UT has a good four factor test for an answer to that question.

I really liked it. It also discusses music, art, and research specifically.

new = good
then as it becomes more available, it becomes harder to be good.

When there were only 1000 videos on the net, they were a big deal. Now there are billions and what people watch are mostly professionally produced (like TV clips).

apples and oranges
newspapers didn’t go away when radio came in
radio didn’t go away when television came in
but newspapers may go away because the internet will do what newspapers do, in the same alphabetic sense– and the advertising situation is an issue
local newspapers are dying, but they have been for years.

So… all this came from “The End of the Essay.” Is it really the end of the essay or are we just adding a new dimension?

There is a wiki on how trust is computed for Wikipedia.

It’s an interesting idea. How could the trust level be mediated/examined in a freshman comp classroom? Is this something I could look at with my students? Is it even relevant?

I want to do a presentation on Beowulf, perhaps flashing pictures while we read? I don’t know. But I want to do one. So I began collecting Beowulf sites with pictures. And then, of course, I found other cool Beowulf sites.

This is not pretty at all. But there are some great pictures and sites listed here.

Images:
the fight with Grendel’s mother

drawing of Beowulf that on first glance looks like a photo

Death of Beowulf

A series of photos from a movie from Iceland called Beowulf and Grendel.

Beowulf with a short beard

An anime type Beowulf, but he looks way too young to me.

A lime green rendition of Grendel and Beowulf

A better series of photos from the same movie.

A line drawing of the beach scene when Beowulf arrives.

Line drawing of Beowulf and Grendel by Claraval, the Tolkien artist

from Corona-Online

Grendel in Heorot, with legos

Heorot with legos, after Grendel

Beowulf art from Beowulf in Cyberspace. This is an entire set, organized by sections of the work.

Here is one example:

Beowulf answering Unferth

Grendel,
with bodies

4 very different Beowulf pics

Beowulf and dragon

Much better Beowulf and dragon

Beowulf and Grendel, where Grendel has a necklace of skulls (The early goth?)

Beowulf presents himself to Hrothgar, a drawing made for an English class. (I’m glad I didn’t have to draw anything for English class. I might not have made it to grad school.)

Dragon burning Beowulf’s shield.

A frontspiece

Beowulf fights the dragon, Wiglaf included

Beowulf pictures which are development designs, so a whole series. Click on them and they get rather big.

Beowulf geography

Beowulf family trees

the Death of Beowulf

Whole site with pics:
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Hero

Other, not just images:
A Pace course on Beowulf to Lear: Text, Image, and Hypertext. But I went to the Music Files for “Dream of the Rood” and got a blank page. Oh my gosh, though, the Student Works INT had some good stuff. This is some great stuff… It was a sophomore course in Computer Science and English. Basically a class on how to make websites and an Early British lit course. That would be fun to teach. Wonder if I could interest the departments in doing that?

Beowulf translations with over 100 selections of translations. Includes stuff on alliteration, a quicktime movie of reading in OE (though I can do that myself and with much more inflection and drama), and all kinds of interesting treats.

Beowulf in Cyberspace

An assignment on Beowulf, examining translations. This actually compares three different ones and talks about them. Then it gives a table of others and asks for students to identify the parallels. It’s very interesting. This is great. I am SO going to use this. Can I use it if it’s on the web?

Beowulf: Still a Hero an online presence for a teacher/class, is a whole set of annotated links, information, etc. My favorite section is at the bottom. “Graphic Novels.” There are three.

Beowulf vs Sir Gawain offers two images and an interesting characterization of the men, then asking which is the real hero. A definition/illustration paper in the making.

A good introduction/summary of research on the poem. It includes a pronunciation guide. Dang my prelim in Old English would have been a lot easier (or a lot harder) with the internet.

A much better reading, this one of Beowulf and Wiglaf fight the dragon.

A grad class syllabus on “Beowulf, Cultural Memory, and War”

Beowulf in Hypertext has some intro, history, stuff on the manuscript, author, and more than just Blackburn’s take on Christianity in the poem. (Though not a lot more.)

Gif of Beowulf, includes OE and modern E lines at the bottom that change and a live dragon that flies through the sky

Other things I learned

There is a graphic novel (originally a series of three) called Beowulf by Gareth Hinds. I loved the covers.

Beowulf is a game for xbox and a board game. But while the pics in “Google Images” looked amazing, I couldn’t find them when I clicked to the site. It might be worth purchasing just to get some good pics. I could probably find the game at Nan’s.

I got to page 44 of Google Images for Beowulf before I quit.

“Test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain” sanity

“What we need here is an original moment.”

Now he’s using powerpoint as a vidcast? That’s a weird presentation.

Kids in Ft. Worth… write about eating ice cream.. the kids just couldn’t say enough…

“ever since I’ve been searching for the joys those Ft. Worth children brought to their writing”

“a new enthusiasm for writing when that writing is in a mediated environment accompanied by…” music, pictures, etc.

“You’ve got to see this.”

“imagine that the essay is no longer with us”

“If we can still retain the ability to function, then we can get on to other things.”

“Begin with the allegory…”

“In the simplest terms allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’”

Looking at a young child’s writing:
“the hat is provided… an icon… The central image is the hat. Drawing it I can conjure up wishes. You can do the conjuring too. See the hat.”

Grad student:
“e-portfolio… my work… design documents…”

“Graduate student has very precise concepts of rhetorical form and audience…”

“if we ask Carol, … computer-mediated communication led her back to the sense of wonder and exuberance she remembered as a child.”

presence of aesthetics… iconographic significance…

“writing academic essays is an elaborate game…”

“There are other forms of student expression that are valuable… especially to the … of student voice…”

“rhetoric, poetic, and electronic…”

“individual and collective…”

“What would the room look like with the gorilla (essay) not there?”

at the research network forum…

“hierarchy is just not as important as perspective”

“work that our students have performed” (Very different language.)

Has some weird segues into Miles Davis and James Taylor music…

Okay. I am not as impressed with these as I expected to be. The visuals are better than a podcast, but that’s about it. The child’s picture is visible and the writing legible. But the computer screen shot, which he proceeds to parse, is hard to read and I would have liked to have been able to see what he didn’t point out. So he does use visuals in a good way, but not exactly the best. Would this have been as good with a podcast? Well, he couldn’t have thrown the eye looking into infinity in there. But it’s kind of like the music. I didn’t get the connection. (Okay, the Taylor had a forced connection.)

If we are going to include this kind of technologically multimodal classroom, shouldn’t we have a better grasp of it than our students? Can we teach our students what we ourselves do not know?

Now, I have actually considered/planned on adding music and art to my Early Brit Lit class. There’s a Christian song about everyman that I want to use a clip of when we are reading Everyman. And art of Beowulf would be interesting, putting together a collection would be fun and having them rotate through the screen as we read would add a counterpoint to the melody of the poem that the original with the scop and music…

Hmm. Maybe I need to think about that a lot more than I have. Maybe my lit paper for the CCTE should be a on a multimodal presentation of Beowulf.

“We would be not only consumers but creators… learning 2.0, school 2.0″

“none of us saw the mediated impact that computers would have”

“I think we were right about media. People were very quick to embrace video… lot of talk about visual literacy”

(available on iTunes)

“The technology became a mediating experience…”

“k-20 this idea that it is one long continuum”

“what’s the rate of change in a k-12 system?” fast, but lots of restrictions

“critical literacies, information literacy, visual literacy”

“hs is still driven by what they think colleges want”

“What drives what colleges are teaching?” the marketplace, but “more conceptual”

“don’t want essays” “a controversial issue”

“I think that is a discourse form that is no longer required.”

“I wonder how much of this is driven by students. I think there’s kind of a grassroots driving of technology, that students are asking things of the teachers…”

“Students are driving the way they want to report.”

“They want to bring sound. They want to bring music…. a more diverse audience…”

“hope would be that folks would listen to these, … blogs, … NCTE…, all places that actively engage the new media”

I don’t know which guy was which. At the beginning the guy in the polo talked the most. At the end the guy in the suit did. It was a very odd juxtaposition of clothing and quite a switch in emphasis as well.

Again, I’m listening to this and not hearing a lot of unexpected things. EXCEPT I’m hearing this from an English teacher and as a rhetorician, I can value literacies, but I’m wondering how we can have multimodal presentations and not drift back into speech communications… Are we going to re-merge the rhetoric departments? Are they suggesting that we are moving to a third kind of rhetoric, a multimodal rhetoric?

It’s an interesting thought, but I am not sure how much of this is a realistic picture of the future for English and how much is a fad. Obviously, I am not technology phobic. I need to do more than I do, but I do fairly well with what I do. I have introduced students with no computer literacy at all to the web and the information on it and brought them into an academic and personal integration of that knowledge.

It is something to think about though.

available free at iTunes

Introductory Interview

“Single recording structure for what we did was the essay.”

“the 90s…the media that communicated that culture… a new media arose…”

“Students do things that are analytic, that are practical, and that are creative.”

“online portfolio assessment”

“we move beyond those things traditionally associated with the essay, grammar, mechanics”

“web posting, design, aesthetics, format”

“Students listen to the lectures on podcasts before they come to class.”

“We’re in a kind of continuous communication.”

“They’re experiential learners… digital natives… truly enjoy the medium”

“a certain kind of student who was at first reticent in using the medium”

Hmm. I was expecting this to be a lot more revolutionary than it was. But the interview itself was kind of basic except for the throw-away line of grading their multimodal essays on design, etc. That’s an interesting idea and I am not quite sure how I would grade that. It seems that the teaching would require a lot of technical teaching for a classroom with very different levels of technical expertise.

Two Year College Association: Southwest
Ensuring Information Literacy in the Classroom – written, sent, accepted
Looking at Both Sides – written, sent, accepted (if they need it)

TCEA
Memories of West Texas, poetry – written, sent

CCTE
Teaching English in a Texas Community College – written
Using Fairy Tales to Introduce Literary Analysis – mostly written

CCCC
Bridging the Gap: Ensuring Information Literacy in Low SES Students – written, sent as a panel

PCAACA
Reading the Sacred in Popular Speculative Fiction: The Christianity of Cyborgs and Werewolves – proposal, outline, introduction written; proposal sent

MLA
Fox News.Com paper- researching

Computers and Writing
I just found the call for papers and I am still trying to think what I want to do for that.

I think you can see that my summer has been productive. Too bad it’s over on Sunday, because I am not quite finished with papers and proposals. But C&W and finishing the Fairy Tales shouldn’t be too hard. The MLA paper isn’t due until March.

Update (8/25/08)
CCCC didn’t like my proposal. (Quiet tears here.)

I sent an extraordinarily revamped version to Computers and Writing today. I don’t know if it is what they want, because it doesn’t necessarily play into their views, but I liked it and thought it was good.

CCTE still doesn’t have someone to send the State of the Profession papers to, so I am not quite sure what to do with that. Of course it would be the one that I did finish, as opposed to the other possibilities for that conference which aren’t complete.

Also I found the Science Fiction Research Association call for papers and will probably work on that and the MLA over the Christmas break.

And I am sending a proposal to CEA, too.

as rendered at Wordle