Crafting Upper Division Writing Assessment

I've moved from being director of first-year writing to being director of upper division writing, and I am working on a pilot assessment procedure. Our department has expanded its 300 level offerings considerably, and we don't have a history of assessing these types of courses. I'm working from Bob Broad's What We Really Value and trying to craft a procedure that will work for our situation.

That's probably a lot of background information only slightly connected to what I wanted to write about. As I was figuring out the procedure, I started imaging the ideal 300 level portfolio.

1. Students should include everything. Get them into the habit of keeping track of their work, starting a filing system, organizing their electronic work in a coherent and manageable way. We could ask for "everything" in both print and e-format.
2. Everything might include short, non-revisable work, longer revisable projects, and the earlier drafts of those projects.
3. Revision--what do we want to teach? I wonder if we should require that students a) revise their lowest grade and b) revise one document radically. Try to get at a) the process of significant revision and b) the process or remediation, re-genrification (good new word?), transmediafication (another kind of remediation?).

Okay, back to crafting the portfolio assessment. I just wasn't sure where I wanted to store these portfolio ideas.

Valentino Achak Deng's Google Talk

I just discovered Valentino Achak Deng's Google Book talk on YouTube. He is the subject of Dave Egger's What is the What and does a nice job of telling his story--much like Joseph's--in a succinct, powerful, and occasionally humorous way.

For sale: The NEW Education

The new education has to take the form of training of perception instead of learning lists of concepts, so that we equip our young to navigate through entire fields of information. This is to train explorers and innovators, intellectual and cultural nomads rather than sedentary bureaucrats.

Eric McLuhan, "One Wheel, All Square."

Remembering how to teach

This semester has been a struggle for me, and as much as I would like to blame various factors, I have started to realize all the ways I have failed to be a teacher with a pedagogy or a plan. I need to remember:

1. Don’t just assign writing, teach it.
2. Don’t just cover material, interact with it.
3. Don’t just teach the course, teach the students.
4. Get the students to teach; they learn more from teaching than listening.
5. Don’t let the students disengage; confront disengagement.
6. Remember that the classroom is an environment; don’t let the environment deteriorate.

I'm sure the list needs to be much longer, but its a start.

The essays I'd like to write this summer

1. Fathers Playing YuGiOh with Sons.
2. Run Over by The Ambulance.
3. Why Southern Sudan Still Matters.
4. Ulmer McLuhanized--an essai concrete.

If only summer would come.

Bill Moyers, Hope in the Congo

Bill Moyer's Journal covered the rebuilding efforts in The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Southern Sudan faces many of the same challenges--lack of infrastructure, few jobs, no reliable food source, etc. What really stood out for me, and something that I have heard from Joseph and others in southern Sudan, is that life was good before the wars. People had enough food, kids were going to school, progress was being made and it was being made by the people of Sudan and the DRC. Joseph remembers a good life before the Sudanese Civil war of 1983-2005. Valentino Deng in What is the What describes a good life in his Sudanese village before the war. My Congolese friend Martin says life was good for him, he was going to school, his father had earned a Master's degree and was gainfully employed before the family was forced out of the Congo in 1999. I fear that many in the west assume these African countries are always at war within and among themselves; I fear that many in the west assume life has always been and will always be difficult in Africa, but that isn't an accurate perception. The wars disrupt everything, they destroy everything.

The Future of Academic Libraries

I'm listening to David Lewis's talk on the future of academic libraries, based on his paper with roughly the same title. Good stuff! My couple of notes don't do his talk or work justice.

1. Libraries are a means, not an end.

2. Reposition library tools, resources, and expertise.


Can a library buy access to a good handbook? Can we be done with writing teachers using print-bound handbooks?

Warhol and McLuhan?

The connection seems obvious, but hard to track down. Found a few blog posts with casual references, one pretty good post on the place of Warhol and the Velvet Underground in The Medium is the Massage.

Saw about an hour and 15 minutes of Ric Burn's documentary on Warhol tonight, and Burns came straight from the airport to talk with the 60 or so of us who had gathered. Apparently the whole work is 4 hours--worth checking out.

The McLuhan-Warhol connection that seemed potentially surprising was Warhol's "return to business" after he was shot. He had started out as a commercial artist, abandoned the commercial for the Factory and the art scene, then came back from his near death experience to recognize that "Culture is Our Business," the McLuhan book title from 1970.

Geoff Sirc at Grad Student Conference

The NDSU graduate students put on their annual conference this weekend, and invited Geoff Sirc to to deliver the keynote. He provided his usual fascinating reading of contemporary composition (iTunes reviews) in the context of classical rhetoric and engaged education. I'm terribly aware that this little post has none of the rhythm or groove displayed by the iTunes reviewers.

I used to have students write Amazon reviews, but it was always interesting to see how much the classroom assignment interfered with the nature of online writing. I also suspect that many of the fine and interesting examples Sirc showed us come from people who enjoy playing with language, people who are comfortable playing with language. When I give my students an opportunity like this, I find out that many struggle with those notions of play, voice, creativity. Heck, I struggle with playfulness, as much as enjoy it. Lots of good reasons to use an itunes / amazon review assignment, but it needs to be supported by the teaching of creativity (possible!?) and probably some of the kinds of voice / sound pedagogies suggested by TR Johnson.

Virtual Peace Garden in Second Life

This post comes from my short-lived Word Press Blog. I thought I had copied it to Ten a Day, but I can't seem to find it in the archives. I've also added some material since that initial post.

I've been imagining a "Virtual Peace Garden" for Second Life as MEmorial to civilian harm and loss in global conflict. My site would be a "peripheral" MEmorial, attached to the physical International Peace Gardens located on the Manitoba-North Dakota border. I decided I had better do a bit more research on the IPG first, however. Here are some things I found out.

1. The garden just celebrated its 75 anniversary, July 14, 2007.
2. The IPG has been under-funded for a number of years now, but during the last legislative session in ND, the state decided to increase its commitment to the gardens--5 million for this year, $32 million total (although the Canadians are going to chip in half, as I understand the agreement).
3. A 9/11 memoiral was erected in 2001, with beams from the WTC transported to the IPG by Canadians, erected on the US side.

I found out a variety of other facts, but in general, I was impressed with the vision the Director and the governments have for the IPG. My own plans for the Virtual Peace Garden seem, in fact, parallel to their vision of increasing the traffic and function of the site. A new interpretive center and conflict resolution center (Camp David style) are in the plans for the IPG. The park is currently open only 3 months of the year, but the goal is 12 months. The IPG plan probably isn't quite as ambitious as my own vision: turning both the physical and virtual IPG into a kind of mecca, a pilgrimage site for peace activists from around the world. By building in Second Life, I would make the Virtual Peace Garden more accessible than the IPG, but with any luck, a community forming around the virtual PG might be inspired to visit the physical PG.

What would a visitor to a Virtual Peace Garden do? Leave notes and objects, meet and talk with others interested in peace and justice issues, perhaps someday visit "rooms" within the virtual museum. I have been working on a MEmorial for the Lost Boys of Sudan*; I could envision a virtual room for southern Sudan, for Darfur, for Rwanda, for The Democratic Republic of Congo, for Somalia, etc., rooms that might collect video, photos, and text. Audio tours could be recorded. I don't know how to build anything in SL, so I would need to find good technical support for this kind of project. I'd also need to find a job that would give me the time to do this kind of work. The VPG could also host Rallies and other events. Conflict negotiation students welcome!

Greg Ulmer, primary theorist of Electronic Monuments / MEmorials, talks about the work of virtual memorialists as the work of "consultants without portfolio" and "unsolicited consultations." I do wonder how the IPG board of directors would respond to my "unsolicited consultation" and I wonder what compromises I would need to make if I functioned as a consultant with portfolio? Seems like I need to keep pushing my project further, define it more clearly, and then see about contacting the Director.

Clinton Global Initiative University

I just read about the in The Clinton Global Initiative University in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and then checked out the website. I was particularly interested in the idea that universities might start scholarship funds for refugees, but was disappointed when I got to the website and found no real help or means for doing so. They offer some Tips for Universities but those are pretty vague and general.

Mash-up Ideas for ASAH

I submitted some ASAH ideas to the NetSquared Mashup Contest. The Mash-up contests asks non-profits like ours to identify various data sources and web applications relevant to our project, and then envision how the data and the interactivity of the web might be brought together in compelling ways. In a nutshell, I envision an old-school mash-up of data that might simply constitute a montage for the documentary, but also an interactive component on the website where people might be able to interact with photos, videos, and maps to get a better feel for the history, geography, and current humanitarian needs of the region.

Please take a look and see what suggestions for improving this mash-up you might have.

Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

I read a very short but positive review of Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody in Wired, so I thought I should check it out. Seems to be available now, but more importantly, perhaps, I found this video of his book talk at Harvard. My immediate reaction upon listening was "This is plagiarism!!" Talk about fully absorbing McLuhan but not citing him! Maybe the book does, and I checked around--he cited McLuhan in an essay from 2000--but I really haven't heard anybody else evoke things like the communications epochs and communication as prosthetic / extension without at least dropping McLuhan's name.

Of course Shirky has moved into analysis and details well beyond what McLuhan was able to do in the 1960s through 80s, so I will need to check out the book this summer. A trend that continues to strike me as interesting is the appropriation of McLuhan by the popular press commentators (Steven Johnson, Clay Shirky, Chuck Klosterman) but general dismissal among scholars. I have some ideas as to why this happens, but I'll need to come back to those later.

Watch the video, and leave a comment--come here, everybody!

Rice on McLuhan on Wired

I can't pass up responding to Jeff Rice's post about McLuhan as the patron saint of Wired, appearing on the cover in of 4.01 in 1993. That issue of Wired was undoubtedly a turning point in my academic career, although it took me a long time to accept and realize that.

4.01 was the first issue of Wired I bought. I remember having a physical reaction not unlike purchasing pornography--I was in the last semester of my MA literature program, living in a palpably anti-technology environment, so purchasing Wired, with Canada's infamous Philosopher of Pop on the cover, was definitely a challenge to my moral and ideological environment, yet titillating. I didn't do any McLuhan scholarship for a few years, but my first academic presentation on hypertext was well received, McLuhan makes a few cameos in my dissertation on writing instruction in western Canadian universities (that was an exciting project!), I more or less sketched out a book I still haven't written about McLuhan for Compositionist in 1997, I finally told myself I had to commit to computers and composition as "my field" in 2003 or 2004, I had a dream about Jeff in 2004, and 15 years, I have more or less absorbed McLuhan, but still haven't written the damn book. : (

As for Wired, the once-pornographic has reversed to the common-place, so much so that my 9 year old often reads it, or at least looks through it. It certainly covers his world (video games, manga) more than it covers my world. The mag may have flattened out, as Jeff notes, but I feel more like McLuhan reading it now, noticing all the little stories that re-enforce "the medium is the massage" over and over again without the authors even noticing.

African Soul, American Heart Sample

About two weeks ago, Matt McGregor, the ASAH camera man and now editor put together this succinct, beautiful, little sample of our documentary project, African Soul, American Heart.

Friends of the Congo

I wrote about the Congo a few posts ago, and I have continued to correspond with the young Congolese man I met in December at Kakuma. I spent some time this afternoon looking for possible scholarships (Peterson's has a surprisingly large collection of scholarship for non-US citizens attending non-US schools), but I also came across an interesting projectFriends of the Congo. This 501.c.3 based in Washington DC is trying to do things like raise money to send kids to school (primary and secondary, but not post-secondary), build an Internet Learning Center in Kinshasa, support a health clinic, etc..

For any professorati reading, they also have a speakers bureau--invite a Congolese speaker to your campus. They suggest starting a blog to follow news about the Congo; first-year comp classes with an inquiry-based focus could sure learn a lot about research and the Congo (or Africa more generally) by taking up a task like this.

Remixing for Social Change

Just saw an announcement for the Remixing for Social Change contest. This has me thinking about a Lost Boys of Sudan Mash-up, a consciousness raising, nation building, social change project:

Mash-up the various Lost Boys projects and foundations--lots of video footage to work with.
Mash-up the data, e.g. 16,000 orphans in Duk County + X in other counties, because the call asks for real data.
Mash-up some of the health data, the school data. Need to track this down.
Mash-up the costs--the costs of building, the costs of maintaining, these infrastructure projects.
Mash-up people like John and Joseph and other others talking about what needs to be done in. Joseph has a great line about raising this generation to be equal to the rest of the world.
Mash-up some of the others we have on film: commissioner, Gideon Dau, footage from others?
Mash-up some of the great music we have, some of the children and women singing.

I'll have to see what the team thinks.

Chuck Klosterman Live!

I heard Chuck Klosterman perform tonight at MSUM. Long time readers of 10 A Day might remember that I occasionally get obsessed with Klosterman's writings, his application of McLuhan without acknowledging his source, and the mystorical elements of his first memoir, Fargo Rock City.

His performance was okay, and he was self-aware enough to acknowledge that it wasn't great. He more or less told the story of his unlikely rise to stardom from his humble beginnings in Wyndmere, ND to NYC darling (or love-able goof ball?). The first twenty-or-thirty minutes were nicely delivered and he spoke eloquently, flawlessly, but he began to tire, I suspect, and the Q&A didn't really have much zing to it. I left after he talked about an essay he just finished (not yet published) on bloggers and their sense of fame, their sense of being public figures. Clearly he isn't a blogger, or he knows different bloggers than I do.

He made a couple of other sociological-type arguments that seemed pretty weak--i.e. people under forty are unhappy in their relationships because of idealized relationships they see on TV and movies. Like most writers/thinkers, he really is much more convincing and interesting when he writes about his own life and things he knows a lot about (hair metal).

I do applaud him for not just reading from his work; more engaging than the average book reading.

Notes on Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment

I had on my to-do list "Rickert Notes" b/c I have been reading Acts of Enjoyment, but being the social media scholar that I am (cough cough), I thought I should see what notes others have written first. Saves a lot of typing.

Jim Brown has an extended entry comparing Rickert and Rice.

Everything else I found gave Rickert a mention, but no notes to steal / borrow. Too bad. Lots of "go read it" recommendations, but no notes.

I'll post my notes here if I ever get 'em finished.

Following up on WUSC

The World University of Canada is doing exactly the kind of work I saw the need for while I was in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in December. They linked to a story that ran on CBC--it focuses on 2 Somali students from the Dabeeb refugee camp in Kenya; apparently they selected 11 students from Dabeeb last year. I am sure they must go to Kakuma as well, but I will try to find that out.

I wonder if there is any equivalent program in the US?