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September 30, 2005

groupsicle? (collaborative writing 1.3/?)

Byrd, Don and Derek Owens. "Writing in the Hivemind." Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet. Eds. Todd Taylor and Irene Ward. New York: Columbia UP. 1998. 47-58.

1 sentence summary: What conversational technologies allow in the way of written collaboration goes--or can and should be allowed to go, even if it rarely occurs to the purpose-minded to encourage such--beyond putting multiple authors to work on creating a unified version of an expected text, but can instead challenge our definitions of texts, our expectations of them, our notions of and ability to participate in community and human connectedness.

keywords: community, consciousness, enactment, groupuscle, hive, hivemind, identity, multiple, networks, technologies, third mind, value

passages:
47. field-wide the emphasis on collaborative writing is so ubiquitous that most students have never been in a writing classroom where papers weren't traded & some projects jointly authored; "clearly, composition theory has moved away from the romantic image of the sequestered, solitary writer toward a sense of writing as a tribal practice--to an extent."
48. chaos isn't "the absence of logic" but is instead "the proliferation of multiple logics ever in flux and open to mutation"; we "unwittingly contain the social energies we claim to promote in our classes," in part by using new technologies only to "refine" our achievement of old goals.
49. too much of our work with new writing technologies focuses on "perserv[ing] old paradigms of rhetorical construction" rather than looking for truly new modes & purposes for reading & writing--"how might we reconceptualize collaboration not as co-labor but as the transformation of labor into heretofore unanticipated modes of communal ludic meditation?"
51. the problem w/solitary authorship (that's still present in most collaborative work where the solitary authors never lose awareness of their own isolation) is that "a painfully...self-reflective voice or stance remains engaged in an act of self-definition or self-question" ultimately devoted to the "self-promotion" of putting forth the self-on-page.
52. "groupuscle effect"--people were so able to let go of authorial concerns that they often couldn't identify on later read-throughs which portions of the text they'd written; rather than a "multilayered polylogue" what was created was more "synergistic arena from which a...feeling evolved...to which all contributed but none possessed"; parallels to what Burroughs & Gysin called the "third mind" created by collaborators so into their project that they find themselves writing things neither of them could otherwise have known.
55. products of the project were more like "textual clouds" than linear texts, and no, this doesn't do much for us in terms of "value" & "compensation"--can't grade or pay for the results of these events. but we don't do enough with technology to look at the ways it can do other things, the way it can connect people for the sake of connection rather than compensation.
57. our communication technologies make "good toys, but terrible addictions. finally we realize we cannot 'reach out and touch someone' who is not present in the flesh" (Hakim Bey)--goal is not to replace f2f but to find ways to connect, communicate, get closer to people & human-interactions that matter: "to reach inside new technologies and, aiming for the electrons, suddenly grab hold of someone's hand"

response: this is lovely but strikes me as idealistic & to some degree foofy... of course, i forget that when a lot of people say "writing" they're really thinking more of creative enterprises--and my claim that all writing is creative isn't what i mean by that. the people in this project were primarily poets & fiction-writers, & so what they found & why they cared is fascinating, but has little (at least immediate) bearing on what my students do & care about. grades & compensation are the point here--& as long as they're what's counted, finding purposes for this sort of thing outside of that isn't going to light a lot of fires among the pragmatic. then again, of course, if not an attempt to hold hands through the electrons, why do i spend as much time as i do on AIM & lj? (& how many of my students do the same, & do we do it for the same reasons? & how does *that* potentially tie in to the project i'm working towards?)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2005

e-conversing (collaborative writing 1.2/?)

Warschauer, Mark. "Networking into Academic Discourse." in Electronic Literacies: Language, Culture, and Power in Online Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earbaum Associates, 1999. 43-82.

1 sentence summary: Interface technologies (e-mail and chat programs) enable different levels of authority & types of interaction between teachers and students and between students and each other than face-to-face discussions and class meetings do.

passages:
45. Gee's quote ("One does not learn to read texts of type X in way Y unless one has had experience in settings where tests of type X are read in way Y...")
47. technology offers ways of sharing texts w/many people that allow learners to learn from peripheral participation, by seeing with more immediacy the writing that goes on in the community they're entering and sharing their successive approximations of it.
61. list of "studies show" benefits offered by "computer-assisted classroom discussion":


70. it's not the way to do everything & shouldn't replace f2f interaction; computer-based discussions aren't good ways to arrive at consensus, for example.
76. teachers need to remember when pushing students into participation in public forums that there are risks--some listserv responders are jerks, for example.
80. Bahktin & dialogism: "language is a continuous generative process implemented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers"; "echoes and reverberations"; "many have speculated that it is in the electronic era that Bakhtin's ideas are seeing their fullest and clearest expression"

top 5: Gee, Bahktin, Volosinov, Lave & Wenger, Nystrand, et. al.

Posted by ttobryan at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)

getting in the game (collaborative writing 1.1/?)

Forman, Janis. "Computing and Collaborative Writing." Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991. 65-83.

1 sentence summary Studies of the impact of collaboration-enabling computer technology and software advances are being conducted primarily by sociologists and computer scientists, whose interests and so whose studies' applicability differ, sometimes widely, from those of compositionists: because these technologies are being used by writers in ways that affect writing--both the act and the product--compositionists need to participate in these studies and advance questions relevant to their discipline.

keywords collaboration, groupware, technology

passages
65-6. people will work within what the technology allows; a technology offering a set of options constrains people to adapt their work-habits & impulses to fitting those options (& often we teach that way rather than bending the technology to fit the work-habits & impulses we want to encourage).
68. "misconceptions about technology and writing": rather than seeing "the computer as a machine that writers use," it's productive to look at "technology...as a set of options of tools that writing groups manage or mismanage"
71. asking how good technology is for "collaborative writing" means discriminating between definitions of "collaborative writing"--some technologies might be suitable for collaborative revision but not (are others?) for "collaborative invention, a central activity in the composition of multi-authored texts"
71. (defines "genre" as "type of document")
75. all research in comp & computers = interdisciplinary b/c "technology" is a distinct discipline in 1988?

Posted by ttobryan at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

life gets in the way

the title's actually a quote from my student lauren, who used it--and only it--to explain why i hadn't seen her for a few days & still haven't seen all of the work she's been out there working on. i understood. i recognized the look on her face, & i'd seen it often enough in the mirror.

i volleyed that same quote back at her class today, explaining why i hadn't gotten their papers back to them yet (or at least the ones i'm actually willing to grade. the ones who haven't told me whether or not they can see the comments on the trial run i did for them? no love = no papers. they might think i'm kidding, but i'm not). first there were library quests to gather exam materials (i have a whole crate of things to read sitting like an unwanted guest in one of the chairs at the dining room table), then there were exam meetings (wherein a very nice member of my committee loaded me down with a whole other pile of books that i promised i wouldn't lose), & then there was life, which got in the way.

it's also in the way of my exam-reading process, which is why there haven't been any new posts to that effect in a few days. i was reading. and then i wasn't. i can see the future now: reading happens in terrific spurts and doesn't for long lulls. i can't help it. there are students, and there is life.

a good friend's mother died yesterday. her death was unexpected, my friend was unprepared; twenty-some people had plans this weekend involving all kinds of travel and my friend, who has way more to worry about at the moment than other people's logistics. my friend is shining like she always does through all the roughness this presents--and i'm sure in so many ways it hasn't hit her yet, and i'm trying not to think about it too deeply so it doesn't hit me either; i'd hardly even met her mother, but i'm awfully damn attached to mine! i've spent a lot of time on IM with her over the last few days. her husband's been in thailand on business (flying home from thailand right away still takes days) and she's minding two toddlers and an infant; any words i can throw her way are better than silence and spit-up and more silence and the beginning ripples of implication.

i can't fix anything that's wrong here, but i can micro-manage logistics for travelers & their weekend plans, so that's what i've been doing. on an academic relevance-scale, it's not a bump, not a blip, & certainly not a worthwhile excuse. but it's life. and it's real. and it matters. and it's not only in the way, it is the way. sometimes school makes us forget that. i hate that it takes something being this wrong to force a little occasional remembering.

Posted by ttobryan at 08:45 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2005

performing selfhood (authorship 4/25)

Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1997.

1 sentence summary: Although we like to think that, as teachers, we're teaching our students "good" writing by encouraging awareness of and complexity in rhetorical moves and discouraging the unthinking or facile, in fact many of the moves student writers make that we dismiss are rhetorically sophisticated, pupose-driven, and meaningful; what we too-often fail to realize is the degree to which "good" writing is defined by entrenched academic preferences prioritizing certain (habitually white, upper-middle-class, well-steeped in traditional educational environments) strategies over others, an entrenchment that, despite all our idealism towards democratic education, continues to reinforce the status quo.

keywords:autonomous self, composition vs. writing, emotion, expressive pedagogy, expressivism, honesty, individual, move, "presentation of self" (Goffman), significant, the turn, voice, unified self,

passages:
xii. "What if we viewed 'being personal' not as some natural 'free' representation of self, but as a complex cultural performance?" "When students write about themselves in ways that seem unsuccessful (e.g., trite, superficial, sentimental) to us, are they drawing on forms of authoritative discourse the university seeks to stigmatize?" "Can we read against our own aesthetic...?"
xiii. "Too often the student is seen as a pawn of inimical, capitalist-bred, media-purveyed discourse in which all that is bad in our society is encoded and endorsed. The composition teacher then rescues the student by providing the defensive strategies of analysis. This view understates what I see as the moral power, energy, and self-confidence that is admirable in student writing, and in the students themselves."
6. Goffman on self-as-a-performance; Berlin "debunking" the idea that the student has a "true" self that can be exposed in writing.
9. "English teachers operate on a principle of inversion, expecting students to magnify the menial...to subvert the conventional evaluation of significance.... And how could a student possibly know that?"
15. For Christian students (& i assume others Newkirk doesn't notice) our demand that they write "thoughtfully" by questioning their own beliefs on paper is unreasonable & dangerous; there are other ways to demonstrate thinking without refusing any value-system but our own.
19. The argument against expressive curricula based in its invasion of students' privacy is almost entirely based on opponants' projections of what they expect students to mind; students don't say it.
21. There is no unified, singular self, only a malleable one or array of them differently performed for different situational purposes.
27. Bourdieu "argues that this discomfort with emotional appeals is a feature of the 'aesthetic disposition' assumed by those who belong (or seek to belong) to the cultural aristocracy."
35. "The modernist criteria of emotional displacement provided (and continues to provide) a justification for dismissing sentimental literature."
86. Demanding students' "honesty" & working with such root metaphors for writing as "discovery" and "exposure" displays a faith in that unrealistic unified self.
90. Arguments against expressivism construct the student as "morally and civically deficient," as "acting in bad faith" when speaking from the stances they already inhabit.
93. "Self" for Kinneavy is interactive: something created & recreated in our communication with others (Buber too).
101. Postmodern demands for virtue to = epiphanies & moments of question/change go against working-class values where virtue is better equated to steadfastness, to faith in the face of challenges.
104-5. The "divorce between writing and composition" has brought about the replacement of literary content in comp classes with cultural-studies content in comp classes without actually changing much of what it purported to intend.

top 5: Berlin, Bourdieu, Buber, Goffman, Kinneavy

Posted by ttobryan at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

negotiating everything (authorship 3/25)

Shor, Ira. When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. Chicago, IL: U Chicago P. 1996.

1 sentence summary: The implications of critical pedagogy go beyond talking about power relations; enacting negotiation of these relations not only has tangible material consequences on teachers' & students' roles, practices, & habits--in terms of curricula, syllabi and such easily taken-for-granted details as attendance policies, grading, & definitions of lateness--but draws to the fore the hidden intricacies of students' and teachers' positions and the power both always exert upon each other.

keywords: argue, authority, autonomy, curriculum, democratic, discomfort, negotiation, political, power, Siberia, status quo, student, student-talk, teacher, teacher-talk, Utopia

passages:
xi. list of theorists whose ideas influence/determine Shor's methodology
67. "the dialectics of circles and rows"
82-87. grading as the ultimate expression of teachers' unjustified & unjustifiable (in something as "squishy" as a writing class, anyway) authority.

top 5: Berlin, Dewey, Elbow, Foucault, Freire

Posted by ttobryan at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2005

ma peeps in print! (authorship 2/25)

Carrick, Tracy Hamler and Rebecca Moore Howard, Eds. Authorship in Composition Studies. The Wadsworth Series in Composition Studies. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth. 2006.

1 sentence summary: Authorship--whether as a theoretical concept or array of concepts or as a sub-field of rhetorical study--is of key value throughout contemporary composition studies, influencing the way we define, develop, and interact with our field, our selves, our work, our students and their work.

key claims by chapter/author:
1. Howard: We too-often & too-unconsciously use the term "author" to create a binary division between (grubby, error-prone, un-qualified) "students" and culturally-validated "authors."
2. Butler: Copyright is federal/international law, plagiarism is about morality, & at their intersection (because it's not a logical connection) is a postmodern connundrum: the laws & policies on the books don't reflect the theories we study & teach.
3. Adams: The notion of Authorship involves a distancing from the material body of the writer; writers slave over desks, make erasures, breathe, & occupy student positions, while Authors are above and indifferent to materiality and such correlatives as readers' needs.
4. Robillard: Our textual practices work like our classroom practices to keep students in a deficient, immoral, classless category binarily opposed to Authorship: why else do we use Authors' names when we quote from them and replace our students' names with pseudonyms if we acknowledge a responsible individual at all?
5. Gilfus: Composition textbooks/handbooks construct students primarily as un-authors & potential theives who need to be corrected, as deficient geniuses responsible for their own isolated work even when they're encouraged to learn from the work of others, as inexperienced users of their own language whose ideas would never be cited in each others' work like the ideas of "real" authors.
6. Bain Warring conceptions of authorship (solitary genius vs. social nexus) come into obvious conflict in writing centers, where tutors are supposed to assist students while holding back ideas, suggestions, and even corrections they would offer colleagues, reinforcing a romantic notion of invention even while the field's favorite theorists decry such and further widening the gulf between the faculty-elite & student-Others.
7. Brooke Emerging and rapidly-changing computer technologies change the face of Authorship: anyone can publish, but the simple fact of wide exposure does not an Author make; and sampling is a kind of authoring (in postmodern theory a kind much closer to the accepted norm than in other theoretical conceptions) but to call it such is threatening to long-accepted popular conception.
8. Queen The practices & metaphors of authoritative writing being already firmly male-gendered (founding fathers), women often made strides into male-dominated linguistic modes by use of mimesis; such modes of becoming authorized, of donning existing mantles of authority, can and should be part of the classroom practice of teaching writers to write like the authorities whose positions they wish to inhabit.
9. Baca "Alternate ideologies of authoring" besides the dominant Western ideals carried over from European Enlightenment thinkers already exist, even in the U.S.; we don't need to reinvent the wheel to break out of some of these habits we're starting to reexamine, but instead need to listen to the other voices already among us.
10. Carrick Because there are dominant modes of discourse and power in their world, students must be taught those modes rather than only taught in spite of them as if resistance came without a cost; rather than giving up the potential for change, however, Carrick suggests several classroom activities that can be used to examine and call into question the necessity of existing frameworks even while working within their demands.

passages:
1. the terms "student, writer, and author carry very different cultural freight" (Howard)
4. "students are neither authors nor writers but applicants for admission to the place where authors and writers operate" (Howard)
6-7. foucault & barthes & their precious-dead author, oh my. (Howard)
8. "now that everybody had it, literacy was no longer a hallmark of the upper classes. Not surprisingly, the notion of the author of genius and originality became increasingly important" (Howard)
10. Trimbur & Crosswhite advising against totally remaking authorship as only-always social (Howard)
11. Lunsford's "from owning to owning up" (find Lunsford)
14. copyright is based in economic principles; intellectual labor is Locke's baby (Butler)
15. "plagiarists violate no federal or state laws" (Butler)
19. "imitation is a normal part of the authorial process"; copyright law & plagiarism policies disagree about whether ideas are owned or belong to the public domain (Butler)
28. "those who are not Authors are characterized as all body, mired in the material" (Adams)
29. "Authorial status derives from an (apparent) indifference to readers' needs, whereas student writers are required to remain obedient to and grounded in the very material demands of their teacher-readers" (Adams)
30. "The author-function represents status, a hollowed-out space, not a presence" (Adams)
34. lesbians writing together "queers" author-space (& i'll go ahead and assume the writing-together does the queering even w/o the lesbians); "the chair is empty because it was never occupied"; "if texts are indeed orphans...then readers are free to throw parties in the parents' absence. Finally, collaborative writing threatens to expose the dirty secret of Authorship: writers are never solitary" (Adams)
35. proliferate writing = prostitution; "Even the writer who is supposedly working alone is actually trying on selves, negotiating identities. (Adams)
47. "the refusal to name students positions teachers as the parents with the power to name or withhold a name"; naming Authors names relationships between writer & Author, between Author & other Author; witholding students' names makes them interchangeable (Robillard)
48-9. Harris & CCCs policy (Robillard)
50-1. teachers can't grant authority to students; (a) they don't have it to give, & (b) students aren't wholly lacking, either. (Robillard)
58. all writers learn to share words via imitation & adaptation (Gilfus)
59. trouble w/expressivist pedagogy--> "these two versions of authorship combine to normalize the construction of authors as both instruments of God and independent producers, and thus owners, of the words they compose" (Gilfus)
69. Barthes' metaphors get fabric-y ("tissue") (Gilfus)
71. a-ha: patchwriting = what i called "close imitation"
76. we can be writers, but to write about writing with authority we have to invoke (A)uthors (Bain)
78. power is relational; when terms s.a. "author, Author, and writer" are "used imprecisely, they not only confer power but also hide the operation whereby that power is conferred." (Bain)
79. the author-function functions differently when the author really is dead. (Bain)
84. collaboration btw. writers of equal status = learning; unequal status = cheating (Bain)
86. we create us/them divisions by withholding idea-sharing from students that we'd share w/colleagues. (Bain)
93. "anyone can be an author, if...publishing is limited to the admittedly narrow criterion of 'making public,'" but the apparent "inverse relationship between quantity and quality" leads to the reality that while "anyone can be an author, perhaps,...not everyone can be an Author" (Brooke)
98. shifts by shifting the realm: in "various screen-based textualities, authorship is less a matter of asserting a thesis or a plot than it is of providing a range of possibilities" (i.e. mix-tapes)(Brooke)
102-3. Carruthers--> "there are two distinct stages involved in the making of an authority--the first is the individual process of 'authoring,' and the second is the matter of 'authorizing,' which is a social and communal activity"; authorship can't just be "claimed" but must be "granted...by an authorizing authority.(Queen)
114. imitation & mimesis--which "can be used as an authorizing tool" (Queen)
117. Valdes quote
121. Matalene on cultural assumptions: "As Western writing teachers, when we admit the ethnocentricity of our notion of the 'Authentic Voice,' we can begin to appreciate the sound of other voices" (Baca)
124-5. western history (of comp) isn't the only history (Baca)
130. Anzeldua's metaphor: "the writing process as the seaming together of fragments"; Lunsford's "authorship as a patchwork" (Baca)
132. the [other models are] out there (Baca)
136-7. "storying an argument" assignment--links to something of Tobi's w/no reference (Carrick)
140-1. "authority/authorship narrative" assignment (Carrick)

top 5: Barthes, Foucault, Howard, Lunsford, Susan Miller

Posted by ttobryan at 07:53 PM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2005

in the shadow of (authorship 1/25)

Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Ser. 2. Stamford, CT: 1999.

1 sentence summary: Because the textual practices we identify as "plagiarism" vary widely in scope, intention, & implication, and because some of those practices are pedagogically valuable if not necessary to the learning and practicing of successful academic writing, we need to discriminate between these practices, decriminalizing what Howard calls "patchwriting" in order to take advantage of the benefits offered by its conscious practice.

keywords: author, authority, authorship, collaboration, cultural arbitrary, gatekeeping, hierarchy, individualism, juridical, mimesis, morality, originality, patchwriting, plagiarism, proprietorship, reader.

passages:
8: pw is plagiarism when students do it & ok for published authors
9: handbooks on source texts--don't collaborate
14: plagiarism rules as gatekeeping mechanisms
15: it's contradictory to crack down on students' authoring strategies by old theories while overhauling all our theories of authorship
20: no common definition of plagiarism
21: collaborative influence of tutors (co-authors?)= plagiarising
23: "The economy of plagiarism [authorship]...postulates three tiers of writers: those who are original; those who are derivative but have the intellect and decency to acknowledge it; and those who are derivative and either don't know it or won't acknowledge it. The label plagiarist marks and criminalizes this third category, a textual 'Other'..."
30: "harsh" (teacher-as-gatekeeper) & "humane" (teacher-as-facilitator) "punishments" for plagiarists both perpetuate the same "cultural system of textual purity"
31: b's articulation of the "how binaries are also good" position
33: b/c pw = author/text collaboration, criminalizing pw = criminalizing collaboration
34: source text shares agency w/the writer working with it
43-44: theory-talk (or "what happens when pedagogy is described by lacan, misha, bourdieu (& passeron), & others' work w/durkheim"): school works to "naturalize hierarchy" & changing only one aspect (allowing instances of authorship being collaborative--lunsford & ede) won't change that.
46: "Autonomy and agency are not synonymous terms. The issue of autonomy is an issue of whether the writer acts alone, whereas the issue of agency is one of whether the writer acts or is an action."
47: barthes, misha, & bakhtin positioned around the above.
53: def. "cultural arbitrary" (bourdieu)
58: 4 properties of the "true" authorship for the past century +: "autonomy, originality, proprietorship, and morality"; historically there was no overall creation of or "killing" of the autonomous author; rather authors have always been concieved of as both socially & individually determined, but the prevalence of each view changes in prominence.
64: authorial autonomy didn't only just emerge; it was in ancient rhet but not popular in medieval thought.
75: the modern period doesn't promote a new idea of autonomy but does introduce the idea of "accord[ing] outlaw status" to its conceptual opposite.
80: labor, locke, engels: literary property as property of the body
81: blame rené descartes (sing to the tune of "blame canada"?)
87: "one's ability to be original" = "high character" vs. the "absence of virtue" associated w/"authorship's opposite, plagiarism."
89: contamination, hygiene, literacy "for the masses" ("the great unwashed") vs. "for the [threatened] intellectuals"
91: "intellectual's opposite is the plagiarist"; "students become representatives of the masses, their teachers...of the intelligentsia"; student writers are "error-makers" & "low characters" who cheat & steal.
97: copyright vs. plagiarism (definitions & purviews)
103: what protects you from plagiarism accusations (what all students automatically lack): "political necessity, Teflon greatness, and great wit" plus "postmodern discourse challenge" (still perpetuated by the qualified).
126: readers' contributions to authorship/plagiarism binary (& p's ubiquity)
127: nod toward the influences [threat] of electronic media on authorship's conception
133: hypertext & other pedagogical possibilities
134: implications of intersecting/dischordant theories (as they're played out) are that "authorship 'means' something other than--or at least more complicated than--'autonomous' and 'originary'"
146: "voice-merging" & the necessity of students' (all writers'?) "intertextual" position--"they are never inventing a new language out of nothing, but patch together fragments of the multiple texts, the multiple voices...already available to them" (flannery--miller--bakhtin)
148: minock's "postmodern pedagogy of imitation" (inspired by mike rose & glinda hull)
150: contexts & consequences of resistance--if we just ask our students to do something outside the allowances of the larger system, we get screwed & screw them. there are ways of intersecting & teaching/studying the intersections.
156: proposed policy change that would more accurately reflect conceptions of authorship
164: case-by-case intentionality is the only way to adjudicate "infractions"--the judgments are passed against humans, not author-functions
165: what are the consequences of policies assigning authorship to individuals if identity is always in flux, if text is always combined rather than original, if meaning depends on readers?
166: final claims: how the policies should be divided

top 5: Seán Burke; Lunsford & Ede; Mark Rose; Susan Stewart; Woodmansee & Jaszi. plus, of course, the 3 musketeers of this stuff-according-to-b: bourdieu, barthes, & misha.

yes, i spent considerably more than 10 minutes doing this. i'll get better at it. (i also know he was thinking more "pick one or 2" than "do 4 out of 5 of these things," but he was also talking seminar-course reading lists, not exam texts--let alone exam-texts written by the exam chair!)

1 down, 99 to go!

Posted by ttobryan at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

step one: find the damn path!

as a wrap-up to a discussion he had w/a graduate class i'm not in but wish today (& not for the first time) that i were, cgb @ cvb says:

when you read a book (or a week's set of readings), do this: put the info at the top of the page, and give yourself only 1 page, and only 10 minutes, to take a verbal snapshot of the reading.

Some possible categories for this activity:

  • The 1-sentence summary. Obvious enough.

  • Keywords or tags. I'm more and more enchanted with this method of "distant reading" a text.

  • Yes/No. We talked about why we "go back" to texts, and often, it's either because we want some support for a claim, or because we're working against it in some way. So jot down 2-3 fairly central claims with which you agree, and 2-3 with which you either disagree or about which you have doubts or concerns.

  • Passages. Some people copy out key passages, but I've always found it more useful to do a quick transcription: page number, and a quick description. I often do this when I prepare to talk about a text in a course.

  • Top 5. Imagine being able to ask the author, based purely on the text in front of you, who their top 5 suggested sources would be. That is, what are the 5 texts that would help you read this one better?

I'm sure that there are other possibilities, but you get the idea. The idea is to only take 10 minutes and to use categories that are recognizable once the reading itself has faded from memory. Imagine being able to look over a semester's worth of entries, and look for those authors whose names appear most frequently in the Top 5's (this might answer the question "what should I be reading?"). Or being able to see some patterns in the kinds of claims you pay most attention to, or the thing(s) that you have the most skepticism about.

i have 2 books read out of the 100 (an approximate number: the real thing is still all blurry, as my advisory board and i have a lot of pinning-down of the texts still leaping like dolphins into & out of the water, from one list to another & back on & off again) i'm supposed to be an expert on by mid-january. saintly advisorperson says those are the last 2 books i'm to read cover-to-cover in any sort of linear fashion; before i leap into trying to do the rest her way, though, i've got to get something logged about these two before they disappear into the fog.

for a little bonus-pressure: she wrote/edited both of them.

Posted by ttobryan at 09:31 AM | Comments (4)

September 06, 2005

was that inappropriate?

the football comment? was it? i can't decide. i was called to task about it by a friend yesterday--entirely of my own deserving, because of the way i prefaced it & led into the conversation. i'm sure--in no small part because my friend's comments made the impression absolutely crystal clear--that it's easy enough to read me as wholly hypocritical for that. after all, as my friend pointed out, there are often--if not always--tragedies unfolding while i'm writing about being *happy.* and i chose not to disguise my comment, not to question how people i didn't know could write about things i assume they're out in the world writing about rather than using the actual thing that struck me when i saw it central in the attention of people whose blogs i actually read.

in my friend's eyes, i was completely out of line, not only because i'm a hypocrite, but because knowing it was even possible that i'd be read by the people i was critiquing--and my friend assures me, and i'd like to argue but i'm not sure i can, that that sort of question is clearly a critique whether i ever phrase it as one or not--makes me deliberately a rabble-rouser (not in a good way) & also a sanctimonious shit.

my friend is far too polite to say these things. well. the "h-word" was employed, but the rest are my interpretation of the mood imparted. in any case, it brings me to an interesting intersection of a lot of different theories and awarenesses. like madeline over at academom has been talking about lately, there's an author/audience issue always on the table when you're blogging. who's your public? who's reading you? to what degree do you know who's reading you? what rersponsibility does that knowledge give you? does the existance of a huge possible-public defray responsibility--can i say that since it's just "out there" for anybody to read, i don't have to imagine what i wrote as if i'd written it on slips of paper & slid it under the doors of people on my hall who happen to care (like good, decent, caring, willing-to-contribute-to-the-disaster-relief-effort people all over the world, all the time, tragedy or not, which i never have really understood anyway, which might make my comment that much worse or that much more irrelevant--i can't honestly tell which) about football?

do i have to account for everyone who might possibly read my blog? everyone whose reading is just likely? how would i reckon "likely," anyway. likely now is a different pool than it was 6 months ago, might be a different one six months from now, or tomorrow, if i happen to say something today that someone in my incredibly small readership (at least that i'm aware of and consciously responsible to) finds worthy of picking up, linking to, arguing with, or otherwise drawing to the attention of other readers in other circles. i'm answering my own question there, & somewhat facetiously; of course i can't account for everyone. does it make me a loud-mouthed immature snot-head to say things i know people in my building might be hurt or offended by if i only say them here but don't say them about those people? is it better if i'm commenting about a behavior i find perplexing without naming names? or am i just as guilty as i would have been had i done so because it still amounts (or can be read as amounting) to calling out individuals for doing something wrong, because the question implies a critique and the behavior implies the individual and my location & position make it possible that someone might, without too much work, trace to see who on my blogroll happened yesterday to have recently posted about football?

in case anybody tries it, i should offer the following disclaimer: i really was puzzled & frustrated in the moment, but i don't think anybody's insensitive or unkind or whatever other words i didn't use but could be accused of having hinted at for being interested enough in their fan-sport of choice to write about it even while other things are going on. it just seemed amazing to me in that moment of contrast, when i was feeling guilty for watering my tomatoes because i had fresh water coming right out of the tap & i should have been pouring it into glasses to hand out to dehydrated people still waiting on overpasses in new orleans, but for the logistics of the whole affair.

i don't think i'm better-than. that wasn't/isn't my intention. theory intrudes (damn grad school anyway) at this point: is everything an argument? i know there's a book out titled that, as if titling makes it so, but i don't know if that's applicable or appropriate here--and i'm sure i'm not ready for the implications if it is. can one not make observations in the blogosphere--or anywhere--without being held accountable for arguments one hasn't actually made but which might easily enough be assumed or extracted from the observations made (and those withheld)? how accountable to the lives our texts take on beyond us are we or should we be? and what does the presence of emotion add to that query? is it not argumentative if i say "somebody wrote about football" but only if i also observe my own confused or frustrated emotive response?

i'm rambling. so i'm stopping. feel free to tell me that yes, i am a sanctimonious shit, if you want to. i'm okay with that accusation, or at least not unfamiliar with it. but if you don't mind, i'd also like a little more unraveling of why you think it fits.

Posted by ttobryan at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2005

hurricanes

i went to class thursday with an agenda, but i couldn't not talk about the hurricane. i made it rhetorical, political, relevant to issues of american racism & reporting &... while that wasn't specifically on-topic either, i managed to connect it to what we were reading in our rhetoric book, to the dangers of generalization & creating--and stopping at--binaries as ways of understanding the world. looters vs. finders. as if there are only two kinds of people, black criminals & white survivors, in all of new orleans.

this is supposed to be a class whose first project is focused on education, because that's something they know, something they've always done, something they have longstanding practice at critiquing. it's not supposed to be a class about racism & ineffective disaster relief & presedential indifference, hype, empty promises & war-metaphors, but i can't promise right now that that won't happen.

it's hard to pay attention to anything else for long. it's hard to read the news & think anything else is significant. it's hard to read other people's blogs & see how everybody made that first push of focus & then moved on to other things. i know we're too far away to do much, once we've made our donations. i know there aren't any refugees in our dome--there can't be, after all, there was a game on saturday--to take in or help out. i know the human brain has a limited capacity for tragedy, especially when it has the option to turn it off, which tens of thousands of people down south don't right now but we do. i don't know how the hell so many people can write & talk & think & care about football.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:53 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

okay, first *week,* then.

that e-mail i sent my classes about that room? the one wherein i told them everything that had been told to me, like a trusting fool? yeah. i trusted the wrong people, the ones working in the building who i thought likely to know their way around it. turns out the registrar was right, there *was* a 147.

i only found this out, however, after conducting my first class, or at least the first 45-minutes-or-so of it, after which i let them go, in a hallway/lobby because the only room we could find was 149 & somebody else was scheduled to be there. we did find a few other locked, unlabeled doors, & it later turned out, somewhat miraculously, that 2 of those doors led into the same overheated little room with something less than the 20 desks the class requires & a chalkboard with one piece of chalk but no eraser, but the bonus of a piano.

there's a new sign on the door now, & today it was unlocked. i'm knocking on wood in hopes it'll continue to open for us, & while i'm at it hoping for another desk or two & maybe some ventilation in the building that didn't happen to be working today but will work by next week? all things are possible, i suppose. a few of them might even happen.

to balance that, because balance is good, the students in that class are a flexible, agreeable bunch who followed me good-naturedly around when we had no room & showed personality during our summer-camp-ish name-game today, & had more to say about their reading assignment than we had time to account for.

the other group, who has a room with a thermostat that might even work, plenty of desks, a window they can see out of, 2 chalkboards, plenty of chalk, AND erasers, had to be coaxed and cajoled into saying anything at all for the first hour-fifteen i had them in there, & almost unilaterally didn't bother doing their homework because... who knows why "because." they just didn't. i think i asked them, in addition to reading (which only some of them bothered with), to write an entire sentence, or maybe two, & make a list with some words in it.

i flex my hands & pop my knuckles & get ready for a semester of ad-hoc dentistry.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)