« January 2006 | Main | March 2006 »
February 25, 2006
The Cluetrain keeps on chuggin'
Last semester in my WRT 307 class, I asked my students to read the 95 theses from The Cluetrain Manifesto. They had to post a responsive comment to at least two of them in a Blackboard post, and respond to the comments of at least two of their classmates. You talk about filling up a discussion forum! I was most interested to see how many of these aspiring management and marketing types disagreed with the theses offered. Their belief in the wisdom of the corporate structure was surprising.
This is a lesson I intend to keep in my future professional writing classes, and to build on. So I was pleased the other day to run across this over on Presentation Zen.
I'm also really interested in developing a more polished theory about how these lessons apply to teaching. When I first came to my graduate career, I brought with me a long history of teaching professional continuing ed seminars, general financial fitness seminars, and formal academic courses for professional designations. I also had some in-depth experience with facilitating seminars, which is much different than teaching. I've tried, over these past few years, to bring the things I learned there to my teaching. I've had some success, but I've also lost touch with some stuff I used to know. Stay tuned - when I get the revision worked out, I'll post it here.
Posted by cageyer at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2006
I-Pod now has...
What's the latest television entry in the IPod music store? Want to guess? It's a very important addition.
24?
no.
West Wing?
nope.
Food network shows?
nuh-uh.
All pale in comparison. My friends, Schoolhouse Rock is now available for downloading to your IPod.
::sings:: lolly, lolly, get your adverbs on IPod
How totally Awesome!
Posted by cageyer at 08:21 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2006
The Patience to Engage
Christine Mason Sutherland talks about her love of primary research emerging from her own education, of being taught to read the primary text, make some assessment of it “however naïve or mistaken it might be” (109) and only then pick up the secondary scholarship on that text. My mentor, or perhaps it would be best now to refer to him as my first academic mentor, told me the same thing a long time ago. The primary texts in question then were literature texts: short fiction, canonical literature, even poetry. Somehow I never felt like I had the time to digest the primary material when it was being assigned. Of course, I never felt like I had the time to understand the secondary material either, in part because I didn’t ever get my own handle on the primary stuff.
Why bring this up now? Well, because I am on the verge of my exam preparation. Because today I found the summary I wrote of a Hayden White essay and realized this is the kind of work I will want to have done for every text I read in relation to my exams, in fact in relation to any subject I find interesting. The ability to bring up that summary, as well worked as it is, makes having the computer the kind of enormously valuable resource I have not availed myself of so far.
I recall that I struggled with that summary – to get the most value for the word limit, of shortening sections and refining language choices to bring the key ideas of the essay, some 18 book pages long, into one single spaced typed page. It took time. Time that every semester I tell myself I will have and every semester find that I still don’t. There’s a patience and focus required that I still have to force myself into. So often it’s like reading without glasses – words on the page as a whole, the perception of text, but not the understanding and response to the key words, the key concepts. Patience. Yes, patience. I’m sure I have that packed away somewhere.
Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Vol. 32, Number 1, Winter 2002. Rhetoric Society of America, 2002. 109-122.
Posted by cageyer at 12:34 PM | Comments (1)