Well, another week has flown by. I feel like it has flown by without me getting a whole lot done. I turned two chapters of my thesis in to my adviser this week, so that is good. We hosted a home speech meet for about thirty schools on the heels of a big snowstorm in much of the state, and that was pretty chaotic.
I switched to working on wikis this week for class. My intent was to get started on that on Thursday. My reality was that I didn’t do anything substantial until Sunday morning. I have contributed to some threads on three different pages this week. I have realized this week that I am much better at raising questions and stirring things up than I am at answering them or cohesively bringing things together in a coherent document. This should not have surprised me. One thing I love about teaching is that I get to ask questions, questions, and more questions and leave my students to sort out some sort of response. I write that way as well. Start with questions and see where they lead me. It keeps me thinking.
Anyway, The difficult thing for me this week was there was not a lot going on, wiki-wise, earlier in the week. I should have just jumped in there, but I didn’t want to step on toes. Why I was worried about that, I have no idea. I think I have this sense from class that people in it value authorship. Maybe I’m off base on that. I hope so. If not, people are going to find wiki work frustrating.
The fun part of the week for me, much like Jen, is the thread we have going with Delana on UsingAWikiforAcademicWriting. Makes me think, which I always appreciate.
I received horrible news recently. Friday, at 3:08 pm to be exact. A friend called to tell me that one of my former speech students had committed suicide the day before.
It was surreal. I was running a little late that day, so I was walking into the high school just as all of the students were pouring out. It was such a strange moment. I was instantly in this weird space of being an island of sepration from this river of tremendous, alive, energy.
If you have never walked against the current of a bunch of teenagers leaving school on a Friday afternoon, I don’t know if I can even begin to adequately describe the energy level of that rush of kids. They are pumped. I heard snippets of conversations about the snow week dance that night, an Axemen game, hockey, parties, people. The energy of these kids was just rushing past me.
And I stood there, separate, with this image of the girl who had died. It seems like yesterday I walked in that school to see her at speech practice. I had this perfect image of her sitting on a desk on her script, swinging her legs, grinning, informing us that she was working on memorizing her poetry through butt osmosis.
Earlier this year, a student with ASD I was working with told me her neighbor had committed suicide because “his heart was so sad he couldn’t stay here anymore.” That is perhaps the most succinct and least patronizing explanation of suicide I have ever heard. So that is what I think.
Her heart was so sad she couldn’t stay here anymore.
But it still sucks.
I see so much brilliant light, energy, and beauty in these kids. I wish they could see it in themselves. Maybe sometimes they can. I hope so.
The end of this Erik Ott poem has been running through my head:
Most people in this world probably didn’t even realize their loss.And I feel sorriest of all for those people — you —those of you who never had the chance to meet her.She was that cool.The last sentencein this poemis how I will rememberher:This world is a better place for having her in it
even if it was only for twenty years.
Well, I shifted gears this week. Instead of trying to wrap my head around something new, I gave some thought and insight about a topic I already knew something about. It felt like a little bit of a cop-out, actually, but my brain needed a rest. And I really do like wikis.
I did dig a little deeper into what other people do with wikis in classrooms and courses. I also looked for some research-type studies on their effectiveness (also some pedagogical stuff). I need to keep digging there, I think. I know I have not fully realized the capabilities of the wiki in my class. I planned my wiki to fit into what I was already doing, but didn’t spend a lot of time looking at what else it could do. I could be doing so much more cool stuff with it. This is a work in process (as is all teaching, really).
I was inspired by this video this week:
It’s all about how you set things up.
Anyway, this was a week of reflective thinking about my teaching style and what I am doing in my classroom and how it all ties together, as hopefully it does.
As with the last couple of weeks, I feel like I have just touched the surface of this topic. I am wondering if there might be a written comprehensive in this somewhere, which would allow me to dig into the literature on higher ed and wikis a bit more. Sigh. There are never enough hours in the day.
If you can’t already tell, I am new to blogging, if you don’t count a less-than-successful classroom blog I tried out in my composition class last year. However, thanks to this guy, I have been using wikis quite a bit the last two years. This semester I am teaching my Argument and Exposition class using a class wiki. I love it.
Even though I have been using wikis, I haven’t actually read that much about them. I just got around to reading the Wikipedia entry on wikis. It was interesting and deepened my understanding of the history of wikis and how they work. I now know that I have Ward Cunningham to thank for this tool.
To me, these are the benefits of the wiki in the classroom:
Little implicit structure, allowing the structure to emerge based on the needs of the user. It is a lot more flexible than other online teaching or learning tools I have used. The class itself can change the structure as we go. The very adaptability of it encourages risk-taking and collaboration.
In this interview with Ward Cunningham, he states that “I wanted people who wouldn’t normally author to find it comfortable authoring, so that there stood a chance of us discovering the structure of what they had to say.” I teach beginning writers. Most of them are not comfortable with ‘authoring.’ The loose flexibility of the wiki helps them put what they want to say in writing without a lot of the constraints we impose on other, more familiar writing materials.
Page history aspect is fantastic. You can’t lose what you’ve written, unless you are not saving. There is a freedom in revising a wiki page, knowing that you can always go back and recover what you have deleted or changed. As an instructor, I can also see students’ revising process. I can also see what they are not doing (and what they wait until the last minute to do).
The best feedback I have ever gotten about group projects have been from wiki-based group projects. Collaboration is easy and I can see which students haven’t done anything and pull them from their groups. Yes, I have done that.
Seeing what they are doing as they work makes it easier for me to intervene earlier when I see a student going off into the weeds with something.
I can change things on the fly, and my students can keep revising. There is no “finished” paper printed off and preserved for all time. It is never done.
Downsides:
Sometimes technology fails. Last week we were meeting for a peer edit workshop. The wireless hub where we meet was having problems. It was a giant pain. I had to give them directions and send them off. However, the nice thing was that they could still workshop remotely.
Skeptical students. Although, even they are coming around.
Grading. I am not going to lie, reading hard copy papers is much easier on the eyes. By digging and playing around with different sites, I have found that some wikis are better than others at mobile device compatibility. Critically reading lengthy prose on a mobile device is much easier. This semester I am using WikiDot.
I guess this is my shout-out to wikis. They may not be pretty, but that is one thing I like about them. They are not concerned with being pretty, just with content and collaboration and getting the work done. I can appreciate that.
I wanted to follow up my last post about Power Law with some quick thoughts about Power Law and the blogosphere.
Clay Shirky and Jason Kottke had interesting posts about this in February of 2003. They are a little dated, in terms of blog posts, but relevant to the discussion at hand.
My understanding is that both posts were written in response to an outbreak of lamenting the rise of “A-list bloggers” at that time. In his blog, Shirky links to this post, illustrating said lamenting. It seems that people were trying to find reasons why this phenomena of powerful bloggers was happening.
Shirky writes this in response to the discussion, specifically, that some bloggers had ‘sold out’:
What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.
And:
Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone’s goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system. The relatively egalitarian distribution of readers in the early years had nothing to do with the nature of weblogs or webloggers. There just weren’t enough blogs to have really unequal distributions. Now there are.
This really brings us back to Manuel Lima’s question at the end of his TED talk: is there a universal structure?
And, for more about Kottke and Shirky’s posts and the relation of scarcity of time to Power Law distributions, see this post from Amber’s Blog.
Well, this week I sorted through Barbasi’s Power Law and then backtracked to look at some network theory. It seems I keep circling around to materiality and cognition. There is probably a reason for that, but I am not sure what it is yet. I do enjoy swimming around in theory, and I like to ponder why we think how we think. Issues related to meta-cognition definitely impact how I approach teaching.
The biggest issue I had this week was that my tendency in general is to happily dive very deeply into a very narrow topic, but to be reluctant to move on from it. So, since moving on is what we do in class, I have dragged my feet reluctantly away from the Gutenberg Parenthesis and started working on Barbasi, and now do not want to move away from either one of those. It slows me down. I am now thinking of ways to justify including Pettitt in my thesis. It’s a problem.
Anyway, on a fun note this week, I realized this morning while working on MLA citations with my A & E class that the Purdue OWL has now listed a way to cite Twitter (it appears to be in response to the MLA website doing the same). Fantastic. Take that, you Luddites.
I also started this, a second Power Law post last week, but found after I started it that I just wasn’t as interested in Power Law as it specifically related to bloggers as I was to network theory in general and the internet as a whole. Since it was done as much as it was going to be, I decided just to publish it as is and link to Amber’s Blog, as she discussed the same two posts. Thanks, Amber.
I spend a lot of time with a biochemist, who is in love with proteins. Really. He spends more time fondly thinking about proteins, their structures and activities than anything else. Yes, there is debate about such things, and, yes, proteins actually do stuff. I am a little sad I know this.
Simply put, the power law states that blogs that already have ‘power’ will get more. This is not a feature specific to blog or social networks; it is a feature of networks, as physicist and network theorist Albert Laszlo Barabasi explains:
A new node joining a network, such as a new web page or a new protein, can in principle connect to any pre-existing node. However, preferential attachment dictates that its choice will not be entirely random, but linearly biased by the degree of pre-existing nodes — that is, the number of links that the nodes have with other nodes. This induces a rich-get-richer effect, allowing more connected nodes to gain more links at the expense of their less-connected counterparts. Hence, the large-degree nodes turn into hubs and the network becomes scale-free — the probability distribution of the degrees over the entire network follows a power law. (Barabasi 2012)
So much for the freedom and egalitarianism of the web.
I have to admit, I did not understand all of the jargon in the above passage. What the heck does scale-free mean? The image it brought to mind was fish scales. Probably because I was hungry. Luckily for me, I have the hub known as Google. I found a nice (albeit lengthy and academic) Scientific American article through the University of Notre Dame’s website. Basically, previous theories looked at networks as random — each node in a random system has an equal number of connections to other nodes. Okay, then they studied the Internet. Barbasi and Bornabeau write:
So in 1998, when we, together with Hawoong Jeong and Reka Albert of the University of Notre Dame, embarked on a project to map the World Wide Web, we expected to find a random network. Here’s why: people follow their unique interests when deciding what sites to link their Web documents to, and given the diversity of everyone’s interests and the tremendous number of pages they can choose from, the resulting pattern of connections should appear fairly random. The measurements, however, defied that expectation. Software designed for this project hopped from one Web page to another and collected all the links it could. Although this virtual robot reached only a tiny fraction of the entire Web, the map it assembled revealed something quite surprising: a few highly connected pages are essentially holding the World Wide Web together. More than 80 percent of the pages on the map had fewer than four links, but a small minority, less than 0.01 percent of all nodes, had more than 1,000.
That was in 1998, when the world wide web was a bit smaller. In 2005 it looked like this:
They called these systems “scale-free” to reflect the fact that some nodes, or hubs, have a seemingly unlimited number of links and no node is like any other. Apparently these types of networks can be found everywhere, from cell’s metabolic systems to actors in Hollywood. In these systems a small percentage of nodes have the most connections and keep it all together. Apparently these systems behave similarly — they are pretty immune to accidental disaster, but vulnerable to planned attack. hmmmmm …
I also found this Popular Science article on Albert-Laszlo Barabasi which was interesting and frightening, all at the same time. On page 2 Gregory Mone, the author of the piece, gets into Barbasi’s more recent work with “control nodes.” He has been studying just what percentage of hubs need to be manipulated in order to change, or control, a system.
Yikes. I suppose this can be a good thing in terms of proteins and tumor growth, but the idea that a small percentage of websites are control nodes in the system of the internet, well, that is troubling.
On a lighter note:
This video is fun. It is a look at how we see the world — the shift from the hierarchy of the tree to the power of networks:
There is more to say about all of this — beyond the research into what the theory is. Hopefully I can wrap my brain around it and write more about it in another post.
I feel like all of my posts should have a nerd alert warning, but, well, this one really needs it. My inner nerd is coming out to play. Unrestrained. I have found that these posts are a way for me to try stuff out that I am thinking about writing. This is one of those.
I keep thinking about that 14 minute segment of Thomas Pettitt’s lecture I highlighted in a previous post (minutes 23 – 37, in case you missed it). He talks about words being restrained in the container of the book happening about the same time paintings start to be framed, fixed maps start to replace navigational directions, and the image of the body starts to be seen as an envelope. A container. That 14 minutes of video has been pinging around in my brain ever since. I am fascinated by this. Fascinated.
I study fairy tales, this is true. But I also spend a lot of my time with Julia Kristeva’s work, particularly her theory of abjection. My thesis, in fact, is trying to bring those two things together. As a result, sometimes I get lost in my own head. Anyway, this idea of the image of the body as an envelope corresponding to the Gutenberg Parenthesis really connects with abjection.
As Pettitt points out, etiquette of the time starts to become very concerned with keeping the envelope intact. Cover your mouth when you yawn or cough, cover your nose when you sneeze, don’t eat with your mouth open, keep your legs and ankles together, and so on and so forth. According to Kristeva, when anything leaves the body it becomes abject. If we didn’t view the body as an envelope, a container, if we weren’t so concerned with categories and compartments (another aspect of the Parenthesis, according to Pettitt), we wouldn’t have the abject.
Would we also not be as concerned with the differentiation of self and other?
How much does materiality affect cognition?
Could abjection be the result of the Gutenberg Parenthesis?
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Well, this feels like a lost week in a lot of ways. I spent most of the time sick, at doctor’s appointments with kids, and trying to keep up with basic life necessities. So much for my goals from last week.
Anyway, I need to let posts go with much less revision, keep them shorter, or probably a little bit of both in order to post more frequently. I need to worry less how they will be received. And they need to be shorter. A lot shorter. This is a blog for cripes sake.
I enjoyed reading about and thinking about the idea of the Gutenberg Parenthesis this week. I have invested a lot of my time into keeping oral culture alive through speech and performance, so I guess that makes sense. The audience changes things, and it should. I love the idea that digital media has given us an avenue back to that type of interactive communication. I am not entirely sure how this fits into my (academic) work as a whole, but I think it does somehow. I am going to let that percolate for awhile.
My difficulty, digitally speaking, is that when doing research I tend to go off down different rabbit holes. Endless interesting paths to explore. The connectivity of the web just exacerbates this tendency. It is difficult to pull back and concretely tie things together. I start to feel like Penny on the Big Bang Theory when she discovers online gaming.
Part of the challenge for this whole project for me is definitely going to be less thinking and more just generating content. This is a challenge for me in general. Also, pulling back from interesting stuff to focus on relevant stuff much earlier in the rabbit hole exploration. We will see how this week goes.
“He threw whole handfuls of frozen words on deck, and they looked like striped pills of different colors. We saw words of mouth, green words, blue words, black words, golden words. When we warmed them a bit in our hands, they melted like snow. Then we really heard them!”
I always enjoy having disparate paths of inquiry come together. Or maybe it just seems like everything is coming together and making sense, and I really just need to lay off the DayQuil. Anyway, I read fairy tales. I study them, I read about them, I write about them. And, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have a speecher working on a speech about fanfiction. And then this week I started reading about changing media and the Gutenberg Parenthesis. How did these come together you ask? Well, it might just be the DayQuil, but it seemed like they did.
With every media shift there have been skeptical voices lamenting the loss of whatever characteristics the previously dominant medium was perceived as promoting . . . Plato famously argued that writing had great disadvantages in comparison to oral dialogue. (49)
In fact, the notion that print — and the newspaper in particular — was a killer of the oral fairy tale was a claim frequently made by Yeats himself, and one which resurfaces (from a Marxist rather than a nationaliast angle) in Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller.”
Oh, the horrors! However, If Thomas Pettit’s is right, then we are returning to a pre-print mentality and understanding of communication. Rettberg introduces Pettit on page 47:
Before the introduction of print, Pettit argues, literature and art were seen as malleable, flexible, and changing. A story would be performed again and again, told by a storyteller or enacted in a theatre. A song or tune would have no owner, but be played in different ways by different people. With the introduction of print, we began to think of literature as something that could be fixed in time and space. (48)
According to Pettit, this is something we are returning to with the decline of importance placed on fixed print in the digital age. Bring it on, I say. This is an intriguing idea, and one I was unfamiliar with. Cue the research.
What I found:
A rather lengthy lecture by Thomas Pettit at MIT on the Guttenberg Parenthesis. Feel free to skip the first 2 and a half minutes of intro, and then the important part is really the half hour after that (yes, it’s long, but worth the time. Seriously). If you are really pressed for time, the really interesting bit is from minutes 23 to 37. He talks about the parenthesis regimenting words so that they are contained — to stop them from “getting out,” and the effect on cognition.
If you don’t feel like looking through all 191 slides, 8 and 9 are the most relevant to understanding Pettit’s perspective (8 is a video of Pettit), and 87 is my favorite. Slam poetry, from television’s perspective. Slide 125 is a hoot — a professor from University of Argentina describes why they started a Facebook project there — because they were sick and tired of their students looking at them with cow faces. Yup, I know that feeling. Slide 142 is fantastic and presents guidelines from the Steal Like an Artist site.
In fact, that is so fabulous, it warrants its own image.
And the author, Austin Kleon, has a TED talk.. Yay!
I may be developing a little intellectual crush on this guy. It happens. Don’t judge.
But, I digress, back to Burvall’s Prezi. I highly encourage you to watch the whole thing and be open to it. It is a work of art, and though I have isolated certain bits, it is understood best in its entirety.
A paper about digital literacy and new paradigms in media and learning. The authors begin this paper with an examination of the differences in attitude toward digital media between teachers and students. Particularly interesting to think about how beliefs about whether knowledge is owned or retrieved may be impacting classroom contexts and (mis)communication between instructor and student. Reminded me of the Argentinian professor’s cow faced students.
A less wonky explanation of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, viewed through a journalistic lens, can be found in The Guardian.
And a blog! Dedicated to examining the Guttenberg Parenthesis! Ok, it is pretty brief yet, she might think the Internet is a new god, and we don’t seem to have a lot in common, but it is an interesting endeavor.
For more information about fairy tales and chapbooks (because who doesn’t want to know more about that?):
Also, I am super excited about this project (and not-so-slightly jealous). Students at the University of Guelph are digitizing a collection of chapbooks, archiving and curating them for a digital collection. These are all Scottish chapbooks from the 17th and 18th centuries and contain romances, comedies, political essays, information about social customs, and yes, fairy tales. I can’t wait to see what they the end result of this project is.
Seeking Knowledge... 