bomphiologia
Exaggeration done in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a braggart.
Welcome to the third installation of the 2009 Teaching Carnival! Spring Break is looming (for some of us, it’s already here), which is the perfect time to take a breath and explore the academic blogosphere. Just as a reminder, here’s some definitions and a few words of wisdom for academic blog readers. And thanks again to Jason Jones and Kathleen Fitzpatrick for the first two Teaching Carnivals.
Beginning on a non-blog note, 4Cs (the Conference on College Composition and Communication), the big deal gathering in my field, takes place this week. If you’ve noticed your rhet/comp people making lots of photocopies and fretting about time, that’s why. If you’re going, Mark Crane has called the hash tag: #cccc09.
(Special tip for my Writing Center peeps…the master list of WC-focused sessions is available from the IWCA.)
I love it when I have data to back up my vague feelings. As I mentioned in the last post, I find e-book readers to be fascinating and believe that they could someday be a viable future form for texts. That said, we are still in the “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you” era of e-book hardware development. That seems to be the conclusion reached by Northwest Missouri State. I think the key paragraph is:
Students were initially fascinated with their readers, said Dean L. Hubbard, the university’s president, but they soon became frustrated with the devices’ limited interactivity capabilities — which made it impossible to highlight passages, cut and paste text, or participate in interactive quizzes.
Text on E-Ink tools like the Kindle and the Sony Reader looks super-sharp, but that readability comes at a price for students. These problems are both hardware- and software-related.
In a surprisingly uncommented-upon (as I write this) essay for IHE, Lev Gonick predicts 11 IT trends for 2009. Most are fairly straightforward—I think anyone paying any attention to the inroads Gmail has made in universities (including my own) knows that more cloud computing is on the way. But there are two that I think warrant more thought.
Going smallest quibble to largest, I think Gonick’s fifth item, “e-Book Readers Disrupt the College Text Book Market Place” will be true only if iLiad-like devices with larger screens and annotation abilities, are made available. I stress “talking back” via marginalia, and I honestly can’t imagine reading without a pen or word processing notes function in hand.
Moving to the bigger issue, Gonick’s fourth item—SecondLife Goes Back to School—actually triggered a double-take for me. the meat of the entry
Rather than torment the Teaching Carnival 3.0 participants with the mishmash that is my main blog, I decided to repurpose this little-used quote blog for the project. Ideally, this will become the main site where pedagogy, online discourse, etc. will be discussed.
“[H]istory is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish and selfish people, that is, of everyone.” (Busman, R.U.R. [Rossum's Universal Robots])
“But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. . . . The wavering line between the two cannot be ‘scientifically’ identified; rival rhetoricians can draw it at different places, and their persuasiveness varies with the resources each has at hand” (A Rhetoric of Motives 25).
A ‘postmodern’ boss insists that he is not a master but just a coordinator of our joint creative efforts, the first among equals; there should be no formalities among us, we should address him by his nickname, he shares a dirty joke with us etc., but in all this, he remains our master. With such social links, relations of domination function through their denial: we are not only obliged to obey our masters, we are also obliged to act as if we are free and equal, as if there is no domination – which, of course, makes the situation even more humiliating. Paradoxically, in such a situation, the first act of liberation is to demand from the master that he acts as one: one should reject false collegiality from the master and insist that he treats us with cold distance, as a master. [http://www.springerlink.com/content/hut14l316704u631/fulltext.html]