The New Research Summit

Cross-Atlantic Conversation

noreply@blogger.com (rsc) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:42:00 +0000

Cross-Atlantic Literary Conversation

Here is the link to an interview/conversation held Thursday, January 24, 2008 between the editor of Northwest Review (John Witte), from the University of Oregon, and the editor of Le Noeud des Miroirs, Jean-Pierre Pouzol. The interview was arranged by arranged by Suzanne Clark at the University of Oregon and Prof. Taffy Martin (translator), speaking from the university campus in Poitiers, France. We're using the facilities for distance education at the University of Oregon and the Université de Poitiers to explore the possibilities of research exchange.

The idea is to produce a streaming video that can be used in classes and by individuals for research.

To look at the journals we discuss, go to their sites:

The Northwest Review: http://www.uoregon.edu/~nwreview/

Le Noeud des Miroirs: http://lauranne.lauranne.free.fr/Pouzol/NoeudMiroirs/

To see the interview, go to: http://contentserver.uoregon.edu/tcs/

Web 2.0/digital text video

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:27:00 +0000

Thanks to Mark Watson (UO Libraries) for pointing out this video from Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography group at KSU:

"... a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography."

Yochai Benkler webcast (Cornell Computer Policy and Law Program)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 12:49:00 +0000

This archived webcast is long (1.5 hours) but well worth watching for anyone interested in intellectual property, social networks, open source/open repository movements, etc.

This is relevant to the New Research Summit because Professor Benkler dishes up lots of food for discussion/debate not only about law, politics, and culture, but also about education. For example, what does it mean to the academy when "critical evaluation is moving from academic seminars to blogs and wikipedia?" What does it mean for pedagogy and curriculum when virtually everyone can be a content creator as well as a consumer? How should we prepare our students for citizenship and employment in a world where "the means of production are radically decentralized" and "social sharing and exchange are a third mode of production, and the market (which responds to price signals) and the firm (which responds to managerial signals) are moving and adjusting as a result?"

It isn't all lecture, BTW -- watch for some lively and provocative remixes, including The Black Lantern's video remix of the Legendary KO's "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People," which is a mash-up of Kanye West's "Golddigger," which is a mash-up of.... well, you get the idea.

second life news reporting

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Faris) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:16:00 +0000

I'm not sure how many people still read this blog, but I know some discussion was going on last spring about Second Life. I thought I'd repost this BBC story here:

Online world to get news bureau
Dancers in Second Life, Linden Lab

The bureau will be staffed by Reuters media correspondent Adam Pasick who will report on the lives and business dealings of Second Life's residents.

An avatar resembling Mr Pasick, called Adam Reuters in the game, has been created to act as a virtual reporter in the world for the news agency.

Second Life has almost one million members and 400,000 of those are regular visitors to the online world.

Making headlines

While many online virtual worlds are games that encourage users to live out a fantasy existence as a warrior or wizard, Second Life is intended to be a more playful version of the real world.

Second Lifers can alter their appearance to look like animals or robots and buy outlandish homes, such as giant shoes, to live in.

The virtual world has been in the news a lot recently as real world firms establish in-game presences. Car maker Toyota is planning to offer a virtual version of its Scion xB van to Second Lifers. BBC Radio One has rented an island in the game that will be used to stage concerts.

Mr Pasick said he would act like any other correspondent and chase up news stories in Second Life.

"As strange as it might seem, it's not that different from being a reporter in the real world," he said. "Once you get used to it - it becomes very much like the job I have been doing for years."

He is also planning to explore issues that the growth of online worlds have exposed, such as the intersection between real and virtual economies.

The currency in Second Life, known as Linden dollars, can be swapped for real money and many regular players make a significant income from their game transactions. On an average day the Second Life economy involves the turnover of goods and services worth more than 400,000 dollars.

News stories will be filed to a blog and to a portable device that Reuters will make available to Second Life avatars so they can stay up to date with the latest virtual and real world news.

Media Commons; Future of the Book (USC/Annenberg)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:47:00 +0000

The MediaCommons project is part of the Institute for the Future of the Book, & they seem to be doing things that relate closely to the UO's New Research Summit:

"As has been mentioned several times here, the Institute for the Future of the Book has spent much of 2006 exploring the future of electronic scholarly publishing and its many implications, including the development of alternate modes of peer-review and the possibilities for networked interaction amongst authors and texts. Over the course of the spring, we brainstormed, wrote a bunch of manifestos, and planned a meeting at which a group of primarily humanities-based scholars discussed the possibilities for a new model of academic publishing...."

Online-Only University Press & textbooks (Rice/Connexions)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew) — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 17:47:00 +0000

Dear New Researchers:

I hope you're all having a great summer. Dave Moursand forwarded this article to my attention.

Andrew

==========

RICE PRESS REBORN AS ONLINE ONLY
Rice University will restart its press, which was closed in 1996, as an online-only operation, publishing peer-reviewed books and monographs. Faced with declining budgets, many libraries buy fewer books, leaving academic publishers unwilling to publish books unless they can justify the printing costs. Rice's model does away with printing, allowing the press to publish texts not published otherwise while considerably speeding up the publishing process. Because texts will be peer-reviewed, organizers hope the reborn Rice press will be as
prestigious--and as valid for tenure or promotion--as a traditional press. The press will operate through Connexions, a site that offers course materials free of charge. Separately, Connexions will also begin offering print-on-demand custom textbooks, assembled from individual modules within Connexions. The textbooks are expected to cost significantly less than comparable offerings from traditional textbook publishers.
Inside Higher Ed, 14 July 2006
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/14/rice

Our Summit in Streaming Video

noreply@blogger.com (rsc) — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 19:06:00 +0000

Check out our Summit meeting in streaming video at:

http://media.uoregon.edu/medsvs/newresearch/

WR 399 Writing and the New Research

noreply@blogger.com (rsc) — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:11:00 +0000

There is a class on writing and the new research developing out of the "New Research Summit." It's WR 399, offered Fall 2006 by Suzanne Clark and Heather Briston. As teachers, you might all want to tell your students about it. It has its own blog:
http://wr399writingandthenewresearch.blogspot.com/

We're excited about the new possibilities for research, new and old media, and for various forms of written and on-line "publication."

If you are a graduate student and you're interested in pursuing these questions, we'd be glad to have you work with us under an ENG 605 number. Email Suzanne at sclark@uoregon.edu for information.

Just joining the blog

noreply@blogger.com (Julia Lesage) — Wed, 24 May 2006 14:47:00 +0000

Hi, I am just joining the blog and it will take me a few days to read all the back posts and follow out some of the recommended sites. I had written Suzanne and told her of a web site that presents a power point, 35 minute audio lecture (you can put it on pause but not print out), that is stimulating about pedagogy and challenging to many of my own assumptions. I learned a lot from it and am trying to think why I disagree with it, as well as agree with many parts. It assumes a whole new model of education premised on new ways of getting and using information:

http://www.elearnspace.org/media/connectivism_Web_2/player.html

If folks can go through it, I would love to start some thoughts circulating on it. Also, this format may indicate a useful way to put our own lectures online. It is a lot more compact and cohesive than most of my lectures are. I was frustrated that I could not just skim or print out the whole thing, but taking 35 minutes to consider the ideas actually did have a beneficial effect on how well I absorbed or thought about the ideas.

As a way of introduction, let me say that I am currently working on a links page for Jump Cut, about the current state of the Internet. One of the main things that fascinates me in terms of the Internet is how the blog took over from the homepage. And so few faculty had homepages or published their essays on their own sites, I could never understand why.

For the past three or four years, I have been working away at getting all of Jump Cut's past issues online, as well as publishing a new issue online at least once a year. The accumulation of the archive gives us some "heft" on the Internet and we seem to be reaching a lot more people than when we were a print publication.

http://www.ejumpcut.org/

It is exciting to have this blog, The New Research Summit, at the University of Oregon. Can the folks who started it retrace their steps and tell us their thinking as they set up the blog before the conference?

Also, can someone tell me how to make hotlinks in the posting?

Abundance, Attentiveness, Utopia

noreply@blogger.com (Jim Crosswhite) — Mon, 22 May 2006 19:44:00 +0000

I want to respond to Lisa's post below but also perhaps push the discussion a little, too, and so in a new post. First—yes, we who have, as adults, lived through these changes will have a different experience of the changes from those who have grown up in a research environment already changing or changed. Whether this induces personal vertigo or not varies from person to person. Regardless of our personal reactions, though, the facts that the sheer amount of information available to us has exploded and that it is accessible (in principle) almost immediately, with almost no lapse of time and no movement of our bodies in space—this does change things. We are in a new situation. And the examples Lisa gives of the ways people marked related changes in the past—of course they may seem quaint and lacking in foresight. But that is because their discourse is to some degree incommensurate with ours because our worlds are so different. Since Lisa brought up the Phaedrus, which laments the fact that writing may become not a help but a hindrance because we will no longer use our memories to think but will rely on the reminders stored up in the written text, let’s think about that. At the beginning of the dialogue, Phaedrus is in the process of memorizing the entirety of Lysias’ speech by heart, even though Phaedrus is represented in almost every respect as an intellectual delinquent. How many of our students (how many of us) have committed substantial discourses to memory? What difference does it make to have one’s memory cultivated this way? Is this a completely dead question for us? Are there occasions when we might need or want to use our memories instead of an externalized text? Would our memories organize and preserve a “text” differently from the way the text is organized and preserved by a writing technology? We will not describe or evaluate past technological revolutions the same way as the people who underwent them (of course we won’t!), but they were observing something real—and understanding why their perspectives seemed sound to them might help us understand the soundness and unsoundness of our own perspectives better.

Second, I don’t think pessimism and optimism are especially useful postures here. There is plenty to justify optimism and plenty to justify pessimism. That’s part of my point about the comedy of abundance. The abundance overwhelms us, and exposes our limitations. I don’t want to make a simple negative or positive judgment about the new abundance. I do, though, want to ask what ethical and intellectual resources we will need to get into the best relation to it. That’s the point of the focus on attentiveness as the intellectual virtue that seems to correspond most closely to what is new in this situation.

Lisa’s great presentation at the summit provides a useful example here. When is it appropriate to pay attention to those citizen reviews on Amazon.com and what kind of attention is that? When is it appropriate to pay some different attention to the New York Review of Books or a review essay in a professional journal? What is worth our attention and how do we give it when we come across hip-hop bloggers offering ground-level criticism of new recordings as well as perspectives on the cultural significance of different forms of hip hop, bloggers whose critical style and vocabulary and focus and sense of the aims of criticism might differ substantially from an academic treatment of the music and its relation to culture? How much and what manner of attention is appropriate for my viewing and listening to and thinking about the machinima (genre of video) about radical telepresencing that Michael Aronson sent me to suggest another approach to the issues we discussed at the Summit?

I can’t imagine being either optimistic or pessimistic about this abundance. The closest I can come is to taking the posture suggested by Kim Stanley Robinson of being a practical utopian, of trying to imagine how we might act skillfully enough in our situations to nurture a small hope that we are contributing in some way to a better situation, both in the time in which we act and for those who will follow us.

Some Post-Summit reflections on John Gage's and Jim Crosswhite's presentations

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Ede) — Sat, 20 May 2006 20:49:00 +0000

It's been a bit more than a week since the New Research Summit. I want especially to thank Suzanne Clark for organizing the Summit--with great help from Carter Soles, Raphael Raphael, and Kom Kunyosying. (Please forgive me if I've omitted anyone else who worked on the Summit.)

I found all the presentations at the conference stimulating. I'm very impressed with the UofO Library's Scholars Bank project, for instance. And I loved learning about the various curricular and pedagogical projects that grad students and faculty discussed.

In this post, however, I want to reflect on Jim Crosswhite's and John Gage's comments at the conference. I'd also like to encourage Jim and John to post their comments here, so that those who didn't attend the conference can read them.

Jim researched, organized, and established the first computer classroom for the English department at OSU. His opening comments for the Summit were, in part, a reflection on all that's happened in online and computer literacies since then. Referring to Richard Lanham's new The Economics of Attention (thanks for the tip, Jim!), Jim characterized contemporary life as "a comedy of abundance" of information, especially online information. Jim went on to emphasize the importance of rhetoric as "the building of attention structures" and argued that attention is best understood as an intellectual virtue: "the power to give the proper attention to the proper things."

My notes on John Gage's talk aren't as complete as my notes on Jim's. (Chalk that up to afternoon conference fatigue.) As I remember it, John's talk was a strongly worded critique of contemporary online discourse. John argued that things get posted to blogs, for instance, but that these posts never develop as arguments. The information is out there, and no one responds. I'm not quite as clear on the next point. In my memory it connected with Jim emphasis on the "comedy of abundance" that writers and readers now face." John also, wondered, I believe, whether we need a new rhetoric to address these new discursive positions. He seemed less certain than Jim that the rhetorical tradition as we understand it could "build attention structures" because he was unsure that, with online discourse, it's possible to organize one's attention.

(Jim and John, please jump in and correct, add, etc.)

I want to thank Jim and John for characterizing so carefully our contemporary online discursive moment. As someone who never expected to have a blog, and who now hosts a personal blog and several academic blogs, I know the sense of vertigo that these new online forms of communication and technologies can bring. Jim and John do an excellent job of characterizing this feeling.

I guess I am more optimistic than Jim and John, however, and for two reasons.

First, the kind of intellectual and rhetorical vertigo that they describe is characteristic of the experiences of readers and writers who are caught up in major shifts in technologies of communication. One of the most well-known examples of this is Plato's fears in The Phaedrus that those who learn to write will have the reputation for wisdom without the reality. But there are other examples. In the eighteenth century, for iexample, the French scholar Diderot, alarmed by the rapid increase in the number of printed books, feared that "the world of learning will drown in books." At roughly the same period, a "German treatise on public health warned that excessive reading induced a susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, asthma, apoplexy, and a host of other disorders. Fresh air, frequent walks, and washing one's face periodically in cold water were prescribed for solitary readers" (source: Gertrude Himmelfarb. "A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/1-96, p. A56.

When I was growing up, there were many dystopian warnings that television would ruin my generation. In 1956, for instance, educator Gerald Thorsen, in a statement strikingly reminiscent of Diderot's, complained that students at that time were "lost to a world of mass media: tv, radio, motion pictures, newspapers, and comic books." As a result, he said, "the cultural uses of language have been excluded. We have forgotten about books" (Source: Himmelfarb).

That's my generation that Thorsen is fretting about--and we seem to have remain attached to books, at least those of us in the academy.

I think what we're experiencing is real: for someone of my generation there can seem to be an overabundance of information, as well as new technological developments that arrive at a staggeringly fast rate. Ask younger folks, like my copresenter Michael Faris, and he'll tell you that his experience feels quite different from mine.

I'll be briefer about the second reason why I'm a bit more optimistic than Jim and John. This is because I believe that the rhetorical tradition is exactly what we and our students need as we negotiate the dizzying world of online discourse and technologies.

Whew, this is a long blog entry, so I'll close for now! Would anyone like to develop my second point about why rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition are just what online writers and readers can depend upon.

And, again, John and Jim, I hope you'll post your comments for all to read.

Male Pregnancy and More!

noreply@blogger.com (Carter Soles) — Fri, 19 May 2006 17:43:00 +0000

Hi folks--

First, thanks to Michael Faris for posting so many great Hoax sites recently. In the same vein, here's the link to the male pregnancy site I mentioned at the Summit:

http://www.malepregnancy.com/

Also, I have had many people ask me for suggestions about how they can better teach the analysis of visual media (such as websites) to their students. My response is best encompassed in a few articles I have written on the subject: "Teaching Visual Grammar and Rhetoric in Composition," a one-page compilation of the eight (yes--only eight!) key terms I think you need to know in order to teach visual textual analysis, and "Popular Culture and Composition: A Critical Intersection," a transcript of a conversation Raphael Raphael and I had on this topic in Summer 2005. Click on the link below for access to these documents plus a couple of others:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~csoles1/newmedia.html

And lastly, here is the link to an excellent online glossary of basic film terms (with pictures!) provided by the Yale Film Studies program:

http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis/index.htm

Enjoy!

e-books and their implications [NYT Magazine, 14 May 2006]

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew) — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:14:00 +0000

May 14, 2006
Scan This Book! By KEVIN KELLY

Worth reading..... consider this, for example:

".....once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), see note (*) the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages...."

There's a lot of potential in this flexibility; at the same time, what happens when extended narratives or arguments that develop over several chapters get "snippetized?" How can we be sure that readers
a) know how to recognize a snippet for what it is, and
b) know how to locate the snippet's original source, with all of its context?

(*) NOTE: One of the complaints I've heard about iTunes is that collections of songs organized as "albums" get broken apart into singles. Those of us old enough to remember listening to Sgt Pepper all the way through will understand this.

virtual office hours, 24/7

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Faris) — Tue, 16 May 2006 18:23:00 +0000

I read this article on Inside Higher Ed from a link from kairosnews that discusses how students are expected immediate response on email from professors and instructors. I'd suggest everyone reads it, because it raises a few interesting questions (at least in my head) and also is a little humorous. An excerpt:

But read a batch of evaluations by current students, and you will find complaints about Professor Luddite never answering e-mail. Who cares anymore about seldom-kept office hours? Faculty are now expected to be on-call electronically — if not quite 24/7, like transplant surgeons, then certainly far more than under an old paradigm that assumed availability to students only during class and office hours, scheduled or by appointment. It is e-mail, finally, that is the main engine behind ever-burgeoning demands.

Not so long ago you could display your techno-awareness just by printing an e-mail address on a syllabus. Want to impress your students today? You’d better send immediate answer to e-mails arriving sometime during Jay Leno’s monologue. (They’re probably watching Jon Stewart or playing online poker, but that’s a topic for another essay.) Outside readers of Professor Luddite’s course evaluations, though, should interpret student gripes skeptically. Or do I alone receive late-night messages from students posting second messages sent at 2:32 a.m. anxiously asking whether I had received the first, sent at 11:45 p.m.?

Also, some of the comments left by readers raise interesting questions and propose various solutions.

On last Friday's Summit--and the death of poet Stanley Kunitz

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Ede) — Tue, 16 May 2006 02:01:00 +0000

I want to say how much I enjoyed--and learned from--last Friday's Summit. Thanks to Suzanne Clark for organizing such a stimulating and thought-provoking event! Once I get a bit more caught up, I hope to post a few reflections.

For now, I want to acknowledge the death yesterday of Stanley Kunitz, who died at 100. I have loved Kunitz's work for quite a while. I'd like to share this poem that appears in his 2000 Collected Poems.

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore, but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm, endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

fraudulent websites

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Faris) — Sun, 14 May 2006 21:24:00 +0000

At The New Research Summit, Carter discussed a hoax website he uses in class that claims to be able to make men pregnant, and I offered to post some fraudulent/hoax websites.

Here is a list of some hoax websites that one teacher has used. My favorite is the site that advocates banning Dihydrogen Monoxide (H20 - water). One town (I forget where) has actually banned Dihydrogen Monoxide because of this site (and felt really embarrassed when someone informed them that it was water).

I came across this list from a post on the blog Remote Access, where a teacher discusses his use of online fraud with his public school students. I've used the Dihydrogen Monoxide cite, as well as a few others, with my eighth graders and tenth graders, and I was really quite surprised with how many students believed that there was a zoo somewhere that had elephants with twig-legs (I can't remember the URL for that one).

Often, though, my students could figure it out once they paid attention and focused on the author's credibility, the accuracy of some of their facts, a bit of research, or dug deep enough to find the disclaimer stating the site was fraudulent.

But Does She Attract Our Attention?

noreply@blogger.com (rsc) — Sun, 14 May 2006 00:18:00 +0000

Rhetorica has been a persona of note for so many centuries that you'd scarcely expect her to appear once again in the newest of media--would you? What Kom's analysis of the "Amazing Racist" videos may help his classes to do is to attend to rhetorical questions rather than the outraged emotions the videos aim to prompt, most especially the outrage of taking pleasure in racism.

I was impressed, yesterday, by some ways that research now must indeed be "new." If students are living mostly in a condition of "continuous partial attention," and the question of paying attention becomes tremendously heightened by competing interests, does that change the value of classes on rhetoric and critical thinking as well as their methods? More oral work needed? More knowledge of visual rhetoric?

And if citizenship may be more and more available as writing--participation not only by vote but by review or by blog--does that also change the significance of classes on writing?

I for one am left after the "New Research Summit" with the desire to talk more and explore these questions in greater depth. A compelling result.

Passion For Paper

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew) — Thu, 11 May 2006 20:52:00 +0000

Passion for Paper

from the Inside Higher Ed site:

By Alex Golub

I am a digitally-enabled, network-ready scholar. I check e-mail and browse the Web. I read RSS feeds. I leverage Web 2.0’s ambient findability to implement AJAX-based tagsonomy-focused long-tail wiki content alerting via preprint open-access e-archives with social networking services. I am so enthusiastic about digital scholarship that about a year ago I published a piece in my scholarly association’s newsletter advocating that we incorporate it into our publications program. The piece was pretty widely read. At annual meetings I had colleagues tell me that they really like it and are interested in digital scholarship but they still (and presumably unlike me) enjoy reading actually physical books. This always surprised me because I love books too, and it never occurred to me that an interest in digital scholarship meant turning your back on paper. So just to set the record straight, I would like to state in this (admittedly Web-only) public forum that I have a deep and abiding passion for paper: I love it. Love it. ...more.....

By way of an introduction

noreply@blogger.com (kevin maier) — Tue, 09 May 2006 23:41:00 +0000

Greetings New Researchers,
As I spend near-pathological amounts of time online—lurking on the blogs of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues; eBaying for things I don’t need and will never buy; reading about sports, music, and movies; and generally seeking out the various curiosities and oddities that make the world wide web at once enlightening and hilarious—I'm looking forward to thinking critically about the way "new media" shape our daily lives and our understandings of the world. In particular, I'm interested in the way cultural consumption has been forever altered.

Since I entered the iPod age two years ago, I've not purchased a proper "album "or engaged in one of my favorite pastimes of record store perusing. Since I got highspeed at home, I've stopped relying on Anthony Lane and David Denby to tell me which movies I should dislike and why I should dislike them; instead I rely on the collective wisdom of Metacritic. I no longer rely on the wit of the Portland Mercury or Seattle's The Stranger to get my weekly chuckles over the world of hip youth culture—The Onion and Viceland provide me with my dose of post-PC cultural humor. I no longer seek out my indie-rock-geek friends to find out the latest gossip; instead I've got the purveyor of indie-hegemony, Pitchfork.com, where my bookmarks bar takes me first thing every morning.

I've accepted all these changes in my daily routines—even celebrated the access to all this information—but I've not thought about what it all means. I'm excited that the Summit may afford me opportunity to reflect on these changes with others who've already theorized and thought carefully about them.

All that said, however, I think I may be a bit more ambivalent than other participants in this conversation about the ramifications these New Media may have on traditional classrooms and pedagogy. Given the tenor of the posts on this blog, I say this a bit reluctantly, for I fear it may mark me an anachronistic luddite: but I'm just not sure that I'm ready to embrace the Electronic--in all its myriad forms--if it means taking time away from real life discussions in the classroom.

To situate this assertion I should note that I'm coming off a year of teaching at the University of Alaska Southeast, where 30% of the credit hours are "delivered" via distance, and where this percentage is sure to increase in the coming years. I'll be returning there this fall, and one of my first assignments will be to help develop a massive Assessment Document that accounts for and documents virtually everything we do in our English classes to achieve the mandated Learning Outcomes--chief among these Learning Outcomes is preparing students for employment in the digital age.

So while I don't doubt that bringing technology into the classroom has the potential to enrich and enliven the educational experience, I also worry that for every gesture we—as academics and instructors—make toward embracing technology, administrators (who always seem to have their eye on the bottom line) are perhaps encouraged to make even more strident moves toward replacing the traditional classroom with the virtual one. While this is not necessarily a worry at well-established Research One institutions like OSU and the UO, at smaller universities and colleges, the movement toward the Phoenix University model and away from the "outdated" traditional model is well underway.

So the central question for me will be not how can I use these technologies or which one's should I use, but, rather, are there ways that I can embrace and negotiate new types of research that don't distract us from what I take to be the most important business of an education: face-to-face conversations about issues and ideas that matter.

I'll stop this long-winded introduction here, for I fear I may have moved beyond questions of "research" toward my own anxieties about technology and the increasingly "managed" world of the New University.

Looking forward to our upcoming summit-in-the-flesh,

Kevin

Research, Race, and Pedagogy

noreply@blogger.com (rsc) — Fri, 05 May 2006 17:59:00 +0000

There's a lively interactive site for the UC Santa Barbara Race and Pedagogy Project that offers connections to very interesting research: http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/
For example, Deborah Brandt has made a real impact on literacy studies. On this site, her study of race and literacy emerges from looking at over 80 case studies and thinking about the implications for rhetorical theory.
‘The Power of It’: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives." From Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 105-145.

A Small Victory for Open Standards and Digital Research

noreply@blogger.com (Peridyd) — Thu, 04 May 2006 17:05:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

One of the fundamental challenges that researchers face these days is that many of our source or primary texts can disappear, either because the web site that hosted them has gone dark or taken the documents off-line, or the technologies that we use to read the documents become obsolete. As far as the latter is concerned, think for a minute how difficult it would be for you to read a WordStar document from the mid '80s that was only available on a 5 1/4” floppy.

Open standards are a way of mitigating that problem inasmuch as they strive to standardize the ways in which software stores information. The use of open standards is especially important for researchers, many of whom are already contending with compatibility issues. For instance, will the digital document that I'm reading and using as a source today still be readable by the software that's available in 10 or 100 years?

Wednesday marked a small victory in that regard, as the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was approved by the International Standards Organization. A competing standard, designed by Microsoft, is ostensibly still being considered, but since the ODF was approved, it's highly unlikely that a second standard (Microsoft's) would also be approved. (The whole point behind standards being that there's one of them.)

This does not mean, however, that Microsoft would be forced to follow the new ISO standard. One of the privileges of having near-monopoly status is that you're neither constrained to play fair nor nice.

Legal Scholarship and Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Peridyd) — Wed, 03 May 2006 04:27:00 +0000

Gleaned from Charlie Lowe at Kairos News. No less than The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law recently hosted a symposium (April 28th) on How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship.

My personal favorite paper title: "Blog as Bugged Water Cooler."

more on social bookmarking

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Faris) — Mon, 01 May 2006 01:54:00 +0000

Lisa posted earlier about del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website, so I thought I'd post about another social bookmarking site that I found via CultureCat (Clancy Ratliff's blog out of U of Minnesota). This program, H2O Playlist, is described by Ratliff:

H2O Playlists: This service is provided through the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and it has a progressive open-access, Creative Commons ethos. It's influenced by MIT's OpenCourseWare and other open education initiatives. If you watch this Flash movie about H2O, you'll see how strongly they're emphasizing teaching and learning. Users are required to publish their playlists with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses, which makes the whole site more collaborative. For example, on each playlist, there's a link that says "Create new playlist based on this one," so users can create derivative playlists with one click (and that's one way people can find each other in addition to the standard tag-surfing -- "tagging along," perhaps). Unlike most other social bookmarking tools, users can't tag one item, but rather they assemble lists of items and tag the lists. For example, I have this list on cyberfeminism. On the list, I have Faith Wilding's article "Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?" I can't tag that article, but the whole list has the tags feminism, gender, cyberfeminism, technofeminism, girlculture, cyberculture, women, femininity, and masculinity. Because playlists are meant to be kind of like syllabuses, H2O lets you break the lists into categories, like units or modules. (read more...)

I haven't played around with H20 Playlists much yet, but it looks like a really neat place to build forums, communities, and groups of resources. It works in quite a different way from del.icio.us, though. If you read Ratliff's whole post, she compares del.icio.us, H20, and another social bookmarking site.

Of note: if you're a fan of open source, Ratliff suggests de.licio.us, which runs similarly to del.icio.us, but is open source.

Welcome to the "Summit"

noreply@blogger.com (rsc) — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 20:02:00 +0000

I’d like to welcome you to the “New Research Summit,” coming Friday, May 12. Your participation in this event will be important. If you did not sign up to be part of the “Summit” in person, you can still play a role; your comments on our blog will be very welcome.

I hope that together we can inaugurate an ongoing, exciting discussion among teachers and students of writing and research and the new media. I invite you in particular--if you haven't yet joined in--to begin your participation by reading, posting, and commenting on this “New Research” blog, and I invite you to continue this discussion here afterwards as well. The Summit proceedings will be available after May 12 via streaming video on our website: http://newresearch.uoregon.edu/.

Rhetoric is a discipline more than 2500 years old, a discipline that still refers back to the discoveries of its founders—Aristotle is a lively voice among us. And yet perhaps rhetoric has something to say to the new technologies, to the amazing (and sometimes dreadful) new views opening up electronically every day.

It is certain that the rapidly changing situation of knowledge must cause us to rethink what exactly we mean by “research.” Are we asking questions the same way we once did? Can rhetorical understanding help us to understand these new situations?

What about the sources we use? How can we find them? How are libraries changing?
How can we know what is “credible” when we do find something interesting? Does credibility itself matter in different ways? Is the “cool” more significant than the “credible”?

What about the researcher herself/himself? Does the heroic figure of the lonely scholar pursuing a patient inquiry--a solitary quest of discovery, perhaps, through obscure archives—provide an adequate model for the age of the laptop? Is a more collaborative idea of research beginning to affect even the humanities? If so, is this a good thing?

And what about the ways we “publish” the results of research? Much of our thinking goes on now in public, before publication—on blogs and listservs, in “grey literature,” in informal communication. And might the product of writing and research be more like a performance: a web site, a DVD, a Powerpoint presentation—and might research begin to overlap with creative works? New freedoms, and new ethical issues, are arising--and new questions about the economies of research (grades, credit, copyright, payment, open access, open sources . . .)

I'm looking forward to hearing what you will say.

Interesting information about blogging and bloggers in rhetoric and composition

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Ede) — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 02:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone,
A person named Donna just posted a helpful discussion of social bookmarking on my personal website, The Writing Way. She also gave me a link to a site with information on bloggers and blogging in rhetoric and composition. I thought others might like to see this.

http://ccr.syr.edu/~dmueller/blogs.html

Thanks, Donna!

Lisa Ede
OSU