Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Here’s a fun blog containing a plethora of poems celebrating the absurdity of English spelling. You may have heard some of these before, but they’re still fun and good grist for FYC. What’s your favorite?

NB: Mike Edwards contributed heavily to these notes. In fact, most of what’s here is his work, so I want him to get credit for it.

The CCCC Blogging SIG had a large and productive meeting Thursday night in
Chicago. We began by discussing some of the initiatives the SIG had proposed
the previous year, including the one-page paper handout guide for teachers new
to blogging (which, we might hope, will continue to be revised collaboratively and kept up to date as necessary), as well as thoughts about assessment of weblog writing,
outcomes of weblog use in writing courses and professional endeavors, and a possible large multi-institution study investigating the
classroom uses of weblogs.

Following the initial discussion, we split up into five small groups focusing on
action in specific areas. The groups discussed their areas and reported back when
we reconvened. Here are the results of our discussion:

This fall, I took a job as an assistant professor at a university that is very serious about welcoming diversity. To that end, I’ve attended seminars addressing topics on racism, sexism, and so on, but this information (while useful) is, unfortunately, too general to be of much use in the particular problems I’m having in the classroom. However, thankfully I know I can count on all my wonderful friends and distinguished colleagues here at Knews to help me through these troubling times–please, take a moment to help me address my dilemma.

It begun when I read RIP-OFF 101, a report detailing how the textbook industry is inflating the costs of college textbooks by a variety of means, most of them devious. It goes beyond the “new edition” that differs only in pagination. It’s a national scandal. I don’t want to be associated with it. I find it embarrassing. I want it to go away. Let me add my voice to those of students demanding that the the $70 composition textbook remain on the shelf. We don’t need them that badly and never did. Thankfully, there is something we can do about it. Find out how.

Dear Kairos Readers,

The Institute for the Future of the Book is pleased to announce the launch of next\text, a new project designed to encourage the creation of born-digital learning materials that will enhance, expand, and ultimately replace the printed textbook.

There are two stages to the next\text project. The first is a curated website showcasing significant projects currently in the field. The aim is to draw attention to a broad range of experiments that identify ways in which digital media and networks are expanding the potential of textbooks, redefining the role of teacher and student, and converging to create new ecologies for educational institutions. These areas include, but are in no way limited to: “expanded” multimedia textbooks; “open-source” textbooks continually improved by teachers and students; dynamic, networked textbooks with live or regularly updating components; collaborative work spaces; and multi-user games.

During the last academic year, many of my fellow teaching assistants (and full-time faculty) struggled with Blackboard. The primary issue was the desire of most users to type in another application, then paste the results into discussion boards. The results tend to be a mess. High-ASCII and Unicode characters become question marks, formats are lost, and everyone gripes.

I tended to prefer using Nvu, which works pretty well on my PowerBook. I’d paste the resulting HTML into Blackboard, and all was good. However, this is not a practical solution when dealing with 84 instructors and more than 6,000 English 1 students.

In the last seven months, the community of scholars in rhetoric and composition studies has lost three highly respected and admired members: Candace Spigelman, John Lovas, and now Maxine Hairston (see tributes by Rebecca Moore Howard and various others at The Blogora. I couldn’t find a general site for Hairston, so for her name I linked to her “Ideas for Grading,” which seems to capture appropriately, in her own words, her passion for helping students learn. I never got to meet her myself, unfortunately, but Michael Keene, my advisor from my master’s program and a former student of Hairston’s, has asked me to post this essay, derived from his essay in Against the Grain. I’m happy to do it:

TAKING RISKS: A Tribute to Maxine Hairston*

Michael Keene

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Maxine Cousins Hairston, born April 9, 1922, to
Louise Hennessy Cousins and Richard Clyde
Cousins in Ironwood, Michigan, died July 22, 2005.

Probably one of the most remarkable things about Maxine—to me, anyway, a man who
is by his own admission a slave to habit—was her willingness to take risks. To go back to
graduate school after her kids were not quite grown, to take on being freshman director at
Texas when she knew the folks who gave her the job were giving her what they saw as a
glorified secretarial position, to build a major national career on that basis, to first
embrace and then become a primary advocate of process pedagogy, to become a strong
critic of the literary establishment (“mandarins,� she called them [and worse in the
earliest version of “Breaking Our Bonds,� which I got her to tone down]), to be a leader
in the separation of the rhetoric and writing program at Texas from the literature
program, to take on people she thought were making a grave mistake in introducing
politically one-sided approaches into freshman composition, and then to walk away at
the top of her career, throw herself into tutoring disadvantaged kids, fighting for the
Democratic Party in Texas, and supporting Planned Parenthood, to earn yet another
college degree and keep doing her books—what a great risk taker she was! She passed on
a little bit of that to me. Here’s a story about one way that worked. This would have been
in about 1985, when she was 63 or so.