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Rhetoric RSS FeedsJustice Department may hold websites to ADA standards - According to a report in the online Chronicle of Higher Education, The Justice Department "this week announced that it is considering revising ADA regulations 'to establish specific requirements for state and local governments and public accommodations to make their Web sites accessible to individuals with disabilities.'" Read more here. ...Feed Source: kairosnews.org Online Sections of First-Year Writing -
Starting this fall (yeah, in a few weeks), we're going to offer a couple of sections of our first-year writing courses online. Does anyone have any advice, or can you point me toward some readings? I have a great teacher teaching these classes who has some experience with online education, but I'm sure she'd appreciate any extra help I can give her. Though I've used technology a lot in my teaching, I myself have never taught or taken a completely online course.
... Gotta Love Copyright Fights about Punctuation¡ -
According to Slashdot, Sarcasm, Inc., is trying to advocate a new punctuation symbol to indicate sarcasm, the SarcMark, only they have copyrighted it and require the purchase of their software to use the symbol. Open Sarcasm has responded to the SarcMark by providing an open sarcasm symbol: ¡. Yes. It's an upside down exaclamation point (I have no idea what the official name for the typographic symbol is. Anybody?).
Anyway, I'm certain I won't be following the battle between Sarcasm, Inc., and Open Sarcasm. I kind of like the idea of having a typographic symbolm, though, to use at the end of a sentence. Couldn't be because I'm sarcastic¡
... Drupal the Easy Way: Drupal Gardens -
Now there's an easy way to build a basic Drupal site. Drupal Gardens is a new ad-supported web-based Drupal site creation and hosting engine similar to WordPress.com's free blog service. Choose from among three preconfigured site design templates--campaign, product, or blog (more templates are supposedly coming)--and be up and running with a Drupal website in just a few minutes.
So far, the number of site themes is way more limited than what one gets at WordPress.com, but unlike WordPress, no need to pay extra to be able to modify the CSS to create a custom look and style for the site. Drupal Gardens is also more powerful than WordPress.com in terms of the different content types and configuration options offered. For instance, the site creator can choose between blogs, news, forums, polls, or pages. However, Drupal Gardens is limited... World of Warcraft Leads to Better Jobs -
There's a story on Slashdot about a Forbes article that claims games like World of Warcraft lead to better job performance--particularly in motivating workers to seek out challenges and greater rewards. They even think that soon being a "guild leader" will be worth putting on a resume.
... Skip Publishers: Go Directly to Kindle -
There's a story on CNET about how an agent has published 20 novels from Mailer, Roth, Bellow, Updike, and others directly to Kindle--bypassing big publishers. The end result is a much higher royalty for the authors, though the author of the piece (Carnoy) points out that these ebooks are too expensive ($10) and quite spartan. Another downside (or perhaps upside if Amazon markets them heavily) is that they're exclusive to the Kindle for 2 years.
... Blackboard and Barnes & Noble/Nook Integration -
Amazon and iPad better watch out:
Barnes & Noble continues to makes inroads into the education, um, space. It just announced that it has teamed up with Blackboard, the Web site/software suite that is used in colleges all over the U.S. (Lord knows I had to use it all the time.) The deal should ensure that college students, starting with the upcoming fall semester, have easy access to electronic textbooks. (Crunch Gear)
I'll have to test this out in the fall and see how/whether it integrates with the Nook.
... Having Students Turn in Hard Copies of Papers -
In the course of my duties as a WPA, I've grown tired of grade appeal cases that hinge on student: "I turned in my paper" and teacher: "I didn't receive it." Also, I hate it when grades are dependent on information that exists nowhere in the universe except on one piece of paper, like an in-class rough draft or peer review. Loose leaves can be lost.
I think I'm done with hard copy in my own classes, but I'm trying to decide whether or not to issue a program-wide recommendation or position statement encouraging teachers to have students submit work electronically. I like the objectivity of a timestamped post to a course web site; the student is able to see for himself or herself that the file IS there. What are your own practices?
... A little sanity in the file sharing wars? - The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus reported today that "A federal judge has cut a Boston University student?s illegal file-sharing fine by 90 percent, declaring the original fee ?unconstitutionally excessive.? The decision is sure to be appealed. More information at http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Judge-Reduces-Students/25459/?sid=wc&utm_s
... How to create PDF archives of web pages for research -
If you are like me, you might like to save PDFs of web pages as archives for later research. Here are two tips that might assist with that for Windows machines:
PDF Creator. I have Adobe Acrobat Professional on my machine, but it's so slow generating PDFs from the browser (no, it's not machine; happens with every machine I've had). The open source application PDFCreator is much faster. Plus, the first dialogue it brings up is a title for the document based on the title field of the web page. I either use that or modify it, and then PDFCreator uses that title as the default for generating the file name. Very rarely, PDFCreator will not be able to generate a good PDF of a web page and then I have to go back to pokey ole' Adobe Acrobat Professional.
Readability is a bookmarklet that produces a more reader-friendly vers... First-Year Writing Files - This is just a collection of links to files associated with my administration of my university's first-year writing program. I may add files here later:
Instructor Manual
Syllabus for English 509: this is my syllabus for the teacher-training course I'm teaching this fall. Our program requires two pedagogy courses, one that leans toward the theory end and another that leans toward practice; this is the latter.
... My would-be GraphJam submission -
... On the candy, of course. -
^clicking image goes to larger version. I estimate that I wrote this obtuse little story sometime around third grade.
... Teaching 101 This Fall - I've been off-and-on planning my English 101 class this fall. We have just made some biggish changes to our writing curriculum -- different textbooks and somewhat different assignments -- and I wanted to be sure to teach 101 so that I'll get this new curriculum internalized and have a solid understanding of how our students respond to it.
The book I'll be using for 101 is Writing Arguments, you know, the one by Ramage, Bean, and Johnson. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to use anything from Writing Spaces as well, and if so, which essays. I'm thinking about What Is Academic Writing, I Need You to Say ?I?: Why First Person is Important in College Writing, and So You've Got a Writing Assignment. Now What?.... THERE'S the ball! - My little guy:
He loves to tell everyone where the location of a ball is. When I take him to any kind of store, he hollers "THERE'S the ball!" whenever he sees something spherical (fruits in the produce section, Easter eggs, anyt... One Room a Day - I've said this before, but I read a lot of productivity blogs wherein the writers strategize about bringing order to chaos, moving projects forward, that kind of thing. On one of them, I read about a "one room a day" approach to cleaning. The idea is that you do whatever basic subsistence-level cleaning needs to be done (dishes, laundry, cleaning up spills and Goldfish cracker crumbs, etc.), then you focus on deep-cleaning one room for about 15-20 minutes. Here's what we're doing:
Monday, kitchen
Tuesday, bathrooms
Wednesday, bedrooms
Thursday, living room
Friday, garage and cars
Saturday, dining room
Sunday, hallways and laundry room
I'm very happy with how it's working so far; I just hope we can keep it up. I'm much less stressed in a clean house.
... Little Sister! - Our son Henry now has a little sister, Clara. Eight pounds zero ounces, nineteen inches, score of nine on both Apgars. Born via scheduled c-section, a decision I may or may not write more about later. And she's wonderful, but of course I would say that! Many adorable pictures here.
... Am I an Expressivist? - I've always thought that no, I'm really not an expressivist. I'm much more interested in assigning research-based argument writing in my classes than I am in assigning personal narratives or personal essays. That being said, it isn't as though those genres are mutually exclusive, obviously. Here's where I stand now:
In my own experience having written a whole lot of different texts for academic audiences, the response to what I write is overwhelmingly more positive when I make it personal and accessible -- chatty, even -- than when I write a paper that more closely resembles the IMRAD tone and structure. I've also noticed that for academic lectures, not just ones I've given but ones I've attended, audience response is much more positive when a speaker tells stories along with presenting information and argument. ... Thoughts on Basic (and Not-So-Basic) Writing - So far in my graduate course this semester, among other readings, I've assigned Mina Shaughnessy's introduction to Errors and Expectations, an excerpt from Robert Connors' Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, an excerpt from Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing, and David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University." These four I mention are really forming a constellation in my mind about teaching academic writing to beginners, especially the place of grammar, that dude who just will not leave the party.
For one thing -- as I'm pleased the students in class picked up on -- when most people say "grammar," they don't mean only grammar. It's a shorthand, umbrella term for a lot of organizational, rhetorical, and stylistic conventions that the user of the term "grammar" doesn't know how to articulate. Every time I read Bartholomae's essay (PDF)... Macrorie Concept Map - This afternoon in my composition pedagogy course, we talked about Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing -- the excerpt from the Norton Book of Composition Studies, anyway. We also talked about the article by Peter Elbow in the same anthology. As I was preparing for class, I thought it would be fun to make a diagram of Macrorie's idea of "Engfish," the unfortunate result of a lot of schooling in writing, next to his definition of "good writing." I plan to say more about expressivism, the approach to teaching writing that Macrorie and Elbow are often associated with, in a near-future post. But for now, the concept map:
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