July 15, 2008

Sometimes the Freewriting... Isn't

While freewrites can be powerful and productive ways to get the composerly juices flowing, they don't always go according to plan. Or at all.

This morning, for instance, we were given the luxury of choosing from two different prompts: "Where were you last night?" and "The earth rumbled..."

Here's what I came up with:

The earth rumbled...
Where were you last night?

As I said, sometimes the magic happens, and sometimes it doesn't. Sigh.

Posted by reparent at 3:19 PM | Comments (0)

May 14, 2008

Meditations on Cool

As the Vermont Summer kicks in and temperatures soar into the upper 70s (swoon, swelter, I know), here are some things to think about on and around the topic of cool.

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Our friend Attic Man sent us this news report, which is a little late now, but it was timely when he sent it. And though Obama didn't actually win everywhere in the Pennsylvania primary election, it continues to illustrate the divide between election coolness and un-coolness. Notice the band, Earl Pickens and the Band Named Thunder (a pretty cool name) is pretty cool. Notice the Obama supporters dancing in the video... are not.

From a mass media and electioneering standpoint I think this is perfect. It attaches coolness to the campaign without alienating all of the dorky wanna-be supporters out there who may feel not nearly cool enough to vote with all of the pretty celebrities in the other videos. (Much like the Lipton commercials playing before films now that ask if you're "young enough" to drink their white tea. I suspect that many iced tea drinkers are not.)

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Regulatory oversight and control of abusive commercial practices is cool. While in England outer space, The Spouse and I heard BBC reports of the European Union's impending action against British cell phone providers. Last year, when we were in Scotland, the big news was that this same agency was about to force cell phone providers in the UK to stop charging outrageous fees for calls made from other EU countries. For instance, if you lived in Dover, England and took the hovercraft over to Calais, France, calling your mum at home would have become 10-100 times more expensive than if you'd called her from Belfast, Northern Ireland, even though Belfast is much farther away.

Well, the cell phone companies complied, but refused to change their texting rates. So, now a call from Calais to Dover costs less than texting her: "hi mum, home @ 9." Now the EU regulators are going after texting charges, with action promised this summer. Imagine how cool it would be to live in a place where the government (or at least parts of it) care more about you than they do about Verizon Wireless! Cool.

Boing Boing adds fuel to the fire by reporting that we pay more per megabyte of data for even normal-costing text messages than NASA pays to get pictures of the Crab Nebula!

Now that's not cool.

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Design Observer wants us to think about how cool tables of contents can be, with 30 beautiful ToCs.

Above: ToC #27, from The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee. Jürg Spiller, ed. George Wittenborn, 1961.

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A former student (hi J!) sent me this article from the New York Times about sports blogging, which raises a number of cool questions. As Times reporter Tim Arango writes, "At the heart of the issue, which people on both sides alternately describe as a commercial dispute and a First Amendment fight, is a simple question: Who owns sports coverage?" Interestingly, this isn't a fight between bloggers and mainstream, establishment media organizations. In this conflict mainstream and popular media are aligned against the sports organizations who want to control not only the sports event, but also what can be said and shown about the sports event.

Mike Fannin identifies one of the key issues:

Ten years ago newspapers weren’t in the world of video and audio,” [Mike Fannin, president of the Associated Press Sports Editors and the managing editor for sports and features at the Kansas City Star] said. “We were in the world of print. The leagues don’t have a print product. Their view of this is that we entered their world.

As the mainstream print media (newspapers and magazines) become increasingly digital, their coverage becomes, of course, increasingly multimodal. And suddenly what they're doing looks a lot like what the television networks pay millions of dollars each year to broadcast.

Not only that, but the digital coverage provided by the establishment "print" media increasingly comes to resemble what bloggers do. And if bloggers are already doing it, and if some of them are doing it much better than the establishment writers, what's to stop bloggers from increasing their coverage? Well, the team owners, for one. Except when they're stopped, that is.

Last month [Dallas Mavericks owner Mark] Cuban sought to ban bloggers from the Mavericks’ locker room, but the National Basketball Association intervened, ruling that bloggers from credentialed news organizations must be admitted.

Mr. Cuban then decided to let in any blogger — "someone on Blogspot who has been posting for a couple weeks, kids blogging for their middle school Web site or those that work for big companies."

It's a petulant response, but one that has precedent in other venues. In 2004 the national election conventions both had a large and active corps of citizen bloggers who were given "press/media" credentials and access to the events. Why not sports events? And if this does catch on in professional sports, you can expect many, many of my future posts (especially during spring training and the fall/winter season) to be coming to you from the New England Patriots locker room. Everyone wins.

Except for the athletes, who are suddenly having to face the fact that with the democritization of publishing that blogging and online communication presents, everyone and anyone around them could be a blogger, and anything and everything they say could end up "in print" around the world.

“It’s a new world,” said Jason Zillo, the head of media relations for the Yankees, surveying the team taking batting practice. “We spend a lot of time in spring training on media training.

It's not just professional sports, either, that's getting into the "who owns sports coverage" game.

The limits of coverage is a hot issue in athletics at the college level as well. The National Collegiate Athletic Association issued new guidelines this year: in women’s water polo, bloggers are allowed three posts a quarter and one at halftime; in fencing or bowling, 10 posts are allowed for each day or session.

“I think we’re hitting the ridiculous button here,” said John Cherwa, chair of the legal affairs committee for the Associated Press Sports Editors and the sports projects editor at The Orlando Sentinel. “We’re getting tired of everyone trying to tell us how to do our business.”

Damn right you are, John Cherwa. For the uninitiated, what the NCAA is trying to do with these restrictions is to prevent "liveblogging" college sports events, the practice of writing a continuously updated stream of reportage and reflection during an event. Luckily for Cherwa, that horse is already out of the barn. With mobile and ubiquitous computing, and the microminiaturization of increasingly powerful computers means that just about anyone at any event could be liveblogging and most people would never know.

Many cool and uncool things here to ponder...

Posted by reparent at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2007

CCCC 2008 & Blog Hiatus

Here's a first for the blog: is anyone out there going to the 4Cs this April? If so, wanna share a room?

For those of you who aren't residents of Composition Land (it's the section of Disney World that no one goes to because the best ride there is Mr. Toad's Wild Term Paper), the 4Cs is the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). It's the composition field's biggest conference, and it happens every year somewhere around spring break. This year it's being held on April 2-5, in New Orleans. It's a long conference, and just like the Modern Language Association's conference, staying there ain't cheap. Hence the bleg. (That's techno-talk for "blog-beg," using your blog to put a request out to other people.) We'll see if it works.

So, if you're going to New Orleans in April and want to share a hotel room, zing me an e-mail.

In other news, the blog is officially going on hiatus until New Years. Try not to get into too much trouble.

Posted by reparent at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2007

Kids Say The Darndest Things!

In the Teaching Seminar we've been having a discussion all semester about student writing, and we've also been talking about gender. (The first is pretty obvious in a seminar teaching teachers how to teach composition, the second is due to a wickedly problematic set of sample papers on gender and performativity with which I've burdened the students this semester.*)

Recently, an op-ed column in the student newspaper of the University of Texas (ah, memories) has waded into the turbulent waters of sex, gender, and performativity. But not in the subtle, insightful way you might hope. Oh, no.

Meet Ryan Haecker. Ryan's a history major in his third year. He had this blinding flash of insight to share with the world:

The nature of sexual attractiveness in women is objective, immutable and incontrovertible because it is directly related to the constant and unchanging physiology of men and women. What men find attractive in women is fixed because the physiology of humanity has been relatively unchanged. In this way, the ideal form of femininity is also unchangeable and without regard for cultural context or time period. What men find attractive in women - the form of a true lady - is objectively identifiable, just as it was in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. In short, femininity is sexy, and sexy is timeless and universal.

Apparently, the history major has never heard of a bustle. Victorian babies got back like no rap guys' girlfriends ever did!

Haecker continues:

In advocating the wearing of dresses, I must distinguish between the flowing elegant dresses of tradition and the more degenerate and immodest dresses of our present culture. The miniskirt, a dress of sorts that doesn't extend below the knees, is both lacking in modesty and elegance. Elegance is essential to femininity, and the lack thereof implies a sort of masculinization. Modesty is essential to feminine virtue, and the lack thereof implies a state of whorification. Immodest, inelegant dresses constitute a degeneration and androgynization of true dresses.

The androgynous masculinization of the modern woman, through the donning of pants, suits, uncovered shoulders and unveiled hair, has in a sense led to the slow whorification of ladyhood. In discarding feminine dress, women seem to have symbolically discarded femininity and modesty (the virtues of women) in favor of sexual virility, promiscuity and immodesty (the vices of men). The ideal form of a true lady is a constant, immutable aspect of humanity, and this strange new development can only represent a bizarre aberration of a perverse and ignoble culture.

You should read the whole thing. It's choice. I am particularly fond of Haecker's neologism "whorification."

As one should expect, there are excellent responses from bloggers TBogg and Pam Spaulding.

The newspaper's site seems to be experiencing some difficulties, as I can't post the link that will let you click through to read all of the comments on this column now. Sigh.

Sometimes I miss UT, the place where I began my college career. Most of the time, though... I really don't.

* The sample papers are wrestling with a core feminist idea: the idea that all gender is performative. That is, that our actions, every action we perform constitutes our gender. It's not an act we put on, but what we do while we're doing the things that make up our lives, that constitutes our gender. Thus, our genders are not essential parts of us that have always been. (This is a big part of the feminist differentiation between gender and sex.) Anyway, it's a complex theory that goes against much of what we're raised to believe about ourselves and the world. Not surprisingly, the sample papers struggle with it.

Posted by reparent at 5:35 PM | Comments (1)

August 29, 2007

The New Semester Begins

Well, the semester has started and the world has not yet ended (as far as I know).

The new courses are running, and each has a snazzy new blog. Check out my teacher-geeky graduate-level Practicum in Teaching Writing blog here. I'll refer to this as "the Teaching Seminar," regardless of what the University has it coded as in its arcane and Vaal-like computer system, so don't be confused. In the Teaching Seminar I'm tasked with teaching the new teachers how to teach English 001, our version of Freshperson Composition. I like it, and it's absolutely essential for our new Graduate Teaching Fellows, but it's not exactly going to set off any super-cool detectors. Sigh. One day society will realize that teaching is dead sexy. Until then...

We've got my other course this semester, Composing Digital Narratives, a course that is really, honestly, cool and sexy all at the same time. Sort of like David Beckham if he were a college course being taught in a computer lab in the bowels (seriously, we're waaaaaay underground) of the administration building.

Anyway, in the Digital Narratives class, we'll be using crazy tech to mess with everything you thought you knew about stories and storytelling. Should be mucho fun.

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In other news, my colleague over in the tech garrison here at UVM, Justin Henry, links to Khoi Vinh's thoughts on "ignorant objects," that is, a provocative take on technology and the Velveteen Rabbit phenomenon. I highly recommend you check it out. And while you're there, note the minimalist design of Vinh's blog. Spare, sparse, yet seriously sharp!

Which brings me to our good friend BoingBoing, now in v2.0. They've dropped the clutter from their site design, added comments to their posts, and launched a new sibling site, BBGadgets. I'm hooked.

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While checking out the new BBGadgets, I came across this picture:

And I was reminded, as I so often am, that the future we were promised is not the future we inhabit. There's an article in there somewhere, I think. Something about the rhetorical appeals and promises in the visual design of the future from the 1940s onward. Hmm...

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And speaking of the future we inhabit, here are two bits of cultural ... um, something.

Item 1: The Wall Street Journal notices the LOLCats phenomenon:

I know it's hopelessly co-opted now, but I can't help myself. I luv me sum LOLCats. Especially when they make it sooooo easy to put together LOLWSJs like that.

Item 2: I am not a hipster. Seriously. I'm not being ironic. Or maybe I am. Who can tell anymore? Anyway, check this out:

Posted by reparent at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

April 3, 2007

Fresh New Designs for Spring!

Spring is just around the corner, and something (besides pollen, mold, and dust) is in the air. It seems that everywhere you look, sites are getting EXTREME MAKEOVERS!

Click the link to read all about it.

First, Arizona Senator John McCain launched his new campaign website: Stormtroopers for McCain '08. Okay, so it's not actually targeted to Imperial Stormtroopers, but you have to admit the color scheme is highly... evocative...

Next, we've got the McCain MySpace page, which got a whole heap of sapphic supportiveness. MySpace is no longer just the domain of America's youth, it's also a favorite hangout of our elected members of Congress. We know what happens when Congressmembers find out about Instant Messenger, but what happens when Senators decide to set up their own pages? Hilarity! It seems that the Senator's staff pirated a MySpace template from Mike Davidson, and didn't give Mike credit for the site design. Oops! And not only that, but they were stealing Mike's bandwidth by including sample images hosted by Mike on their page. This allowed Davidson to create, in his own words, an "immaculate hack" -- he was able to hack McCain's page without touching anything of McCain's. And this is what he did:

Awesome makeover, Mike!

But wait, there's more! Josh Marshall (he of the Talking Points Memo) is redesigning his popular liberal blog, and wants feedback on design ideas. I like this a great deal. Marshall isn't just slapping a new look on the old site, he's researching emerging trends in information presentation to find the best practices for the web. I'm looking forward to test-driving the new look and layout.

And as if that weren't enough, Daily Kos is not just redesigning its site, it's switching formats altogether! As I was reading the post announcing the change, I was struck by a few things:

Lots of folks may freak out over the changes, but I think the community at large will enjoy this new version of DailyKos with its many comments, avatars, and sig lines with pictures. I know I will.

When I read this, I immediately thought of forums, as these are all features of forums. But forums aren't really like blogs, which confused me. (For a comparison of forums and blogs, check out the official forum for the TV show Survivor, and compare that with a blog like Boing Boing. The setup, layout, and overall feel of the sites are very, very different.) But, I decided that I must be imagining things. Until I read:

Forums on the new DailyKos will include: Elections, Politics, Open Forum, Humor and Jokes, and any others that occur to us.

Oh. But notice the rhetoric here -- CT isn't exactly saying that Daily Kos will become a forums-only site, just that the new site will have forums. Whew. That's a relief. Except that...

One feature that will excite many of you is that there will no longer be front page stories, diaries, or mojo, thus simplifying the DailyKos experience for everyone. It might take some getting used to, but we'll all be happier for it afterward.

A blog without front page stories isn't a blog at all. It's a forum. And they're ditching the diaries, too. This does not "excite" me. It saddens me. I found the diaries to be one of the biggest and coolest community-building ideas in the blogosphere. They're going to be using phpBB, an open source forum platform, which is nice, ideologically. But I'm still filled with foreboding.

I have an ongoing discussion with The Spouse about my refusal to read newspapers online. Okay, it's not really a discussion, it's more of an argument. And it's not really about my refusal to read newspapers online, it's really more about my refusal (so far) to write about my refusal to read newspapers online and then send that off to academic journals. But still.

Anyway, in a nutshell, I have much the same problem that Josh Marshall discusses in his post: online newspapers do not have the same "topical serendipity" as print papers. That is, I scan, glance around, and flip through the pages of a print newspaper. I don't do this with online papers. And I don't do this with forums. When I'm on a World of Warcraft forum, for instance, I'm there to find answers to particular questions, not to enjoy a sense of community. I read World of Warcraft blogs for that. And I really do feel more connection to WoW Insider than I do to the official WoW Druid Forum. (Druids ftw!)

So, there you have it. A whole lot of sites are getting a whole lot of spring cleaning. When did you last redesign your site?

(X-posted on Lives Online)

Posted by reparent at 5:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 4, 2006

The Blogger SAT Challenge -- The Results!!!

A little while ago I mentioned "The Blogger SAT Challenge" -- a not-so-scientific experiment in comparing the writing of bloggers with the writing of high school students on their SATs.

First, the good news. My entry scored thusly (out of 6):

And for all of you wondering what the super-secret topic was, here it is:

The essay gives you an opportunity to show how effectively you can develop and express ideas. You should, therefore, take care to develop your point of view, present your ideas logically and clearly, and use language precisely.

Important Reminders:

• Since this is an online version of the test, you will get 20 minutes instead of the usual 25
• An off-topic essay will receive a score of zero.

Directions: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed." -- Booker T. Washington

Assignment: What is your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

If you'd like to read the entries, click here.

Second, the even better news. My entry was scored by the "expert grader" thusly (also out of 6):

The first score is from other bloggers. The second is by one (I'm guessing each grader only read one entry, but it may have been two) of the following: David Bruggeman, Suzi, Elisa Davis, Natalie Hudson, Battlepanda and Lisa. I don't know any of these people, but I agree with the score.

I'm a horrible (now) high-school writer. When I was a student in high school, I was a whiz at the Linda Richmond-esque mode of extemporaneous "The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire; discuss" mode of motiveless oration. And it does have its uses. For one thing, it really does demand a close attention to structure and organization.

On the other hand, it's also deadly dull.

And, possibly worst of all, it reinforces dichotomous thinking. Writing prompts of the type included on the SAT and in the Blogger Challenge almost always present two options and ask the writer to make a persuasive case for one of them. In the real world, we know that "You are either with us or against us" is a logical fallacy. Demanding that developing writers conform to this sort of on-off cognitive world-view is demeaning to them and a waste of a grader's time.

Chad Orzell -- a physicist, and one of the architects of the Blogger Challenge -- reflects:

I think these results do support my original point, way back when this whole thing started: it's a lot harder to write a good short essay on demand than you might think when you have the chance to look at the question at leisure. Even bloggers, who spend a lot of time writing short essays of their own free will, don't do all that well with a set topic and a tight time limit.

Orzell's right: writing good, short essays is hard. But I wouldn't call what the SAT calls for "a good essay."

I was especially intrigued by the comments by the "expert graders":

I was struck by the number of writers who felt that musing about some aspect of the question, or one of the words in it, or one of the stories it reminded them of, was a reasonable way to respond to the directions.

Goodness! How... willful of them.

Often writers tried to be clever with roundabout ways of coming at the question, but it only made my job as a grader more difficult, and grumpy graders don't give fives and sixes.

If anything, the bloggers were *worse* than high school students in getting to the point and staying on topic. They also tended to equivocate more, to argue the merits of both sides, which, though it might mark you as a reasonable person in normal discussion (in real or online life), actually hurts your SAT score.

Heaven forfend that "expert graders" should be forced to contend with complex approaches to the topic at hand! Don't they know that issuing anything other than a "Sir, yes sir!" or a "Sir, no sir!" over and over again (the New York Times article that started the Challenge informs us that "longer essays were more likely to get a high score than shorter ones") dishonors the spirit of open inquiry and skillful expression that these writing exercises enshrine?

But my favorite has to be this gem:

I was struck by the number of people who wrote essays without apparently thinking the directions applied to them. They made assumptions about the assignment, or decided that they were better judges of what the assignment should be, and then wrote what they wanted to write rather than produced what they were asked to write.

I smiled, but I wondered why do they think a scorer (and after all, pleasing the scorer is what matters much more than self-respect when taking a test) cares about their opinions?

"[W]hy do they think a scorer ... cares about their opinions" indeed? After all, the prompt only asks "What is your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment?"

I'm giving the scorers grief, but it's not their fault that they're being forced to behave this way. It's the nature of the beast.

The New York Times article gives a brief list of tips for writing a high-scoring SAT essay. Here are a few more that, mysteriously enough, didn't make the final edition:

• Reduce your complex set of ideas, opinions, and experiences into easy-to-spew talking points. Talking points are the new essays.
• Begin your writing with a clear statement of your position. That way, the grader (or anyone else) won't be burdened with having to read any more of your essay.
• Repeat, repeat, repeat! Your grader/reader may forget what your position is if you don't restate it in each paragraph.
• Never, ever question the false dichotomy presented to you as the wisdom of the ages! Resist the infernal urge to comment on its hackneyed topic! And foreswear the temptation to question the question being put to you! Like the Pope, We are infallible. And we are not amused by your so-called "free thinking."
• Regardless of what you write (you are in control of your writing, aren't you?), or what you realize while you're writing (this isn't the time for thinking, it's a timed writing exercise!), or the weight of the evidence on the other side (you did pick the more obviously correct position, didn't you?), don't ever change your mind as you write. And for goodness sake don't ever concede that the other side might have some virtue. That's a quick trip to a low score!

Orzel concludes that bloggers are "dumber than high-school kids." I disagree. We're just not as obedient when it comes to reductive, intellectually demeaning busy-work.

And thank the gods for that!

Posted by reparent at 2:45 PM

September 19, 2006

The Blogger SAT Challenge - HURRY!!!

Following this article from the New York Times on the scoring of the new writing section of the SAT, bloggers Dave Munger and Chad Orzell pose:

The Blogger SAT Challenge!

Head to Dave's blog, Cognitive Daily before midnight on Wednesday, September 20th, to compete in the challenge. I'll post my thoughts (and maybe even my entry!) after the challenge closes.

Posted by reparent at 1:21 PM | Comments (1)