Based on personal experience, I have to recognize some grain of truth in this piece reporting on narcissism among Gen Y college students.

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory asks students to react to such statements as: "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I like to be the center of attention."

The study found that almost two-thirds of recent college students had narcissism scores that were above the average 1982 score. Thirty percent more college students showed elevated narcissism in 2006 than in 1982.

If nothing else, the piece makes me want to think further about the links between the physical and online social activities of today. Read to the end to get to this posting's subject line.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 08:52 AM
Taged as >> it's all about metube | Permalink

If you subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education, you might want to click over to "YouTube Youniversity" by Henry Jenkins. I don't have an account and had to settle for a version of the piece passed around through e-mail, which makes me want to revise my earlier comments about e-mail--the added relative privacy of e-mail probably has its advantages. Jenkins's piece makes a number of points regarding media and teaching. There is the familiar call to move beyond analysis if we hope to provide relevant instruction in new media:

In such a world, the structural and historical schisms separating media production and critical-studies classes no longer seem relevant. Students around the country are pushing to translate their analytic insights about media into some form of media production. And they are correctly arguing that you cannot really understand how these new media work if you don't use them yourself.

Before we started our master's program [in comparative media studies], I went on the road to talk with representatives of more than 50 companies and organizations. They told me that they value the flexibility, creativity, and social and cultural insights liberal-arts majors bring to their operations. They also shared a devastating list of concerns--liberal-arts students fall behind other majors in terms of teamwork, leadership, project completion, and problem solving. In other words, they were describing the gap between academic fields focused on fostering autonomous learners and professional contexts demanding continuing collaborations. Those desired skills were regularly fostered in other disciplines that have laboratory-based cultures that test new theories and research findings through real-world applications.

At such a moment, we need to move beyond preparing our students for future roles as media scholars, wrapped up in their own disciplinary discourses, and instead encourage them to acquire skills and experiences as public intellectuals, sharing their insights with a larger public from wherever they happen to be situated. They need to be taught how to translate the often challenging formulations of academic theory into a more public discourse

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:40 AM
Taged as >> youknow who youare | Permalink

With this in mind, I suggest that upon arriving at a job, somewhat counter-intuitively, it makes sense to focus some energies outside of the self, establishing a small program, set of classes, computer lab, or other initiative that will give you a presence and create connections with colleagues and decision makers. Of course, these efforts should not be completely other-centered--when I arrived at UNC, there were no computer-assisted classrooms, so creating such a space was needed to facilitate my own work, but the project had a public face.

Clearly, also you need to transition in the early stages of a career to a self-interested mode, probably working up dissertation materials into publications. Having established a public presence initially, any retreats into a work cocoon are likely to be revealed in a positive light--willing to reach out, but committed to research and able to hunker down to perform.

Over time, you want to move back into public realms, this time likely extending to work in the institution as a whole. This work is likely to be service oriented, but the larger point is you are networking now beyond the department level, sitting on campus committees, organizing events, maybe co-teaching.

With this movement (actually all the time in an academic position), you are likely to find that you need to operate in both self- and other-interested spheres simultaneously. Here is where learning to commingle your personal areas of interest with the public work you do will pay off. If you do technology, perhaps say no to the curriculum revision and yes to the distance education committee. If you participate in a large-scale campus initiative, see if you can present or publish on institutional decision making. A progression in which you extend yourself publicly should eventually translate into connections on a level outside your institution, working on advisory boards, reviewing or editing submissions to journals, perhaps organizing conferences.

Ultimately, the transition to tenured professor should, in my mind, bring the personal and public interests into closer alignment. The rationale for aiming for such an alignment is not to be more productive. You will no doubt have to continue doing work in both areas, but these activities can lap over each other. The rationale is to emphasize your personal interests, even as you willingly apply them to helping others and make them public. You need to aim for a place where you can do what makes you feel good, share that work, and get attention for it.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 01:18 PM
Taged as >> transition into the sweet spot | Permalink

I’d like to send out a message aimed at two different audiences. It’s a post to weave together two threads of conversation I’ve been considering of late. The first thread is Web 2.0. I know: not another summation of what makes the second Web different from the static Web. But, remember, I’m thinking of two different audiences here. And one of them needs to learn more about the current state of the Web, and especially about writing on the Web. Consider the composition outcomes offered by the Council of Writing Program Administrators:

By the end of first-year composition, students should have a critical understanding of digital literacy, including:

• using the computer for drafting, revising, responding, and editing
• employing research strategies using electronic databases
• conducting web-based research and evaluating online sources
• understanding the difference in rhetorical strategies used in writing traditional and hyper-text prose/graphics.

I should note that these outcomes are the current set listed on the WPA technology plank blog and they may have shifted some after discussion at the recent WPA conference, but they will serve to highlight the need to explain something about the second web to the WPA audience. The outcomes represent a static understanding of the Web and technology-mediated writing. (For expansion on the concerns regarding the statement, see the recent discussion collected nicely by Kathie Gossett and Derek Mueller.) I’m in an odd position, since I really know just a little about Web 2.0 and even less about how to construct outcomes for writers. Further, the members of the WPA community represent an audience of sophisticated writers, expert teachers, and gifted scholars. I feel, though, that I can address this group to say, focus more on the nature of writing today on the Web. I can say this because I, too, need to think through the kinds of writing outcomes that might play out on the current Web.

So, what might writing teachers remark about the Web today? Well, clearly the Web is growing functionally and visibly social. Take the communication activity that characterized healthy e-mail or newsgroup discussion during the first years of the Net boom (say, 1994-2001), and then translate it into Web space. The Web and its mechanisms of subscription, notification, trackback, and comment now facilitate a more public and spatialized version of e-exchange. If e-mail once eclipsed the letter, it now sits in the shadow of the social Web. Where does that leave writing teachers looking toward the future (present)? Note: this is not a train on the tracks argument. (It's not about technology's ubiquitous nature and reach. The claim is that writing can be a social act, a claim nearly every writing teacher would support, but a claim often not reflected in many classrooms.)

Perhaps there really is only one audience addressed in this message, since the second audience I had in mind concerns itself as well with the nature of writing. This group might be represented by the sample in the latest Pew report on the state of blogging. Members of this group almost certainly “get news from the Internet” (97%) and most of them (77%) “have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, and videos online.” Seventy-seven percent. And, get this:

Bloggers also like to create and share what they make. Forty-four percent of bloggers have taken material they find online – like songs, text, or images – and remixed it into their own artistic creation. By comparison, just 18% of all internet users have done this.

And this:

[F]our out of five bloggers (80%) post text to their blog, but nearly as many (72%) display photos on their blog. Nearly half of all bloggers (49%) say they have posted images other than photos to their blog – items such as drawings, graphs or clip art. Close to a third (30%) of bloggers had posted audio files to their blog and another 15% vlogged, or posted video files to their blog.

True. Writing rules the blogosphere, but three quarters of bloggers posting images? Thirty percent posting audio files? Fifteen percent posting videos? That’s a lot of writers dealing in multimedia.

Of course, not all bloggers post multimedia. More to the point, not all writers blog. So, maybe this is just a fringe element, a blip. But I don’t think so. The Pew report notes the rapid growth of blogging. Twelve to nineteen year olds blog more than twice as much as older bloggers. The percentage of blog readers has shot up since 2005. No, this is not an insignificant shifting of the ways people are writing. Writing is moving into social Web space. And Web writers compose with multimedia.

And, that’s exactly why I’d ask a group of teachers, scholars, and practitioners of writing to think about the activities and opportunities (tag as outcomes, if needed) afforded by the second Web. It’s a chance to put forth some suggestions about what you need to know and what you need to do to write today. To write today you need to

• Conceptualize networks,
• Find and move materials,
• Make rights decisions.
• Edit images,
• Edit sounds,
• Use a movie or authorware program,
• Compose prose,
• And what else?

You need to spatialize the net. Understand computing metaphors, established (desktop, server) and alternative (bus stop, kitchen sink). Know about files and applications. Understand and shape your computing environment. Find archives and databases. Compose searches. Get into the public domain. Know not to be thwarted. Capture. Screen shot. Exercise your fair use. Make decisions. Give credit. Know about layers. Resize. Crop. Add text. Move among media. Compose with a timeline. Fade in. Say something. Shape it. Fade out.

I list these needs as expectations. I would hope students leaving a writing class could meet such expectations. I list them because I feel there are more important outcomes that these activities might facilitate. One, they might enable students to participate in written exchanges with currency. And, two, they stand a good chance of engaging writers with their materials. The outcomes might be the ability to say something meaningful personally and relevant socially. Only then are we likely to discover that unnamable suspension felt when writing well, forgetting (I would hope) the assignment, and instead fixing on the mixing

 

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 08:57 AM
Taged as >> weaving the second Web and writing outcomes together | Permalink | Comments (3)

Moreover, publishing within such a network seems increasingly crucial to media scholars, who need the ability to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about, and for whom form needs to be able to follow content, allowing not just for writing about mediation but writing in a mediated environment.

Point two:

The move from the discrete, proprietary, market-driven press to an open access scholarly network became in our conversations both a logical way of meeting the multiple mandates that academics operate within and a necessary intervention for the academy, allowing it to forge a more inclusive community of scholars who challenge opaque forms of traditional scholarship by foregrounding process and emphasizing critical dialogue. Such dialogue will foster new scholarship that operates in modes that are collaborative, interactive, multimediated, networked, nonlinear, and multi-accented. In the process, an open access scholarly network will also build bridges with diverse non-academic communities, allowing the academy to regain its credibility with these constituencies who have come to equate scholarly critical discourse with ivory tower elitism.

I don't want to come of as hyper-critical. I'm eager to see this play out. There is also a pedagogical dimension that is really worth a look. I'm excited about such moves and want to plug them.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:54 AM
Taged as >> new venues and process may mean new ideas and relationships | Permalink

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:37 AM
Taged as >> tweaking margins and possibly noses | Permalink

But that presentation matters to me because I tried to weave in something personal, something expansive in the prose and metaphor. And it really matters because John Slatin afterward told me to trust my ideas, to do more with the metaphors and language play. It was a powerful suggestion that I had forgotten, and remaking the piece has helped me savor it once again.

In the video for this year’s conference I repurpose the bus stop metaphor and use less prose, more sound, and some images. The video itself simply makes the point that instructional materials need to emphasize composing over consuming new media. (I’m not sure how much longer one can get away with that angle in these presentations, but still it resurfaces for me.)

The video also hopes to open some questions, including,

Why is there so little collaboration between programmers and content providers in most electronic text production models?

Does the power of autonomy and individual authorship undermine collaborative paradigms?

How much new media composing practice must authors of instructional materials have?

What should be the role of familiar pedagogical terms and structures in new media instructional materials?

What limits and benefits derive from the print biases of current electronic materials?

How can publishers facilitate projects that enable more new media composition for authors and students?

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 09:51 PM
Taged as >> looking back to find the next stop | Permalink | Comments (3)

We also did a lot with images in this literature class, so I took inspiration from that to craft some of the remarks I gave this weekend to our graduating seniors. I paste a version of them below.

I’d like to ask your indulgence for brief experiment in visualization. I’d like you to think about the way our minds move between looking at the details in life and taking in the bigger picture. On the computer if you are working with images, there is a function that helps you switch between looking at the details and seeing the bigger picture, the magnifying glass or zoom tool. Think about a well-known image like Monet’s painting of lilies and clouds. Zoom in on Monet’s lilies, and you see some leaves and yellow flowers; zoom in more and you see merely the paint blobs, built up into hard-to-recognize shapes. Recall this painting or some other favorite image and zoom in, then zoom out. See a small detail and feel the zooming effect.

They say that verbal learners, like language-focused English majors, tend to hone in on the details—this passage, this sentence, this word. It’s what makes us great readers. So now we’re into the most minute of details, the last semester, the last month, the last hours. So before you leave English, we’re going to complement all that verbal and language learning with one last lesson, a lesson in visual learning—we still have six minutes to teach you something and we don’t want you to go away without getting your money’s worth. So start with this afternoon, or this weekend—the splotch of paint. Then zoom out to the semester—the yellow flower. And then zoom out to see the image of the lilies on the water—your career here as an English major.

Now the real tricky part. Imagine zooming out fifty years from now and walking up to a larger picture framed and hanging on some museum wall. Now imagine what the image would be like if it were missing the lilies, or even the yellow flower. If, instead, there were merely a dull pond or an empty space. What seems like a small detail, a brief moment in zoom mode contributes to the entire image when we zoom back out. And so, I ask that you don’t doubt that what is happening today and what has just happened in your years with us will continue to color and shape you as you pencil in the bridges on your horizons and figures in your lives. And I ask that you remember your zoom tool works both ways. As you move forward, take some time now and then to zoom back in and remember these teachers, these moments, and these friends. We’re honored to be among the important details of your lives. Now go out and continue filling in your canvas. Congratulations.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 07:28 AM
Taged as >> details build into the larger vision | Permalink

In some ways I’m a bit surprised that a concrete way forward failed to materialize. I guess, though, I’m not that worried about it. Jeff makes a good point about the need to simply talk over things and also made a good point in the meeting regarding not trying to hit a home run when integrating technology into teaching for the first time. The morning blue sky session went well, with large concerns about creating a new “book” that allowed a hybrid model that blended scholarship with typical textbook instruction. The idea was to make pedagogical authorship easier to recognize in terms of promotion and provide an extra layer of information for teachers using the book or students wishing to take things to the next level. We also moved toward a model that includes folksonomy-based interaction and filtering. We wanted the ability to tag items already in the collection and to customize the materials based on key terms. A big focus was on developing something modular that would allow instructors to combine models as needed to construct a course. To my mind, the assignment or syllabus creation piece of a new book could serve as the main entry point (at least for thinking about how to create and organize the materials). This is something I’ve wanted for a long time and something Johndan mentioned trying to implement with publishers in the past—a course builder tool that operates on a semester-based timeline. Much as one can drag, drop, arrange, and edit video clips in something like iMovie, an instructor can compose a course based on these modules that come with layers like the pedagogical and scholarly component that might contextualize the work as she puts together the syllabus. We also spent time talking about how to integrate content-oriented resources into the project—a media archive, links to openly available online materials, possible functions for uploading sample projects and additional readings. So, the highlights for me that we came up with were the hybrid text that includes a scholarly layer, the folksonomy participation tools, the modular organization with syllabus composing tools, and the fluid access to rich resources in many modes—all terrific specifications for a next-generation teaching text.

Our afternoon session, however, was more remarkable (to my mind) for what it revealed about the readiness of the academy to implement such a project. After an initial attempt to think about the project modules that might go into the collection and the listing of a few possibilities we began to try to more carefully spec out the functionality, but quickly took up questions of how radically we were altering the existing model of knowledge creation and textbooks. This was a frustrating conversation to my mind as it ultimately hinged on terminology and priorities, Some members had problems with calling projects things like “audio essays” or the notion of the syllabus, the assignment, and assessment. Ultimately we ended up debating the pitfalls of replicating print logic and pedagogy in a discussion that centered on the inadequacy of these terms and of the project to capture a free-wheeling, remix-based composition that could not be addressed or assessed in conventional terms—at least that was the question under discussion as I heard it.

To me, however, this debate reduces to the familiar saw about the shape and certainty of language and the level of abstraction we should bring to our work. Wondering whether we might call the module an assignment rather than a project, doing away with assessment, or calling something a studio, or kitchen, or whatever instead of a syllabus builder is really a debate about the influence of language and culture and our ability to resist their control. Yes, we replicate when we work within the system or extend rather than tear down the system, but whether it’s even possible to escape such inevitabilities is also open to debate. Replace the essay with the mash up? Sure, but don’t imagine that will break the bonds of institutional and linguistic control or that everyone agrees about the nature of those bonds or that control. Arguing against a potential system because it falls prey to the vagaries of language, institutions, and culture is a bit disingenuous unless one recognizes that the debate boils down to the cracking of the epistemological walnut of knowledge status and creation. Sure, at some level the nut cracks revealing the fundamental uncertainty within its fragmented shell, but even the most radical dissolutionist recognizes the others may want to leave their walnut whole, or move forward using the leftover pieces, And here’s where taste comes in. I prefer my metaphysics with some certainty and pragmatics stirred in. I’m comfortable working with the existing structures of knowledge, trying to tweak them, build on familiar terms, even tradition. Bringing some inescapable printcentricity into the project poses no problems for me. I suppose it’s not surprising that questions about the status and shape of knowledge circulated a good deal in the meeting. For the most part the questions lead to helpful insights, but they also pulled attention away from how we might go about actually making something rather than talking about it.

Well, attach slash soapbox to the end of that paragraph. I’m excited about the demonstration of Sophie that we had. My experience using TK3 tells me that authorware offers great promise as a way of making multimedia publishing a viable option for teachers and students. I have worked on electronic accompaniments with the outsourced-production-team and content-provider model and can say they really miss the boat in terms of asking book authors to work as composers with new media. Every book now has gobs of media magic in its content. The next step is to get some into the production of the ideas and the book itself. My sense is that it will be slow going, but that since Sophie will be open source and extendable it may be one of the main avenues to go down in the next few years. I’ve resolved myself to compose some sample book stuff with it as soon as the beta version comes out and to see about working on the DRM and licensing issues as part of any project I take on with a publisher.

I’ll say more on that in the near future. I’m eager to open up the book and its production process to exactly the kinds of ideas we started hashing out in the meeting.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 10:01 AM
Taged as >> textboook publishing reflections | Permalink

This is to say, of course, we must and will consider and make countless choices about commercial education. The power. The power of making those choices intoxicates. And should. The idea is to imagine standing amid the swirl and shaping it, affecting its pieces and pitch ("not so fast"). So, textbook writers should ask not whether to be a part of commercial education, but how carefully/forcefully they might shape its production. Aim for?

[Bullets Now]

Relevant
Self-reflective
Classroom-generated
Thundering
Project-based
Multimodal
Public
Creative
Effective (add fraught tree—creative vs. effective)

Watch out for?

Replication
Pitch
Watering
Over-abstraction
Over-simplification
[in that order]

Now it’s got to be a project of love. However wrapped in excesses of deadlines and demographics, not so fast. It has to be a project of love. Rhetorical lights turned to journeys with others. Changes felt and offered. Motivated well, whenever misguided. Some projects tap along for work or money, but [shift the pronoun here] I (one, you) can’t hope to shape the swirl without an honest intent (tag as foundation) that stands behind the words. Without pretense, I can hope to affect.

Not so fast. The real projects must add jazz to the mind. They’ve got to move. Motivate. Make us puzzle thoughts and tweak them toward expression. (The feel-good premise of the year.) The phenomenology of message-making plied into a techno-teacherly process stopped in the shape of book and site. Yes, it’s not just the shape but the process we’re after. That mental change. That sustain.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 10:55 AM
Taged as >> brainstorm textbook publishing redemption | Permalink

One other observation: Stephanie and I sat down for the podcast after I turned over the idea of writing yet another progress report and snapshot of our technology efforts. With the three or so blank word processor pages and a set of points to make staring me in the face, I decided it would be easier to just record a conversation and make the points that way. It took about two hours to record and then clean up. Maybe a wash, but the impulse not to type and instead record was undeniable.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 06:01 PM
Taged as >> SITES lab status report | Permalink

We touch on the ways that traditional publishers have struggled to monetize electronic work created by academics. We also speak about the difficulties for scholars working with electronic media when familiar publishing mechanisms are not relevant to their work. And, we think about institutional changes and tools that might help address some of these challenges.

The conversation is recorded in this podcast about blogs, electronic scholarship, publishing, and the academy. You can hear about more of the economic issues related to blogs and electronic publishin in the first podcast covering our conversation.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 11:32 PM
Taged as >> publish electronic scholarship transform institutions | Permalink

One tension in our discussion centered around the ways that blogging can be configured as a professional activity. As blogging moves from a personal to a professional writing mode, what models can be put in place to support it? How might free market or commercial models such as advertising-supported funding alter the spirit of blogging? How do folksonomies and attention economies alter familiar commercial models? How can or should the academy subsidize professional blogging? Are there alternative models such as cooperatives that might sustain and extend blogging?

A good bit of our discussion also focused on tensions wrought by blogging that might be felt particularly by academics. We worried about losing proven models of editorial control but noted the evolving self correcting nature of blogging and its communities of knowledge. We wondered about the impact of the severely compressed time to production for blog writing. And we thought about the concerns raised by the forms of blog writing and about aspects of academic culture that determine how knowledge is created and counted.

I have compiled some of the conversation into a podcast covering blogs, economics, and the academy. The segments of the discussion included in the podcast treat some of the concerns sketched out above. It shouldn't be too surprising upon listening to the podcast to learn that our conversation touched on these issues, but served less to provide solid answers and more to open questions.

Posted by Daniel Anderson at 10:30 PM
Taged as >> academic economic blog writing models | Permalink