Author Archives: Kim

Slides from CCCC 2009

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I just noticed that I never posted the slides from my talk at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication.  So here is a pdf version of the slides.

Here is the abstract:

Since the earliest MUDs, MOOs and networked composition classrooms of the 1990s, composition teachers and scholars have been thinking, speaking, and writing about the impact of computers and later, Internet and Communication Technologies (ICTS) on composition.  By the end of the 90s, there was little question that we must address this issue (Selfe 1999).  By fall 2005, the Kairos CoverWeb identified three waves of technology users; even one of their own editorial team was a member of the third wave of users new to writing in virtual spaces.  More than twenty years after computers first entered both writing classrooms and the disciplinary discourse, we must ask why this third wave represents people who are not just new to a particular technology, but to using computers or ICTs in the composition class in general?

The answer is both complex and simple.  On the one hand, people encounter computers and ICTs in various ways throughout their education and professional life, and some may feel they are at best a necessary evil.  Further, class, gender, age and other factors may have an impact.  This is the complex answer.  On the other hand, a quick survey of doctoral programs in composition and rhetoric around the country reveals that even now very few offer courses addressing computers and ICTs in composition and rhetoric.  Of those few programs with these courses, only a very very few require them in the degree program.

Based on a more thorough survey of graduate programs in composition and rhetoric, I present trends in course topics, readings and structures.  I further compare these trends to actual disciplinary trends to reveal how closely they are linked or not.  I then discuss revisions to graduate curricula to better integrate study of computers and ICTs in composition and rhetoric, and argue that training all of  our future faculty in these matters is crucial to both graduate and undergraduate instruction. Finally, I argue that the future of graduate pedagogy must involve more interdisciplinary awareness, particularly of scholarship about the cultural impact of computers and ICTs, and I draw connections to developments in new and comparative media studies, internet research, and technology studies that would enrich our understanding and our teaching.

Blogging and the Paperless Class.

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I recently manned (womanned? personed?) a table at our school’s little tech fair; my subject was this post’s title. I am using blogs exclusively in my classes now–I’ve dropped Moodle, wikis or other platforms.  For me the choice was not between blogs and paper– but that’s the choice for many of my colleagues, hence my title.

For me the choice was mainly between blogs and some educational CMS like Moodle or Blackboard.  I stopped using blackboard a few years ago for three reasons.  First, because it’s so integrated with our registration system that students who were on the waitlist or waiting for financial aid to clear would not be able to access any course material.  That was a disaster every term. Second, It’s proprietary software which is very expensive for our school, and I stay away from that whenever I can on principle. Third, It’s proprietary software and can’t be modified at all.

Fourth, (ok, four reasons) and maybe most importantly, apart from their time here in school, when will anyone need to know Blackboard again?  This is the same reason I ultimately abandoned Moodle.

Even the students who plan to someday teach will by that time need to learn entirely new systems or versions.  Blogs, on the other hand, are being used by wider and wider groups of people, to create personal websites, and often by businesses to create websites as well.  I find this development interesting in itself, as an example of technological affordances being exploited.  No longer just about online journaling, blogs are used to create all kinds of websites because they are so easy to update.

Wikis are cool in many ways, but the open source types all seem to have steep learning curves and after trying to use them for a few semesters and finding that even my grad students had a tough time, I decided it wasn’t worth the time it was taking from class.

So, I decided that if students were to get comfortable with any Web 2.0 platform, blogs would most useful, while having a shallow enough learning curve that they would not take up too much time in a one-semester course that is already interrupted by mandatory furlough days.

Tonight I’ll be giving an actual presentation about using blogs to campus faculty; we’ll see how many people show up!

Redesign Coming Soon

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Ok, I have now mastered just enough knowledge of the WP templates to be disatisfied with how this blog is working.  Sometime very soon I’ll be doing a major redesign, as well as expanding the content, though the latter will probably wait until summer.

My other projects have slowed down because funding at my school has really dried up.  Now I’m having to back up and redesign several of them, at least for now.

The main difference will be focusing more attention on the Bay Area in comparison to NL.  I had planned to wait another year or so before getting into this angle, but since travel abroad is tough right now, I’ll focus closer to home.  Happily for me I’ve ended up in the last nine months or so meeting a lot of artists, hackers, scholars and others who occupy a similar “space” to those I’ve been working with in the Netherlands.

More on all of this soon, but untill the end of term next month, updates will be sporadic.

New Media (or whatever we call it) at the MLA

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From 27-30 December I made the traditional pilgrimage of English faculty everywhere to the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, since time immemorial held between Christmas and New year’s. This year, lucky for me, it was held in San Francisco. Bigger and … well, bigger than ever. Forty-eight concurrent sessions every day, from 8:30 am to 10:30 pm every day.

I spoke about new media and my belief that we need to ditch that term, and expand our attention to a wider range of issues than are currently getting much play in the US, –I’ll upload my remarks shortly. There was a panel on Participatory Education 2.0–quite good; a workshop on evaluating digital scholarship for tenure–grim; a panel on E-literature–contentious and quite a few others as well.

The participatory education panel included remarks from Cathy Davis (Duke) about the HASTAC project (which is aimed more at faculty than students), Howard Rheingold (Stanford) about the set of tools he’s been developing and his basic thoughts. His essay in Joi Ito’s book, FreeSouls captures most of those ideas. And Greg Niemeyer (UC Berkeley) spoke about the Black Cloud project which involves students and schools in measuring air quality in their communities. You can join the project at the main Black Cloud page. This was really a valuable panel more for making me aware of possibilities than anything else.  Rheingold in particular has done a lot to integrate technology into his classes in ways that enhance participation and I can see things I shoould do very differently.

The E-lit panel was about “Genre, Form, and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature” and included leading lights from the E-lit scene: Scott Rettberg, one of the editors of the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1, and Sandy Baldwin who directs the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University, Maria Engberg who has just finished her PhD but is already well-known for her work on digital poetry, were the main speakers, while John Cayley responded and Jay David Bolter presided over the panel.

The basic question boiled down to “what is electronic literature” and was unresolved. Sandy and Scott had almost opposite views on whether it is better to define it broadly or narrowly. For me the highlight was going to lunch with Maria, Sandy, Jay, my friend Aden Evens and my co-panelist Joe Tabbi afterward, where we could continue the discussion less formally and over some yummy Thai food. 🙂

I’ll write about the tenure workshop later, but for now here’s a link to material organized by the MLA Committee on Information Technology.

There were even a few tweet-ups, but they weren’t as well-organized as might have been, given the technology, and this was complicated by the lack of an open wireless network in the conference meeting rooms. Really I would have thought that would be a given for a huge national conference by now.

Along with attending the conference, I also visited an exhibit on Participatory Art at the San Francisco MoMA and got to hang out with some people I mostly only connect with via Twitter and Facebook, so that was great. More on that stuff later as well.

Tangled in WordPress templates

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Well, slowly getting the blog sorted, but it’s more time-consuming than I thought. Also more interesting. I can see how tinkering with this stuff could become a real time-sink! Plus, importing from Blogger changed all the tags into categories, so I have to go through and decide which should go back to being tags (most of them) and which should stay categories. And then I have to put images into the front page, and add the tags back to all the posts…. yeah, this is going to take awhile.

Hello again…

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Just migrated to this WordPress blog at my new website.  Took two tries to get it installed the way I wanted it, and I’m still not totally happy with the theme, but it will do for now.  Regular posting should resume soon, I hope!

Wow, long timelines

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Sometimes I am amazed at how long journals still take to get articles and reviews into print. Given how quickly things get posted online, I would have thought they would all be changing their practices in order to not get left behind entirely. I mention this by way of introducing the following review. i wrote it for the European Journal of cultural studies and have just learned they expect to publish it in 2010. It’s a book review, not a 20 page article requiring peers to read it. But anyway, I don’t care that much, except I think the book really deserved more attention sooner, so I’m re-posting the link to my review (which I blogged a couple of months ago) here.

I also just learned that a chapter I proposed on the FB stuff has been accepted for publication in the Handbook of Digital Research (at least the proposal has been accepted meaning, I can send a full chapter, which I think will be also be reviewed), so that’s cool.

On the downside, My NEH grant proposal has been rejected. I asked for the feedback, but haven’t yet received it. I was approved for an internal grant of a few thousand dollars, but our school is so broke at the moment, there is no money to actually fund that grant program. Unless they find money somewhere in the next 2 weeks, it seems I will not be able to make the trip I had planned to the Netherlands in late January. I’m pretty discouraged about that because it will delay my work on my book projects by at least 6 months and they have already been held back by the fact that I can only visit each time for 1-3 weeks, have only been able to afford 3 visits in the last 2 years, and have such a heavy workload the rest of the time that (like almost all of my colleagues) I have almost no time for research anyway.

Lack of funding and too much work would be problems for any academic, but when you actually love your research like I do (as opposed to just doing it because your school requires some amount, and I personally know several people who take that approach) this is especially awful. If all I cared about was meeting a requirement, I could argue that the requirement was unreasonable under these conditions and have a powerful case, but I love the research. So much so that I’ve been doing it on my own time and out of my own pocket. –My school doesn’t have a really good internal grant program to support junior faculty, nor are any time or money allotted to everyone just to support research.

So it boils down to my work being accepted by my peers for publications and presentations, but if I want to do the work and travel to present it, I have to pay for it myself because academic research is not sufficiently valued by the public to support it (not just mine, but most scholars’) generally. Maybe I need to just leave the country. 😛

Bastard Culture!

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My good friend, Mirko Tobias Schäfer is defending his dissertation today. In fact, by the time many of you read this, he may already be finished and recognized as Dr. Schäfer. 🙂

It has been my pleasure for the last 15 months or so to read Mirko’s manuscript, Bastard Culture! User participation and the extension of cultural industries, and I am pleased to report that he has posted a pdf online. –Particularly since I need to cite his work in some of mine, and have been waiting on this! It’s a solid piece of scholarship. Briefly, it

steps beyond the usual framework and analyzes user participation in the context of accompanying popular and scholarly discourse, as well as the material aspects of design, and their relation to the practices of design and appropriation…

The availability of computers and Internet expand the traditional culture industry into the domain of users, who actively participate in cultural production, either by appropriating products from the commercial domain or by creating their owns. But while user activities constitute a significant loss of control for certain sectors of traditional media industries, especially in the area of distribution, the larger culture industry benefits from user driven innovation through the appropriation of corporate design.

Go and download it immediately.

So congratulations, Mirko. I’m proud of all your hard work and perseverance.