Poet Ponders the Digital

I teach at a small regional and it is making some positive moves to foster online and traditional courses that are compelling for students. We know we have to compete or we will slowly fade. Continuing from my previous post, the challenge facing regional institutions serving the mid-tier student population: what makes your online program special? Or, what makes your on campus programs distinctly "tech enabled" for the future? To thrive online, and on campus, regional institutions must embrace faculty training, cutting edge technology, and an entrepreneurial attitude that embraces quick revision to degree programs. We can survive, and even thrive, but we cannot do so without substantial investments — especially if online education is going to be part of our degree programs. The for-profit Big Box Retailers of higher education are a real and substantial threat to the regional campuses that dot our map. Hundreds, if not thousands, of regional institutions are struggling t...

I have always preferred to work alone, despising group work. Apparently, I'm not the only person to realize group work is absolutely not better  than working alone:   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Pedagogically, I've always thought that groups allow students to avoid improving some skills. When I assign a group project, the best design student ends up doing the layout and design. Yes, that makes perfect sense and results in the best grade, but it doesn't help the student most in need of practice. Sure, we should play to our strengths on teams, but school is also about improving your weaknesses. We must balance letting students focus on their favorite tasks and skills against the need to get students to do what they don't realize they can do. Teams allow too many students to avoid work, while other students end up doing extra work. I want to work on my own, most of time, and that's ...

For the last few months I have been working on a new website for the Military Writers Society of America. The goal was to create a collaborative writing site, where the members of MWSA could share ideas and work together to create the online version of their magazine Dispatches. In many ways, the goal was the same as when I create an online classroom for university students: the technology should assist collaboration and never hinder participation. If you are curious, the new MWSA website is at: http://www.mwsadispatches.com What I've learned during this process will influence my approach to designing other online spaces, including courses. Allow me to detail the lessons, some of which were frustrating. 1. Drupal was a good choice. I experimented with several other content management systems, such as Joomla, Mambo, Moodle, XOOPS, and the classic PHP-Nuke. It was Drupal or Joomla, and Drupal won. For all the choices out there, I settled on Drupal because it is so ubiquitous...

One of my favorite writing tools is Word Counter 2.1, from Supermagnus Software. http://www.supermagnus.com/mac/Word_Counter/ The price? Free. The value? To quote a popular credit card company, "Priceless." If you're like most of my students, you're asking yourself, "Doesn't every word processor include a word count function? What's the big deal?" Yes, most editing and word processing applications do count words, sentences, and paragraphs. However, I'm more interested in two features that are either incomplete or missing from word processors and layout applications: word frequency counts and readability analyses. Again, most applications provide at least the ability to create these reports, but none of them match the speed or ease of Word Counter. There are several reason I use Word Counter: Not every text editor I use provides real-time word counts; Word counts are curiously inaccurate within some applications; Macros for Word that ...

On March 1, 2011, I wrote about the difficult state of the academic job market in fields such as mine: "digital rhetoric" and "new media" studies. Even with a specialization in "special needs pedagogy" (disabled students), the market is challenging. There are several reasons for this and I want to share those before I share my personal update. Let me first point to a trend that has finally reached the university setting: "Software as a Service" (SaaS). For several years, and even before the rise of the Internet, companies and non-profits alike could pay to access software remotely. In fact, this was the original model of computing back in the ancient days of mainframe dominance. A company would "lease" time on a mainframe, housed at a data processing center. Universities would lease time on their mainframes, too. Often, smaller universities and local public schools would use a regional minicomputer or mainframe. Today, this is "the...

The word "community" is overused in academic fields, but it is the best word for what it on my mind today. I closed a Web server this week on which I had created a Drupal and MediaWiki site on special education. The site was functional for about two years, which is an eternity online. The reality is that online communities come and go so rapidly that what was popular a year or two ago is often "inactive" now. There are dozens of Yahoo groups that are dedicated to special education. Most of these were active five years ago, but have since fallen out of favor with users. Just as the Usenet groups and most "listservs" have faded away in the last five years, so have many online forums. The Internet has accelerated the speed with which a community grows, propers, and then declines. The timeline of the Internet is punctuated by technologies and business ideas that were "hot" for a moment. When is the last time you used IRC or read a newsgroup? Remember...

This weekend I installed WordPress on our personal server. The process took about two hours, including customization and tweaking beyond the basic installation. No great PHP or MySQL skills were required; as long as you know how to use the command prompts you can install WordPress. The modifications included adding Amazon code to the PHP-generated pages. This allows us to use Amazon links without long URLs. To do this, I had to copy code from our Amazon Associates account and paste it, formatted, into the PHP code. Not a challenge, thankfully. I also enabled two spam filters via the PHP code. What makes WordPress, Drupal, and Moodle popular is the ease with which these systems can be extended. Third parties have created numerous plug-ins, widgets, and themes for these three open source platforms. I could, rather easily, support a pretty large number of teachers and students using open source software (OSS) for Web applications. The price is ideal and the skills required are incre...

This is a portion of my summer (re)reading list, at least on one particular subject matter. I am reading various books on type and design. So far, I have completed Dodd and Lupton. The Bringhurst and Parker texts are re-reads, which I will tackle later in the summer. The current book on my stand is the Stanley Morison Tally of Types . I'm putting the bibliography up top, to stress the books a bit more than my own ramblings. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style . 3rd ed ed. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, Publishers, 2004. Consuegra, David. American Type: Design & Designers . New York: Allworth Press, 2004. Dodd, Robin. From Gutenberg to Open Type: An Illustrated History of Type From the Earliest Letterforms to the Latest Digital Fonts . Vancouver, WA: Hartley & Marks Publishers, 2006. Lupton, Ellen. Thinking With Type : A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students . Vol. Design briefs. 1st ed ed. New York: Prince...

For October 16, 2007... Blog post: Add a YackPack plugin to your PBwiki (click on plug-ins) and try it out. Sign-up for tappedin.org (http://ti2.sri.com/tappedin/index.jsp) and explore its features for online chat (see how it was used at Hillcrest High School: http://www.slideshare.net/sbgaddy/hillcrest-high-school-21st-century-project-student-products). Reflect on how you might use tappenin.org or other discussion sites (WebCT/Vista, Moodle, Drupal) or tools (IM’ing, etc.) or virtual/game sites (Second City, etc.) for online discussion. I gave up trying plug-ins with OS X and Safari, which I think might happen in many educational settings. I just don't have the energy to manually link and setup so many items, even though I have done so with images and other elements in PBwki. As with Google Docs and other "Web 2.0" items not supporting Apple's browser at this time, I generally won't sacrifice my system to another browser. (FireFox is the only major alternativ...

Selected Bibliography My views on the implementation of online writing curricula are also informed by the following texts and articles: Anson, Chris M. "Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (1999): 261-80. Applebome, Peter. "The on-Line Revolution Is Not the End of Civilization as We Know It. But Almost." New York Times 4 April 1999 1999, sec. Education Supplement: 26-28, 35-37. Armstrong, Alison, and Charles Casement. The Child and the Machine : How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk . Updated ed. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe Publications, 2001. Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures : Refiguring College English Studies . Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition. West Lafayette, Ind.: Parlor Press, 2003. Callister, Nicholas C. Burbul...

Blog post: describe the search methods and databases you employ to collect information for use in your writing; how do you determine the validity and credibility of the information you acquire and how you categorized and organize that information for use in writing; how might you use RSS feeds to Bloglines or Google Reader to enhance your students how could you improve your students’ search strategies (see the Teachers Teaching Teachers site) Work on your vlog This week we are being asked to consider two very different topics, so I'm going to split my response accordingly. However, I'm also going to take a detour, which isn't that unusual for me. I like detours. [rant] Knowing a blog is for a course, especially a course on teaching writing/composition using online technologies, leads to blog posts that are anything but "bloggy" in nature. Instead of a wry wit or wandering observations, the writing feels controlled — mediated by the context to the point it is an...