Two-Year Review: Service Summary (Draft)

As mentioned in previous sections, I maintain a persistent presence online, which has significant connections to professional service. In keeping active accounts on Delicious, Posterous, Twitter and Scribd, I not only make new contacts in my fields of interest but also have additional venues for sharing ideas and information. By posting items about composition, literacy, pedagogy, rhetoric and technology, I support and encourage the work of others. I also remain engaged in learning on a level that is similar to yet different from conversing with colleagues in the halls of the English department. Such online engagement is a kind of worthwhile public intellectualism and it continues to have a direct impact on my pedagogical and publishing interests. 

Less nebulous forms of university service have had similar impact. The first of these concerns my participation in Mid-Career Writing Assessment. Roy Barnes, Stephanie Roach, Jacob Blumner and I selected essays of varying correctness for a university-wide norming session on what faculty should value in terms of students' writing. Bi-weekly meetings involved detailed discussion of scoring sample essays and justifying those scores in narrative formats to be distributed to UM-Flint faculty volunteers. The actual norming session with these volunteers occurred March 27, 2009, and lasted from 9am until 2pm. I was thankful to be part of this process as I found cultivating common ground with instructors from other fields to be easier and more enlightening than daunting.

Just as enlightening has been my time serving on the Student Publications Board as advisor for the student literary magazine, Qua. In Fall 2009, I conducted a successful search for a new Qua editor, interviewing two possible candidates. As of this writing, there is an open call for submissions to Qua and the editor plans to have the new issue published just after the spring break. In facilitating my role as Qua advisor, there is an opportunity to reinstate something of substantial worth to the campus community.

I also accepted invitations to and/or volunteered for a variety of other university activities and events. All of this is in addition to my regular attendance at CAS and English department meetings. 

• At the invitation of Mary Jo Finney, I attended the first FYE Living Learning Community meeting at Good Beans Cafe on November 5, 2008. 

• When MLA updated its handbook, I helped revise the Composition Survival Kit in May 2009 to reflect the changes.

• I was a guest lecturer for New Student Programs (Orientation) in summer 2009. 

• With Dr. Vickie Larsen, I represented the English department at UM-Flint's Fall 2009 Academic Showcase. 

• At the request of Krista Heiser, I was among the contributors to the Office of Extended Learning's "Blogs in Education" session on October 7, 2009.

• Most recently, I joined the Bookstore Advisory Board, which addresses customer service, long-range planning, textbook adoptions and the support of local authors.

"A scientist who takes credit on an article written by pharmaceutical company should face punishment like any other plagiarist"

When students pawn someone else's work off as their own, they get expelled. But when some professors do the same thing, they get a "pat on the back," and maybe even a few extra bucks. Scientists credited for research articles that were secretly penned by ghostwriters from pharmaceutical companies often are not reprimanded for their misrepresentations; rather, their ranks and career trajectories often improve.

"Call me a digital crack dealer, but here’s why Twitter is a vital part of the information economy"

Hundreds of thousands of people now rely on Twitter every day for their business. Food trucks and restaurants around the world tell patrons about daily food specials. Corporations use the service to handle customer service issues. Starbucks, Dell, Ford, JetBlue and many more companies use Twitter to offer discounts and coupons to their customers. Public relations firms, ad agencies, schools, the State Department — even President Obama — now use Twitter and other social networks to share information.

There are communication and scholarly uses. Right now, an astronaut, floating 250 miles above the Earth, is using Twitter and conversing with people all over the globe, answering both mundane and scientific questions about living on a space station.

Most importantly, Twitter is transforming the nature of news, the industry from which Mr. Packer reaps his paycheck. The news media are going through their most robust transformation since the dawn of the printing press, in large part due to the Internet and services like Twitter. After this metamorphosis takes place, everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe.

"Online social network sites may play a role different from that described in early literature on virtual communities."

Our empirical results contrast with the anecdotal evidence dominating the popular press. Although there are clearly some image management problems experienced by students as reported in the press, and the potential does exist for privacy abuses, our findings demonstrate a robust connection between Facebook usage and indicators of social capital, especially of the bridging type. Internet use alone did not predict social capital accumulation, but intensive use of Facebook did.

The strong linkage between Facebook use and high school connections suggests how SNSs help maintain relations as people move from one offline community to another. It may facilitate the same when students graduate from college, with alumni keeping their school email address and using Facebook to stay in touch with the college community. Such connections could have strong payoffs in terms of jobs, internships, and other opportunities. Colleges may want to explore ways to encourage this sort of usage.

Online social network sites may play a role different from that described in early literature on virtual communities. Online interactions do not necessarily remove people from their offline world but may indeed be used to support relationships and keep people in contact, even when life changes move them away from each other. In addition to helping student populations, this use of technology could support a variety of populations, including professional researchers, neighborhood and community members, employees of companies, or others who benefit from maintained ties.

"More than ever before, students live in an intellectual world of their own, a personal world where every individual’s baseline is likely to be different from that of most others and coincides with few."

Other causes, less tangible, contribute to students’ poor record and performance in college (especially that 20 percent or so who demand extra time and energy from the professor), and here I venture on more speculative ground.  Some are not sure what is done in the classroom—how to behave.  They don’t know when or how to take notes.  They perennially miss due dates, drift in late, drift out during the break not to return.  They sabotage themselves and then seem to expect forgiveness and accommodation from their professors.  Someone showing up one day after having been missing for five or six weeks, only vaguely recognized by the professor, will assume that a way can and will be found to bring him up to speed and on track with the rest of the class.  Is all this the result of repeatedly being forgiven in the past?  I think so. 

While there are some, especially older students, who carry around excess anxiety and who sell themselves short academically, the more common affliction is overconfidence:  “I expected to do a lot better.”  The bump in the road that is the developmental class is seen as an aberration, largely lacking the sobering effect it would have had 30 years ago.  No one is going to flunk out of school.  Plenty of warning is given if you are in danger of failure.  Most developmental courses can be taken on a pass/no pass basis. One’s GPA remains intact in any case, including a withdrawal.  A system is in place to cushion failure, and students who have always been praised for just showing up need it.  They have been told time and again, “You can be anything you want.”  All that is needed is “passion.”  So when the academic path contains a detour, explanations to yourself and to others can come easily.  Scholastic problems don’t emanate from within but from without. So determined is the college to offer “support” and so long is the list of reasons to receive that support that almost anything can be explained by or blamed on an external cause

"If a writer has any guts he should write all the time..."

"...and the lousier the world the harder a writer should work. For if he can do nothing positive, to make the world more liveable or less cruel or stupid, he can at least record truly, and that is something no one else will do, and it's a job that must be done. It is the only revenge that all the bastardized people will ever get: that somebody writes down clearly what happened to them."

- Martha Gellhorn, 1941.

When students have the technology and schools don't

allowing students to bring their own computing devices to class may be the inevitable solution for districts that are under ever-constricting budgets but want to preserve a technology-enhanced education. It’s not just student-owned laptops that schools are opening up to, but any web-enabled device, including PDAs, iPod Touches, and cell phones. Not too long ago this would have struck many educators as a deal with the devil, to invite such potential chaos into the classroom. But now it only seems sensible

I wonder how much this will grow, i.e., schools 'adopting' student-owned technologies for the classroom. Perhaps future studies and surveys about how much of a school's student population own certain tech will be used as support for cost-cutting measures, the removal of computer labs in favor of a requirement that students bring their own laptops, etc.

"The greatest shock to most people is that we willingly create this commercial pact when we think we're alone"

A Google search, for example, transcends the barrier between what we view as public and what we view as private. When we do a search on our computers at home, in the office or on the road, we have a misplaced sense we are transacting only with our machine. In fact, when we type a query in Google's search box, we are divulging our intentions to a technology located across the planet, with hundreds of potential eyeballs sifting through our search terms for the perfect advertising match. Yet we still treat it like an oracle, asking it deeply personal questions and looking for answers in its computer brain.

I aspire to do what @RogerTravis already does.

if you wanted to call practomime "playing pretend" or "playing a role-playing game" I wouldn't argue. Think about it: how much do people learn playing pretend, whether that's playing a game, acting in a play, going through a religious ritual, or reading a historical novel? I would contend that it's more than they ever learn in school.

How it works

From a purely technical perspective, the entire course is a big practomime. (In fact, if you think about it, every course you've ever taken [with the exception, to be sure, of my previous courses] is a boring practomime in which you pretend to be a student who's getting to know the stuff he or she needs to know to pass the course.) You are learning to be something like a Roman who could function in some small range of ancient Roman culture.

From a practical perspective, your sessions of reading Latin poetry, however, which would be interludes in the life of the Roman you portray, will in the world of this course dominate his or her practomimetic life. The rest of his or her existence—the times in which he or she gets to "do stuff"—will be squeezed in between the reading. This fact of course means that we get to skip the boring parts of Roman existence (sleeping, walking, eating non-banquet food) and concentrate on the interesting ones.

Roger's doing the kinds of things I dropped cautious hints about in my dissertation, "Acquiring Literacy: Techne, Videogames and Composition Pedagogy." He isn't just making more explicit the connections between college-level coursework and, for example, James Paul Gee's 36 learning principles found in good videogames. Roger made the course the game.

I need to go all in as he has.