Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

Its the first day of classes here at Rowan and Blackboard is giving me issues posting Web links, so here are the videos we are going to show in Introduction to Writing Arts:

Updated 12/8/07, 9:48am. The New York Times continues its tradition of mapping traumatic spaces in its remediation of the shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, where Robert A. Hawkins killed eight people with an assault rifle.

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Via Roy Tennant’s Current Cites, the latest edition of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology special section on folksonomies:

This special section of four articles plus a substantive introduction by the guest editor focus on user tagging and what has been called “folksonomies” — or user-created taxonomies. The articles are an interesting mix of simple explanations of why users tag, tag usage in Flickr, and others that seek to explain various tagging systems and how they may or may not be useful in retrieval.

We’ve been talking a bit about tagging and folksonomies in my Technologies and the Future of Writing module, and students have been slow to see the reason for tagging and the comprehending just what folksonomies are, and to be honest I have often found myself at a loss for explaining it to them. I’ve yet to read the articles included in this special edition, but I’m hoping that they—and especially the guest editors’ introduction—will help us gain a better understand the implications that folksonomies can have on classification systems and writing technologies.

NPR’s Larry Abramson began a two part series this morning on Morning Edition on the growing trend of students taking courses online (according to a new Sloan-C survey, nearly 1 in 5 students take at least 1 online course). The first report is called “Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges.” Abramson offers a surprising balanced report on the benefits and drawbacks (though, these were weaker, I think) of teaching online from the perspective of two college professors and one or more students.

The piece, however, does tend to fall back on the typical tropes of teaching, for example:

The process looks kind of awkward — the natural flow of a regular class is missing, as responses arrive onscreen in a digital flood. But at second glance, there’s something else here not seen in a regular college class: All of the students are paying attention and all are engaged.

Later he states that the professor “is part of the show” of face-to-face classes. Stating that students are “paying attanetion” and “are engaged” recapitulates several unfortunate ideas about what education is, notably that education is when students are listening attentively to the teacher espousing knowledge and that, for the most part, students are not engaged in their classes. Rather, it would have been nice if Abramson described the active learning experience (or, as he calls it, “a digital flood”) that is taking place is the classes he reports on, where the synchronous medium is encouraging all students to express their ideas, voices, etc—something that often does not happen in face-to-face discussions.

Tomorrow Abramson is going going to investigate the “growing sophistication of how to teach effectively online,” so perhaps he will address some of these issues.

I must say, however, that it is nice to see that at least one media outlet is catching up to what we have known for many years—synchronous and ansychronous communications enhance teaching and learning.

Update 12/2/07: The second installment is called “Illinois Schools Look to Tech Tools to Teach.”

Soon after my engineering students sat down in front of the computers in the computer classroom that we are “squatting in” (so sayeth the Assistant Dean) in Education Hall, one of them brought up the Kindle, and pointed to this image:

He was just enthralled with how well the pencil shows the Kindle’s size and shape. I agreed that it was an excellent example of scaling and mapping. I think Tufte would agree, too.

Jim Brown over at Blogging Pedagogy (by way of Earth Wide Moth) points to Voicethread, an application which allows users to annotate images documents, and videos with sound and text from multiple users. I have been searching for something like this for quite some time. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of assignments Jim comes up with (his assignments are always quite cool).

Right now I’m thinking of asking my grad course next semester, Writing for Electronic Communities, to use it in their presentations of their usability test results (as an alternative to the horror of PowerPoint, for example). Or, perhaps, to compose a Voicethread compendium to the written report which provides oral and written comments to screen shots and data. My engineering students this semester could orally describe their parametric design process as they optimized their bottle rocket and truss designs.

I’m having trouble with the embed—sorry!

My old friend who is an art teacher in the town where I grew up (and I blogged about here) is having her students design advertisements based on the iPod theme. Students come up with their own poses to communicate a certain meaning. My favorite is by joseph318:

I am constantly amazed by the work her students are doing–especially when I think back to what I created in that same classroom space: papier-mâché everything—a memory my sister also shares. Their understanding of technique, theory, and form suggest that there is something significant going on in their minds and in her classroom. When I first saw the pieces I immediately thought of Janet Emig’s The Composing Process of 12th Graders, wondering if there is a composing process that can be identified for K-6 art students.

Chris Anson of North Carolina State University forwarded a link on the WPA list to a pointed and hilarious letter from Pat Conroy to the editor of the Charleston (WV) Gazette in which he lambastes the Kanawha County school board’s suspension of his books, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. The letter begins with:

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, “The Prince of Tides” and “Beach Music.” I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

And ends with:

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book banners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works — but writers and English teachers do.

Update, 9:18pm: Video from Zack Harold who is one of three finalists in West Virginia for MTV’s Choose or Lose ‘08 election coverage. He submitted this as port of the interview process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpq1yZOrtYA

Update 10/24: An uncut, extended version has been leaked:

Just came across this: The Blogging Scholarship. Funded by College Scholarships, this is an annual award that provides college student bloggers up to “$10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs.” Full or part-time students eligible. The 2007 deadline has just passed (see the 20 finalists, which have blogs on a range of subjects), but prepare for the 2008 competition by blogging your fingers off.

Hat tip: Mark Ghosh at weblog tools collection

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