Further notes as I continue to explore the affordances of blogging platforms

Just finished searching through every one of Blogger’s available gadgets for this blog page (1174 by my count). Most gadgets are developed by third-parties rather than Blogger. There are a LOT of them, but also a lot of repetition. For example, along with quote collections, ports for old 16bit video games, and pictures of military jets, there were gadgets for a virtual cat, virtual sheep, virtual guinea pig, virtual ferret, virtual turtle, virtual waitresses (powered by beer.com), and a virtual stripper.

On a related note: one thing I appreciated was that the gadget “Online Safety Tips” immediately followed the one titled “Suchen Sie sexy Dessous.”

From this eclectic collection I added an English grammar checker, a calendar, and Clint Eastwood quotes. But they all looked so clunky on my page (and clogged with ads) that I dropped them almost immediately.

It appears our current state of bloggy gadgets reflects the early state of the web: there is some great stuff but quality is really hit-or-miss, and ultimately searchers are limited to browsing whatever folks feel like uploading.

After an extended survey of the gadget landscape, I feel like the basics offered by Blogger allow for more real individual expression than any of the ad-burdened, semi-functional third-party apps available. Adding pictures, text, and HTML will probably serve my meager blogging needs just fine. And they always work, unlike my Twitter gadget off to the side here. . . which seems to come and go.

UPDATE:
I'm tacking this note onto the end of this post, since the note is related and because it is not really worthy of a post itself. I just stumbled across Widgetbox, which looks like it leaves Blogger Gadgets in its dust with the number of widgets it has. Also, it actually calls them widgets, which I prefer. I've tried a couple of the widgets, with mixed results. The weather app is still hanging in there to the right of this page, but a cool looking topic generator from some USC group kept causing my page to crash. Needless to say it is not around any more.

Thinking on approaches to Literacy

Blogger’s Note: Class blog guidelines request that we limit our posts to 250-500 words. Obviously, I have flouted this guideline thus far. In this post, however, I will try to honor the original word goal of the assignment for the first time.

In my Literacy and Technology class we spend significant energy simply getting handle on the best ways to conceptualize literacy in the new digital age, with the ultimate goal of bringing a more informed and expert understanding of our students’ needs into the writing classroom. And thinking from that perspective I was struck by Stuart Selber’s “parameters for a functional approach” to computer literacy (summarized here far better than I could). The parameters are cast very wide, and they include a lot of qualities I would not immediately associate with functional literacy. But that seems to be precisely Selber’s point.

The term literacy has been batted around in our class for several weeks now, and we have seen several definitions presented. Gunther Kress (2003) defined it very narrowly as the ability to interpret and manipulate alphabetic text only. He then follows that by explaining that literacy and language are one of many “means for representation and communication” (p. 35). When I compare Kress’s notion of literacy + other means and Selber’s Functional literacy, I feel the concepts are more similar than they might first sound. Kress makes a semantic point of distinguishing and narrowing “literacy,” but he shares other authors’ (including Selber) concerns for communicating with newer modes and tools.

But I can’t help feeling Selber’s notion is the more useful. At the end I am interested in taking this knowledge into my classroom and suing it to help students. Selber’s parameters give me a set of concepts, and helpfully, a sample set of concrete class exercise to help me do precisely that.

On an unrelated note, I would like to say while reading Selber I was tickled by the mention of McLaughlin, Osborne, and Smith’s “taxonomy of reproachable conduct” (p. 54). A quick search tells me that it comes from an influential and often-cited article. But the name sounds like a gallery you’d walk through in Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Odditorium.

Academic Literacy Summit: Further reflections

I am no great shakes as a blogger. I wrote a grand total of one post before the Academic Literacy Summit. Not much of a tweeter. I tweeted a grand total of never until I signed up for a Twitter account during the summit. But our class decided to blog and tweet to cover the summit. As such, I approached the social networking aspect almost anthropologically.

What I saw in the Summit Tweeterverse

It seemed like the summit tweets fell almost exclusively into one of two categories: summaries or updates. These two, I later learned, fit roughly into the basic kinds of tweets according to this guy.  

Update tweets focused on an individual's position in the conference, the energy of the conference, or the fun the tweeter was having. One such example:

@HogsMH Arrived at Academic Literacy Summit & jumped into a conversation on the space between expectation and reality in writing studies. #ALS2012

Summary tweets were more constant and far more numerous, and they consisted mostly of letting the audience know what was happening—either in the largest, most global sense:

@RebekkaUCD Keynote Jose Rivas presents an exploratory lesson design to develop academic literacy. #ALS2012

Or down to the smallest specific

@Jenae_Cohn Jose Rivas showed us how he teaches Newton's Second Law with a song from this website: http://www.fmalive.com/ Catchy stuff! #als2012

Commitment twitters

From my position of ignorance, I am certain the tweeters had a mission, perhaps to archive the activities for posterity. This hashtag was also at least semi-official and meant to promote the summit. But as a conversation it was hard to see very much “there” there. It lacked the fun and frolic of more organic backchannel dialogues, which I feel probably would have promoted interest in the summit even more effectively.

I actually signed up for Twitter with the intent of livening up the conversation a bit. I got my account, prepared to write a zinger, and then a funny thing happened: The sheer weight of the “permanent public comment” hit me.

Twitter is not the medium for communicating intricate points laden with rich detail, so it stands to reason that tweeting would be of-the-moment, off-the cuff, and forgettable. And yet, every tweet will stay around as long as those garbage bags that time cannot decay. That forever-ness gives the little anarchist within me pause. Like the plastic shopping bag, the tweet will be around long after its single intended use has been served. The life it finds afterward may be in a whole new and unforeseen context.

Perhaps, then, that is why our summit folks, like many folks, played it so safe when tweeting. We are not NBA team owners whose smallest tweet becomes news if it is the slightest bit off point. It would be easy to think that our anonymous tweets just do not matter. It would be easy to think the tweets are anonymous.

But just “what if”?

During one of the summit breakout sessions I sent off a tweet heckling the makers of Prezi for failing a presenter. Ever since then I have wondered if that little bit of snark might come back someday to haunt me. Perhaps someday when I am in the running for a researcher position? When my life is on the line in a murder trial? How does that tweet represent me in the future public sphere? How could it be spun? In the future would all of these worries become completely irrelevant?

So many questions. And the only thing I know for sure is all of those tweets will still be around to help provide the answers.

First reflection on the Academic Literacy Summit at UCD

I attended the Academic Literacy Summit Thursday, which was a great time in many ways. Like every conference, it meant a very long day and sore feet by the end. But like the best conferences, it meant good company and conversation, and an array of interesting work and talk.

As part of my Literacy and Technology seminar I decided to keep tabs on the summit’s Twitter hashtag and blog a few thoughts about it afterward. This was the first time I’d ever done so, and the first thing I reflected on is: it is hard to work in the back channels during a live conference.

I’ve never been much of an enforcer when it comes to phones, texting, computers, or internet browsing in my classrooms, but if anything I emerged from the conference even more partisan in that direction. Students who can—on one screen—chat with their friends, scan Facebook, tweet, follow a document I am introducing, and still look up from their screens often enough to make me feel they are still in the room are superstars. The cognitive demands involved in that level of interaction are breathtaking.

Defining Literacy

I am posting this while heavily under construction, to remind me it still needs to be done and to save its place. I want this post to come right after my confessional, but in all honesty I am much more eager to get another post put together--and I am still not sure if I can reorganize blog posts after they are posted.

Yeah, yeah. Pathetic. But true.

So here is the promise of a blog to come, and its prompt:

What are we talking about when we talk about literacy today? What does it mean to be literate in a digital world? How is our understanding of literacy changing and to what consequence (what seems to be gained or lost)? What does this changing understanding suggest about how educators might best approach teaching literacy and/or re-envisioning literacy programs (such as writing/composition studies)?

Our readings during the first three weeks of this course each attempt to get at these questions in one way or another. In your blog post this week, help your readers understand how two or three of the authors that we have read have responded, either directly or indirectly, to these questions (NCTE, in this case, would be an “author”). Synthesize and analyze the authors’ perspectives and offer your own response to these perspectives and the questions posed above. Ground your response in the class readings but feel free to draw on other scholarship/research, personal experience, or anecdotal evidence to engage your readers and tease out your thinking. Draw on at least one of the readings due next week (Kress, Selber, or Baron) in your post.

Shoot for a 250-500 word response but feel free to go longer should you be inclined to do so.

If you stumbled upon this page seeking some actual informed discussion of that topic, allow me to refer you to three bloggers who can help you:

http://twentyonepages.blogspot.com/

http://losingtheluddite.wordpress.com/

http://hoganhayes.blogspot.com/

The obligatory confessional post

It really is both obligatory and confessional. This post is something new, and unassigned. I feel that in order to blog I need to post at least semi-honestly to my four readers. And I am not certain what else to say, except that my upkeep of this blog has pretty well derailed, and I am trying to fix that. And the tally of my reflections leads inevitably to the problem of honesty.

Reflecting honestly sucks

This is not an especially busy quarter for me, as quarters in the PhD program go. But I am behind. Soooooo very behind. My fellow bloggists and classmates know this better than anyone.

I’ve encountered this feeling before. Every quarter I ever spent in grad school, in fact. Academic work doesn’t provide quick, tangible rewards like the work of housecleaning. It isn’t a single great crisis that I can sink my teeth into while shoving all other things aside. In fact, it is the opposite of that. It is the grind: the daily constant demand that never leaves and only rarely rewards. It requests your attention, accepts your work, and immediately repeats its request. I don’t always do so well with that kind of constancy, as my energy tends to come in fits and spurts.  So it is a rare quarter when I don’t get behind and have to claw my way back.

I am also a reserved person. Frankly, I don’t like sharing certain parts of me with a general audience. I did a bit of creative writing as an undergrad (English major, duh), which was tough. To write creative and personal work, put it to a hard deadline, and read it aloud for others terrifies me. I don’t have to face that task often so I almost never do. I figured out within a year or two that creative writing was probably not my thing. Discussion boards and forums are neutral spaces. We can interpret research or argue about books, authors, or ideology. We are never forced to argue us.

Blogging is different somehow. It is the sum of all fears: constant, implicitly personal, and (let’s face it) creative writing.

My bugbear.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem and I don’t want to fail. I also do not want the special treatment our class leader would certainly provide that would let me out of this task. I want to take a shot at this blogging thing, but it is probably not going to look like a blogging thing should. So, as I would say when not writing in Academic English, fuck it.

Here are a few things about me

I’m cynical, and pessimistic. I don’t really expect good things to happen, and I am not often disappointed. To bolster that perspective I regularly aim low so as not to disappoint myself. I doubt that I am on my way to a great academic career (see previous statements), but then I doubted I was ever good enough to merit attention from a quality PhD program. Sometimes life brings little surprises.

But then: I’m stubborn, and once a goal or idea gets in my head I rarely let it go until I’ve hunted it down or seen it through, which tends to have a mediating effect on my cynical outlook. The end result is I have succeeded at some things in life, while never really hoping to. I expect attaining a PhD will be one of those successes, but then I often speculate that I may take my degree and spend the rest of my days quietly beachcombing (see how it works?). If I manage to take my research and make use of it or be successful it’ll just be one more of those pleasant little surprises.

There are, however, parts of my world where that cynical/pessimist paradigm doesn’t apply. One of them, I am happy to say, is the family that makes up my household (I won’t go too much into that—I’m kind of reserved). The other, which took years of teaching for me to say out loud to myself, is teaching. I am an unabashed fan of students. Anyone who is learning in a program is my hero, even if she is just stuck there. Compulsory education has a lot of downsides, especially in its real-world bureaucratic application, but the societal goal behind it is the highest kind of good: keep little kids away from the stamping machines of the assembly line for a few years and give all of them some basic level exposure to (and practice in) the making of human knowledge.

I teach college courses, so my students even came of their own free will—or at least the state no longer compelled them—which means I have the easiest time of all teachers. My specific area is mostly first-year writing, and that means students are in transition. Most are new-ish to college, and many are trailblazers in their own families. They are often still learning “what it means to be a college student,” which means that I am something of an ambassador as well. And they are here in my class to develop writing.

I’ve always felt empathetic to student writers. And one of the reasons, I think, is because of the natural reservations I have about sharing my own writing. One of the first projects in my classes is to build a community: a place that makes it safe to share. As the years pass I wonder more and more whether any particular skill or practice I can pass along to students is anywhere near as important as the ability to seek out a small community of trusted confidants to share advice and offer feedback. That means seeing yourself as someone already in that community, and to help you see yourself as someone like that, it helps to have a fan. That is where I come in: it is one of my best traits as a writing instructor.

So, back to this blog.

Now what? If the time for truth has come, then I must admit I cannot write this blog in the same way that my colleagues and classmates can. They are, hopeful, reflective, and professional in all they do. I am going to take my own stab at this, but I’d be lucky to accomplish two out of those three traits in any given post. I can be reflective, but doing so is likely to cause an “epic fail” in being both professional and hopeful. So I’ll try to salvage one of those traits along with reflection as I post.

Since I don’t really want to cuss too often in an academic blog I’ll probably aim for professionalism. My apologies to the optimists among my few readers.

Alright, so I reflected. And I shared. And I really felt like this little mini-manifesto needed to be laid out before anything new could be built. So here goes: Now on to the next assigned blog post.

An academic literacy narrative

It’s 1:25 in the morning, and I am getting settled in for the night. Another night of trying to turn a little idea into a full thesis. Another night of trying to be a college writer. My stomach is full of the cereal and milk I just crammed down for fourth meal. It's a crunchy cereal, loaded with good fiber, which is kind of a disappointment. I really wanted some Choco-Sugar Bombs, or something. I am up and full, and alone. The house is alone with me; all of the people in my world are asleep in their dark rooms. There have been so many of these nights in the last couple of years as I tried to be an English major, but each one had the temporary feel of a one-time emergency. Just get through this _______ (insert: project, paper, assignment, reading response), and you'll be fine. Tonight it hits me: This is the job. This late night grind is the writing process for me in my life as an academic writer. It has been this way as long as I can remember.

I will be honest. That realization does not fill me with warmth. I am not sure what it means for me, for my life.

For right now it means I am stuck sitting here at this small metal-framed computer cart, typing away. But there is a disconnect between the very large job at hand and my willingness to engage with the job. Perhaps it is the lack of energy or activity in the apartment, perhaps it is my fatigue; more likely, it is my complete lack of understanding about what I am supposed to be doing, or why. A college literature (or, Literature) paper is an odd duck: a long, extended piece of writing, which you will work on for weeks, and which you will likely shelve and never write on again. Each time a paper comes due I follow my nose and fight blindly to get it out and completed, but I have no real concept of the genre. So now, like usual, I dodge. I let my mind wander and escape.

As I avoid focusing on the screen I notice the little sounds around me. Nighttime is the real time for sound junkies. One I can't locate has the same high-pitched “swoosh” sound  as a jump rope being swung around forcefully in the air. The spinning hum of the refrigerator sounds like a toy robot walking across the floor: it rhythmically rises and lowers in pitch, without ever stopping or starting. An everlasting “RRRrrrRRRRrrrRRRrrrRRRrrrRRR” combines with the ticking of the second hand on the wall clock to form a nice rhythm. ​The computer whispers along, regardless of how much or little I use it. Right now, the use is pretty minimal.

I slowly begin to realize that I’ve been tapping the sheet metal tray that supports my keyboard, and I’m doing it to the rhythm of the clock-fridge beat. Every once in a while, I knuckle-rap the keys in front of me, just to add a different percussion. This, too, is part of my writing process. How pathetic.

The walls are blank in this section of the apartment. It’s as if nobody really cares to live in the area where we keep the computer. The cart is shoved in an unused corner. The door of the storage closet sits immediately to my left. In this closet is everything it takes to make this house function: Tide, trash cans, recycle bins, broom and dustpan, iron, and a Costco-sized bag of birdseed. I think of all these things—the computer cart's place in this home, my working through the night, and my big thesis—as I my mind wanders.

That's when it hits me: my life as an academic doesn't cross over or connect with anything else in my world. It is the tucked away thing I pull out at night, and I bury it when I drive off to the warehouse each day. I'm gaining a new sort of literacy, slowly and painfully, but it is an egotistical thing. Vanity. It doesn't play with my son and it sure doesn't pay the bills.

I snap back to focus. My family is long asleep in their beds. My bare feet are cold. I shove them under a blanket and rub my curled toes together. I have to be at work in three and a half hours, and here I sit. It is going to be a long night, and I have more than just this assignment to do. I'm lonely and completely unsure of myself. This is what it feels like to develop academic literacy.