"writing a college paper is custom-designed to crush in the student the idea of writing as a communicative act" #wymhm

What I mean is that what I wrote at Yale was for an audience of a single person, my professor, and that it was intended to convince him that I knew what I was talking about so he would give me a good grade, rather than being intended to communicate something to him that would convince them to change him mind, or trying to give him a framework for thinking about something. In a way, writing a college paper in its current structure is almost custom-designed to crush in the student the idea of writing as a communicative act, because it feels like a long, highly structured interoffice memo rather than an address to the world.

I'll tell you two things I've done here at NYU with the writing my students do for me. One, I assign them write for each other. So they think, "My peers are going to read this and also my professor is going to read this." You'd think they'd be more concerned about me reading it, but the quality goes up when they know their friends are going to read it.

The other thing I do, with some of their stuff, is publish it online. I took a whole bunch of papers by my students from a class we did on the effect of the Internet on the 2008 Presidential election, and I just put them in a big folder and put them online. People's reaction to this was: "Oh, I may actually be communicating something; I'd better get it together here."

"computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households" #wymhm

The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying.

The North Carolina study suggests the disconcerting possibility that home computers and Internet access have such a negative effect only on some groups and end up widening achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups. The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students.

 

"the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach" #wymhm

the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.

Researchers say the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming the sort of infinitely patient, highly informed instructors that would be effective in subjects like foreign language or in repetitive therapies used to treat developmental problems like autism.

"Students of all ability levels are studying less." #wymhm

Some question whether college students ever could have studied 24 hours a week — roughly three and a half hours a night. But even if you dispute the historical decline, there is still plenty of reason for concern over the state of 21st-century study practices. In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all. Some longtime professors have noted the trend, which rarely gets mentioned by college admissions officials when prospective students visit campus.

But when it comes to “why,” the answers are less clear. The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them.

Executive Decision: a potential model of online engagement

Providing a writer with the opportunity to revise opens the door for executive decisions. Not only might we see a potentially strong point jettisoned due to lack of development in a timely manner (aka, Steven Seagal's Colonel Travis (skip to 9:21 if impatient)), but it is also possible even something more substantial might not make it. What follows is that something more, "A Potential Model of Online Engagement," a later section of a piece I'm revising under deadline this week. Given the focus of the essay, "Potential Model" didn't quite fit; I knew it when I submitted the piece and those who reviewed it only reinforced this knowledge. So, rather than subject it to the editor's knife, I made a pre-emptive strike, an executive decision, and offer it up here instead for your perusal. 

Also, I need to get some less militaristic metaphors (or maybe more Seagal references).

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Because of my diverse research interests in composition, pedagogy, technology, and videogames, it is essential to remain current. Offline methods include organization memberships, attendance at discipline-specific conferences, and subscriptions to journals and other publications. However, I also keep active accounts on Delicious, Posterous, Scribd, and Twitter. This not only makes scholarly activities accessible and public, but also allows me to follow those with similar interests and keep abreast of new developments. Interaction via these communicative technologies is somewhat akin to subscriptions to academic discussion boards and mailing lists but in ways more accessible, open, and public. Through social media tools, I show academic work performed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis as well as the fruits of those labors. 

Functioning as a model of sound academic research online, these four social media tools also work together as a performance of public intellectualism. For instance, I store all online information relevant to my interests on Delicious, a social bookmarking site that allows me to maintain a public, reverse-chronological record of the most recent developments in research through the application of tags like "pedagogy," "rhetoric," and "videogames." Meanwhile, Posterous functions as a vehicle for working through ideas in a public format and further recording the directions my research interests take. It is also in this space that I document the drafting of more traditional academic pieces, such as this very chapter. I post these more traditional academic pieces on Scribd, which is similar to Youtube in that anyone can post any text-based document for others to see and read. I use it as an online repository for all my efforts I consider to be academic work, including assignments and syllabi for past, present, and future courses as well as my dissertation and essays approved for publication. In other words, I use it to provide tangible evidence of my academic output. I announce much of this output on Twitter, which also provides a way to brainstorm new work. 

There is an implicit encouragement to finding community with others on Twitter, but it also functions as a launching pad to the other online spaces mentioned here. In fact, Twitter offers what Henry Jenkins calls "spreadable media," noting that, as an academic, broadcast channels are important if he is going to get his ideas into broader circulation: "I don't have access to the airwaves or to a printed publication which might bring what I write to a much broader readership. I don't have an advertising budget with which to put my ideas onto billboards. Twitter, as a platform, alters the scale of my communication by allowing me to expand my readership". The expansion of readership via Twitter often leads to further conversation among interested parties; such conversations continue to have a direct influence on my own research and scholarship.

A tangible example of what this online scholarship makes possible concerns my recent involvement with the Great Lakes THAT (The Humanities and Technology) Camp. Ethan Watrall, Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University and director of the Great Lakes THAT Camp, encouraged me to submit a proposal because of prior Twitter-based conversations about open courseware. These are the kinds of scholarly activities in which I engage almost every day. In this particular instance, it led to a conference presentation that furthered the academic interests of THAT Camp attendees. 

Maintaining a persistent presence online also has some significant connections to professional service. By remaining active via Posterous and Twitter, I not only make new contacts in my fields of inquiry and interest but also have additional venues for sharing ideas and information. By posting items relevant to my interests as well as those following me on Twitter and subscribing to me on Posterous, I encourage and support the work of others. I also engage 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.

Again, it is vital to be informed about the latest research on topics of importance and interest; online communicative technologies help me do that. Partaking in such activities, though, also reveals something about the university I work for. I am an online representative of the English department at the University of Michigan-Flint. I remain mindful of this in every online action I take and I emphasize this point to students in relation to their own academic, online work as well.

It is necessary to be critical and open about teaching with technology in different contexts.

"Online instruction may be more economical to deliver than live instruction, but there is no free lunch," said David Figlio, Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and primary author of the NBER working paper released this month. "Simply putting traditional courses online could have negative consequences, especially for lower-performing and language minority students."

The academic and the e-community have this in common: both necessarily go beyond the classroom and beyond direct, physical interactions. So Facebook, for instance, is necessarily part of our honors community. It's not just "out there," it’s also "in here" – whether we invite it in or not. If we truly believe in technology as integral to teaching and learning (as we do), we must remain open to these tools – even when they’re misused.

Problems of interactivity and intimacy in videogames

While we seemingly get lots of choices in a game about how we get from place to place, how to kill enemies (and with what weapon), and even how we make moral decisions, when the game prompts us we usually get down to doing what it tells us to do.  Even if we don’t, if we really want to play the game, ultimately we will have to.

If the player blows the right moves or says the wrong thing or chooses the wrong place to eat, intimacy is a no go.  “Intimacy” becomes an activity in which a potential lover is acted upon, not a complex system of mutual interaction.  It is also seemingly antagonistic.  The paramour is competing with him- or herself or the desires of their intended lover in order to engage with them intimately.  Failure means that the lover is displeased, transforming them into something more of a threat or obstacle to be overcome than a potential partner.

Related to a recent tweet by @stevendkrause, a thought bundle on reading books and e-books, print and screen

we want the fruits of our labor to exist between hard or even soft covers in our own time and after us (and accept that the pages containing our being will turn brown and become brittle), it means something to us to see and speak of a book as a weighty tome or a slender volume, we like to be able to locate a passage we've already read spatially on a page, we are interested, even as we are dismayed, to discover that we are the first person in 61 years, eight months, and three days (according to the "due date" slip) to check a book out of the library, it pleases us to think of Whitman's leaves of grass as pages of a book
via tnr.com

 

For me, reading is a physical experience, one that vanishes, evaporates completely, the minute you read something on a screen. Books also have an architectural dimension. Rooms full of books are meaningful places where people assemble. And yet, one of the things that defines reading is its very intimacy—which is what I love about it.

 

So real books and e-books will coexist. That has happened time and again with other new technologies that were prophesied to kill off old ones. Autos didn't wipe out horses. Movies didn't finish theater. TV didn't destroy movies. E-books won't destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.