Resources

In his book Outliers Gladwell offers the route to becoming a genius. It is not something you have to be born into. It is not a culture, time, place, or socioeconomic status per se. It is something that anyone can develop, if it is important to that person.

So what is this single step that we (you and I, on our own, but perhaps together) can take to become a genius?

It is the willingness to keep working.

Gladwell was building on, among other things, the work of Dr. Alan Schoenfeld of Berkeley, who videotaped students talking through math problems. Schoenfeld found, and Gladwell discusses, that being good at math is a function of success and willingness to keep working (246).

Students who are willing to keep working, trying to figure out what it is that needs to be done, are more likely to succeed. That success makes them more likely to be willing to work on a problem even longer the next time.

Math geniuses, like my eldest son, are folks who are willing to sit and fiddle with a math question for twenty or thirty minutes, trying to figure out how it should work. I know that my eldest does this. I have seen him do it.

Confession time:
I have spent the last four years working very hard at teaching. I’ve taught 5/5/1, 6/6/2, the equivalent of 5/5/0 (developmental classes), and 4/4/1 (the 4s being new preps). I have worked on making my presentation better, my material stronger, and the relevance to my students high.

What I have not done is kept up with educational theories, learning theories, composition pedagogy, etc.

I have not been working on the problems, finding out how other people have said I might do it better. I haven’t even, most of the time, been working on seeing how my colleagues are doing what they do, to see if they can offer me ideas for doing it better.

Immediate response and longer-term study plan:
Recently I have come to feel this lack fiercely and I am attempting to remedy it by reading, taking notes, thinking about, anaylyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and applying in areas that I think would benefit my teaching.

While right now it is still somewhat haphazard (I have books in a list of recommendations, for example.), I am willing to work at being a better teacher by reading not just the recommended lists, but the works cited in the recommended lists. I am going to graduate school–in my own home and office–for being a genius at teaching.

In addition, I am going to take my present attempts at improvement–including discussions with colleagues, careful reflection over classroom experience and follow-up tweaks, and haphazard blog reading–and develop them into habits and schedules that will help me become a better educator.

I want to be more than acceptable in this field I have chosen, thoughtfully and giddily, as my own. I want to be superior. But I have not been as careful about creating and working towards micro-goals to improve my teaching as I should have been.

Resolved: Dr. Davis will work at being an excellent, superb educator in her chosen field through the acquisition of new knowledge through theoretical readings, creation of micro-goals, implementation of new knowledge, and intense reflection and self-evaluation followed by new and improved approaches to/in the classroom experience.

It is billed as a directory of blogs and other resources on writing. There are a lot of good sources there.

I’m going to take a look at some of the ones I didn’t recognize to see if there is something else I need to be reading. (Yes, I think there probably is. No, I really don’t have time for that.)

I follow the 99percent.com blog. Recently one came up that sounded interesting, so I kept it open to read. Turns out it will be relevant to my linguistics class.

It’s The Noun Project.

If you haven’t read the article yet, do you know what this is?

I recognized it immediately. It is iconic, if you are South American or have been around Argentinians.

Reading the CHE fora the other day, T-Notetaking was mentioned as being the skill taught that turned a belligerent, angry student (a year later) into one who was acing his majors classes and teaching the skill to others.

T-Notetaking is apparently another name for the Cornell Notes method.

If you want to teach your students to take notes, this might work very well.

I have seen a book about progress touted as a great read from 2011 and have been planning to get it and read it.

Then I saw a post from Community College Dean about the book.

Over the break I read The Progress Principle, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, and I have to admit that it unintentionally shed some useful light on academia.

The one idea of this book is that the feeling of “progress,” even when small, is a powerful motivator. People who achieve little victories are far more likely to stay engaged with what they’re doing and put forth solid effort than people who don’t get those victories. The major advice of the book was to structure work (and management) to recognize the value of small victories, and to encourage a sense of forward motion whenever possible.

And then I thought about semesters.

It’s hard to get a sense of progress as a teacher when you have to start all over again every few months. Just when the students are starting to get the hang of it, they leave, and you have to face a fresh crop that puts you right back where you started.

He goes on and it is very interesting.

I especially was intrigued by how he very specifically ties it to community colleges.

He’s made me want to read the book even more. I am going to stop typing and go shopping.

Read an interview from Daniel H. Pink with Teresa Amabile on Pink’s blog.

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Presiding: Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick

1. “Steampunk Online: Game Design as Narrative Pedagogy,” Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt Univ.
author and editor of numerous books, including Charles Dickens in Cyberspace

Based on English 115W: Digital Narrative and Virtual Reality
extensive use of social media
worldsofwordcraft.wordpress.com
40,000+ hits
Design and build an online game in the final three weeks of the semester.

2 topics:
Remediation and pedagogy
Active learning, student production of knowledge

Remediation:
Substantial benefit accrued by multiplying number of media used in classroom.
Bolter and Grusin Remediation
“the representation of one medium in another” (45)
Remediation highlights formal features of narrative in unexpected ways.

To move them from “fidelity” issue in adaptations from book to film, toward thinking about formal differences of the media, is a challenge.
Adding three or more media makes the problem disappear for the classroom.

“The Lord of the Rings Online” integrated into course.
Obvious choice. Three media. Novel, movie, online game.

How does juxtaposing 3 media help?
character standing in the game, in a rather well-known spot, 3 stone trolls

Put up moment in game
Put up the text
Show the movie section

Game is quite faithful to Tolkien.
Movie not so much.

Aragon with ringwraiths: Comic in book. Dramatic in movie.
Arwen becomes heroic. Least Tolkienesque.

Talk about Space and Time with students.
In virtual world, seeing virtual word brings home to player (student) control of space. Various 3D control. Took different pictures of the Stone Trolls to use in the classroom.
Question of faithfulness to the book is just exploded by the ability player has to live in the world of the game. Also the sense of controlled space is brought home.

Second half of semester turn to Steampunk.
Steampunk: immensely popular genre of science fiction, remediates Victorian Era and populates it with machines
“the Difference Engine”

Read several Victorian texts: Time Machine, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes stories

Films: Steamboy was first. Wretched.
Moving Castle 2004
One of most popular graphic novels, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Because students have steampunk friends, becomes more intertextual.

Take this Victorian material and create an online game.
Steampunk Online was the name of the game.
Only did this one semester so far.

NeverWinterNights 2 Toolset (included with the game)
quite inexpensive
with it comes a Professional Grade game design platform

Sword and Sorcery game. Fantasy. Derivative of the Tolkien universe. But allows you to customize. Were able to change environments to more Victorian.

Divide class into groups of three. Five groups. Each responsible for an area.

Go through the process of creating the game.

Process:
Storyboarding– spend time in class deciding spatial arrangements of the areas in the game
What you understand when you have to create a narrative game, you have to figure out where it takes place. Where each zone is. Relation. How character moves from one zone to the next.

Spatiality becomes relevant (from first half of semester).

Zones roughed out in drawings by students.
Using the toolset makes their rough drawings very beautiful, because you use already created stuff…

Enter game through a Victorian replica of our classroom.
The door takes you to Soho square. Near Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory (in literature).

Going through the door, you are set upon by a very irritated Mr. Hyde who renders you unconscious. You wake up in Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes’ home.

Advantage: Students have to go back to text again and again to figure out what to include. Chemistry set in Holmes’ rooms.

Students have to write a Game design document which is posted. (30 pages)

In the apt you find there has been a disappearance outside of Richmond. Students speculated The Time Machine takes place. Disappearance is of the time traveler.

There you discover the time machine. (Students created the game narrative.) Then you go to Land of the Eloi. Taken to the Eloi home. Remember, no floor, no ceiling, grass.

Sent on a quest to the ruins of a museum, called the Green Palace. Students designed museum and layout. This is where you first encounter a Morlock, in the story and the game.

In game you must go into caves of Morlock to encounter them, just as in novel.

Game ends when you rush pell mell into the distant future. Find a land populated by monstrous crab-like creatures and things do not end well. (So you can’t have an Epic Win, only an Epic Fail, in this game.)

Designed as a multi-year project. That is the architecture the students have created would be the basis for future classes’ work.

2. “Technologies That Describe: Data Visualization and Contemporary Fiction,” Heather Houser, Univ. of Texas, Austin
Ecosickness: Environment, Disease, and Emotion in Contemporary Fiction, just finished

Intersections of our talks, esp in juxtaposition.

Data visualization is becoming ubiquitous form.
Blogs, art galleries, etc. (Good.is for example)

Network of visualizers is quite vast.
Three very different examples:
Aaron Koblin “flight patterns”
kayser-brill “100 years of world cuisine”
national bldg museum “cost of owning a car”

Often counter-code visualization.

Aaron Koblin says “tells stories about our lives that make us more human”

Data that is a conduit to narrative in affect and not its neutralizer.

I kept it outside of X. Unfortunate.

Visualizers think in affective terms. Critics should consider scientific history and change.

“crucial object through which we understand our data-rich world”
determine what is specific to and shared across forms of cultural production

Data visualization as a …

Chris Jordan’s visualizations and Cormac McCarthy’s X
Data visualization might be in contrast to descriptive practices.
Argument not just about the artists.
Pedagogical implications: show fungible workings of this narrative device

Chris Jordan, series of images, “Running the Numbers” (her title?)
2.2M pounds of plastic every hour…
Through Jordan’s lens and computer, undergoes a transformation.
Consumption pattern, collects individual examples, digitally manipulates them
gyre, 2009 depicts plastic waste
ben franklin, 2007 shows $ spent on Iraq War

Sebastien Pierre “What is data visualitzation?” wordle

depends on referentiality and affectivity. Ethical dimensions.
Coming at this as a scholar of environmental literature.

Jordan’s TED talk, Feb. 2008, “take these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt”

Gathering, collating, and X the work.

Most important to Apprehension in narrative theory of mastery and control.
what description is and how it works
extensive description betrays impulse to control what is external
Fleissner: “compulsion to describe”
“endless excessive attempt to gain control over one’s surroundings that reveals one’s actual control”

Who commands the control of information?
Answering this loosens distinction between two forms and proves centrality of words(?) to both.

“[Novelistic description] seeks to capture, to arrest within the moment”
Banfield “Describing the Unobserved”

Note: Capitalization limited to start of sentences. Why? Grammatical change of projection. Issue noticed at college and churches overhead/projection.

Drucker Speclab “always located in a perceiving entity”

How do descriptive practices either reinforce human mastery or inculcate a sense of self-restraint?

What can reading across media and for both form and ethics show us about the pathways between representation, knowledge, and ethics?

Jordan’s work crosses disciplines and ethical issues.

plastic cups, 2008
1M cups used on flights in US every 6 hours
from afar appears to be pipes
But composed of stacks of cups. You have to focus in or see it at the museum.
Viewing in is meant to force viewers to see relationship between the one and the many.
Art is meaning to kindle awareness, but brings awareness to the art as well. ?

potentially empower the viewer
help isolate patterns of data
positive control of awareness

on the other hand
control over data is a totalizing impulse
gives impression that describing problems is tantamount to the problems
minimizes the task’s size (to mitigate waste)

power accumulates to Jordan
values objectivity
rarely includes humans
artist’s power always clear
viewer kept outside of control

Compare to:
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness in the West (novel)

Judge is a violent polymath who thinks he can escape from strictures.
Judge not a tree hugger. Botanizes in response to threat to human control.
quote from page 199 “No man can acquaint… insult to me.”
Do the judge’s beliefs account for novel’s experience?
Travelers take in view. View consumes the writer.
“Dawn saw them deployed in a long file over the plain…” (42)
“The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army…” (46)
Non-human subject diminishes appropriative drive of the judge’s program of knowledge-creation as domination and overcomes it.

What claims to knowledge do different media technologies make through their form?
Drucker “neutralization as…”
Students read literature for knowledge.

How do formal practices slip out of alignment with social and environmental projects?

3. “Better Looking, Close Reading: How Online Fiction Builds Literary-Critical Skills,” John David Zuern, Univ. of Hawai’i, Mānoa
“Mind Your Own Business: Cisco Systems…”

“My name is Alice. I’m 13 years old.”
I must have been dozing… “Better Looking, Closer Reading”
appeal to broader spot of human sensorium
as students read online enhance their ability to read at all

better reader overall

Can it help us become better people?
One that might be worth making in an institutional environment in which literary studies is having to argue for its worth/contribution.

Recent reforms led to focus requirement of critical ethics. Depts are expected to run ethical courses. Profs have to explain how course meets hallmark of ethical judgment.
Served for 3 years on review board. Having to advocate on behalf of humanities. Seemed unacceptedly vague.
For folks largely focused on ethics of/in work experience, literary ethics seemed too removed.

what might lit crit have to say about moral question as posed in a literary text?
ethical turn in lit theory
sophisticated accounts of ethical imagination of reader in theory

Steve Akbockers? who? discussion of Coetz’s Disgrace
“taste impossible status”
“reading in this special sense is sacred”
reading is not only an event but a task
Task provides bridge of online and print reading.

taught a course for introduction of English majors
text intended to introduce readers to digital
“high quality robust text” “quality suited to reading and re-reading… academic …”

Inanimate Alice, online text

first-person narrators in both texts
both child narrators markedly vulnerable
both are worriers and focus is on fate of fathers
novel even uses flipbook (reverses person falling from World Trade Center)

Jonathan Safran’s work: adverbs extremely and incredibly crop up in the text
(5) limousines were extremely long they wouldn’t need drivers
“stuff that happens to me”

Can I stimulate experience of “implied author”?
para-text of the novel’s title and notable features of the narrator’s ideograph

analytical task of gathering up the adverbs…
meaning fullness that can’t be exhausted by a summary of the plot

In Inanimate Alice, doll becomes connected with narrator.
Also the doll is strewn throughout the reading.
in pocket of a mafioso –clicking on the doll invokes Alice’s game
Adds kinesthetic and urgent element to the plot.
Unless you have rescued all the dolls before you get to the end, Alice and her parents won’t be able to escape through the checkpoints.
To get them through, you have to re-read and rescue all the dolls you missed the first time.
Makes reader responsible for the “event and task of fiction.”
Would I have ever thought of clicking on the dolls? I am not sure.

engage moral empathy and sympathy
ethical agency of narrative empathy –new study in lit theory
but meta-empathy, affective insight, felt before known or articulated, but something you can discuss after it has happened and trace it back and explain it based on what spurred it
meta-narrative can help recognize rhetorical dynamics that are intended to be affective (and succeed in being affective often)

Being able to identify how the narrative are set up to create affective responses helps us to avoid the authorial attempts to control us as readers.

Pedagogical payoff for online readings… not a matter of staying up to date nor a pandering to interests of students” but to multiply structured opportunities to reason about our essentially irrational responses to the world.

before reform= 2 English classes required
after reform= students may elect to take 1 English class

Have to find authentic, not cynical, ways to connect the close reading experience. will help save our discipline

Questions:

Is the creation objective?

Avoids aesthetic question by choosing works that are clearly aesthetic.
Visualizing feelings… subjectivity is necessarily embedded
Do need to study how the subjectivity is embedding in the works…

College Misery posts about a paper on the Magna Carta, which is totally ridiculously wrong and was not only plagiarized but also published on the net by the student in question. I wonder how often Aaron Kerzner’s theft of a paper will be googled during his working career.

Every once in awhile, I google a few phrases from the paper to see how it’s gettting along in the wild. Over the years, the two seed essays I planted have spawned a dozen or so Google hits at various disreputable sites. Sometimes they even want you to pay to see the whole text. However, for years I had no idea if any student had actually handed the thing in.

It kind of makes me want to write something equally ridiculous on the topics which I ask my students to write about and see who brings it in. But apparently design trumps content for many professors, since Kerzner’s work was published on the net. I’m guessing the prof didn’t realize it was plagiarized. But surely he would recognize the ridiculousness of some of the statements in it?

Evaluating for pedagogical soundness

Framework to Analyse (British) Technology-mediated Mobile Learning

Departmental leadership for quality teaching

Do one thing at a time.
With so much coming at us so relentlessly – emails, texts, people, and information – we assume the only way to get to it all is to juggle multiple tasks at the same time. In fact, moving between tasks creates something called “switching time.” When you shift attention from one focus of attention to another, the average time it takes to finish the first task increases by at least 25%.

from 99%’s A Master Plan

Here are the rules: All work must be done in blocks of at least 30 minutes. If I start editing a paper, for example, I have to spend at least 30 minutes editing. If I need to complete a small task, like handing in a form, I have to spend at least 30 minutes doing small tasks. Crucially, checking email and looking up information online count as small tasks. If I need to check my inbox or grab a quick stat from the web, I have to spend at least 30 minutes dedicated to similarly small diversions.
…
On the flip side, the percentage of time spent in a flow state was as large as I’ve experienced in recent memory. I ended up spending 2.5 hours focused on my writing project and 3.5 hours focused on my research paper. That’s six hours, in one day, of focused work with zero interruptions; not even one quick glance at email.

At the same time, the careful pre-planning required to satisfy my batching rules increased the efficiency of my small task completion. Even though I dedicated 6 hours in one 10 hour work day to uninterrupted focus, another 1.5 hours to exercise and eating, and another 1 hour to a doctors appointment, I still managed to accomplish an impressive collection of logistical tasks both urgent and non-urgent.

from 99%’s A Day Without Distraction