Archive for April, 2010
Two Kinds of People
There are two kinds of people in the world:
those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.
Teaching Writing: My Philosophy
Basically, my philosophy is that purpose must be made explicit, authentic writing should be integrated, process-oriented and collaborative, and both writing and teaching can delight, as well as instruct. Above all else, students must know why writing is important.
Unless students understand what effective writing can do for them in their real lives, writing assignments will remain little more than busy work, artificial assignments to prove that they have read and understood a text or mastered a particular form, and compositions courses will be just another hurdle to be surmounted on their way to graduation, instead of one of the most important classes in their careers. Student writers must experience firsthand how clear, exact, detailed, persuasive writing can give them power, yes power, in their academic, professional and even personal lives. Read the rest of this entry »
“Educational Blogging”: An Article by Geoffrey Middlebrook
Over 112 million blogs crowd the blogosphere, mostly self-referential blogs about personal experience. Geoffrey C. Middlebrook argues that blogs can be used for advanced writing courses, since they conform to current student-centered, active learning models. It is a space that writers can develop their voice and explore their interests “in a medium that appears to have life and longevity,” offering the potential of a wide and authentic audience and for developing a students’ disciplinary and professional identity, “an incipient sense of self in the discourses of one’s field.” Blogs can empower students, stimulate the initiative to write, engender information sharing, help reputation building and facilitate personal expression. He insists that his students adhere to the course objectives to “write clear, grammatical, well-structured prose; discover and convey complex ideas critically; appreciate the nuances of good argument; identify and speak to specific audiences in a voice of authority and persuasiveness; and address the academic, public, and professional aspects of writing within disciplines and career fields.” Although some may argue that Blogs may actually harm reputations, Middlebrook’s students have won awards and received high-level job offers. However, he warns that in a recent study students appreciated the use of technology when used effectively, but felt it was a waste of time when managed poorly or poorly integrated into the class.
Teaching Writing Offline (With Online Support)
Even though Scott Warnock’s book Teaching Writing Online: How & Why focuses on writing classes that take place entirely over the internet and hybrid classes which are about half online and half in person, any writing teacher in the digital age can glean important advice from his book on how to update and enhance their own teaching practices. Here are some suggestions I thought I would adopt and, in many cases, adapt, with comments and musings about why they are significant.
Ronosaurus and I Present “Borges and I”
Borges’ “Borges and I” is such a wonderful piece of metafiction that I will just reproduce it whole for you here, with just enough of a comment to suggest that writing writes the writer, as I discussed in Who is Writing This? and It’s All Fiction, in which I discuss how every piece of writing requires the invention of a speaker, even a dictionary entry (the “nobody” speaker), so the requirements of the piece determines the voice and therefore the speaker. In the short fiction below, Borges is talking about how his fame has taken over his life (or, as Foucault would put it, his author function, his reputation as a great writer, has erased the real person).
History is an Angel Blown Backward Through Time
Walking Backwards Through Time
We walk backwards through life, only seeing where we have been, not where we are going. From a physicist’s perspective, it is not clear why this is true. If we accept time as the fourth dimension and state that the universe is a four-dimensional object, why does our consciousness seem to move only in one direction along only one of four possible axes, yet we are only able to see in the direction opposite to our movement? This is not the only possibility imaginable. Many claim, for instance, that God is omnipresent in time as well as space, existing in all epochs at once, in other words he is outside of the illusion of time.
If Not a Pipe, Then What?
When first I came across René Magritte’s famous painting, which says in French “This is not a pipe,” I was quite confused. Of course it is a pipe. Just look at the painting. I propose a simple test to check: put something in the pipe and smoke it. You can’t? Why not? If not a pipe, then what is it?
Las Meninas: A Meta-painting
Las Meninas is a meta-painting, a painting about paintings. (Thanks Alejo for pointing this out!) I decided to post Velasquez’s masterpiece with a quick explanation of what makes it meta, but as I have been studying the (digitally reproduced) oil painting and writing about it, I have noticed more and more self-references and so my explanation keeps expanding. At this point I count at least 23 meta aspects. Take a look at the painting yourself and see if you can identify them:
The Serial Beyond the Serial: Battlestar Galactica
A serial narrative is a story broken up across time, delivered in pieces rather than as a whole. Battlestar Galactica, the television series launched in 2004, is typical of a serial narrative: it has an overall narrative arc which stretches across four seasons, but, as is common for serials, especially in film and television, each episode has its own beginning, middle and end, so in effect we have many smaller stories making up a larger narrative. But these do not make up the entire tale of the Battlestar Galactica, not by a long shot. The recent TV series is itself an episode in a series of series, which extends into film, books, comics, games and webisodes, the whole of which is part of still larger traditions of science fiction, genre and religion. In fact, it is almost impossible to establish the limits of the story Battlestar Galactica, a serial within a series of series.
Meta-YouTube: “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube”
A profound meditation on the community YouTube creates, this video, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” by Michael Wesch is thoroughly meta from beginning to end (55 minutes, so make some popcorn) and profoundly moving (I am still all choked up and puffy-eyed) because it is about the revolution that is happening as “real” people share “real” content with a growing, global (and very “real”) community (hello world!).
