Poet Ponders the Digital

By May, I'll be half-way through an MFA in Film and Digital Technology. People ask why a Ph.D in rhetoric would need an MFA. My explanation follows. Rhetoric (and composition, since they are often lumped together in academic settings) has struggled between the tension to teach traditional rhetoric and a need to update our courses and field to reflect new technologies and trends in communication. Other departments expect us to teach how to format academic papers (MLA, APA) and write traditional genres: the five-paragraph (yuck) "essay" (which isn't an essay at all), the term paper, the journal article, the "book review" (again, which isn't a review at all), the thesis, and so on. We know these forms and many of us want to resist them. Yet, our classroom work is often relegated to the "service" of other academic fields. Shifting away from composition seems necessary for me to explore rhetoric where it is now most effective at reaching broa...

Pittsburgh TechFest was Saturday, June 1, 2013. For me, this is like going to a county fair or theme park… minus the junk food I adore. Technology captures my imagination, and I do love new hardware, software, gizmos, and gadgets. But, reality has set in, yet again, and I cannot immerse myself in tech and do everything else I enjoy doing. As readers know, I've been trying in fits and starts to relearn programming concepts, and then teach myself Objective-C for OS X and iOS applications. I really do love code almost as much as I love creative writing of the English variety. The "almost as much" is the problem. Annually, TechFest features seminar "tracks" on everything from careers development to Web development. You can go from database sessions to object-oriented programming. It's wonderful, the skills on display and the discussions. Yet, I am forced to choose between writing or coding, because both require more than a full-time effort for success. ...

Can computer software evaluate student papers? The debate has waged for about three years in higher education, and lately it has taken on a new urgency. This article from 2012 raises the question. According to a new study [ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44416236/NCME%202012%20Paper3_29_12.pdf ] by the University of Akron, computer grading software is just as effective in grading essays on standardized tests as live human scoring. After testing 16,000 middle school and high school test essays graded by both humans and computers, the study found virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases proving to be more reliable than human grading. While the results are a blow to technology naysayers, the software is still controversial among certain education advocates who claim the software is not a cure-all for grading student essays. — http://www.aaeteachers.org/index.php/blog/714-study-robo-readers-more-accurate-in-scoring-essays , April 23, 2012 Now, a recent New Yor...

Computers have changed writing education, but many writing teachers wonder if technology is now turning into a threat. Too many politicians, administrators, and non-profit foundations are rushing to embrace technologies such as MOOCs and adaptive tutoring without skepticism. What is the balance between too little and too much faith in technology? The question of what computing technology can and cannot do for writing students is something we need to consider — as well as whether or not some of these tasks should be done (by a computer or a human). 1) Formatting. I cannot remember the intricacies of APA or MLA, so I use Bookends with my writing tools. Even Word has improved its basic bibliography formatter to the point I catch few minor errors when I triple check the entries. Yes, I do tell my students to double and triple check citations and bibliographies, but I also demonstrate Bookends, EndNote, RefWords, and Word's built-in tools. The time saved lets a writer focus on c...

A few years ago, a colleague and I at the University of Minnesota helped our students launch a Wikibook project on professional and technical writing. The link to the project is: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professional_and_Technical_Writing I am posting this to two blogs, one on rhetoric and one on digital pedagogy, with the hope that someone out there has a class that could reboot this project and bring it back to life. I had only four students in my technical writing course this spring, at a small private university, and they edited a few pages. However, the project needs to be much larger than four students every other year if it is going to thrive. My view is that students in a variety of courses could update and expand the project. The book needs material on ethics, communication theory, visual design, style guides, and more. I'm sure there are dozens of topics that could be tackled by students. Please, consider asking your students to contribute to this project. ...

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University ( http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ ) is one of the two websites I check when I have a writing related question. The other is the Tameri Guide, of course, since Susan and I tend to add content to Tameri based on our experiences writing and teaching. I am a bit envious of the great content on Purdue OWL, though. It is probably the best academic writing site on the Web. Recently the OWL began adding slide shows, movies, and podcasts for students and teachers. The MLA and APA citation guides were already invaluable, but I've started to accept that students want content in digital form. The podcasts' content focuses on rhetorical concepts. Because students struggle with ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos, any additional explanations are helpful. I'm for anything that helps students sort through the complicated textbook definitions of these concepts. For a few years the OWL has been adding PowerPoint presentations on a range...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley June 2008 Issue May 12, 2008 Time to Require Pen and Paper Again? When I was a student at Golden West High School, a particularly well-read English instructor quoted from a text he held in contempt: the Cliffs Notes guide to Albert Camus’ classic novel The Stranger. Dr. Postelle informed us that he had read the same paragraph, sometimes paraphrased and sometimes not, in numerous papers during his career. It was his way of warning us that cheaters would be caught. Now, as an instructor at a university, I am longing for the days when the laziest of students would copy from the same tried (and seldom true) source. Unfortunately, I do catch a few students trying to offer the wisdom found on Wikipedia as their own. As the spring semester ended, I had a university senior offer an entire Wikipedia entry as his paper on a famous scientist. When I asked how he could do something so incredibly brazen, he replied that he didn’t have the time to use Google ...