Ben McCorkle

Ben discussed using GoogleDocs to manage submissions throughout the editorial process.  He also uses it for a preproduction version before moving everything into InDesign for the final version.

• GoogleDocs allows for him to provide different students different levels of access.

On the issue of open source, it is built using open source software and friendly with the open source community but the program itself is not actually open source.  Hearkening back to Bolter’s talk, Ben alluded to GoogleDocs as basically open source in a metaphorical if not literal way.

Dickie Selfe

Dickie pointed out the importance of giving credit to student work.  So, his question is why open source e-publishing.

Why do so?

• a commitment to a gap in the profession and institution
• the commitment and willingness of young developing undergraduate technical consultants (STCs)

Complexities

• tenuous site location
• tenuous support staff
• tenuous editorial staff
• no traditional institutional space for it
• constant need for inventive unforeseen work

Dickie also ventriloquized Scott DeWitt and talked about http://www.commonplaceuniversity.com/ .  Commonplace does not use open source software because of problems with scalability at this point.

Vera Dukaj

Vera talked about Harlot.  Harlot is a fledging online magazine that uses open source software (ojs).  The group first sought some space at the university but found it locked down and largely inaccessible.

• One of the concerns that she identifies with open source software is that since the code is open and available potential hackers can evaluate the code for weaknesses and hack in.
• Another issue is sustainability of that software–keeping it up to date with security patches, installing updates, etc.  If the university won’t do this for you, of course.

Katie Braun

Katie reported on a case study of evaluation of digital scholarship for tenure and promotion.  She first introduced the criteria used in this one department:

• originality
• lucidity (mostly relevance and understandability to outsiders)
• intellectual depth
• contribution to the field (advances the field, fill a gap)

She then invited a department member to critique several pieces of online scholarship:

• http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/DavisHardy
  • technology:  basically just uses hyperlinks and otherwise traditional text
  • member’s critique:  pedagogy-focused, doesn’t seem like it needs to be online, unoriginal
• http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/8.2/binder.html?features/ellertson/home.html
  • technology:  some flash-based, but working a line between print and multimodal
  • member’s critique: liked the theorization, the ethos of the video, appropriate use of medium
• http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/9.1/binder.html?http://www.msu.edu/%7Ecushmane/one/landscape.html
  • technology:  flash-based interface–distant from a textual interface
  • member’s critique:  could not read it because he couldn’t download the plugin in his office computer, quickly dismissed once he read it

Her question is then that it’s incredibly important to have clear definitions of evaluation criteria.  Need to do more to help department members use the criteria appropriately.

Cheryl Ball:  New Media Scholarship:  Taxonomies, Heuristics, & Strategies to Connect (?) Authors, Editors, Departments, & Tenure Committees

Cheryl has collected lists (read:  taxonomies, heuristics, strategies) connected to evaluating digital scholarship.  I’m going to beg her for her works cited page.  Seriously.  She’s created a digital scholarship axis that she first presented at CCCC 2008:

Strategies for Understanding Digital Scholarship

• textual performances
• seminars/colloquia
• in-text reading/analysis guides
• extra-textual T&P binder narratives
• co-articles in print journals

She’s negotiating between her own work and her departmental guidelines.  She would like feedback about what’s going on in all institutions and how work is getting addressed for T&P committees.

Virginia Kuhn

Virginia looked at these same issues from the perspective of authorship, though from a number of authorial perspectives:  the perspectives of published authors, student authors, etc. Looking at:  http://iml.usc.edu/dev/kairos .

General issues:

• the problem of calling scholarship into question
• how to effectively comment on text/sound/image for student drafts

Video issues with putting the site together:

• compatibility
• compression
• uniformity with out losing experimentality

She is going to start using Sophie with her honors students even though there has been concern about standardization.  She thinks it allows the intellectual work to come through.  One her student’s projects:  http://immersiveflow.org/

Open Writing Spaces: Inscription and Technology

Bolter began his speech by joking about the number of us (me included) sitting in the back row to access power for laptops.

In sum, it seems that he is tracing a trajectory from what he calls cyberspace, which was preoccupied with VR to what he calls Augmented Reality (AR).  Augmented reality, in comparison with VR, isn’t completely immersive.  It basically allows a mashup between a real world environment and some digital element, such as bringing a Second Life avatar onto the college campus (in real time, not just doing some photo composition).

From Bolter’s own website:

The AR user typically wears a headset, similar to that used for Virtual Reality. The difference is that with AR the user can see her physical environment; the computer overlays information or graphics in her field of view. Blair MacIntyre and I have been exploring the domains of education and entertainment by blending digital video of actors and sound into the AR view. Examples described in the DART web site include: Alice’s Adventures in New Media and Three Angry Men.

So, why do it though?  It might be cool to have a meeting with my friends in Nebraska and Oklahoma where we each are experiencing the same space through AR, but is it really necessary?  Are you seeing something here I’m missing?

Some further notes:

• historical context: hypertextual writing–there was a movement of literary hypertext; he is still emphasizing the power of hypertext to have influenced a number of following events.  Makes a split between the internet and belles lettres–seems like he’s presenting a bit of a binary.
• Enter Game Studies.  New form of digital inscription.  Games include procedural rhetoric.  Anyone else need to know more about procedural rhetoric?  Ian Bogost Persuasive Games is the text Bolter quotes.  Seems like Bolter is identifying games that are overtly persuasive, even political.  Go to http://newsgaming.com .  Are these games a new kind of writing, Bolter asks?
• Comparison of the hypertext movement and the game studies movement.  He thinks the literary world successfully beat back the hypertext movement.  The response to the game studies movement comes in the form of a binary:  either games are dangerous or games are innocuous.  The hypertext movement was a formal movement (focusing on form), but the gaming movement is more informal, eclectic.
• Furthermore…cyberspace as the “old” paradigm; cyberspace as an escapist space from the “real” world.  Bolter uses the example of VR technologies.  VR turning into a new interface…of course the reality of VR is much less impressive than the hypothetical.  VR centers on disembodiment:  “our identities have no bodies” Barlow “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.
• So, the paradigm shift from this concept of cyberspace to ???  “ubiquitous computer” “tangible computing and media” “wearable computer” “mixed and augmented reality”.  Shift that moves from completely immersed (VR) to an integration of technology into real environment.
• Factors in this shift:  personal computer, graphics, inter-computer connection
• Bolter’s term is augmented reality (AR):  in the 1990s the idea was that a worker could have information from a computer that supports the construction of the real world
• His interest is more in AR experience-based situations than worker modifications.
• He provides examples that use virtual reality technology but that use the actual space as a background for the experience and that allow you to switch identity positions during the game and experience the space from the point of view of all the characters.  The third example is “Voices of Oakland [a civil war graveyard]“, that works just like an audio tour of a museum except that it uses GPS tracking to tell where you are and play the appropriate audio at the appropriate time.  In the next edition he hopes it will be possible for participants to contribute their own voices to be heard by other participants.  Other ideas are being able to deliver users poetry at given subway stops through something like their cell phones when they arrive at a certain stop.

I’ve been reading bloggers posts of bad Cs travel experiences (here and here) and so I thought I’d be publicly thankful that traveling home from New Orleans was incredibly easy and uneventful.  I’ve traveled an inordinate amount this year, rivaled only by the other year of my life spent in a long distance relationship.  I know that year I flew 13 times…I haven’t really kept track this time around.

I have a personal preference for American Airlines, and the airline I loathe emphatically happens to be US Airways.  My one really sad travel experience was having a delayed flight that caused us to miss our connection to an international flight, thereby losing a day on an international trip.

I still like to fly, but if I’d had all those horrible experiences I certainly wouldn’t been looking forward to traveling either!

…at least for now.  The last 6 or so months have been pretty overwhelming.  It’s not so much starting the PhD that has been hard, but being on quarters has been really, really difficult.  Quarters are…intense.  Some of the other grad students seem to absolutely take it in stride, but I feel like I’m continually behind, never quite finished reading before a grad seminar, never responding to emails quickly enough, never starting paper research early enough, and never prepared enough to best teach a two hour long first year writing course.

This quarter started March 24, and I’m feeling less freaked out, particularly because I’m only taking one full-blown graduate seminar (the other class is shadowing a faculty member who’s teaching an undergraduate  course in preparation for teaching the same course in the future).  Also, I just got back last night from 4Cs, and putting that behind me is really a relief.

All that to say that I’m going to start writing here again, hopefully.  I doubt anyone is going to read this unless I actually request they do so, but out there in the interweb ether it goes anyway.  Hope things aren’t too crazy for you, interweb ether.

This quarter is going to go by really fast.  We just finished week 2 of the quarter, and it’s honestly just flown by–everything is going really well, but I’m just so busy!  So far I’m really, really happy with the classes I’m taking, the classes I’m teaching, and especially the fact that I got paid a little bit so I could go to the grocery store today.  I actually ended up fasting for the last three days, not because I didn’t have any food or money, but coincidentally I also didn’t have any food or money.  I actually fasted for spiritual reasons, and with the hope that fasting would cause me to be more aware of my body and the food I’m consuming and how I actually feel.

You see, I haven’t been eating terribly, but I haven’t really been eating well either, and I was starting to get stomachaches a lot and attributing them to lack of food when in reality I think I’d just let my system get out of balance.  So three days of fasting later all I can say is that everything I ate today tasted absolutely wonderful.

It helped that I went to Sunflower market and bought delicious things (though I admit I have some qualms about how they’re like supposed to be all healthy and organic but they’re also a chain…I have some notion that health food stores should be like The Earth in Norman or Open Harvest in Lincoln).  Anyway, I had baguette and garlic stuffed olives and sushi (well, that was so-so) and an awesome fresh tomato.  I like yummy food.

Basically just got home from Oklahoma, where I saw many people, some of whom I wanted to see, but most of whom were OU fans going to the game on Saturday.  I did get some excellent social time in on Friday with some peeps in English.  We spent a lot of time talking about Ph.D. programs and first year writing curriculum, which is to be expected.

Saturday Lisa and I went out to a lake near Norman in an attempt to escape from the 90000 excited fans mulling about nearing our living spaces.  It was an absolutely beautiful day and I wish I could have taken a picture of the fish jumping in the lake!  Could there possibly be flying fish in Oklahoma?  Were they just really hungry?  I have no idea, but they were interesting.

This morning I got to go to Summit, which was wonderful, and got treated to a birthday lunch at Johnny Carinos before spending the rest of my birthday in airports or on planes.

In other news, I got into CCCCs, as did everyone at Oklahoma that I asked.  This makes me very excited for a big OU reunion in New Orleans in the spring.  Now I just have to find the money to go!

I went back, again, to Village Vineyard this morning.  First, I’ll admit in a slightly sheepish manner that I basically got addicted to praise and worship at Summit, and so in a lot of ways I think I’ve been looking for good praise and worship as one of two things (the other being fellowship) in a spiritual community.  This is not to say that I don’t think a good pastor who speaks well and has good sermons isn’t important; that was the very reason I stuck it out at Summit–Devon was awesome.  But then somewhere along the way, as I was going to church for the message, I started actually listening to praise and worship and to, well, worship.  In a way, it’s like I know I can ask and learn about Devon’s message any given week, but I can’t experience the praise and worship at Summit.

So anyway, the p&w was really good today, and I thought the message was pretty darn good too.  One of the most amazing parts was that the pastor actually asked us to pick up our notebooks and write at multiple points during the service (there are notebooks under each chair for this purpose).  And people actually did it!  There are certainly things I don’t like, but I’ve been withholding judgment and so far it seems to be paying off because as I get a more complete picture of where things are coming from each time I go.

Today we (finally) talked about assessment. First, Michael presented his impressions of writing assessment, an area he has clearly done a great deal of research in. He actually couched assessment in terms of argumentation, which was just genius as far as I am concerned. After the presentation we had the opportunity to assess a research paper and I thought the paper deserved a C+ or at most a B-. Generally, other GTAs seemed to agree with me. It was interesting, though, because the instructor whose student it had been sort of argued in defense of the student (not in a disagreeable way) pointing out clarifications to us that really weren’t on the assignment sheet, which we each had a copy of. It highlighted for me how important it is to be as clear as possible on my own assignment sheets, or at least to follow them as closely as possible when I don’t have editing control (we must use the assignment sheets given to us by the WPAs).

The best part of Friday, though, was the afternoon, when we got to go to the computer lab for a while and play with D2L Carmen…Scott let me share the floor a bit and I think I’m now on my way to having him know who I am )

Friday evening Scott Dewitt had a party for all of us and sig others at his place which is really beautiful. The party was quite nice.  It feels really good to be on the way to knowing other people in Columbus…I even ended up talking to a guy from Oklahoma for a long time.  He grew up in Duncan.  Mostly we talked about baptists, because Oklahoma was about all we had in common since he’s not in English.  I waver between really liking all the other GTAs and feeling excited to know any and all of them and then also feeling like I have nothing in common with anyone and that I’m never really going to make any friends here.  I think the latter feeling is largely attributable to my own lack of self confidence and was somewhat remedied by actually calling someone on Saturday and going to a movie with her.  I know I’ll make friends, logically, but I don’t always use the logical part of my brain.

Yesterday we spent pretty much the whole day in the computer lab on photoshop. I had used photoshop intermittently when necessary since the late 90’s but have switched to Fireworks in the last few years because it was free at OU. It was nice to get formal training, but since graphics programs mostly work similarly it was quite figure-out-able. In other news, I caught a cold. Who catches a cold in August September you ask? Me, I guess. It’s just sort of a low-grade annoyance.

Today, the pre-quarter workshop for new TAs focused on the final assignment we’re to give our students: a call to submissions for an online journal called Commonplace. This assignment was originally constructed by two Ph.D. students, Michael Harker and Aaron McKain, and involves asking students to write a 750 word op-ed piece. Teachers then pick the eight best (or most interesting or whatever) and those get to go through a blind peer-review system (basically trading sets of essays with different first-year classes where they are then peer edited by other first-year students). What I think is really, really good about this: real audience, in-depth peer evaluation. What I’ve yet to be persuaded about: that first year writing should ever, ever be about giving the best students the most opportunities (the other sixteen essays only receive feedback from the instructor; now why should the best writers get the most feedback??). That the amount of time this takes in a very short 10 week quarter course is worth the benefits.

I will, however, teach it, as unbiasedly as possible, and will let you know what I think.