Council of Writing Program Administrators

The honest answer is that it's a hard to say. If you live in NY then you probably know about the state's budget issues with SUNY being one of the main targets for cutting. All types of bad stuff might happen. Despite the fact that there are well over 400K students at SUNY's 64 campuses, the state has always been better know for its private institutions. So what is one to do? I'm not only SUNY faculty but also a SUNY grad. There's a lot of good here, but the situation now is not good.

Anyway, there's a larger issue here. The cost of higher ed has well outpaced inflation for decades. My step-father earned his tuition money in the 70s working a summer job. Little chance of that now. On top of that, a larger percentage of HS grads go to college now. That means less prepared students and it also means more students with less economic ability to afford college. In short, the costs keep rising, and the students' ability to pay keeps declining. It doesn't take a genius, right?

While it's true that European universities go back to the 11th century or something like that, higher education as we know it is pretty much an industrial age phenomenon. They're the prototypical bourgeois institution, the gateway into the managerial-professional class. I'm trying to imagine appropriate analogs from previous eras. Would you say that the monastery was the university of the middle ages? that guilds were the colleges of the early modern era? Obviously colleges existed at those times but they were for such a small % of the population that they couldn't have served the same purpose.

I'm not sure how well those analogies hold up, but the point I would like to make is that during those historical periods it was probably difficult to imagine society functioning and transmitting its cultural knowledge without those institutions. That's the way we think about higher ed today. I mean, if anything higher ed seems more necessary than ever, right?

But in part the reason it seems that way is b/c we are facing educational challenges where our existing institutions no longer seem up to the task. This is obvious in these rising costs (and I'm looking at this not only as a prof but as a parent who'll be sending kids to college in 10 years). Colleges continue to operate by an industrial model and it's very difficult to imagine faculty and admins moving out of that model. No one in any job likes to be the subject of "efficiency," as that seems to always mean something dehumanizing. However, we need to recognize that the practices that we have naturalized as college teaching/learning are contingent, material-historical artifacts. That doesn't mean those practices are bad or even ineffective. It just means that they represent ways of teaching and learning under certain conditions. Conditions that are now changing. And while we can certainly manage to keep up with our legacy systems, eventually they start to become expensive by comparison.

Given all that, I certainly wouldn't want to imply that we should just buy what "they" are selling--whoever they are. Instead, as is the running theme here, I would contend that faculty need to reinvent their practices to respond to our new circumstances. And clearly there are faculty doing that.

But I don't think it's enough. It's easy to imagine a system like SUNY falling apart in a handful of years. SUNY really came together in the 60s. Just 40 years ago. There's no reason to believe it will last another 20 years. It might, but it could just as easily be gone in 10. And who knows what will happen to the colleges then. If this kind of thing would happen nationally, not to everyone but to a decent portion (say 10% of colleges) you'd suddenly find a couple million students still in need of an education.

Something will fill that gap. And whatever it is. If it "does the job" and does it with less cost then look out. And I'm not necessarily talking about for-profit universities, though that's an easy assumption. I'm talking about a new institution that will attract faculty from colleges, give them the kind of work environment they need to thrive intellectually and professionally, provide students with higher education, and be able to do it better than current colleges b/c they will not be bound by institutional inertia.

As always, we'll see.

Foxes Next Door
Originally uploaded by ewidem

Returned from a couple of errands yesterday afternoon to find three young foxes wrestling in front of the barn next door. The property is vacant (clung to for nostalgia's sake by a man who grew up there). In exchange for shoveling the drive and making the place appear minimally kept up, Ph. gets to park the '90 bucket-o-bolts there--that's the ultra cheap set of wheels we picked up in February so Ph. could learn properly to drive. I don't know whether the foxes are a threat to much of anything. They're young and small--innocent seeming. One was pawing at an old tire. The other two were rolling around on the ground, grappling with each other. Of course, I'm sure they have parents. Will they run off the other barn-friendly vermin (esp. the skunks, who take every opportunity to make their presence known)? I don't know. A family of foxes also cannot be good for field mice, squirrels, and outdoor cats. But are they dangerous enough to call in animal control? As long as they don't bring Bill O'Reilly sniffing around these parts, they're harmless, right?

About the photo: I snapped it on my cell phone, a freebie from AT&T. The only way your cell phone would take crappier pictures is if you didn't have a cell phone. Even then your impressions might be crisper than this. But, hey, work with what you've got, no?

OK with Daniel Ha's help at Disqus the problem was fixed. The problem was a seesmic widget I had in my sidebar, which I have now deleted. Hopefully they'll work that out and I'll be able to have both again soon. So, merry video commenting to all!

OK still not working, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Now here's the thing. There's a recent post in Mashable about this--do people really want to make video comments? I'm not sure. It's a new thing, so maybe it will take some getting used to no doubt.

There's a good point about how its more efficient to read text comments, though obviously video comments have the potential to create a better sense of personal connection. As such, it depends somewhat on the kind of blog you have. If it's a personal blog with mostly friends as an audience (e.g. Live Journal), maybe video comments will be really popular. But a more impersonal, business-like blog will remain mostly text driven.

Maybe, maybe not.

I think you also have to factor in the mobile device. I imagine in the future I'll be able to post to seesmic or something like it directly from my mobile phone. I'll be able to watch/listen to video and respond in kind. That'd be a lot easier than trying to type out something substantive, right? Similarly, it might be easier to listen to/view comments than try to read them.

Of course I'm always thinking first and foremost of the educational application. I think video commenting will be great for my online courses. They will help to establish community among the participants and also engender a more conversational tone. It's also a way of responding to different learning styles and strengths. Not everyone is comfortable with writing off the cuff like this. While I am teaching professional writing and would like students to develop these skills, I also want to give them other modes of communication. Like this one.

Ars Technica reports on a recent study which shows that instant messaging may not be ruining students' writing abilities after all as many might believe. For instance,

Researchers Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis studied over a million words from IM communications and compared it to more than 250,000 spoken words of those between the ages of 15 and 20. The two found that, while written and spoken speech share some similarities, IM communications actually leaned toward the formal side.

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Full disclosure: one of the founders of this site, due to launch May 19, is a former student of mine. But here's an interesting re-mediation: Web back to print.

WordHustler is conceived as a social network that, according to the press release, "provides writers with a bevy of innovative tools designed to help authors of all genres to get their manuscripts into the hands of editors and find publishing success."

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So I am trying an experiment right now making use of these two applications. It should now be possible for y'all to leave video comments on this blog. Now I don't know if you want to, but I thought it might be cool. If it works I'll probably try to integrate this into my online course in the fall.

In a recent Chronicle column, "Tales of Western Adventure," (via) historian Patricia Limerick writes on the challenges facing "public" scholars. The public scholar vs. "scholar of the esoteric" dichotomy is fraught with brambles (might the passionate pursuer of the arcane run afoul of hasty caricatures?), of course, but nevertheless the column is a must read. I was especially taken in by her bulleted lists. The first one, halfway into the short piece, weighs reasons for not encouraging newcomers to pursue academic careers in the humanities. The second list consists of Limerick's everyday techniques or manners for delivering "on the promise that university-based academics are of value to the world." Among them:

• Face up to the fact that your own convictions may not be the final word in human wisdom. Surrender the pretension that can poison professorial efforts to communicate with the public.
• Apply to the world around you the methods you were taught you in graduate school for assessing evidence. Take in information carefully; keep your hypotheses in a limber state; do not leap to conclusions; resist the common human habit of celebrating the evidence that supports your pre-existing point of view, while dismissing the evidence that invites you to question your assumptions.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and in it's Wired Campus Blog, there is an apparent controversy between colleges that want to publish student theses freely on the web and students and faculty, particularly in creative writing, that want to keep their theses private. The primary reason is that these students want to be able to publish their creative works and believe that having their work freely available online will hamper that.

I especially liked this quote from Jeanne Leiby, editor of Southern Review at LSU:

“I don’t necessarily want people to go back and read my thesis,” says Ms. Leiby, who earned a graduate degree in writing from the University of Alabama. “I’d like to think that in 15 years I’ve become more of a writer. I don’t necessarily want those early attempts associated with my name.”

Hmmm... and what do you plan for the next 15 years? To get better? Worse? Sure I wrote a creative writing thesis 15 years ago before I switched to rhet/comp. Are the poems in that thesis great? No, not really. Some are OK. I don't think there's much danger of anyone reading them, even if they were online.

Of course this leads to a curious contradiction. Which one is it? Do we want to keep the poems private b/c they aren't good? Or do we want to keep them private b/c they are good and we want to be able to exchange them for something rather than giving them away? I suppose it could be both, depending on the author.

So here's my take on this business.

1. Read the fine print! If you're a graduate student or a faculty member you are party to an agreement regarding intellectual property with your institution. You should probably know what it is. It would appear that first-year students don't have the right to refuse to submit their work to Turnitin.com. Of course they do have the right to not go to college or to go to a different college, I guess. Best to know what you are getting into before you start.
2. My personal position is that authors ought to have the right to decide how their work is disseminated. I also agree with others in this article that creative works are a special kind of case. The way they are disseminated is part of the work.
3. It may be the case that many publishers and editors, like Leiby, won't accept works that have been freely published online. However, I believe these publishers are making a significant intellectual and economic error in following this policy. Take the Southern Review as an example. It's a well-respected literary journal. I would guess that a significant portion of its subscribers are institutional. Are these institutions going to stop subscribing b/c some of the poems might also be available online? I don't think so. However, let's say I'm reading poems online and I find one that says it was published in the journal. Maybe I buy a copy to see other poems like the one I read and liked online. I honestly don't see how you lose here.
4. All it will take is for a half-dozen or so of the top MFA programs to start publishing theses online to reverse this course. Then publishers will discover that the best work is still the best work, even though its available online too.

In the end I think students are getting poor advice and publishers are making short-sighted policies here. You know the thing that is really stupid about all this in the end? Why would you care about getting published in Southern Review when you can put your work online where it will be seen by about a bazillion more people? The only reason you care is for reputation, and the only reason you care about reputation is so that you can land a tenure-track job. If you change the mechanisms regarding how we evaluate online work then all this gets turned upside down. You get to say, "No sorry dr. mla interviewer, I couldn't get published in Southern Review b/c my thesis was published online, but I do get a bunch of hits every month on my poetry collection which means I have more readers online than I'd ever have in print. I've also got links to established poets saying good things about my work on their blogs."

I was browsing the template library of Office 2007 today when I came across an interesting "academic" letter template: "Complaint about Teacher." The letter is probably what you could expect from a parent whose kiddo isn't making the A's she rightfully deserves. Here's a few snippets from it:

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You probably know about Educomm. It's an annual conference put on by University Business Magazine coming up in June in Las Vegas. It's one of these conferences where you get industry, administrators, IT professionals, and faculty all in relative proximity to one another.

To me, conferences like this are of interest for a couple of reasons:

• you get to find out where industry people seem to be going
• you can tap into the national-institutional discourse of educational IT
• and most importantly you get a sense of how this market intersects with your campus.

This conference actually looks pretty interesting. If I had the money and my wife wouldn't totally kill me for running off to yet another conference, I might consider going. Of course I'm interested in these institutional narratives about how technology practices are developed.

Most academics object on principle to the way in which curriculum, pedagogy, and general college policy seems to get driven by larger market forces. It's one thing is college's evolve over a generation to address the shift toward an information economy. It's another thing if classroom pedagogy is directly shaped by the way a company like Blackboard tries to shut out competitors with patents or if a particular piece of enterprise software dictates how curriculum might be constructed or if we have our courses turn tricks for a particular product line b/c they provide us with free stuff.

It's often in our nature to imagine the worst of others, but if you go to a conference like this one you have a chance to see some aspects of how these things actually work. Obviously not everyone is a saint, but it's also misleading to be wholly cynical about such matters.

The real task here is to get an understanding of educational technology so that you can be an informed participant in decision-making in a department or campus or whatever. Because one thing is certain: "decisions will be made" by some absent invisible hand/actor.

I'm preparing for a meeting with our writing faculty to discuss our proposed model. As I mentioned in a previous post, I don't think that it's anything revolutionary, nor do I imagine it will "solve" the problems of writing instruction on our campus. The purpose is primarily to dislodge the program from its bureaucratic and calcified state. I think I used the same adjectives last time, so I'm sticking on message ;o

Anyway, I thought it might be helpful to provide some examples of how these 200-level courses might be developed. I didn't want to do entire syllabi (too much work!) but the following provide enough details. Again, I'm not trying to be radical here and if I were to teach these courses I might not do what I describe here. Instead I'm really just trying to communicate how these courses are "doable."

CPN 203: Writing in the Sciences
(A) Introduction to writing and library research practices in the sciences. Prerequisite: A grade of
C- or better in CPN 100 or 102. Fulfills Liberal Arts Requirement: LASR (3 cr. hr.)

Readings:

Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map.
Other readings online or on reserve

Kuhn’s work is foundational in science studies/rhetoric of science and accessible. Johnson’s book (a national bestseller) looks at a cholera outbreak in 19th century London. Bazerman would be another option here. I would also include an excerpt from Bruno Latour’s work. And there are many others.

Assignments

“Normal Science in Action.” Here I’d have students examine an article in Scientific American or Popular Science to investigate how scientists and science are represented to the general public. This is a kind of critical-rhetorical analysis.

“Explaining Controversies.”  Students are asked to explain a current scientific controversy (stem cell research, biofuels, etc.) to an audience of high school students. This could potentially be a multimodal writing assignment.

“Revolutionary Science Wiki Project.” Students collaborate to conduct research on a number of scientific revolutions (the class could focus on one or the students could be divided into smaller groups). Students could do research on individual scientists, relevant technologies, scientific methods and theories, broader cultural contexts, and so on.

CPN 205: Writing and Professional Studies
(A) Introduction to writing and library research practices in professional studies.
Prerequisite: A grade of C- or better in CPN 100 or 102. Fulfills Liberal Arts Requirement: LASR
(3 cr. hr.)

Readings:

Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind
Richard Florida, Flight of the Creative Class
Other readings online or on reserve

The theme here is to examine the shifting nature of the economy and workplace. Pink and Florida offer related definitions of an emerging class of “creative professionals.” Pink’s book offers some insight into how to prepare for such a career. Florida’s is more of a social-scientific study of the behaviors and values of the creative class.

Assignments

“Escape from (Upstate) New York.” Bright flight from our region has been a challenge longer than most of our students have been alive. Florida’s book addresses this subject. Students write an essay for a college student magazine (e.g. NeoVox) explaining why they believe their peers should be encouraged to leave or how they might instead be convinced to stay.

“Preparing for the 21st-century career.” Students conduct research on what they believe will be the key knowledge and skills they will require for successful careers. They present this information to entering college students. This could be a multimodal assignment, perhaps a website.

“Co-working and the nomadic worker.” Students do field research on the emergence of semi-public co-working spaces (e.g. coffee shops with wi-fi) and the role mobile technologies have on how people work. They present their work as a slidecast presentation--combining slides with audio.

CPN 204: Writing in Education
(A) Introduction to writing and library research practices in education. Prerequisite: A grade of C-
or better in CPN 100 or 102. Fulfills Liberal Arts Requirement: LASR (3 cr. hr.)

Readings

Commission of the Future of Higher Education (Spellings Report)
Ted Sizer, The Red Pencil
Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year
Other readings online or on reserve

In this class I would explore the explosive, partisan discourses on public education and have students balance these with their own observations and experiences with schooling.

“A Day in the Life.” Document your daily activities as a student. What happens in your classes? What else do you do? How and when do you “learn”? What do you observe in yourself and your peers that resonates with what we’ve read?

“Why is education so political?” The public discourse on education is heavily partisan from NCLB to the perceived liberal bias of college courses. Why have the challenges of educating our children become a site of such intense ideological struggle?

“The changing space of the classroom.” From mobile networks bringing increasingly sophisticated phones into college classrooms to K-12 schools trying to block social networking sites, the classroom is being changed in fundamental ways from the 19th-century industrial model on which is currently functions. Discuss these changes and how teachers might address them. This assignment would be a good place for a multimodal and/or collaborative web project.

I'm getting ready for RSA in Seattle next week, entering data for years eight and nine of what will be a twenty-years thick map, when I realized that I've been calculating the grid coordinates all wrong. The place markers draggg to the south and east with each new instance. Then again, that's the point (of one of the two panels I am involved with): wallow in your amateurism.

About RSA: Seattle from NY is a long, expensive trip. I called the Westin (i.e., the conference hotel) today to learn how much I would be paying for six nights of parking--six because we are making an extended family trip of it. The Westin gets $35 for parking. Eeeach night. Oh? That's more than the rental itself costs. I also read this about their Business Center on the Westin web site:

I came across the video on Will Richardson's blog. It has what should be a familiar theme. Basically, we spend a lot of time watching tv. If even a small percentage of that global tv viewership shifted to participatory media, say 1%, the resulting cognitive effort made available could create significant cultural objects (e.g., several Wikipedia-scale projects per year). This reminds me of a couple things. First, the way that you can donate your computer's down time to search for aliens or looking for cures. Second, something that William Gibson said about how he finds the time to write his books (he only watches about eight hours of tv a year).

Shirky's point lies somewhere in there. It also suggests something about crowdsourcing... namely that there is potentially a great deal of potential cognitive activity out there waiting to be engaged.

Now I do think there's something interesting in terming this potential activity a "surplus." For one thing it implies a kind of economic equation here, which is something that shouldn't be overlooked b/c we are talking about a kind of Marxian subjective labor potential here. Secondly, it's not exactly surplus b/c watching tv creates value--as everyone who makes money off tv knows: without people doing the "work" of watching tv, there's no money there (just as there's no money in beer unless someone does the work of drinking it).

Nevertheless Shirky's main point is vital. We are waking up to the realization that there are choices in how we use our time. We don't have to spend our time, as Shirky describes, sitting in our basement watching sitcoms and trying to figure our if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. We can go online and have a threaded discussion/argument about it instead.

So OK, not every possible choice we make will be that heroic or take us very far from TV land. However, even given all that dross, we will finally have our answer to the question about all those monkeys with their typewriters... only we are the monkeys!