Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 2007 Issue December 11, 2007 (1040 words) Students Programming for the Future Twenty-five years ago history was made. The Commodore 64, the first home computer to sell more than a million units, shipped just in time for the Christmas season of 1982. A year earlier, I had received what might still be the most important gift I have every received: a Commodore VIC-20. Thanks to Apple, Atari, Commodore, and a dozen smaller computer manufacturers, the late 1970s and early 1980s were an amazing time in computing history. By 1993, Commodore was bankrupt, Atari was sold off in pieces, and Apple was struggling to compete against IBM and a legion of “PC clones.” I am extremely glad I grew up during the personal computer revolution. A generation earlier, I might have built crystal radios and box cameras. Instead, I was learning to manipulate bits and bytes to produce sounds and images. I was thrilled the first time my VIC-20 played a “song” I had...

If I have to think of what things have changed my life, the answer is simple: computers. I have owned quite a few. If I had kept them, I would have an interesting museum of old technologies. Commodore VIC-20 My first computer at home was a Commodore VIC-20. It was an odd computer, soon replaced by Commodore with the C64 — the best selling computer model of all time. (More than 3 million of the original C64 were sold!) I have a real fondness for the early years of the home computer: Atari, Commodore, Apple, Tandy, Texas Instruments, and many others were competing to get technology into the home. They were all more interesting than the modern Apple Mac and IBM PC to me. Magazines like BYTE, PC World, PC Magazine, Compute, InCider, A+, and dozens of others included program code. You could enter BASIC, machine code, Pascal, or C programs and then change them to see how things worked. Today? The complexity of software no longer makes it possible to include code in a book. Games take do...

I posted a response to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004) that might have been my reaction to his essay, but I also think I didn't quite understand the essay. Hearing Prof. Sirc speak on November 27, 2007, I realized his theories were not far from my own, at least within creative writing, which might have been why I didn't sense any "revelation" in the essay. At the same time, the links between art theory and composition that escaped my comprehension when reading were much much clearer during the visual and oral presentation. However, I also don't complete agree these approaches help in a college composition course meant to teach academic norms. This leads to an interesting question: why would I be thrilled by his presentation, but utterly flummoxed by a text? Why did the text leave me confused and disappointed, while hearing Prof. Sirc was fascinating? I think it is important to admit -- Sirc's ideas are interesting....

How do I respond to student writing using online technologies? I tend to make extensive use of Microsoft Word's "track changes" and "reviewing" modes. The real challenge for me as an instructor is to not make every edit for a student. My primary concern, and research seems to support this, is that students have been inculcated with the notion that you make the suggested corrections, no more or no less, and that is what constitutes "revising" a paper. Online, this habit becomes even easier... cut-and-paste or simply "accept change" and the revising is "done" in the view of many students. When I first started student teaching, in the late 1980s, I fell into the trap of making too many comments on papers. Now, I try to minimize how often I correct mistakes students need to discover. I also do not make as many suggestions as I did years ago. Online tools have made editing and leaving short comments much easier. For all the dang...

What makes a Web site readable? As the Internet moved from the ASCII texts of the USENET and FTP repositories towards HTML, no one really cared about appearance. The notion was that content was everything — and most content files were journal articles and scientific research. The early notion of specifying fonts on the World Wide Web was a major shift from the original notion of the Web. You can look at changes from HTML pre-1.0 to our current standards and the shift towards visual content is obvious. The reality is that there was no stopping the drift towards a visual medium. Given basic HTML 2.0, designers resorted to complex tables-within-tables to mimim familiar print designs. From the earliest handwritten manuscripts, artists have known how words are placed on a page (or screen) affects how they are read. No one was about to settle for no control over a Web site's appearance. Temptation to experiment can lead to innovation, but on the Web it also helps to k...

Assignment: find images of interest to you and collect them. I do not collect much of anything. I do not know of any "scene" nor do I have any particular focused interest at the moment. Maintaining my Web sites is now about maintaining content, not creativity or discovery. (They are academic tools, not hobbies.) I seldom leave my house, except to travel between the home and the university campus. I do not have any hobbies, which would merely distract me from writing assignments. I have no desire to gather random things without purpose, and the "purpose" of completing an assignment was painful enough with the Flikr slideshow I was asked to produce earlier in the semester. Without my wife's assistance, the idea of looking at pictures would have been too daunting. When I have "nothing to do," I do whatever I am asked to do by my family or employer. I have a list of stories and projects at all times, though, giving me guidance when I wonder wha...

Responding to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004): 1) What should we be teaching as composition? (p. 110) I do not spend much time on Web design (HTML, CSS) because those technologies will change within a year or two. Rhetorical thought, however, is a skill that can be applied for both analysis of existing material or synthesis of new. Thinking strategically is a portable skill. 2) I truly despise the "creativity" of making blocks of text non-columnar (113). It is painful to read as it is, so why make it any more difficult? If this were poetry, I would be forgiving — poetry is condensed meaning. This is not poetry. It is a mockery of poetry and creativity to have a scholarly article make pretense of creativity. Bluntly, the blocks serve no purpose in this text. They do not move me emotionally, they merely annoy me as a reader of a dense text. If you want to be poetic be poetic, but this is not even prosaic. It's silliness. 3) I a...