New Blog Layout

Wow. I decided to update my blog layout, and found that Blogger has been hard at work rethinking what blogs should look like.


I went with the dynamic mosaic layout, and I like the look.


I did lose my blogroll, links, and other sidebar stuff.  But I'm not sure how much of a loss that constitutes.


Anyone want to weigh in on the new look?

Okay. So I'm ditching the mosaic look.  I might try something like that later, but for now I think the traditional look will work best.

Think About Digital Spaces as Learning Spaces

This site and video illustrate what interactive learning spaces can do.

Looking Good

This week I'm prepping a presentation on how to use e-portfolios in composition classrooms. I've been spending a lot of time with an open source platform powered by Mahara.

So my head is in an odd kind of space. Presentation prep has me thinking about teaching students to compose academic work for online spaces, teaching a novel interface, evaluating students based on their ability to work in a digital environment, and all while trying to learn the new technology myself.

This has me thinking about what digital texts look like, and that is why, of all the week's reading for my Literacy and Technology course, Matthew K. Gold's chapter in From A to : Keywords of Markup has engaged me the most.

Gold writes a surprisingly engaging chapter on the horizontal rule HTML tag, otherwise known as "hr".

Let's see if I can compose an 'hr'. I'm going to switch my blog's composition box to "Edit HTML" mode and add a horizontal rule.

---

See. It worked.
And I have a fuzzy screencast video of the process.
(Btw, if you plan to use screencasting software, it looks like you have to pay for quality. Actually, I just needed to learn the software better. I think the Camstudio open source screencasting software will work out just fine.)

But even if my screencast video doesn't look that hot, its inclusion is a vast improvement over the kinds of web-texts I remember from the 90s.

Popular Website from the 90s

The huge number of readers and composers of web-text has resulted in a rapid reconceptualization of the reading space. Both Gold and Wolf call on the Sumerians to help develop an understanding of how even the oldest conventions of text influence web text. Gold explains how the linear divisions on Sumerian pictographic texts depicted a hierarchy of gods, kings, and the vanquished.

While most modern text horizontal conventions do not have quite so stately divisions as the Sumerians, it remains interesting to see how people have struggled with layout. The the gap between the Sumerian writing system and today's web texts is filled with conventions dictated by technology. From the printing press to slow processing speeds, texts have long been restrained by the mode of production.

I found it amusing when Gold got around to describing the worst kinds of ornamental perversions of the HR: flowering vines, fire trucks, and dancing figures dividing the text. It had me thinking of MySpace's downfall - allowing users to add whatever bells and whistles they wanted to their personal page. That was a social experiment that taught us never to distribute an animated dancing baby.

That disaster of popular culture, in turn, got me thinking about Wolf's echoing of Socrates' concerns about the impact digital texts could have - Could we lose our sense of a text's true meaning in the flurry and flood of information now available? Gold reiterates this concern when he quotes Helfand, who describes "a new kind of illiteracy" motivated by the urge to self publish.

Gold does not join Helfand in fretting about the decay of literacy, arguing instead that as the rules change, so too will our conceptions of literacy. I think I sit somewhat uneasily in between the two views. I see the changes taking place, and I believe people will adjust. I also believe, however, that at the moment, most people do not know how to read or compose effectively for digital spaces. That is a kind of illiteracy.

I suppose the question that raises is this: How do we teach society to read and compose for a rapidly changing medium?

Result of an image search for "HR Tag"

 Interestingly, when I did a Google Image Search for "hr tag," the image to the right was the number one result. I find it funny that someone choose to illustrate the HR by dividing pop song lyrics from 2000. It's as though they knew the shelf life of both the tune and the textual convention.

If our writing conventions have the same staying power as our bubblegum, what's a composition teacher to do?

Reaching the Summit

Yesterday I attended the Academic Literacy Conference Summit here at UC Davis.

It was a great experience.
I posted about the event on twitter, which was a fun way to engage in the event. 

Here I want to focus on the table of people with whom I shared lunch.

That was an odd experience.

People who had led breakout sessions were each assigned a table. The idea was that people would have follow-up conversations about what happened in the session. I had missed the first session because I had to teach, but when I arrived for lunch I saw Aaron, Jenae, and Mary all at one table. So I sat down with them at the "Bill Macauley" table.

Bill Macauley is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the University Writing Center at the University of Nevada, Reno. He'd led a session on audiences for student writing. Very sharp man with some great ideas on writing instruction.

It promised to be an interesting table.

We didn't talk much about writing centers, however, or even writing instruction in general. Efforts to dig deep into what it means to facilitate writing instruction were repeatedly stymied by a pair of attendees from a regional college that I'll call Wassamatta U.

The pair took issue with almost any question posed or subject brought up for discussion. Their contention seemed to be that all constructive talk was useless because their students aren't capable of carrying out even the most basic of educational tasks.

Example 1: the pair reflected on the morning's keynote presentation by Jose Rivas. Rivas had demonstrated an entertaining and engaging science lesson on Newton's Second Law. According to my lunch companions, Rivas would not have engaged the students of Wassamatta U. because those students would not participate in activities or respond to problem solving prompts. [laughter]

Example 2: When Luciana C. de Oliveira showed the Common Core expectations for kindergarten level narrative texts, I was told that students at Wassamatta U. were not able to compose at that level. [laughter]

Example 3: When Bill Macauley suggested finding entertaining and culturally relevant sources for developing grammar skills, we learned that the students at Wassamatta U. don't watch television or share any common cultural mores. [laughter]

The easy thing for me to have done would be to dismiss the pair as burntout or bitter. I tried to do as much, but I couldn't shake this question: If things were so hopeless for these two, why were they attending the summit?

Even if Wassamatta U. was paying for the day (which I don't think is the case), no one at the conference was taking role. The pair could have picked up name tags and hightailed it to a day spa. Something didn't fit.

So I turned to one of them and asked about teaching at Wassamatta U.
Here's what I learned:
There's no money. The students arrive with a lot of baggage and few skills. The college and the larger institution to which it belongs offer no real support to instructors. There are colleagues and supervisors who are incompetent.
And then I heard this: "Have you ever used the Yoda Sentences? Students can build all sorts of sentences after just a few minutes with that exercise."

What? Wait...

The person who said that was clearly excited about a student's learning.
That's not the excitement of a burntout teacher. 

And then it hit me. This pair was fighting on the front lines. They worked where most of education's casualties fall. Even if the pair at my table go to work on Monday and work as hard as they can using the best practices available, many of their students are going to fail. A morbid sense of humor is pretty valuable in a place like that.


And that shed a new light onto the rest of the conference.

The Common Core asserts that academically literate students need to reflect on learning experiences and think critically. It sets high standards for students and asks teachers to find a path to reach those goals.

This was emphasized in the afternoon breakout session, which demonstrated ways to help students critically engage what the Common Core has deemed a 9th grade text, "A Quilt of a Country." The methods described are powerful classroom tools. I'm glad I attended. But the text had me thinking about Wassamatta U. The reading refers to novels by Phillip Roth, Francie Nolan, and John Cheever, as well as a "Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche."

Those kinds of references would have sailed way over my head in 9th grade. I am thrilled that we have set such challenging standards, and I think talented teachers working with motivated students will achieve some wonderful results. But I'm left questioning the meaning of the word 'common' in the Common Core. I don't think the resources required to reach these goals are commonly available in every community.


If we really are interested in such a high level of academic literacy, then summits like the ALS need not only to assess what is at the core of literacy, they also need to describe the tools and techniques communities require to attain academic literacy. Then there's the task of showing schools how to take an inventory of their own learning environments to identify where they need to make changes. It's a tall order. The ripple effect from the ALS has to be very powerful.

I hope attendees feel the weight of that, because it was an impressive group to spend the day with, and I think we could have an impact.

Defining Literacy

This week, Rebekka asked the class to think about what the term 'literacy' means in a digital world.

Interestingly, shortly after I put my last blog post up on Facebook, my cousin asked me a similar question in the comments section. An image of the exchange is posted here because...

1. I think I composed a nice little definition there, if I do say so myself, and...
2. That exchange is a an good example of reading in today's digital environment.

Some explanation of the exchange: When I posted to Facebook, I noted that my literacy narrative referred to the white-on-blue word processing screen made famous by the TV show "Doogie Howser M.D." As a result, the comments that followed include hyper-specific pop culture references alongside a discussion of the abstract concept of literacy.

I love this about digital literacy. A quality exchange normally has multiple foci. Digital literacy is found in the act of navigating all the points, counterpoints, ironic responses, non sequiturs, misfires, misunderstandings, baiting, esoteric references, and the all-too-obvious observations that are each accepted as part of the discourse.

Paul's Boutique

I'm reminded of the Beastie Boys 1989 album, Paul's Boutique. The Wikipedia page for the album's 6th track, "The Sounds of Science," lists no less than twenty-one pop culture references, and that list is nowhere near complete. Luckily, Soopageek has provided a much more complete annotated version of the song's lyric.  Here's one annotation from Soopageek's page:

Ponce De Leon constantly on
The fountain of youth not Robotron  

• Ponce De Leon was a Spanish Explorer who discovered Florida while searching for the fountain of youth.
•  Robotron: 2084 was a popular arcade video game released in 1982.

Now I know that the Beastie Boys' effort to innovate through extensive sampling and rapid-fire references from across the cultural spectrum is more of a reflection of postmodernism's influence than it is of digital literacy, but... And this is a big 'but'...

The fact that a postmodern approach to ideas had seeped so deep into our culture by 1989 has a lot to do with what digital literacy looks like today.

In our class last week, Aaron argued that for the digitally literate, the onus is on the reader to understand how a link or allusion informs the document at hand, and this is true regardless of the cultural capital the author is drawing from - from Spanish explorers to early 80s video games. Aaron's argument suggests it is no longer the author's task to anticipate the reader's frame of reference.

I resisted in class, but I'm coming around.

Here's an instance that might explain why: Today I read James Sullivan's review of William Gibson's latest book. Among other things, the review refers to Skip Spence's 1969 album "Oar," the post-hippie era, Jorge Luis Borges, eBay, politics in Singapore, and of course Gibson's entire body of speculative fiction.

I was on a website I visit regularly reading about an author with whom I am familiar. Nevertheless, I had to look up Skip Spence (good stuff, btw).

It's not the number of references that requires a new kind of literacy, it's the range. A reader attempting to take in the full meaning of that review needs to have access to such a broad swath of cultural knowledge that internet search becomes a necessary part of the reading process.

In fact, readers now expect digital texts to send them off searching. If readers aren't moved to teach themselves something new as a result of a digital document, than the author isn't properly taking advantage of the medium. And if that's the case, then the author is not fully digitally literate.

So, if we lost functions of memory in the shift from an oral to a literate culture, as Wolf and Hass suggest, then perhaps we'll have to sacrifice the concept of individuals owning cultural capital in the shift to a digital culture.

I'm in a New Class

I've enrolled in the UWP's Literacy and Technology course this winter. The seminar is being led by Rebekka Andersen.

Maintaining a blog is one task in the course. I've been keeping a blog for a while, as my 3 readers know, but I'm looking forward to the added direction. This week I'm posting a literacy narrative with a focus on how technology has impacted my reading and writing. Normally I won't explain a post's aim like this, but I thought the shift in focus might merit an explanation for those who have visited before.

Below is a video of a spokesperson from the Hunt Institute talking about his institute's take on 'literacy in other disciplines' as seen through the lens of the common core standards. You can watch it if you want. The man says nice things, sounds smart, and paints a wonderful picture of the value of literacy in science and history. I want this guy to be right about what school can achieve, but this task of composing a literacy narrative has me feeling skeptical. When I listen to someone describe students acquiring broad cultural literacy via a formal process, I can't help thinking about how messy that process was for me personally - a white, Midwestern, middle class, heterosexual male; I'm the kind of person for whom the system was designed... when it was designed over a century ago. 

So, how is a formal education system to inculcate literacy across disciplines to a diverse population in a world where literacy is changing at the speed of technological development?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I think developing a narrative of an event that contributed to my literacy could be a point of departure.

When I was in eighth grade, every assignment in our English class was geared toward the composition of a large autobiography. Each student was to assemble final drafts of all the assignments into a binder, personalize the collection of assignments with photos and additional writings, and put finishing touches on what would be read as one coherent work. A select few of the projects would be judged by a panel of parents who would declare one student "The Author of the Year."

I would love to say that I set my sights on that prize the day it was announced, but I was not that kind of student. I was a reader, but I rarely read the assigned texts. I would occasionally complete a writing assignment, but only if the assignment grabbed my interest. In short, I was a bad student. My teacher told me as much when she pulled me aside a few weeks before the final deadline and expressed her concern. "Hogan, I know you have some good ideas, but I haven't seen any of your revised work yet. I'm afraid that you don't have enough time to complete your autobiography, and if that happens, you won't pass eighth grade."

I cried.

Don't feel bad. That was nothing new. I was a crier back then.

But when I stopped crying, I decided that my teacher was clearly in the wrong. While I may not have had my autobiography written, I had a lot of rough drafts, and more importantly, I had been thinking about the project quite a bit. I just needed to sit down at the computer and type it all up.

Word processing before fonts.

So the weekend before the year long project was due, I booted up the family PC, entered the appropriate MS-DOS commands, and had a blank blue screen of the early MS word processing software.

I got to down to the business of putting my ideas on the page. I had a lot to say. All the thinking I had done in the run up to the writing had the words flowing from my mind to my fingertips.

And that's when I realized I was a lousy typist.

It was bad. Hunting and pecking really isn't a fair description, because I spent so much time hunting.

After taking more than three hours to write one full page, I did the math and realized there was no way I would finish the project before Monday... or ever. I had something of a meltdown at that point.

Worth noting here: I am a middle child with an older sister who is the only girl and two younger brothers who are twins. It was a difficult environment in which to effectively communicate my needs. At that stage in my life, the only method of getting attention I had mastered was a horrible melodramatic outburst.

In the instance of the autobiography, this strategy worked. My folks calmed me down and listened as I explained my predicament. They picked up on something I haven't really explained here yet. In my tone my parents heard something they normally didn't associate with my orientation toward school: I didn't just want to finish the project and pass eighth grade; I really wanted to do a good job.

There were a few contributing factors:

• That year I had started hanging out with a new group of friends, and they were all good students.
• In seventh grade I had started reading the Xanth fantasy novels, and after finishing a few books with +500 pages, I had begun to fancy myself as a bit of a literary type.  
• I needed to prove my teacher wrong.

My dad told me that my execution of this whole project was a disaster, but he then told me that he would type if I read aloud the words I wanted to have on the page. We got to work on Sunday morning and did not go to sleep that night (yeah, my dad is great).

I ended up winning the "Author of the Year" award, which was really exciting.

My Autobiography's Cover

But something else happened as well. Throughout that day and night of writing, as my dad and I would print up a final version of this or that portion of the project, I began to compose the whole. I thought about appearance, order, pictures, captions, cover art, and the kinds of details I had never considered before. 

I have awful handwriting and trouble spelling things on the first try. So before using a computer to complete an assignment, I really just wanted to get the required material on the page. Computer publishing put a well-composed document within my reach, and suddenly I was thinking about a reader's first impression.

Double-stick tape, a Sharpie, and dot-matrix printing.

Since that long day of writing with my dad, I have read and composed texts using technology quite a bit. But my appreciation for how technology and composition are woven together stems from this story.

So thinking back to that guy from the Hunt Institute video, I'm not sure if anyone can bottle that kind of experience and make it work for a diverse population of students. But I'm here at UC Davis trying to find methods that will help students discover their own set of circumstances that will lead to a better understanding of literacy. 

My Letter to My Congressman about SOPA

Dear Representative Thompson,
I'm a Ph.D. student in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. My emphasis is in post-secondary writing instruction. I have been teaching young people how to critically engage in discourse for over a decade now, and during that time the role of an open internet has become crucial. This is why I oppose SOPA. There are a lot of talking points on both sides of this debate, but I'd like to present you with another point of view by way of comparing my experience as a student to the experience of students today.

When I was an undergraduate, I had to go to the library to do research for a paper. It was a useful exercise, but one problem I didn't have to worry about very often was the authority of the sources I found in the library. I didn't have to hone my critical sensibility because I knew scholars, editors, and librarians had done the sifting and winnowing for me.

Today's students don't live in that world. Thanks to the internet, students have access to much more information than they once had, but the filters that keep information out of the libraries are less important to the research process. Some view this as a problem because students have access to bad information, but that has not been a problem in my experience. The students I work with understand that they need to become the filters - they need to critically evaluate the information that comes their way.

This is a wonderful skill for citizens in a democracy, and it is an open internet that fosters the development of such a skill. Tomorrow's information and media consumer has to become a more critical consumer, a more discerning consumer. They have to be critical because they know that supporters of SOPA are right about one thing: bad things happen on the internet. There are thieves and liars out there, just like there are on Main and Wall Street. But we don't need a government gatekeeper that would shut down avenues of information. Imagine if Wall Street reform was as harsh as SOPA aims to be. What we need is smarter consumers, and the open internet is producing such a consumer.

SOPA's values have unintentional consequences that are undemocratic. Please work to insure the bill does not pass into law.

Thank you for your time and consideration,
Hogan Hayes

#Occupy at UC Davis

This is the video of yesterday's incident at UC Davis. There are plenty of reasons to watch the entire +8 minutes.

I am a Ph.D. student in the School of Education at UC Davis. A lot of the work I do here is with the University Writing Program, because my interests involve the improvement of instruction and access to early undergraduate writing courses.

Over the course of the past year and two months, I have worked with over 300 UCD undergraduate students from a large variety of majors and backgrounds. That's a pretty good sample. So I feel confident when I say this: UC Davis undergraduate students are intelligent, driven, reasonable, and articulate people.

The group that was protesting this week did not come out to demonstrate because they are lazy or because it's what the hip kids are doing or because they want someone else to pay for their mistakes or because they love urban camping.

The protesters in the video above are students at a competitive public university where the estimated cost of a 5-year education (the average time it takes to graduate) is $154,000 - that's the cost of a home in this region. And the price of that education is likely to go up even while the UC puts austerity measures in place.

Not my generation, nor any before my own had such a price tag attached to higher education. 

The UC Davis students are protesting because they have the critical capacity to evaluate the system in which they are participating; they recognized that the deck has been stacked against those who earn less. They have also recognized that it is not enough to sit at home and whine about how unfair that seems.

Those students decided, "If the democratic system in which we participate is unfair, we need to make our voices heard." So they demonstrated peacefully while maintaining contact with the authorities at the school.

Like I wrote, they are intelligent, driven, reasonable, and articulate people. I am proud to study and work at a university with such an impressive student body - a group that not only believes in participative democracy, but also is capable of remaining civil in the face of hostility and violence. The students in that video are amazing and deserve the University's respect.

They certainly have mine.

I am troubled to be associated with a University where administrators and safety officers will bend the rule about camping one day, only to reinstate it the next through the use of violence and arrests.

However, as the students in the video assert, "This is our University."

To those who would assume otherwise, "You can go."