"SUSTAINABILITY and WRITING" CONFERENCE SUNY COW 3/30/12 - 3/31/12 PROPOSALS DUE 2/1/12

ATEG Journal - Summer 2012/Conference Issue

2012 Southwest Teaching & Learning Conference: March 30th-31st

CFP: At the Round Table

“Allotropes of the Academic Essay: How to Teach Writing for the Academy without Assigning the ‘Academic Essay.’”

"Principles of Uncertainty" May 4, 2012

Call For Submissions: Internationally Read Magazine Publishing Poetry, Flash Fiction, Short Stories, and Creative Non-Fiction

DH Redux

http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/getting-started-in-the-digital-humanities/

http://www.austinkleon.com/2010/02/10/25-quotes-to-help-you-steal-like-an-artist/

http://www.austinkleon.com/2010/02/10/25-quotes-to-help-you-steal-like-an-artist/

http://www.austinkleon.com/2010/06/02/25-more-quotes-to-help-you-steal-like-an-artist/

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

The meaning of 9/11's most controversial photo (from The Guardian)

The Guardian - Map of Musical Influences

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/02/02/underground5.pdf

CFP's for the fall

http://www.writersroomofboston.org/ - Writing Space in Boston $300/quarter

Grub Street Essay course begins Oct. 12 - http://www.grubstreet.org/index.php?workshopcategory=all&coursetype=all&level=all&instructor=Michelle+Seaton&id=402&ditto_tags=

Lesley University low-res MFA (June res, March 1 deadline) - http://www.lesley.edu/gsass/creative_writing/application.html

http://www.sumlitsem.org/slscontest.html - summer opportunity - feb 2012 deadline

http://lowres.uno.edu/contest.cfm - UNO Summer 2012 residency in Edinburgh Jan 31, 2012 deadline

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/42759 - PCA poetry panel - Dec. 1 deadline

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/42798 - Emerson Society research grant

http://wpacouncil.org/node/3374 - Dartmouth Summer Seminar for Composition Researchers - application available 9/30

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/42180 - Computers in Writing, proposals accepted between 9/1 and 10/22

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/42161 - College Readiness, 10/15 deadline

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/42131 - Peer Review Reimagined, NEMLA 9/30 deadline

RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment

Rethinking Education

Intermezzio Part II: "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century"

Using an "Ecological Approach" to Thinking about Communication Technologies, Social Networks, and the Activities They Foster

"Rather that dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationsp among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communitites that grow up around them, and the activities they support.  Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them" (8).

Definition of Participatory Culture

For the moment,let’s define participatory culture as one:
1.With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2.With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3.With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced ispassed along to novices
4.Where members believe that their contributions matter
5.Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least theycare what other people think about what they have created).

Not every member must contribute,but all must believe they are free to contribute whenready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. (7)

Educational Goals Directly Tied to Rhet/Comp

"Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture" (8).

Jenkins, Henry, et al. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. MacArthur Foundation white paper. (PDF - 1.8 MB)

Intermezzio: Excerpt from "A Pedagogy of Original Synners"

Their imaginations are structured and shaped through encounters in different kinds of mediated worlds: RL and online games, institutional and familial, peer-based and anonymous. They move easily through different kinds of networks: social, technological, material, and virtual. Consequently, their identities are a hybrid of multiple personae performed and shaped through their participation in dispersed (mixed reality) social networks as well as within simulated virtual (gaming) worlds. In this they are the quintessential decentered postmodern subjects marked by differing intensity flows and shifting affinities. Remix is their cultural vernacular. (244)

To assist us in these efforts, we might think of these students as “Original Synners,” a title borrowed from science fiction author Pat Cadigan’s cosmology, which identifies them as “original synthesizers” whose most important literacy will be the ability to create knowledge by harvesting information from diverse sources. (245)

Anderson, Steve, and Anne Balsamo. “A Pedagogy for Original Synners." Tara McPherson. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 241–259.

Cy Twombly at The Black Mountain College (Part 1)

As early as 1964, the writer and artist Roy Ascott recognized that new technology would change not only kinds of artistic artifacts but also the process of artistic creation, the process of making, though I can't imagine he would have conceived of the new iPad drawings and paintings of David Hockney recently exhibited in Paris.  Specifically, Ascott was interested in what he called in the 1960's as "cybernetics," which as a field of science Ascott understood as limited to territories of communication, connection, and information infrastructure--the information sciences--and built a course for the Ealing School of Art in London to use as a kind of core curriculum for art education.  The course though is a more general exercise in creative thinking.  The exercise meant to elicit questions about the nature of drawing, for example, asked students to perform seemingly illogical tasks:

1. Draw the room in reverse perspective.  What information is lost?  If any, find a way of adding it to your drawing.
2. Time-drawing of the model.  Draw her hair in three seconds, face in three minutes, left hand thumb nail in three hours, legs in six seconds, right ankle in two days.
3. Draw her with acute earache.
4. Draw the room using only rubbings from surfaces in it.  Copy the drawing precisely with line and tone.

To delimit students' thinking about volume and perspective, the following exercises are given:

1.  Imagine you wake up one morning to find that you are a sponge.  describe visually your adventures during the day.
2. List the sense-data of an umbrella or a hot water bottle.  Visually restructure the parts to form a new entity.  Ask your neighbor to identify it.  
3. If fifteen ragged criss-cross lines stand for a cough, how would you draw the BBC time signal?
4. Use only solid shapes to discuss your perception of: a bottle of ink; fish and chips; a police siren; ice hockey.
5. Show how zebras disguise themselves.
6. Invent a typewriter bird and show the kind of tree within which it could most successfully hide.

To challenge students' tactile adeptness, these exercises are suggested:

1. Make a sculpture in plaster of interlocking units, such that when a key piece is removed, the rest falls apart.  Allot colours to the separate pieces, (a) to indicate the key, (b) to facilitate reassembly.
2. Using only wood, sheet aluminium, string and panel pins, construct analogues of: a high pitched scream, the taste of ice cream; a football match.  

To thicken students' idea of growth and scale, the following:

1. Analyze and dissect a section of a pomegranate.  Discuss with precise drawing its three-dimensional cellular structure.  
2. Examine a plant in minute detail; design a new plant based upon the principles of growth you have observed.
3. Discuss visually the movements of a hungry, caged line; a frightened squirrel.

To develop a sense of artistic identity, students are asked to do these things:

1. Draw a man, machine or animal.  Cut up the drawing into seven sections (e.g. arm, head, wheel, handle, etc.).  Put the pieces with every one else's in a box.  Pull out another seven at random; construct logically a new entity.  Draw the environment in which you might expect to encounter it.
2.  Show, with line and color, the potential function of: the studio door, a water tap, an elephant, the window blind.  Attempt to describe what they might have in common.
3. Invent two distinctly different animals; imagine them to mate and draw the offispring. 
4. Make the illusion of, say, a bun or sausage, in three dimensions on paper.  Show it being submitted to various events: run over, squeezed dry, soaked in acid, minced, pierced by a shot gun.  Measure the real against the metaphoric.
5. Create a world on paper with major and minor structural systems.  Show a fault occurring in the minor one; design a repair center to put it right. 
6. Entropy may be described as a constant drift in the universe towards a state of total undifferentiation; pockets of resistance are organizing continuously.  Discuss this proposition, limiting yourself to six visual elements.

During the second year of study, a more profoundly bizarre experiment in creativity commences.  Here's Ascott's description:

Students are est the task of acquiring and acting out for a limited period (ten weeks) a totally new personality, which is to be narrowly limited and largely the converse of what is considered to be their normal "selves."  They design "calibrators" to read off their responses to situations, materials, tools and people.  The equip themselves with handy "mind-maps" for immediate reference to their behavior pattern as changes in the limitations of space, substance and state occur.

They form groups of six.  These sexa gonal organisms, whose members are of necessit interdependent and highly conscious of each other's capabilities and limitations, are set the goal of producing out of substances and space in their environment, an ordered entity.

The limitations on individual behavior are severe and unfamiliar.  The student who thinks himself "useless" with, say, colour, machine tolls, objective drawing, may find himself with the sole responsibility for these things in his group.  The shy girl must act out an easy sociability; the aggressive youth must become cooperative.  One student may be limited to transporting himself about the school on a trolley; another may not use paper, numbers or adhesive substances.

The subsequent "ordered entities" are as diverse as the composite personalities of the organisms they reflect.  Totems, time machines, sense boxes, films, sexagonal cabinets, cages have been produced out of the flux of discussion an activity.

Students are then invited to return to their former personalities.  They must make a total visual documentation of the whole process in which they have been engaged.  They must search for relationships and ideas unfamiliar to art (i.e. spatial relationships are familiar).  They use, at first, every possible expressive means: film, collage, graphic processes, wood, plaster, metal, cloth, glass, readymades, rubber, paint and so one.  They work on a huge scale at one point, and in miniature at another, sometimes with kinetic structure, sometimes with static relationships.

In the process, and reflecting upon their previously contrived limitations of behavior, they become aware of the flexibility of their responses, their resourcefulness and ingenuity in the face of difficulties.  What they assumed to be ingrained in their personalities, they now tend to see a controllable.  An sense of creativity viability is being acquired.

Gordon Parks Portrait of Langston Hughes

http://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/pdfs/Hermes_GPF.pdf

Making is Connecting by David Gauntlett

Participation culture, creativity, and social change by David Gauntlett

The History of Social Networking

Via: Online Schools

Vilem Flusser: Excerpt from "Toward a Philosophy of Photography" and assignment

http://www.altx.com/remix.fall.2008/flusser.pdf

Distance

View more presentations from lindsayillich.

Remix a short online narrative using both "Distance" as your visual model and the Flusser text as your theoretical source material.
 
Your image/text sequence should be 10-15 pages total.
 
Suggested ways of sourcing/creating images:

• Surf the internet for live web cams, take screen shots of selected web cam images, and crop and resize images to fit "Distance" template.
• Capture images with a mobile phone and crop/resize as necessary.
• Take screenshots of live video chats (i.e. Skype, iChat or Chat Roulette) and crop/resize as necessary.
• Find images and build a profile on http://www.thefancy.com/ t use in your narrative
• Use the photo album function on Powerpoint to create your slideshow and anaopensource app like Slideshare to publish your narrative to the web.

For each image, create a one sentence text caption that remixes autobiography, fiction, poetry and/or theory focusing on themes that resonate with contemporary ideas of the "virtual self," "networked identity," "online role playing," "electronic narcissism," or any other phrases and concepts you research, remix, or make up on-the-fly.

Remix Assignment

Remix "Borges and I" so that it becomes "your" short work of pseudo- autobiographcal fiction and post it on your blog.

Jorge Luis Borges
"Borges and I"

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
 
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Bittersweet Symphony

"Bittersweet Symphony" - The Verve

"Last Time" - The Andrew Oldham Orchestra 

"The Last Time" - The Rolling Stones

"This May Be The Last Time" - The Staple Singers

"Maybe the Last Time" - James Brown

RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Watch Rip: A Remix Manifesto

Film Representations of Writers

Sebastian Seung: I Am My Connectome

English Composition as a Content Farm

NPR this morning did a story on Lance Armstrong's multi-billion dollar company that supplies content for the website eHow.com, Demand Media.  Specifically, the story detailed how eHow outsources the articles that are posted to freelance journalists usually for minimal compensation: journalists get paid about $30 per article.  One journalist was interviewed, a person with a B.A. in journalism from a reputable school, said the gig wasn't worth her time because it would take at least 2 hours to produce anything worthwhile, which would mean working for less than $15 per hour (after taxes).  The practice is referred to by critics of the practice as content farming, and the big internet media companies hiring content writers as content farms.  It's easy to see why the content farming is so controversial: in a struggling job market, writers are more willing to take jobs writing for less than a living wage, and the reality is that real information--valuable, rich content--can't be produced like a widget in a factory.  The result is shoddy workmanship.  That's right--crappy writing, crappy information.  In an article about content farming at Mediashift (a PBS subsidiary) about the realities of this kind of work, a journalist (she didn't want her name to be used for fear of embarrassing her current employer),described writing content for eHow, admitting "I was completely aware I was writing crap" when she wrote articles like "How to Wear a Sweater Vest," "How to Massage a Dog That Is Emotionally Stressed," and "How to Make Gin."  She was quoted saying that she "hope[s] to God people don't read my advice on how to make gin at home because they'll probably poison themselves." There's nothing like spam that might kill you.

What's at stake here is the availability of good information--valuable content--for the global community.  How is that possible? EHow uses algorithms to record what people are searching for on Google and other search engines to decide what articles to write, and once the content is written, they tag the spam content so that it appears first in a Google search (which btw is the reason why some critics have found declining search results for Google and other engines).  But big picture, bad content is more problematic than not being able to find good information; ultimately, when words are divorced from reality--eg, when dog doesn't exactly mean dog any more--not only is language corrupted, but also and more importantly (as Wendell Berry points out in a great book The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture) a meaningless language means a dissolution of human connection.  Apocalypse from ambiguity, so to speak.  My Delicious tags for content-farming


Student Essays As Content Farming

The kind of writing produced by content farming is often on par with the writing that is produced by student writers in composition courses on the college level.  Not always, but often.  Writing is on-demand, much the same way the assignments for stories are at the big content farms.  The writers producing the articles aren't engaged with the topics; they could are less.  Likewise, sometimes students approach writing assignments with little interest, especially if the topics are assigned.  Reading them, like reading spam, is a particular kind of torture punctuated by hilarity (eg, titles of essays like "Othello: The Moor the Better").  When it comes down to it, spam content and the average student essay don't do any thing in the world.  Note also that the departmental rubric used to grade final exams in a fresh comp class at my college doesn't measure the accuracy of information as a element that be assessed.  That's right: as long as it's well-written, you could plausibly argue that the Holocaust didn't happen.

Here it is important to note that the demands of the composition classroom mirror the demands and values not only of the university but also of the demands and values of our culture: efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.  Scott McCracken in "Idleness for All," notes that "academic life is part of a larger culture of work that values visible products and perpetual motion" (65).  The student is always doing in the composition class—attending lectures, studying for tests, writing drafts for papers, workshopping drafts of his or her peers, researching topics, preparing works cited pages, and "reflecting" (another activity that is required by most composition teachers, although rarely with the results that true reflection offers).  As a teacher, I feel obligated to pack my syllabus with work because I believe we (the class) have a lot of ground to cover over the course of one semester.  I don't want to waste any time.  I want to see results.  I want to see drafts, revised drafts, and responsiveness to my comments on students' previous drafts and essays.  Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By identified the TIME IS MONEY metaphor as a root conceptual metaphor, a metaphor that even I draw on when thinking about things such as course design (wasting time in the classroom or spending time on a course objective, for example).

             

The well-intentioned teacher, however, manages to efface the creativity and engagement necessary for students of composition when busyness takes over the class.  Take, for example, "prewriting activities"—invention strategies or heuristics designed, like brainstorming or thought-mapping, to elicit student responses.  Prewriting, which encompasses four of the five steps in the creative process according to creativity studies, is a stage in the writing process model similar to every stage of the writing process—now do x and you will get to step y.  When the pseudo-doodling encouraged by textbooks doesn’t work and students show up during offices hours in need of topics, I have on more than one occasion pulled up the UPENN calls for papers.  The message I'm inadvertently sending students is that invention can be faked.  If you can't find a topic, then look for someone or something to give it to you.

Now What? 

There's one thing I've ignored up until now, and that is the ridiculousness of the topics on eHow and the topics that get assigned to students to write about.  I mentioned earlier that the topics that get assigned at eHow come from the algorithm results.  Meaning, if you were assigned the article "How To Carve A Shoehorn Out of Butter," then someone somewhere actually typed that into Google, in jest or all seriousness.  A recent essay assignment in one of my classes involved defining the term "good teacher."  The assignment might as well have been "Dirt. Discuss" for all the meaningless platitudes and overstating the obvious.

The old media model of pitching stories to an editor is one way to think about shifting the engagement from the algorithms/teachers to the writers.  That would at least shore up the tendency for the lack of engagement on the part of writers.  It doesn't, however, account for the lack of accountability for what is produced.  I'm reasonably certain my students would not want to post the essays they write for my class as notes on Facebook.  It would be too embarrassing.

The essay as Facebook update also brings up another important point: our students are writing more self-sponsored content than ever before in the history of the world.  Facebook, twitter, blogs (multiple blogs for many), Delicious accounts, Netflix (where you write your queue of movies), iTunes (where you write playlists of music)--and let's not forget the lesson of eHow--even the most passive user of the internet, what a lay person may call a spectator or consumer ONLY--that person is creating content by merely typing a search term into Google and navigating the web.  We're back to the concept of prosumerism (see later post).  What would happen if the class focused on online presence and students were evaluated based on a online portfolio showcasing that one great status update when s/he was washing dishing (This sponge smells like a hotdog) or the movie review that one over his girlfriend to see Country Strong: Original Motion Picture (click here to read Craig Meister's review of Country Strong).  We can't magically change the values of culture or the university (military industrial complex), but we can give students more leveraging power as citizens, consumers, and producers of culture, especially given the powerful argument made by writer such as Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life