January 2009

Computers and Writing is being held in June at UCDavis.

However, in February, many of the conference presenters will be using Second Life, Sakai, and blog posts, for an online conference.

This blog will host one of those series of blog posts the last full week of February. The schedule (with addresses) will go up on the Computers and Writing site on February 9.

Check it out and check in here. Comments will help make all these presentations more interesting and more useful.

My presentation proposal:

A series of blog posts, one a day, on the following:

Many of our students are digital natives. Because of this, we search for new contact zones in emergent technology. But if we presuppose that our students are already computer savvy because of their age or texting ability, we are doing some of them a disservice. A Pew survey indicates that twenty-three percent of college age people never use the internet. Most often these students are from a low socioeconomic background. How can we move beyond short-term interventions and help all our students develop information literacy and sustainable lifelong learning?

One part of the answer is to understand the value patterns that students’ communities have historically championed and invoke those as a means of engaging the students in their own educational development. We need to understand and follow their cultural mores in order to introduce them to academic culture.

Another part of the answer is to create a multimodal composition course which predicates a minimal expertise with technology and engage our students, at all levels, by building towards information literacy for everyone that is on par with the most technology-immersed. While the early levels of expertise will be basic to some of our students, they will be a stretch for others. We can enhance student learning for the former by decompartmentalizing their knowledge and applying it in new configurations, expanding its domains and applications, thus building their framework for sustainable learning. We can enhance student learning for the latter by creating a system for the active construction of knowledge through intense involvement with accessible technologies.

Addressing the difficulties of providing information literacy across socioeconomic backgrounds is a challenge that we can meet in the multimodal composition classroom. Through institutional support and sustained instruction, our students can gain the expertise they need for work, school, and play.

That’s because they are hiring more adjuncts. It’s a cost-cutting tactic that works because there are so many of us who want to work in higher education.

Most of the nation’s colleges are gradually paring back their investments in classroom teaching, an analysis of federal data shows. And all colleges have in recent years been spending a greater share of their revenue on expenses other than instruction, including computing centers, student services, administrative salaries and lawn care.

from USA Today and, ultimately, from The Delta Cost Project

New Scene Quarterly is up online with the Winter 2009 edition.

It contains poetry, prose, and reviews.

One of the reviews is by me. Yeah! (Though they did not print the edited version, so there are two grammar errors in the piece. Ouch.)

And if you missed the fall 2008 edition, it is still up.

Community College Dean wrote today about the bright side of economic free fall. It is, he posits, that the idea of obtaining a job by merit will be destroyed. Clearly people now are not significantly less good than the same group was two years ago.

It is an interesting discussion and one that may have a legitimate point, though one outside my sphere of discussion, but he said something else that I can address-and that I want to address.

I can’t help but wonder to what degree the otherwise-puzzling persistence of long-term adjuncts who just keep on plugging, looking for the big break, is driven by a felt need to redeem themselves in this value system. It’s not economically rational, but there must be something, or there wouldn’t be so many people doing it.

There are plenty of long-term adjuncts who want to do what they are doing, even for little money. They love their job and though it is not economically rewarding, it is a job they love.

Clearly long-term adjuncts can afford to do what they are doing, either because there is another worker in the family or because they have settled into poverty.

The adjuncts who have settled into poverty probably need help with career counseling. But where would they get it? They do not receive this as part of their work for the colleges and university and they can’t afford it. Many of them, especially those who came out of poverty, have already bucked their culture to get an advanced degree.

If they are working multiple colleges, as I am, they can teach a full or more than full-time load and make more money than they could in a minimum wage job. And many of them may have no idea what else they could do. They worked to get where they are and don’t know how to get anywhere else. I have not heard of that from adjuncts I work with, but I don’t talk to a lot of adjuncts either. I have heard it from full-time faculty who want to get away from the institution they work for and don’t know how…

But there are many long-term adjuncts, including me, who are doing what they want to be doing. They don’t want to have another job and they are able to take the low pay for one reason or another.

Now, most of us would prefer to do the work we are doing now for $15,000 a year for $50,000 a year. I don’t think anyone would turn that down. But we want to do what we are doing and we are willing to take $15,000 a year to do it.

Just last month I was told to get a high school teaching job, instead of trying for college. But it’s not the prestige factor that keeps me from doing that. It’s the fact that I would have to do a lot more grunt work, have twice as many people to talk to when someone gets upset, have much less freedom in my classroom, and have much closer restrictions on how and what I teach. I chose higher education because I wanted to make a difference and I wanted to be a professional and not a drone.

I am not saying that high school teachers are drones. I know many brilliant, hard-working, motivated high school teachers. What I am saying is that I am a drone when I teach high school. (I know. I’ve done it before.)

Right now I am still in a position where I can do what I want for minimal pay. So I do that.

If that changes, then I will do something else. But I have a bit of an advantage there. I teach business writing and I know how to write a resume. I have an idea of the job system outside of academics. It would be easier for me to move out of academia than for others, perhaps. But my guess is that most long-term adjuncts are still adjuncting because they want to teach more than they want to make money.

I know I do.

Forbes has the story of the most educated small towns in America.

They also have a slideshow presentation on the top twenty.

Purdue, in West Lafayette, IN, is one of the highest educated towns in the US. There are 30,000 people in town and 40,000 people at the university. All together that’s less than the size of my suburb.

Chapel Hill, NC also made the list:
Total Population: 54,091
Advanced degrees: 46.4%
Bachelor’s degrees: 29.4%
Associate degrees: 3.6%

Both of those universities are ones my son is considering attending.

found via Right Wing Nation

U of Minnesota has an article entitled “Humorous Reminders of Common WRiting Mistakes.”

Here are the first six:

1. Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
2. Never use no double negatives.
3. Use the semicolon properly, always where it is appropriate; and never where it is not.
4. Reserve the apostrophe for it’s proper use and omit it where it is not needed.
5. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
6. No sentence fragments.

There are a total of 35.  I have to confess that I don’t see the sentence without a verb very often.

I am presenting at CCTE on using fairy tales to introduce literature. But soon I won’t be able to assume any of my students have heard the traditional European fairy tales.

Parents have stopped reading traditional fairytales to their children because they are too scary and not politically correct, according to research.
…
It also emerged 65 per cent of parents preferred to read their children happier tales at bedtime, such as the Mr Men, The Gruffalo and Winnie the Pooh.

Three quarters of mothers and fathers try to avoid stories which might give their children nightmares and half of all parents would not consider reading a single fairy tale to their child until they reached the age of five.

But expressed by Michael Mazenko at A Teacher’s View:

we should not be shocked by the remedial course issue until we understand who the students are and whether they should have been admitted, or even advised to go, to college.

That’s really my question about the statistics (that 1/3 of Colorado college students have to take remedial courses).

The statistics “should generate genuine discussion of the high school curriculum, college prep classes, and the necessity of a college-educated workforce” (Mazenko).

Do we need more than 1/3 of that nation to have a college degree? If so, why? What are they doing that requires a college degree? I read several blogs over finals week which said that recruiters on their campus are hiring for Target managers. Do people need a degree for that?