Resources

After walking the dog in 21 degree weather (Thank you, SO, for the use of your EMS coat. Warmest thing I have ever worn.), I sat down to check my mail and–as usual–became engrossed in email and Twitter feeds.

I saw a review of Norton’s Critical Edition of the King James Version of the Bible and wrote an email to someone who might enjoy it.

Now I am going to order the two books myself, even though I wish I were paying hardback prices, and go have breakfast quickly.

Then I am off to finals!

I’ve got linguistics links all over my computer (not saved systematically) for when I teach the intro to linguistics. That’s coming up next semester again.

I just got a new link and decided I should make a post and start throwing them in here.

Evolution of Word post:
That’s So Random: The Evolution of an Odd Word from NPR:

Random is a fighting word for young Spencer Thompson. The comedian posted a video to a Facebook page entitled I Hate When People Misuse the Word Random.

“The word random is the most misused word of our generation — by far,” he proclaims to a tittering audience of 20-somethings. “Like, girls will say, ‘Oh, God, I met this random on the way home.’ First of all, it’s not a noun.”
…
But these uses of the word are not incorrect, according to Jesse Sheidlower. He’s the elegant, purple-haired editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary, which includes several definitions of the word random.

“It’s described as a colloquial term meaning peculiar, strange, nonsensical, unpredictable or inexplicable; unexpected,” he explains, before adding that random started as a noun in the 14th century, meaning “impetuosity, great speed, force or violence in riding, running, striking, et cetera, chiefly in the phrase ‘with great random.’ ”

Well, there’s a phrase that deserves resurrection. Sheidlower says that in the 17th century, random started to mean “lacking a definite purpose.”

Thanks to my colleague who sent it, Dr. Delony!

I also like this quote: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, nerds seized on random in the 1960s as slang.” Nerd power.

Notes from: The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell:

A post-game interview is a great way to ask players questions too complex for a simple survey sheet.
Note: Ask Chris, perhaps, about linguistics. And Leeanne.
——————————————————————————————–
Highlight: Have a script of questions ready when you interview people.
Note: Create this for individual classes AND gen questions

Notes on first day, that I tell them, but I think they forget.
Maybe I need to make a bigger deal out of it.

What is linguistics? Intro
Tools of analysis: sound system, morphology (word origins, morphemes), syntax, semantics
Do tiny practices so that the students will stay with the class. Did you know? Ideas to talk about:
Consonants and vowels— 5 minute segment on languages, kinds of gives examples
Use the Hawaiian.
First part of semester is based on these tools.
Why do we need these tools?
Complex discipline.
People need to have the same set of tools to describe whatever language they are working on.

Second half of semester:
Look at topics utilizing tools of analysis. This helps them use those tools.

Then we go into these notes:
Introduce What is Linguistics? Because it does a better job of describing the course.
Every English major has to take three hours of language: either linguistics or advanced grammar
They overlap in that there are morphology and syntax in both.

Majority of linguistics is about spoken language. So we are going to be emphasizing that.

Observers and recorders. That’s what we are going to be doing in class.

When you are using the phonetic alphabet, you have to HEAR what is actually pronounced, not SEE the word in your head. Most English students are good spellers, and good spellers tend to see the word when they think about the word, which is something that you will have to overcome to do linguistics.

Make sure to emphasize phonetics is NOT the same as phonics.
Phonetic alphabet, put up chart.
Have to get the students past the fear of looking silly.
Put your hand on your throat and make an s sound. Then a z sound. What is different? Then talk about voiced and voiceless. Use d and t. Make everyone look silly together.
When you do your homework, go in your room and shut the door. Tell your roommate you have to talk to yourself. You have to do this out loud.

Put your tongue right behind your teeth and then roll your tongue back until you almost choke yourself. Talk about what you feel. What are those? They matter for speech. Different sounds come different places.

Consonants = stopped sound

Do it (with the class, together). Show it (on a diagram).

University of Iowa
Phonetics: The Sounds of American English
Videos—shows an animation

Places of articulation and manner of articulation (look at these)
Narrowest area

Tell them we are going to be looking silly. All of us.

/i/ /I/ v

What’s your tongue doing?

Wordsmiths when you are done.
Playfulness of language and creativity of language

Bring your own examples…

Recursiveness of language = This is the House that Jack Built (book)

Language acquisition, order that children acquire phonemes→ Talk about names and 3 year olds and Joey (what would they say instead)
All languages use d, p…
Also the Explain Everything clip from James about jeeps.

Emphasize:
Patterns
Rule-governed (not haphazard… There was a descriptive grammar rule about what people do. Why did little kids call Joey Doey? Language that is rule-governed can be predicted—You don’t have to know every sentence in English in order to be able to say a sentence in English.)
EX:
Generating new words… to create a new word, using English phonetic rules: can start with an st- but can’t start with an ng- sound. Because it does not appear as an initial sound in English. But does in Vietnamese.

Sometimes the students get really upset because they have to learn information and a new procedure at the same time. Some of the test methodology is sufficiently different in linguistics… don’t want to get the methodology to throw them.
So the first RAT is on the syllabus. It’s a practice.

Give the practice exam before the real exam. They get to see how they are going to do the transcriptions… how they have to do the transcriptions, what I’m going to ask and how I’m going to ask it…

Stop students will breeze through it. Watch for mid-level students.
During the first half of the semester, the students hate the homework and hate the RATs. But by the end you will see how important it was and you will tell me to make sure the next class does it too.
May be left-brained for a group that are generally right-brained.
Much more of a social science. Think of linguistics more like a math class. Repetition of homework till you learn a new concept. Analytical component, until you get the rules, so you know how the rules work.
Study strategies for typical English class will not work here. Just do something very different. I know what you will need to do. That’s why I’m doing it this way. All homeworks are essential for the weekly RATs. The weekly RATs prepare for the midterm. It is not easy to catch up. You really have to stay on top of it.

Skills-based class. Memorize tons of stuff the first half of the semester. Till you think your head is going to explode. But it won’t. (Monty Python: can’t eat another bite)

Great clip on Youtube in The Pink Panther, Steve Martin is trying to learn an American accent. Trying to speak English with a French accent. This difficulty level –
Playing with the language. An American speaking English a French accent trying to fake learning an American accent. “I would like to buy a hamburger”

It’s not like History. You can’t read ahead. Don’t read ahead. You will get lost and you will waste your time. Don’t read ahead. Now if you want to read ahead.

Michaelsen: 3 tries, if you are sure it is true, put True true true
If you aren’t sure, put true true false

In teams, if the group is split, you can put different answers. Then someone will be right and someone will be wrong.

Need groups of 4 (ideal) or 5 (if necessary). NOT 3.

Also, Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, pages 192-201, is about status and how it impacts discussions.

from tire.cis.upenn.edu

Ha! And when I found those, I also found the book list for the December ordering that I started LAST YEAR but could not find this year. That was very helpful.

41 minutes video introducing…

Recommended by a friend, but I haven’t watched it yet.

I haven’t had time to write much, but these are useful sites and I want to comment.

In Praise of Memorizing Poetry — Badly begins:

Mistakes are instructive. In particular, they can become a form of analysis, as, for example, in sports or music, when getting something a little bit wrong leads to improvement in technique or understanding.

It is an intriguing proposition and one that would be interesting to discuss with students.

Shakespeare’s Authorship

This is both a commentary on the movie Anonymous and on the Oxford-theory camp of Who Wrote the Plays?

While I’m not as zealous as the author is, I’ve often wondered if Shakespeare really wrote the texts, the information in the article is fascinating.

The lie about Shakespeare’s literacy. In the opening, our fancy-pants British narrator (Derek Jacobi) tells us disdainfully that Shakespeare only had a “grammar school” education, disingenuously concealing the fact that the typical “grammar school” of the time, such as the one in Shakespeare’s hometown Stratford, had graduates who had learned how to translate and compose verse in Latin. Can you compose verse in Latin? How many American poets can? How many Oxfordians can even read Latin? As Simon Schama, the British historian, put it recently:

“Grammar school,” which means elementary education in America, was in fact a cradle of serious classical learning in Elizabethan England. By the time he was 13 or so, Shakespeare would have read (in Latin) works by Terence, Plautus, Virgil, Erasmus, Cicero, and probably Plutarch and Livy too. One of the great stories of the age was what such schooling did for boys of humble birth.

(But, of course, no one of humble birth, say the Oxfordian birthers, could possibly be as learned as they.)

Then the movie contradicts itself. Later on, we’re treated to a supposedly comic scene showing that Shakespeare didn’t even have a grammar-school education, however you define it: He’s mocked by actors in his troupe as utterly illiterate. (I have a theory about why some otherwise distinguished actors buy into the Oxford conspiracy theory. Actors are notorious for their self-loathing and loathing of other actors and it must gall some of the weaker egos among them, the idea that a “mere” actor like Shakespeare could also be an incomparable author of the parts they play.)

Visual Communication through Web Design talks about testing design changes you make.

Expand Your Blog’s Reach on Inside Higher Ed

and
Vanderbilt U’s Center for Visual Thinking have things that I need to consider.

What have you read recently that you found interesting?

The Darker Side of Blogging

There are a lot of things about an online presence that can be problematic.

I’ve seen how Facebook posts negatively impacted my job search.
I attended an SCMLA presentation on the need to keep our students OFF the net.
I’ve had several issues regarding posting conference presentation notes online, which are summarized in the linked post.

When I first started blogging, I heard a lot about people losing their jobs over what they posted about those jobs on the net. So for several years, I was very circumspect in what I published here. (Less so now, when it probably matters more!)

I’ve read other people’s blogs and commented on what they said.
I’ve written on academic uses of blogging, as they relate to single or multiple author blogging.
Also I’ve written about Twitter ideas I wish I’d known when I first started tweeting and why you should tweet.
And I’ve written about formats of scholarship.
I’ve also written about the importance of expanding a blog’s reach.

So when I saw this discussion of the darker side of blogging, I thought I should probably read it.

It’s more a reflective piece than a horror-filled description, which is what I was really expecting.

The author does mention having a cyberstalker and losing friends due to that person’s actions and her concern and the lack of concern on the part of those friends.

The author also mentions the problems with unmoderated comments and even moderated comments, which many people whose work gets read online can relate to.

The focus is really on how, despite the darker things that J J Cohen mentions, the positives of blogging are significantly more important.

Obviously I have found that to be true myself. I am still blogging.

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.

When I grade I have to constantly fight myself about only mentioning the negative things.

I like 12 Most Crucial Tips When Communicating Criticism from a Toastmaster, Dr. Michelle Mazur.

I especially appreciated tips 1 and 8. Good reminders for me.

Turns out you CAN teach an old brain new tricks, according to Neuroplasticity at bigThink.

I would disagree with the opening sentence: “Your brain is more flexible than we’ve ever thought before.” I think that many people have thought/said/believed that the brain was very flexible. But we’ve been told so often that we were wrong that I started buying into that.

I’ve seen from my father’s experience that the brain is massively adaptive. “After a stroke, for instance, your brain can reorganize itself to move functions to undamaged areas.” Yep.

Dr. Dennis Charney, dean of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, has studied how the brain responds to dramatic changes in peoples’ environments.
…
Charney is using this research to conduct psychological therapies that can improve learning and memory, and solve problems with anxiety and depression.

I don’t know that we have to have a dramatic change in environment, but maybe we do. Maybe we are just doing the same old thing and getting the same old response unless we have a dramatic change. What dramatic changes can we make to teach our brains new tricks?