Resource Blog Post #3

I liked this article, but I wasn’t able to use it in my eight-page paper. If you’re interested in blogging or hyperlinking, browse Tiffany J. Hunt and Bud Hunt’s “New Voices: Linkin’ (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks.” I found it on JSTOR. It’s a bit ironic that the article is about hyperlinking and I’m not sure how to hyperlink to a JSTOR article…

Also, I had a conversation with a few people during class last week about searching the blogosphere. You can, at least the blogs that are registered on Technorati, as I understand it. You can search here: Blog Directory.

Resource Post #2: Blogs in Plain English

Here’s a video called “Blogs in Plain English,” made using only paper cut-outs by Common Craft. It’s quite entertaining and informative, for a 3 minute video on blogs. CommonCraft.com has other videos on topics such as RSS, Wikipedia, and Social Media. They may or may not help you with your research project, but they might work as an introduction for students.

Wired for Learning

 

I just discovered Wired for Learning: An Educator’s Guide to Web 2.0. It’s divided into five parts: Introducing Web 2.0: Trends, Signs, and User Design; Social Learning, Networking, and the Web. 2.0; Environment and User Center Design; Learning Management with Web 2.0; and Web 2.0: Case Studies and Ideas for Educators. Much of the text is available on Google books, except the two pages on communities of inquiry that are most relevant to my topic, so I’ve requested it on Link+. Let me know if you’d like to look at it.

 

I am more than a Writing Workshop Instructor at the LAC

I try to restrain, but I sometimes hear the words come out of my mouth: “What do you do?”

“I’m an accountant at Some Prestigious Firm,” this guy told me.

“Oh, I haven’t heard of it.”

It’s not that I don’t want to know what someone does; I just don’t want the answer to matter, or to be someone’s most vital statistic. For example, look at Facebook. Sitting right below the name of any filled-in Facebook profile is one’s job title and place of occupation. Curiously, I just noticed the latest status update from Joshua Radin, a folksy singer-songwriter: “People’s first question in la? What do you do? First question in NYC? Where do you live?” His fans have added the questions of different locations. In Scotland: What are you drinking? In Minnesota: Are you single? In Utah: Are you Mormon? But “What do you do?” is dominant on the pages of Facebook’s 6 million users.

I thought about this after reading danah boyd‘s “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” in which she argues that social media provides teenagers with a space, a public of their own. For Emily Rutherford, a first-year student at Princeton at the time of writing an entry called “Thoughts on Facebook and Identity,” social media sites are a place “to broadcast, to declare, to pontificate, to make some statement about who we are and what we value.” She writes about social media’s power as a “shaping agent of our cultural norms and expectations”: “Mark Zuckerberg determined the makeup of our vital statistics, and these in combination with our profile pictures become the sum of our identities.”

Facebook now has twice as many users worldwide than Myspace, according to Newsweek. If Facebook is teenagers’ new public, the place “where norms are set and reinforced, where common ground is formed,” it may impose the superficiality of our culture. Even when just glancing at someone’s page, it’s easy to judge. “She’s a Wench at Medieval Times?!”

Myspace pages, on the other hand, give prominence to the user’s music choices, interests, and personal description of themselves, rather than the user’s job, education, and relationship status. Myspace users infuse their profile with what they want to define them, rather than their status as unemployed, single high school students. It seems Myspace provides a better public for those working through their identity, while Facebook, created in the Ivy League, exposes its users to a constrained view of what’s important—at any age.

“A checker is a bless sing”?

Remember the spell checker joke? “Eye halve a spelling chequer,” the poem goes. “It came with my pea sea.” Although I read it years ago, I had never really considered the insidious effects of MS Word’s Grammar Checker (MCGC) until reading Amber Buck’s “The Invisible Interface: Word in the Writing Center” and Tim McGee and Patricia Ericsson’s “The politics of the program: MS Word as the invisible grammarian” this week.

While I’m indebted to the spell checker, when I see those green squiggles, I immediately check for the correction and amend it. I can’t help it. But, on those infrequent occasions, I think I know what I’m doing—and the correct change is almost never what the MSGC recommends to me. (As the articles mentioned, its corrections can be as awful as my spelling.) I hadn’t thought of its deleterious effects on less-than-grammar-savvy students who might see the green squiggles covering their black-and-white pages.

Like Cheryl Haynes (who stepped on my toes, to be hideously cliché, by writing the same post as me at the same time), I, too, took issue with how the teaching of grammar is depicted in these articles, as well as many other articles and in some graduate composition classrooms at San Francisco State University. After working on an influx of grammar issues at the Learning Assistance Center last semester, I wondered if the whole class could benefit from some kind of grammar instructor and how to effectively teach it if I did.

By now, most of us have heard that studying grammar does not improve writing skills. In fact, maybe we’ve seen George Hillocks’s (1986) study that proves it:

“The study of traditional school grammar (i.e., the definition of parts of speech, the parsing of sentences, etc.) has no effect on raising the quality of student writing….Taught in certain ways, grammar and mechanics instruction has a deleterious effect on student writing. In some studies a heavy emphasis on mechanics and usage (e.g., marking every error) resulted in significant losses in overall quality” (Miller, p. 248).

Yeah, but it’s just as clear that ignoring grammar hasn’t improved the overall quality of students’ writing  either. In “Three Views of Composition,” Nan Miller, a markedly traditional professor at North Carolina State University, wrote, “Teaching grammar in freshman composition shouldn’t be necessary and wouldn’t be necessary if our public school system were doing its job. Most college freshmen need a systematic review of grammar precisely because high school teachers often go by what the NCTE claims ‘research shows’ rather than what they can see with their own eyes.”

Miller cites a 2004 survey of business leaders, called “A Ticket to Work,” in which the National Commission on Writing “found that proficiency in writing was the ‘ticket to professional opportunity’, while poorly written job applications are a figurative kiss of death” (p. 20). The survey’s respondents found recent graduates’ grammar “deplorable across the board,” saying “I’m amazed they got through college.”

I see benefit in teaching our students to turn off the Grammar Checker, but I also see these articles as urging us to do more. I’m open to changing my mind at time, but as this point in my non-teaching teaching career, I see grammar instruction as something our students need from us, so they too have battle the green lines when necessary. The theorists who shaped my view champion for a descriptivist approach—yes, as Haynes also mentioned. Descriptivists see grammar positively and as a mean of achieving great clarity and style—and what harm can that do?

Reading Ourselves

My most used word on Facebook in 2010 was “love,” according to the “Top Words” application. Down to my word choices, I’ve carefully constructed my identity on Facebook, making it match my most cherished self-representation.

“To me, it seems wonderfully fitting for you that the word ‘love’ is number one,” a friend from high school commented on my post. Ah, yes, I’ve constructed it well. After all, “identity is something we do, rather than simply something we are,” as David Buckingham wrote in “Introducing Identity” (8).

Summarizing Anthony Giddens, Buckingham states, “Modern individuals have to be constantly ‘self-reflective,’ making decisions about what they should do and who they should be. The self becomes a kind of ‘project’ that individuals have to work on” (9).

But what about those who are less fastidious about the details they disclose, or those that lack what Michel Foucault calls self-monitoring and self-surveillance? (A few girls got kicked out of my undergraduate university’s dorms freshman year for being caught red handed in Facebook photos, or at least holding red Solo cups.) The majority of my friends on Facebook are from high school and college, meaning they’re “digital natives,” or those born after 1986, but they seem to lack the critical reading skills needed for the Internet, let alone our classrooms.

In her post last week, Sarah Powers nailed this week’s topic even before the readings: “Online, they [students] are both consumers and producers of text. But this doesn’t ensure that they’re acting as critics (self—or otherwise) in the sense of critical literacy.”

Every reading in my grad courses this week has been about teaching my future students to read. In “Using Reading in the Writing Classroom,” Donna Qualley writes that she encourages ‘metacognitive’ reflection, in which students “read themselves and their work to gauge their own development as readers and writers” (123; emphasis mine).

Reading ourselves, it seems, is skill, possibly learned in college English literature classrooms, along with self-crafting, -censoring and -criticizing. Students are ‘reading’ each other all the time on Facebook, but that doesn’t always translate into self-reflection. For her students’ sakes, it seems the composition instructor, as Kathleen McCormick writes, does need to adopt a view of ‘reading’ that includes both the word and the world—Facebook included.