Reading

Most of the posts I read from Dr. Bessette, @readywriting, I heartily agree with. We have had similar experiences in higher education and her ability to articulate those is amazing. She has a recent post in Inside Higher Ed that I disagree with, however. I think she may be letting her frustration with a particular text cause her to overgeneralize.

[W]hat worries me more is that, in response to falling sales, textbook publishers have started making their textbooks more like the worst parts of the web: garish, busy, and visually over-stuffed.
…
I’m all for integrating media into teaching, and that includes useful and relevant visuals in a textbook. But to include pictures and “visually interesting” elements to try and appeal to the “born digital” generation is short-sighted and wrong-headed.

I am not sure that pictures are included because of digital nativity. I, like Dr. Bessette, don’t think that many of my students actually are digital natives. I’m more of an expert on the digital than they are in general–and I remember when computers took up entire buildings and the electricity of NYCity to run.

I think that this generation is very visually oriented, however. They are used to television, not radio, and even their music comes with videos.

Based on readability studies there is no reason to use a lot of different fonts and plenty of reasons not to. And, honestly, how many pictures or graphics or popups can one page have before it is overwhelming?

However, I do think that one well-placed image relieves the stark winter landscape of text for our students and even for some of us.

I showed my original template choice (the best of what I felt were not great choices) in iBooks Author and the sleeker, more image-rich template I liked in the new update for iBooks Author to several people of different generations–mine, older, and my students’. Everyone liked the sleeker more image-rich template better–not just the younger folks.

Of course, Dr. Bessette is responding to a particular textbook, which sounds like a disaster.

The impetus for this post was receiving my new desk copy of a Intro to French textbook I am using in the Spring (oh, I’m teaching one section of Intro to French in the Spring. Sacré Bleu!). I couldn’t get past the first pages. The first “lesson” is about saying Greetings in French (Bonjour! Comment ça va? Bien, merci, et vous? Etc.). For some reasons, it needs 17 pictures, 12 different fonts and sizes, and four different colors.

Despite not having seen the French text, I can easily imagine someone going crazy with the options available in a digital textbook and making a disaster— but I have seen that in print textbooks too. We’ve just had longer to weed those out.

And sometimes, unfortunately, they go too far the other direction, in an attempt to keep costs down or something.

This may be one of those unusual cases where Dr. Bessette and I have not only not had parallel experiences, but have had opposite trials/traumas.

I’ve been dealing with some of those this last year. Ugly covers that my students say (during our discussions of visual rhetoric) scream, “Boring! Nothing to learn here.” Or covers that simply have words and the interior is typewriter font all the way through… Ugh.

Just in case you are interested, I have pics from version 0.5 of the iBook for class and version 1.0 (from the updated templates) embedded in this post. Which do you prefer?

I don’t think either of them are the kind of problematic text Dr. Bessette is talking about–although they might be. I might just be too emotionally attached to my own work to see it.

Far later than I should have, I finally got Outliers at the store and am in the process of reading it.

As I read it, I am joyful, scared, happy, afraid, satisfied, and amazed. But right now I am shocked. Shocked at what Gladwell says and how right I think he is.

I’m fifty pages on from the most important things I have read, yet I didn’t stop until I was shocked.

If you’ve read the book, you will know what I am talking about when I say that I am Southern. My family is from the Appalachians. And that is why I am shocked. The shock was enough to get me off the couch and up to the computer to type what I want to remember the most.

“autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying” (149)

Hmmm. Need to think about that for homework.

“Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful” (150).

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig” (150).
“if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires” (151).

And, for another shock, I apparently was very much at risk of death on my plane trip in 1988 to Thailand, not just physically assaulted by an old Korean guy. … Thankfully my Korean Air flight did not crash.

Update: Have finished it. Going to use part of it in my linguistics class.

I was on Twitter (to get a break from grading) and saw a post I really wanted to read. It is called “How do you read?” and is on Text Mining and the Digital Humanities. The author did 12 in-depth interviews and had a survey up for two days, which received 153 responses from humanities scholars.

I didn’t get to take the survey.

So, I thought I’d post here.

I am a humanities scholar and, to date, most of my primary sources are textual.

I copy out snippets frequently. I do this for multiple reasons including:
The snippet provides evidence for an argument I am trying to make.
The snippet gives me an idea or seems interesting.
I am looking for examples or occurrences and the snippet provides one.
The snippet is a quotation I think I may need.
Writing out a snippet helps me think about it.
Writing out a snippet helps me remember it.
The snippet helps me develop a longer argument.
Also, which was not mentioned, the snippet makes sure that if I use the author’s own words, I quote them rather than thinking I have paraphrased them when I actually quoted.

How long are the snippets I copy out?
Very short = very few
One sentence = some snippets
Two to four sentences = most snippets
Paragraph = very few
Longer than a paragraph = very few or none

What information do I add to the snippets I copy?
Notes to myself about relevance
Notes to myself about ideas generated by the snippet
Other markers
Citation information

When do I revisit and re-read primary sources I’ve already read?
When I develop a new hypothesis, to look for evidence.
When I think of a new idea, to investigate further.
When I notice a new or interesting pattern, to see if it occurs elsewhere.
When I’m writing.
When I get stuck in my writing.
When I teach.

How do I take notes when I read and/or re-read?
The first time I read a text, I copy out snippets into my notes.
When I re-read a text, I make notes and underline along the way.
When I re-re-read a text, I do both. Depending.
This has changed as technology as changed. (Somewhat.) Now that I have Evernote, I am far more likely to copy more snippets.

BUT
The only thing I think needs to be added to the conclusions is that searches depend on the key words being the same key words that are in the primary text or your notes every time. I use a lot of jpegs in my classroom syllabi. Sometimes I have trouble finding them even though I saved all of them because I don’t always call them the same thing.

I might be looking for something from Morte D’Arthur.
So I look for Morte
or Arthur
but what if it is labeled Lancelot, Guinevere, Camelot, Gawain?
When I want something related to Gawain in my printed notes, I usually wrote SGGK near it. But I have not used SGGK in my jpegs (I learned today as I searched for a particular picture).

How could a program create/log/feature my own keywords? Too many and I would get lost in the list.

Now, first, let me say that I think that flipped classrooms are a great idea. I think that having the students do engaging work in the classroom, as discussed by a long-time blog read Casting Out Nines. One of my friends is presently flipping her classroom and I am excited about her work.

However, EdTech Magazine‘s “Colleges Go Proactive with Flipped Classrooms” begins with a statement that can easily be read the wrong way:

Professors are moving away from the straight lecture approach and running more hands-on learning and group activities in class — and they’re using more technology to get it done.

When I first read it, even though I know what a flipped classroom is, I thought the article was saying that lectures were disappearing while group activities were being done in class. The third paragraph clears up this misunderstanding by explaining that students watch the lectures outside of class and do group activities in class.

There’s a big difference between having no lectures and having lectures but not in class. (Yes, I know the first sentence can be read that way. It is not the most common way of reading it, however, even by someone who understands the flipped-classroom concept.)

I have heard people question flipped classrooms because “If the teacher gives the lecture online, why do the kids even have to come to class?” and “You just want to flip the classroom so you can stay in your pajamas all day.” (WHAT?) These are academics saying these things, by the way.

If students can come to class already having heard the introductory material and then while they are in class practice applying that material, I think everyone will be better off.

Let’s flip classes, not burgers!

Brainpickings has a post on The Ravenous Brain by Daniel Bor. It sounds like a fascinating read.

The arts, too, generate their richness and some of their aesthetic appeal from patterns. Music is the most obvious sphere where structures are appealing — little phrases that are repeated, raised a key, or reversed can sound utterly beguiling. This musical beauty directly relates to the mathematical relation between notes and the overall logical regularities formed. Some composers, such as Bach, made this connection relatively explicit, at least in certain pieces, which are just as much mathematical and logical puzzles as beautiful musical works.

But certainly patterns are just as important in the visual arts as in music. Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so fascinating to create and to view, precisely because we are forced to contemplate a new, higher pattern that binds lower ones together.

I wonder what that says about rhetoric, especially in a time (such as now) when rhetoric may be still more written than oral/visual.

By ReadyWriting, Dr. Lee Skallerup. Great Xtranormal video showing what our students think and do about reading–some of them anyway.

The reading I did as an undergraduate (and even earlier and later) is significantly different than the reading done by the undergraduates I presently teach.

I have been reading quite a bit about reading this summer.

Here’s The Digital World Demands a New Mode of Reading, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Other books on the topic, or related works, included:
Writing the Visual
You Can’t Read This
The Book on the Bookshelf
Theology after Reading
How to Read a Book
How to Read a Poem
The Digital Divide
A Theology of Reading
In the World: Reading and Writing as a Christian

I’ve gotten stackloads of books this summer to read. I’ve mostly been doing the fiction recently.

I did finish The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Intorduction by James A. Herrick, that I thought was very good.

I also re-read parts of RAW (Reading and Writing) New Media for the fourth version of an R&R for a review. (Yes, sometimes I wonder if I really want to do the review that much, but since most of the work was done…)

A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love by Alan Jacobs has some interesting stuff. I am only on page 29, though. I’m expecting it to get even better.

Reading still to get to:
Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students by Crowley and Hawhee (textbook for grad class I am teaching part of)
Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, Andrea Lunsford, editor.
Culturematic by Grant McCracken. The cover also has a beginning part of the title as “How Reality TV
John Cheever
a Pie Lab
Julia Child
Fantasy Football
Burning Man
the Ford Fiesta Movement
Rube Goldberg
NFL Films
Wordle
Two and a Half Men
a 10,000-Year Symphony
and ROFLCon Memes
Will Help You Create and
Execute Breakthrough Ideas.”
Maybe I should move that one to the top of my reading list?

Working as much as I can, I am still not getting everything done for my new job. Most people can’t do everything that needs to be done in their lives. In another confluence,
I found Prof Hacker’s What do you want to ignore? post in the CHE.

I found this particularly useful:

A to-ignore list clarifies in specific terms what it is that you do not want to spend your energy or attention on.

Bregman offers four questions to consider in drawing up your own to-ignore list:
What are you willing not to achieve?
What doesn’t make you happy?
What’s not important to you?
What gets in the way?
…
The crucial part of Bregman’s model is that he suggests you look over this list at least once a week and possibly every day. Just as you refer to your to-do list to select activities for a particular day, referring to your to-ignore list can help keep you on track, especially if some of those items you want to minimize in your schedule tend to take over.

In the comments, a summative question appears:
What will you KEEP doing, STOP doing, START doing? (Though I think it should read:
What will you STOP doing, KEEP doing, START doing?)