Poet Ponders the Digital

While working on the research for my dissertation, I have read page after page on writing pedagogy asserting that the goal of a university writing course should be to teach students that knowledge is socially constructed and that "truth" is relative to culture and community. The problem with this assertion is that students with autism and similar conditions (my scrambled brain, apparently), are not relativists. Various researchers (Wellcome 2008, Frith 2001) have found that individuals with these conditions are more logical, unaffected by emotional inputs or rhetorical framing. I've found quite a bit of research on this aspect of brain trauma and autism and am including these findings in my dissertation. If a group of people are "wired" to think there is a "truth" -- that knowledge is not created but discovered and then applied creatively -- who are educational theorists to consider such people "immature" or "simple-minded" in s...

In the last few days my wife and I have fought Blogger and SurveyMonkey. For two applications that are used by a lot of people, especially writers and academics, the applications are horrible. When an engineer and computer programmer can't figure out the choices to accomplish basic tasks, something is wrong. I have used Blogger for several years. This is a great platform, but some of the tools need improvement. The help to accomplish tasks leaves much to be desired. We wanted to create a multi-author blog. While we were able to get the setup to allow anyone to post, the author name was always the same. It took several passes through the settings to realize you needed to create special "inbox" addresses for each author. Sure, it was a logical fix once we realized the issue, but it wasn't obvious on the surface. That's not good. Also, the editor has some problems with formatted e-mail. I wish the editor were more like Google's Doc application. ...