tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52367982024-03-13T09:29:21.291-04:00Odds and EndsNick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.comBlogger109125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-18016003036480151702017-03-23T23:16:00.002-04:002017-03-28T11:56:30.579-04:00#4C17Link Collection and Drawing WinnerTo help encourage folk who were at the recent <a href="http://www.ncte.org/cccc/review/2017program" target="_blank">Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland March 15 - 18</a> to post links to their handouts or conference summaries, on Twitter, a contest evolved. It went like this:<br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Lauren E. Cagle</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"> tweeted:</span><br />
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<a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-hashtag m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/hashtag/4C17?src%3Dhash&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNHTTBPDC8vFMQW6wxyO7Tiepw3rpA" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/4C17?src=hash" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>#</s><b>4C17</b></a> folks, please consider sharing links to your scripts and slides for <a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-hashtag m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/hashtag/CsTheCouch?src%3Dhash&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNFHef6pcQVB76ABKkWuMdmYCHA8sw" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CsTheCouch?src=hash" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>#</s><b>CsTheCouch</b></a> folks. For <a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-hashtag m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/hashtag/accessibility?src%3Dhash&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNHNP5Ep8VeD7K-FATLEN2Ftm9XgrQ" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/accessibility?src=hash" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>#</s><b>accessibility</b></a>, include image descriptions!</div>
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<b>That lead</b> me to this idea:</div>
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<a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-hashtag m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17?src%3Dhash&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNFrsJ9mwCz9Q32WZYWVrPG1Wnhk_A" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17?src=hash" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>#</s><b>4c17</b></a> A contest for this. Use <a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-hashtag m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17link?src%3Dhash&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNFjENzLniOWRp5A1sxiIMuUhZVKug" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17link?src=hash" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>#</s><b>4c17link</b></a> & I will draw one name from a hat & send winner a copy of <a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-atreply m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/PriceMargaret&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNFNpdECj-GOy7Iuo1FFCU8Mfomd7w" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/PriceMargaret" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>@</s><b>PriceMargaret</b></a>'s Mad at School: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://bit.ly/2nD0E7A&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNHsLRo_NPkrVDVcDgl8Sy-bZifvig" href="http://bit.ly/2nD0E7A" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/2nD0E7A</a></div>
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<b>Margaret Price </b>generously made it better:</div>
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. <a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-atreply m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/ncarbone&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNHhmUpigC7g6RZYXyasi4VFnTWRSQ" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/ncarbone" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>@</s><b>ncarbone</b></a> That is so exciting! I will sign it if you like. I have extra copies at home I can send out. Thanks for doing this! <a class="m_486915358918194944gmail-twitter-hashtag m_486915358918194944gmail-pretty-link m_486915358918194944gmail-js-nav" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17?src%3Dhash&source=gmail&ust=1490384396505000&usg=AFQjCNFrsJ9mwCz9Q32WZYWVrPG1Wnhk_A" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17?src=hash" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><s>#</s><b>4c17</b></a></div>
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And so here we are. Ten folk jumped in and made links to handouts, websites, slides or blog posts about conference sessions they lead or attended.<br />
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The winner of the drawing is: <span style="color: #351c75;"><b>Stephanie Wade of Unity College</b></span>.<br />
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And here, in order of appearance, is the compiled list of links; to see them in their native Twitter habit, go to, visit <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17link" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/hashtag/4c17link</a>, and you can skim the hashtag thread. But trust me, this is faster:<br />
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1. @lecagle, Lauren Cagle: “How Can We Ethically Research Unethical Images” slides & talk script. <a href="https://t.co/b4hqKqkfOO" target="_blank"> https://t.co/b4hqKqkfOO</a><br />
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2. @mintburlap, Dan McCormick: “Locating Queer Writing as Failure”<br />
<a href="https://dtmccormick.wordpress.com/research/" target="_blank">https://dtmccormick.wordpress.com/research/</a><br />
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3. @BenVilla4Real, Ben Villarreal: A Blog Post on His First 4C’s after 10 Years in the Field and copy of his handout on Introducing Students to Twine.<br />
<a href="http://gamesandteaching.blogspot.com/2017/03/dissertations-digial-posters-on-my.html" target="_blank">http://gamesandteaching.blogspot.com/2017/03/dissertations-digial-posters-on-my.html</a><br />
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4. @tgrett, Teresa Grettano: Slides from Cultivating Collaboration Between Information Literacy & Writing Instruction, fellow presenters Barbara D’Angelo, Michelle Albert, & Caroline Sinkinson<br />
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/tgrett-slides" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/tgrett-slides</a><br />
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5. @invernessfalls, m∆tt gømes (Mathew Gomes): Slides from I.21, “Reframing Writing Assessment” w/ fellow presenters Catherine DeLazzero, Bridget Fullerton, & Dayna Goldstein<br />
<a href="http://goo.gl/s1gjTb" target="_blank">http://goo.gl/s1gjTb</a><br />
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6. @CSmithMo, Cheryl Smith: “Resources for “Social Annotation (SA) for Close Reading”,<br />
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/CSmithMo-slides" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/CSmithMo-slides</a><br />
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7. @cwittig, Carol Witting, Slides from panel A.21 “The Future of College Writing, And How to Stop It” <a href="http://tinyurl.com/cwittig-slides" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/cwittig-slides</a><br />
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8. @stwade, Stephanie Wade, “Root Systems: Creating & Sustaining Community Connections Via School Gardens,” w/ co-panelists Veronica House, Carla Sarr, Kelly Shea, & Sarah Young<br />
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/stwade-slides" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/stwade-slides</a><br />
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9. @lygeia1, Ligia Mihut, Tweet included image of her handout —<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/lygeia1/status/843145603601260544" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/lygeia1/status/843145603601260544</a><br />
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10. @cbdilger, Bradley Dilger Included a link to The Corpus & Repository of Writing, <a href="http://writecrow.org/" target="_blank">http://writecrow.org/</a>, which has summaries of session A.10 & H.47 on the homepage.Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-17435417755678586692017-02-14T13:47:00.003-05:002017-02-14T13:59:44.363-05:00#worthassigning: Daryl Davis on Conversing with People Who Hate<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Conor Friedersdorf, a conservative opinion writer for <i>The Atlantic</i> has a new post up (2/13/17) titled, 'Every Racist I Know Voted for Donald Trump' at <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://theatln.tc&source=gmail&ust=1487183683700000&usg=AFQjCNEAy3vIGCSiBy4QFR1Acea08yBERg" href="http://theatln.tc/2kOWZEd" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://theatln.tc/2kOWZEd</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It's worth a look. Friedersdorf's title comes a quote by the man he profiles, Daryl Davis. Some of you might be familiar with Davis, but this is the first I ran across him and his project. He's a black musician who tries to persuade members of the KKK to leave that group. Friedersdorf provides a transcript of some of what Davis said in an interview with Love and Radio (<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://loveandradio.org/2017/02/how-to-argue/&source=gmail&ust=1487183683700000&usg=AFQjCNGLzg7kXFUM71G_2BpF-T3VevsWhA" href="http://loveandradio.org/2017/02/how-to-argue/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://loveandradio.org/2017/<wbr></wbr>02/how-to-argue/</a>). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here's a snippet of that, via Friedersdorf:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A Davis do:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Look for commonalities. You can find something in five minutes—even with your worst enemy. And build on those. Say I don't like you because you're white and I'm black. You disgust me … And so our contention is based upon our races. But you're like, ‘how do you feel about all these drugs on the street, and all these meth labs that are popping up?’ And I say, I think the law needs to crack down on things that people can get addicted to very easily and it's destroying our society. So you say, ‘Well yeah, I agree 100 percent.’ You might even tell me your son started dabbling in drugs. They don't discriminate. So now I see that you want what I want, that drugs are affecting your family the same way they affect my family, so now we're in agreement. So let's focus on that. As we focus more and more and find more things in common, things we have in contrast, such as skin color, matter less and less.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A Davis don’t:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“You can become argumentative but don't become condescending. Don't become insulting. You're going to hear things that you don't like. You're going to hear things that you know are absolutely wrong. And their opinion may be ridiculous. You will also hear things that are not opinions that they're going to put out as facts. ‘There are more black people on welfare than white people.’ Well, that's not true. And you should counter that and correct that. But don't do it in a manner that is insulting or condescending because you know they're wrong, and you're going to beat them over the head for being wrong. Show them the data, or tell them you'll get it, or if they really believe it, say, I know you're wrong, but if you think you're right then bring me the data.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A lot of what Davis says you can find in a good argument or rhetoric textbook. But hearing someone say it who practices it, and speaks in a contemporary voice from compelling experience, might be useful. This is lived argument and embodied respect. Note how much of Davis's work centers on listening and accepting the other person as a person. It's not that one accepts a vile idea, or a bad reasoning, but that before moving to disagreements, one listens with respect. And patience. And then responds with respect and reason and persistence, but not rancor.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I can see using the Friedersdorf piece, or the link through it to the full Love and Radio interview, as preface to a conversation about how class discussions might go, especially in courses that will be touching on contemporary political policy issues or themes. Or it might be used to supplement an argument course, or a course on civic responsibility or critical thinking or courses touching on things like fake news and media literacy.</span></div>
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Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-83879031003799374382016-03-11T16:18:00.003-05:002016-03-12T10:41:32.321-05:00Thoughts on HBCU and PWI Writing Centers After Reading Karen Keaton Jackson's WCJ Post<div class="p1">
Thanks to Karen Keaton Jackson for contributing to <a href="http://www.writingcenterjournal.org/community/" target="_blank">The Writing Center Journal's Community</a> site as a guest blogger.</div>
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In a post at <a href="http://www.writingcenterjournal.org/new-blog//why-have-hbcus-been-absent-from-the-writing-center-party" target="_blank">http://www.writingcenterjournal.org/new-blog//why-have-hbcus-been-absent-from-the-writing-center-party</a> called "WHY HAVE HBCUs BEEN ABSENT FROM THE WRITING CENTER PARTY?," Karen writes about how work loads and lack of funds make it hard for writing center directors and tutors in HBCU's to get active on a national scale. </div>
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The following response to Karen, which I could not manage to get to go into her post's comments, doesn't answer the national question directly. It does the opposite; it looks at more local and smaller possibilities. But what I hope is that by doing, when and where possible, more local conferences and writing projects that may require less time to complete, may create more entry into the field's national discussion.</div>
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Karen,</div>
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My job at Bedford/St. Martin's brings me to HBCU's once or twice a year, and so I've seen some of what you describe about work loads, lack of travel support, sometimes lack of professional development support. Those issues are not unique to HBCU's, but given that HBCU's, as you note, make up only 3% of U.S. higher ed institutions, the impact weighs more heavily for HBCU's overall than PWI's overall.</div>
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Time and money are hard challenges to overcome in an era of still-shrinking and ever more scarce resources. So I’m writing really to brainstorm some things that might help address that. These aren’t perfect ideas, and won’t work for all people in all places, but they might help.</div>
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The ideas build on your step #1: communication.</div>
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First, on travel support, I wonder if this might work to build HBCU and PWI writing center families’ interactions: where a PWI with faculty active in Writing Center scholarship and community is near an HBCU with a writing center, meet for lunch, or arrange for tutor swaps or cross tutor visits. </div>
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Perhaps it would be possible to hold a local, one day or half day writing center symposium. Or perhaps a joint tutor professional development. </div>
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An off shoot of these local meetings, HBCU&PWI DIY Conferences and Professional Development, to give it an abbreviation heavy name, might lead to more writing. </div>
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You wite honestly about getting writing done, sometimes sadly only in your head. You wrote too about being the last person on the team to turn in edits on two of three of your collaborative projects. </div>
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As hard as it is, you are finding a way to write. I would guess, that it might be easier for others to make time if they too could find ways to do more collaborative projects. Working with someone to reach a goal, whether it’s an exercise buddy, a book club to sustain reading, can help in many ways. </div>
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Collaborative writing is social, and for that perhaps restorative in a way that writing alone may not be. Also, it’s possible to choose writing projects that might be easier to complete, genres (the interview, the lesson plan, the description of practice or policy) that because they come from lived experience and insights might come to fruition more readily than pieces, like a formal longer form journal article, that usually take more time to not only write, but work through the peer review process. And a lot of these kinds of pieces, like your own blog posts on WCJ site, Karen, can find their way into the national discussion.</div>
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And so one can imagine too a combination of conference/meet up and the writing. Two centers -- maybe both HBCU's, maybe an HBCU and PWI in the same town, get together to not only share insights and begin a collegial conversations, but maybe just using the time together to write together, perhaps with fun food and drink so that the finding of words happens with the breaking of bread.</div>
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Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-37731215272477674002015-12-17T11:15:00.001-05:002017-04-19T15:30:38.761-04:00My Grandmother's Courage and Using Writing to Reveal Different TruthsFor me, the story starts May 6, 1929, when my grandmother, Frances Corridino Carbone, appeared before the Board of Pardons to plead for my great grandfather's release from prison. Research from my Aunt Fran discovered that Victor R. Le Valley, writing in the Hartford Courant on May 7, 1929, had the following item among a list of pardon reports he filed that day:<br />
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<b>Pleads for Father. </b></blockquote>
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Flushed with a girlish beauty, Frances Corradino of 48 Morgan Street made a tearful plea for the pardoning of her father, Gaetano Corradino, alleged member of black hand gang and charged with luring one Saladino to his death in Suffield nine years ago. </blockquote>
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“I’ll be 15 years old next Sunday,” she cried, “and it would be a real pleasure to have my Dad home again. Daddy,” she said, turning to the fair-haired, handsome man she so much resembled, “do you want to say something? </blockquote>
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Corradino spoke in spread-eagle fashion of his life before the crime, and Assistant State’s Attorney Donald A. Gaffney replied with the concluding statement, “I don’t think his family needs him so much.” </blockquote>
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Frances flared up at this. Undaunted by the presence of the august board of pardons, she stood up and retorted, “Well, I still think I need him. I ask you to put yourself in our place and ask yourself if you wouldn’t want him back. My father is no murderer.”<br />
She went away weeping on her sister’s shoulder, and her father went back through the door he had come, to resume the drill and discipline of his weary prison life.</blockquote>
Isn't that language something? You don't hear or read phrases such as "flushed with girlish beauty"; "handsome man she so much resembled"; or "resume the drill and discipline of his weary prison life" all that much anymore. They were commonplace for a daily paper in 1929 but sound poetic now, or maybe even overly sentimental and melodramatic.<br />
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And so the writing teacher in me imagines an exercise where students draft a similar small piece, just a few graphs, describing some small human interaction -- a conversation at lunch, a meeting, a disagreement over a bill. They might draft in their native vernacular, just to get something down, and then be asked to revise using more, florid?, melodramatic?, fictional?, poetic?, language. The exercise would be one, perhaps, in shifting the purpose of the story telling for a different effect or audience. And maybe for contrast from to the other, since we'd be playing at an imitation game, students might also recount the same event using the language and tropes of police report, or insurance investigation report, or some other account that generally affects dispassionate (so called) tone.<br />
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The idea in all this imitation is simply to play, but also to explore, in the play, what is true, or rather what truth is emphasized and in what way for what purpose.<br />
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For there is truth in the words Le Valley used.<br />
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Here are two pictures, my great grandfather and my grandmother, so you can see why she would be described as having "girlish beauty" (though the portrait of her is well after the parole hearing, we think a high school class photo) and he as a "fair-haired, handsome man." You'll certainly see the resemblance of her to him.<br />
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The photo of her, I believe, is from her senior year of high-school, when she would have been 18. In 1929, when she marched into the Board of Pardons hearing, she was only 15. When her father was arrested in 1919, she was five. As my second cousin Nick recounts here, <a href="https://youtu.be/wpLL00Ya95w?t=2m53s" target="_blank">in a speech about his grandparents given at a Toastmasters event</a>, the family believed our great grandfather was framed. Nick recounts how gangsters threatened Gaetano's family, specifically to kill his wife, my great grandmother, if the family spoke out in his defense at the time of trial.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1bUO1Q27kqI/Vmm15B4syGI/AAAAAAAAAlk/F9LvM-AyeY8/s1600/great_grandpa_corridino.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="1" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1bUO1Q27kqI/Vmm15B4syGI/AAAAAAAAAlk/F9LvM-AyeY8/s320/great_grandpa_corridino.jpg" width="244" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gaetano Corridino, my great grandfather, 1885- 1935</td></tr>
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<th><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zPDP1e9e34g/Vmm2A1cCRgI/AAAAAAAAAls/Mrli19ZPPBI/s1600/grandma_frances_corridino_carbone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="1" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zPDP1e9e34g/Vmm2A1cCRgI/AAAAAAAAAls/Mrli19ZPPBI/s320/grandma_frances_corridino_carbone.jpg" width="244" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">His daughter Frances, my grandmother, 1914 - 1990</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</th>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
What went unseen for years in my family was this story. My great grandfather died in prison, despite my grandmother's persistence in trying, before she was 18 even, to prove his innocence. My second cousin Nick's grandfather, Nick, (whom Nick was named after), was Frances's
brother. In his speech, my cousin Nick recounts his grandfather describing how
shortly after the police stormed into their home to arrest his father, two members of the mafia came to the house and threatened to kill Gaetano's wife, our great grandmother, if she spoke to his innocence.<br />
<br />
Gaetano was convicted. Gaetano had been a master mason, and because he could read and write, was a masonry foreman on the building of the G. Fox Department store in Hartford. So while not rich, he earned enough income to support a family six children. After my great-grandfather's arrest, the family had no income. This was before the New Deal, so no welfare, no aide. As my cousin recounts, his grandfather Nick dropped out of school at 6th grade to work. My great grandmother went to work in menial service jobs, and the older kids watched the younger kids. The family was ostracized, the children taunted at school; they grew up either in or barely out of poverty for many hard years. And memories in the neighborhood lingered, the story stayed current, and even after 10 years, my grandmother heard taunts. Still, she persisted, going to the parole board with her sister, speaking for her family where he mother could not (Nonny spoke the same very broken English Gaetano spoke). <br />
<br />
Still, despite the setback described in the item above by Le Valley, my grandmother persisted in her father's defense. This is from a May 8, 1934 round up of board of pardon hearings:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Daughter Makes Plea</b> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When the young daughter of Gaetanno Corradino, who has been serving a life sentence since October 29, 1920 for a murder committed in East Hartford, appeared for the sixth time and made a sympathetic plea for her father, State's Attorney Alcorn replied that he would not accept any responsibility if the board released Corradino. He denounced the crime as a brutal one and said the man was killed because he knew the facts of another murder. Mr. Alcorn said he sympathized with Corradino's family and praised the girl for her loyalty but told the board, "You are asked to endorse a particular form of favoritism."</blockquote>
Writing teacher aside: You'll note the above item, written just five years after the first item by Le Valley, comes closer to a contemporary newspaper idiom. It is more dispassionate. Yet there are details that hint at the emotion exposed in Le Valley's account: "made a sympathetic plea" and "sympathized with Corradino's family and praised the girl." But the repeated use of 'sympathy' in root form requires readers to supply their own details, or at least more details than Le Valley's account.<br />
<br />
So the writing above tells as much about the outcome, but reveals less about the flavor and emotions of the hearing. Contrasting these kinds of passages, or having students create their own variations and making their own contrasts, helps get at the one of the delightful things about writing -- the choices writers make about tone, details, voice, point of view. Those choices empower writers, and for student writers especially, who often feel insecure and unsure of power they do have, learning to engage these small sentence level choices is offers them a chance to write, for a passage or two anyway, with some power. Now the writer may not succeed -- the choices made, the attempt made may fail. But that's okay; the value is in the freedom to try.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, back to truth. There is truth in the sympathy attributed to Mr. Alcorn.<br />
<br />
My grandmother told my father that Mr. Alcorn later offered to pay her way to law school, so impressed was he with her poise and preparation. I don't know if my great grandfather was ever pardoned; I find no record of it, but his obituary from February 5, 1935 indicates he died at home.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Gaetano Corridino of 611 Wethersfield Avenue died Monday at his home after a short illness. He was born in Palazzolo, Italy, and was 50 years old. He leaves his wife, Mrs. Frances (Zgro) Corridino; three daughters, Mrs. Mary Maltese, Miss Frances Corridino and Miss Rose Corridino of Hartford; three sons, Nicholas Corridino, Thomas Corridino and Bruno Corridino of Hartford, and a sister in Italy. The funeral will be held Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. at his home, with a solemn high mass at 9 o'clock at St. Augustine's Church. Burial will be in Mt. St. Benedict Cemetery.</blockquote>
The above obit notice possibly obscures a truth and reveals a desire. My great grandfather's death certificate showed his place of residence at time of death to be a state prison that was in Wethersfield, CT. The funeral notice above was crafted with the aide of funeral director. It's short, and sad on its own -- 50 is young, even back in 1935 it was young. But it also hides as it was intended to do, by averring death at home, the larger family tragedy and trauma. Because the truth is saying that he died in prison would have caused more pain and embarrassment, more taunts at school, and opprobrium from neighbors.<br />
<br />
And so it is that sometimes we need and want writing to hide certain truths. The important facts in the obit notice are not where Gaetano died, but that his wife, sister in Italy, and children had lost a husband, brother and father. What matters is where the funeral, mass and burial will be, so those who care about Gaetano's survivors can offer their support. The death notice, as an act of writing, is a turn to something more normal: more families are absent fathers and husbands from death than imprisonment. It must have, on some level, become easier for my grandmother and great aunts and uncles, to say, "I am a widow," or "my father passed away," as a means to address his absence as life moved forward.<br />
<br />
It certainly seemed that way for my grandmother.<br />
<br />
Over time my grandmother and great aunts and uncles managed to pull themselves and their mother out of poverty. My great Uncle Nick became a successful business man, and his brothers Bruno and Tommy worked with him before Nick moved to Arizona. Bruno and Tommy served in combat in World War II. My grandmother met and married Carl V. Carbone, who became a successful restaurateur, and started her own family. <br />
<br />
She worked at her father's innocence as though a lawyer, doggedly, doing the leg work. But he died in prison, and the shame of his fate, that she couldn't win his release was a personal humiliation despite her courage and pride, her willingness to stand up before the justice system on his behalf.<br />
<br />
And so she never spoke of her father to her children.<br />
<br />
Until
one day my father came across a bible that was hidden away in the
attic. He saw the name Gaetano, the dates and newspaper clippings, not
only of the parole hearing, but from years before that, at the trial.
For though she was a newborn at the time of his arrest, and a toddler when
her father was convicted and sentenced to life, my grandmother, in her
early teens, researched the case, the law, and gathered news
accounts, trial transcripts, police reports. She talked to lawyers and judges looking for a way to overturn the conviction or to win his parole. She wanted back the father she mainly came know from prison visits.<br />
<br />
My father, of course, asked her about the bible, and she told him under the condition that he not say anything to his siblings, my aunts and uncles. The bible had been my great grandfather's prison bible, his consolation and stay against "his weary prison life." My grandmother kept it hidden, stored and saved. I imagine she kept it as a touchstone, and perhaps a token of memory she could return to when the house was otherwise empty, or think upon knowing it was stored when she tended to her siblings, and later her children and then her mother, who came to live with her after she married.<br />
<br />
I wonder if my great grandmother and she sat over it together, or if they spoke of Gaetano, or whether both women kept their thoughts and longings silent. <br />
<br />
Still, for all her shame, my grandmother, as the court reporter's sketch shows, was also proud and determined, keenly intelligent.<br />
<br />
And the writing I wish the family had, and surely it existed, would be the writing my grandmother did in her pursuit of her father's exoneration -- letters to pardon boards, drafts of appeals, petitions to the courts, notes from her research. <br />
<br />
I wonder what truths, and despite her anguish, what determination, her words would reveal.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-51970384368940942322015-12-11T15:09:00.001-05:002017-06-14T12:07:39.667-04:00Evaluating Student Peer Review Feedback -- Putting Eli's Advice into Action<h3>
What is Quality Peer Review?</h3>
Today a question came up on POD-L seeking resources for evaluating student peer review, with a request for books, possible rubrics and other tools. Happily, two of the respondents pointed to one of my favorite peer review resources -- Eli (http://elireview.com), in particular this professional development module, written by Eli's team for teachers called "Feedback and Revision: The Key Components of Powerful Writing Pedagogy" at <a href="http://elireview.com/content/td/feedback/" target="_blank">http://elireview.com/content/td/feedback/</a>.<br />
<br />
In the module, there's a section, part 3, called "What Feedback Is and How to Teach It." The team writes about peer review:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So So what, then, are the qualities of helpful feedback?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ol>
<li>It is formative — it helps learners get better at a task or increases their understanding.</li>
<li>It is timely — it happens at a moment when it's possible to learn and change (e.g., revise).</li>
<li>It is descriptive, goal referenced and directed. </li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As teachers, our goal should be to prepare students to give feedback that helps a writer understand: </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ol>
<li>What they accomplished (descriptive).</li>
<li>What they were asked to accomplish (goal referenced).</li>
<li>What they must do next (goal directed). </li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Of course, we help our students when our own feedback has these characteristics. But how can we help our students learn to provide better feedback? Three specific things we can do include: </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ol>
<li>Modeling effective feedback.</li>
<li>Providing ample opportunities for deliberate practice in giving feedback.</li>
<li>Constructing effective review prompts.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<h3>
</h3>
<h3>
A Peer Review Assignment is a Writing Assignment</h3>
If you look at the outline above from Eli's team, you see in it all the necessary elements of a writing assignment. The first three items gesture toward the writing situation -- touching on purpose and audience. The second three name explicit goals and features of the review written -- moving into the elements of the genre Eli's team. And the third three elements get the kinds of things that go around writing assignments -- models, practice, and good prompts to elicit the kind of writing one hopes to see.<br />
<br />
You don't have to agree with the nine ideas above for every peer review activity you plan. And if you're going to grade the peer review, or evaluate it in some way, you might add a tenth item that describes how you will assess the reviews given.<br />
<br />
With that in mind, then the question of how to evaluate peer reviews written by students is in inextricably linked to the design of the peer review assignment and its prompt. Eli's middle three items --- features that reviews should have present and should address -- can, for example, be recast as rubrics for a quick scoring tool, or used as the basis of formative feedback on the review given by not only the professor but also the writers who received the feedback.<br />
<h3>
</h3>
<h3>
Teach Students What They Need to Know to Be Able to Write the Kind of Reviews You Want Them to Write</h3>
<div>
<br /></div>
A writing assignment works better if the student has some instruction and guidance in how to write the kind of writing being assigned. So too for peer review feedback, which is a form of assigned writing. Consider the idea above from the Eli team that good peer review describes what a writer is doing well. Students might be readily able to deem something good, mimicking teachers past who maybe wrote "nice" or "good job" in the margins of papers those students had written. But that passive use of adjectives is not the same thing as describing why a passage is good or nice. The art of describing why writing works can be taught; it can be practiced.<br />
<br />
So it wouldn't be enough to say to students "describe why and how the writing works" if their review is going to be judged on that criteria. One has to take a few minutes to teach active description, something like -- "This passage really works well because the details ('the crisp crust of cheese snapped on first bite' and 'I could hear in each bite of pasta the music my mother always played when she made her sauce from scratch') made me pause and painted a picture of what your meal looked like and tasted like. Great verbs helped it to move." And how that active description differs from passive description in a comment like this -- "I liked the dining room passage; it was good." One has to teach why the active and detailed description better helps a writer, and why the review activity, to succeed, requires that kind of writing from the reviewer.<br />
<br />
And very often, in peer review, one has to give writers the chance to return to a review type -- the description of what is working -- again and again, so that writers can practice the technique, make mistakes in applying it, revise even.<br />
<br />
So setting examples and criteria for the kind of comments one hopes to see, and then teaching students how to write to meet those criteria, and letting them try it more than once -- weekly or biweekly peer reviews is what Eli's team recommends -- builds the ability of students to become good reviewers.<br />
<br />
Just as any writing assignment, done well and done often, makes any writer, over time, better at writing the kind of thing the assignment calls for.<sup>1</sup><br />
<br />
If assessment of student performance is tied to clear articulation of what is expected in peer review comments, and if that expectation is taught so that writers understand and can find a path to meeting the criteria, with practice, then assessment serves a formative and celebratory purpose. Which is always a cool place for assessment to be.<br />
<br />
__<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">1. Yes, there be a fragment there.</span><br />
<br />Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-52956654262538280752015-08-07T12:41:00.001-04:002015-08-08T15:40:28.312-04:00#worthassigning: Eli Review's Lessons for Students on Feedback and RevisionI am preparing a faculty development workshop on how to teach students to give good feedback to one another on writing, and how to help students use that feedback to revise.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I just came across a wonderful site by the team at Eli Review that introduces Feedback and Revision to Students. </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Feedback and Improvement: Becoming a Better Writer by Helping Other Writers --</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://elireview.com/content/students/feedback/" target="_blank">http://elireview.com/content/students/feedback</a></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Rethinking and Revising: Using Feedback to Improve Our Writing --</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://elireview.com/content/students/revision/" target="_blank">http://elireview.com/content/students/revision/</a></span></blockquote>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">These introductions for students are part of a larger curriculum guide -- </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://elireview.com/content/curriculum/introduction/" target="_blank">http://elireview.com/content/curriculum/introduction/</a> -- written for teachers. The curriculum guide explores how to use Eli specifically to enact the ideas presented to students in the introductions above.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Here's what I like about the student materials. First, consider this screen shot from "Feedback and Improvement."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sZSFlIAhxfg/VcTca8dK4EI/AAAAAAAAAfE/lUGi6y5YrUw/s1600/eli_clean_linesJPG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Screenshot showing step two of lesson, "everyone can be a helpful reviewer"" border="0" height="195" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sZSFlIAhxfg/VcTca8dK4EI/AAAAAAAAAfE/lUGi6y5YrUw/s400/eli_clean_linesJPG.jpg" title="Image one" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Image 1: Feedback and Improvement Navigation is Clean and Fast</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
You see that the lines are clean, the space uncluttered. Navigation is clear via the numbered parts navigation top center. Note too the positive assertion -- "everyone can be a helpful reviewer," which is both true and friendly in its assertion.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
That emphasis on "you can do this" carries into the prose and videos and images that make up the unit. Here's a sample:</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Trust is particularly important because feedback can lead to big changes in our writing. But trust has to be earned. Gaining confidence in the quality of the feedback we get and give occurs over time, with practice. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
SUNY-Albany Professor Emeritus Peter Johnston observed in <i>Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If students can provide productive feedback, then collectively they will tend to get more feedback. And it will be more immediate feedback, because, rather than waiting for the teacher, their peers can provide it. More feedback improves learning, and immediate feedback is more effective than delayed feedback.</blockquote>
Even in small classes, instructor feedback is limited by the amount of time instructors have to respond. But more feedback and faster feedback is possible between peers. That feedback can sometimes be more helpful than instructor feedback.</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
The Eli Review team doesn't skirt the issue at hand -- writers have to trust reviews; and that trust needs to be earned. One of the biggest qualms faculty have about doing more peer feedback centers on this lack of trust: writers don't trust the feedback they get; reviewers don't trust their ability to give good feedback. The pedagogy explored, the advice given to students, gets directly at ways of building that trust, that confidence.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Note too that the piece quotes research from the field. The lesson builds a case for peer feedback, gives students concrete advice, and sites relevant research on the value of making that advice work in practice.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The larger curricular piece for instructors, "<a href="http://elireview.com/content/curriculum/introduction/" target="_blank">Framing Feedback and Revision</a>," written by Melissa Graham Meeks and Mike McLeod, gives instructors a lesson plan sequence, ready to use activities, they can use in Eli Review. But even if you're not using Eli Review, both the two introductions for students and the curricular plan for teachers, can be adapted to other settings and tools. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And that's what makes the lessons for students on Feedback and Revision worth assigning, and the curriculum guide for faculty worth visiting and adapting.<br />
<div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-4974754608502010932015-07-14T09:05:00.002-04:002015-07-14T09:17:48.826-04:00A Vacation Experiment: Deleting All Work Email As It Comes In While I Am Away<div class="tr_bq">
I am on vacation. A true vacation, the kind where I won't look at work related items until I get back in the office. No work reading, writing, or (in the case of expense reports), arithmetic. And definitely no work e-mail.</div>
<br />
Not only am I not going to even look at work e-mail, but to avoid the pointless and soul-crushing backlog of messages I'd find on my return in two weeks or so, I've done the following, all captured in this auto response message people who e-mail my work address get:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
July 9, 2015<br />
If you are getting this after 12:31 pm on Friday July 10 and before Monday, July 27, 8 am, know that I am automatically deleting the message you just sent. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
I'll be vacating -- truly and surely -- work thoughts, work office, work e-mail, work state of mind during the two work weeks that fall in that window. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Consider me digitally vaporized, as it were, from this inbox. My laptop will be secreted in a secure location over 200 miles from where I will be. My phone's data plan will be turned off, its Wi-Fi shut down; it'll be just a phone, one that I won't answer unless I know the person behind the number I see incoming and also know that the person is friend or family confirming where we will eat or what we will drink or when we will go and who else will be there. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
And because I am digitally vaporizing myself, so too will be your incoming email. To avoid a backlog of messages on July 27 at 8 am, I am setting an inbox rule to automatically delete anything that comes in. If you are writing me on something urgent, resend it on July 27th. Though chances are very likely that you will have resolved the item before then and what I will be missing is a long chain of messages that at the end reveal the problem is solved. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
I know this may seem rude, inconvenient at best, for me to tell you that I'm deleting what you've sent with a request that you resend it. But consider this: with the backlog I would've had on July 27th, you very likely would've been sending me a beseeching reminder by the 28th or 29th or 30th anyway, were my response still needed. So this is better. You know that I am not going to see your message at all unless you send it on the July 27th, when it will arrive fresh to my eyes, on top, and not sitting there two weeks old and buried among the zombified deluge of the unread. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
And if my response is not needed, then what difference does my deleting the message make?<br />
__<br />
Paste this -- <a href="http://bit.ly/1qEx6Pv" target="_blank">bit.ly/1qEx6Pv</a> -- into a browser for a note on the rhetoric of auto responses.<br />
Nick Carbone<br />
Director of Digital Teaching and Learning<br />
Bedford/St. Martin's Imprint, Macmillan Education<br />
nick.carbone AT macmillan DOT com</blockquote>
<br />
Now I really do not know whether this will go over well with all recipients, but at least it's honest. And as a strategy, it makes sense. Conservatively 200 messages times 10 work days is 2,000 messages. Why lose a whole day or two just sorting through that when there will be other, more important, work to be done?<br />
<br />
I suppose some you reading this may hesitate to try it for fear of being viewed as irrelevant and replaceable; will bosses ask, "if (to use me as an example) Nick can ignore fully two weeks of email, including company pronouncements and announcements; colleague queries and requests; and customer beseechments and entreatments, just how useful is the schmuck?"<br />
<br />
Two things on that, and why I think this policy makes sense. First, the practice demonstrates efficiency, not indifference. Important things will rise more quickly to the top of my attention this way and get taken care of more quickly. Second, I don't kid myself -- of course I'm replaceable. Looked at one way, I am, like everyone with a job, a hiring line, a budget item, human resource, by definition not permanent nor stable because people and their jobs change. People retire, the work goes on. People leave for better jobs, the work goes on. People are fired, the work goes on. People die (which in my case, were it to happen, would be, I admit, tragic and untimely), but work goes on.<br />
<br />
So it goes.<br />
<br />
But in the end, work works better when it's workable, and this new vacation from work e-mail method allows me to do more of the work that matters when I get back. And that's important to me, the professors I work with, and the company I work for. So I think this will work.Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-14340901469908664302015-06-30T16:25:00.001-04:002017-08-21T09:31:03.811-04:00On Why I Call People Who Are Writing WritersYou are a reader. You are reading this now, and as I write this (making me the writer), I am thinking of you, dear reader, because as the writer, that's one of my many jobs. I am the writer of this blog post, thus I am a writer at the moment, even though my title is Director of Digital Teaching and Learning. But while I write, I am a writer. Seems logical, doesn't it?<br />
<br />
Still, the term 'writer' carries some very specific cultural connotations. In our literate culture it is an elevated term, an honorific of sorts that one earns, or takes on, by virtue of job title and/or aspiration. It is also a term some people guard or that others are wary of claiming for themselves.<br />
<br />
Rachel Toor, whose Monday, June 15 profile of Anthony Grafton, a historian who writes and teaches his history students to write, finds the generous application of the term irritating. She guards the term. In the interview, which I recommend, Grafton, a good writer, modestly denies the term applies to him. Her piece came to the attention of an e-mail discussion list for writing center directors and scholars when <a href="http://english.gmu.edu/people/scorbet3" target="_blank">Steven J. Corbett, Assistant Professor</a> at George Mason, sent the following:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Colleagues, hope your summers are going well so far. A new post on the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ from Rachel Toor, "Scholars Talk Writing: Anthony Grafton: The Princeton historian is a teacher, scholar, collaborator, but not, he says, a writer" <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Talk-Writing-Anthony/230845/" target="_blank">http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Talk-Writing-Anthony/230845/</a> starts off talking about a writing center:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Every time I walk to and from my office I pass a big poster for the Writers’ Center at my university. The poster features an oversize photo of Ernest Hemingway, and next to it, in proud and arrogant type, the following assertion: 'Everyone is a writer. Period.'
<br />
<br />
I try to avert my eyes, because I get irritated every time I see this poster. I go into class and start ranting. No, I say, everyone is not a writer. Just because you write — because you have to write to get your degree — that, my friends, does not make you a writer.</blockquote>
What do you think about this way of characterizing writers and/or writing centers? (Note: see <a href="http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/messages?id=24656464" target="_blank">http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/messages?id=24656464</a> for full email.) </blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white;"><br />
The conversation unfolded and several good e-mail messages came round, but most useful in helping me frame my own thinking were two from <a href="https://www.coastal.edu/writingcenter/coordinator.html" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc;">Scott Pleasant, Writing Center Coordinator</a><span style="background-color: white;"> at Coastal Carolina University.</span> He wrote a smart take that echoes Toor's and Grafton's sentiments, but unlike Toor, Pleasant doesn't avert his eyes in irritation:<br />
</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white;">I was just saying there's a perspective from which the phrase "I am a writer" means something very different from "I write" or "I can write."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">I write all the time. For pay, even. . . . But if someone were to ask me, "What ARE you?" I kind of doubt my response would be "I'm a writer." I'd probably say I'm a teacher if I really had to characterize my existential essence. . . .</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">. . . I've now contributed two e-mails to an online discussion, probably because I'm looking for ways to get a break from the tedious document I'm writing. If all of that makes me a writer, then fine, I'm a writer, but right at the moment, I really just feel more like a person who happens to be writing than like "a writer."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">. . . If it helps them learn to write, then by all means let's call them all writers. But I'd have to see some convincing data before I would accept the idea that simply calling them "writers" helps them to write. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;">(For full e-mail, go to:<a href="http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/archive?id=24656491" target="_blank"> http://lyris.ttu.edu/read/archive?id=24656491</a>)</span></blockquote>
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While my experience isn't convincing data, it has convinced me that calling folks in my courses and workshops writers helps. But like so much in teaching, it helps because I work at making it work for me. I do not want to suggest that what helps is "simply calling them 'writers.' That's not enough. What helps is both calling workshoppers and students "writers" <i>while also</i> teaching them to act and think the way writers -- or people who are not "writers' but who do write an awful lot in their professional capacities -- do.<br />
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And you can see from that last sentence one reason I like to call students writers. It's easier than saying, "person who is not a 'writer' but who is learning to write based on some approximation of what I as a teacher of writing understand writers do for a probable future where they will need to write, if not a lot, well enough to succeed at the work their writing needs to do.<br />
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I have been calling students writers for a long time, and I fell into it because I had a teacher who called me and my classmates writers and made it fun to be called a writer. I took an advanced writing course my first sophomore year (I had three of those in my peripatetic road to a BA.) with Leo Rockas at the University of Hartford in a class that met for three hours, 5 - 8 pm, I think on a Monday night. The class started with us getting in a circle, and Dr. Rockas telling us we were all writers in this course, and that he wanted us to think like a writer, argue like a writer, call our work "stuff," like he said writers did, and, he too he said, we should drink. Writer's drink he said, and from a brown super market paper sack he pulled up a gallon Gallo sherry (This was in in '78 or so, before the winery went more upscale.), paper cups and invited us to imbibe (The drinking age was 18.) if we were of a mind to. He set a scene (He also taught a playwriting course, so no surprise.) and invited us to play at being, as a way of becoming, writers. In fact, the class had folks in it <i>who wanted to be</i> writers (myself among that crew).<br />
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I don't serve sherry in my courses or workshops -- though when I've had a class of all adults, I've met them for drinks and spotted them a pitcher of beer or two -- but I like the fun of calling students writers, of getting them into the role-play of being a writer while being in my course. And I start that from day one. <a href="http://computersandcomposition.candcblog.org/archives/v10/10_4_html/10_4_5_Carbone.html" target="_blank">Consider this first day of class writing prompt from 1993</a>:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Hello Writer,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"> Since for most of you thinking of yourself as a writer may be a new notion, I'd like you to recall your history as a writer. Your history can include talking about any writing experience you've had in the past, including shopping lists, essays in high school, letters, journals, any and all writing you've ever done.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"> You can talk about how you feel about writing. You can talk about the best writing you've ever done. You can talk about what kind of writing you like to do. You can talk about what you think makes writing good. You can talk about what has influenced your writing.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"> You can talk about your writing habits--where do you write best?, when do you write?, how many drafts do you do? You can be specific or general.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"> Here, for example are some things other writers have said about writing. I'll start with one that is especially true for me.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"> "I hate writing but I love having written."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"> --Dorothy Parker.</span></blockquote>
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I can imagine this kind of prompt might disturb Toor -- equating even the making of a shopping list with being a writer. But you can see too that idea was simple -- when you write, you're a writer is the formulation here. You may not be a particularly competent writer, I tell my students, no more than I am a competent (all right, if you must know, I stink) golfer when I golf.<br />
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But when I play golf now, in my increasingly late 50's, I play with the same kind of imagination I played any game as a kid: I imitated and imagined I was Reggie Jackson at the plate when I played baseball; was Jack Nicklaus when I played golf; Jim Brown when I was a running back; and James Bond when I played baccarat (which I played only once and only so I could pretend to be James Bond). I pretend to be, when I play, if only for a little bit, those who are good at what I am about.<br />
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Of course it's hard to imitate a writer per se. The only novelist whoever<a href="https://youtu.be/ogPZ5CY9KoM" target="_blank"> wrote for an audience in a stadium, with a play-by-play announcer and analyst was Thomas Hardy</a>, and most students don't know him. But my courses and workshops focus on teaching folks who are writing some of the things writers do: the <a href="http://wpacouncil.org/framework" target="_blank">habits of mind they follow</a>; the strategies and work habits for writing and revising and revising and revising they explore.<br />
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Stephen North, in <a href="http://www.evergreen.edu/writingcenter/docs/cv/North_TheIdeaofaWritingCenter.pdf" target="_blank">"The Idea of the Writing Center" (1984)</a>, famously wrote,<br />
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Let me use it, then, to make the one distinction of which it still seems capable: in a writing center the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. In axiom form it goes like this: Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing.</blockquote>
One step in making better writers, a fun step, is to start by calling the students writers. I do not expect students to identify themselves as a writer ever more, though some of them may go on to careers where they do that, write for a living and with a job that has writer in the title, careers, maybe, in journalism, the literary arts, professional writing, ghost writing, research writing, speech writing, copy writing, comedy writing, and so on. <br />
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No, I call them writers in large part too, on top of the fun of it, to get them to understand some of the responsibilities a writer takes on. In the game of writing, the writer must find a purpose for writing, an argument to make, and an audience who will read their stuff. To learn to do that, the student must inhabit the writer role, and must be able, to analyze and reflect on how they are doing, step outside of themselves, seeing themselves as a writer in that context, in that course or workshop writing activity. So the appellation, then, serves for me a necessary metacognitive function.<br />
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Grafton, the subject of Toor's profile, a man who writes well but doesn't think of himself as a writer, does, however, even if he may not call them such, think of his students as writers. He says to Toor, "Where writing is concerned — as with scholarly research — I work very hard with my students, and the better the writer, the harder I push him or her."<br />
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It's hard when you teach writing -- whether in a course you teach, a workshop you lead, or a writing center where you tutor -- to not think of students as writers. It makes the teaching and learning of writing less fun in the end. Where good learning is hard fun, less fun hurts instead of helps.<br />
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</span>Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-60715166902840626292015-06-24T14:39:00.001-04:002015-08-20T11:26:07.882-04:00#worthassigning: five online essays by Charles Moran<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">
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In Case You Don't Know Charlie Moran, An Introduction</h3>
On Father's Day, June 21, 2015, Charlie Moran died at home, with his wife, Kay, and his two children, Seth and Amy, by his side. He lived a wonderful life, energetic and generous, as<a href="http://www.gazettenet.com/home/17437728-95/umass-english-professor-charles-charlie-moran-iii-dies-at-age-78" target="_blank"> this profile, published after his death in the North Hampton Gazette, illustrates</a>. I recommend it for a fuller sense of the man and his remarkable contributions to teaching writing, his community, and his family.<br />
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As for me, I first came to know Charlie, I think, back in 1991, when I began as a graduate student in the PhD program at the English Department of U. Mass, Amherst. I started teaching there in a computer networked classroom -- a local area network built on Novell, with WordPerfect as the word processing software, a simple tool for making class announcements, and what was then a new program for real time online classroom discussions in writing called Daedalus Interchange.</div>
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Charlie, along with Marcia Curtis, oversaw the graduate student teachers who taught in the two networked classrooms; both he and Marcia innovated pedagogically, she focusing on perhaps one of the best basic writing programs ever developed, and he on traditional first year writing courses. Most of my time in those classrooms came with Charlie as my course director. Through that, and as I also took graduate courses with him on teaching with technology, he opened up doors to an online world of teachers who taught writing with computers (a novelty then), a world where I found a way of intellectual and professional life I enjoy and cherish to this day. </div>
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Things You'll Notice About Charlie's Academic Writing</h3>
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The other thing Charlie did, besides being a great teacher, and did productively, was write and encourage his graduate students to write and publish. He was a teacher-scholar who pursued both parts of the hyphenate equally, the art of one and the discipline of the other informing each other. He shared his insights with the field at large in his body of published works, at conferences, and <i>via voce</i> in the classrooms and offices at Bartlett Hall. His work models how to be a teacher-scholar.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">He collaborated with graduate students on essays. He collaborated with colleagues. And even when he solo authored, his work often referenced or thanked those who read drafts, helped his thinking. This is no small thing, this collaboration. The <a href="https://www.umass.edu/writingprogram/" target="_blank">UMass Writing Program</a> encourages GTA's to explore and use collaboration in the design of courses, via peer review, the sharing of drafts, discussions to foster ideas, and for asking for co-authored projects by students. Charlie practiced what he taught his first year students; that practice made him a better teacher of those things he asked his students to learn.</span></div>
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In looking over the pieces I've found online that he's written or co-written, I notice some wonderful things. The chief quality that comes through is his devotion to teaching and learning, evidenced by a deep respect for students and teachers. His pedagogical inquiries, his application of theory, always put students and their learning at the absolute center, and teachers in close proximity. Even when an essay doesn't evoke a student directly, reading it you can see that students are central to his concern. </div>
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A look back shows that Charlie's brilliance as an academic writer came from his ability to observe and reflect. So many of his pieces observe students, or his own or colleagues' teaching practices, or larger trends (automatic writing assessment engines; testing mania). Whether looking at small acts of practice or and larger trends, he looked to see how they supported or distorted the central mission and necessary relationship teachers and students share. </div>
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<b>A Tangent: Charlie as Observer and Teaching Mentor</b></h4>
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I remember, in rereading some of his essays, how great he was at doing teaching observations of graduate student teachers he was assigned to mentor. Charlie would come into the computer networked classroom, find a terminal that wasn't going to be used, and sit unobtrusively. Charlie would sit and write on the keyboard, creating a running narrative of what he observed about the class, the teaching and the dynamics, noticing things the teacher could not. I don't have those reports any longer, but I remember things like, to quote approximately, "this class has a row of male jocks, all with ball caps and broad shoulders sharing the back terminals, almost like a frat row in the classroom." Or, "as Nick leans over an helps two students, students a row back, swap files and both type feedback into one another's draft, they are discussing the drafts as they type, but also other things, using off tasks asides, it seems, to keep them largely on task."
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He'd capture the telling detail, the nature of interaction, and do so on the fly in long, generous reports that came from continuous typing as he looked; his hands operated independently of his eyes and ears, transposing what his mind made of things as he continued to watch and listen.<br />
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Discussion afterwards about what he noticed, what interpretation he had based on what he could see, became apprenticeships in reflection. He'd ask questions that would lead, at least in my experience, to teaching insights, finding strengths, and finding weaknesses, and talking about both with equal comfort and candor.</div>
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Reflection imbues so much of Charlie's writing in the essays below. Some of pieces are about his adjustment to technology -- or in one case, going to a classroom where it was absent. One essay frames modestly his work based on his own classroom observations as auto ethnographic, not seeking to make a big claim. But those pieces are finely wrought, hand-crafted jewels of insight that, even though the technology in question may be twenty years past, offer lessons in adjustment, observation, reflection, patience, and humility which matter still. They serve as useful models in faculty professional development, as ways faculty can explore their own teaching, can explore whatever technology they have on hand, whether it is very new or somewhat bewhiskered. </div>
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Other pieces are more contemporary, and many of the links, you'll see, are made available via the <a href="http://www.nwp.org/" target="_blank">National Writing Project</a>, an organization Charlie devoted some of his best thinking, leadership, and writing to. </div>
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All of the pieces, too, are well-written. Charlie has an accessible academic writing voice, making his work especially useful for people new to a field as well as important to those long versed in the literature. Charlie cites important and complex thinkers as needed, but still writes in a way that uses specialized terms and jargon minimally, in sentences of ordinary length with strong verbs. He writes, really, what seems to me speakable prose; that is, you can read it aloud and hear a cadence easy on the ear. </div>
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So for all these reasons, I think the following works of Charles Moran are worth assigning, and if you do assign or read them, I hope they open the door to reading some of the excellent work he's done that doesn't happen to be readily available online but can be found easily enough in a campus library's academic journal catalogs, or his work in books, perhaps the in stacks. </div>
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Five Online Essays by Charlie Moran that Are #WorthAssigning</h3>
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I've included a small excerpt from each essay, so you have a sense of its flavor, and sometimes a note two about the essay and why I recommend it specifically. These are in chronological order, oldest to newest.</div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">with Nick Carbone, Margaret Daisley, Ed Federenko, Dix McComas,Dori Ostermiller, and Sherri Vanden Akker, "<a href="http://computersandcomposition.candcblog.org/archives/v10/10_3_html/10_3_2_Carbone.html" target="_blank">Writing Ourselves Online.</a>" in Computers and Composition 10(3), August 1993, pages 29-48.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">At the beginning of our project, six of us divided into pairs. We looked at each other's online language in "Class News" bulletins, in online prompts and messages we left for our students, and in the comments we volunteered in Daedalus INTERCHANGE sessions. In addition, we observed our partner's classes, focusing on our partner's live classroom presence. Then, with our partners, we co-wrote drafts of the three sections that follow. We also met regularly as a full group during the semester and the subsequent summer to reflect upon what we were seeing and writing and to focus and refocus the project. </span></span> </blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"></span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">As we proceeded with our project, it became clear that each of us had a different online voice. Yet each of us was, according to our student-teacher evaluations, a "good" teacher. Like the Lake Wobegon children, we were all above average. We could, therefore, freely speak of "difference," but we could not so easily speak of "good" or "bad" ways of presenting ourselves online. </span></span> </blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"></span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Further, it became clear to us that our online presences existed in a complementary relation to our live, off-line presences. Together the two worked, though in each case differently. We knew of a strand in the literature in our field that assumed that we should each adapt to the computer-equipped classrooms in the same way (e.g., Barker & Kemp, 1990; Handa, 1990; Kiefer, 1991; Klem & Moran, 1992; Spitzer, 1990). </span></span> </blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"></span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">These studies begin with the assumption that technology drives change. Because we were teachers, what we saw was perhaps inevitably different: that different teachers will successfully use technology in different ways, adapting it to their different goals and needs. We came to believe that the relationship between teacher and technology was what Paul Levinson (1990) has termed a "flexible, feedback process" (p. 7). We write, therefore, as soft technological determinists (Pool, 1990, p. vii) who know that we influence, and are influenced by, our environment. How the teacher uses a given teaching environment depends upon the character of that environment, of course, but it also depends upon who that teacher is. As William Carlos Williams tells us, "It all depends. . . ." </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"><b>Note</b> My recollection -- apologies to my co-authors if I am wrong -- is that Charlie wordsmithed most of the excerpt above, from the article's "Note on Method" section. I draw on this essay because it shows a bit how Charlie mentored graduate students -- all of us listed as his co-authors were graduate students who were part of his course director group. We meet regularly as a team on a range of issues related to teaching. Charlie used the project to help us learn how to observe teaching, to work with fellows as peer mentors, to practice good teacher reflections, to collaborate on an article, and to meet the needs and goals his role as a course director required. So as a teacher-scholar, the experience was as much about how to work productively, getting as much value from the work we had to do as possible. I also remember that after the article was accepted, and final draft sent in, Charlie turned to us and said something like, "my habit is to put these behind me once their done and turn to the next project," and so we didn't talk about it after it was sent, but moved on.</span></span><br />
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"From a High-Tech to a Low-Tech Writing Classroom: You Can't Go Home Again," in <span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"><i><a href="http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources/quarterly_archives.csp" target="_blank">The Quarterly</a></i>, Vol. 22, No. 3, </span><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Summer 2000. Available at </span><a href="http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/782" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" target="_blank">http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/<wbr></wbr>print/resource/782</a></div>
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I begin to resent, too, the amount of new work I seem to have to do. For instance, I've had to go all the way to my office to get to my computer to put together a writing exercise for the class, print multiple copies on blue paper, and cut the pages in half to distribute to the class. I wrote, "All this cutting and copying is time- and resource-consuming!"<span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"> </span></blockquote>
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I resent the grade book I have to construct for myself and my need to discover a new way of organizing the course. I wonder: should I purchase a three-ring binder? And an ominous note: I begin to feel that as a teacher I have to become more active, because I'm feeling that not much is happening.</blockquote>
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<b>Note </b>This is one of my favorite pieces, and I share it in workshops with faculty who are just beginning to take deeper dives into using technology. It focuses on what is lost when one goes back to not using the technology after coming to rely on it, and so it reverses the anxiety many faculty feel when they start to use technology. Charlie does a great job of making a simple brick and mortar classroom feel strange. The essay also shows Charlie at his reflective best, for example in this expert you see it in his "ominous note" about starting to do more in the classroom -- filling time and air -- because it's harder for him to get students engaged without the technology he became used to using.<br />
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"Computers and Composition 1983–2002: What we have hoped for" in <span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"><i>Computers and Composition 20</i> (2003) 343–358. Available at </span><a href="http://rhetcomp.gsu.edu/~bgu/8121/Reading-Moran.pdf" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" target="_blank">http://rhetcomp.gsu.edu/~bgu/<wbr></wbr>8121/Reading-Moran.pdf</a></div>
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In accounting for the optimistic and positive tone of our journal, the cultural cross-currents I’ve referred to are important. But at least as important as these cultural forces has been the agency of particular people at particular times. As a community we reflect the values of our leaders (they’d hate to be called this, but they are and have been)—three generous, energetic, and hopeful teacher–scholars: Kate Kiefer, Cynthia Selfe, and Gail Hawisher. These remarkable teacher–scholars have drawn to their work others who share the same generosity, energy, and optimism. This group, call it a <i>de facto</i> (and partially <i>de jure</i>) editorial board, has shaped the journal and the community, infusing both with temperament, enthusiasm, and vision.</blockquote>
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<b>Note </b>I love this short excerpt because it captures so much the spirit and generosity of Charlie. In this project, he acted as both emcee to, and historian of, the nearly 20 years the central journal in the field of Computers and Composition had been publishing, rereading every issue to prepare the article. That he rightly acknowledges the founding editors, citing their work as a team that engaged collegially with their readers and authors, bespeaks too, in a single-authored piece, his belief in collaboration and community building. As a piece that looks at the history of one journal, it's a great survey piece for an introductory course on teaching writing with computers.<br />
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In 2003, the same year Charlie published this piece, <i>Computers and Composition</i> initiated <span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 17.5499992370605px;"><a href="http://computersandcomposition.candcblog.org/awards/charlesmoran.htm" target="_blank">The Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field</a>. The editors write:</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 17.5499992370605px;">The award celebrates the first 20 years of the journal (1983-2003) in which Charles Moran not only contributed over 30 publications-books, articles, chapters-to the profession but also supported the growth of the journal and field in multiple ways as a valued member of the</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 17.5499992370605px;"> </span><i style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 17.5499992370605px;">Computers and Composition </i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 17.5499992370605px;">Editorial Board. We can think of no other person who better exemplifies what it means to be an esteemed scholar and colleague in these rapidly changing times of the information age.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">With Anne Herrington, "Challenges for Writing Teachers: Evolving Technologies and Standardized Assessment." in <a href="http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/books/22" target="_blank">Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom</a>, edited by Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran. Copyright © 2009 by Teachers College, Columbia University. Available at </span></span><a href="http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/12466/Teaching_New_Writing_Chapter1.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" target="_blank">http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/12466/Teaching_New_Writing_Chapter1.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d</a><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Writing teachers have inevitably felt pressured to change from the forces we have listed above. But more important, teachers, and in particular those who have contributed to this book, have felt the world of writing shifting under them and have wanted to account for this change in their teaching. These teachers are embracing technology in their teaching, to support not only the learning of traditional essay texts but also new electronic text types—what Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2006) call “post-typographic forms of texts” (p. 23). These new electronic texts—a Web site with words and images, blogs where multiple readers and writers contribute—challenge our basic notion of written texts as linear, verbal, single-authored texts.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">At the same time that new forms of writing—and thus literacy—are emerging in our culture and in our classrooms, forces of assessment and standardization exert a counter-pressure, asking us to prepare students to produce conventional, formulaic print texts in scripted ways. Paradoxically, technology is also being harnessed for these purposes by educational publishers and testing companies, taking the form of machine-scoring and responding to student writing. So it is that technology seems to be leading us forward to new forms of writing, but, as used by standardized testing programs, backward to the five-paragraph theme.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Teachers are caught in this conflict, for their students’ sake wanting to respond to the changes taking place in this thing we call writing, and at the same time wanting their students to do well in the 19th-century school essay called for on standardized tests.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"><b>Note </b>As the first chapter of an edited collection, this piece surveys the evolution of computer technology in writing courses, moving in particular to assessment technologies. I chose this excerpt because it includes the kind of trenchant observation Charlie was so good at making: that instead of using technology to move to 21st Century writing needs, testing is preparing students for 19th Century writing. The full chapter is online and excerpts from other chapters, as well as ordering information for the book, can be found in the link with the book's title above.</span></span><br />
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With Anne Herrington, "Writing to a Machine is Not Writing At All," an essay hosted online by The National Writing Project. Undated, but guess is about 2010 or 11 based on the citations. Available at <a href="http://digitalis.nwp.org/sites/default/files/files/44/MoranHerringtonms.pdf" style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" target="_blank">http://digitalis.nwp.org/<wbr></wbr>sites/default/files/files/44/<wbr></wbr>MoranHerringtonms.pdf</a></div>
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Imagine the effect of this 95%-wrong feedback on the student writer and on the teacher. The feedback would at the least confuse the student writer, leaving the teacher somehow to counter the confusion—although if the student were using her <i>Criterion</i> card on her own, as purchased from the bookstore, there would be no teacher to intervene. If the student accepted the feedback, here are some of the lessons that would be learned: do not use <u>e.g.</u>, or <u>texting</u>, or <u>peloton</u>, in any of your writing; do not use the dash as a mark of punctuation; shorten and simplify all sentences so that the program will be able to parse them accurately; do not use inductive, specific-to-general, sequences, but stick with deduction—topic sentence first. Among our goals as writing teachers are these: help students discover and use their voices; help them take risks with their writing; help them master the grammar, usage, mechanics, and styles of written English. In this trial, and in earlier trials we have reported on (see Herrington and Moran 2009, Herrington and Stanley), <i>Criterion</i> has proved not a useful assessment tool but, to quote Ed White again, “a major impediment to what we need to do for our students” (1994, 3). </blockquote>
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<b>Note </b>The essay looks at how <i>Criterion</i>, ETS's automated writing feedback tool, treats student writing. As you can see, Anne and Charlie found it treats students shabbily, in ways counter to what good teachers seek to do and what students need to learn about writing. Charlie's early work, as you saw above, looked at teachers adapting their pedagogy -- enhancing it, or trying to -- via technology. Here and in other later work, especially with Anne, the focus is on what comes when technology is imposed between student and teacher.<br />
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Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-38617295655548652852015-06-19T14:03:00.001-04:002015-06-19T14:32:44.689-04:00#worthassigning: Paul Ford's What is Code?<div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/themeantweets" target="_blank">Adam Whitehurst</a>, a colleague at the Bedford/St.
Martin's Imprint of Macmillan, shared this link with folks in house: <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/" target="_blank">http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/</a>.<br />
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It's
a long, funny, sane piece that posits an audience of people-in-charge of big things or
departments approving or overseeing a project that involves coding, and spending a lot of money on coding, and not quite getting what the is meant by code and how coding and
software design happens.</div>
So it explains that, but in eminently readable prose, like this</div>
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This man makes a third less than you, and his education ended with a B.S. from a large, perfectly fine state university. But he has 500+ connections on LinkedIn. That plus sign after the "500" bothers you. How many more than 500 people does he know? Five? Five thousand? </blockquote>
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In some mysterious way, he outranks you. Not within the company, not
in restaurant reservations, not around lawyers. Still: He strokes his
short beard; his hands are tanned; he hikes; his socks are embroidered
with little ninja. <br />
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“Don’t forget,” he says, “we’ve got to budget for apps.”<br />
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This is real. A Scrum Master in ninja socks
has come into your office and said, “We’ve got to budget for apps.”
Should it all go pear-shaped, his career will be just fine.<br />
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You keep your work in perspective by
thinking about barrels of cash. You once heard that a U.S. dry barrel
can hold about $100,000 worth of singles. Next year, you’ll burn a
little under a barrel of cash on Oracle. One barrel isn’t that bad. But
it’s never one barrel. Is this a 5-barrel project or a 10-barreler?
More? Too soon to tell. But you can definitely smell money burning.<br />
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At this stage in the meeting, you like to look supplicants in the eye and say, <em>OK, you’ve given me a date and a budget</em>. But when will it be done? Really, truly, top-line-revenue-reporting finished? Come to confession; unburden your soul. </blockquote>
The piece is multimodal, playfully so, making a little sly fun of code and coding too as it goes. For example, when you get to the end, you're told how many words you "read" and
how fast. (So yes, go to the link, read the first paragraph or two, then
scroll to the bottom to see what I mean.)<br />
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The piece is worth assigning in writing courses with technology themes or issues, cultural study courses, technical communication courses, philosophy (yes, philosophy) courses, where any goal of the course is to understand humanity's relationship to machines. Turning again to Ford, he reminds us that the role of code in our lives, how we perceive ourselves and our world, is deep and vast:<br />
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What I’m saying is, I’m one of 18 million. So that’s what I’m writing: my view of software development, as an individual among millions. Code has been my life, and it has been your life, too. It is time to understand how it all works.<br />
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Every month it becomes easier to do things that have never been done before, to create new kinds of chaos and find new kinds of order. Even though my math skills will never catch up, I love the work. Every month, code changes the world in some<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JXL-8U5tScc/VYRHjIeBN1I/AAAAAAAAAc0/otptHmdwJYQ/s1600/Ford_interesting_wonderful_distrubing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="images illustrate words -- robot walking on bricks for interesting; child using technology to connect with another person for wonderful; and 3-d printed gun for disturbing" border="0" height="440" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JXL-8U5tScc/VYRHjIeBN1I/AAAAAAAAAc0/otptHmdwJYQ/s640/Ford_interesting_wonderful_distrubing.jpg" title="Three images" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Images come from Ford's piece, collected as a single image to here to fully quote the closing sentence, its use of images and its layout.</td></tr>
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The idea that <a href="http://bit.ly/1RgJhAo" target="_blank">coders or programmers are the unacknowledged legislators</a> of our world, a riff on Percy Bysshe Shelley's <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237844?page=10" target="_blank">concluding sentence in "A Defence of Poetry</a>," that Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, is not new observation. Ford, however, while never using that riff, explains in a sustained and detailed way, how that legislation-by-coders gets written and enacted, with far more nuance and as much mirth as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeJ55o3El0" target="_blank">School House Rock's "I'm Just a Bill."</a><br />
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Depending on your approach and what you want to emphasize, you might want to ask students to first read this short <a href="https://ssl.www8.hp.com/hpmatter/issue-no-4-spring-2015/case-web-literacy-douglas-rushkoff-media-theory-digital-culture" target="_blank">HP interview Ben Cosgrove had with Douglas Rushkoff about consumers increased need for media literacy</a>. Ford's piece goes a long way to giving students the kinds of context and understanding useful for understanding the kinds of web literacy Rushkoff advocates. The interview is short too, serving as useful pre-reading activity that can activate the minds of students, giving them ideas to link to, play off from, and discuss with one another as they read Ford's longer work.<br />
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Ford's piece touches not just on coding, but too on coding culture, making connections to the culture at large or aspects of the culture at large most faculty (and many students <a href="http://www.upcomingcons.com/" target="_blank">in the age of *Cons</a>) will recognize:<br />
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Technology conferences are where primate dynamics can be fully displayed, where relationships of power and hierarchy can be established. There are keynote speakers—often the people who created the technology at hand or crafted a given language. There are the regular speakers, often paid not at all or in airfare, who present some idea or technique or approach. Then there are the panels, where a group of people are lined up in a row and forced into some semblance of interaction while the audience checks its e-mail. </blockquote>
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I’m a little down on panels. They tend to drift. I’m not sure why they exist. </blockquote>
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Here’s the other thing about technology conferences: There has been much sexual harassment and much sexist content in conferences. Which is stupid, because computers are dumb rocks lacking genitalia, but there you have it.</blockquote>
Who among us has not noticed or remarked, if only has part of graduate school rites of passage in the academic realm, on the "primate dynamics" at our own academic, industry or company sales conferences (and yet not nearly so smartly as to use the phrase 'primate dynamics' when doing so)?<br />
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Ford's piece also serves as model of bravura writing, of multimodal composing, mixing in not just the usual elements of image and video, but also the coding element of the recurring bot I urged you to see by scrolling to the bottom of the text.<br />
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So there's a lot to work with in the piece, but I especially like it because of its length and range. I think too often we worry about student attention spans, about keeping readings short, and about the belief that long reading is serious and dense. This piece finds a sweet middle: its long and fun, requires time, but makes the time pass well enough. It's a good piece for helping readers develop the skills needed to stay with a longer text, giving them practice in doing so, and could be useful in setting up a later long reading that may not be delivered with as much joy.<br />
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There will be things, and this is a good thing, students may need to re-read, to look up, to ask questions about, to talk to classmates about to see how they're understanding the piece. But that kind of reading is needed in courses because it helps bring learners to conversation.<br />
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And as you can see from just the few snippets I've quoted above, Ford's piece can spur worth discussions, and thus is worth assigning.</div>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-73225580141607793702015-06-15T13:57:00.004-04:002015-06-18T09:50:06.211-04:00Notes Toward a Rhetoric of the Curmudgeonlycross posted at <a href="https://community.macmillan.com/people/nick.carbone/blog/2015/06/15/notes-toward-a-rhetoric-of-the-curmudgeonly" target="_blank">https://community.macmillan.com/people/nick.carbone/blog/2015/06/15/notes-toward-a-rhetoric-of-the-curmudgeonly</a><br />
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When my daughters watched Sesame Street -- the t.v. show or one of the movies -- back when they were little girls, and I watched them, my favorite moment came when Oscar the Grouch sang "The Grouch's Anthem" in a movie called <em>Follow that Bird </em>:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8IHMctrKCg" new="" target="_blank"><img alt="Oscar the grouch singing by his trash can with U.S. flag as backdrop." border="0" height="296" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-a4Z0yQu-FuE/VX8Qpj_WdUI/AAAAAAAAAcQ/Msqv8xWQvg4/s400/oscar_anthem.jpg" title="Oscar's Anthem" width="400" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oscar singing the Grouch Anthem. Click the image to see and hear its glory over at YouTube.</td></tr>
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I love that song and believe fully in the spirit captured in the lines, "Don't let the sunshine spoil the rain/Just stand up and complain."</div>
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And today it is raining and it is Monday, so it's a grouch's kind of day, no sun to complain about. And it got off to a grouchly start too, which made me happily grumpy: I woke to the sound of the garbage truck trundling down the street, with the trash-container-grabbing reaching out, squeezing, lifting, dumping, and dropping the plastic barrels. I woke and realized our container still sat in by the side of the garage and not at the curb. So I rushed from bed, threw on a rain coat and boots, rushed out of the house dressed like a flasher and dragged the barrels out just before the truck reached the house, much to the mirth of the driver.</div>
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And then to make me even grouchier, I find myself out of my favorite breakfast meal -- potato chips and beer, forcing me to rely on brandy and toast instead.</div>
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So I am home and grumpy and writing. And that to me seems a good combination for getting work done, don't you think? Sometimes writing, or rather some kinds of writing, works better with a sour disposition: love poems, self-evaluation performance reviews, letters to editors, revising a prior draft, writing the utility company to dispute a bill . . .</div>
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It's not that one wants to be mean, but that one wants to be unsentimental, unblinded by the sun, unfooled by a blue-sky view of things. So the rainy and cloudy days, oddly enough, when making certain kinds of judgments and finding the words to go with them, inspire, for grouchy curmudgeons, clarity.</div>
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And its good practice, writing while grumpy, for putting a writing teacher into students' shoes. I write today on some projects forced on me, assignments, if you will, that seem to me pointless busy work even if on one level I know they are not. Certainly the work is dull. But it has to get done; goes into the h.r. grade book; will be read and scored. I'll be sorted, ranked, and tracked by it. And like many students, I'll be content with passing it in and getting it behind me and then forgetting it. Like so many assignments before, it will be writing forgotten, left in the box outside the professor's door, never to be picked up.</div>
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I'll save my energy and enthusiasm for more important-to-me projects like how do I avoid giving my students work that makes them feel like I feel now?</div>
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What I want to avoid is lecturing to them about how sometimes you have to write things, do work, that you don't like writing, don't care a lot about, and so you have to suck it up and do it because blah, blah, blah. Of course that is true, and they know it and I know it. So maybe the other thing to do is come up with a pedagogy for teaching writers to write when they do not want to write. A lot of time we focus on making assignments attractive, trying to find ways to tap intrinsic motivation while at the same time meeting curricular outcomes. But what if we acknowledge that we all sometimes write under grouch conditions? Is there a way to celebrate that as well? Maybe developing a rhetoric of genial subversion, like the Advanced Placement students who wrote, then crossed out so examiners could not help but see and read the phrase but couldn't count it in scoring, "This is Sparta (<a data-mce-href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/ap-exams-inspire-internet-age-mischief-high-schoolers-inspired-sparta-prank-article-1.184694" href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/ap-exams-inspire-internet-age-mischief-high-schoolers-inspired-sparta-prank-article-1.184694" style="color: #2989c5; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/ap-exams-inspire-internet-age-mischief-high-schoolers-inspired-sparta-prank-article-1.184694">http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/ap-exams-inspire-internet-age-mischief-high-schoolers-inspired-sparta-prank-articl…</a> ).</div>
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The right kind of grumpiness, grouchiness, curmudgeonly-ness can be puckish fun, for the writer, so that at least the tedium finds relief, and that relief, that steam-let-off, might be just the thing to make the writing work a bit better for the poor sap who required to read what was required to be written.</div>
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Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-54306876020585048112015-06-12T10:22:00.003-04:002015-06-18T09:50:57.862-04:00On Editing My Father's Memoir My father, Nicholas R. Carbone, whose <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=e4I2fveWvw4C&lpg=PA244&ots=jRjCkuYo5_&dq=nicholas%20r.%20carbone&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q=nicholas%20r.%20carbone&f=false" target="_blank">work as a progressive city council majority leader in Hartford, CT from 1969-1979</a>, established him as <a href="http://www.iop.harvard.edu/nicholas-r-carbone" target="_blank">national expert on urban issues</a>, hired a ghostwriter to help him write a memoir. The memoir uses those years as a prism for exploring his political the personal and intellectual roots of his moral-political philosophy, and his take on what skills and approaches leaders -- council members, city managers, mayors, community activists -- need to embrace for cities to thrive in the future based in an increasingly global economy.<br />
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My role will be as a development editor, working with him, his researcher, and his ghostwriter on the manuscript. The project's been fun so far, with a chance for me to look back to a time that was formative for me as well in many ways. I'm finding that it involves a lot of writing, notes to the ghostwriter, revising manuscripts, emails, drafting some sections of the memoir to supplement the writer's work. It's writing for different reasons -- to support a writer who works by dictation and a ghostwriter who is shaping that dictation into drafts, but it's writing still. And fun for being so.<br />
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So while the project is his memoir, my own memoria plays a role in how I see and think and feel about the work. The project is fun for what I am remembering and learning.<br />
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I was ten in 1969 when my father started on the council, and twenty when he lost an election for mayor and stepped out elected offices for good. During that time, as I got older, I attended the occasional council meeting, or meetings at schools or senior centers where he answered questions about taxes, bonding issues, school construction, policing, and other municipal issues from Hartford residents, often meetings where constituents were angry about or afraid of the ideas on the table.<br />
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I'm remembering all kinds of names, controversies, events, campaigns (city councilors and the mayor serve two year terms), and politics, local, state, and national. Just a few things by way of example. During a dispute with the police union on contracts and guidelines for police behavior, we would routinely get calls at two or three in the morning from distraught people hoping to get bail for a son, daughter, mother, father or friend who had just been arrested. Some members of the police department were giving our home phone number out when people asked for a bail bondsman. My father didn't want us to just hang up or be rude -- the folks were in distress. So we were told to explain what the officer was up to, and had handy the number and names of one or two bondsman to give them. <br />
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I also remember meeting President Carter towards the end of my father's time in office (and Carter's too for that matter), and Vice-President Humphrey, who was running for President, earlier, in 1968, a year before my father was appointed to the council to fill one three vacancies.<br />
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But what's key in those years is that they came at a time when I was old enough, and interested enough, to begin understanding what he was doing as a councilman and political leader and boss, and why. So my progressive views were shaped by growing up and tagging along with a progressive public servant who used his political muscle, which muscle peaked with Carter's primary and then general election wins in Connecticut, wins my father largely engineered, to serve city residents. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d3GTlY6TlK0/VXryaOhnd3I/AAAAAAAAAbw/JFeCOYr8c3s/s1600/Nick_and_Nick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Picture of my father, Nicholas R., seated, me standing, in front of campaign sign that says "Nick"" border="0" height="358" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d3GTlY6TlK0/VXryaOhnd3I/AAAAAAAAAbw/JFeCOYr8c3s/s400/Nick_and_Nick.jpg" title="My father and I" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My father and I in 1979, when I was twenty, at the headquarters for his mayoral campaign, which he lost. The photo came from a campaign mailer that also featured photos of my mother, and my four brothers and our sister, the youngest.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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17 - 20 are formative intellectual years for many teens, and I was no exception. I went from a catholic high school to the University of Hartford, where I read a lot of literature, philosophy, and wrote for the campus paper, following the news, still going to meetings, that marked some of my father's work. So I came to understand the importance then of equity, education, treating everyone with respect, and as well the forces and systems that, without being challenged and remade, without being questioned, disadvantage the poor and powerless. So much of the work in those years centered around addressing the poverty in Hartford, and the things poverty is linked to and perpetuated by: struggling schools, crime, drugs, adversarial policing, racism and classism, broken homes, ruined property (which weaken the tax base for addressing issues), and more.<br />
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What I'm learning now, and never knew then, is a bit more about how he got things done -- the strategic economic planning as the city's resources and revenue streams shifted, as well as the strategic thinking in how to move things not only through city hall, but also the state legislature and from Washington, where lobbying agencies and congressional committees for grants, legislation, and speaking to them about national city issues became part of the work necessary to govern well.<br />
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I'm also discovering that a lot of what was accomplished was first, and only happened through persistence and careful strategy in persuading and aligning the votes necessary to get things done. For example, <a href="http://shoeleatherhistoryproject.com/2014/07/02/gay-pride-straight-prejudice/" target="_blank">Hartford, in 1979, passed an ordinance</a> that Hartford would not discriminate in hiring, choosing vendors, because of sexual orientation nor ex-offender status. Coming ten years after Stonewall, and in the era of Anita Bryant, it was a brave ordinance to write, one of, if not the first, such city ordinance in the country. To pass it had to go through a year or so of planning, lining up votes, working with council members on language, coordinating with gay rights activists on timing, and still overcoming some strenuous objection from radical right groups like the Blue Berets and a mayoral veto by then Mayor George Athanson, who signed the veto statement from Idlewild Airport while waiting for his delayed flight to Greece to be rescheduled then ducked out of town to avoid the heat.<br />
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So it's a fascinating project in many ways, and I am looking forward to seeing what the first draft of writing brings, and then editing it, working with my father on clarifications, and hearing him talk about what he knows and thinks.<br />
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<br />Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-32440438948193955952015-06-10T17:26:00.002-04:002015-06-18T09:51:32.725-04:00Reading about Reading Apprenticeship and Thinking about Textbook Publisher Technology<br />
I'm reading about reading, which right now is more fun than writing about writing. <a href="http://www.wested.org/resources/reading-for-understanding-how-reading-apprenticeship-improves-disciplinary-learning-in-secondary-and-college-classrooms-2nd-edition/" target="_blank">The book is Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms</a> by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and Lynn Murphy.<br />
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Based on research into best practices for making students better readers, the book explores classroom approaches instructors can use to make even the weakest readers stronger, able to read the kinds of longer, more complex works students will engage in courses and outside of courses.<br />
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You can see the basics of their framework here, in chapter two, which they provide online: <a href="http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/read-12-01-sample2.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/read-12-01-sample2.pdf</a>.<br />
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Two quick take aways that go to textbook publishers' software product development efforts.<br />
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First, there is no quick-fix, and skills practice technologies, where students go to Web services offered by publishers and others selling in the developmental market might exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problem. From page 8 of the text. At the bottom of this post, I've put in the citation their footnote references.<br />
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Instead, the quick-fix or "skills-in-a-box" programs commonly promoted as suitable for solving a range of reading difficulties feature discrete skills practice and decontextualized reading of short paragraphs or passages. Some of these programs focus on word-level exercises and vocabulary drills; others divide comprehension into a suite of skills such as find-the-main-idea, sequence sentences, draw conclusions -- all with decontextualized snippets of text. Some other skills programs put students through batteries of test preparation exercises: read a paragraph and answer "comprehension" questions, read another paragraph and answer questions, and so on. These, too, fail to help students gain the kind of deeper comprehension skills and practice that are needed for high-level literacy demands. </blockquote>
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Simply put, there is no quick fix for reading inexperience. Decades of research have shown that reading is a complex cognitive and social practice and that readers develop knowledge, experience, and skill over a lifetime of reading. In building reading aptitude, there is no skills-only approach that can substitute for reading itself. On the contrary, repeated studies have demonstrated that isolated instruction in grammar, decoding, or even reading comprehension skills may have little or no transfer effect when students are actually reading.<sup>15</sup></blockquote>
This summary gibes with what many teachers know to be true about writing and the teaching of writing -- isolated skill practice doesn't transfer into better writing habits of mind, drafting and final copy editing skills.<br />
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In addition, the nature of these programs -- or textbooks that take this approach -- dispirit the learner, mark him or her as unable, and leech joy from learning, motivation from reading (and writing when skill and drill is used there). What does work, write Schoenbach, Greenleaf and Murphy, is quite wonderful for a teacher who seeks an energetic class:<br />
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Recent literacy research has identified the instructional characteristics necessary to meet the unique needs of low-achieving adolescents: treat all students as capable learners, create a collaborative climate of inquiry, build on students interests and curiosity, tap into students' knowledge and experience, and harness their preference for social interaction to serve academic goals.<sup>5</sup> (4)</blockquote>
The Reading Apprenticeship authors also warn against the tendency of professors to find ways around reading -- explaining what was in text via lecture or slides that summarize key ideas, an over-reliance on video, using unchallenging texts where text is used, and other practices.<br />
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I work for a college textbook publisher, and we do have books and software which offer developmental readers support through decontextualized reading practice and drill. Those are legacies from market requirements (teachers and programs ask for this stuff), competitive pressures (other publishers win business by having them), and not quite knowing yet what an alternative offering is. As one who does professional development for faculty, my workshops encourage instructors to move in the direction the literacy research identifies as best -- a belief in students, finding ways to tap into their intrinsic motivations, collaborative reading and writing activities, scaffolded support that moves students into reading more complex texts instead of finding ways to work around reading, bringing learner experience into the mix, and so on.<br />
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But those shifts can be hard for folks to make because they can be messy, require more patience, in the world of seat-time and fixed-weeks in a semester, make it harder for all course goals and outcomes to be reached. So the challenges are real. I think publishers can do more. While the market may demand and teachers may crave discrete skills products, adding to them or offering as alternatives software and books that move in the direction literacy research points to becomes essential.<br />
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Many of our books go there now, but the technology is slower to follow because its harder to develop and what we offer may not be necessary given the plethora of good alternatives. We have, at Macmillan where I work, a tool for shared annotations -- a tool that can support social reading, guided writing around reading, where students can share experiences, insights, questions, answers to make their reading experiences in the course richer and deeper (see <a href="http://thinking-about-student-reading.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://thinking-about-student-reading.blogspot.com/</a>). But as useful, and perhaps more powerful because they were designed around social reading first, are tools like those outlined here -- <a href="http://dutchessworkshop.blogspot.com/2015/01/great-online-tools-to-consider.html" target="_blank">http://dutchessworkshop.blogspot.com/2015/01/great-online-tools-to-consider.html </a>-- that one of my workshops focused on.<br />
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At any rate, two things: I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the Reading Apprenticeship book, and am looking forward to what it can teach myself and my colleagues in publishing about how to make better books and software to support reading.<br />
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5. Lee, C. D., & Spratley, A. (2010). <i>Reading in the disciplines: The challenges of adolescent literacy</i>. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.<br />
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15. Fielding, L. G., & Pearson, P. D. (1994). Reading comprehension: What works. <i>Educational Leadership, 51(5)</i>, 62-88; Cartwright, K. D. (Ed.) (2008). <i>Literacy processes: Cognitive flexibility in learning and teaching</i>. New York: Guilford.<br />
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<br />Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-19764056580330645982015-04-28T09:07:00.000-04:002015-04-28T09:13:06.589-04:00#worthassigning: Derek Muller's "This Will Revolutionize Education"Derek Muller, profiled here in Scientific American (<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/03/15/meet-derek-mueller-winner-of-the-cyberscreen-science-film-festival/" target="_blank">http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/03/15/meet-derek-mueller-winner-of-the-cyberscreen-science-film-festival/</a>), is an Australian scholar with a PhD in Physic Education Research, a road that has taken him to the study of digital learning.<br />
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He has a YouTube channel with a mix of physics lessons and the nature of learning. Among those videos, a link to which came from Chris Clark via POD-L, is one called "This Will Revolutionize Education" (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c" target="_blank">https://ltlatnd.wordpress.com/2015/04/24/this-will-revolutionize-education/</a>). I've linked to Clark's blog post so you can see how Chris frames the video, which looks at why, so far, digital technologies have failed to really revolution education. And he looks pretty closely at the nature of learning along way to describing what technology evangelists often leave out of their imaginings and hype.<br />
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Consider this example, a text excerpt from the roughly 7 minute video, from the 2:55 - 4:40 point that I typed up. <br />
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Let's consider the process of learning. Say you want to teach someone how a human heart pumps blood. Which learning aid do you think would be more effective? This animation with narration, or this set of static images with text? Obviously the animation is better. For one thing, it shows exactly what the heart does. <br />
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For decades educational research focused on questions like this: does a video promote learning better than a book? Are live lectures more effective than televised lectures? Is animation better than static graphics? <br />
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In all well controlled studies, the result is No Significant Difference.<br />
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That is, so long as the content is equivalent between the two treatments, the learning outcomes are the same with all different media. <br />
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How is this possible? How can something which seems so powerful like animation be no more effective than static graphics? Well, for one thing, animations are fleeting and so you might miss something as they go by. Plus, since the parts are animated for you, you don't have to mentally envision how the parts are moving, and so you don't have to invest as much mental effort, which would make it more memorable. In fact, sometimes static graphic perform better than animations. </blockquote>
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If you're teaching a course in digital learning, humanities, multimedia delivery and presentation, course design, online learning and the like, the video should prove useful.<br />
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If you're working as program administrator, doing professional development with teachers who are being asked to engage digital learning technologies, Muller builds to the point that technology is evolutionary, and that "the foundation of education is still based on the social interaction between teachers and students." So this is uplifting.<br />
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But the video is also the basis for departure. What does evolution mean? If you're in a graduate program readying for a career as a full-time, tenure track college professor, will you be hired as the kind of teacher you see in your seminars, or will you be among those who shift to becoming a learning coach as described by Christine Seifert and Richard Chapman in "<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/04/27/essay-making-switch-professor-coach" target="_blank">The Coaching Transformation</a>."<br />
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That is, technology will, over time, -- because its happening now--, change significantly the nature of "the social interaction between teachers and students."<br />
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So perhaps the most vital use of this video and the discussions that might come from it are not so much Muller's celebration of the centrality of students and teachers working together, but rather what kind of new expertise teachers will need, and what roles they may no longer be asked to perform going forward.Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-9688385432111252242015-01-23T09:00:00.000-05:002015-03-18T09:01:01.060-04:00This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 1/19 - 1/23<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;">Monday, January 19:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The wonderful thing about winter in New England is that when you get them, days like today, days in the mid thirties, with mostly blue skies and slight breezes now and again, feel balmy. No longer underwear, no thick socks, no heavy jacket, no down mittens, just a good coat, cap, and fast step, and you're all set.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Now here's the the other thing: there are times in the winter that are so cold that there are days after them when the high teens and low twenties feel balmy too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Tuesday, January 20:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The stop sign outside my window must feel particularly disrespected this morning as cars roll through it, maybe every third or fourth actually coming to a full stop, every fifth or so simply blithely ignoring it and not even pretending to be about to stop. I think even one just accelerated past it, actually sped through it as if it were a traffic light at yellow about to go red. So my question for today: will I be like the stop sign, depending on the kindness of others for respect?. And who will those others act? Like the courteous driver, who comes to a full stop in this residential neighborhood?; the impatient driver who slowly rolls through?; or the road boar who fully ignores the sign because lord knows that the two seconds saved in traffic by doing so means so much to the driver's ego? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And when I drive, how will I behave? Well, given that I am a bad driver, anything is possible</span><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">, but I'm inclined today to a longer than full stop, one I exaggerate as if giving a driver's education lesson.</span><span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Wednesday, January 21:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">It's 10:33 a.m. and I haven't had breakfast yet, though I had have coffee. It's what comes from getting up early, reading and writing right away, and not noticing the time until three hours into work.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">It's a good day that starts with reading and writing stuff that keeps you from food, maybe not a good habit for every day, but a good day none-the-less to wake energized and doing those two things.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Next up -- breakfast then a walk. But before that, I want to see if there's a voice t text app for my cell phone so that I can walk and write at the same time. I cannot walk and read -- too many obstacles (parked cars, curbs, telephone poles, branches, deep puddles of cold water or shallow patches of ice) to do that safely, but writing, well . . .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Thursday, January 22:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;">I really like this time of year, the start of a semester. Now is the time when conversations with students and teachers are most optimistic, when plans are still fresh, class chemistries are still forming. It's a hectic time, these first few weeks -- the period of add/drops; instructor assignment changes; waiting for books to be bought, borrowed, or shared; and the first dipping into any course edutech: textbook publisher learning tools, open education resources, locally coded sites, campus licensed stuff, or the same tools and services non students use all the time such as blogs, video sharing, and social sites. </span><br style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;" /><br style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;" /><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;">And experience says that not everything will go as planned. Some students won't read nor, if they do read, understand assigned work. Others will struggle to create accounts and get off to smooth start in their electronic spaces because of user errors. And too many of those spaces will be slow to load, have bugs, lack content, or simply not work as imagined. There will be hiccups, with online and offline learning. There always is.</span><br style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;" /><br style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;" /><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;">Learning is hard, complicated, and unpredictable. People aren't widgets; schools aren't factories. Neither teachers nor students are uniformly designed. And so what's fun in the coming weeks is the work of helping people adjust to one another -- teachers to students -- and to the tools they use. What can supplement a book?, how can an assignment be adjusted?, how do you find a way to get to a goal within the limits of what a technology does? </span><br style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;" /><br style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;" /><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;">So for me, spring is the season of workshops, consultations, learning what worked and planning changes for fall, and other fun stuff. From now to May, no matter how rough things may get here and there as adjustments are made in the here and now of making the current semester work, it's really a forward looking and hopeful time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.3333330154419px;">Friday, January 23:</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Today will be fun -- off to MIT to learn about their HyperStudio's AnnotationStudio software (</span></span><a href="http://www.annotationstudio.org/" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">http://www.annotationstudio.<wbr></wbr>org/</a><span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">) </span><span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">for reading and writing.</span></span><span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"> I've explored it a bit on my own, but today in a one day conference, we'll hear from the designers as well as teachers who use it. Nothing like a day spent exploring the pedagogy of learning software, especially when it's smart stuff from smart people. </span><br style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">The nexus of technology and learning continually surprises and fascinates, and so while there are days when a job can get old -- use this form, fix that bug, complete expenses, the report is late, answer that question again -- there days like this, days of learning and thinking and imagining "what if we did . . ."</span></div>
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Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-44122343151282907352015-01-16T15:35:00.003-05:002015-01-16T15:58:48.202-05:00#worthassigning: Effective Peer Review Assignment Design from the Eli Review Team<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The team at Eli Peer Review (<a href="http://elireview.com/" target="_blank">http://elireview.com</a>) has a new professional development piece up for faculty on designing effective peer review assignments at <a href="http://elireview.com/content/td/reviews/" target="_blank">http://elireview.com/content/td/reviews/</a>. If you do faculty development, tutor training, like using digital tools to teach, offer a writing and the teaching of writing course, you'll find this invaluable. </span><br />
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The full module includes video pieces from professors and useful illustrative graphics, but here's a humble text excerpt from the piece that speaks to its quality and smarts:</div>
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Reviews from which writers receive helpful feedback that will drive revision rarely happen without coaching, especially with novice reviewers. Teachers in feedback-rich classrooms must give as much attention to designing reviews as they do to designing writing prompts. </blockquote>
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Review prompts shape how reviewers talk to writers, influencing the details reviewers notice and ignore. Prompts are not just words instructors use, but also the various forms of response they choose to help reviewers read a draft carefully and respond to it thoughtfully. </blockquote>
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Unhelpful feedback is often the result of reviewer insecurities, caused by many factors:<br />
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<li> They don’t know how to talk about writing, generally.</li>
<li> They aren’t aware of the learning goals of a project, specifically.</li>
<li> They aren’t comfortable providing feedback to peers, especially friends.</li>
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When designing a review, there are three important factors we can take into account that will help overcome these obstacles and result in better feedback: we can consider the <b>cognitive load</b> of our reviews, start with pedagogical goals and <b>design reviews backwards</b>, and be <b>detailed and specific</b> in how we prompt students. </blockquote>
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I really like how this starts -- students can give good peer review feedback (the piece cites relevant empirical research showing as much) with coaching and guidance. And often that's not provided in peer review assignment design. And the second point --- review activities, to succeed, require as much attention, as writing assignments. </div>
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Eli Review is a Web-based software platform for writing workshop pedagogy; it purposefully puts teachers in the role of guide on the side, with the only teacher-centered commenting space being in their revision plan tool. In that tool, students choose which written comments they'll follow in their revision; after choosing the comments and saying how they'll use them, the professor can comment on the revision plans. Professors do not comment on drafts, nor do they use Eli to grade (there's no grade book), the emphasis is on designing good reviews, coaching good feedback, and for professors, commenting on revision plans based on writers' decisions about classmates review comments. It's a dramatic shift.</div>
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But here's the thing, you do not have to teach or have colleagues teach with Eli Review to benefit from its advice on assigning good peer review assignments. The advice is simply smart no matter what tools you use for peer review. Here's another excerpt, this one elaborates on their observations about considering cognitive load:</div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"> One mistake we often make is giving students too much to do. Asking reviewers to read too much text and address too many questions can often mean that they don’t have time to respond thoughtfully. Module 1 discussed the issue of time and feedback loops, but some specific strategies for reducing cognitive load on reviewers include.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Review smaller texts</b> - consider smaller, focused reviews as a text develops, rather than asking reviewers to digest and respond to a large text. In an example like this, writers get feedback early, on small pieces, helping make sure that the larger draft they’re building toward is on the right track, with the added benefit of making plagiarism much harder (since you can watch as a text evolves from earliest kernels to a full draft):</span></span><br />
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Multiple reviews of the same text</b> - Divide reviews to conquer cognitive load. Design smaller, swifter reviews that are focused on specific, granular goals. This will let reviewers focus carefully for discreet moves: </span><br />
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The advice to review smaller pieces of writing, smaller pieces of larger texts, or smaller goals in a larger text make incredible sense no matter how one does peer review.<br />
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Finally, because the writing is so clear, and the case for the approach so compelling, if you put into practice some of the strategies the piece suggests, no matter the technology you use, this is a piece worth assigning to your students before they begin doing peer review. It will help them to better understand your peer review approach, why you're asking them to do peer review, and it demonstrates convincingly that students can become reliably good peer reviewers.<br />
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Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-68653346907664907552015-01-16T14:08:00.007-05:002015-01-16T17:39:22.244-05:00This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 1/12 - 1/16I began the week on the road -- leading a workshop with great teachers at <a href="http://sunydutchess.edu/" target="_blank">Dutchess Community College</a> -- and then working from my portable office storage device at home, in coffee shops, and even for two and half hours, at the actual office.<br />
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Monday, January 12: On the slippery road again . . .</h3>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I got home <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_749205675" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 1px; position: relative; top: -2px; z-index: 0;" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ" style="position: relative; top: 2px; z-index: -1;">Friday</span></span> night, but <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_749205676" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 1px; position: relative; top: -2px; z-index: 0;" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ" style="position: relative; top: 2px; z-index: -1;">this Monday</span></span> finds me on the road again. I'm off, with a stop over in Hartford, CT tonight to do a workshop in Poughkeepsie, NY tomorrow.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">So today I get to drive through snow and some sleet, or maybe just freezing rain, depends on the route. I'm kind of looking forward to that part, the driving in bad weather part, of today.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Driving in bad weather is actually fun -- a little sliding here, hydroplaning there, wipers not keeping up quite with volume and so visibility reduced, trees and guard rails coming closer, sideways blown weather . . . better than sledding on a lunch tray during recess.</span></div>
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Tuesday, January 13: How do <i>you</i> say that?</h3>
<span style="background-color: white; color: maroon; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">In Poughkeepsie today -- and by the way, Poughkeepsie is fun to say if you mispronounce it and enunciate each syllable as its own word, much the same way Worcester is fun to mispronounce -- for a workshop that addresses reading in college. Here's the url for the workshop blog in case you want some fun stuff on reading to read (use the resources link in the menu):</span><span style="background-color: white; color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <a href="http://dutchessworkshop.blogspot.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="color: red; text-decoration: none;">http://dutchessworkshop.<wbr></wbr>blogspot.com/</span></a>.</span><br />
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Wednesday, January 14: Time is not on my side, yes it isn't</h3>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Am I this far behind, only 14 days into the New Year, because I've suddenly become inefficient? Or has the volume of what I need to get done expanded? I do not think it is inefficiency. After all, I play solitaire as crisply as ever and linger at the water cooler with the same elan as always and my afternoon naps -- marked as overseas conference calls in my calender -- are still only two hours, taken after my standard lunch of ice-cream and pretzels. No. I think it must be a volume issue. I must learn to say no.</span><br />
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Thursday, January 15: Charm only lasts so long for some frogs</h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I got into work at 7 a.m. today because getting into work meant shuffling from shower and shave to laptop, coffee in hand, cereal by my side, banana peeled, mimosa aflute, ready to go. My New Year's nonresolution -- I prefer gestures and water testing to resolve -- is to have a mimosa every morning for breakfast under the theory that it combines two great fruits - oranges and grapes - with a little effervescence.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">If you see me and I'm effusive, cheerful, helpful, now you'll now why -- my morning glass of effervescence. If you see me and I'm not effervescent, that means it's 8:00 a.m. or later and you missed my window of charm.</span></div>
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Friday, January 16: I am my own auto-correct fail</h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I'm starting to mishear. My daughter was telling me about how she had to buck calls yesterday, and I said, "do you mean, 'duck calls?," meaning to me not answer the phone. She glanced at me, paused, and said, "Dad, I said _muck stalls_." Of course, since she works at a barn tending to horses that makes sense.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Now, it's one thing to mishear when another is speaking, but I sometimes mishear when I write. As I write, I say the words in my head. A few days ago I was writing an email and almost sent out "raisin finds" instead of "raise funds." That would not have been an auto-correct error. That would've been a "me mishearing my own words as I inner speak to myself as I write what I say" error.</span></div>
<br />Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-62933167134391504422015-01-11T22:18:00.000-05:002015-01-12T11:11:09.426-05:00This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 1/5 - 1/10This past week I was in fact out of the office, for the whole week, at the national sales meeting for Macmillan Higher Education (where I work) and the high school division, BFW High School. So you'll sense of theme.<br />
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Monday, January 5: A Room w/ a View, But in Only One Direction</h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I am in Huntington Beach, CA until Friday, at a hotel across the street - US 1, the Pacific Coast Highway - from the beach. Sadly, there is too much sand on the beach for my taste, the water is salty, so I will not cross over to the waves. But at least if you look west you see water, though not quite blue in color, more an industrial gray heavy green.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">But it's nice to look at, maybe the only thing nice:<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">If you look south from the hotel, it's flat and dull until you see what look likes some kind of oil storage or processing facility, all done in gray.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">If you look north, there's construction, with iron skeletons of shops, hotels, and condos yet to be born in the rust red and black of new iron works encased all around by silver scaffolding.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And to look east from the hotel, it's all gated communities with walls and Spanish style roofs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">-- So look west, especially at sunset:</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BhEGmTS-A84/VLM8rkc0K4I/AAAAAAAAAWc/bjrKGgcxgsQ/s1600/sunset_hbeach_jan_nsm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="sunset at huntington beach" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BhEGmTS-A84/VLM8rkc0K4I/AAAAAAAAAWc/bjrKGgcxgsQ/s1600/sunset_hbeach_jan_nsm.jpg" height="223" title="sunset " width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">West is best.</td></tr>
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Tuesday, January 6: Lots of Books Get Carried and Shipped</h3>
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<b><span style="color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A Textbook Publisher Sales Meeting Limerick:</span></b><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">A meeting in California<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Is a textbook cornucopia<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> If you happen to go,<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> You really should know<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">That too many books gives a hernia</span><br />
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Wednesday, January 7: Apologies to Princess Leia</h3>
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<b><span style="color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A long time ago, in a state far, far away . . .<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">. . . It is a period of the sales meeting<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Travel away from Boston, gripped<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">in wind chill readings of minus -24<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">degrees, means those from there who<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">are here in Huntington Beach, CA have<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">won their first victory.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">During the meeting, restless reps<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">make secret plans for their free afternoon.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Avoiding the doom of cognitive overload,<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">the break should refresh people with<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">enough power to survive through Thursday.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Friday, everyone who hasn't already left,<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">races home, most in cramped and crappy<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">coach seats, custodians of plans<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">that can save schools from the Evil<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Galactic Empire's MyLab Plus and restore<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">learning to the galaxy....</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
Thursday, January 8: If I'm Not at E-Mail, You Shouldn't Be Either.</h3>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I am in the office, not out. I have access to email. So nothing's changed. But still, I may not <span class="il">reply </span><span class="il">automatically</span> except for this <span class="il">automatic</span> <span class="il">reply</span>.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">My office is my laptop, and it is in a hotel in California, not to be confused with the Hotel California in Peoria, Illinois. I am not at my laptop right now. I am either in a car on the way to campus, at a meeting at this hotel in one of their conference rooms, or six paces away on the bed watching a movie from 20 years ago where Richerd Gere is a lawyer defending an altar boy who . . . cannot stay awake any more.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: black; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I hope this <span class="il">reply</span> finds you well and ready for the weekend, which can start now if you like. Really, go ahead. Leave, go home, get a drink, call it 5 pm on Friday. I won't tell.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: black; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<h3>
Friday, January 9: Switching Songs of Home</h3>
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">All my bag's are packed, I'm ready to go . . .<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Just can't wait to get home again . . .<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: maroon; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">To see my wife again . . .</span><span style="color: purple; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Be in her arms again . . .</span><span style="color: purple; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">To wake up Saturday morning with her again . . .</span><br />
<span style="color: purple; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
Bonus -- Saturday, January 10: No, Not a Bad Cocaine Memory</h3>
<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><span style="color: red; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">I really wish it were possible to eat broth with a fork. Spoons scare me.</span></b>Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-49853781014623839952015-01-05T13:07:00.002-05:002015-01-06T01:31:55.360-05:00This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 12/29/204 - 1/2/2015<br />
Though I only had a few days for required work this week, I kept a full slate of auto-responses to better mark the transition from 2014 to 2015. We begin at that beginning:<br />
<br />
<h3>
Monday, December 29: Resolving not to be Too Quick to Resolve</h3>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">It's the last Monday of 2014.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Today is a good day to think about your new year's resolution, if you're so inclined.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">If you're at work, things are likely more quiet than usual, most holiday parties past, many co-workers cramming in unused vacation and sick days before the new year starts.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">If you're not at work, today is a pivot day of sorts on the break you are taking. Visiting relatives might be making their way home today, or you might be traveling back to where you're from, hopefully at a laconic pace that doesn't involve airports. Or maybe you're just resting quietly for a bit, doing some minor work while it's quiet, which is why you're getting this.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">In either location -- at work or away from work -- today is a good day to think about next year.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">My advice, don't think too much about it. Don't rush rashly to resolve. Let the year arrive, give it time to simmer, and make your adaptations quietly, over time. Ease into things. Make any resolutions or long term plans in February, after you get all tax paper work, final holiday bills, sense of what the issues are at work, at home, in the country as a whole.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Then make some plans, set a course, and find a way to stay sane that doesn't demand drastic or dramatic change or surgery...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;">Tuesday, December 30: Actual Out</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #993366; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: medium;"><b>Today</b></span><span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"> finds me genuinely out of the office, off line for much of the day. </span><br />
<br style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">Not that it matters to you too much because if you're writing me, there's nothing urgent at hand. I've delivered unto deadline what is deadline's, and now is the time for low level projects - the last expense report for the year, some tidying up of files, deleting of things past for which remembrance, let alone archiving, would be wasted, and other squaring-aways of the past year in preparation for the next.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">I am looking forward to 2015, and the chance, from a work point of view, for new adventures in pedagogy and online learning. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;">Wednesday, December 31: No TV Tonight</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: green; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It's New Year's Eve, </span></b><span style="color: #993366; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"> or as we used to say when I tended bar and waited tables for a living, amateur night. If you're going out tonight, have fun. If you're not going out, you'll have more fun.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="color: #993366; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">If you're staying in, whatever you do, do not turn on the television and watch the inexorable coverage of first nights, ball drop, fireworks, and the inane commentary of B-list singers, and local anchors trying to sound chipper between their shivers. There's nothing more desultory and cheerless than new year's eve coverage on television.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #993366; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It's much more sensible to to take a good hardcover book and hit yourself about the head than it is to watch television coverage of the count down to the new year. At least when people asked you how you spent your new year's eve you can sound constructive about it -- I curled up with a good book.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #993366; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So look, whatever you do tonight - be it stay home alone, stay home with family and friends, go out alone, or go out with family and friends - do it with the television off. Enjoy or despair the moment, wherever you are and whatever your mood, live and direct, not through a screen.</span></div>
<h3>
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;">Thursday, January 1: Flower Power Redux</span></h3>
<b style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"><span style="color: maroon; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium;">This will be redundant in its way, but here goes: Hippy Nude Year!</span></b><br />
<h3>
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;">Friday, January 2: A Year of Travel Kharma in One Day?</span></h3>
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
Have I used all my travel kharma for 2015 today?</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
I needed to get to Hartford from Canton, Ma. My plan was to rent a car from Logan because I fly out early Sunday morning and the car rental from Friday to Sunday is cheaper than -- get this -- a cab to the airport from my house Sunday am.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
But, at the last minute, I had an appointment come up that meant I couldn't leave as early as planned for the airport. I though for sure I'd be late to the meeting in Hartford.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
But . . .</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
I got t the train at Canton Junction just in time to catch the, coming onto the platform and stepping aboard as the last passenger just as it was about to pull away.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
At South Station, I transferred to the Silver Line, stepping aboard just as the bus was to pull away for it's run to Logan.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
At Logan, I transferred from the Silver Line to the car rental shuttle, stepping aboard just as the door closed.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
At the rental car center, I hit no line, FastBreak was fast, no line, the envelope waiting, the car there, with no line at the exit booth.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
I hit no traffic delays on the Pike.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
So instead of being a half hour to forty minutes late, I was ten minutes early, a minor miracle. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;">
I hope I don't have to pay the kharma bank back on Sunday after I land at LAX and begin the drive to Huntington Beach.</div>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-66858917787230217412014-12-27T20:00:00.003-05:002014-12-27T20:00:46.800-05:00This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 12/22 - 12/26<div class="tr_bq">
Though it was a holiday week, with the office closed anyway from 12/24 at noon through the weekend, was doing some work each day, if only the work of changing my auto-response messages. Which of course is play too.</div>
<br />
<h3>
Monday, December 22: Merry Monday</h3>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Merry <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_223806994" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ">Monday</span></span> to you, merry <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_223806995" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ">Monday</span></span> to you, merry <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_223806996" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ">Monday</span></span>, merry <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_223806997" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ">Monday</span></span>, merry <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_223806998" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ">Monday</span></span> to you.
<br />
<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Though today is not my birthday, the birthday song is fun to make up words to any day. </span>I'd go on to a riff on the "how old are you now" verse, but asking about age is impolitic. In case you're
wondering, however, I am 65, though if you meet me ever you'll swear I
look young for my age. And I do. I find that after
a certain point, if you're going to lie about your age, it's better to
lie up.<br />
<br />
In fact, if I were writing a self-help book, that would be the title of
one of its chapters: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">"It's OK to Lie About Your Age if You Lie Up (Unless
You Are Under 21)" </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">And the chapter might open with these lines:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Actually
it's more than o.k., it's in fact wise to lie up about your age. First,
most people who do lie, unless they are under 21, lie down. Which means
then that you have
to live down to your age. Lie up and live it up. Plus lying up on age
is aspirational -- adding years gives you a number to shoot for, is in
its way life affirming. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"></span></div>
<h3>
Tuesday, December 23: Dick and Jane</h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">This is Nick's auto-response.<br />
<br />
"Look," says Dick.<br />
"See it in the inbox.<br />
See it ready to be read."<br />
<br />
"Yes," says Jane.<br />
"Yes, I see it in the inbox.<br />
Will you open it?"<br />
<br />
Dick clicks on Nick.<br />
<br />
"See," says Dick.<br />
"See what Nick says."<br />
<br />
Jane calls, "Sally, come see."<br />
<br />
Sally says, "Nick auto replied to Dick." <br />
<br />
"It is in Dick's inbox. <br />
<br />
I see it already. <br />
<br />
Can we go have cookies and scotch now?"<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">"Silly, Sally," says Jane. "Cookies and scotch are for after work."<br />
<br />
"Let's leave work now," says Dick.<br />
<br />
"Yes," says Sally, "Then it can be after work."<br />
</span></span><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
See Dick and Jane and Sally leave work.<br />
<br />
See them forget the cookies.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h3 class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Wednesday, December 24: 'Tis the Day Before Christmas</span></h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Tis the day before Christmas, and all through the house</span>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">No technology is stirring, not even a mouse</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Well,
that's not true. We used the toaster today at breakfast, and the t.v.
is on, and my daughter's in her room listening to music via an mpg3
player. And the lights are on, and soon we'll be using the oven, not to
mention we did drive a car, and my other daugther made a card with
water colors and brushes, an art technology.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">So a revision. Because in an auto <span class="il">reply</span> one should not lie:
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"></span></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">'Tis the day before Christmas, and all the through the house,
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">All technology is whirring, _except_ the email mouse.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<h3>
Thursday, December 25: Merry Christmas </h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 76.0pt; margin-right: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">M</span></b><b><span style="color: teal; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">e</span></b><b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">r</span></b><b><span style="color: green; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">r</span></b><b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">y
</span></b><b><span style="color: green; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">C</span></b><b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">h</span></b><b><span style="color: green; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">r</span></b><b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">i</span></b><b><span style="color: green; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">s</span></b><b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">t</span></b><b><span style="color: green; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">m</span></b><b><span style="color: red; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">a</span></b><b><span style="color: green; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-size: 22.0pt;">s</span></b><span style="color: green; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 22.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">I hope your day brings joy and good company, though I hope that for everyone everyday.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">If
you are one to give and receive gifts on this day, I hope you receive
more than you give -- that the monetary value of
the gifts you receive is higher than whatever you spent on the gifts
you gave. Or I hope that you at least break even if you can in that
regard.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Now wishing you a profit isn't to diminish the joy of giving that today is about for so many. I hope you do know the joy of
giving. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Unless
you've managed the minor Christmas miracle of getting everyone just the
right gift, gifts that bring genuine joy to
their hearts and show you to be a gift giver of superior talent and
sensitivity, so much so that you shame those lame gift-givers that seem
this time of year to abound. </span>Not that I'm jealous of your your gift to gift, but if you're a perfect gifter, I hope you stub your toe and find lumps in your mash potatoes.</div>
<h3 class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-autospace: none;">
<b>Friday, December 26: The First Return</b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">And
lo, on this day Mary and Joseph wrapped their babe in swaddling
clothing and went to the agora to exchange the gold, incense, and myrrh
for
more practical things, like a bed, fresh camels, and a place to live.
The stable looks good in a creche, but not so much for bringing up the
King of Kings. This was no easy thing in those days, because the good agora was far away, and the caravan traffic slow and
heavy. But though Joseph was tired and wanted to stay home, Mary
insisted they shop and trade, telling Joseph he could buy some wine
and goat meat on a stick and wait till she was done for all she cared, but he had to
lead the donkey she rode there because she needed to hands to
hold the kid. <br />
<br />
And so began the tradition of exchanging gifts the day after Christmas,
where men and women who cannot stand being out now sit over beer and nachos in
any bar at or near the mall waiting while their partners to correct
imperfect gifts or to put those gift cards to use, which is always more pleasant because you don't have to find the gift receipt, if one was provided.
<br />
<br />
And thus it was decreed that for people over 13*, the perfect gift is
cash, not a gift card with its fees and worse god help those who suffer
them, good for only a particular store or mall, but cash. Of the three magi,
the wisest was he who brought gold, and so Mary
sent him the first thank you note.<br />
<br />
*For 13 and under toys. Not clothes. Especially not socks and most
especially not pajamas. Toys -- and if the toys are to nieces and
nephews, loud ones, to help your brothers and sisters not sleep in <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_223806999" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ">on Saturday's</span></span> and <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_223807000" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ">Sunday's</span></span>.<br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-86885530542341481142014-12-19T09:00:00.003-05:002014-12-19T09:15:07.753-05:00This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 12/15 - 12/19<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ncarbone.blogspot.com/search/label/%23autoresponse" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">About This Week in Auto Response</a></h2>
<div>
Each workday, I write a new auto response e-mail for my work address only: nick.carbone AT macmillan DOT com. If anyone e-mails me, they get an auto response, even on days when I'm in the office. I mean why not? It's not quite a "set it and forget it" move, but the auto response does at least confirm for a send of e-mail to me that their letter has arrived.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bit.ly/1qEx6Pv" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/1qEx6Pv</a> for a note on the rhetoric of auto responses.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Monday, December 15: Blank You, Spam</h4>
</div>
<div>
<div>
I do hope you do not mind getting this automatic reply. Please feel free to fill in the ending blank:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Because I must do that work due that I do so well, I reply to tell that my unread inbox will swell. I've turned off the chime, shut down the bell, so no alerts my progress will quell. If you need a response I'll get back in a spell. Unless you've sent spam, in which case, you can just go to ___.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Tuesday, December 16: Peter, Paul, and Mary and Me</h4>
<div>
<div>
I've been thinking about hammers of late, and the Peter, Paul, and Mary song that starts, "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning . . ." keeps popping into my head because of it.</div>
<div>
A hammer is a technology in search of things that need hammering: nails, of course, but sometimes horseshoes, or pegs, or the handle of a chisel, or metal to be shaped . . .</div>
<div>
Hammers vary and can be banged for a lot of different purposes and situations. Sort of like writing. Writing is a technology in search of things that need hammering out too. I guess that would make the song go like this:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I'd write out danger,<br />
I'd write out a warning,<br />
I'd writer out love between,<br />
My brothers and my sisters,<br />
All over this land.</blockquote>
</div>
<h4>
Wednesday, December 17: It's a Wonderful E-Mail</h4>
<div>
<div>
Quotes from <i>It's a Wonderful E-Mail</i>, the story of an outbox in despair because it thinks it makes no difference what it sends; Outbox learns its messages matter after an angel in need of wings shows Outbox how its messages have made a difference.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hey look, Outbox. We serve hard drinks in here for unwritten mail that wants to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint "atmosphere". </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Strange, isn't it? Each e-mail touches so many other lives. When it isn't sent around it leaves an awful hole, doesn't it? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Remember, Outbox: no e-mail is a failure that has contacts. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
You see, Outbox, you've really had a wonderful e-mail. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to never send again? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A toast to Nick's Outbox: The longest messages in town. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Every time an autoreply is read to the end, an angel gets its wings. </blockquote>
</div>
<h4>
Thursday, December 18: I Am a Romantic, but Not Ridolfo</h4>
<div>
<div>
Right now the rain is almost snow. Some drops are clearly water, some white globs, slush on the way to being flakes. Given a few more degrees, I'd need a shovel today. But the degrees that do come will be warmer not cooler and so no shoveling just yet. Still, it's good sweater and hot drinks weather, simmer a stew weather, and, sitting with a warm computer on one's lap, in the cozy glow of the snow-white editing screen longing for words, writing weather. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This is clearly not La Boheme, I'm no Rodolfo writing despite the cold in a gusty garret, but there is something Romantic to writing on a blustery day, even if only for work. Some of the stuff I'll be working on, the pedagogical stuff not the expense report stuff, requires idealism, passion, and even with all the science I know, respect for what remains mystic and uncanny about teaching and learning. So that's largely what I'll be doing today, writing stuff for courses I won't be teaching, instructors who are not me, students who will not be my own, creating imaginary classrooms with real students in them.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Friday, December 19: Writing to Unstuff</h4>
<div>
<div>
My head is stuffed. No, not because my ego is bloated (though it often is), in which case anyway, to be pedantic, I'd've said my head is swelled, but rather because I get allergies from, I suppose, dust in the winter, when windows and doors stay closed and the air dries.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
And so, while I wait for my daily ZYRTEC® to take effect , which I wash down with my morning shot of brandy, another winter tradition used only as a daily medicinal against the allergy, which medicinal, because it makes me sleepy, is followed by two cups of coffee, a brisk shower, and a morning walk to my office, which, since I work at home, is a short perambulation of six strides from bedroom to living room where couch and laptop await, I work on small things that can happily be done with a stuffed head in something of a slight haze.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Today that work is converting Microsoft Word documents of multiple-choice quizzes into the Respondus quiz format. It's tedious markup, remind me much of the days when I used to write with Word Star, a wonderful word processer that wasn't WYSIWYG when I used it. You were never quite sure until you printed whether the underlining or italics you marked up the text to have were rightly marked up. Same too with converting a quiz in Word to one in Respondus. It ain't until you import that Respondus manuscript that you really know whether there's an error.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
So the work is tedious because I didn't write the quizzes, don't like the quizzes -- they're banal grammar questions, not fun at all -- is really a matter of conversion as a favor to a professor using some of our technology.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Such sometimes is the glamorous life I lead and why today, though my head is stuffed, it sure as hell ain't swelled.</div>
</div>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-36300899162766459492014-12-12T08:45:00.002-05:002014-12-12T08:54:55.569-05:00This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 12/09 - 12/12<h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Series Introduction</span></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have, in an effort to be more efficient at work, decided that I will only check my work e-mail -- nick.carbone at macmillan dot com -- twice a day. And thus since replies will not be instant, each day I will write a new auto response so that my virtual correspondents know that in due time I will in fact read their tender missives.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I began this new approach with great resolve on December 9, a Tuesday. Though I suppose I could have saved it for a New Year's resolution, I believe in starting early when an idea is good. Also, it's year-end review season, and I can point to the tactic as an accomplishment in the same way that having a child just before the end of year is a great tax break.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here are the auto responses for this first week. Each Friday, I'll post the weekly collection. What<span style="font-family: inherit;">eve<span style="font-family: inherit;">r I use as Friday's message will stay through the weekend.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;">See <a href="http://bit.ly/1qEx6Pv" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/1qEx6Pv</a></span><span style="color: navy;"> for a note on the rhetoric of out of office auto responses.</span></span><span style="color: #632423; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br /></span></span><br />
<h4>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></h4>
<h4>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Tuesday, December 9:</span></h4>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">And
on the 9th day of December, the skies opened and the rain deluged, and
verily I said unto me --- 'tis a good day to stay home and write
unperturbed
by the nuisance of a drench-the-trenchcoat commute to an office where,
once I arrived, I would simply be writing while wet, with door shut to
be undisturbed, meeting with no one, talking to no one. So I am home
writing dry. If you need me, write me. If you
need me to pay attention immediately, call me, my number's in the .sig
below. <br />
<br />
Though come to think of it, if you are seeing this iteration of my
o/o/o, you are not someone who works in my office, and so it makes no
difference to you where I am because it's not like you're in my office
looking for me. But at least now you know I'm dry.
And writing.<br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: #632423; font-size: 10.0pt;"><br /></span></span><br />
<h4>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Wednesday, December 10:</span></span></h4>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Once
upon a time I came to the office, sat at my desk, and turned on the
automatic reply message. I then shut down my e-mail program. It was a
gray and blustery day, and my work for the day included one brief face
to face meeting and then lots of reading & writing. So I am in full
e-mail denial if you are reading this: I've silenced the e-mail
notification ding and icon and removed the e-mail shortcut
from the start tray. If you're reading this far, know that I will
blithely ignore my inbox until tomorrow. If you really need my
attention, best to call.
<br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h4>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Thursday, December 11:</span></span></h4>
<div align="center">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: navy;">Thank you for
writing. No, really, I do mean it. Thank you. Even if your e-mail consternates, requires me to jump-to something, means more work of
one kind or another, thank you. Sure, an e-mail
of some other kind -- notice of good news, a gentle reminder to do
something pleasant, like "Nick, don't forget to take your office nap
today," praise of any kind, even if it's not for me -- might be more
enjoyable, and so if you're sending one of those, consider
my thanks even more profuse. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: navy;">But really, whatever you send, since I'm a don't-let-the-sunshine-spoil-<wbr></wbr>your-rain
kind of guy, thanks. I'll get back to you as soon as I get back to
e-mail reading, which is now deliberately intermittent.
</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: navy;">Today my attention will be enslaved by other things, more, so I hope, productive things. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h4 class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Friday, December 12:</span></span></h4>
<div align="center">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><span style="color: red;">The Incredible T<span style="color: red;">rue Story of the First Textbook</span></span></b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because my new work efficiency diet requires me to cut down on my e-mail
consumption, let me tell you a very truthy story while you wait for my
reply.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Today is Friday, December 12, with only 378 days until Christmas 2015.
On this day in 105 AD, paper making was invented in China. On the next
day, that would be December 13, 105, the first textbook was published.
No, not by Macmillan, we're not that venerable. The
book was print on hand-written command. The first draft required
readers to scroll, but after two unrolls to see more text, eye-ball
tracking revealed that reading stopped; instead, students took to
watching thieves get their hands cut-off, the role-playing
video game activity of the time. Professors, since times were stricter
then, tried corporal punishment, but the poking students in the eye with
a stylus and yelling "since you will not do the assigned reading, dog,
you do not need this!" proved counter-productive.
So in revision, the book came out in a compact edition, a single sheaf,
no scrolling required. However, by then, in addition to to thief
punishment, other diversions had emerged -- ceramics was a growing
hobby, and rice krispie treats were invented because
opium had been discovered too. hus in its third revision, the book was
reduced to an illustrated koan that could be copied by just about
anyone. And so it spread, almost like a virus, across the land, causing
giggles with each forward. But it also put the
publisher out of business. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Glad those days are gone. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Meanwhile, I do check e-mail, but only twice a day, not constantly. So I
will find your message eventually and if it requires one from me, I
will respond. If a response is not required, know that I read every word
you wrote, underlining the good ones.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-47431816400870185042014-12-08T16:21:00.002-05:002014-12-10T08:36:37.189-05:00Want to Pass a Writing Test? Memorize an Essay<span data-mce-style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span data-mce-style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;" style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">A <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/magazine/those-who-cant-teach.html" target="_blank">July 12, 2013 <i>New York Times Magazine</i></a>
piece by Curtis Sittenfeld about her time, while a creative writing graduate student, tutoring a woman who needed to pass the writing test on her GED exam, describes an unsuccessful two year struggle to pass the exam:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span data-mce-style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;" style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">During the two years my tutee and I worked together, she tried to pass the English section of the G.E.D. several times and didn't succeed, always unable to write a sufficiently coherent essay. It crossed my mind from time to time that maybe I wasn't her ideal tutor. For one thing, my understanding of grammar was more instinctive than formal. I didn't think of, say, gerunds or reflexive pronouns as gerunds or reflexive pronouns; I just knew how to use them correctly, which wasn't the same as knowing how to clearly explain them.</span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Sittenfeld got a job on graduation, and moved before her student passed the GED, under the guidance of a different tutor. But she had become friends with her tutee, who, after passing, explained to Sittenfeld her strategy:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span data-mce-style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;" style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Over the phone, my tutee told me about her new tutor’s approach to the English test: together they would construct a vaguely worded essay. My tutee would memorize it, and depending upon the test’s essay question, she would alter it slightly. Weeks after I moved away, she used this method, and it worked; she finally passed.</span></blockquote>
<div data-mce-style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;">
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And
that seems to me to be the issue so often in teaching writing. Learning, about gerunds and reflexive pronouns wouldn't necessarily have helped pass the writing test. The test
isn't about gerunds and reflective pronouns; it's about writing a
formulaic essay that's predictable and acceptable enough to be easily
scored and passed.</span></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are two lessons in this. </span></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lesson 1. If You're Teaching Writing, Let Students Write</b></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I want to be clear -- I don't mean to criticize Sittenfeld here. She did the best she could with what she knew and with her experience as a 25 year old volunteer. But the lesson from her experience I encourage is this: </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">L</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">et writers write. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I
do a lot of work with teachers of developmental writing, and they often do stress
the need for their students to be able to know grammar and usage terms
and rules, so much so that the students don't really get as much writing done as they would in first year writing courses. They do more workbook exercises, here lectures on grammar, read grammar handbooks before and during writing. So grammar and rules are first, and finding something to say a distant second.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We don't know enough about how Sittenfeld taught to know what the balance of workbook to actual writing was in her tutoring, but the attention to error and rules before writing is a common practice still in developmental writing courses. And it's the kind of attention that makes it harder for students to write well because it leads with anxiety by focusing students first on perceived deficiencies. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The place for her to get tutee to have gotten to, is the place Sittenfeld describes for herself when she writes, "</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">For one thing, my understanding of grammar was more instinctive than formal. I didn't think of, say, gerunds or reflexive pronouns as gerunds or reflexive pronouns; I just knew how to use them correctly." </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">That balance of mainly playing and referencing would translate to mainly writing and then referencing a handbook or learning a rule for grammar or usage as needed. But too much developmental writing focuses on the rule book and exercises first, not play, not a reason to want to know the rules. It's the opposite of the balanced and explicit-about-transfer approach recommended by the </span><a data-mce-href="http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/qandaaboutgrammar" href="http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/qandaaboutgrammar" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar</a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">.</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Lesson 2. If the Test is Stupid, Undermine it By Teaching Tricks for Passing It</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If your students are going to be assessed by readers trained to read like a machine, or a machine trained to match the reading and scoring of humans normed to read like a machine, discover what the testing regime will pass and teach students to mimic that. Don't let the weight of such tests, meaningless often in what they measure, stand in the way of students moving forward. Sittenfeld's student needed the GED to get into cosmetology school, and was motivated enough to do that for over two years, working through and past GED test attempts until she got it. Most students lack either that resilience or the means to keep trying even if they were a mind to. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That the student passed by memorizing a formulaic essay, a strategy that probably alleviated the stress from prior failures, is not a condemnation of the student nor Sittenfeld's work as a tutor, but rather of the inanity of the test. The strategy worked because the test design allows and encourages it. </span></div>
</div>
<div data-mce-style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px;" style="color: #222222; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But if testing is going to treat students so shabbily as to call for the kind of formulaic writing only ever used to pass writing tests, then the tests what they deserve for not being valid in the first place.</span></div>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-28080638809186519372014-12-04T11:13:00.002-05:002014-12-04T11:19:08.688-05:00#worthassigning: How to Write Effectively without Really TryingThis is cross-genre advice. Feel free to use these tips when sending
memos to your supervisor, e-mailing colleagues, working with an author
who needs some help, drafting a personal ad, and other places and times
when writing makes a difference but you are really too busy to give it
much thought.<br />
<div style="height: 8pt; min-height: 8pt; padding: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<ol>
<li>E-Mail:
End all e-mail with "Sent from my iPhone," or "Sent from Blackberry."
Research shows that readers of messages with those auto-added
advertisements forgive grammar errors and typos more readily: <a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/06/_-_kind_of_like.php" rel="nofollow">collision detection: Why people forgive your bad spelling in email "sent from my iPhone"</a></li>
<li>Georgia, Georgia, the whole document through, just an old sweet font, keep Georgia on your mind, for better grades. <a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://theweek.com/article/index/245632/how-typeface-influences-the-way-we-read-and-think" rel="nofollow">How typeface influences the way we read and think - The Week</a></li>
<li>If page length matters . . . Triple Space! Graphics!: <a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html</a></li>
<li>Extortion, lying, and sudden endings: tips for getting readers to read: <a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm" rel="nofollow">http://workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm</a></li>
</ol>
Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5236798.post-852506022929110152014-11-24T13:38:00.003-05:002014-11-25T20:50:52.136-05:00Editing, A Love Story in Four Subheads<h3>
1. What Love Has Got to Do With It</h3>
<a href="http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/" target="_blank">Hybrid Pedagogy</a> published, on November 22, "<a href="http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/love-time-peer-review/" target="_blank">Love in the Time of Peer Review</a>," a tender evocation for peer review as the act of giving lovingly to academic colleagues the feedback needed to make a a journal submission better. The ten authors and reviewers who crafted the piece open, by way of bell hooks, with a reminder that education -- of which teaching, reviewing, and editing, are a part -- is an act of love:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Love, patience, kindness, humility, truth — we don’t often talk about these things in the academy. Even those of us who eschew discussion of “efficiency” and “effectiveness” in favor of “empowerment” often stop short of genuine affection. But education, at its core, is an act of love — it seeks to empower as its very nature. And this care fuels our desire to help each other become full agents in our own right. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When we truly love, we humanize rather than normalize. Much of what the academy does — both in teaching and in scholarship — is about norms. Even our new wine ends up in old skins, as the norms of academic discourse dominate the dissemination of our work in journals, monographs, textbooks. But love does not “insist on its own way.” In <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/teaching-to-transgress-hooks/1111862709?ean=9780415908085" target="_blank">Teaching to Transgress</a>, bell hooks advocates for “an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (207). Empowering another human to be a mindful agent in their own learning requires a great deal of patience, kindness, and determination. These things only coexist with conscientious effort. This is the work that we all do as we exist simultaneously as authors, editors, and students. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As editors of <i>Hybrid Pedagogy</i>, ourselves also educators, we strive for love-as-peer-review. We seek to “<a href="http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/collaborative-peer-review-gathering-the-academys-orphans/" target="_blank">give any author a voice</a>,” bringing our voices to them in a meaningful and accessible way through a specific style of peer review. In this, we spread a little love around so that we leave the world in better shape than we found it.</blockquote>
Their work reminds me of the approach <a href="http://technorhetoric.net/11.1/topoi/bridgeford/spirit4.htm" target="_blank"><i>Kairos</i> sought in its beginnings and still carries to this day</a>, an ethos of cooperation, where peer review was not blind after a piece was accepted, but collaborative. In 1997 I was on the Kairos editorial board, and drafted a small webtext called "So Ya Wanna Be An Editorial Boarder?," one of the nodes for that piece, ""<a href="http://technorhetoric.net/2.1/loggingon/peer.html" target="_blank">Peer Review" ... The Next Iteration,</a>" says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Peer review is honorable and necessary. It gives authors a glimpse of their audience--colleagues in their field who can help them massage a contribution into better shape. We know that peer review can be abused; the "blind read" can turn colleagues into pit bulls who do no more than tear and gnash a piece to bits. It's an odd habit. When we teach peer review, we make sure to steer students from savage to constructive criticism. But too many blind reviewers neglect to practice what they teach. So it goes. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But so it doesn't have to go. <i>Kairos</i> seeks to maintain the best in peer review--collegiality, respect, encouragement, sound advice, and honesty--while at the same time avoiding the imperious dismissal and disdainful rejection harried readers can fall habit to. </blockquote>
What <i>Hybrid Pedagogy</i> writes of love and peer review speaks to my heart, both as an academic who still gives peer review advice to fellow academics, and as an academic who also works for a textbook publishing company, who sees the work that textbook editors and authors do. Textbooks, at least in my experience at Bedford/St. Martin's, are works of love, of scholarship transformed into pedagogy. The work depends very much on the kindness of reviewers, but is really only successful when authors and editors can do the hard work -- the intense work -- of loving what they're working on well enough to bring a book to fruition.<br />
<br />
<h3>
2. Publishing is Pedagogy </h3>
<br />
Though writing about academic scholarly publishing, <i>Hybrid Pedagogy </i>gets at the heart of how a good publisher views textbook publishing, and at the heart of why I enjoy working in the field:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Publishing is a pedagogical activity: for the author, the reviewer, the reader, the (re)user. Like all pedagogy, it sits in the present tense. And yet, it also holds to an emergent vision for the future. </blockquote>
Like the editors at <i>Hybrid Pedagogy,</i> the editors who work on textbooks do so because they love what they do, and care as much about teaching and learning as the authors they work with and the faculty who teach.<br />
<br />
Work on a textbook happens in a present where the work is designed to meet an emergent future student. The work embraces a pedagogical vision meant to serve that student. Developing a textbook is a labor of love, and the story of each book's origin is a pedagogical love story.<br />
<br />
At Bedford, such love stories were made possible by its founders, Chuck Christensen and Joan Feinberg.<br />
<br />
Just as <i>Kairos</i> sought to forge new ground in the academic publishing and acceptance of native hypertext scholarship, just as <i>Hybrid Pedagogy </i>seeks to forge new ground by making peer review an act of loving and generous grace, Chuck and Joan forged new ground. Chuck retired at the end of 2001, and Joan just recently announced her resignation. In her farewell letter to the company, she sets forth, much the way <i>Hybrid Pedagogy</i> is doing now for their project, the vision that guided her and Chuck:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
From the start we wanted to be known as a different kind of publisher. Bedford was a company committed to innovation and high quality and committed to the disciplines we published for. We put great care and attention into every title we published. Our secret was that we developed every book we published. Every Bedford title had a development editor working on it. We used to say that we employed 80% of the development editors in the business, and I think it might have been true. Most of our development editors had graduate degrees in the fields they worked on, so they had a clear understanding of the needs of students and instructors. We tried to make ourselves a useful presence in our disciplines by publishing professional books, by supporting professional organizations, and by giving good parties. We also were committed to hiring and training the best people and creating an environment where they could do their best work. </blockquote>
<br />
<h3>
3. Editing as a Teaching and Learning Marriage -- It Sometimes Takes Tough Love</h3>
<br />
It's no small thing to build a successful business -- Bedford/St. Martin's was the most successful company in college publishing these past 33 years -- on a model of care. Care of the kind Chuck and Joan, then Joan as she carried on, both nurtured and insisted on, takes money, time, faith, patience, and yes, love. Entering into a project with a Bedford/St. Martin's development editor means having your book reviewed, revised, developed, and sold very carefully, with as much time as is needed to draft, review, revise, review again, revise some more, to reach a first edition. There is a lot of labor, a lot of love, years, in that process.<br />
<br />
With rare exception, in most scholarly publishing, once a journal publishes the article or the university press publishes the book, authors and editors may not ever work together again as authors and editors. Textbook publishing, however, takes a long view, and the relationships of textbook authors and editors can last decades. <br />
<br />
Wendell Berry, in his wonderful essay, "<a href="http://buff.ly/1vB0W0v" target="_blank">Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms</a>," writes, "The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to one another we join ourselves to the unknown."<br />
<br />
<i>Hybrid Pedagogy</i> recognizes this in their take on peer review -- what loving peer review means begins in the words given. Working with a textbook author begins too in the giving of words, the endeavor is suffused in words, from the first conversation of an editor with a potential authors. The words begin at pedagogy, continue with pedagogy through all the work of writing, feedback, revising, and end in a pedagogical tool upon publication.<br />
<br />
Chuck and Joan set up a shop where, because each book requires so
much energy and love, each editor only worked on a few key projects at a
time. Bedford does not encourage lots of proposals; instead, development editors try to find the right professors to work on the right books. <br />
<br />
To
make this work, development
editors learn the fields they edit in, read the journals, attend
conference sessions, listen to faculty on campus visits. Development
editors are as immersed in the field as are the editors of academic
journals and presses,
only with a focus more explicitly on pedagogy.<br />
<br />
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
<b>Love Can be Tough</b> A Road to Walk</h4>
<br />
Now human hearts and minds are fallible. Not all marriages work, after
all; not all hiring decisions lead to tenure; not all submissions
accepted at a scholarly journal find completion; and so not all textbook
editor and author partnerships work. But at Bedford/St. Martin's,
because projects are few and because editors only develop projects they
can believe in, the work usually lasts.<br />
<br />
Belief in a project matters. You cannot love without belief. The work of love in publishing, academic and textbook, as in a marriage, can be hard, involving frustration, despair, and the occasionally needed intervention. Thus the work of a development editor partnering with an author involves recognizing another truth Berry describes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
. . . no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone
think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you
want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you . . . will take it. You do
not know the road; you have committed your life to a way. </blockquote>
Textbooks are a genre, recognizable as such. They, like poetry, like marriage, have recognizable forms, and procedures for discovering what a book needs to be. For first time author and editor teams, neither party can be solely in charge, and though the editor may be experienced, and the author perhaps well-published and an expert teacher, neither will know, nor can know absolutely which way the road to the book will wend. <br />
<br />
<br />
Textbook writing is hard because the writing needs to speak to students and at the same time written in a register instructors hear and recognize. Creating a pedagogy students can follow as students and teachers can adapt as instructors requires lots of reviewing. <br />
<br />
The road to a first edition can be long and winding indeed. I've seen books take five or six years from contract to publication, with several review cycles, where two, three, or four full revisions and re-conceptions took place. Such a journey, where people work so closely on work so important, is only possible with love -- sometimes tough, sometimes tender -- marked by respect and patience and forgiveness for one another, and the willingness to celebrate the Aha! moments together, to share joy, when things work.<br />
<h3>
</h3>
<h3>
4. Love's Legacy Not Lost</h3>
<br />
I do not know -- who can -- whether the road <i>Hybrid Pedagogy</i> forges for academic publishing will be followed by others. I think it should and hope it will be. Having been down the road at Bedford/St. Martin's, I can say that publishing with love is a great road to follow. But whether others follow <i>Hybrid Pedagogy</i>, their work and their essay serves as beacon and reminder that scholarly and pedagogical writing not only <i>can be</i> but naturally <i>wants to be</i> loving. Their legacy will be the good work that emerges <i>because </i>of their approach, work that will not exist without their love.<br />
<br />
I'm drawn to these considerations of love and legacy by the occasion, mentioned above, of Joan Feinberg's recently announced resignation from Macmillan Education, the company that owns Bedford/St. Martin's. <br />
<br />
Chuck and Joan leave a prodigious body of work as a team, and Joan an incredible body of work on her. They've helped create hundreds of textbooks published over three decades that have supported the learning of millions and millions of students. <br />
<br />
Chuck retired early in my career, and so most of it was shaped by my time with Joan. <br />
<br />
Joan's a great a teacher. She smiles genuinely, listens carefully, criticizes constructively, and
praises readily, all qualities that made working with her fun and learning from her motivating. I've learned as much about teaching and working with
teachers from the conversations we've had, and the questions she's asked
-- important questions, the ones with no easy answers -- in both
private and group meetings in the office. But I learned most from the questions I saw Joan ask professors about their work, their teaching, their students. <br />
<br />
Joan stepped into the presidency of Bedford/St. Martin's in January 2002, and
then was co-president of Macmillan Higher Education, January 2012 to December 2013. All of us higher education --faculty, textbook editors, administrators, writing center and learning center directors, directors and members of the centers for teaching and learning -- know the past dozen or so years have been, and remain, tumultuous. Systemic
change is sweeping colleges and universities as well as the textbook
industry. Joan helped Bedford/St. Martin's weather those changes by keeping to
the vision.<br />
<br />
The times required making hard calls, in a tough, competitive, and roiling climate, an era that saw competitors disappear, or go into bankruptcy, or taken over by venture capital firms. But as higher education roiled, Joan tended to authors and editors by continuing to lead us with, and to encourage in us, the
"love, patience, kindness, humility, truth" necessary to good writing
and editing. And so as Joan resigns, Bedford/St. Martin's still has the most
developmental editors of any college textbook publisher, editors who only know how to do their work with love because with love is the only way for the work to have value.<br />
<br />
I wish for <i>Hybrid Pedagogy</i>, that they too always find the
space, time and shelter to work in the way that their love for learning
requires, that as their years go on, when she is needed, they find among their founders, their
Joan.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Nick Carbonehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13965878135277592695noreply@blogger.com1