Disqus - Latest Comments for kafkaz

Re: a poem for dzhokhar

kafkaz — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:04:02 -0000

Every poem is an exploration, every version of a poem is a draft, and every draft of a poem shared is an act of bravery. I've written far worse poems than this. Today's writing alone makes this look pretty darned good, gosh darn it all. (Having one of those days when something goes terribly wrong between the image so clearly in my mind and the sentence so forlornly limping across the screen.) Look, every poem is self-referential to some extent. We take imaginative leaps, but of course can never leave ourselves behind entirely. Plus, we really *don't* know all of the things that have to go terribly, terribly wrong for a young person to choose to do such things, and we really don't know what happens in his brain and soul in the aftermath. It's okay to wonder, even if the wondering doesn't match what others want or expect or would articulate for themselves. Anyway, sometimes churning these things out is worth the effort even if when we go back later there's only one idea or sentence or image we'd save--and even if we'd trash it all and begin again. I'm sympathetic to the impulse to write one's way toward figuring things out. (But I'm glad that I don't have a large audience tracking my efforts. Way too much pressure!)

Re: “The” Writing Process begins with Google

kafkaz — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:49:57 -0000

Oh, I doubt that many FYC courses (and the class studying _The Moonstone_ is an honors FYC course, which should not be too surprising--lots of that still going on out there) could be passed on quizzes alone, but the quiz as reading check is still a very common tool, and quite easy to game when it comes to novels. As far as I'm concerned, students who quickly do what must be done to check off that quiz so that they can prep for midterms in Physics, Calc, Programming, etc. are doing the smart thing. (And I've taught a few students how to do just that. No apologies. Stay afloat.)

But yes, the reality of contemporary research, reading, writing, composition (not just writing anymore) and collaboration are often not touched at all by college classes. It's revealing, I think, that many teachers are wanting to impose small groups in MOOCs. They want to take that "M" down a few pegs. Nothing about small group work as it plays out in many a writing classroom suggests that writing teachers are particularly good at facilitating small group work, though (is anything more reviled by writing students than "peer review day"? doubt it), so whence this yearning? Turning MOOCs into online iterations of courses that are outdated and out of touch with where and how writing lives doesn't seem like such a worthy goal.

Is it so that MOOCs subordinate close reading to collaboration? Not my impression so far. Rather, I'd say that students are more eager to do the individual reading when that makes it possible to connect and contribute. Conversely, the connections and contributions often point to still more reading. I'd call reading, research, writing, and composing parallel activities in #edcmooc, at least. In the Philosophy MOOC I'm looking at, it's all vid lectures and quizzes. Boo. Haven't gotten too excited about that just yet, but that's of course a common model, too--just take the usual lectures, quizzes, and readings and pop them online. (A course like that would make for a good SparkNotes equivalent, or a good pre credit experience for someone nervous about a course.) Same thing we saw when smaller courses began moving online locally, so no shock there, but why haven't we learned that what makes online writing good (to invoke the title of a long ago writing text that was a favorite) is that it's *all* writing/composition, and it's all available?

Anyway, yeah. It's always a good time to think anew about what it means to be a writer and to teach writing.

Re: “The” Writing Process begins with Google

kafkaz — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:14:47 -0000

This observation stands out for me: "Writing in this way takes a fair amount of experience to do well. It's the thing I have most learned to do through writing this blog."

Where are students learning to do this? Seems to me that they are not learning it in class, but are learning it around or in relation to many classes, and often without the teacher or professor being at all aware that this is how it goes.

Say students have to read (as at least one class full of college students I know are doing at the moment) Wilkie Collins' _The Moonstone_. They will read the Wikipedia entry and hit the SparkNotes, for sure. On the basis of those two alone, they probably can and will pass any quizzes the prof pops their way. A few enterprising students might fan out just a bit from there, maybe visiting some fan/professor/student generated pages, and maybe even chasing the question of where the mystery novel in English really began. Fewer still might actually read the novel. They'll probably be in the best shape if they read the novel after the Googling is done, since Googling is perfectly suited to prereading. They'll learn about the serialization, the relationship with Dickens, the structure of the novel, etc. All of that will make the actual reading easier and more productive, but the reading will really be entirely optional in most classes if the only goal is earning a good grade. The rare student who actually does read it and develops a deeper interest might then even track down some of the adaptations. There's an interesting early radio adaptation, for instance, that's readily available in the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio collection, and is actually mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, which makes it relatively easy to find.

In by far the majority of classes, this process is not only not addressed but is actually actively hidden. Makes sense, because it doesn't fit comfortably with the way many teachers believe and expect things should happen. Oddly, even if teacher's prep process is very like this, it's a process that's still hidden. Teachers hide it from students because it seems to undermine their air of expertise. I've seen plenty of students howl with glee when they discover that a teacher has swiped handouts, tests, or quizzes from the web, only lightly adapting if bothering to adapt at all. Generally, this is only a "gotcha" when students dislike that teacher, but it's an interesting dynamic at play. Teachers and students, both, are often at pains to hide "the" process of reading and writing from each other.

So, going to tie this all back into MOOCs, because that's a learning space capturing my imagination right now. Could be that in the more interesting MOOCs (where teacher gives up some of the pose of expertise in favor of not only allowing for but actively promoting the social construction of knowledge about and around a given topic), we have the ideal space in which to reveal and examine what readers and writers actually do. There, the links and writings would be openly shared. The adaptions discussed. Other students' and teachers' sources examined. Of course #moonstone would be a means of tagging and tracking the network of sources and responses.

Even if the likelihood of anyone delving into the actual book remained about the same (and I'd be curious about the actual statistics, there--how enlightening would it be to have access to that info?), I would submit that this would be an entirely better, more instructive writing experience for everyone involved. But it's an entirely different sort of game than what's still happening in most college classrooms.

Re: the double bind of open education #edcmooc

kafkaz — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:32:33 -0000

Interesting. Gardner's talk fascinated me because it is both so uplifting and ultimately so sad. He, too, yearns for openness, but the moments in which he finds it tend to be very intimate and in many ways quite closed, as with the students on the hill far, far away.

That said, I'm mostly a post educational institution creature. So for me, at least, the openness is appealing. No need for certification at all, and no desire for it, either. It's that sense of "open" that he's after. The double-bind is trying to find or facilitate it in school at all.

So, look what's happened--a double-bind from the other end. I'm back in the institutional world exploring its attempts at an "open" incarnation, but always aware of the institutional nature of the thing and the implications of that for those with a stake in the usual institutional ends.

Was just looking over the course description for Susan Delagrange, Scott Lloyd DeWitt,
Kay Halasek, Ben McCorkle, and Cynthia Selfe's Writing II: Rhetorical Composing, and thinking that's probably not a course I'd ever be drawn to if I weren't going to get any sort of college credit or professional certification for it. The reason? The "peer review process" using "sets of defined criteria" sounds very classroomy. Maybe curiosity will have me signing up anyway, but the seriously post-classroom part of me shudders a bit at the prospect. Sounds like schooling. https://www.coursera.org/co...

Re: why utopian/dystopian thinking is wrong-headed #edcmooc

kafkaz — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:24:11 -0000

Also, the material is clearly very much meant for beginners, so that's part of the reason I couldn't resist tweaking you about your professor-speak. I like beginners and beginnings, so I'm finding it fascinating.

Re: why utopian/dystopian thinking is wrong-headed #edcmooc

kafkaz — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:17:42 -0000

I think it takes a bit of Zen-like dipping and sampling to find what you're drawn to, or even just to get a feel for the overall shape of the thing. It seems to me that one of the most interesting aspects of a course like this is deciding how to slice and dice it. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that students who are adept at zeroing in on their own purposes and silencing most of the peripheral chatter are more likely to persist, I do think that questions like these (how are you accessing, with what, why might that matter, what are your goals, how might this be similar to or different from what you may already be doing on FB or Twitter and so forth) would be usefully raised in the introductory materials, but that said it seems to me that the overall presentation and structure of the course content is thoughtfully designed. I'm actually finding the in-Coursera interactions deeply fascinating for what they reveal not only about how students are engaging with the content and each other, but also about how they are engaging with the Coursera space itself. Here's hoping developers are tending to those very smart questions, complaints, and observations.

Re: why utopian/dystopian thinking is wrong-headed #edcmooc

kafkaz — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:38:14 -0000

Ummm--I rather think the whole point is to lead students towards seeing that as a simplistic binary. You don't?

And truly, confused as many students are, I seriously doubt that starting with this

[Given this frame, what seems like a better starting point for me is attempting to identify the functionality of these media technologies and the activities that arise from them. Out of that analysis one might begin to think about their situation in pedagogies. I don't think that's a strictly technical or rational process, though obviously some technical understanding is necessary. That said, it's more about investigating what people do and the myriad capacities that might emerge when humans and nonhumans interact.]

lovely as it is, would help them much. Not in this context.

Though that's fun to think about on some levels, so many students are such beginners and so very delighted by the prospect of learning something that it would be sad to lose them that way, which you would.

No point in meandering away from your usual audience to see what you might discover? Why not?

Re: robot graders, new aesthetic, and the end of the close reading industry

kafkaz — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:02:47 -0000

The whole NA/OOO thing makes me think of Teilhard. Omega point, the singularity, etc. We're desperate for mysticism.

Re: literary studies’ digital humanities future

kafkaz — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:24:52 -0000

Churches--at least the big ones--are corporate, as well. I'd count that among the commonalities.

As far as constantive/performative goes, seems like grammatical play with too tenuous a connection to what happens at a conference (which is always a happening). Guess I'll be the old-fashioned one and say that it's all performative, but also claim that this old-fashioned approach is well-suited to the digital humanities, particularly when it comes to TechRhet. Composition is more a performance than ever, it seems, and the ability to groove with that makes composition in digital realms possible. Comfort and confidence with connected composition depend on ease with the notion and act of performance. Unease with the notion and act make composition perhaps not utterly impossible (ooh, a constative/performative pun!), but harder, more fraught with anxiety, more likely to devolve into silence.

Re: literary studies’ digital humanities future

kafkaz — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:35:15 -0000

Is it? I don't know. Maybe if you're talking "leap of," but of course he seems really to mean religion as opposed to faith in the "leap of" sense, and there it certainly makes sense to see academia as a kind of church--it's the business of faith (its pronouncements, its authority), rather like the Magisterium.

Also, I wonder why you separate performance from "discovery/production." Is a performance not an occasion for discovery? Not, in itself, a production? Seems an odd and uncomfortable line you've drawn, there.

Re: literary studies’ digital humanities future

kafkaz — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:08:14 -0000

It's interesting that the thing that seems to bug people the most about this Fish piece is the accusation that they have or need some brand of faith.

Re: Live online debates on digital composition in FYC

kafkaz — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:58:40 -0000

I feel like I started engaging in this debate way back in 1984, when Costanzo's *Double Exposure* was already ringing true to my experience that composition is something more than text. Over 25 years later, it's stunning to see it still unwinding.

I have to disagree about the key being leaving a notion of compositional transcendence behind, though. It seems to me that what's required is exactly the opposite: understanding and appreciating that composition transcends mediums and genres, and that it blends mediums and genres, as well.

The first part of that certainly could pose something of a problem for the project of teaching writing in the academy, but only if writing teachers believe that they need somehow to own the notion of composition in its entirety, which would be quite impossible. Surely, we're fine with the idea that students in music, photography, film, literature, and creative writing (one of the areas we sadly traded away in the push towards professionalism) are learning crucial things about composition. That's fun and exciting, and offers all sorts of possibilities for cross-pollination. The second part, though, is probably more effective to focus on as a practical matter. All we have to do, there, is spend some time looking at what real writers really do. (Yup, that's *all*. Easy. Hah!)

Truly, though, even though that's a tall order, it's important. To accomplish my daily tasks as a writer I have to be comfortable with working with images (still and moving), sound, databases, hypertext, style sheets, intertextuality, visual design, and writing. In practice, these things are often not readily separable, anymore. Even if I'm after writing something that's purely textual (insofar as that's even possible), my research is unfolding online, the feedback is likely to be digital, and even the environment the piece is written in is foundationally digital. Even if we were to force students to compose strictly with pencil and paper, as still routinely happens in grammar school and high school, we couldn't escape the fact that the students themselves are multimodal creatures whose literary histories and understandings are inevitably and inescapably shaped by film, music, video, texting, web surfing, gaming, etc. At the very least, teaching writing successfully right now requires engaging those students successfully. A teacher with no digital skills or enthusiasms at all will have a hard time, there.

My literacy life in the last few weeks: 1) Emerging from a doctor's appointment with a prescription sheet that listed a website, and directed me to order a given book from Amazon, 2) Locating the iPhone app for a *Julius Caesar* study guide and encouraging my "Shakespeare stinks" 15 year to download it for review, 3) Throwing together an emergency blog, website, and FB page to keep folks informed about the status of a school threatened with closure, 4) Creating a job exchange board for a local parish (embedded db functionality so folks can post positions that are immediately listed), 5) Engaging in all sorts of online writing, research, and discussion that seem so routine, now, that they don't even make the "highlights" list.

Whether or not digital composition is part of FYC is kind of beside the point. It is part of writing. It *is* writing. This is and will be so whether the FYC powers that be find a way to cope with it or not.

Re: actualized virtualities in Latour: the case of the tweckled lecturer

kafkaz — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:24:15 -0000

I enjoy a well-delivered live presentation or lecture, and also enjoy the presence of the audience that is part and parcel of that experience. Just so, despite YouTube, Hulu, and movies on demand, I enjoy actually going to the theater--even the drive-in. And my trusty iPhone notwithstanding, there's something about live radio that has always fascinated and attracted me, and continues to, which is why the iHeartRadio application is among my favorites. It seems to me that although it is true that the scene of academic or professional presentation is changing, we still do have to contend with the ongoing allure and effectiveness of the live performance. That it *is* a performance is, of course, part of the appeal. Those with a knack for or a love of performance are fun to watch. Then, too, the physical presence of the audience has a performative aspect to it, so that I love the movie theater partially because of the communal nature of the experience, which is lacking online. Watching and listening with others, and watching and listening to their reactions is part of the enjoyment and the intellectual satisfaction. If the presentation that isn't really a presentation at all but is merely a reading dies out, that's fine, but I'm not willing to toss away the satisfactions of the well-wrought presentation along the way.

Re: louisgray.com: I Don't Want To Hear About Distributed Conversations Any More

kafkaz — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:03:55 -0000

I was going to add my two cents, but another conversation is no doubt already unfolding or in the offing. And so it goes. Everything is an archive.

Re: is artificial intelligence a rhetorical process?

kafkaz — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:29:48 -0000

Hmm. I like the idea that poetry is somehow the language of wisdom--like it a whole lot and so want immediately to agree with that--but I wonder. It seems not quite right. It strikes me that wisdom is more expansive than that. When discernemnt encompasses the metaphorical and the logical, the gut and the spirt, the pattern and the exception, the text and the subtext (and on and on), then that seems closer to what I would call wisdom. Seems to me that wisdom also necessarily does have an emotional/psychological element, most notable an air of peace.

To me, the most intersting way to think about AI generally is as something not separable and other than humans, but as largely a matter of how we extend our capacity to absorb and sort, discern and decide. When I think about my own thinking and writing processes now, it's pretty tough to figure out where search engines and social networks end and I begin, or vice versa. AI has arrived. Since it seems so natural to us--second nature passing into "nature"--it's tempting to think of it as something yet to come. Meanwhile, every time I write and quite casually pop in a link, or a bit of multimedia, and every time I put a piece of writing into a digital social flow, I'm using both the gray matter in my own little brain box and the AI that so significantly extends what that little brain box can hold, marshall, discover, etc.

Re: louisgray.com: Hi Facebook, It's Me, FriendFeed. This Relationship? It's Complicated.

kafkaz — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:23:57 -0000

No, no--it's more like the good girl geek ended up with a junior high dropout. Sigh.

Re: Another day at CCCC 2009: thoughts on academic bullshit, part I (it never ends)

kafkaz — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:52:03 -0000

Sigh. Usability, design, production values--not a whole lot of agreement on any of t hese things. Doesn't seem reasonable at all to suppose that one must, then, have recourse to whichever area of the university one imagines to "own" design (etc.) to determine whether a digital English Studies/Comp diss is up to snuff.

Indeed, I'm not persuaded that taking it to the level of code helps much. What woud the meaure be? Validation? Well, the Amazon site (wildly effective by many other measures) would fail miserably, there, as would many others.

Gosh. Next you'll be demanding that text dissertations be well-written (quite as if that's what the genre were about).

Re: the crisis of scholarly publication: a regurgitating choragraphy of CCCC 2009

kafkaz — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:57:31 -0000

Hmm. The fading of our known and familiar print genres on the one side, but the sense of impending crisis as the newer technology spaces (blogs, twitter, facebook) grow ever more crowded on the other.

Dyscrasia . . .

Yes. A bad mixture--that's the crux of any emetic recipe, isn't it.

But emptiness can't be sustained for long, either. Appetite reasserts itself.

Interesting times for writing and education. If eucrasia comes, it's likely to look and feel much different that nearly anyone expected.

Re: CCCC in the blogosphere

kafkaz — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:28:05 -0000

Sigh, yeah. The professional organization could surely do better, blog wise. Is techrhet still an Ashputtle, there? I can't imagine why that would be so. Guess the more optimistic read is that there's *so much* to tend to that things sometimes fall by the wayside.

Oh--little note of clarification, too. In blogger, you can actually choose to display the original post as you are commenting. I still don't like the comment function there much, though.

Re: CCCC in the blogosphere

kafkaz — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:56:21 -0000

Oh, yes, in his kick off post, Victor actually addresses the fact of being a newbie blogger, and not being comfortable at all in that arena. So, I suppose that's what I mean by multiple paces. Yes, there are lots of folks who could spiff up the blog in no time, but then again there are lots of Victors--folks with oodles of expertise in various slices of rhetcomp, but little expertise and, even still, little awareness of or comfort with techrhet. New beginnings are always underway, and it can be annoying, true, but then again I'm fairly routinely a newbie at something, and it's not only very nice, indeed, when folks who are farther along are gracious about that, but also easier for me to get up to speed quickly when they are. Of course, a new blogger might find his or her maiden voyage a whole lot more appealing if the blog is nicely designed, and invites good discussion that's easy to track, but I know from working with that particular subset of person who is an "expert beginner" (used to being an expert, and treated as such, but new at the thing at hand) that's it's tricky, indeed, to negotiate newness with someone for whom expertise is generally a given. Very tricky!

Re: CCCC in the blogosphere

kafkaz — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:38:46 -0000

Ha, well. On the design end of the thing, this reminds me of all of those long ago discussions about teaching with email or BBs, etc. All these folks just "inventing" email as a writing and learning tool, when some had been at it a long while. I think that's ever the way, don't you? There are always multiple paces of discovery and experimentation underway. That said, I do not love the blogger comment function, and have always found it difficult to write in, for some reason, although I've never really examined why. Perhaps it's a simple matter of being delivered to a whole 'nother page to write in. Hmm!

Re: Experimentation and expertise in web-based scholarship

kafkaz — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:17:41 -0000

Hah! So, I'm continuing to mull it over in the Owlish podcast here.

http://www.kafkaz.net/

Mixing Expertise and Experimentation : 2nd response.

Re: Experimentation and expertise in web-based scholarship

kafkaz — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:31:48 -0000

Oh, and while I'm worked up about this . . .

Here's a video remix I constructed in response to last years Kairos webtext winner, which ticked me off no end by being all about remixing, and then wanting me to play an audio file while running a ppt. Make and embed the danged video, already! That's pretty much how I felt about it, so I just went ahead and made the thing myself so Michael (and his cowriter, too, though my conversation was mostly with Michael) could see for himself what I was on about.

http://www.kafkaz.net/remix...

So, you know--it's not experimentation, really, that we need. It's a willingness to play, and sometimes being too damned scholarly gets well in the way of that. Play, I think, is at the very heart of the sorts of scholarship I most value. Nice quality in a teacher, too.

Re: Experimentation and expertise in web-based scholarship

kafkaz — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:48:29 -0000

No camera, here, so I replied in audio podcast.

http://www.kafkaz.net/

Look for "Experiments and Expertise" in the Owlish Podcast.

Re: Experimentation and expertise in web-based scholarship

kafkaz — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:58:28 -0000

Hmm.

Well, it occurs to me that there's a different way to look at this, now. If multimedia use is--as you observed about Seesmic--basically "disposable," then another way to think of that might be to say that it is ubiquitous. It is how people communicate now. One needn't be a radio broadcast specialist to produce a podcast, or a film expert to produce a videocast or a YouTube vid, etc. These things are forms of composition, now, and they're just what people do. Are Composition teachers among those doing them? It seems to me that Kairos has been more than an online journal. It has been it's own ongoing manifesto, declaring with every issue that Composition teachers are doing this, should be doing it, and can and should get started right now if they haven't already. To me, it's really quite beside the point that the web composition might be less than stellar, or that the videos don't have professional level production values, or whatever. That's not the goal, I wouldn't think. The goal seems to be to explore, theorize, discover, share, and promote what we *can* do. It might even be very specifically to say that a person surely does not have to be George Lucas to make a film, to see the value of that process for communication and for learning about composition, or to discover how that process promotes students' understanding of and ability with composition. Instant online publication of writing has forced some changes in the way we think of how to value writing, or "What Makes Writing Good," as one of my favorite old texts put it. Well, now we're undergoing a similar (and simultaneous, really, since we're still not done working through what to make of this change in how we approach text,either) reevaluation of composition in images, in sound, in text, and in the interplay of all of these and more. That's good. I *want* Kairos authors to confront that. I *want* them thinking through their choices, and their limitations, and seeking support as they learn how to do things better. I also want readers to see just how much can be accomplished with quite readily accessible tools: screen capture, Audacity, video and audio embedding, etc. Thinking those things through *is* at the heart of the discursive practices of the field, and to the extent that this isn't familiar, it *should* be familiar. I'd hate to see Kairos lose that sense of urgency, creativity, and persuasion, really, that is so much at its heart.