defines and measures “excellence”? It’s not that faculty are afraid to be “examined,” but that the tools of measurement are certainly questionable. Who determines “excellence”? And how does one measure it? Again, these are not new questions. Readings asks them in much more detailed and thoughtful ways in University in Ruins. I just am raising them again as the crises that Readings, in some ways, foresaw taking place come to fruition, and at the same time our solutions don’t seem to be changing (“accountability” and “excellence” are not solutions – despite O’Donnell’s experience leading multiple “organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors”). And he ends on the idea of “truth” (as in, “the truth shall set you free) — an idea at least as ambiguous and amorphous as “excellence.”

Montaigne was the Original Writing to Learn Advocate

In his 2004 piece, “The Age of the Essay,” Paul Graham essentially argues that the kinds of essay writing we teach in school (particularly postsecondary) is a pointless kind of writing, and he defends students’ views that this writing is (or can be) “boring.” Now this argument about college essay writing as out of context and therefore pointless–not the stuff of the “real world”–is nothing new, but it is Graham’s interest in tracing the current use of the essay in writing classes back to its origins in Montaigne’s work that I find useful (if not entirely new, then at the very least, a good reminder).

Graham writes that the “big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it.” This, for me, is a slightly unusual perspective. It certainly rubs against my own pedagogical approach to teaching writing, but I’m more than willing to entertain it. Defending a position, Graham asserts, is “not the best way to get at the truth.” This statement assumes that there is such a thing as “truth,” but because there is no capital “T” there, I’ll go with the assumption that Graham is leaning more toward the idea of exploration that can help a writer get at some version of accuracy/reality/truth.

And that idea of exploration is what guides Graham’s ideas. As he puts it, writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid form of writing, but it is not an essay. Here he invokes Montaigne’s 1580 collection of “essais”–from the French verb essayer, meaning “to try.” At the start of each semester’s expository writing course that I teach, I do this whole word origin discussion with my students, tracing the word “essay” back to this idea of “to try,” and we discuss what that means for their writing and how they might approach composing an essay with this idea or goal in mind. It is meant to take some of the intimidation out of and pressure off of the writing process. In other words, writing an essay is merely an attempt. When you attempt something, you might succeed or you might fail. I try to make both those options an “okay” and natural part of the writing process for my students. However, when reading Graham’s essay, I started to wonder whether or not I truly embody this approach in my assignments/pedagogy.

Again, my writing pedagogy tends to fall into the “everything’s an argument” category characterized in Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz’s Everything’s an Argument. That is, I spend a great deal of time helping students form a position that they then support. I work hard to ensure that student essays have an actual argument that they are making. I do emphasize the kinds of “meanderings” and explorations that Graham highlights in his piece. Though I have students write the kinds of “defend-a-position” essays that Graham rails against, I try to teach them that their defense of that position must include both concessions and refutations (awareness and exploration of alternate viewpoints) that refine (and sometimes completely change) their stance. In other words, it is not a “defend your position to the death” type of essay. I do try to tell them, as Graham does, “Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought– but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation.”

Ultimately I find the advice that Graham gives in his piece to be not only helpful to me, as the writing teacher, but potentially helpful to students as well, which is why I will be assigning them this piece to read in ENG105 this Fall.

The Materiality of New Media

In Writing New Media, Anne Frances Wysocki draws on the work of Bruce Horner (in Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique) to encourage composition instructors to focus on the materiality of writing itself and the new media tools frequently used to compose. Horner’s work is formed around Raymond Williams’ idea of “the materiality of culture.” I was heavily influenced by Horner’s book back when I first read it and was happy to see it being brought into use by compositionists working with new media.

One of my goals in my Fall 2011 ENG252 Writing for New Media course is to have students critically engage with the technology they are using as a cultural artifact/an object of study. In other words, I hope that they see these tools not as neutral but ideologically charged/situated–produced by people with particular ideas, beliefs, and goals of their own, and then used by people (in this case, my students) in a particular context with their own ideas, beliefs, and goals.

My intention is to have them utilize Du Gay, et al’s (more commonly attributed to Stuart Hall) “circuit of culture” in order to conduct a systematic and careful analysis of various digital tools and applications. However, after spending the weekend at THATCAmp LAC, I’ve been thinking more about specific methodologies of the digital humanities. Most of them it seems are related to the more narrow definition of the digital humanities as “computational”–drawing on the methodologies of computer science to better understand humanities-oriented texts. This does not jive with the idea of using a humanities-oriented form of analysis to understand the digital. Much of THATCamp LAC focused on digital archive projects of various kinds (and related tools like omeka and TEI). But I am most interested in thinking about what forms of humanities-oriented methodologies we can bring to new media. Again, my idea is to utilize the “circuit of culture” to study “new media artifacts” in this manner, but I also recognize that this approach is more than a decade old at this point, and so I am interested in hearing other more recent approaches as well.

Thoughts on “Bringing our Brains to the Humanities”

On Friday I am heading to THATCamp LAC at St. Norbert’s College in Wisconsin. In preparation for one of the “boot camps,” “Integrating Digital Humanities Projects into the Undergraduate Curriculum,” I just read one of the suggested articles: “Bringing our Brains to the Humanities Increasing the Value of our Classes while Supporting our Futures” by Sheila T. Cavanaugh. The article addresses the now commonly explored questions of what has become of or is becoming of the humanities. This is a hot topic as of late, and this is not the first piece that I’ve read that suggests the answer lies in creating some kind of monetary/financial/economic value for the humanities. In my dissertation, I write about the digital humanities collective called 4humanities. At the heart of their mission is advocacy for a declining humanities, but the argument in some ways boils down to the supposed economic value that those in power (“administrators and funding agencies”) assign to the digital, giving the digital humanities a means of “saving” the humanities.

In some ways, Cavanaugh’s argument in “Bringing our Brains…” makes a similar argument and/or connection. She writes, “[W]e should not deny students the possibility of engaging with literature while preparing for an economically feasible future” (134). She mentions at various points that while the worlds of business and literary education may appear to be at odds, “their goals intersect in significant ways.” And it is this intersection of goals that Cavanaugh encourages us to embrace and take advantage of in order to keep the field of English/literary studies relevant. That is the key word in all of these recent articles on humanities disciplines–relevancy. How do we keep our fields relevant? (aka How do we keep our jobs?)

On many levels I do not have a real problem with these kinds of arguments. After all, by no means do I want to deny my students the abilities with which to attain and maintain a job within our capitalist society. And I, of course, would like to keep my job as well. Creating pedagogical approaches aimed at teaching “real life” skills, as Cavanaugh advocates, might be one way of doing this. My concern, however, lies with what appears, at least on the surface, to be a kind of wholehearted acceptance of the economic system as is and the subsequent infringement of that system upon academic life. By approaching the answer to “saving” the humanities through making it economically viable, we seem to leave little room to critique (both for ourselves and our students) the ways in which market forces have taken over our lives in ways that we might not always be attuned to. Again, while I have no qualms with teaching my students the language needed to write a good cover letter, I also want them to have access to the kind of critical thought and language that might lend itself to questioning that which appeals to “administrators and funding agencies.” I want them to wonder about how what we think we “need” and how our “worth” is constructed by the economy and how that economy favors certain people over others. I fear that by creating a (digital) humanities that “catches the eye” of those in power, we are encouraging this kind of acceptance of the system as is in our students.