Blogging and the Complexity of the Academic Ecosystem

Peter Taylor forwarded to me and other participants in the "Infrastructures and Agents" Inter-College Faculty Seminar in Humanities and Sciences (ISHS) an interesting article from the Chronicle that addresses the "virtues" of scholarly blogging.  Among the many fascinating issues raised, such as scholarly productivity, the perceived value of digital publications, and public engagement, I was intrigued by the claim that our "academic ecosystem" is "more complex" than it was before.  I must admit that much of me wants to agree with this statement.  After all, the possibilities for digital scholarship seem to be endless, from the standard digital essay, to the blog, to the wiki-compilation, to the video mashup, to the audio remix.  And I generally think this "complexity" is a great thing because it expands the nature of what scholarly work can be and makes visible the research that has often been obscured from public view.  That said, I worry about fetishizing of this "new" complexity, mostly because it participates in what I think is an irresponsible adherence to the myth of progress, the notion that we are always improving upon what had come before.  Moreover, this perspective may encourage us to assume that our academic ecosystems were once quite simple, which I don't believe was ever the case.

I want to know what you think about this.  Is it fair to suggest that new digital forms of writing, such as blogging, increasingly complicate our methods and networks of knowledge production?  Does "complexity" helpfully characterize our current academic ecosystem?    

I'm not not saying you shouldn't not read this . . .

It's been some time since I've posted something here, but Dr. K (in her usual style) pointed me towards this recent article on words of negation that I'm guessing HEL folk will find very interesting.  What bothers some of us about statements such as "He don't do nothin' all day long" is based on the prescriptivist grammarian's logic about how negative words cancel each other out.  However, this article demonstrates that the history of most languages indicate that words of negation emerge as expressions of emphasis.  In other words, when we hear someone say "He don't do nothin' all day long," we all know that the speaker means emphatically that "He doesn't do anything all day long."  Only the literalists among us would assume that the speaker was just being clever with words of negation.


Students of Chaucer (and yes, I'm talking to you all in ENG 381!) will recognize the preponderance of such emphatic negations from the descriptions of the pilgrims in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  Chaucer describes the Friar by saying, "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" ("There never was no man nowhere so virtuous") and the Knight by claiming "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight" ("He never yet no vileness didn't say / In all his life no manner of man.").  We don't need to count the number of negatives to guess that Chaucer is characterizing both as virtuous men (although, we know from the rest of his description of the Friar that this assessment is suspect).


I'm curious to know, however, if such superfluous negatives or other words noted in the article such as "literally" bother us.  My father used to get after me for asking "Where are you at?"  What he didn't know was that I was just using "at" for emphasis.  Okay, I may not have been not un-conscious of that at the time . . .      

Pedagogy of the Crowd

Many thoughts have been gathering in my mind lately - nostalgia for the end of summer, preparing for classes, etc. - but they haven't managed to crowd out some recent thinking about the value of online collaboration.  To spur a discussion on this topic in my "Teaching English with Technology" course last night, I asked my students whether they disagreed with the following statement by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule."  Even though this was taken out of context, I must admit that I was shocked that the majority of them agreed with the wily German classicist (I do too, much of the time, but not on this point).  And even for those that disagreed, they only resisted what they thought was the philosophical problem of Nietzsche's apparent imprecision about where madness could be located - that is,  if madness could be realized in groups, wouldn't it then exist as a potentiality in the individuals that make up the group?  Only one student suggested that this statement appeared to be unnecessarily pessimistic about the intelligence or sanity of groups.  Given the recent emphasis on collaboration in education, I wonder if this skepticism about the value of group work is even more widespread than I suspected.   


I've been thinking quite a bit about this question, particularly how a "crowd" might be harnessed within pedagogical settings, specifically in the service of response to student writing.  For most of us who teach English classes, our intellectual mobs are thankfully fairly small, but I've become increasingly convinced that even groups as small as 15 can offer each other a volume of feedback, unmatched by most writing teachers or peer revision groups, that can be facilitated with little effort in blogs and wikis.  I've experimented a bit with a "crowd review," or online student review of their peers' work, in both my undergraduate and graduate courses with some mild success that I'd like to share here.  And as a matter of fact, I will be sharing these thoughts at an October 5th CIT/Edtech Faculty Forum, so I would greatly appreciate any crowd I can gather here to respond to the following piece.

? or :

The syriac double dot.  Image credit: University of Cambridge

Once again Dr. K has called attention to exciting linguistic news, in this case, for the history of writing.  Apparently scholars of Syriac - a Middle Eastern language known to many as a primary language of the Bible - have been perplexed by the dots that riddle the pages of surviving texts.  Dr. Chip Coakley, a Cambridge manuscript expert, has just recently suggested that one grouping of dots, the double dot, is the earliest example of a question mark.  Check out the following link to see the full article.  What seems especially intriguing to me is that this double dot resembles our colon, which of course is designed to offer the opposite function of the question mark.  Rather than opening up the sentence for many possibilities, the colon limits them, specifying the material that precedes it.  Also, I think we could learn something from the way the double dot operates.  Apparently it appears at the beginning, rather than the end, of the sentence to indicate to the reader that the subsequent sentence is a question.  I know that other languages do this, notably Spanish, but why have we insisted on leaving the question mark until the end?  In some cases it would be very helpful - haven't you ever begun reading a sentence aloud, only to realize that it's a question, not a declaration, and your inflection is all wrong?  :Maybe we can start this new rule  

Grotesque Multilingualism

Pieter Bruegel, "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent," 1559
(http://fishmarketblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/why-feast-of-fools/)

One matter we frequently discuss in HEL is the relationship between English and other languages.  Inevitably, such discussions lead to talk about movements toward official English, loan words, and the status of English as a global language.  I'm especially interested in how the digital world is becoming increasingly multilingual, especially in the face of the assumption that English is the dominant language on the Internet.  While it's true that English dominates, it is no longer the exclusive online tongue it once was. Those of us who only know one language may be surprised to learn that there are more multilinguals than monolinguals.  How then should we deal with the diminishing value of a lingua franca?  And I'm curious: how many of us consider ourselves to be multilingual?

As complex as communication may become, I have to admit that I'm thrilled by the challenges that an increasingly multilingual world offers, especially to the classroom.  This coming Monday, a friend and colleague of mine, Tom Friedrich, and I will be sharing a paper that addresses these issues at the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetoric and Writing Across Language Boundaries.  We will be presenting in a session titled "Rhetoric and Identity in Online Spaces," which includes other papers on iPhones and street harassment and the collapse of the private/public binary in digital discourse.  Our paper is titled, "Grotesque Multilingualism: Male Literacy in a Globalized Era."  Here's the abstract:

           Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that the grotesque body is perpetually "in the act of becoming."  This unfinished and dynamic corporeality characterizes male student writers, who often resist traditional models of composition instruction that encourage them to mimic formal models and promote a “standard” register as a shared ideal. Such a monolingual environment limits the diverse rhetorical and linguistic corpora available to multilingual students, whom we take to include not only L2 or marginalized dialect speakers, but also native English speakers whose multiple literacies go unrecognized in US English classrooms.

            This presentation turns to student and teacher authored-texts to theorize multilingual males’ "act[s] of becoming" within two contexts: online fan fiction and an undergraduate new media course and the compositions it assigned. Mueller documents how ELLs are increasingly contributing to fan fiction websites, within which contributors revise and elaborate upon fan texts, ranging from manga to Harry Potter.  He argues that these multilingual spaces have a long history that reaches back into the medieval classroom, in which students and teachers glossed and rewrote Aesopic fables, developing an expanding corpus that was produced in multiple languages. Friedrich describes an undergraduate new media course where an emphasis on cultivating an identity as an informed consumer-producer allowed male millenials to see, value, and extend their histories of creating digital texts.  In this way, these participants came to see themselves as multilingual speakers, a stance that allowed them to claim ownership over the course and to create more inclusive pedagogies.

If you want to read more, see below.  And I apologize for the inconsistent documentation styles - it's APA meets Chicago!

Death by PowerPoint

Last year after I presented at the UMB Ed Tech conference, I checked the Twitter feed and discovered a number of very complimentary and emboldening tweets.  But one (isn't this how it always is?) has always bothered me, mostly because I discovered it to be true.  It claimed that my presentation was "Death by PowerPoint."  Well, if you aren't afraid of dying via digital slides, you might want to check out the screen capture of the session I ran with my students, Christine Sands, Kate Unruh, and Adam Overbay during this year's conference.    As I noted in my last post, I blogged about this presentation earlier, so if you fear redundancy, don't click the link.  In any case, I thought I'd share it with you to see if you had any thoughts about the presentation, be they about the content of the presentation, the presentation style, or the use and abuse of PowerPoint.  I'm not happy with my use of slides, but I really like to avoid handouts when I can.  If for no other reason, I would suggest checking it out to hear from some brilliant students!   

Time Travel and Romance

At the end of this week I will be participating in two conference sessions.  The first one is on blogging and role playing at UMB's Center for the Improvement of Teaching / Educational Technology Conference.  You might be wondering why the conference title is exceptionally long - it's the result of the merger of two conferences.  The CIT conference was scheduled for earlier this year, but was postponed by one of the many massive snowstorms we had this year in the Northeast.  You may recall that I blogged about my anticipated (but alas canceled) presentation with my students here.  After this second-chance presentation (fingers crossed) on Thursday morning, I will hop on a plane to Kalamazoo for the 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies.  There on Friday morning I will be presenting in a session sponsored by the Medieval Romance Society called "Traveling Texts: Adaptation of Medieval Romance."  I'm still tweaking this talk a bit, so I thought I'd share the text of it here.  Please let me know what you think!